Postby obloquy » Tue Nov 19, 2013 5:05 pm
This is the same argument I just got into with a very intelligent and respectable admin @ Chev (ton of respect for the guy)
I hear it but I think it's really the other way around.
Old games die from lack of new players, true. But unfortunately there is simply no realistic "cure" for this--it's just the way things work. The old players who keep it alive are the same ones who will eventually allow it to die once they finally give up on it. It's a war of attrition and no amount of friendly overtures and "acceptance" of new players will turn the tide. It's the stalwart old vets who still kick around who are the final governors of a game's (or clan's or host's) life expectancy.
Fixating on new players as being in any way consequential, let alone necessary for survival is a fallacy. The numbers simply don't add up, because they can't--it's literally like playing the lotto in the hopes of finding a diamond in the rough. Hoping for, out of 1000 "new" players, 1 valuable "convert", a useful commodity for the host, a serious player who has come to enjoy the game and the community and was worth everyone else's collective grief and frustration to "put up with" until he "matured"--it's a shot in the dark, a futile grasp.
I'd challenge anyone to provide an example of a single player (let alone multiples) who literally was brand-spankin-new, fresh off the boat, who had never played wc3 before, who tried it and liked it, who stomached the painful "initiation phase" in which he was treated like shit and spent countless hours sucking ass before he figured it out, and came out of the fire reborn as a valuable addition to the clan/host/bot/game at large. I'm not saying it's beyond the realm of possibility, but I'm firmly convinced that it simply just. doesn't. happen. much. And if/when it has happened, how many ruined games, pissed off players, how many other dozens of failure "new" players who fucked around in a few games and got fed up and left--how many of those are left behind in this wake of aggravation which was all in the hope of obtaining this one cool new player who somehow is going to tilt the balance.
The last time I argued this with Edge, I did understand his point, but other than his personal example, I haven't heard or seen one single player across Chev/Ent/more who is literally a "new" player and sucked it up in a bunch of games and then evolved into something useful and valuable such as the rest of us old fucks who still sit around debating this dying failing game. No offense to him but I think his example is also hard to apply in the current state of affairs because he was "new" three years ago. That is a LONG time ago and the world of wc3 has SERIOUSLY evolved (read: deteriorated) since then.
Now maybe there are more like him who have similar stories and ended up becoming great moderators/supporters/players/whatever, who the host is lucky to have attracted and kept as a valuable resource. When you look at a player like this it's easy to think "well we'd sure be kicking ourselves if we had been asshole elitists and treated him like shit and he never came here"....but again, compare the cost:benefit of 1 player like this vs. all the aggravated, frustrated, and disappointed "old vets" who had shitty games and were forced to "deal with it".
Again, it's a war of attrition as we all know, but there needs to be more focus on keeping the majority happy--the meat and water, the lifeblood. The people who have still been playing nonstop for years, the people who used to play but quit and came back (and they might suck but they won't be suiciding over and over because they fail to grasp the game mechanics).
There needs to be a serious re-measuring of who is more important than whom, because continually catering to theoretical and largely-nonexistent "new" players comes at a price. This price, this cost, may not be immediately evident, but I argue that in the long run it will be, and I'm saying this from experience and out of a motivation for improvement, not just to argue or act like I'm hot shit. The new player defender argues that in the long run, it will pay off, that it's short-sighted to discount their worth, that it's necessary to attract and appease them for the sake of the game (when I say this I don't mean you INSANE--just in general--like I said I've had this argument on 2 different forums recently). But I claim the opposite--in the long run, it's the disgruntled and disappointed "old" players who will be dearly missed.
Every year more new games come out to attract attention and literally "steal" old players from old games. Every year the same old game gets older and less fun and less worth playing. As we all know this contributes to a steadily declining flow of new players, but at the same time it means there's an ever-declining attraction for old players to continue playing the old game. Once each person has "had enough" (at whatever their tolerance level may be) then they're done. Sure, they may randomly "come back" after a hiatus--or possibly even return "for good" (but again these aren't "new" players), but for the most part they've put that behind them and you can basically cross that name off the list and add +1 attrition point to Game Dying.
Old players must be properly and keenly manipulated and that carrot must be continually dangling and refreshed to retain their interest in a game that's only getting older with each passing day.
I'm not saying that all this attention and desperate sacrifice for new players is immediately or even "recognizably" translating into old players leaving, but you have to keep picturing this complex set of variables which dictates how "worth playing" you find the game. Eventually the old players start to discover that they're sacrificing their time and enjoyment for the sake of ephemeral and largely theoretical "new" players, and like a bad investment, the returns simply aren't there. The main thing keeping people playing on a given bot/host/clan is personal investment and return--you feel like you are known, you're comfortable, you have stats which mark your progress, you have friends, you have a good time, you want to keep enjoying it while it lasts. But it's not difficult for the tide to be turned and eventually if you realize that you're playing a dying game with no fresh blood and stats don't mean shit and game after game is ruined by foolish antics, it's easy to turn the corner and say "fuck it" because look how many other, newer, better options are out there to sink your time into.
This got way too long but anyway, the point is that the game is dying and you can't do shit about it, new players are dying and you can't do shit about it, what you can do shit about is managing the experience of the players you DO have, and try to cater to them as best you can because once they're gone, they're probably gone for good, and they're irreplaceable. A new player might serve adequately to replace an old one if the super-rare conditions are met (i.e. the new player turns out to be "in for the long haul") but the ever-decreasing amount of these means that you're fighting, struggling, in a losing uphill battle to get more and more new players in the hopes of 1 working out, while those old scarred-up war vets finally throw in the towel.
And who was it that uttered these superb words? Oh, you guessed right!
