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The current new player experience


fletch

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How am i supposed to succeed as a new player? am i even supposed to? do i have to wait until the stars align to do so?
what do i mean? well, let's talk about the new player experience.

You download the game > grind to max level hyped about the mid game > farm gold and buy your set (after spamming chat for a week+ someone will sell it to you, but overpriced, because he/she knows you've been trying to buy it for a week) > end of the road > keep farming gold until the end of time while waiting for a trial opportunity that will never come > uninstall

What should come after or before farming for the set would be joining a guild or asking for a trial carry to get your equipment, but the game has around 200 active players and most of them are afk farming 24/7 on their guild towns and only play when their friends on discord ping them, the guilds left insta spam trials/dungeons with their already established and already set in stone parties as soon as the reset happens and then log out, so no trials or equipment for you bro, have fun with your +14 Temple Knight Weapon! (the only new-player-friendly content in the game by the way, the Temple Knight equipment boxes)

Let's say we're giga tryhards and want to squeeze as much content during our painful stay in the game as possible so we make an alt account, invite ourselves to a party and solo farm Lvl 95 trials with an extremely specific build everyday.. congratulations, you've wasted hours of your life farming for weapons that are, at most, 50% stronger than your Temple Knight weapons yet completely irrelevant if you ever wanted to farm the weakest Dragonside Ridge mobs (Blade Acrobat sword being the only exception and not because of it's raw power)

I was wondering why is the playerbase so low when there's actually so much attention to the game coming from the development team but now i know why, it is because there's no future for new players, sure there's a lot content that has been introduced quite recently, but that content is all hyper-late game content made to keep old players and whales hooked.

I don't know, i can tell that the development team is pretty talented because you really can't pull what they pulled by being clueless or half-assed, but come on man how can't you see that the player retention is non-existent? sure you can keep whales and old players hooked by constantly releasing hyper-late game content so they have something to do, but there will be a time when even these people will quit, then what? 

Seriously, if you used 30% of the attention you give to the late game content to improve the new player experience, maybe the playerbase wouldn't be in the hundreds.

TL;DR: Unless you mindcontrol 3+ of your friends into playing and grinding Eden Eternal with you for weeks, this game does not welcome you.


inb4 someone posting about how they got in a guild first day and that they were carried everyday and also got his full awaken set/weapons in a week, good for you bud, hope you had fun, because i certainly didn't.

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While I have never been on the unlucky end of this guild business, I have been saying the same exact thing for years and Im very happy somebody finally spoke up as well.

Everything in this game forces you to be a in large guild or you need to fuck off with not having pts/ppl to do things with.
Many aspects in the game are extremely unfriendly to new players, despite all the QoL patches to help with such issues, lets start with a few examples:

TW: it literally is healer meta, and yes the more healers the better chance to win, even if the situation varies slightly. Now, if that was just THE problem, this wudnt be listed here. But because only big groups can PvP effectively, this just forces more people to migrate to 1 big guild, and then people wonder why there arent enuf guilds competing with each other. Solo PvP experience needs buffs, and group nerfed, something like making Crystal take less dmg from multiple targets so you cant group rush a crystal much faster than a guerilla fighter silently solo capping. Nerfing anything that can kill u with 0 counterplay unless you have a party helps too, such as Conju, most other classes got their cc nerfed but only conju is still almost completely untouched man, or Chibi Ranger in nctw.

Events: Boss rewards are sent based on DMG DEALT, this is a terrible idea that says "if youre not endgame, your screwed", we unironically Need equal rewards for this aspect of the game. I have encountered new players who got reeled in by their friends, realizing they cant actually participate, and just didnt log on again.

Trials: I believe OP has perfectly demonstrated the frustration. But endgame players suffer from this as well, I can NEVER find a DS pt that doesnt have trolls in it, or Fox Abyss. The community is content with defending trolls as long as they arent the ones dealing with said trolls, literally "its not my problem until I need to deal with it", resulting in this idea that everyone is fine and that improving gameplay is not needed, nobody wants to "git gud", they just want to get gear.

