The Mana World Forums

foobo wrote:Instead of million npcs, maybe you could try to implement interactive npc (bot?), sort of a guide (with player abilities and for example poltergeist sprite, able to move, attack, cast magic, which will guide through necessary steps in the game, teach almost all regarding game system, including magic and pvp and will leave us when will reach certain level to move forward). Hard task, but it'd be definitively more interesting and entertaining for a new player.

I discussed sometimes ago with a lead developer about a similar possibility, but my idea was less sophisticated than yours:
Server keeps track of which main accomplishment a character has already done. It would be nice to be able to have a look to the list of accomplishments/quests and see which of them are (undone?), initiaded/unfinished or done, and even redoable. A few NPCs located in main towns could do that (town hall?) or maybe a new window in client. Of course your idea is much more user friendly and much closer to what I saw in other commercial games.

Nard

As you know the web interface for account registration is currently broken and new players need to be registred manually. While this situation is of course bad and should definitely be resolved, it also adds interesting new data to this discussion.

There is currently a high number of new people who request manual account registrations on the forum. We can safely assume that they all belong to the set of legit users. But I am pretty sure they are only a small fraction of them, because the entry barrier to register on a forum and write a personal post is much, much higher than filling out a web form.

Crush wrote:As you know the web interface for account registration is currently broken and new players need to be registred manually. While this situation is of course bad and should definitely be resolved, it also adds interesting new data to this discussion.

There is currently a high number of new people who request manual account registrations on the forum. We can safely assume that they all belong to the set of legit users. But I am pretty sure they are only a small fraction of them, because the entry barrier to register on a forum and write a personal post is much, much higher than filling out a web form.

I noticed that point. Though it is likely that some ( a few) of them abandon the process of double registration and post in its middle, you can have an estimate of the number of fake registrations that occur in regular use. Anyway the number of requests have nothing common with the numbers I estimated before .

Nard

Nard wrote:Though it is likely that some ( a few) of them abandon the process of double registration and post in its middle

Some? I think you are grossly overestimating the persistence of people. I am pretty sure most people just say "Well, I'll just try later when they fixed it" when they read the message on the registration page.

The number of registration we see at the moment is the absolute minimum number of legit registration, but definitely far away from the maximum.

I initially wanted to say that a few went through the double registration process. I still wonder about the outstanding usual rate of registration:

Nard wrote:I estimated, based on account creation dates and accounts numbers i knew, that there were (roughly) between 40 and 70 accounts created per day! (depending on the time period)

Nard wrote:The account creation rate is still very high in 2011 (50 per day, 2 per hour!)

.

According to a very rough first estimate I made: 90% (at least) of active accounts are 1 char ones, 10% include 4 to 9 chars.
That makes: 0.9+6.5*0.1=1.55 chars per active account (I will not discuss distribution estimation, there are too much error sources).
thus the number of active players (I mean having at least 1char) is inferior to 0.85/ 1.55= 55% of accounts number.

Nard

Hello, greetings from a noob player.

just popped over to give my two cents on the game as a noob.

so far it doesn't quite strike me as a mindless grind-fest, but completing the many quests I have so far was rather unrewarding. the time spent on quests wasn't worth the items/experience received, not by a long shot.

on my current agenda is gaining access to that cave south of the desert town. so far its been rather frustrating. I figured out that get access to the cave, you have to do quests in town. I have lost count how many quests I done and am now at a point where I cannot find any more quests. if I may, I have suggestions to help new players.

we need some kind of quest log to keep track of incomplete quests. the second is NPCs that are quest related, it would help a lot if their names are in a different color. finding NPCs that offer quests are a bit of a nightmare.


another thing I would like to point out is the drop rates and leveling rates are rather low. this causes noobs to get bored rather quickly.

that is all

Hi Arkza, thanks for this reasoned feedback. I agree with you that a quest log would help a lot, but unfortunaly we currently lack the resources to implement this rather large feature.
In the specific case of the quests in Tulimshar, do you think it would help if Lieutnant Dausen gave hints on who to talk to for the next quest? That way he'd function similiar to a 'local' quest log.
Note that not all quests in Tulimshar are needed to get access to the cave, the ones in the northern part of the town are unrelated, but there are five quests on the southern part of the town that need to be done in linear order. (Having them linear is a bit unfortunate, I already thought about changing that, but didn't get around to actually doing that.)

Arkza wrote:another thing I would like to point out is the drop rates and leveling rates are rather low. this causes noobs to get bored rather quickly.

The problem is that they *have* to be low, or they will become too-easily accessible by upper-level players.

I've never had any problem with the early-game drop rates, though. Only things like 30 yeti tears and 500 dark crystals.

I've never had any problem with the leveling rate. In fact, it seems pretty high at the start.

Stats again:

Based on my own accounts information between April 2010 and now (June 2012), I saw that account creation vs date is quite linear.
On the overall period the rate of account creation is 53 per day with a determination coefficient of 0.983
A closer look reveals a bend that occurred around february- may 2011.

1. During the first period, let's say April 2010-April 2011, the account creation rate was 66.6 per day, with a determination coefficient of 0.998
2. During the second period, let's say April 2011-now, the account creation rate was 41.8 per day, with a determination coefficient of 0.997

published to be helpful to whom it may concern.

Nard

I added a few measures (account creation dates). The account number inflation is still stable: about 40 per day, while everybody could notice a decrease of active players number. (19 max this at about 6 server time!). Compared to that the 3 nice old players who came back though their account were deleted are very important.