Feb 14
Age [detailed]
TL;DR Abilities of old players are decreasing to open opportunities for new players
Problem to solve:
The challenge at hand is the decline in server populations over time, often due to players accomplishing their objectives. Additionally, real-life commitments contribute to this inevitable decline.
The pitch is to motivate players to join servers during mid and late-game stages. While existing players may gradually leave, the intention is to attract new participants. The central concept is to incorporate age-related factors, influencing various aspects of gameplay to foster a dynamic environment.
The suggested age-related adjustments include:
- walk speed (old players prefer cars)
- max weight (old players prefer trucks)
- increase time of all manual recipes (with combination with https://feedback.play.eco/improvement-suggestions/p/simultan…)
- probability of diseases (with medicine https://eco.canny.io/feature-suggestions/p/medicine-specialt…)
- appearance of a player
Age can depend on one of:
- real time from joining the server
- real time spend on the server
- number of skills
Overall it can motivate people to join severs at late game because old players would produce goods efficiently, but not in sufficient quantity thus creating opportunities for newer players. This approach not only enhances gameplay diversity but also visually showcases players of different generations.
Minor ideas to help new players:
- Unclaim plots after 3 days not logging into server
- Reduce effect of Upgrade Modules or remove them completely (it gives a huge advantage to old players)
Pending
This will only demotivate existing players and will lead to faster server depopulation, while there's nothing to attract new players anyway since there will be no advantages of an old server over a new one. The main problem is that the older the server the fewer opportunities new players can potentially have: less land to choose from, fewer profession choices and more strict competition, potentially less influence on the laws (which they know nothing about until they join), much more new information about this world to digest in bulk (market situation, law system, ecological situation, local restrictions, social structure). When players join a fresh new server they are put in the same context as the rest of the players - an early deployment - and everyone on the server has the roughly same path to go through at the same time. This gives a sense of community and solidarity. Meanwhile when they join an old server - everybody else is already far away ahead of them and everybody already went through the path that new players have ahead, and this creates a sense of loneliness and alienation. To resolve server depopulation devs should address these problems, and not demotivate current players to leave.