110 active users from the past 7 days (in General)

Ayup, it's still going downwards pretty heftily.
Wonder how long until we drop under 100.
Other than that, no comment.

Thanks for the heads up, time to go recruit!

Honestly the fact we've got the user base we do considering the age and time and money invested is awesome. If you'd like to see things improve as far as population goes, do something!

I can not possibly in good conscience recommend CB to anybody else.
I am barely hanging on myself, and it's almost exclusively due to the fast I spent so much time so far.

There have been minimal GAMEPLAY changes in years, and those changes were overall for the WORSE.
Unless by "do something" you mean actually suggest gameplay changes that somebody with the appropriate rights can promise WILL be implemented sooner rather than later if found overall good (as if that's going to happen), there is absolutely nothing I can do without breaking some self-imposed common sense guidelines.

Interesting point, I hadn't thought about that aspect.
Even playing casually as I now do I still enjoy the game, and I don't spend more than 10-15 minutes on it a day these days... but were I in your shoes I suppose I'd agree.

The new blood we've got seems to like it, so I don't think the niche we fill has closed completely

Yeah, I really like it! :)

(typo correction above : "fact" instead of "fast")

To name but a few "oversights" that at best do not worsen with the passage of time, but in no way does it get better:

* the initial decision to allow direct player-to-player real-cash transactions (instead of at least having them go through the game system, or be integrated in the game completely)

* the NUB is vastly inferior to the NCB, and only RL-cash spending can really equalize things a bit ; on the flip side, if the NUB also decides to spend cash, same situation ends up noticeably cheaper for the NUB

* RL cash spendings offer a radical advantage, but THAT advantage has to come at somebody else's disadvantage, which is a double whammy ; I'd really rather see CB$ sold by the game itself rather than traded between players (and bought back by the game at a much lower rate and with some limitations)

* still no way to take a vacation and come back to a competitive spot in a reasonable amount of time

* still forced to log on at least 2 (with cash backup), preferably 3 or more times a day to not end up sliping out of a competitive position

* reward/score/PR/MPR system makes less and less sense to me the more I look at it and is still too opaque even for some experienced players

* the drop system is actually getting crappier, if that was even possible ; the median intervals between drops is huge, the median value of drops is negligible

* the character storage limits are ludicrously low, the rental system is archaic and cumbersome, the forging system is little more than mindless bot-worthy sequences of clicks and mostly just duplicates existing blacksmith functionality with minimal overall CB$ benefits

* there is very little incentive to go into a clan, let alone bother getting your clan to the top ; the clan join process is sometimes buggy and the limits imposed on clans are partially arbitrary, partially unfair, and also fairly opaque too

* the very few changelogs that still exist generally keep getting more and more arcane, and the people responsible for the gameplay mechanics or inner working changes do not contribute to the wiki

* persistent long term questionable gameplay mechanics, assorted oddities and some downright bugs like, say, anything from the way "to-hit" chance works, the crazy boolean nature of a situationally overpowered item like the Xbow, the insanely costly team size adjustment options, and the way TSA zombies just won't go away for good

...and so on and so forth.

Do you, really ?
Are you sure it's the GAME that you enjoy ?

Here's a small experiment : for the next 14 days, DO NOT open the forums at all, not even read them (and switch away from the default loading page by fighting or forging immediately after login) and play it all with the chat disabled.
Let's see if you still think you enjoy the GAME so much after those two weeks, as opposed to, oh, say, primarily just the fact that you were spending time with people you know for a good while.

Well, that, or the time you already sunk into your character so far.



Who ? Almost literally a handful of people at best ?
For god's sake, you can actually find a lot more people that play pre-CU SWG on reverse-engineered buggy servers !
If all you can find on the ENTIRE internet is just about a dozen new people that are sufficiently interested in a completely subscription-free game like this (at least as far as they know) to at least finish the tutorial (by the way, THE TUTORIAL SUCKS), you KNOW it's going badly.

First impression retaining rate is abysmal - and it's only partially due to the mostly text-based nature of the game, rest is due to the atrocious brand new player experience from the get-go - and after that, long-term retaining rate is pretty bad too, due to some of the above-mentioned factors, which "new blood" slowly starts realizing after they reluctantly semi-committed in spite of the glaring initial shortcomings (and again, no, the lack of graphics is NOT the whole story).