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2 hours ago, fletch said:

How am i supposed to succeed as a new player? am i even supposed to? do i have to wait until the stars align to do so?
what do i mean? well, let's talk about the new player experience.

You download the game > grind to max level hyped about the mid game > farm gold and buy your set (after spamming chat for a week+ someone will sell it to you, but overpriced, because he/she knows you've been trying to buy it for a week) > end of the road > keep farming gold until the end of time while waiting for a trial opportunity that will never come > uninstall

I mean welcome to the real world. This is supply and demand at its finest.

 

2 hours ago, fletch said:

What should come after or before farming for the set would be joining a guild or asking for a trial carry to get your equipment, but the game has around 200 active players and most of them are afk farming 24/7 on their guild towns and only play when their friends on discord ping them, the guilds left insta spam trials/dungeons with their already established and already set in stone parties as soon as the reset happens and then log out, so no trials or equipment for you bro, have fun with your +14 Temple Knight Weapon! (the only new-player-friendly content in the game by the way, the Temple Knight equipment boxes)

So what are we suppose to do?

The set scales with level, its free to fortify so you can get into a semi-decent position within the game, yes its not perfect but I mean asside from just giving you the best set from level what more could you expect? We give you trophies that are good for players who are yet to complete achievements, accessories that are good for players to help them tackle new content and theres access to free gems that again are good enough for beginners. Like asside from giving you the best possible gear from day 1 I don't know what more we can do for you.

You're forgetting the fact that the game is around 12 years old and the content will reflect that. You're also catching up to players who have been playing this server anywhere from a year to 6 years.

Instead of going full bold why don't you offer some suggestions based on your own experience.

2 hours ago, fletch said:

I was wondering why is the playerbase so low when there's actually so much attention to the game coming from the development team but now i know why, it is because there's no future for new players, sure there's a lot content that has been introduced quite recently, but that content is all hyper-late game content made to keep old players and whales hooked.

I don't know, i can tell that the development team is pretty talented because you really can't pull what they pulled by being clueless or half-assed, but come on man how can't you see that the player retention is non-existent? sure you can keep whales and old players hooked by constantly releasing hyper-late game content so they have something to do, but there will be a time when even these people will quit, then what? 

Seriously, if you used 30% of the attention you give to the late game content to improve the new player experience, maybe the playerbase wouldn't be in the hundreds.

TL;DR: Unless you mindcontrol 3+ of your friends into playing and grinding Eden Eternal with you for weeks, this game does not welcome you.


inb4 someone posting about how they got in a guild first day and that they were carried everyday and also got his full awaken set/weapons in a week, good for you bud, hope you had fun, because i certainly didn't.

The game content has nothing to do with the playercount to be honest with you. I mean you can spew a bunch of nonsense about how the numbers wouldn't be like they are if we focused more on new players but yet when the server opened and everyone started at level 1 and even when the classic server opened where everyone started level 1 with less content available to catch up on. Yet the numbers where still not massive.

So I'll leave it like this.

If you think that the only thing thats holding this game back from being a massive game and having lots more players is the new player experience. Then sure, give me some suggestions push ideas towards me that you think would encourage new players to join the game. Rather than come here and moan about how we're not doing enough why don't you actually give us constructive ideas on what you feel went wrong or is going wrong and what could help improve this.

As for this:

47 minutes ago, SmolShibe said:

TW: it literally is healer meta, and yes the more healers the better chance to win, even if the situation varies slightly. Now, if that was just THE problem, this wudnt be listed here. But because only big groups can PvP effectively, this just forces more people to migrate to 1 big guild, and then people wonder why there arent enuf guilds competing with each other. Solo PvP experience needs buffs, and group nerfed, something like making Crystal take less dmg from multiple targets so you cant group rush a crystal much faster than a guerilla fighter silently solo capping. Nerfing anything that can kill u with 0 counterplay unless you have a party helps too, such as Conju, most other classes got their cc nerfed but only conju is still almost completely untouched man, or Chibi Ranger in nctw.

