Tynon, really need to re-think your player retention plan

After having played and even enjoying this game site ...
I have noticed some things that are disturbing ..

First ....
The creation of new servers ... without any thought to previous servers ..
What you are doing here is really unfair to players who have been playing on some of the older servers.
All the time and monies invested to build up levels only to see a new server started and watching more then half
leave in hopes they can build levels faster and become more powerful on a new server... only to have the old server be left like a ghost town.
Making sailing or GW either boring as hell are impossible to complete ...

Need to add some incentives to have new players or existing players want to join the old servers ...
purge some of the players who obviously havent played in a long time ...
add or change tasks on some of the features to encourage people to join or stay ..

The failure rate on several things are seriously out of control...
take the stars .. we already take a chance adding medals for more stars and then on top of that we take a chance of losing stars we already have?
talk about a double edged sword ...
even if it says you have a 70% and above success rate .. right? lol .. failure is actually a lot higher then that ... I don't care what the % says...
I think the success rate is more like 5% at any given time ...

BOTH of those issues above .. make players NOT want to invest money into the game....
Seriously what is the point?
Invest $ and then watch players leave realm for new ones ....
Invest $ only to have everything you do fail majority of the time...

I have only spent a little and there is no way I can justify spending anymore for the things I have mentioned ... and after talking with some other players
they feel the same way .... it is just not worth the investment ...

I really do like this game .... but starting to view it as a waste of time if in the end the servers I play on will be worthless as they are close to now :(

I agree entirely. I almost spent some $$ once and ended up not doing it - now I'm thinking my lucky stars I decided against. It seems to be a decent effort of a game but now gone to waste since they're just wringing money out of people who don't think about what they are spending on too much.

Perhaps they are working on bigger and better things? there is a lot of potential... a lot of things i like and appreciate but ultimately it's FAAAR too much pay to win with no real rewards for "winning".

Looking at my guild - out of 33 players: 19 haven't logged in in over 12 days, 10 have only logged in once in the past week, and only 3 or 4 appear to be active on a regular basis. THAT'S TERRIBLE! and what's even more terrible is that's i'm fairly sure that no one who matters is going to see or read this at all. (meaning devs and such... no offence to you fellow gamers)

yup servers are full!!! ofcourse they are full but with a bunch of - 1000 power ones^^that didnt log in more then once loller

on my server s67 i think there are less then 30 active people over all 3 realms, i spend monney for vip 3 at the start and wanted to go vip 4 but i see no reason^^ so i stop spending monney on the game

Agree with ya,I started on s94 when it came out and guess what?
It's actually pretty deserted like s30 :/,I easily maintain arena rank one/ragnarok(30streak) with only 150k power in the first day and the whole arena?Max five players in my realm lol(the first day,the second day were actually better..more than 30 players log into server).

World boss,
Three different realm,only about 1-3 players in each realm participated world boss.
Still max we got were seven players that successfully kill Baal at the second day :(.

Pirates,
Hm,worst.....
20players in my guild,only three players were actually active chatting with me or sail with me..others either afk or offline.
It's so damn hard to get a sail partner on new server. :/

On server 3 I actually belong to a pretty good guild ...
but in our realm most of the other Guilds are pretty much dead ...
There is no way for them to be able to complete the sailing or have a chance in any GW ..
even though my guild is active and has some high powered players, sailing is still a joke..
it is basically a battle between high powered and everyone else gets robbed ...
But that takes us back to the investment aspect ..
Why invest when most will leave and go to other servers? I just cannot justify the investment ..

Servers are full...of tumbleweed.

I play on a pretty active server and im noticing a sharp decline in activity. Sailing is becomming increasingly more difficult since theres hardly anyone to rob. Pvp is a joke, i comb the wild and heroics about 20 times a day and only on occasion do i fill my 10 pvp limit( and im by no means the strongest player)

It seems That the emphasis is on trying to make a quick buck on the poor sap who joins a new server hoping to become king of the hill, instead of keeping active players on the older servers and encouraging them to spend.

