I'm sick of expansions bringing the population up to 150-200 for a week or so, then declining down to 100-110. We need to get our Bane Shift together and get Pox-Nora's name out there, cause this trend is driving me insane. Okay game play for a week, the stale games playing the same Firking person AND OR Bg's multiple times in a day. It's extremely discouraging. Of course.. Game balance is iffy (and frankly it'll always be this way) and bugs are still apparent (things are being done, yay) but honestly.... WE NEED MORE Firking PLAYERS! Thanks, your friendly neighborhood *******.
i take it you think advertising is the cure. The game has been out there for years and has been launched on steam more than once. I don't think pox's problem is that people don't know about it.
Partially true. The Steam launch was a massive failure because it was done in an era where powercreep was at its worst and bugs were rampant in every game.
I agree. So how do you convince all those people who have already looked at the game but passed it by? It's going to take more than a banner ad with boobs. Pox 2.0 would probably grab their attention but it needs to live up to the changes that 2.0 implies. Subtle balance changes and bug fixes aren't that noticeable to the new player. I think the f2p is finally getting to a good place but the game still needs more reasons to play than just rank. The solo experience right now is just ok (still seeing the ai deploying over chasms). And once skirmishing for cards gets old you either make the shift to ranked or else lose interest. DoW needs to be a bigger part of the game and the world map used as much as possible. We need to attract the tbs players back.
I thought the second release on Steam (as DOG) was after the rework of the runes? Although I don't know if anyone defines the second release as a failure or not. It didn't feel like there was much talk about it afterwards other than an issue I believe they fixed.
Yeah, there was a second Steam release post revamp. Problem was, the revamp was a big freaking failure, so the second Steam release was a failure as well. And, even though I think your numbers are way too high Karma (I mean, honestly, all the last times I've logged in there were less than 100 people online), I think the truth finally hit you, so I welcome on board. Soon you will realize as I did that the only way to save this game is a Pox 2.0, it doesnt get much more straight forward than that. If you guys don't, just keep pushing for monthly release of cards, that will surely help a lot!
This games like 90 years old with a crazy high cost of entry for new players and a lack of other new players for them to compete against. Doesn't matter if we get new players because it'll be damn hard to retain them. As far as the population decrease goes, speaking personally I only really ever enjoy them game for the first week or so after a patch when nobody knows what they're doing. After about a week everyone knows the meta and copies decks so you end up facing the same 3-4 bgs in every match. This game has a billion runes so actually balancing it where the isn't going to be an obvious fotm deck is borderline impossible.
Before soe abandoned pox there were a lot of players who were saying the meta was rather varied and the balance between factions as high as it had ever been. It's easy to balance the existing runes. Step 1 is to stop constantly making new ones. Start making this game for players who want to actually play a complete and polished game instead of treating it like a cash machine for the devs ( and their trade shark accomplices ).
Veteran players are quitting and not enough noobs are taking there place. Soon it's just gonna be Tiny all by himself.
We have been advertising, and doing various fixes/features, and it seems to have been helping numbers recently. We are quite a ways from the expansion launch, and even now, in the morning on a weekday, we have ~120 online right now (on Monday we hit 140 at 10 AM) and hit at least 150 on the weekends, which is higher than we have seen in the past few expansions.
the games not that old(barely older than league...), the cost of entry can be addressed and so can player retention. This game isn't nearly as complicated as you are making it out to be and can be more or less balanced for the most part. The devs would need alot of help though, they are not capable of balancing this game by themselves simply because they only understand this games pvp at a very basic level.