(repost from another thread last month)

There are some things that were introduced that might influence gameplay in the long term. With this i mean for example that now you can change your strategy including almost everything whenever you want.

So it's more and more 'math' instead of simple funny playing. Especially since you don't have to stick with your strategy.

Maybe remove 'disenchant', 'ink tatoo', 'salvage yard' and even 'untrain'.

This way you have to stick to your character, you'll know and love/hate him.

The second thing that made (like 5 years ago) my CB-live more boring was the introduction of 'Favorites' .. because since then i was fighting only the same few chars over and over, never lost and never knew if my strat was good or bad ..
Without Favorites, you'll fight much more against different chars, see their strat, adjust your strat, etc. etc. -- all the fun stuff in the end.
Maybe you should even 'have' to fight everyone without skipping .. then you could only decide 'how high' you fight in relation to 'how often you win/loose' .. but this would be something new and i'm not able to guess all the consequences.

In the end, CB is the _only_ game I know where you can change your Character and/or your items like you can. It's just way more fun if you really have to try to auction other upgraded weapons and not just try to get a base one.

just my 2 cents

It's only odd that also the only place where it's "negatively" competitive (as opposed to purely positively competitive) is in the clan score system.
There is no reason to have any negatives in there, you can simply boost the positives more instead for the same end effect.

The "favourites" thing is indeed a bit of a detraction from some of the challenge, but it's nothing you couldn't have done before anyway.
The fav. list is a supporter-only thing, and I was NOT a supporter for quite a long time (supportership was actually purchased for me as a prize for a competition, I didn't buy it myself), but I was already fighting as if I would have had a fav list (recent battles, 24h summary, open each opponent in new window, cycle windows and refresh).
So... it's more of a slight convenience than anything else.
Now, either LIMIT the number of times you can attack a certain opponent per day or DRASTICALLY LOWER GAINS for attacks past certain total thresholds in a 24h period and things change quite a bit all of a sudden.


We're not lacking ideas - ideas keep constantly being presented, even these days (after many YEARS of basically being ignored or discounted).
What we lack is the willingness for any of those ideas to be implemented, even on a trial basis.
And last but not least, the below-lower-abdomen fortitude to admit when a past change was more bad than good, then revert it.

We used to be a "Johnocracy", and that sort of worked when Jon was around and active.
It wasn't always very pleasant if you wanted to make yourself heard, but you at least had the solace of knowing that there is one person with a clear vision of how he wants things to be, and even if he was not always right he usually managed to get in the rough ballpark eventually.
But now ? We're a Jon-the-departed-god cargo cult, at best.
Almost nothing of substance ever changes for fear of disturbing the work of the allmighty (even if he would constantly alter it in the past, including the occasional reversions) out of some misplaced loyalty to something that will never really come back anymore (and anyway, if he ever came back, I bet he'd just /facepalm at what we made of it).

I do not doubt the player base is slowly descending, but I check the community page often and as far as i can tell we are coasting. currently the number of battles served in the last 24 hours is just over 33k. for the past few months its stayed between 28 and 35k. So if we are getting smaller, there must be more of us buying BA.

I keep records of the population. It's been this much for nearly a year.... We do need to make some moves to grow a larger population, I admit that; but CB is not drastically heading down hill, although once again, I'll admit we need to take some steps to improve things.

Posting in a thread that reminds me of Fox News!

CB1
Autumn 2004: 1000+
near end : 800+

CB2
Early 2005: 300+
Early 2007 : 400+
Summer 2008 : 300-ish
- item drops introduced summer 2009 - no record of active user count at this time
Autumn 2009 : 220-ish
Spring 2010 : 180-ish
...
Now, early spring 2012 : 110-ish

If it's really been only around 110 for almost a year now, then it means we lost a huge percentage of the population somewhere from early 2010 to early 2011.
Hmm, I wonder, what exactly happened around those times. Nothing big that I remember. Maybe the lack of any sort of changes ?

What happened is the introduction of better free MMO online games.

One thing I do notice is that the black market requires an awful lot of votes for only 110 active users to generate an item - even if they all agree on the item...

I agree on that one, less votes required please :)

There's already a incredibly flooded item market, it doesn't need more water.

There's already a incredibly flooded item market, it doesn't need more water.

