Reached a new point tonight with this game...

@icarusinundated said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

I can understand getting burned out man. I personally have such fun with the game and play it a lot. But the best way me and my friends have found to enjoy it the most is both to take breaks so as to not burn out and also to really engage with the sandbox and make our own "minigames" and such.

The game did loose a lot of players early on and will loose more as other games come out but that is only natural that happens to everything.

This is NOT about being burned out on this game. I am NOT burned out on this game. I am absolutely tired of watching things be added that make this game more and more boring, and things being added that drive more and more people out of this game.

This game currently panders to casual players who at their best will JUST NOW get to pirate legend by purchasing commendations. Those players who have been pandered to will NEVER get to Athena 10 because they do not have the time or patience to get any of it done. It takes a couple of hours (average) to do a single Athena voyage.

Now add the time it takes to sit at an island for 8+ minutes because it begins erupting as soon as you get to it. Then when you come back after the eruption it immediately erupts again and you soon find yourself doing what one of my crew did earlier -- sitting there wanting to stop near the end of a mostly completed (two maps left) Athena voyage because you would just rather watch a movie than sit there staring at hot rocks.

The content being added to this game is not deep, it is not rich, and it is not engaging. There is no story. There is no plot. There are no players. There is nothing. When something new comes, and it is supposed to be great -- there is a one or two day surge and things look like they may get better -- then silence. Nothing. And boredom takes over the seas again. This time we even had a few whole days of server merging! That has stopped again, because there is nowhere to merge us to now that the servers are empty again.

This is not burn-out... this is sheer boredom in a game that offers nothing substantial six-months after launch that was not already in pre-launch.

@personalc0ffee said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

Well for starters it is not a game, the in the traditional sense of what a player would think of as a game.

It is a sandbox.

By definition, a sandbox game is the following:

"sandbox game
A game in which the player has been freed from traditional video game structure and direction, and instead chooses what, when, and how they want to approach the available content. The term alludes to a child's sandbox without rules, with play based on open-ended choice. While some sandbox games may include building and creative activities, they are not required. Sandbox games generally employ an open world setting to facilitate the player's freedom of choice."

There have been many sandbox games. I have played almost every one of them from Star Wars Galaxies on. I have to say that most of them fail, and all of the ones that fail have a few qualities that make them fail. Let us go over some of those things here.

** They were poorly executed and are laden with bugs that they just run poorly or crash often
** They offered absolutely nothing to do other than wander around
** Player encounters were rare and PvE content was bland and/or repetitive
** They offered absolutely no story or way to create a story
** They offered no base-building element or way to influence the game-world
** Many of them were developed in Unity (or another commercially available engine) and threw together flipped assets in an attempt to cash-grab with a slapped together title
** Decision-makers involved in the creation of the game literally led it down the wrong path -- either because they thought they knew best, they just wanted to get away from it, they just wanted to save money and hire far too many inexperienced interns over experienced developers and designers, or they decided they needed to mimic elements that another popular game was using to try and gain in popularity
** Or some combination of the above

This game basically suffers from almost all of those issues.

@personalc0ffee said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

@imadeyoureadme No, this is not true.

When the game times out in matchmaking, it is a problem.

I have never had an issue with the game timing out during match-making but this could have absolutely nothing to do with the population of the game. I don't see how this is relevant to what he said at all.

When you regularly keep running into the same users, it is a problem.

When you regularly run into the same people in a game with a population as large as people claim this has then clearly something is wrong somewhere. You should never see the same player twice in a game with a healthy population and a max of 24 players per server. Even if there were only a couple of thousand players per continent at a time you would almost never see the same players more than once. When you load into the game you are also placed on a server that is regional to you. So you are limited in scope to who you are playing with.

When you get merged many times during actual peak hours, it is a problem.

Server merging and short "match making" times almost go hand-in-hand here. Games with low populations take almost forever to get matches in because it takes longer to pull players together for a game. The same goes for server merges in this game. For the first half-a-week or so of Forsaken Shores we got the first server merges that we had seen since the first month of the games release. We got them over and over again. We have not seen one in several days now. I do not expect to see one now any time soon. Just like I do not see boats on servers anymore. If there are empty servers out there, they have nowhere to merge you to... therefore you do not get merged. When servers empty, they likely shut down. I am sure they are virtualized... they do not sit there idling with no players.

Until the game actually starts having these issues, there are not population issues.

