As a child of the 70s and 80s, video games are in my blood. I was one of the first kids in my neighborhood to have an Atari and quickly worked my way up to Colecovision, The Commodore 64, Atari computer, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation 1,2,3,4, PC... Ok you get the point. I freaking love video games! As a result I am incredibly excited about the games that are popping up all over Steem. I have been an early adopter of Steem Monsters, Drug Wars and Next Colony. Not only do I enjoy playing them, I truly believe they are a key in the success of this blockchain. Games have the power to attract "normies" to the blockchain. The more fun the game, the more likely it is for the masses to jump on board.
NextColony has a ton of potential. It is already better than a similar game I tried on another blockchain.
Although I have absolutely no technological expertise, I do know a lot about games and a little about people. Whenever possible I have tried to help these brave devs (Yes "brave" these guys are doing something groundbreaking and new. That takes guts!). Usually this means all I can do is provide a little encouragement for them to keep going. Sometimes I give them some feedback based on my perspective, my friends' perspective and the perspective I perceive other players to have.
Recently I was lucky enough to chat with Oli from Next Colony. He and his entire team have been very willing to communicate with players in their discord chat. I truly respect this because I know every second they spend chatting is a second that they cannot be working on their game... and these guys really want to work on their game! In order to get a better understanding of the team's vision, I asked the following questions:
What type of gamer are you trying to attract? (Ones with the patience to build a game they will play for years?)
Are there enough of that type of player who are also comfortable doing things on a blockchain for the game to thrive? (Those seem like two very small niches. Is there enough of an intersection for this to work?)
Battles seem to be the most important thing right now. Why? Will including battles attract many players? Will those players stay if they find it will take them a month to build their first ship and there is not much to do while waiting?
Is the advantage gained by early lucky players (like me) so big that new players will feel hopeless and quit nearly immediately?
Are too many players being driven away by the slow pace and the unpleasant feelings brought on by true 100% randomness when it comes to explorations?
Oli was incredibly quick, open and honest with his answers. He had definitely already thought about each one of these before I ever asked (which was an awesome sign).
Here is what he said (posted her with Oli's permission):
We don't make it easy for people, this is deliberately a hard PoW cycle. We can't get passed the fact that it's about rewards, we are very realistic. But before the rewards we have a difficult task. But we haven't been able to draw the whole picture yet, we're at about 20%. Target is: Crypto relevant gamers
We're a very small niche. There is no way around it. [Some other games] cheated and that's not an attack, there are not 6k players in the whole Crypto landscape, but we're coming in that direction. We don't compete in the App Store, but we can convert players in the Crypto landscape to Steem and have already converted nearly 50 players to Steem. That's not many, but marketing outside the chain hasn't started yet.
No, Battles won't bring any new players. Battles are a building block that is important to finish the picture, we are on a kind of alpha.
This is one of our big current problems, for which I currently have no smart answers yet. I have approaches.
We're seeing that now, and I can't stop it. I'm counting on being able to reactivate all players in the long run by releasing the next 4-6 modules.
As soon as I read the second answer, I cheered out loud (I'm not kidding).
"Outside marketing"!
I let Oli know how excited that phrase made me. Then Oli let me know that "marketing is my profession".
Professional marketer!!!
One thing that has been sorely missed around here is marketing. These guys have a pro on their team! That is music to my ears.
Is Next Colony perfect? No. But after this conversation I have a ton of confidence that this team is doing everything they can to get as close to perfection as possible. Just knowing that they recognize and understand some of the early bumps in the road was a huge relief. If a team does not understand the problems it faces, they cannot fix those problems. I also appreciated the fact that they were honest and did not pretend to have a perfect answer to every question. I am confident this team "gets it" and is going to do what they can to create a great user experience.
What questions would you have asked that could help the team to make improvements?
I'm worried about the answer to question (4). Stronger players will just steamroll over weaker players non-stop and soon almost everyone will quit the game.
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We are now in open discussion to talk about possible solutions because you know i was unlucky for a long time and exactly know the concerns from these players. I have hope we can improve that in the future.
We already have some of the answers to that question:
We will also address this topic with some of the features in the upcoming battle release:
We are monitoring the balance and we will adjust accordingly to make sure that active players can recover from losses.
On 4 I see only the option to have slow to normal speed ships, so that new players can build up and not be overrun by the (lucky) whales.