Then get rid of the Black Market entirely

ok what is the html tag for quotes? Its not <quote> lol

So remove the bleepin' drop system then, everything's peachy.
Or, you know, remove all current non-rares from the shop (only crazy people use'em more than a couple of days anyway), make lower-tier "rares" purchaseable in the shop (only as base versions), keep the current rares as auction spawns AND add new tier of higher rarity gear only obtainable via BM-votes.


P.S. To "quote" you go plaintext and start the line you want highlighted with a "> " in front ; any "enter" will end the quote.

Where did you get those numbers sickone?

They don't seem accurate at all..

Various related threads in the forum archives and nobody in those threads disputing any of the numbers.
One of my old threads from a year and a bit ago, a few of the weekly economic reports that used to be posted at some time, a link to a googledoc file containing more historic data too and so on and so forth.

Feel free to look for yourself if you think there's been any error or that the numbers at any quoted point in time were actually significantly off from what I posted.

IIRC, CB1 had more than 100 active players when Jon decided to shut it down...

Just saying now that a few more are out the door. Like Dude, and Collector.

This game just has too much grinding required to make it interesting for very long.

And as for too many items... Why does that matter? Oh wait because the price decreases and people can level faster with less grinding.

In other words, people who have been playing for years lose the benefit of all that grinding.

I mean seriously, a game where it takes years to reach the top 100 players is just not going to make it.

Sickone pointed out that CB1 had ~1000 active users. That was accomplished in just a 3 year span. The first year of the game was pretty dead while it found it's footing, so really more like a 2 year span of active community growth. All it took was active changelogs and a balanced economy.

The NUB/NCB that was supposed to help improve community growth only ended up destroying the economy and only really retained many players for 6 months. Once they reached end game they either no longer had anything to really work for and lost interest or saw the chance to sell out and fill their pockets while flooding this economy.

The addition of disenchanting, while convenient, only further floods the economy with cash that would normally be trapped on items. As does leveling and selling tattoos to the store.

It's gone downhill since I joined. Should I leave? :-P.

Seriously 1 thing that bugs me is lack of changes. Sure I appreciate the ones that have happened but we need more.

What needs to happen is a reset every 6 months or so - at least as far as XP and item upgrades, while letting people keep the base items. The cash would basically be sucked out of the game completely every 6 months.

This would basically spell immediate death for the game.

Probably now that the tiny player base has invested so much real $ into upgrading weapons and armor with the expectation that they would get to keep the upgrades - forever. A bit unrealistic, but there it is.

It would be better to reset just xp at first.

This is still the same CB is dying thread that has been going for years, that's the part I find the most hilarious in all this.

Jon didn't just choose to shut CB1 down, the work to upgrade to the new version of the database wasn't worth the effort in his mind.

When CB's membership peaked there were a handful of quality time sink type games, there are quite literally millions at this point. The niche we occupy is itty bitty and I don't think we should turn into another type of game entirely to try and avoid that. Quality is what kept most of us here this long and I don't see the quality of the community or the administration diminishing regardless of the numbers. CB continues to attract the occasional amazingly brilliant person, and that in my opinion is enough.

Gossip threads like this hardly serve a purpose, I guess venting frustrations and fears is still something, but I'd love to see someone running a contest, or discussing what it is I could do to stop Ranger without losing Mikel from my fightlist.

The problem with discussing those players is that unless you've been playing for years or paid for a ton of BA and clicked till your thumb feel off, you've no chance against them.

That's the point I was making.

That's quite simply not true. It's not easy, but there are examples of folks who have been quite successful, even without investing outside cash. It's not impossible, heck Joel came in and beat my old setup when almost no one else in game could with a very specific targeted setup.

And how long did that take?

I think he beat me before the end of his NUB, it was quite the feat

So you're saying he took about 6 months to do it and probably used his entire BA NUB bonus.

So what you're saying is that with a huge bonus over your BA, and who knows how many hours in a 6 month period, he defeated a high level player and it was "quite the feat".

You make my point for me.

you said years Wise, Novice stated 6months.

More like "CB is declining at a slow but steady and alarming rate, and I'm mad nobody that might be able to bothers to do anything about it".
And I don't find it hilarious at all.
I find it tragic and pitiable.


