Very Interesting Post - but hard to turn this into action. Understanding our target market segment is great for marketing.
Some of globey's remarks on newbie friendlyness have definitely caught my attention.
What I want to know is how to do we put the collective ideas of the community into action?
The answer I have is trello - https://trello.com/b/YEVcmVae/allegiancemarketing
We need to begin capturing brainstormed ideas - upvoting them- turning them into objectives, putting strategies and plans around them, then executing and tracking our results as a collective group.
If anyone ever says "Allegiance would be fine if you did my idea" SAY IT NOW
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Deathrender
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I will be turning the marketing forum into a place for discussions around the ideas posed in the threads we've seen about all of this, as well.Thallium wrote:QUOTE (Thallium @ Mar 25 2015, 11:24 PM) Very Interesting Post - but hard to turn this into action. Understanding our target market segment is great for marketing.
Some of globey's remarks on newbie friendlyness have definitely caught my attention.
What I want to know is how to do we put the collective ideas of the community into action?
The answer I have is trello - https://trello.com/b/YEVcmVae/allegiancemarketing
We need to begin capturing brainstormed ideas - upvoting them- turning them into objectives, putting strategies and plans around them, then executing and tracking our results as a collective group.
phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Jul 22 2017, 05:58 PM) Mini ac gunner mount was removed because somewhere along the lines we had a core dev that said, "I really hate Terran and want him to be miserable." And all core devs ever since have agreed.
In my opinion it's definitely the lack of single player (or AI opponents) what's killing this game. Ppl come, see nobody, see no opponents, see no AI opponents, leave. If there was that option, he would play, another would join, would be much more fun, he would stay. That's how the playerbase is built. Current way we are losing so many players due to this issue. Advertising is secondary, playerbase (incl. idiots ruining some games) tertiary (can be eliminated by AI). Game itself is great and can be updated/upgraded continuously.
Hi I am Vanca2... kiss my aaasteroid!
Fazz
Interesting stuff
It feels like this 101 theory stuff and notes over a warm cup of tea level but then again it is a single post.
If I suspect you understand this is something much of which a wish list. Also I hope you understand a certain amount of this has been in the list for some time.
Finally, as written well as read tbf, your proposal about management is basically how things are now and works like having a squirrel shoved down your pants in the middle of a buffalo stampede
Interesting stuff
It feels like this 101 theory stuff and notes over a warm cup of tea level but then again it is a single post.
If I suspect you understand this is something much of which a wish list. Also I hope you understand a certain amount of this has been in the list for some time.
Finally, as written well as read tbf, your proposal about management is basically how things are now and works like having a squirrel shoved down your pants in the middle of a buffalo stampede
Ssssh
@MrC
I have just thrown my idea on the board because i think we are making a major mistake for years. Just advertising what is, wont bring us much in the long term. The game in its actual state is only interesting for the TAC kind of player. But this players have tons of alternatives today with better graphics, technical support etc... The new players that take their time to test alleg are mostly soon leaving again. We should stop trying to finger on some details and hope to keep people on board. "The change stays; things that change stay." Alleg has to change, to evolve. We have to strive for something bigger and probably not yet doable to reach what we can reach. If we stay on tuning our cores and factions and stuff and hoping for finally sometimes releasing alleg 2.0 alleg has no chance to survive. We are in a downward spiral:
Few Players => unregular games => drives people away, because they cant play => fewer players => more unregular games ....
To break out of this spiral i strongly recommend to expand the vision of allegiance. My idea is just one possibility, that i thought of for some weeks. We need something to keep the interest to the player if he cant play his daily action game with enough players. We need to turn this into an upward spiral:
new interesting content => new interested players => new ideas => more growth ...
Our resources are scarce but not as scarce as we might think if we can motivate people with a vision of the future of allegiance. If i was a developer of alleg or alleg 2.0 or something i would actually not invest much time because i would think that it is wasted. We have to break this and give alleg a future or let it go like it was always going on. The Squad wipe was a good first step of change, the events a second one. But we have to aim higher !