Events: Boss rewards are sent based on DMG DEALT, this is a terrible idea that says "if youre not endgame, your screwed", we unironically Need equal rewards for this aspect of the game. I have encountered new players who got reeled in by their friends, realizing they cant actually participate, and just didnt log on again.

Trials: I believe OP has perfectly demonstrated the frustration. But endgame players suffer from this as well, I can NEVER find a DS pt that doesnt have trolls in it, or Fox Abyss. The community is content with defending trolls as long as they arent the ones dealing with said trolls, literally "its not my problem until I need to deal with it", resulting in this idea that everyone is fine and that improving gameplay is not needed, nobody wants to "git gud", they just want to get gear.

New players should not be doing TW competitively and to suggest that it should be is absurd. It's a Territory War and the game has no stat balance mechanics. It's guild based PvP, it would be an insult if someone who started the game a week ago came in and shit on the top guilds after they've spent years perfecting their gear. As for the other comment "group nerfed". It's a group PvP event why should people be able to solo. The only thing someone who is solo should be able to do in TW is have a bit of fun hunting people down who are maybe away from the party or trying to ninja cap. They should not be able to fight with a geared group and win, that would be absurd. If it was 3v3 or something then sure, random team mates and incomplete parties but a guild based pvp event, thats madness.

I also touch on the fact that you mention something like Conjurer being able to kill you without a party. Well how are we suppose to balance a game that has group PvP being its main selling point as a game and have it balanced so you can play solo PvP too. Not to mention theres 61 possible classes to play all that have their own debuffs and stuff too. Yes I would love to provide this but as I've mentioned countless times the game is old, it doesn't have systems to improve this and making systems like this are just not worth the weeks of time to make and test and refine. The only way I personally would say to fix this would be having different skills for PvE, PvP and Arena PvP. So atleast that way the skills would be balanced around those areas of the game. But this is all out of the games scope.

However, this is completely off topic.

As for Events. Again this is down to how the game is designed and isn't really something in the scope of something we would fix. I could maybe increase the threshold a bit but you still should be participating to a degree to be rewarded. Otherwise everyone and their mother will just stack alts and abuse rewards that may be abusable.

This isn't something we can fix. It would require some forced dungeon finder method to atleast remedy the situation which quite frankly the game and most games aren't big enough for this thats why other games that have systems like this tend to be massive games with cross server play (would still have plenty of trolls). The game used to be rife with people hosting peer parties and the population count isn't different to back then either. So this is more of an internal player mindset issue where as you mentioned if you invite peer people you get trolls and ninja's and all sorts of bad experience. So players are now just sticking to either premade parties or guild only which isn't anything I can do about that. This being why I always recommend new players find a helpful guild when they join. It doesn't need to be the top guild, I see a few guilds every week when I do checks that are small but have lots of players and those guilds don't even appear to PvP.

I feel like a lot of your issues from this response come from the bigger guilds dominating a lot of things and not helping the smaller guilds. But tbh this is more of an issue of players who play this game lately only care about winning. There is a difference between being a big group that win and being a small group who can be effective. I've played this game for a long time, in meta's that where worse than now. Meta's where you needed people throwing up barriers to make a party invincible otherwise people just get 1 hit healer or no healer, Meta's where people would reflect more damage than you dealt to them and Meta's where if anyone dealt less than 10% of someones HP they'd heal more than they damage. And yet not once has a stronger party of 5-10 players not been able to atleast be a factor in PvP. It's just if you have to have a chance to win the whole thing to enjoy yourself then thats not really something I can fix other than suggest you join the bigger groups.