Who said anything about turning CB into a *different* type of game ?
Since when would a return to a regular schedule of gameplay-improving, gameplay-enriching or gameplay-correcting changelogs constitute a genre shift ?
Or, you know, making it less a pain in the posterior to keep up semi-competitive gameplay with just one login per day... or allowing people to take a few weeks off a couple of times per year and some weekends here and there, WITHOUT noticeably penalizing them ?
So is it your position that GAMEPLAY PERFORMANCE HOSTILITY TOWARDS PEOPLE WITH BUSY REAL-LIFE SCHEDULES is a vital and defining characteristic of the game's niche/type ? Really ? Because that's what it sounds like.


You call it gossip, I call it "wake up and smell the non-roses".
Maybe "hey, frog, did you know you're in a pot that's slowly starting to boil?"
Or if you prefer a medical analogy, "dude, I know you're afraid of blood and this looks like it would be a bad thing, but you have to make a hole in this one's trachea or he'll suffocate soon".
If you catch my drift.

The purpose for "threads like this" would be to HOPEFULLY motivate an insufficiently driven or generally reluctant "upper management" echelon into ACTUALLY STOPPING THEIR IRRATIONAL FEAR OF MESSING WITH ELEMENTS OF CORE GAMEPLAY (like the N*B system, the reward formula, evasion/xbow effects, to give just the most often-talked-about examples) AND JUST DOING *SOMETHING* ALREADY, because whatever is already going on with the game certainly doesn't look like it has any chance of getting better.

You can run a bazilion tournaments or you can make the umpeenth "help me beat X" strategy threads, that still won't change the situation.
For almost every new player and almost every person that decides to do a NCB, there's a frantic (and very exhausting "if done right") 6 month period which is followed by either staleness, disappointment or regret, unless they decide they want to run another NCB (or "cheat" and abandon their old account and hope to come back as a NUB later).
With every iteration of that cycle, more and more of the old regulars get lost between the cracks, and others just can't keep up anymore.

The conversion of new people is low AND ONLY GETTING LOWER due to the "network effect" (the value of a network strongly depends on the number of people in the network) - so the less active players there are, the lower the percentage of people that will stick around is, even if efforts to recruit new people are steadily kept (which is again not the case, because the game is harldy advertising anywhere, and word-of-mouth effects are dwindling too), which means that eventually, almost nobody will join while most of the current people would quit for some reason or another. And eventually, whoever pays for the server will no longer be able to justify keeping it running for such a tiny number of active users, and then CB will TRULY be dead.
And you don't even have to have a worsening in gameplay to lose even dedicated older players - real life will take care of that for you, with the current inclement CB rules towards people with less spare time.


Gossip. Hrmpfh. Right. <expletive self-deleted>.

What you need to beat almost anybody specific in the game right now is:
* 6 months of free time (as in, minimal or no RL responsibilities for at least 4 intervals of 45 minutes per day, every day, for the entire half year)
* EITHER a lot of saved in-game wealth OR a pretty decent and loose real-life wallet -- primarily for purchase of BA, secondarily for purchase of gear
* a halfway decent semi-targeted strategy (which you don't even have to devise yourself) and some minor but vital pre-NCB preparations

The first thing I would look at, for purposes of retention of existing and returning players would be the NCB. The cost of BA if you dont have a pot of cash means it's impossible to get where the competition is. With such a small player base, the number of players who are actually 'fighting' is small enough that most of them are in the upper reaches. If you don't buy most of your BA you will not gain enough XP to reach them and compete.

I'm running an NCB right now and it's a mill a day for BA. I have a bit of a pot, but it's running out, I cannot maintain that for the duration of the NCB, even if that is static. Reduce the running costs somewhat and you might find we get a few returns who are wanting to stay providing they can compete.

I used to think it shouldn't be too easy to get up near the upper reaches, but if it was 'easier' it might encourage some more competition, and that competition would be spread through the levels a bit more too. That can't be a bad thing for a game can it?

CB currently isn't dead, but the 'old' CB where I was active for instance is gone. I know exactly what killed that, at least in my mind. The Wiki.

Couple a huge knowledge bank of how the game works with no new additions to gameplay and the majority of the old strat discussions disappeared. That used to be my main forum activities, strat discussions and changelog posts, and it provided a big focus for community. A new player would come along and have reason to talk to other players and interact. And it gave older players the feeling they had a bit of an edge over the new, which doesn't hurt.

