Salem

Currently I have 3-4 Neighbors that have come after me and all of them have stopped playing. half of them never even made a container and just used hollow logs.
There seems to be a severe drop in interest right about the time you get your homestead in the wilds but I have no idea why or how to fix it.

Does anyone have any ideas that will help the devs make this critical time more enjoyable?

Don't pander to people who expect instant action and pvp with no investment?

So, ill just skip the part talking about how your post was so useless and just go to why.

As seen in all the beta key giveouts, the population plummets after a few days. While I also don't like the idea of watering down a game for the more casual, there needs to be a certain amount, at least at the beginning, to hook them. If they don't, when they release the game, I would expect to see half the pop leave within the first week.

What does that mean to you? well, no population on a privately run game like Wurm isn't that big a deal. They get some money and have minimum staff. No population on a larger publisher means the game gets the plug pulled. I don't even want that to be considered. Therefore, we need more players of all skill levels to at least play long enough to fork over some money.

So then, if we have no more witty quips, back to brain storming.

You just need to accept the fact that this game is not for everyone, I'm sure Seatribe and Paradox both already know this. The retention rate will never be high, this game is for hardcore gamers that can accept massive grind and permadeath. Crafting and Permadeath are the hooks of the game. Salem will never be mainstream, and I seriously doubt that the developers will be trying to improve the retention rate beyond what has already been fixed with client/ui/tutorial problems. Atleast we dont see any more threads about the creation area being too 'difficult' anymore.

these guys already have minimum staff.

They get a rep from Paradox, the publisher, and theres the 2 developers, who are going on golden rule of indie games number 1: You make the game YOU want and not the game the public wants.

I don't think it's a lack in the gameplay - because when you leave Boston that is the gameplay. It's a crafting sandbox with survival themes. If you're not interested in building you land up and making your own fun then it's right for them to move on. A shame that they used a beta key someone more keen could have used but thems the breaks.

I'm nto slamming your idea to encourage more guidance in the early settling stage but really, a town is the best way to go if you find building a niche for yourself to be too boring.

Valdahaz wrote:Currently I have 3-4 Neighbors that have come after me and all of them have stopped playing. half of them never even made a container and just used hollow logs.
There seems to be a severe drop in interest right about the time you get your homestead in the wilds but I have no idea why or how to fix it.

Does anyone have any ideas that will help the devs make this critical time more enjoyable?

Currently I have 3-4 alternate characters that I use just to gather simple items that are not in my main claim like: chestnuts, witch' s hats and such.

People looking at my alts lean-to's may think they have stopped playing since i just log them in to collect a few of what I need. I never even made a containers and just used hollow logs if I want to store nuts and shrooms.

I have some other alts that have lean-to's but no containers and I use them as storage alts and they never leave Boston.

Some people think that my alts lost interest right about the time they got their homesteads in the wilds and post ...

The easiest way to observe retention rates is the world population number. Now that the fancy graph version is down it's a little harder. But right now we have 320 people online. I think that's... a little biased due to a secondary key giveaway perhaps though?

Like I said I'd need graphs to see. What we did observe was 100>300 server pop with the first giveaway. And the retention rate over the first week was roughly 200-250 total pop. That means more than half the players who started stayed through at least the noob stages. That seems pretty good to me.

Always remember sample size issues You have a fairly small number of observations (5 characters). That can lead to randomness having a lot of effect. In my area 3 noob groups just started up, and all were still there after a week. If I took that to indicate general game health, Salem's doing awesome.

We've had serious discussions with Jorb and Loftar vis a vis the lack of early game crafting content and made lots of suggestions....BUT I'm pretty sure that the game is now in the server load testing/polishing area of development and will be released/open beta (Same thing) fairly soon so additional content like that will probably come post-release.

(Bear in mind that this is merely my opinions and guesses based on beta testing Mmo's for almost 20 years, not any word from the Devs.)

the sky is falling... 3 or 4 people may or may not have stopped playing

they coulda moved or rerolled


and the server pop is misleading , thats current log ins, not total who play , as some log off, others log in and the pop is steady at all hours

five9 wrote:the sky is falling... 3 or 4 people may or may not have stopped playing

they coulda moved or rerolled


and the server pop is misleading , thats current log ins, not total who play , as some log off, others log in and the pop is steady at all hours

If you have a graph of overall characters/players logged in per day it's a fairly good idea. Not perfect, but it accounts for those who play short amounts of time (the key is relative population vs absolute). Doesn't account for multi accounts though.