Is it me or the amount of players is going down lately?

[Piateluca]

just wait for the rebalance!!!

[Fai]

Are the rebalance include players?

o1cc liar! there always 3 bots online!

sorry forgot 4 with Frost

[yourmistakes]

warriors will be receiving a berserker skill in the next major update (barbarian quest)
the aim of this skill is to increase critical hit damage

[salmondine]

I think the player base remains steady, but it should grow, not remain static.
if we suffer a temporary set back from botters quiting, I'm okay with that...now we can grow!

[Derpella]

warriors will be receiving a berserker skill in the next major update (barbarian quest)
the aim of this skill is to increase critical hit damage

I was on a test server to check it out, and honestly, it suck.
First, you must give up speed skill, and with this your attack speed decreases badly. So your damage when fighting amongst archers.
Second, if it wasn't enough, there are defense punishments.
Third, the effect is barely noticeable. So what you'll get is a final damage smaller than with speed skill, and you'll be more vulnerable too. Great.
Fourth, the quest is a nice idea, but it was hard to complete even for my gm char with maxed stats and best armor possible.

[Jenalya]

I was on a test server to check it out, and honestly, it suck.
...
Third, the effect is barely noticeable.

http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 12&t=14101

Is there anything warrior friendly coming out soon?

The barbarians we're currently working on will release also a new skill, Raging, which is only for warriors.
You can already get it on the testserver, but it'll be changed before release, since it's too weak in its current version.

Fourth, the quest is a nice idea, but it was hard to complete even for my gm char with maxed stats and best armor possible.

http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 13&t=13765

If you play the minigame with a higher level character and drop a higher number of apples, the possibilty to get a different monster than a fluffy spawned is increased, to make it more challenging. (So e.g. a level 99 character dropping hundreds of apples might get a Yeti spawned.)

[Crush]

I think the player base remains steady, but it should grow, not remain static.
if we suffer a temporary set back from botters quiting, I'm okay with that...now we can grow!

When you look at the long term statistic, it seems like the playerbase is very slowly but steadily declining over the past years. But although you frequently have people claiming that "many people left because of [insert event here]" when they didn't like something, you don't see any general downward jumps with lasting effect. It's more like a steady trend not linked to any specific decision.

I think the real reason for the lack of player base growth is a lack of any organized marketing.

Product success = Product quality * Product marketing

When you have a worthless product, even the best marketing in the world won't sell it. But even when your product is great, people won't buy it when you fail to communicate to them how great it is. Many great innovators (and great salesmen) failed because they didn't realize that, and the most successful startups of our time are successful because they realized that development and marketing can't live without each other.

So what do we learn from that? When we want TMW to be a really successful game, we need to invest just as much time into marketing as we invest into development. The question is: Do we even want that? TMW is a free time project for all of us. We are doing it for fun. Is success really important to us? Do ten times as many players really mean ten times as much fun? Or rather ten times as much stress and pressure?

[o11c]

We need quality content first.

Practically everything for the current server was designed to be "only temporary" while ManaServ was finished. That hasn't been the best for balance or other things.

[DarkestLight]

I would like to try and move this conversation about new skills and balance in this game to my thread 100% on those topics.

http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 12&t=15090

[Platyna]

TMW, AFAIK, was never meants to be a game played by ten thousand players.
About marketing, good marketing can sell Chocolate Cupcake - Apple is a great example. First thing we should do to take care so TMW will be included in major Linux distributions. I see Fedora finally updated the package for TMW, but it was mighty old very long time.

Regards.

[Kurtz]

First thing we should do to take care so TMW will be included in major Linux distributions.
Regards.

This means even a small number of people, but also a special kind of people, those who play tmw as if it were a job more than a game, the same people wich you are trying to discourage the new rules. I think the game should be promoted in other areas, in such a way to attract "the man of the street" as well as the computer guy.

[Platyna]

What new rules? Rules are like they were since like 4 years.

Regards.

[Crush]

Sorry, Kurtz, but I don't understand how you come to the conclusion that being listed in the software repositories of linux distributions would attract only powergamers and not casual gamers. Can you please elaborate?

I would also be interested in hearing about your ideas of other areas to promote TMW in.

[Alige]

You want more players? Then take care of the consistency of the game for at leas 2 years. Developers only care about adding new things to the game... WAKE UP GUYS! This game is currently a complete mess! Every map has issues. Every graphics needs to be updated and cleaned up. Every script has a typo. But guess what, it seems nobody cares about that except me.

My thought (which of course will not be applied): Turn the game off for 2 years giving time to developers to review everything, update it from A to Z.

I'm not surprised that people are making other servers, independently from The Mana World. I'm not appreciated by all developers because, damn, I'm nearly the only one that thinks about consistency! I guess I'll follow my own way soon too. I'm constantly doing commits resolving some problems and what do I get for doing that? Answer: rejections of my work! I will need to talk to Wombat in person about that since it would be a shame to continue alone on my own direction.

EDIT: And according to me, the rebalance will never happen, people don't care about consistency enough.

Best regards,
Ali-G

[Reid]

AliG, you can still start your own fork and clean everything. But i think that what you said is a bit off topic, tmw always get a bad gameplay and bad content, at least, since these last 2years. And afaik, the amount of players just gone down lately.