punk7712 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 16, 2021 5:52 pm
wargrimnir wrote: ↑Sat Oct 16, 2021 4:35 pm
This thread has flailed wildly off topic, you guys keep getting baited by the same troll when he makes new accounts too.
Please stick to why casual players are bad and shouldn't be listened to as the topic title indicates.
I suspect this comment is tongue in cheek, but it's not a good look coming from staff. If you guys want to lean into hardcore only you will be competing with an MMO that does that better than anyone, Shadowbane. These are the kind of population numbers you will be looking at though. That said, and I say this with all sincerity, this is your game and you can do with it what you like. I respect that the developers are doing this for free on their own time.
Shadowbane has been dead for a long time, they shutdown in 2009. They sold off to another company in 2012 who sat on the game until February this year. The only reason it was re-released on Steam is because old Shadowbane players were getting geared up to start playing Crowfall, which is essentially Shadowbane 2. The current version of Shadowbane on Steam is a blatantly pay-to-win zombie reskin of the original game, only the most desperate nostalgia should draw anyone in. We have slightly higher standards than that. I don't expect it to survive a full year. By most accounts, ChangYou is a pump and dump "developer" who has done essentially nothing for the game. We outpace them in development, features, and updates by a wide margin. The SBemu server was shutdown shortly before the Steam re-launch happened to keep their population one place, which backfired. Can't trust some shady cash shop dev to do what a private server will. Once ChangYou shuts down their live server, fans will bring back the emu again, hopefully.
In short, Shadowbane is really bad, and dying for painfully obvious reasons, as it should.
Crowfall on the other hand, despite it's nosedive post-release, managed to bring over several of RoR guilds because it's a modern re-release of a hardcore guild based open world RvR game. This is more the kind of thing we do around here. That would be a much more apt comparison to what an "unpopular" niche might be able to command as far as active players. Casuals, as in the kind of people who
don't want to play a hardcore open world RvR game, played Crowfall anyway because the visuals were nice and it was as shiny new MMO after a long MMO drought. They're the ones leaving, not the people who actually want to play in this niche PvP genre. I have hope that Crowfall knew what they were getting into and were very much expecting a casual pop and bleed post-launch, time will tell. These are the "casuals" I've had criticism over, at least they're the ones I was referring to anyway. Lesser games that panic over the themepark ride ending for an excited casual MMO base can ruin those games as they're unfairly criticized for "losing population" who never had any intention of playing there long term anyway.
The other elephant in the room regarding RoR population is New World, which does have some interesting PvP elements, but if you're a staunch Warhammer fan, it doesn't really scratch that itch. It's not really a high fantasy game, some people really like their elfs and dwarfs and orcs. Otherwise it's a pretty good competitor if you're solely looking for some open world pvp with keep battles. Although on the other hand, I can't imagine we're really expected to compete with either of these games while the populist hype cycle is driving them forward and modern era development is actually being done.
That being said, I don't think in the long run either of these games matter much to ROR. Until Warhammer Online 2 releases (don't gasp, it's not a thing), most of the people that love Warhammer Fantasy and a fair amount of Old World fans, will come and go as they please. There's a difference in how "casual" is used in threads like this. When it comes to low effort, minimal time available, solo pug playstyle, that's fine for ROR. It's not going away. These "casuals" will lose more than they win, and as long as they can accept that this playstyle means less rewards than people who invest a lot of time into the game and play at a highly coordinated level, they can still enjoy the game for what is put into it. When it comes to casual players that I've apparently spit on recently, the hordes of people that might swarm a game for the first couple months after release, I don't find those people very important for ROR at all. Catering to
those people isn't going to bring some renaissance of ex-WOW veterans to the game. They need to enjoy ROR for what it is. A niche, hardcore, RVR-first, Warhammer Fantasy MMO.
It's a good time to be a fan of MMO PvP with a bunch of options newly released. This impacts our numbers, and I really don't think there's much that can be done about it. However, we will be fine in the long run, and will continue development anyway.