Game development for Dummies

Day 2,836, 14:06 Published in Bulgaria Bulgaria by Stolch

I'm in a good mood today and so I'll offer a freebie to the ...... (enter an epithet of your choosing) devs and admins of this game.

No it's not connected with the newest monstrosity of morronity which the current "tournament" is, but rather with a very basic and game killing problem with the mechanics of the game and more precisely the divisions.

Now this change was initially sold to us with great fanfare as a way to give younger and newer players more prominence on the battlefield and in general in the game.

The result has been anything but and now the game is full of farmed and sold and traded top accounts in the lower divisions operated as a second account by active players who have put their primary accounts in D4 on scripts and bots so they can play with their more "lucrative" D1 and D2 accounts which they registered years ago and farmed strength with or bought on the black market.

This of course has meant that the even minuscule retention rate of the game has become virtually 0 with the only new players coming in being multies, new farm accounts for 2 years later or some poor idiot who played the game before and for whatever masochistic reason decided to come back and see whats going on.

Thus the population has continued to shrink and of the active accounts in general more then half are almost fully robotized.

So the problem is that we now have D1 accounts that have higher strength and do more per hit then some D4 accounts, same for D2. With the addition of the IK stash, these accounts will not go up in their divisions for years if they continually buy them, this could be good for the admins in the short term a few dozen accounts spending 40-50 euros a month, however in the long term it would mean an end to new players all together.

Now the reason divisions were not set up on strength was said to be because of the 9999 strength paradox, where players can train their accounts to the max level for their divisions, never again train and thus keep them permanently there gaining an unfair advantage. Of course as we've seen that was BS, the reason was, so that that advantage can be sold for 15 euros a month.

Still there is a better solution to the divisions problem and it is simple and elegant.

Base divisions, not on XP or strength, base it on military rang. Now this will not solve necessarily the farm problem, people will still farm accounts for use, however it will make the use of these accounts finite and especially in D1 and D2 not worth the time invested as a top strength account would very quickly go up the ranks once it starts to fight if it has a very high strength.

More importantly, there will be no need to adjust ranks in the future for D1 and D2, maybe at some point for D3 to not overpopulate D4.


What should the rank requirements for each divisions be?

Well to keep the interest in the players and to keep them engaged it should be setup so they on average reach D2 after 6 months of game play, so I would say when they achieve the rang of "Legendary Force", which means that the player has done 265 Million damage, which for a new player in D1 who has played and not farmed strength is a substantial amount.

For D2 it should be the same, so the appropriate rank in my opinion would be - "God of War**", which means 2 billion damage, or about 8 times more then D1.

For D3 then it would mean achieving the rank of - "Titan*" which means 20 billion of damage and 10 times more then D2.

Finally one would become D4, when they achieve the "Legends of the New world" rank, which would mean 200 billion damage or 10 times more then D3.



This will solve the balance of the game for at least 2-3 years and allow for new players to come into the game again and have the ability to participate.



So in short for all the attention span challenged people:


Change divisions to be based not on XP, but on military ranks, with the following "proposed" (by me, could be different if after analyzing other ranks work better):

D1: from rank 1 ( Recruit ) to rank 57 ( World Class Force*** ) inclusive
D2: from rank 58 ( Legendary Force ) to rank 63 ( God of War* ) inclusive
D3: from rank 64 ( God of War** ) to rank 69 ( Titan*** ) inclusive
D4: from rank 70 ( Legends Of The New World ) and above


I know there are few legends right now, so temporarily D4 could start from Titan*** and be bumped up to legends at a later time when a long list of players who are not that far start ranking up.

I also know this will just go by the side like everything else that makes any sense at all, but for whatever reason I felt like being generous today...