Limited playerbase growth

I started playing DSO in September of 2013 or so, and the only reason I found it was because I was combing through sites that did reviews of videogames and stumbled upon descriptions of this game. As it was very similar to the game I enjoyed previously, I fell in love with it almost immediately.

Now thing is... most players are not going to spend as much time as I did combing through gaming sites to find this game. Many people I have talked to when playing other games have no idea DSO even exists.

So, I have a proposal for the BigPoint staff. Advertise your game. Seriously. This means:

• Divert funding to actually advertising your game. Don't just rely on word of mouth - it hasn't done a good enough job in the last 5 years, it's not going to do a good enough job now. You have great artists on your team, just get them to work on putting some pretty pictures and pay for the appropriate advertising presence.
• Make proper use of your social media presence - especially Twitch.
• Find out how to get your game recognized by other gaming software to make it easier for your players to literally advertise your presence for you (eg. Discord).
  • Quite literally: players who are currently playing the game will show as playing "Drakensang Online" so that their contacts can view it. Right now it has to be manually set, which is a major disadvantage compared to other games.
• Synchronize communication between the various social media platforms and the forums. I have noticed that there are community events announced on some platforms (eg. Facebook) but are not mentioned here on the DSO forums. How is this even allowed happen? This is supposed to be the game's official forum!

This is an important issue. I'm playing on Tegan where the net growth is in the negatives. PvP matches barely exist. Players have to be drafted just to start a 5v5 match, and 1v1 might not exist depending on the hour of the day. There are barely any public PvE groups to be found. This server desperately needs new players and BigPoint needs to be the one to make the effort to make it happen.

 

Another option would be to combine Tegan and Agathon. I know many big payers in Agathon or let us say former big payers. There is no point to pay, when your product is what it is. Agathon (and I'm sure Tegan also suffers) problems are

1. Low population > High cost to reach the top includes lot of solo play. Takes long time to find a party not even talking about PvP.
2. Server loaction change > ms went 200+
3. PvE and PvP imbalance.

 

Where are Agathon and Tegan located? I play on Agathon, and any server located on the East Coast of the U.S. usually gives me less than half my current Agathon ping. The other game I play, EDIT moved their servers 2 years ago over towards the east coast, and the vast majority of the players were happy about that.

 

This servers (agathon and Tegan) was moved Beijing Chine.. ... Dont You believe me?.. use an IP geo-search engine...

That's the reason for the highs ms

 

I tried searching for the explanation @_Baragain_ provided on how the servers got rerouted, but couldn't find it.

The servers are still located in California (as they have been). My MS actually got better when they rerouted them, and I'm in California.

You are 100% correct.

I'm not sure that DSO would want to publicize how many players are currently playing. That might just be too embarrassing for them.

 

Merging Tegan and Agathon would also fix the low population problem for the NA servers, but it would not fix it for Balor, which is just as dead. Moreover, I don't have confidence in the BP staff not to screw up and fry all servers while they're at it. Thus, I would rather not focus on #Tegathon, as much as I like the idea, but focus on advertising to bring in new players. This game has changed a lot, and it's far more new-player friendly than it was 4-5 years ago. There's actually a tutorial & quest guidance, so they should make use of all that effort poured into the early content and actually get some players to play it.

 

It's pretty clear that there are only a few thousand dedicated players on Agathon, just based on leaderboards. Overall playercount is probably not much better.

 

I'm 99.99% sure that Tegan doesn't have a thousand actual people playing on it. Given all the alts and multiple accounts, my guess would be 400 to 500 actual people on the ghost server at most.

Opening up the F key in the parallel worlds, you are lucky to see the player list full. This time of day, it is not unusual to see less than 10 players. Even during events in Kingshill, there aren't more than 50 players at any given time during the day.

The only public chat you see these days are people begging and pleading for players to register for 5v5.

It is so sad. Back before the great exodus, you could get pvp matches in less than a minute. Groups were forming for Mortis and Khalys all the time. It took no effort at all to find a full guild and you could spend hours just chatting if you wanted.

Now you can spend an hour just trying to fill a group.