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Originally Posted by avalontracer_3661413

It seems That the emphasis is on trying to make a quick buck on the poor sap who joins a new server hoping to become king of the hill, instead of keeping active players on the older servers and encouraging them to spend.

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Ditto indeed

Well it works? People on server 98 (opened less then 24hrs ago) are doing the 15 gem invests.

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Originally Posted by Kruize

Well it works? People on server 98 (opened less then 24hrs ago) are doing the 15 gem invests.

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They might be just spending all the free gems from the beginners rewards.
The total gems is around 700 free for the first week.

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Originally Posted by Herby

They might be just spending all the free gems from the beginners rewards.
The total gems is around 700 free for the first week.

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You have to be VIP to contribute gems, I believe. VIP1 for 15 gem contribution, VIP2 for 100 gem contribution, so people are spending money if they're contributing gems.

As for spending more money than I already have, probably not. I've been hemming and hawing over picking up VIP3 for auto-collect, but the money doesn't seem worth it to me at this point. Honestly the value just isn't enough given that I don't honestly know how much longer I will continue to play as things stand (this also isn't me saying I'm quitting, just that I'm not investing more cash at this point).

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Originally Posted by Klepto

You have to be VIP to contribute gems, I believe. VIP1 for 15 gem contribution, VIP2 for 100 gem contribution, so people are spending money if they're contributing gems.

As for spending more money than I already have, probably not. I've been hemming and hawing over picking up VIP3 for auto-collect, but the money doesn't seem worth it to me at this point. Honestly the value just isn't enough given that I don't honestly know how much longer I will continue to play as things stand (this also isn't me saying I'm quitting, just that I'm not investing more cash at this point).

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I see my mistake now. Yes you're correct, you need to be VIP to invest gems.
Are there many grand investments being made on the newer servers?

I also firmly believe Tynon needs to merge servers together if they plan to continue this business for more than a year.
There simply comes a "tipping point" in which new players would wisen up or simply decide not to spend that much money anymore.

This is what I think it the issue, the fact that many of the old servers are not spending money any more.
SO ucool is focused on newer sevrers when people do spend cash.
Now I dont agree that all they are trying to do is a quick money grab. I think they see things differently then us players.

Servers die. That's a fact of life in this style of game. Now in that other game with lots of servers, that dawnseeker is the admin of their forum as well. They had a very good solution to the issue of keeping old servers going. And people would still spend money on old servers. There would be holiday promos double coin events etc.

I think ucool is trying to find their way to keep older servers going and do not want to take our advice. I am sure they have reasons for ignoring all of our wonderful suggestions. The cross server championship I think is step 1 for keeping people spending money on old servers. Its a hope to get servers 1-10 to spend some money to make sure they dominate. Or get the top 2-5 player son each of those servers to spend more, since those are the top spenders so far in this game, so they can have bragging rights.

I have to say its not a bad thought. It may or may not work.

The biggest issue I think is how fast we have all progressed in the game. It is much faster then ucool ever anticipated. I think they figured 5 years till end game, based on my observation of spirit drop rates and how many tokens it would take to acquire all spirit plans. I personally want to see 1 to 2 year max end game scenario. but at the rate I am going through everything, if they released all the heroes today. I could probably finish all quests have all plans except spirits and have nothing to do but daily events in the next 6 months or less. Now I haven't done all the calculations but I could probably also have all the talents finished and most if not all of the equipment maxed or near maxed in that 6 months as well. I think there are others who could be done in much less time then that.

SO ucool is stuck at this point. They have a great game, but parts of it are too easy and parts are too hard. Theres not enough to do to keep the type of players they have attracted interested enough to keep spending money. But with out money they cant pay the bills and design the new content thats needed to keep people interested enough to spend more money. SO they open new servers to get more cash in the bank to keep the lights on.