It is a perception and exaggeration issue.

Trust me.

There are definite population issues. You could absolutely see the spike in players on the servers when Forsaken Shores launched. You can absolutely feel the drop now that the excitement has died. The game is just as dead as it was before it launched. These are not exaggerations, they are observations... and absolutely obvious ones at that.

Ya'll still sound like burnouts. Just quit already.

Come back at the Festival of the Damned., or whatever.

You toon will still be here. Rare should have new stuff for everyone eventually.

@doa-fluid well written, thanks.
Hope they take heed.

Rare keeps taking away and what we get in return isn't worth doing. I am not seeing as many ships. We used to server hop for forts, now we server hop just to see another ship. There really just isn't anything to do.

They catered to the wrong people and lost a lot of the people that were dedicated. It's getting harder and harder to log on and supply up a ship for nothing.

@personalc0ffee said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

I don't agree. It is a perception and exaggeration issue. Go play during peak hours for your time of day and you will see there are still ships sailing around.

As to my statements;

The game uses Xbox Live matchmaking. That matchmaking system eventually times out when it can not find someone to join the game. This is not happening.

If you can go to Open Crew and hit Join and get people in the boat without a large wait time or time out, there are not worrying population trouble with the game.

Okay, I play with specific people and all of us play together. We keep an eye out for ships.

As to my other statement, server merging happens when there is low populations. If you are getting merged constantly, there's low population. That is not happening during PEAK hours.

Except that server merging occurs more frequently when there are obviously boosts to population. It was far more frequent during the opening days of Forsaken Shores, and you saw many complaints about it (ie, people that had developed a habit of unloading a boat and claiming they had lost loot to a server merge)

I won't get into a long technical discussion on why it works this way, but I will tell you that the lower the player population becomes...the less likely you are to see a server merge. Rare can do things to improve this but I doubt this is high on their list right now.

That's the key here PEAK hours and PEAK days. It is currently 3:17am CST. There are very people actually wake at this hour and even less playing the game in America. In Europe it is around 9am. People are going to work.

Our group played for OVER (and I have no idea how long it was) eight hours. We played from late morning (before noon) until 3am doing cargo runs, athena voyages and looking for PvP. We never stopped looking for ships. We found one ship to ally with because I had not bothered to do the 3 cargo item commendation in an alliance. That guy was brand-spanking-new to the game and already was asking what to do beyond the initial quest loop.

Then we found a galleon during peak time in our area and that guy was him...alone...on an open crew galleon...and he had sailed around like that for at least an hour waiting for someone.

All online games have peak hours.

So through the course of an entire day on Saturday, when did this game peak in the United States?

@king-deka said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

@auntrusty-mango sagte in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

@personalc0ffee Not really a exaggeration. The game hasn't reached Guns of Icarus Online levels of players (only 100 on for the whole world) but I feel the community here has agreed that there are probably about only 200k roughly active players left out of 5 million.

That's 4,800,000 players gone since launch. That's a lot of people that have left Coffee. Regardless if you play during peak hours. You are still only working with 200k players.

The overall population of the game has dwindled.

We also can say there were only even 2 million players to begin with as well. As they said they only sold roughly 2 million copies of the game, so 3 million of those players tried it out on the game pass.

Yeah but the problem is you don’t get the point! Maybe 4.8 Million players left the Game, nobody knows I don’t think so! But when a new Content Update is Rolling out and from this 4.8 Million players 1.5 Million coming back then you CANT count this 1.5 Players as left players because they’re coming back on an regularly base! Maybe only for 1 Day, 1 Week or they sticking now for the Volcanos and loving the new added things! For me, I didn’t played for 4 Days now, I’m a left player now? No I’m not I have only a real life but when I’m playing I’m playing SoT! Easy!

No one loved the new things added...because all that was added were more of the same missions, the same missions in a new form (cargo runs) and some slapped together islands that all feel the same. Once you go into the Devil's Roar enough, you begin to realize that there is a lot wrong with how things were done:

