I mean you can suggest that people just ‘get better’ but no one can log in with a team of 4 or 5 to compete with you so everyone has given up. It does not change the fact that right now it is a monopoly and so people stopped showing up already. The attitude of ‘well git gud’ just doesn’t work for anyone in the scenario.
Riley did not built the trickster goblin for a single team… If he did, well that’s not a very good way to make a game. With a current steady number of players between 50-100 online at any given time since release, I don’t see the monopoly situation changing any time soon unfortunately. There are a lot of mechanics that need changing to make the trickster goblin viable for the experience to be what was intended right now.
Yes this is a ‘strategy that needs to be shut down’ because there is currently only 1 team around who can get 4-5 players online at the same time who care enough to do it. I wouldn’t call it a strategy, i would give it the equivalent rating of spawn camping in PvP battlegrounds when the other team only has 1 player.
So why do so many groups do shard dungeons over and over? As the ‘difficulty curve’ becomes harder and harder (aka you have to get a faster time each time) your tactics adapt to meet that requirement. New ideas appear and new ways of playing. a ‘difficulty curve’ is there to constantly improve on. Ill get back to the ‘difficulty curve’ for PvP below…
Essentially what is happening with that attitude is that, you are killing off a whole new game mode for everyone apart from yourself and that is not a healthy way to build game stickiness and player happiness. If you want this game to be dead in a year because Riley has to turn around and say ‘sorry guys, it was fun but we are out of funding and a AAA studio just released this other game which took all our players’ then keep at it… you are doing a great job there with that attitude. I have seen it happen with small studios time and time again and I don’t want that to happen to Orbus… I would rather see it succeed.
Generally there are many reasons why people quit games. Speaking based on papers for game psychology there are a few rules that this feature currently breaks which causes people to quit:
- The aspect of the game is too hard to pick up.
If the game offers an unfair and punishing first experience, the player will likely leave. Unexperienced users in particular. This is true for why the battlegrounds mechanics needed a change. this IS the first experience for most people in PvP.
- A sudden rise in difficulty
Unwanted difficulty spikes will ruin the user’s experience. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that Orbus shouldn’t be hard. However, it should be fair at all times. The Souls series is a solid example of an unforgiving game with a beautiful difficult curve. PvP as it stands does not have that ‘difficulty curve’ .
- An aggressive community
An aggressive community towards rookie players will scare most of your new users away. Real social games need to have good community management. We need to be careful about the way we portray our opinions on the forums as not to scare off other players… Sure getting mad at each other every now and then is okay, as long as we all play nicely at the end of the day. People should realize that the Orbus community is not toxic/non tolerant towards newer players. I don’t believe that the community is toxic… maybe a bit snarky sometimes… But we have to be careful about that… On a selfish note, you are potentially alienating your next A* player in your team because they just ‘weren’t good enough’ at the start.
Generally these are all catalysts for 3 things. They happen to be the 3 things which stop people from playing games:
- Boredom - ‘every time I go to the trickster goblin, I never get a chance to see it. It is boring’
- Frustration - ‘every time I go to the trickster goblin, I get killed upon spawn in. Its frustrating’
- Anxiety - ‘every time I go to the trickster goblin, when it spawns, i don’t know where it is. It makes me anxious.’
When you combine these 3 together, you end up with a feature, although highly sought after, becomes toxic for most players unless balanced to remove anxiety, frustration and boredom.
For PvPers, there should be hard and competitive environments as well as that ‘difficulty curve’ yes but, unfortunately Orbus does not have a high enough player base count for this yet. Its not going to give you the organized PvP feel that you want… That said… Ill try my best to advocate some competition for you… But its probably unrealistic to get the people together for it… Unfortunately the intrinsic reward for everyone is too low and the extrinsic reward is 0, so nobody wants to do it. No reward, no people…
But as I said … i will try.
EDIT: here is my currently favourite research paper on flow in games (and generally great game creator) if anyone is interested.
EDIT 2: Also my favourite game design book for anyone interested.
good fight!