So today I sat down at my terminal with a hot cup of my
favorite morning beverage and loaded up the FB MG Player’s Page to get caught
up with what’s, what and who’s, who. Before the page finished loading so I
could read it my terminal’s thermal alarms started screeching like a flight of Valkyries
coming to claim the dead. The monitor started to warp and sag before busting
into flames setting off the fire suppression system in my office. Now that my warm and fuzzy feelings about my
morning have been washed away along with my tasty beverage, I was tempted to
let loose a long tirade of verbal abuse at the universe for bursting my bubble
of peace and harmony. Thankfully my reporter’s instincts kicked in and removed
the Engineer from that train of thought before it could build a full head of
steam and leave the station. Where there is this much heat there had to be a
story this reporter needed to get in on.
My office being in shambles and my terminal in ruins led me
to head down the hallway to Ken Hicks seldom used office. As luck would have it
GG had to buy Ken a super-cooled terminal when he changed his personal grooming
habits and bought some new bath and body products. They were supposed to have
some special additives that would cause people to like being around you and
more willing to talk to you. This would have been a great advantage to a
reporter so I can understand why Mr. Hicks was talked into buying them by that
slick salesman. Unfortunately for all of us in the Galaxy who found ourselves
even in a not so close distance to Ken it just made us feel cranky and ill. The
“Active Ingredients” would take up to 3 months to leave his system and this led
to a ton of hate mail and we needed to buy him a special terminal to handle it
all. After blowing off the dust coating the terminal I flicked it on and got
back to work reading the post and the 60+ replies that caused my office to get
a shower.
It would be very easy to give into temptation and just wade
into the fray on the Player’s Page and add my own voice to the “Discussion”
there and then have to make more posts defending my position because it was
different then someone else’s. All this would do is make more white noise and
ruin a chance to get my point across. Lucky for me I have a newspaper at my disposal
and can write an editorial on the subject so here we are.
First off, I understand the frustrations when your bets are
ruined with clans you figured should win do not for any number of reasons. I
have been there more times than I would like myself. With the costs to make
those bets super high and the payoff so low for the last 5+ wars I have just
stopped betting.
Warning!! This next paragraph is a shameless plug so read it
at your own peril. If you want to skip it just go to the paragraph after it and
continue on.
If you are frustrated about how crappy the bets are you
could just write 2 articles for me at GG or my fine friends over at ANN and get
60 niodes for your time. This is way less stress then trying to figure out who
is going to win this war and you do not have to pay your own niodes upfront to
get in the door like you do with betting. You can also write more than 2
articles and “Win” even more niodes so please take advantage of this and get
paid!!
Now for those of you who skipped that last paragraph congratulations
you are now caught up with the rest of us and I will now carry on.
Mecha Galaxy is just a game that we the players use for any
number of reasons but to Nick and his team this is a business and MG is a
product they “Sell” to us every day to pay their bills. One of the key concerns
we the players have is how few players stick around and grow our community and
if Game Craftsman is like a normal company this issue should concern them as
well. If they can’t bring in enough new blood to at least offset players who
stop playing the game in time their company will go out of business.
Every time this topic comes up on the Player’s Page it is revealed
that this game is played by a diverse group of humans who have a lot of
different opinions on why it is so hard for new players to stick around and
fall in love with this game like we all did. The most common opinions for this
failure revolve around clans in the lower divisions for Clan War choking them
out from having a chance by camping, spending etc. I would like to offer a
different opinion about what I feel is the single largest obstacle to a new
player and place the “blame” for this at Nick’s feet. Nick, I hope when you
read this you take it as constructive input and not a personal attack. I feel your
new player tutorial is one of the worst I have ever experienced in a game and I
felt like rat that had been taught it was better to push the green button and
not the red one but because this game does not play like most players expect it
to my first account I made after finding your game got messed up quickly and in
only a few weeks of play I left the game with anger in my heart before I even
had the chance to play in a Clan war. After a month break from the game I could
not stop thinking about it. There was enough excitement about the concept of
this game I had to try it again so I created a new account and I had the luck
of meeting a few helpful players in Kong chat and was taught a few key tactics
that helped me feel like I was not just spitting in the wind. Because of those
players I joined my first clan and became a member of the AFF and played in my
first Clan War and this gave way to new frustrations about this game. Nick, you
have created a game that gives us lots of interesting factors that affect how
we can play the game. The problem is your tutorial does not equip the new
player with any knowledge on how the game works other than how to use the game
UI. This lack of education in game leaves a player feeling like they would have
better luck equipping their mechs and going into battle asking a Magic 8 Ball
for advice. Over the years players have had to test the hell out of all the possible
options and then make educated guess on the results. If a new player does not meet
the right seasoned game players and get taught the right verbal lore on how the
magic that makes up this game works they are screwed and leave the game in
frustration. Nick, depending on your user base to explain why a new player
should love your product and how to use your product is a very bad marketing
plan and leaves the continued success of your company up to pure chance.