I think if all of ucool's ideas could come to fruition immediately this would probably be an awesome game and alot of us would start dumping money into their bank account. Some of us might even start a second or third or fourth server and dump even more money into their bank acct.

We are experiencing ucool's growing pains and it SUCKS BIG FAT SWEATY HAIRY MONKEY TESTICLES. Some of us might stick around long enough to see the promised land. I think many will not. ANd i Think there will be a group of players that join up just at the right time and find this to be the best game they ever played

The reason this game isn't lasting is because the very currency that fuels the game's development is also the currency that causes players to chew through content at breakneck speed.

The only currencies that have been implemented well are Tokens (best implementation, though I have gripes with rewards in Lab when it comes to plans), Fragments, and Spirits. All the rest have some rather large flaws. As you progress in power, only the top players actually gain decent levels of Coins or Credits. Noble Lady becomes less valuable. You have to save for larger portions of the week as you progress to prepare for Thursday because costs are increasing week-by-week but income does not increase. Gems can buy just about anything but by using them you warp the entire server around your progress.

Honestly this game would have been much better off providing less direct perks for cash, such as vanity mounts, changes in appearance, that sort of thing. Mounts for cash could have also granted speed improvements to improve Noble Lady chances.

Also, this game could encourage further cash investment, honestly, by reducing costs in certain areas. Chips cost too many gems once they cost gems, even in the Fair. Removing level 4 chips is too expensive. Summoning the runekeeper is too expensive. Honestly, if something is going to cost $10 or even $20 in real life cash, I expect to get something pretty darn awesome out of it. Unfortunately there isn't a single worthwhile investment gem-wise that I can think of that's really WORTH spending the cash for. There's no awesome vanity mount that's a reasonable price or that improves travel speed. I can't spend $5 or $10 to shuffle a current hero's Saint attributes. I can't spend $1-3 to summon the Runekeeper. I can't tweak the appearance of my main hero so I look different than every other player out there.

Additionally, things like opening additional queues exacerbates a lot of the game's problems. With current income I have trouble keeping up with 2 of each queue. If I had 3 queues for equipment and talents I'd be broke all the time. This is partially due to the (welcome) change of reducing cooldown times, but it presents some problems as well, because game income wasn't also adjusted to compensate for the reduced cooldown times.

Further, on servers 10+, with generally one dominating guild across all realms, only one guild on the server gets the benefit of level 4 cities that improve income, and that leaves others in the dust, discourages competition, and creates a widening disparity that only grows larger daily.

This game has WONDERFUL potential but is squandering it by forgetting that a sustainable game is a balanced game, and if you offer benefits to players for paying cash, you have to remember that those benefits cannot significantly create disparity between the haves and have-nots, otherwise the game becomes like Monopoly, where it drags on and on with only one player raking in the dough, and eventually everyone who isn't winning slams the game board into the winner's face and walks away to do something else.

Here is some thing that i need to state, we are all expressing ideas, giving suggestions, Reporting issues, reporting bugs, but who is listening to us. Besides from the Mods who now and then show up to keep the threads in order, is there a real purpose of this forums ? are we being heard at all ? I mean if some one is hearing to us then they would be saying some thing. I have never seen a company ignore their clients this good. If its all money that matters to Ucool or the Evony management, come on guys you made enough out of the bot ruled Evony. Ucool you better get a different source to grab money than being this pathetic at providing answers or service to those who are paying to play your game.

I am almost getting to a point of quitting. Think i really was not aware of this whole mess when i became a VIP 6 player, but now i am wise enough. May god(Cash investing dumb players) bless this irresponsible company.

I've read through some of the comments here and yeah they are pretty standard for the player base. Whereas it's agreed new servers tend to be on the err quiet side but as Matt pointed out uCool and the Tynon team in particular see it in an entirely different way and therefore there has to be some profit in it some where. Servers are expensive things to run so we all might argue all these servers are dead and no fun wharsoever, Tynon must have it covered in their own way. They have a business plan and from their point of view it's working.