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Overall to the pair of you. The game is very old now and the only one maintaining it is me. The original devs gave up on this game 5 or so years ago and I'm the only one who hasn't. I have a life with lots of other things to do so I can only do so much in the time I have. I honestly haven't had much time the past few months and I actually feel bad that the content I've been working on with others has been stopping and starting a lot and is still far from done. But I'm always thinking of ways to improve the new player experience but I'm only one person.

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TLDR: just nerf outdated content to make it easier for new players

Im not saying a random person shud be able to 1 v 10 in a fair fight, people shudnt be able to become raid bosses.
What I am seeing right now, is not that solo playing is wildly inefficient, but that it is actively discriminated against via dismissal.
I am not asking for an immediate fix to all of this, as "new player experience" is too complicated of an issue, and exacerbated by the community itself.

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There are mostly 3 scenarios for new players right now.
1. Whale and shill, but then they get bored because they didnt achieve anything, there is no struggle to overcome, they get bored and leave.
2. OP, but same as 1, cant get anywhere, no light at the end of the tunnel, get bored and leave.
3. The lucky ones who manage to leech off an active guild/group and get stuff done, not as rare as they look but definitely an outlier case. To make matters worse, PAYABLE endgame gear.

Why grind when they can shill a hundred bucks and get a set + several weapons maxed out? Where do they go as a new player after they shilled? They didnt earn it, they arent going to get the enjoyment of upgrading gear, they wont feel the difference of say, going from awakened sword to HoO sword.
(Did I mention how annoying this is to endgame players like me as well? I spend months grinding and grinding, then some punk comes along, pays a hudred USD, and magically has the same gear, completely making my effort meaningless?)
I always imagined the custom content released like HoO/Abyss wud stick to more successful formulas like Awakened, where the item has to be manually done, for a sense of achievement, to keep players invested.
AND THEN u have these drivers that contribute to min maxing.
As of now tho, those 2 things just invalidate the existence of almost every other piece of content that used to be endgame and are supposed to become mid tier, since both are time consuming and yet one gives better rewards than the other flat out, not to mention 100T/110T being cancer to carry and heavily discourages people from investing time into it or helping new players learn.

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Ik you basically have to work alone on this giant project of a private server, Ive seen some of the strange stuff that shouldnt have been possible completed (81- free portal stones, free 80- upgrades 'tho partly I suspect for nctw', and free items), even installing custom waypoints/portals/maps on preexisting content (the entire southwest continent).
You cant solve the community neglection issue, but you CAN make outdated content less of a needed punishment and easier to speedrun, like how 95T/110T was dumbed down, this is why people have been asking for nerfs to older content, including that little mess of a 100T thread.

 

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45 minutes ago, SmolShibe said:

TLDR: just nerf outdated content to make it easier for new players

Im not saying a random person shud be able to 1 v 10 in a fair fight, people shudnt be able to become raid bosses.

Yeh but theres not really a way for a solo player to thrive in PvP when this is what they're up against. And like again the capping thing you suggested is just guna suck for the group players because it will just turn PvP into a solo cap thing which on PvP threads in the past people have been asking me to try and make it the opposite of this as this happens especially in GvG format.

 

47 minutes ago, SmolShibe said:

I always imagined the custom content released like HoO/Abyss wud stick to more successful formulas like Awakened, where the item has to be manually done, for a sense of achievement, to keep players invested.
AND THEN u have these drivers that contribute to min maxing.
 

You call it successful but it wasn't. Ive done many different kinds of content releases and the problem with the "successful formula" is that they're one and done. If they take too long then new players give up if they dont take long enough veteran players run out of content fast and walk away till next patch.