Seriously ? You think the WIKI had a noticeable hand in killing interaction ? I suppose that to some small degree it reduces discourse on certain topics, but to put any significant of blame on it is just... ungh.
Besides, as you put it, if the metagame is stagnant, wiki or no wiki, things get lethargic either way.
Easier and more expedient access to information is overall a good thing, even if it has certain small drawbacks every now and then, like accelerating certain natural undesirable processes.
Again, it's not the presence of the wiki, it's the lack of change. If the wiki would have not been present, we'd still see almost as much decline in numbers, sure, but WITHOUT the wiki, you can be sure a few players would have not stuck around at all to begin with.

Personally, in the short run, I would just lower NCB cash rewards to half of normal and make all NCB BA free of charge, and increase the N*B duration to 1 year, with a STEADILY DECREASING bonus percentage (starting at the current value, ending at near zero in almost 1 year, then vanishing).
Also, I would heavily boost the BA cap, so that even on the most intense BA regeneration level, you'd still get 12 hours offline without losing any BA (and on higher levels, nearly one full day).
I would also remove the CP losses and boost the clan rewards to double their current level. And I would make the hidden 5% (now 10%) bonus for fighting a clan character visible in the fight list.

In the medium run, I would abolish the N*B system altogether (keep the BA cap boosts) and replace it with SOME form (to be discussed, mulled over and altered until adequate) of self-adjusting "catch-up bonus" that is always higher the lower in MPR you are. The shape (linear, exponential, logarithmic) and steepness of the bonus curve are all up for debate.
I would also rework the clan system to no longer be MPR-based but simply a maximum set number of people (say, 7). To compensate, I would adjust the clan score system to grant bonuses or penalties to the effective clan score depending on the MPRs of the members.

In the long run, I would also rework the rental system to become a viable alternative for CB$ income by enlarging the character holding space greatly, drastically reducing rental listing fees (and NONE of the fees would be "up front", or if they still exist, they would be nominal - instead, fees would be a percentage of charged amounts payable upon actual rental) and allowing a simple "per hour" rental fee, with the owner selecting maximum per-rental period and the one renting it deciding how long he needs it for. Owners would also be able to remove the rented item at any time, and in case it is rented, set it to return at the end of the rental period.
I would also rework the forging system from a simple "upgrade NW" system into an ITEM CREATING system (including items never available before) with the NW upgrading part only relegated to the blacksmith. Forging would become a more comprehensive mini-game that would alter the stats of items or add certain effects. The components for effect changes would be the only thing that randomly drop from fights, not complete items. You could dismantle an existing item to recover some of the components used in its upgrade too.


And so on and so forth.
There are a LOT of things you can do with CB, if only somebody with the will to code any of it would actually have the right to.
But very few people with the will, ability and time to do.
So it's "meh".

I said it would take years or buying BA with endless clicking to reach the top 100 players.

That point has not been challenged. It was just pointed out that about 6 months of endless clicking with a NUB bonus could work, but is "quite a feat".

In games that work, there are constant changes and updates...like every two weeks or so and then resets every 3-6 months. The games needs to incorporate new items and strategies to maintain interest.

Perhaps with this game niche, changes should be more like every 2 months instead of 2 weeks.

Small side-comment about the reset thing.

I lost interest in most games that reset periodically quite a good while ago.
That's one of the reasons I seldom participate in CB tournaments, unless the rewards are substantial enough to warrant the extra time spent on the tournament.

If CB would become a periodic-reset game, I think most of the remaining playerbase would pretty much vanish after the first reset.
You MIGHT get some new people around, but a lot of people would simply go away after each reset.

Dont underestimate how central to the community the strat talks used to be. The community has always been split between those that chat and those that didn't and the ones that didn't were quite often huge forum freaks.

Between 2005 and 2008 I had one of the top 5 forum posting totals. A huge chunk of that was strat talk. I got to know quite a lot of people through strat talking, in forums and via CM. I've only ever been in chat twice in the 8 years I've been frequenting CB.

Yes.

And this was a point of discussion many years ago.

Before that was all said and done, and people stopped talking about that as well. ;)

There's probably a WIKI page about it.

