So… SWL is hemorrhaging endgame players, and the trend is only picking up with Morninglight showing no signs of being an MMO. Steam reviews and numbers are mortifying.
Is there ANY kind of bone to toss people running out of things to do? PvP? Raids? Maybe some more dungeons? You’ve got folks beating down the walls for THAT content, so I’m baffled as why all the resources are being put into things that have earned a general “meh” from the community… like Agents (with terrible stock pictures… sigh).
I love this game IP to death, but I’m not into necromancy. The solo experience is fine, but this shoulda been an RPG if that were the case - but this is an MMO without anything to really group up for. Please, help me find reasons to stay!
Frankly, if there was any group content with the new issue, I believe they would’ve mentioned it in that MassivelyOP article about the Collectors Edition (they didn’t).
They said on reddit that they were working on something to remove some of the walls between players (speaking of item power). I think that the major reason they lose players the start of the “end-game” grind (when you’re ~150IP and face massive queue times) because there is a massive gap between the core of the end-game playerbase (mostly in e6+) and the eventual new players. The part of the playerbase that is already at 1k+ IP is probably leaving slower than them.
But… keeping the endgame population bored out of their wits (just 5 dungeons and 1 raid) and annoyed beyond compare (because randomizer so they must ‘enjoy’ the more mechanically broken dungeons, too) isn’t actually going to achieve anything. Well, unless it makes those players finally leave…
I believe I once heard them, the devs, talk about that somewhen past the initial season launch some new dungeons would come but really not sure where I picked that up. I believe it was some stray comment in discord.
Exactly, they wanted to move away from that. Besides, the real weakness the game has is some people haven’t trusted that story content is resuming until they actually see it, and won’t invest a lot of time until they know that future for the game is there.
Also, we’ve been hounding them for new story content for years. I’ll forgive them for focusing on bringing that to us over other content which can wait until a future release.
Marketing BS doesn’t make itself true; it’s marketing BS and remains marketing BS.
SWL is a MMO by monetization - the terrible lootbox gear system doesn’t make a lick of sense otherwise.
To be fair, though: based on what information has been released so far, with the infiltrating the Morninglight and all, having a lair or dungeon on that map wouldn’t really make much sense. I mean, cross-faction infiltrator party?
Still a problem Funcom runs a MMO monetization, but fails to provide MMO content. How much longer can that (sort of) work out?
Not exactly, while the monetization doesn’t match the game, it’s not the monetization that should decide how the game will be but the other way around:
This “marketing BS” is actually what references the game; how do you get to know the game?
you play a lot of story driven RPG’s and steam tells you that you might like it.
you google “story driven rpg”.
you watch youtube videos talking about mmo’s with good stories.
So all the playerbase they will acquire will be after this kind of content and they should tune the monetization to fit the target audience.
The problem with “end-game” content is that if you’re a “end-game” player, you will likely never be targetted by SWL’s advertisement and steam references. And you will play other games that top the videos and ranking websites under “MMO’s with best end-games”.
The marketing and the monetization should be on the same page.
The problem is, SWL lootboxes are kind of locked out of providing the normal “useful consumables, and maybe cool new shiny you can go right ahead and use” experience by a questionable gear system.
The marketing may be easier to fix than the monetization here - but the endgame would then not match the marketing.
At the end of the day they will pursue whatever is the most lucrative for them. My guess is that more money can be made by sucking new players in who may make a one or two time aurum purchase then leave shortly after then what can be made keeping the smaller % of endgame players who may have made several in game purchases motivated to continue playing.
I would guess that the majority of the endgame community are ex TSW players and for most of us this game for 5 years atleast was always an MMO and was a game that we played as much for the community and group experience as we did for the solo story content.
I understand this is no longer the image they want to represent though and I don’t see that changing. As the OP has said I’ve seen 80-90% of the endgame MMO focused community leave over the past 2-3 months and I don’t see many of them returning for 3 hours of story content and an added story grind where you get to do chores in game.
All my most memorable experiences in this game came from TSW. And they were all from the group content whether it be PVE or PvP.
I’ve always been baffled by devs trying to use the churn & burn approach to new players.
That works for one-off mobile apps that are expected to have a lifespan - and a gold rush - of a few months. SWL SHOULD have a lifespan of years, but if you follow the model and alienate your playerbase continually…
no, that can’t be their concern. Because this exact point was solved by Tokyo containers. It was good mean for solo people to get their gear to E5 reasonably fast. But they said: “No, go the other way, queue is the way you are supposed to get there”.
So they certainly are not working on “that” because “that” problem was already solved in the past.
I suspect that even though that was the reason they gave it was not the actual reason for the key nerf. The keys had 2 benefits. For those that were well geared they were a valuable source of MoF (I probably made close to 4 million MoF before the nerf selling keys) and for those not so well geared it was a fast way to gear without buying caches (up to mythic atleast).
So they lost money from endgame players that didn’t need to buy aurum to convert to MoF and they lost money from newer players that didn’t have much incentive to buy caches to upgrade there gear. I don’t think lack of running group content to gear was actually part of the reasoning here.
