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Reasons new players are going to be discouraged:

1. From Day 1 of playing you are years and years away from being King of the Hill. 

Half of the players here have memorized game mechanics and have reduced the game to a science with information not readily available. 2. Even at the top of your game, king of the hill, you need to put in hundreds of hours to suiting/rping/pking to be successful.

The single player gaming experience is severely lacking. This game depends on interaction.

1. That said, 90% of your interaction once you get into a cabal will be capture the flag.
2. Given the small pbase, your cabal will either be massively on top, or massively destroyed, without alot of real competition.
3. There are some fights you will never, ever win, unless you are one of like 3-5 players.

I think the only way we'd actually attract real new players would be by massively rethinking the power balance. Right now if we rated characters on pk prowess from 0 to 100, a 75 would utterly destroy a 25, no contest, and a player won't get to the point of challenging a 75 until they've been playing 2 years. At this point, no new 100 players are being created. Everyone at the top of the heap has been playing since at least 2.0 or early 3.0. 

i think moderates are an excellent idea, and I've had 3 caballed moderates that I think were reasonably successful-- positive PK records, defeated some non-moderate E/L people. The problem is being a moderate requires more knowledge of the game, because I had to go find good non-rare items to swap around. I would change moderates a bit so the limitation was separate between Unique/Rares and they could wear alot of rares, but only a couple uniques, or maybe unlimited rares, but no uniques. I'd also tweak EQ  in general to be less important. Make hit/ac/saves/etc have diminishing returns alot earlier. 

I'd also revamp cabal warfare considerably. We don't have the pbase to support this many cabals. I like celerity's idea of collapsing to only 2-- both because it will be more concentrated, but also because people will have more "friends" they can rp with. I think it'd also be cool if (as I believe celerity's idea was framed) they were cities, we could tip the scales between the two and offer perks to people who roll the "losing" side. Faster EXP gain, faster train, etc, to try and keep the two sides balanced.

Right now this is a mud for Veteran FL players. I love it, and would have an active character right now if I weren't working and doing a masters program at the same time. But I wouldn't recommend new players try this mud out, because they're way too late, will always be behind the ball, and once they get into the game and get a good at it the endgame (cabals) are broken with such a small pbase.

So I think the solution isn't advertising. Its making the game more friendly to new players. 

Which vets here thinks they are going to get PKd by a 3 month player? Anyone? Until that changes, we won't have new players.

While you make a lot of good points - I don't think we should just be writing the MUD off just yet.

I've active in the Mudding community at large, and staff in minor capacities at a couple of others.

I've seen a MUD go from 1 - 3  players online (with long period of time with nobody, and highs of 5 - 6) to a constant 15 - 20 with highs of 50 in the last 6 months.

Now these aren't crazy numbers, but they would be crazy here.  The biggest things they have done have been to change things, a lot.  New Coder came in and his basic principals was - come to me with ideas, if i can't say no to them, i'll try and implement them.

Now some of this is honeymoon period of a new coder of course, and you can't expect a volunteer to be working flat out on a project like this - but the principal remains the same.  Change is GOOD.  The biggest thing holding FL back is that we are VERY comfortable.  We know the game, the mechanics, the combos the areas.  A large amount of the playerbase doesn't want things to change, because they are comfortable.

Change supports new players, because it levels the playing field - not very much, but a little.  Players with experience and knowledge will still figure out the new stuff faster, and will be back on top in no time, but it gives incentive to try and compete.

The amount of complaining we see when Erelei changes pretty much anything beyond on obvious bug needs to go.   People need to start looking at changes in the context of the Good of the Game, not personal benefit.

3 hours ago, Aidon said:

snip

Hey mate, I don't want to sound offensive, but what you wrote is a load of crap.

None of it is either true, or makes sense. And I will tell you why.

Basically, the biggest complaint you have is, that a new player will never get as good as a VET, because:

1. All vets are just PK machines.

2. Vets have hoarded enormous amount knowledge over the years and a new player has no hope of getting even close.

Now, on point 1. You are flat out wrong here. I can list a huge number of people that have been playing for 15+ years and still utterly suck at PK. Actually, I will go as far as saying that MOST of our vets are pretty bad at PK. You just have to go to the PK section and see the logs.

On point 2. Again, you are wrong. You will be surprised at how little most vets actually know. Even those who I consider VERY successful sometimes happen to know very little of what they are actually doing and are actually relying mostly on their intuition. If you talk to the "big" guys, like I do, you will find often that the tactics they use vastly differentiate.

Here a small examples:

Trick likes to dress his character in hit/dam mostly, while Anume prefers a much more balanced build.

Back when I was trying to learn DKNs and how malforms work, I went to the most successful DKN player I can think of, and asked him what his malform weapons of choice were and why. So I asked him, "Hey mate, what weapons did you malform on Masokant?". And he replied "I malformed this and this weapon." Then I asked him, "But why? Those are not very good choices for malforms." And he replied, "Those were the best weapons I know of, so I thought that if they are good weapons without malform, then they would be good weapons after malform." That's not how malform works though. Then I proceeded to explain how it actually works, and his reply was, "You care too much about numbers."

Fair enough. Dude was basically working on intuition and he never once doubted it, because what he was using worked well enough for him.