I would have asked if they could insert something like a binomial distribution algorithm so that it kind of prevents that there are real unlucky player who won't find any planet after 200 searches. Something that it get's from a random mode to this after 100 unlucky searches.
New players spawn in a second ring as you can see on this map: https://spycolony.herokuapp.com/map.html
This gives them days of flight duration protection from all the early player in the inner ring. It is pretty much impossible that the newjoiners will be overrun by the early joiners as they will have to fight their neighbours first.
As the outer ring fills up we will also open up a third region for the new players again and they will start with similarly powered players.
You can think of it like a leveling system in regions. That is also why we will be careful when introducing faster ships. We will connect space regions over time but it will happen in a slow enough pace in order to guarantee a balanced playing field.
Speaking as an early loser I've had an appalling time playing the game. I'm warning people off it as I want to save them from having a bad time too.
Something needs to change. It's just not right that a supporter of steem and this game can get nothing after 6 weeks of game play.
I'm not alone.
@revisesociology i am committed to improving the game at this point and will continue to bring in my thoughts and ideas to support people like you who are just unlucky. Because I know exactly how you feel after 200 fields without having found a planet. Because once you've found at least one more planet, there are a lot more possibilities and that's a chance every player should get in Next Colony! Think would be good if you come into the discussion with your gaming experience to change something for the better.
Hey thanks @onetine84.
I think I'm going to find my first planet and then just quit though. I need some kind of completion but I don't want to play this game anymore.
I can only imagine how frustrating your experience has been. Hopefully the devs of current and future games will learn from your terrible experience.
I hope so.... from your perspective there is a possibility you'll be king of an empty universe as you say below. I checked the leader board recently and noticed there are still a few people on it with no planets! <100 people isn't going to make much of a game!
I'm an accountant with a high level of tolerance for repetitive tasks leading to something unknown. Currently, I am just building skills and buildings by logging in 2X a day.
I am not a gamer and only do things like this to be a part of steem. I'm at level 10-12 in most of the things after 4 weeks in the game and of course everything slows down now with the big upgrade costs and time needed. I have not, and will not, spend money on this activity.
It is amazing to me to be a part of this "watching paint dry" experiment, but I will continue in hopes of good future events. Wishing us all the best :)
Regarding question no. 4, the exploration of new planets i learned about both sides, unlucky (found nothing in about 200 squares) and lucky (to have a streak of 3 planets in double digit amount of squares). I'm with the players who found nothing so far i would even restart the game without my 3 additional planets just to see more balance between all players. So my question here is (even it would not be possible to realize):
Would you support a fresh start of Next Colony with improved game rules especially for exploration?
(even if you found already 3, 5 or 7 planets)
Interesting enough, there is a lot of future potential for Next Colony not just with improvements but with completely new features in the works and i want an universe full of active and enthused players with lively discussion on Discord so i'll continue to give my ideas to the team and support especially the unlucky and unhappy players!
I think you and I are on the same page. I have been very lucky and have found several planets. But what good is it being the king of an empty universe? I'd rather be a grunt in a huge vibrant universe filled with players. As long as they did some kind of credit or voucher for steem already spent, I'd be for anything that would help the game grow. The game is only fun if a ton of people play. Perhaps some kind of bonus for the super lucky would be nice.
I think that the growth of this game will not be built on the backs of the small % of players who invested big but instead on the large majority of people who spend no steem but still want to play. If you want to have a large player base those are the people you need to target and retain. As a free player I can tell you that after a month straight of grinding just to be able to finally get an explorer that if there was a reset I would be gone and definitely not coming back. I think a lot of the current free players would feel the same.
Yes, true and money is also just another term for time in most cases. It was also provocative question. I think there are better solutions.
Posted using Partiko iOS
That is a great point. I was thinking that a restart would benefit "the little guy" the most, but for those who already invested so much time, it could have the opposite effect. This is a great reminder that while some people invested a lot of steem, some people invested something that is far more valuable: time. What voucher could reimburse someone for their time?
This is just a beginning my friend for the blockchain level we will see the extraordinary game will develop on this platfrom for next coming future with full of graphics and we will see STEEM at the ✈️.
Posted using Partiko Android
Hi. I liked your post, keep it up. I wish you good luck and have a good day, and of course you can also get a big jackpot :)
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