Nexus Clash

What is this one-Alt server you keep hearing about? Firstlby, good my guerrilla marketing campaign is working. Secondably, it's a server where you can only play one character. Each round would have a set duration (ex 2 months) or a clear win condition for each side.

What problems does this solve? The current state of the main game:

The main game grows more inactive over time
The main game is dominated by super active players with 6+ alts
Most players play for personal and/or character power goals

Why is this? It's inevitable that any game gets stale over a while. But imo certain aspects of the main game encourage it. People don't play to 'win'. Why not? Isn't the game billed as a grand struggle for the fate of the universe, etc, elder powers, etc. good, evil, etc? But actually, the easiest way to win is tedious (active infusion), your personal contribution is hard to quantify, and the uncertain game length means if you wanted to 'win' you would have 10 alts all of one alignment and commit to log in every day for 2+ years and each infuse different neighborhoods until the round is over. No one would ever do that.

Instead people play for their own sometimes silly goals (I want to create a font in every square of the map) (I want to create Tem shop from the hit game Undertale) or to try new builds. Many players end up with alts on all sides of the 'Conflict'. When the game is small, this makes raiding annoying. And honestly alts themselves are problematic for a game where one side wants to 'win'. Either you're on all sides so are you really able to muster up motivation for all of your character to pursue their 'win' resulting in a net zero, or you have everyone on one side which is a bit sus for a game that's not supposed to be pay to win, no? It just doesn't really matter in the main game because no one particularly cares about winning and do their RP or such like until they got bored instead.

People also like to pursue character power. Which means grinding. Which is boring. This also leads to situations where Good factions, rather than try to stop the Titan from being killed, will often join in for the CP. And then the Titan dies but nothing really changes and the game goes on. Plus Balrog is there but he's an electrician.

How does the proposed new server help?

Short game length!

If you want to 'win' you know you only have to commit for X time
You can still play multiple characters in a year just sequentially
LBR the most fun part of the game is leveling up, accumulating power, and getting to do fun things to your enemies who are powerless to resist you. A year on everyone is maxxed and then we just do raid ping-pong when one musters up the will to do so. (Speaking of if you wanted to 'win' you would probably be better off using your AP to infuse instead). With a short game length (we can tweak XP, start at T2, etc) just as you reach the goodly parts of your power curve you get to make an impact for your side and then the round ends.

How can there be annoying alt issues...when you only have one alt?

I'm a genius!?

Clear win conditions

Can just be infusion which is easiest if a bit blah
In QUARANTINE 2019 (the best zombie game ever) the humans had a win condition of 100% cure research and the zombies had win condition of 100% ruined city
Hard to replicate here but could give 'points' and first to X wins.
Example points – One neighborhood with SO, Celestial Titan (or equivalent) killed, X DP accumulated, first to explore X location, could make easier conditions for unaligned for obvious reasons or have contra factioned unaligned contribute to some conditions, sap 1000 mp with umbral sword, be an endgame rev etc I'm sure one can think up lore reasons for them to sometimes empower unaligned powers

Cons??

Won't it be IMBALANCED?

Probably ye
Ideally during the 'freeze time' of a round start the playerbase will balance themselves out population wise. It worked for QUARANTINE 2019 (the best zombie game ever).

This will be so TOXIC!

Probably ye
Ok no I legit believe that in a short round mode people will just go gg next instead of getting really salty and holding grudges. IDK though you guys are really weird and can surprise me in the worst ways sometimes.

This sounds awful.

Fine, you don't have to play it.
But you have bad taste.

Discuss below!

I mean I like the idea of a server specifically with only one alt, as long as it's a side thing. I could commit to it then.

I wouldn't want it to be the only play mode. You mention quarantine 2019 but that game is super dead.

But as long as you don't replace the main game I'm cool with it

I am not proposing we replace the main game! It would be an alternate opt-in game mode.

consider your petition signed

also I feel very called out

I think this is a very intriguing idea. You have a good point that in practice, the nature of play and the incentives the game gives us encourage players to play in a way where their alts' impacts on The War Outcome tend to cancel each other out; playing alts all on one side with mutually supporting goals risks sketchy play, while playing alts truly and correctly independent of one another means having them do things that may actively undermine each others' goals e.g. calling raids as Faction A against your own alt's Faction B.

There are probably a lot of good long-term solutions to this - more user-friendly land control, picking a favored alt with disproportionate impact, that kind of thing. But that's the kind of Big Design Rethinking Topic that's hard to push forward and takes a ton of development energy for something we're not sure is going to work. And a sandbox map where the conflict is of limited duration and everyone participating is already a veteran player is exactly the sort of place that would be ideal for testing out solutions to those kinds of questions.

It's also true that community interest and activity has dropped off since this time last year. There are a lot of theories that get floated in the meta as to whether this or that design change or dev/mod decision was The Thing That Is Making People Leave but nineteen times out of twenty when someone drops off the real, boring answer is that it's a website and most people don't normally stick around on the same website for years at a time unless they either feel they have a lot of unexplored content to engage with or feel they have some role running part of it. And a lot of our best content takes a long time and a lot of personalized attention to build, and/or zeroes in on parts of the play experience but not others, e.g. AFAIK everyone likes class endgames, but it's a lot of dev attention for one class at a time. This means that as much as continuous improvement is our goal as a dev team, there can't be a constant stream of truly exciting new stuff for everyone all the time.

Would a short minigame version of play solve that? Hard to say, probably not all of that but it might for some of that. Would it turn out to be imbalanced in unforeseen ways in a way that favors one side or another? Probably. Can I think of a way to build this that wouldn't be that hard to build from existing resources? Yes. Would it be easy to pull the plug after one "cycle" if it turned out to be a disaster? Also yes.

We are at what right now, maybe 70 active players? How small would the map have to be? How would i decide between serious teamwork and borderline strat tinkering under the guise of "bug hunting"?

Thenixon wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 8:02 pm We are at what right now, maybe 70 active players? How small would the map have to be? How would i decide between serious teamwork and borderline strat tinkering under the guise of "bug hunting"?

Then again, maybe some people would be happy to come back and try this kind of thing?

Alkasyn wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 8:56 pm

Thenixon wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 8:02 pm We are at what right now, maybe 70 active players? How small would the map have to be? How would i decide between serious teamwork and borderline strat tinkering under the guise of "bug hunting"?

Then again, maybe some people would be happy to come back and try this kind of thing?

I feel like if a mass email were sent out some people would come back and give it X try anyways

Thenixon wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 8:02 pm We are at what right now, maybe 70 active players? How small would the map have to be? How would i decide between serious teamwork and borderline strat tinkering under the guise of "bug hunting"?

Current stats say there are 129 users with a non-idle character (logged in in the last week) in the game world right now. Chopping that down to players who have done something with a character in the last two days makes it 111 users.

For the concept I'm gradually piecing together, the answer is "quite small, smaller than a current outer plane". It could always be made bigger, or allowed to run its course and reworked in a later "cycle".

Strat tinkering vs bug hunting I'd say "do what you like, who knows how it'll turn out anyway".

as the head behind this idea (you're welcome bug) I approve