What I am trying to say is that you are wrong.

Not every vet is a good PKer and not every Vet is knowledgable. At the same time not every good PKer is very knowledgable and not every player that has vasts amount of knowledge is good at PK.

The road to improvement is unbiased and honest self analysis. And yes, that means no more lying to yourself that you suck, only because you don't play for as long as most people, becaues of EQ, because of combo disadvantage, becaues of bad connection. Be fair and brutally honest to yourself. The moment you go, "I lost only becase..." is the moment you succumb to the excuse. The right stance should be, "Alright, lets see what I did wrong, so I don't do it next time."

On cabals. 

I see many people saying, "Our playerbase is not large enough to support that many cabals." while never explaining what they mean by that. How large of a playerbse do we need to "support" 2, 4, 6 cabals?

People don't seem to understand that cabals are supposed to be the endgame of FL. Lowering the number of cabals will only mean that you that you destroy its rich diversity i.e. you lower the replayability value of FL.

And that will inevitably lead to loss of players. Because they have no more combos to try out.

1 hour ago, English lad said:

Change supports new players.

I don't agree with that. Change for the sake of it, is a bad. Take android for example - I know many people who migrated to Apple and iOS for example simply because android changes its interface with every update. And it's not an improvement. It's just a change and sometimes its flat out stupid because they go back and forth between designs over and over, like a little kid that can't make up it's mind.

I would like to add one thing about new players:

If 1 single new player is obtained, they are certainly going to have a hard time competing with the majority of experienced players.

Yet if they are willing to invest a little bit of time in game, and on the forums/discord they should become competitive in not too long.

If 20-50 new players were obtained, all of a sudden the pyramid of skill will completely invert itself.

We don't need a ton of players, we just need some new blood to stick around.

5 hours ago, f0xx said:

I can list a huge number of people that have been playing for 15+ years and still utterly suck at PK

Pick me. Pick me.

Advertisement is great and all, and I don't want to derail this thread too much, but I believe the problem isn't with just getting new players, I think there is also a problem with getting new players to stick. 

As an example, when comparing FL to other games that people play. 

Other games: a series of quests that guide you through the majority of the game and explains game mechanics etc. Even in open world games you are given quests to push your exploration further, teaching you where to go to find specific things/places. 

FL: we have a similar mechanic in the newbie quests, which is great. The problem lies in the fact that the newbie quests only cover a tiny amount of the total world. A bit of trivia for everyone - how many areas/items/mobs are actually covered by the newbie quests in comparison to the total number of areas/items/mobs? 

I'm not suggesting we cover every single area, but teaching people where to find reasonable eq for their level and reasonable places to hunt through quests will assist with teaching new players in learning the game. 

Relying solely on "ask someone in game" won't always work as they might be the only person online, or as in my case, I didn't even know what tells were until my third week in.

Perhaps we can expand on the newbie school? I know Mattamue made an excellent newbie guide on the forums somewhere. Maybe we could find some way to incorporate that into Mud School?

51 minutes ago, Twinblades713 said:

Perhaps we can expand on the newbie school? I know Mattamue made an excellent newbie guide on the forums somewhere. Maybe we could find some way to incorporate that into Mud School?

This was taken from Discord, a little editing was done to remove the superfluous stuff:

Quote

 

Lloth: Throne pushed back until after mud school per request.

Kamikazi: Who requested that?

Lloth: Anume. We want to make the newbie experience more intuitive.

Kamikazi: Why would you rebuild an area that you can use until lvl 6, when we get one newbie in four months?

Lloth: Not just a zone rework.  Whole creation system.  Starting as a soul and gaining each part as you go.  So if you decide partway through that you wanna be ogre instead of Mino, you can change without dropping and starting over.  Or if you pick the scourge instead of cycle, can fix it.

Rensvert: Kind of like Elder Scrolls creation? everything can be changed until you leave the starting area?

Lloth: Correct.  It's more of a way to teach new players all the info vets take for granted.  There's no exp gain before finalizing.  Once you select your perk, that's it.  It's for information.  In a form that isn't wall of text.

When?  In the works.  I'm sure excellent ideas could still be worked in, but this thread is obviously not the place for that.

@f0xx

Just a short note on cabal 'diversity':

You can easily achieve the same diversity with less teams, example:

|-|-| vs |-|-| vs |-|-| vs |-|-|

or

|-| vs |-| vs |-| vs |-| vs |-| vs |-|

Also remember, that diversity is not derived from the total number of choices, but instead from viable opportunities in the available choices. You can have a two race/class system that has a lot more diversity than a 10,000 race/class system.

In terms of cabals, much of the diversity stems from interactions. Having high numbers of lowly-populated cabals means that you are limited to inter-cabal interactions, usually PK. This removes all the 'diversity' that could be had from having intra-cabal interactions.

I'd argue for a more balanced approach: a medium number of medium-populated cabals. That opens the door to interactions inside and outside of your cabal, achieving maximum diversity.

At a playerbase of 30, I would put that mid-sized cabal count to 2 or 3 cabals, not 8.

In short, I want a cabal to be a group of people, not a bunch of solo players with a flag.

I also think that the CTF system likewise severely limits the diversity in cabals.