As for coining, players will continue to coin whatever you may think. I have yet to come across a MMO that suddenly has no money coming in. There aren't any packages available because lets face it you can get free gems pretty easily without spending, through the Arena, Lab, Quest (if your're lucky) and sailing on a Saturday. The only way you can get free game cents in Evony is through the Wheel of Despair and those that have played that game will tell you to remain competitive you need to coin. At least here, there is less of a need to.

I tend to think we've all progressed further and faster than intended. However, have we reached endgame yet? I don't think so. I think there is a lot more to come if we are patient enough, even as slow as it has been. A lot of the frustration comes from reaching certain roadblocks which can't be quickly passed. You either have it too easy and finish the game within 3 months or you occasionally make quick progress to reingnite your game passion before you hit the next difficult boss and lengthen the life of the game.

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Originally Posted by Morgan le Fay

I've read through some of the comments here and yeah they are pretty standard for the player base. Whereas it's agreed new servers tend to be on the err quiet side but as Matt pointed out uCool and the Tynon team in particular see it in an entirely different way and therefore there has to be some profit in it some where. Servers are expensive things to run so we all might argue all these servers are dead and no fun wharsoever, Tynon must have it covered in their own way. They have a business plan and from their point of view it's working.

As for coining, players will continue to coin whatever you may think. I have yet to come across a MMO that suddenly has no money coming in. There aren't any packages available because lets face it you can get free gems pretty easily without spending, through the Arena, Lab, Quest (if your're lucky) and sailing on a Saturday. The only way you can get free game cents in Evony is through the Wheel of Despair and those that have played that game will tell you to remain competitive you need to coin. At least here, there is less of a need to.

I tend to think we've all progressed further and faster than intended. However, have we reached endgame yet? I don't think so. I think there is a lot more to come if we are patient enough, even as slow as it has been. A lot of the frustration comes from reaching certain roadblocks which can't be quickly passed. You either have it too easy and finish the game within 3 months or you occasionally make quick progress to reingnite your game passion before you hit the next difficult boss and lengthen the life of the game.

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My main issue with these road blocks is i hit pursuer at 11m ish power
Im now 19.5m power and still cant beat it. That is too big of a road block imo and that is where my impatient kicks in and demand my new heroes.

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Originally Posted by Klepto

The reason this game isn't lasting is because the very currency that fuels the game's development is also the currency that causes players to chew through content at breakneck speed.

The only currencies that have been implemented well are Tokens (best implementation, though I have gripes with rewards in Lab when it comes to plans), Fragments, and Spirits. All the rest have some rather large flaws. As you progress in power, only the top players actually gain decent levels of Coins or Credits. Noble Lady becomes less valuable. You have to save for larger portions of the week as you progress to prepare for Thursday because costs are increasing week-by-week but income does not increase. Gems can buy just about anything but by using them you warp the entire server around your progress.

Honestly this game would have been much better off providing less direct perks for cash, such as vanity mounts, changes in appearance, that sort of thing. Mounts for cash could have also granted speed improvements to improve Noble Lady chances.

Also, this game could encourage further cash investment, honestly, by reducing costs in certain areas. Chips cost too many gems once they cost gems, even in the Fair. Removing level 4 chips is too expensive. Summoning the runekeeper is too expensive. Honestly, if something is going to cost $10 or even $20 in real life cash, I expect to get something pretty darn awesome out of it. Unfortunately there isn't a single worthwhile investment gem-wise that I can think of that's really WORTH spending the cash for. There's no awesome vanity mount that's a reasonable price or that improves travel speed. I can't spend $5 or $10 to shuffle a current hero's Saint attributes. I can't spend $1-3 to summon the Runekeeper. I can't tweak the appearance of my main hero so I look different than every other player out there.