The other large challenge a new player faces is the ever-widening
level gap that makes up the bottom divisions each Clan War. With more brave
players joining the level 300 club each day and the player base shrinking this
is causing the average level threshold to move into the next division to raise
ever higher. As this gap gets wider and wider it increases the cost a player
has to pay to move up in the game at a time where it is even harder for a free
player to gain the needed crystal from harvesting from other players due to the
shrinking player base. We are rapidly finding out those of us who started
playing in the beginning of the game or at least for a longer time then players
who have joined the game in the last year or so will always crush players who
have joined the game in the last year. The prizes, free giveaways and betting
all had a much higher value then they do now at a time when it costs way more
to try and compete then it did back then. Your only real option is to whip out
your credit card to buy niodes if you want to win but last year when you
changed how your packages are structured you greatly lowed the value of what
you get for the money spent. To be honest I do not have any extra money in my
real life to invest in this game. But also, to be honest even if I did knowing
what you used to get for spending $500 vs what you get now would cause me to
boycott investing any of my money anyway and I know a lot of other players who
feel the same way. They are at most spending $1 each rent party as it gives the
best value for the money with the 50 extra niodes you get and a chance at more
if you win on of the extra prizes in the raffle at the end. Nick, if I had to
guess most of the players who invest more than a $1 in a rent party are in the
upper few divisions and this fuels their exponential level growth with
compounds the issues new players face in the lower divisions. This is also a
very risky position to place your company when you are depending on a few
players for most of your cash flow. In time, enough of them will move on from this
game placing you in a negative cash flow spiral.
Watching how you have been adjusting the prize list over the
last few wars shows that you are attempting to combat the cost challenges new
players face by raising the value of the Silver prizes to the point where they
are worth more than the Gold. This is only creating new challenges as players
do the math and adjust how they play the game to win the greater prize. Also,
with the shrinking player base and D1 level growth having only 4 prize tiers
further erodes the value of the prizes relative to the player level making it
ever hard to grow in levels and not gut your accounts power.
To help combat this issue I would offer this opinion. Scrap
the current Clan War prize structure and just pay niodes for each medal. This
would make for less work for you and your staff each war as you would not have
to decided what mechs, equipment and weapons you want on the list and making
sure you have the balance you need for the prizes etc. It would also allow each
player to take the niodes and invest them into things they feel best help their
army. It would then be very easy for you to create a prize tier for each
division and allow you to better fine tune the payouts relative to the average
player level in each division.
Nick, we all want new players to join our ranks and enjoy
playing this game with us. We also want to retain older players and seek to offer
input on ways to help you win on both issues and in doing so help keep this
game alive and thriving for us all.
To everyone who read this entire 2000+ word editorial I
extend my thanks. My goal with this was to try and offer a constructive opinion
and as always if you have an opinion on how to improve the game please write it
up and submit it to me at GG and earn some niodes for your trouble.
Again, this is just my opinion and if after reading it you
feel it barely has enough value to use as toilet paper then that is your right.
I just ask that we all try to have civil conversations about these issues going
forward or we are just throwing more fuel on the emotional fire and speed up
the player exodus and kill this game.