1. Volcanoes target players and ships .. if this were the case, give it a 1 in 1000 chance that a single rock coming out of a volcano can target a nearby player or a ship... not just being targeted over and over again. We don't even get sunk to them, but hanging out on the ship repairing it for 8 minutes or sailing away and staring at the island for 8 minutes is silly.
2. Islands will almost always erupt as soon as you get to them.
3. Islands will almost always erupt as soon as you come back from waiting out an eruption.
4. There was a Rare post somewhere saying to "zig zag to avoid rocks"...the same post was made about skeleton cannons. I don't think Rare plays this game. If they do, they aren't very good -- we have already seen a lot of that in their livestreaming though. Zig-zagging doesn't work -- it is not the way.
5. Want to have a good time? Do a perfect cargo run and have it ruined by the megalodon that pesters you every 30 seconds -- those bottles are dead. Why the megalodon has to be a guaranteed encounter every game is beyond me, but man does it mess up my "playing in a new and exciting way". I can't wait until I get these commendations completed so I can never do a cargo run again. Speaking of which, onto the next!
6. We already pretty frequently run into server and client stability issues. Want to know where the next one comes from? You are forcing Athena voyages to do cargo runs. Good luck when these commendations are done and everyone just picks the items up from the origin and drops them on the ground. I do hope they despawn at some point.
7. Almost every single large island in Forsaken Shores looks the same. They all have the same silhouette and all have similar cannon placement. These islands do not feel like as much time went into them as the core islands.

Again, I praise the work that went into quality control on the FS update...but overall, it is more of the same.

As for a 200000 player-base? I am not sure I would go that far. I think that is being quite generous.

@barnabas-seadog said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

Ya'll still sound like burnouts. Just quit already.

Come back at the Festival of the Damned., or whatever.

You toon will still be here. Rare should have new stuff for everyone eventually.

Yes, then we can die in new and interesting ways.

Rather than get the lore and story behind the captain of the ferry of the damned...Do some themed lore-based campaign through the world, possibly into the underworld where we get to see a short cut-scene of what happened to him and how he ended up where he is --

We literally are forced to run around on empty servers looking for other players (which is kind of the whole point of this entire discussion, I am absolutely tired of playing an online multiplayer game where I find ZERO players and get ZERO server merges throughout the course of an ENTIRE day. I digress...) We will literally be forced to run around and look for other players on completely empty servers so that we can find all of the ways to die to change the colors of the torches on the ferry of the damned so that we earn commendations and change lantern colors on our ships temporarily. Oh the excitement. I simply cannot wait.

Herein lies another big problem with this game. Shallow content with no meaning that no one ever wants to do more than once.

@personalc0ffee said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

Let it go.

So what if 5 million left? Whoopee, it means NOTHING.

Focus on who are left.

People are fickle, as soon as they think some update is worth their time. They'll be right back here checking it out. Every. Single. Time.

This has nothing to do with being fickle and everything to do with wanting to see Rare's "10 year game" be around in one-year's time. This has everything to do with wanting to see the promises made be kept and the game be more than marketing and hype that is never lived-up to. Because right now, it is shallow, flat, and dry and shows no signs that much is going to change. I have hope for the changes that are going into how they work in-house. I have hope for changes to the pioneer program. I have hope for the new roadmap we are getting soon. BUT... it is hard to hold onto hope when so much has already gone wrong and so many people have already left. You can say "the people that left don't matter" all you want, but they absolutely do...because the people that currently play determine how long Microsoft allows this to drag on as a top-title. When that plug gets pulled, the hype dies...development slows, and this game just festers until we all drop down our heads, poke out our bottom lips, and wander off with a big frowny face.

Just look at No Man's Sky and Destiny 2 as exact examples of this.

Except that no one is really playing No Man's Sky still -- more than used to, for sure...but it definitely hasn't become a popular game. Destiny 2 only made a comeback because so many people got it for nothing via Humble Bundle and both of those really only got talked about again because the companies involved finally got whatever bad decisions they were making out of the pipeline, admitted they were doing it wrong, and turned around and redid EVERYTHING.

@personalc0ffee said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

@jetorchidee97 said in Reached a new point tonight with this game...:

@personalc0ffee I would say that if Minecraft is a sandbox, then SoT is a playground (it's an idea i read on this forum)

I think that tales and adventures are something you can make in every game with a bit of imagination but I agree that SoT has a very fertile ground for it. It just needs more tools, options and a HUB.

I would say this is probably more accurate. It will certainly improve.

Which is kind of the point, the problem is it needs to improve immediately...because if it doesn't, it is not going to live long enough to improve. We are already at a low metacritic score...and more people are jumping ship (no pun intended) each day.

They have got to stop adding shallow "Oh please never let me have to touch this again" content and actually start adding those "New and exciting ways to play!" they mentioned way back when and continue to talk about.