Additionally, things like opening additional queues exacerbates a lot of the game's problems. With current income I have trouble keeping up with 2 of each queue. If I had 3 queues for equipment and talents I'd be broke all the time. This is partially due to the (welcome) change of reducing cooldown times, but it presents some problems as well, because game income wasn't also adjusted to compensate for the reduced cooldown times.

Further, on servers 10+, with generally one dominating guild across all realms, only one guild on the server gets the benefit of level 4 cities that improve income, and that leaves others in the dust, discourages competition, and creates a widening disparity that only grows larger daily.

This game has WONDERFUL potential but is squandering it by forgetting that a sustainable game is a balanced game, and if you offer benefits to players for paying cash, you have to remember that those benefits cannot significantly create disparity between the haves and have-nots, otherwise the game becomes like Monopoly, where it drags on and on with only one player raking in the dough, and eventually everyone who isn't winning slams the game board into the winner's face and walks away to do something else.

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This is a very constructive comment, and it echoes a lot of my own concerns. I hope devs read it and take it to heart.

Just came back to see how things were doing. I have played on quite a few servers and been in the top 3 in pretty much every one of them. I quit playing about 3 weeks ago and have not looked back as it is obvious Tynon is unable to run this game correctly. Now I can sleep and go outside and it is really wonderful. Quit this game while you can. Trust me, after a day or 2 cold turkey you will be much happier.

Servers aren't expensive to run, just to be clear. I'm not sure what sort of mythical thing people may think servers are, but I have a rack of them in my garage that add maybe $25 to my electric bill each month. Total. They are happy to sit and chug and churn and serve without an army of people fussing over them. Yes, we do upgrades. Yes, we do backups. Yes, on occasion we even go out there and clear off the dust bunnies that invade. If anyone would like to pay me a month's worth of what people likely spend on one server for Tynon for these tasks, please let me know. I would be happy to do nice things with this money.

(And yes, there are designers (art and code) and tech support (well, a canned list of tech support messages and probably one poor guy who does gem refunds) so I am aware that bottom line, it does cost more than an electric bill to run Tynon.)

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Originally Posted by Subliminal

Servers aren't expensive to run, just to be clear. I'm not sure what sort of mythical thing people may think servers are, but I have a rack of them in my garage that add maybe $25 to my electric bill each month. Total. They are happy to sit and chug and churn and serve without an army of people fussing over them. Yes, we do upgrades. Yes, we do backups. Yes, on occasion we even go out there and clear off the dust bunnies that invade. If anyone would like to pay me a month's worth of what people likely spend on one server for Tynon for these tasks, please let me know. I would be happy to do nice things with this money.

(And yes, there are designers (art and code) and tech support (well, a canned list of tech support messages and probably one poor guy who does gem refunds) so I am aware that bottom line, it does cost more than an electric bill to run Tynon.)

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Servers are cheap to run, however licensing for certain things can be expensive, especially if they're annual/monthly costs. Internet bandwidth can also get quite expensive for companies. If you need server-grade SSD drives or RAIDs, depending on your setup that can run a pretty penny too. There are other factors, but it really boils down to: Licensing, storage, and bandwidth are expensive. Software that allows you to scale out with more machines is cheap.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Tynon's setup consists of about a hundred VMs (one for each "server" to maintain game state) with a load-balanced internal data access cluster of VMs that can run calculations the actual server doesn't require (such as battles), as well as saving/retrieving required data from their database.

Essentially, I'm guessing optimally there is a 4-tier architecture in place. Game UI, Game Server, Calculation/Data Retrieval Service, Data Storage (be it database or disk). Managing something like that is more complex than you'd believe if you haven't dealt with something that complex before.

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Originally Posted by Klepto

Managing something like that is more complex than you'd believe if you haven't dealt with something that complex before.

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I have. And I do. And it's still not some mythical money pit that people make it out to be. Complicated? Yes, it can be. Computationally intense? I'm sure it is. Have to contract out for bandwidth? Yup.