 

As much as I'd like to advocate for advertising, I'm going to have to throw this out there.
1. The countdown on my daily EDIT deals reads 4 hours. It's not going to reset then-- it resets in the middle of my night, with the daily challenges.
2. There are still two pink group members in our groups, weeks after it became that way. Why are two of them pink, instead of a different color? Who knows. Maybe the rest of ROYGBIV were lobbied for elsewhere.
3. The PVP isn't just inconsistent-- it's one of the clunkiest pvp options I've seen, though granted I haven't played a lot of games. Whatever blind 'method' DSO uses for pairing fighters is clearly an epic fail. More often than not, I'll get left waiting in the holding area until I'm given a draw, even though I KNOW others are signed up for PVP and still waiting to get into any match at all.

These sorts of problems just don't look good, especially to new players who are used to some polish on their games. Add in the exploit problems in the recent past, and I have to conclude that maybe DSO better clean their game house up just a wee bit and do the dishes before inviting over new company.

If those few issues can get cleaned up, then yes-- advertisement would be awesome.

Edited--- if that's not what the daily deals are called, why do they have a rooster as the heading? I'm now so confused. Lol.

 

Daily Deals is the name of the free prizes for spending andermant, and I have the exact same issue as yourself.
I also have an issue with login reward showing up at a random time during the day, causing me to miss it on toons I only log into once daily. It's supposed to reset with the quests at 1 a.m. my time, but it's inconsistent.
Lastly my andermant package for being a pay2win premium user still shows up at 8 p.m, the old time for quests and daily deals reset.

 

Wow... is that so bad? Maybe they could transfer your server to Grimmag or Werian. But it's quite difficult.

 

Here is what Tegan looked like for me last night. That is just plain sad for a Friday night. I played a little over 4 hours last night and never saw more than 15 people in the PW.

 

Advertising? LOL. If you want to see BigPoint doing advertising, look at the planed "rebalancing" changes on test server.

 

Yeah, like they could not even reset the server clocks without making a mess of it

But anyway, I am in total agreement that the real and lasting solution is marketing. I have mentioned this before a couple times in other threads. Merging Teg & Ag is only a short-term band-aid fix that does nothing to address the diminishing population of both. Eventually what will happen is a new merged server with no one on it.

And good marketing goes beyond just advertising. It would also have to include some loss leaders. This is something I fell the banksters behind all this would be very reluctant to do. And sadly I also feel that much of the player community would grumble about new registrations get freebies.

Luck be with ye,
Mikey,
Tegan

 

*Sigh* Here we go again.

Geo IPs are not always accurate. Here is my post on that from 6 months ago because I'm not going to waste my time re-typing it in it's entirety.

TLR- The servers are in California but use an IP from Youza's private IP space. Unless there is a fiber optic cable that runs directly from Palo Alto California to Youzu's offices in Beijing and the signal can make that several thousand mile trip in 1-3 ms (Hint: There isn't, and it can't), then we can be 100% certain that the server is somewhere in California, not China.

I got you.
I'm lazy. I simply searched for "china" and only posts made by me. It was the one and only post where I mentioned China apparently... but now there are two.

 

Really ? I'm wondering because my ms went up from 102 to 184 since the change. ms in arena tend to be higher. What could lead to such a drastic increase ? Even more if the geographical location didn't change

 

You want to know something funny? Before the change, I had a latency of "60 ms" but if i ran a ping test with the command prompt, I got about 100 ms. Way back then, I just treated the latency indicator like the CV... That is to say, the indicator may not reflect reality, but you can tell the difference between "good" CV and latency and "bad" CV anf latency. After the "relocation," the two numbers lined up better. There are plenty of possible explanations, but I don't think the latency really changed much, if at all.

 

Mine definitely changed. I went from a ping of about 18 to a ping of 98. Still playable but I have a lot more rubber-banding than before.

Doing the tracert, it goes to palo-b22-link.telia.net and then on the next IP, to oriental-ic-328160-palo-b22.c.telia.net. So the servers are apparently in California. I liked them better when they were in San Diego or wherever they were before

 

Unfortunately, I have to disagree. If we wait until the game has squished "enough bugs" (by whatever standard we want to measure it by), the game probably would have long since ceased to exist. I've yet to run across an entirely bug-and-botter-free online game anyways, so I wouldn't fret about it and would encourage advertising.

-has no idea why were discussing about ping in a thread about advertising, but ok- XD

 

Because I abhor false information and had to set the guy straight. He seemed so smug, knowing about "geo-IP" and thinking that it made him an expert on the internet.