Originally Posted by
Ele
+1 for this. Tori-agents used to sit and hop between newbie servers to ease people into the game. I think that was a real good thing they did. That responsibility seemed to fade over time after they merged with some other team to make pink GK iirc.
Be good to this sort of thing done again by some newbie-focused team. If we were to bring something like that back I reckon the guys doing that job should be the older and active fellas that have been around the forum/game for a while.
Would be interesting to revisit. It was the first staff position I worked and while I never found out (if it was even discovered) how the TAs affected the retention rate of new users it was fulfilling (albeit tedious and time consuming) work.
Can't remember the reason it was removed either. That could well have been deemed lack of effectiveness or just phased out because eventually just got slack with it that it was killed off in one of the GK iterations.
Originally Posted by
DSCGS
I agree with almost all that you say NUMP, by the way, you really need to be specific, i, personally, always get so sad when i see this.
"Most users ever online was 14,456, Nov 22, 2012 at 03:43 AM".
Toribash is getting boring to a lot of people, probably because every update, doesn't have a several change, a update that you see and says: "Wow, that's what i asked for!", and i don't even know what a several change would be necessary, visual changes? perhaps? i don't know, but i really like Toribash, i started playing this in 2011 in my previous account, i really got awesome moments to remember, memories that flew like petals in autumn, by the way, you can see that the popularity of Toribash plummeted, when you see the first trailer got 2 millions of views, and the another one, 35,000.
That number was when there was a big bot swarm here iirc. Toribash has never had near that many real people online.
But yea your points stand. The game has been stale for the last...god, as long as I remember. Since I joined (7 years ago) the only main things added have been:
Hairs
Objects
Various other cosmetic things
Bug fixes
Command changes and quality of life updates
Maybe stuff to do with mods/mod maker? I dunno, I don't deal with that a lot.
The main capturing point of the game has always been:
1. The unique gameplay (turn-based physics rag-doll fighting)
2. Customisation
3. The community generated aspect (mods, scripts, shaders, flames, replays)
And there are issues with all of these.
1. There is nothing wrong with the gameplay inherently. What's wrong is that the leanring curve is huge and people get turned off quickly unless they have a mate helping them out and pushing them to continue. Also there's not really an endgame. You play lots and then what? Grinding for belts gets boring. I got bored of it around blackbelt/first dan as you can see. Of course you keep playing casual with friends, try mods and stuff - I always just had other games I'd rather
play.
2. To get to the point where you can really have fun with customisation, one of the biggest aspects of the game, you need to have a lot of tc to invest in textures and items. A lot of people don't both pursuing this because the effort is greater than the rewards. Granted, this is where the money is made - people buying tc and items with $$, but I think it would help the retention rate immensely if the reward structure and costings were reviewed and changed to give players an easy buy into customisation. 128 textures should be easy to obtain. Give people a taste. Then increase the work needed to earn 215s and 512s to match their willingness to invest their time. Work and reward.
3. This is tricky. It grows as the community grows. And the more/better community generated content the more users you will draw and retain. It's kinda useless if you can't hit that critical mass.
So yea there are various problems in my view. I don't have solutions though, that's not my job. Does it need reviving? I don't know. Everyone will have a different opinion on that depending on what they want the game and community to be.