I have just thrown my idea on the board because i think we are making a major mistake for years. Just advertising what is, wont bring us much in the long term. The game in its actual state is only interesting for the TAC kind of player. But this players have tons of alternatives today with better graphics, technical support etc... The new players that take their time to test alleg are mostly soon leaving again. We should stop trying to finger on some details and hope to keep people on board. "The change stays; things that change stay." Alleg has to change, to evolve. We have to strive for something bigger and probably not yet doable to reach what we can reach. If we stay on tuning our cores and factions and stuff and hoping for finally sometimes releasing alleg 2.0 alleg has no chance to survive. We are in a downward spiral:
Few Players => unregular games => drives people away, because they cant play => fewer players => more unregular games ....
To break out of this spiral i strongly recommend to expand the vision of allegiance. My idea is just one possibility, that i thought of for some weeks. We need something to keep the interest to the player if he cant play his daily action game with enough players. We need to turn this into an upward spiral:
new interesting content => new interested players => new ideas => more growth ...
Our resources are scarce but not as scarce as we might think if we can motivate people with a vision of the future of allegiance. If i was a developer of alleg or alleg 2.0 or something i would actually not invest much time because i would think that it is wasted. We have to break this and give alleg a future or let it go like it was always going on. The Squad wipe was a good first step of change, the events a second one. But we have to aim higher !
Really the problem is that the ranks and various stats we gather are invisible. I mean you can see someone's rank, but rank doesn't mean all that much. It would be cool if we could link our forum accounts more closely with our in-game accounts with little icons or whatever to demonstrate certain milestones. Something like, "four drones killed in one game" showing up on the left side.
Basically, an achievement system that's visible so you can show off and brag.
Basically, an achievement system that's visible so you can show off and brag.
Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.
Cookie Monster wrote:QUOTE (Cookie Monster @ Apr 1 2009, 09:35 PM) But I don't read the forums I only post.
FBD
Rank is not achievements and our expecting it to perform that function is a desperate attempt to point to something anything showing personal in game progress.
MSR made a similar but opposite mistake making achievements only.
Fazz
We aren't going to please all of the people just we need to appeal to more of them I think you are saying. Achievements are Uber important (I hear the XBox noise every time I type the word for example) and would expand our base tbs. Done wrong and you will a Turing box based game nightmare on your hands but right frosting on the Sushi baby!
FWIF we always expected to do all three of the following
Ranks
Auto balance
Achievements
For a variety of reasons only ranks aka Duckie's bane happened and then the door closed and to the best of my knowledge nothing was done to maintain any of it in a meaningful way. In order to get the first bit done required a significant amount of energy well beyond the work we did implementing it.
That, whatever it is, and why it happens is a significant hurdle to every effort applied to the game in all of my experiences. It was there five, three, one year ago on every project I was part or observed. This whatever needs to change and it is NOT a call to burn things down as I suspect the cathedral is making the high priests mad and driving away the faithful if you follow the analogy.
I'm not going use the tired excuse of talent but I am going to bring up structure etc. If it your ideas or AI or only ranks or squad games or changing the key binding my guess is the start to finish effort will best all but the most insane errm determined.
Any thoughts on my own warm cup of tea thoughts I've been chewing on for some time now myself?
Rank is not achievements and our expecting it to perform that function is a desperate attempt to point to something anything showing personal in game progress.
MSR made a similar but opposite mistake making achievements only.
Fazz
We aren't going to please all of the people just we need to appeal to more of them I think you are saying. Achievements are Uber important (I hear the XBox noise every time I type the word for example) and would expand our base tbs. Done wrong and you will a Turing box based game nightmare on your hands but right frosting on the Sushi baby!
FWIF we always expected to do all three of the following
Ranks
Auto balance
Achievements
For a variety of reasons only ranks aka Duckie's bane happened and then the door closed and to the best of my knowledge nothing was done to maintain any of it in a meaningful way. In order to get the first bit done required a significant amount of energy well beyond the work we did implementing it.
That, whatever it is, and why it happens is a significant hurdle to every effort applied to the game in all of my experiences. It was there five, three, one year ago on every project I was part or observed. This whatever needs to change and it is NOT a call to burn things down as I suspect the cathedral is making the high priests mad and driving away the faithful if you follow the analogy.
I'm not going use the tired excuse of talent but I am going to bring up structure etc. If it your ideas or AI or only ranks or squad games or changing the key binding my guess is the start to finish effort will best all but the most insane errm determined.
Any thoughts on my own warm cup of tea thoughts I've been chewing on for some time now myself?
