Quote:
Originally Posted by Influence
Agreed, that is the most important question for this game. Subsequent question however is, how can you do so without damaging the current game, and more importantly the current community (for economical reasons, new players are less inclined to pay for a game than existing players).
|
Sometimes you're going to have to take a few collateral.
I don't personally have data on how many really active players the game has, but the estimates people have blown on this thread seem to vary from 300 to 500 to even 1000. It's hard to say. If people claim they hold a top200 planet without breaking a sweat and play it an hour a day, it'd be difficult to convince that there's more than 300 really actives. The amount of 'alliances' and their member volumes could possibly back up this estimate.
Expect to lose half of these 300 dedicated people and it's a crack in the nut. As mentioned before, it's a matter of taking the risk: are the administrative staff willing to try the means that have been proven useless year after year (see: slowly but steadily declining) in order to maintain some if slim profits on the short term, or are they willing to go for something on medium to long term, even if it means forgetting this whole 'we have to please the 300 really active players we have' (incidentally, the loudest of whom don't even seem that 'old' actives) rhetoric and stepping up with it.
Communities over-react to changes. Short term shocks are always ten points more more above. Trends however tend to be stationary. It's nothing surprising that the people willing to lay hours and hours to a game (which probably makes the game their 'social environment', the 'something that makes for a lot of their life') are terrified by an idea of radical change.