But the main point (which was missed from Johnny's original post) was that the WIKI wouldn't have had this effect, if there were constant changes tot he game, like there used to be.

Then there would still be things to test, learn, discuss, and wiki.

Now, well. Just look at the largest discussion posts to see what we have to talk about.

It ain't CB any more...

And that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that nobody believes anymore that anybody will ever actually change anything noteworthy with regards to gameplay, therefore any discussion as to what's over/under-powered and how to change that would be basically talking to a brick wall, now would it ?

For instance, whenever any of us says "Xbow", most of the remaining people just go "oh, for frack's sake, not THIS again" (each of them for different reasons).
And then, somebody necessarily HAS to state that the discussion is pointless since it won't be changed.
Why do you even wonder why strat talks and similar things are extremely short ?
Everything that can be discussed about a subject has been done to death already and very few people still have the energy and drive to try and talk more about it when you almost certainly know nothing will get done.

In fact, much like THIS discussion right here.
We've had this discussion quite a few times.
And every time, the people that MIGHT have a chance to do ANYTHING about it barely say a word, or not at all.
And when they do, it's nothing encouraging.

Why do I even bother again ?

I hereby pronounce CB to be in a coma and unlikely to ever get out of it.
Not dead, not dying, just in a coma, and nothing I can do can change that.
I wash my hands of it.

;)

The reset I advocate would only be for score, XP and possibly weapon upgrades. In other words, it would put people on a nearly level playing field every 6 months or so. They would retain their records of course. The other option to resetting weapon upgrades would be to make the upgrades worthless until a certain XP was reached.

As for the strategy discussions, they would sky rocket if we had constantly new items/abilities etc. A wiki would never be able to keep up with monthly or bi-monthly changes.

I really like Sickone's idea of being able to forge new attributes into a weapon. Perhaps giving weapons the ability to add BL or VA or something new.

The wiki really isn't the issue. There were user made sites and enough forum history that most of what the wiki provides was just as attainable.

The reason strategy discussion does not exist anymore is because there is nothing new being added to the game and no changes being made to existing items/spells.

The reason the game has become stale almost entirely has to do with the lack of active changelogs. Though, the economy of the game really hasn't helped (but is a result of changes not being made).

Not as easily or throughly Josh.

It got to a point where new users were comng to ask questions about CB, and we were all giving "use the wiki"/"have you tried this page on the wiki?" yet as answers to thier questions/threads.

Now, new users moslty don't even ask questions.

But I still agree, this wouldn't be an issue with changelogs.

Though, I would think the wiki would help with new player retention. If for no other reason than for ease of information at the start.

Only after they've become familiar with the game does strategy discussion really come into play. If after having read the wiki and questions remained I'm sure someone would have been open to having a discussion as I have still seen it happen since I returned, and even recently in chat.

It simply comes down to changes, it was a huge thing that was discussed in my game design class. Games that rely on community need to provide something for the community to talk about. If it doesn't do that, then players will leave, or just talk to each other via other means.

So just about everybody agrees we need some changes, doesn't really matter all that much what changes...
...so why isn't anybody doing some ?

We are neither Jon nor NS.

Well, Jon's not going to do anything, so that leaves NS.
What does he have to say about any of this ?

We're still at this? I understand your dissatisfaction towards an aging game, but complaints in the past yielded little to no positive change. Whats are you going to do once you get an answer and its not what you hoped to read?

And yes some change would be good, Ive also said it before but its not my game and its not my place to demand anything. All you can do is ask, we've all tried it.

We're ALWAYS at this.


It doesn't appear you do, or you only very superficially do.
Also, which past ? Recent past or distant past ? How distant ?


Then I will *KNOW* for sure whether there's still a chance (no matter how small) for, well, anything.
It will either make me try harder or simply quit.
NOT knowing is far more annoying. And annoyance wishes to be spread.



Actually, it is your place to demand everything you want (even a very polite and submissively stated request is still a demand), and it's every player's place to demand everything THEY want, whichever way they deem appropriate to.
It's the people that are responsible with the game's maintenance and improvement who need to answer to the demands either by yes, no or maybe later (to be clarified sooner rather than later into clear yes or no) to the earliest convenient opportunity.
And finally, it's your place as a player to continuously make a choice between sticking around or leaving depending on the answers to those demands.