Ssssh
No and no.MrChaos wrote:QUOTE (MrChaos @ Mar 26 2015, 03:04 PM) FBD
Rank is not achievements and our expecting it to perform that function is a desperate attempt to point to something anything showing personal in game progress.
Rank is not achievements, that's correct, but if rank shows pilot skill (at *all*, and if it doesn't, then why bother having it?) then achieving a higher rank is an achievement in and of itself. The idea that rank isn't something that people will naturally point to to demonstrate personal game progress or prowess is woefully ignorant of what makes the most current incarnations of DOTA and Starcraft so successful. Without the "bronze-silver-gold-plat-diamond-masters-grandmasters" paradigm, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends wouldn't be half as popular.
Before LoL had their "league" system, they had ELO ratings much like Allegiance has (yeah yeah, "it's not ELO", it's a number that represents how good you are compared to everyone else, erm, excuse me, "How likely you are to win" to use Baker's cop-out, but all that @#(! is splitting unnecessary hairs. It's like people fawning over a particular type of sword failing to realize that at its core, it's just a long metal bar used for hitting people with.). Guess what? People *still* bragged about their ELO. I capped out at like, 1780 before they swapped over. People raced to get the highest ELO.
Which brings me to the bull@#(! that keeps getting spewed about AllegianceSkill:
Yes. It is intended to represent how good an individual pilot is. Baker went on and on about how "oh you don't understand, what it really represents is the cumulative chance that one team will win while the other will lose." While cute, this explanation is really just a smoke-bomb. The better commander and better team will win the majority of matches. Therefore the team that's made up of the better players (and commander) will probably win. That means if you're picking a team which will probably win, you are necessarily trying to decide which team is better. The better team has the better pilots/commanders, therefore you are determining (however loosely) who the better pilots are.
It ain't perfect, but then again Sarajevo's in Diamond and Drizzo's languishing in Silver, so nothing is.
Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.
Cookie Monster wrote:QUOTE (Cookie Monster @ Apr 1 2009, 09:35 PM) But I don't read the forums I only post.
Which is all tangential to my point:
Achievements. Ways to show off. That's how you get people to stay.
Achievements. Ways to show off. That's how you get people to stay.
Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.
Cookie Monster wrote:QUOTE (Cookie Monster @ Apr 1 2009, 09:35 PM) But I don't read the forums I only post.
@MrC
No we shouldnt try to appeal to all people. I only showed like 5 of 1000 types of players out there. But actually allegiance fits 1 or 2 of them. If we fit 3 or 4 of em our playerbase has a much better chance to grow. The advantage of my idea is the low amount of skill needed. Effort and motivation would be the main part. For most of the things that need to be done you dont need any real hard skills. That is very different on developing an AI commander for alleg or something similar. Trying to attract the same type of player over and over again wont bring us further. Even if we are succesful with marketing and dragging alot new players in like doubling our playerbase. Soon most of them will leave again. We need ideas to break this problem. In theory it could be fixed by the things mentioned for years:
- stop insulting newbies
- stop bad behaviour
- make the game easier to learn
....
Did anything work? Most of it didnt. Allegiance actually is like a train on a railroad driving slowly towards a canyon. Everybody is discussing about the machinery, the wagon luxury and the food. But all this things wont bring people on the train. The only way to circumvent the crash is a switch to another track that maybe will lead somewhere else but it will lead somewhere and people might hop on.
No we shouldnt try to appeal to all people. I only showed like 5 of 1000 types of players out there. But actually allegiance fits 1 or 2 of them. If we fit 3 or 4 of em our playerbase has a much better chance to grow. The advantage of my idea is the low amount of skill needed. Effort and motivation would be the main part. For most of the things that need to be done you dont need any real hard skills. That is very different on developing an AI commander for alleg or something similar. Trying to attract the same type of player over and over again wont bring us further. Even if we are succesful with marketing and dragging alot new players in like doubling our playerbase. Soon most of them will leave again. We need ideas to break this problem. In theory it could be fixed by the things mentioned for years:
- stop insulting newbies
- stop bad behaviour
- make the game easier to learn
....
Did anything work? Most of it didnt. Allegiance actually is like a train on a railroad driving slowly towards a canyon. Everybody is discussing about the machinery, the wagon luxury and the food. But all this things wont bring people on the train. The only way to circumvent the crash is a switch to another track that maybe will lead somewhere else but it will lead somewhere and people might hop on.