With the new methods of gear farming yes its met with complaints but I've been refining it patch after patch. A lot of the negative feedback towards HoO was used to make Abyss more player friendly. The new system works because it follows the same philosophy as DS and GoP have in the past. Where you're rewarded for putting time in, even when you finish all your gear. You can help new players get gear faster and/or make a profit selling to other players. It helps stimulate the game economy moving money around for reasons other than costumes and helps those players who don't donate be able to make money without going out of their way to sell runs or constantly spam 0/10's. Yes this does open the door to just completely pay for convenience which fits you first point but to be quite honest, in the era that mobile games has built for us, people who completely just pay their way through a game wouldn't be playing the game if they couldn't do that. So if they just max out and leave, then likely chance is they would have left anyway as they tend to be people who just like the dopamine rush of maxing something. Where as new players who maybe migrated from a much more expensive server like Aeria would use the money to catch up and then join PvP at max gear (Which I know a number of players did that).

This system atleast from the way I have saw from watching the game chat and talking to players has been a success for the most part. Yes I know there are parts people don't like such as the RNG of HoO (one feedback we put towards Abyss was removing large bits of RNG). But in terms of the old system, I would spend say 2 months making a patch, making trials and then within 1 month people are already asking for the next patch. This hasn't been the case with HoO or Abyss for that matter so I would consider that a successful formula. Obviously not everyone will agree with me, but server numbers and in game activity show me that this is the case.

Drivers was a suggestion made to me to remove RNG from the Min Maxing. For weapons it's a bit more understandable that it can be a pain but with armor, it's not really necessary to actually bother its just completely for numeric satisfaction in most circumstances.

 

1 hour ago, SmolShibe said:

Ik you basically have to work alone on this giant project of a private server, Ive seen some of the strange stuff that shouldnt have been possible completed (81- free portal stones, free 80- upgrades 'tho partly I suspect for nctw', and free items), even installing custom waypoints/portals/maps on preexisting content (the entire southwest continent).

I wont take credit for the Portal Stones as that was something that was in FNO so its nothing special. The other 2 though where semi difficult to do (Which is suprising since a lot of things are easy to do in this game, but putting waypoints on a map is not one of them lol).

 

1 hour ago, SmolShibe said:

You cant solve the community neglection issue, but you CAN make outdated content less of a needed punishment and easier to speedrun, like how 95T/110T was dumbed down, this is why people have been asking for nerfs to older content, including that little mess of a 100T thread.

I have been doing this over the years.

Hence the scaling TK gear, the free VL, DD and BTS trophies, the VGN Accessories, free gems, quest added at stop gaps of EXP when solely leveling from quests and ofcourse making trials easier. But theres only so much I can do because theres a player mentality of just "If its not the most current gear, then i'm not wasting my time on it". But then how are veteran players going to have a fun experience. Like last thing I changed was making Awaken level 110 Armor and level 100 Weapons a bit easier and I previously did the 95 Awakens too. But I can't really just start handing them out for free can I? Like everytime people bring specific areas of the game to me as concerning factors for new players I look into it and adjust where I can without just completely gutting it. But like even you didn't really give me something to change, you just said outdated content. Like pretty much everything below Dragon Trials is outdated aside from the odd item here and there. But without specifics I can't really change anything.

As much as I used to be full intune with everything going on in game I've gotten busier and wanted less drama. So a lot of what I know comes from direct communication between people and myself or observing the game as someone not in a guild via chat, screenshots of guild chat etc. So I wont know exactly what is wrong unless someone specifically tells me.

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Hello, i wanted to join the conversation cause i feel i can give some suggestions.

First of all, i want to say thanks u to u Jordan, because u keep this game alive from a extremely long time and i'm pretty sure that the Vendetta Content was and is still the best EE content, from a player that played the original one, the others private servers and one of the first players in the Vendetta server the day that it opened.

Sorry for my bad english, i can understand perfect but i'm bad talking or writting it.

First of all, a way to fix the way the game is done i think would be a "Rework" of the classes skills.

I think is reallly, really, reaaaallly baad for the game that the skills of normal and awakened classes are flat, this makes a HUGE difference between them, like, a normal mage lv80 deals 5k damage crit, a gravity with the same gear with the same level deals 30K. it's really a lot and breaks the game, making some point of it like, REALLY, REALLY impossible to get through. 