Imo, the game is 'endgame' once most hit lvl 90. Rune slots are all full and the Justice set is the last set avail. Now by the time the majority of the players are geared to start getting the justice set will be purely on when Tynon removes the roadblocks in heroic. Im sure that if they removed them now there will be a few players already gunning for those sets due to their sheer power and setups, but thats completely killing off the last 'trumpcard' they have. In the meantime its important to keep the masses interested, a monthly(or bimonthly) championship is one step in the right direction. But they will have to think up a few other tricks to keep most interested.

I feel that most of the Tynon staff dont actually play the game and thus arent really in tune with whats going on. Sure there might be the odd person playing casually, but he(or she) might not encounter the same frustrations we all do. This is why its a good idea to at least, seriously consider the ideas of the community and not just say: we hear you. Then do nothing about it.

There are load of ideas in the forums(some really good and others okish) and yes working them out will take a lot of time. But at least make a post saying: guys we have taken your ideas into consideration and were going to build on that. This will take time, and as such we'll keep you updated when needed. <-- that alone would be enough to keep most of the playerbase happy.

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Originally Posted by avalontracer_3661413

Imo, the game is 'endgame' once most hit lvl 90. Rune slots are all full and the Justice set is the last set avail. Now by the time the majority of the players are geared to start getting the justice set will be purely on when Tynon removes the roadblocks in heroic.

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What roadblocks in heroic? There are none.

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Originally Posted by Herby

What roadblocks in heroic? There are none.

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well theres a few.

first mud giant elite was set to impossible for weeks then set down.
next you have black widow queen and tracker give out the same plans instead of tracker also giving out cloaks like you would normally have as the progression
then theres the insane jumps in their power

These are road blocks designed to slow down progression pure and simple.
And what sucks is some of us will get through them and take all teh time needed to do it, then after we have done that they will make these bosses easier or add new heroes that make it easier, so all teh other players can get through these bosses a lot faster

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Originally Posted by mattp169

well theres a few.

first mud giant elite was set to impossible for weeks then set down.
next you have black widow queen and tracker give out the same plans instead of tracker also giving out cloaks like you would normally have as the progression
then theres the insane jumps in their power

These are road blocks designed to slow down progression pure and simple.
And what sucks is some of us will get through them and take all teh time needed to do it, then after we have done that they will make these bosses easier or add new heroes that make it easier, so all teh other players can get through these bosses a lot faster

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Tracker and Blackwidow elite are really meant to give the same plan types. If you look at the first page of heroic realms, multiple bosses give out the same plan types as well.

You would be a lot happier if you don't worry about how others are progressing, and just focus on your own progress.

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Originally Posted by Herby

Tracker and Blackwidow elite are really meant to give the same plan types. If you look at the first page of heroic realms, multiple bosses give out the same plan types as well.

You would be a lot happier if you don't worry about how others are progressing, and just focus on your own progress.

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Then you can just go play a single-player game :P

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Originally Posted by koja6049

Then you can just go play a single-player game :P

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Is there a single player game thats like Tynon?

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Originally Posted by Herby

Is there a single player game thats like Tynon?

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Plenty. Tynon is just another lame card game in disguise :rolleyes:

The main thing that keeps me from donating is the cost of stuff.

I can donate about $20/month and thats just enough to summon the runekeeper !ONCE! $20 wort of gems to get a blue gem and depending on my luck on legendary keeper (not even sure its 100% that i will get to him by paying the 200gems) probably get a blue or maybe a purple, odds to get a yellow of him are way to low to consider.

10gems seems a more reasonable cost to summon her, and even that might be a tad high depending on chanses to move on to final keeper.

If players read your thread - Devs may decide to see what is popular based on views

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Originally Posted by jaxchess_1418714

If players read your thread - Devs may decide to see what is popular based on views

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Super necro.