This wouldn't happen if the damage of the skills where  "%" like, the skill rush of the Warrior, 

"Deals 100% of ur p-atk and stun the target for 3 secs" instead of "Deals 104 p-atk and stun the target for 3 seconds".

(Leveling the skill damage only will increase the % damage of it, that can be 0.05% or 0.1%)

Awaken warrior ram skill

"Deals 200% of ur p-atk and charges to the target" instead of "Deals 30000 p-atk and charges to the target"

 

This would make the game less explosive, i know, maybe it's a lot of work, i'm programmer too, i did some videogames too, but, this would make in a long term the game easier to carry on and more balanced too, cause u won't do stupid high damage because of the class, u will damage if u're equipped enough to do that damage.
In other hand u will need to nerf the monsters, and i think they need the same way, the monsters skill too can be used with %, they can be re-used and u only will need to adjust the monster stat and won't break the game.

 

I'm also a fan of the no-quest awk class scroll, not spending lot of time in quests that some are finished and some not, a lot of them have bugs or lag issues, just cut them off. 

 

I'm not a fan of giving ANYTHING in a game like this, but i think the temple knight equipment is really good, and helps a lot for new players. 
In other hand i think the fame items of the early maps need to be more cheap, like, this can help people starting the game to start buying orange rings, necklaces and trophies to start the game, making the fame a bit easier too, cause farming these kind of fame is really hard, (i did it on all the maps of the game, have 9000 of fame or more and took weeks) and some prices are just really impossible to buy at the moment u're in that level, but...after that level u won't need that item anymore, so is pretty stupid to have like the "Polar Ring", a lv 50-55 item, can remember now, but it cost like 200-300 gold, and a that level if u have 100 g u're like GOD or something, there's no point of buying a item that sureeee will help right now to have the game a bit easier cause if u buy it, i won't buy anything in the next 10 levels.
So, i think the early shops need a rework to be a cheap version, the fame need to be easier to get, and let the final items keep like they're, cause they're pretty balanced right now.

I'm not talking of making the game stupidly easy, i'm talking to have more sense, and this is clearly not your fault Jordan, this is the problem Aeria and X-Legend had with the game and never fixed. 

 

In my opinion is not a problem of lack of content, just a problem of adjusting and fixing up the shit that Aeria and X-Legend did to this game. 

 

PD: I feel like nerfing op classes do not solve anything, i feel like is better to buff classes that doesn't work well instead of nerfing the good ones. In other case, do not touch anything, balanced doesn't mean "Better" or "funnier".

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@Jordan I dont know if its possible or if it will break the game but i have a suggestion

why not make the Dungeon entry unlimited?

But you can only get the drops/rewards like in 10 runs or less

in a way that the old players can help the new ones after they burn their entries to their guild mates or on ther current parties

so that old players who want to help more other players can have a chance to do so

well its only my opinion it depends on how you wanna tackle it

i know you have so much work to do and i like this game but if you can give it a time maybe you can pull this off 

thanks

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1 hour ago, COmetkun99 said:

@Jordan I dont know if its possible or if it will break the game but i have a suggestion

why not make the Dungeon entry unlimited?

But you can only get the drops/rewards like in 10 runs or less

in a way that the old players can help the new ones after they burn their entries to their guild mates or on ther current parties

so that old players who want to help more other players can have a chance to do so

well its only my opinion it depends on how you wanna tackle it

i know you have so much work to do and i like this game but if you can give it a time maybe you can pull this off 

thanks

Its very much not in the scope of what you'd consider is worth doing. Cause you'd be reworking a lot of in game systems such as the party system and the drop system because you'd basically have to exclude members and add lots of conditions for when people join parties, leave parties and jump around in and out of the dungeon.

This is what I tried to do with DS where even though the quest is daily you can enter 5 times. But I don't really think this would be necessary either. Because most people who do trials would more than likely have spaces in party already. It also doesn't really tackle the issues above mentioned by the other posters.

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