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Would Imperian ever consider a Reboot?
I don't want to offend anyone. Putting that right out there. If discussion about the death/closure of Imperian upset you, it would be best to avoid this thread - if it doesn't get deleted.
I think it's pretty obvious that the game itself has shrunk to a level not seen before. I know I stopped actively playing more than a couple of years ago, after most of the population I enjoyed playing with had moved on for several reasons, though mainly being the games overall direction. It's hard to pinpoint one specific change as the cause, because it's a culmination of things. Since then, the game has continued to haemorrhage players and has dropped to an all time low. Frankly, I consider it unplayable in its current form and I'm surprised there are still a few people trying to make a go of it. When I see forum posts (this post will be the first post on the entire forums since June 25th btw) that state that PKers are in the minority in the IRE MUD that was 'the combat MUD' it just confirms that the game is past it's used by date.
On to my question: Would IRE ever consider a wipe to Imperian with a potential revert to some changes?
Yes I know there's a bunch of stuff involving people having money invested, all that stuff. But if the game closes they lose their investment anyway. But since you can retire now and retain some of your investment I feel it's pretty moot. Determining what changes to revert is another much longer and in depth discussion which this thread is not about.
While the question is directed at Jeremy and any other IRE employee and I'm not really interested in what the playerbase has to say about that, I do have a question specifically for the players: Would you play in a fresh Imperian that would be different from the one currently? Specifically, with a bunch of changes to revert it to an earlier state.
I think it's pretty obvious that the game itself has shrunk to a level not seen before. I know I stopped actively playing more than a couple of years ago, after most of the population I enjoyed playing with had moved on for several reasons, though mainly being the games overall direction. It's hard to pinpoint one specific change as the cause, because it's a culmination of things. Since then, the game has continued to haemorrhage players and has dropped to an all time low. Frankly, I consider it unplayable in its current form and I'm surprised there are still a few people trying to make a go of it. When I see forum posts (this post will be the first post on the entire forums since June 25th btw) that state that PKers are in the minority in the IRE MUD that was 'the combat MUD' it just confirms that the game is past it's used by date.
On to my question: Would IRE ever consider a wipe to Imperian with a potential revert to some changes?
Yes I know there's a bunch of stuff involving people having money invested, all that stuff. But if the game closes they lose their investment anyway. But since you can retire now and retain some of your investment I feel it's pretty moot. Determining what changes to revert is another much longer and in depth discussion which this thread is not about.
While the question is directed at Jeremy and any other IRE employee and I'm not really interested in what the playerbase has to say about that, I do have a question specifically for the players: Would you play in a fresh Imperian that would be different from the one currently? Specifically, with a bunch of changes to revert it to an earlier state.
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Regarding underlying issues - The game is continuing to bleed players. Doesn't appear any underlying issues are being fixed. To my mind that either means the drop in players isn't related to content/changes or that the content/changes that are being released aren't impacting the drop in players.
Or, maybe I'm just wrong and the population is fine. I'm not tied in anymore but I've kept an eye on Imperian in case it showed any changes on that front and I've only seen people leaving the game.
With all of the above, reverting to a more draconian era will not do it any faves. The blow by blow, if you really need it, @Sarthan ...
A reboot will not fix any of this. A reboot will merely inconvenience players by returning us to 'the Old Country' for no other reason than because. For reference on how that will eventually turn out? Look to how they received the inconvenience of much-needed movement nerfs. Well designed changes were thrown under the bus.
A reboot would merely serve to stoke my nostalgia. Nostalgia is poison to true progress.
I don't think the decline is a matter of game mechanics, or that there is a decimal place missing and something is imbalanced. There is a coding wall at which high-end changes affect the Illuminati and do not trickle down the food chain - or potential new customer. Yes, I do get the decisions based on economics here, and yes, I may not be the intended demographic for this game. Your results may vary, but I would favour a shift towards LESS complexity, actually. BEFORE I would need to decide, as a brand-new player (and they HAVE to exist, otherwise, we can end this discussion), which artifact or miniskill to invest in. Because I'm not yet sold on the game, and browser games are pretty, easily accessible, need no installation, and look fun too. Things like fixing the queue to be more user-friendly are a huge improvement (thank you, I appreciate the team's work here), so that I can buff after login without Googlin' to learn how to put in a 5000 ms pause between TOUCH MINDSEYE and EVOKE PROTECTION in HTML or LUA (or both). Remeber that moment, 10 years ago? Yes, I figured it out and was relieved and proud when I did so. Yes, customisation is a plus and HTML and LUA may be valuable 'real world' skills. But learning Esperanto or building a Raspberry Pi that can run Imperian from scratch can also be "challenging". It is a time cost-benefit thing, really. Whether it is "rewarding" depends on the payoff and time spent playing on the back end, which is, largely social according to my internal metrics. Help me out in explaining to my pre-teen WHY he should do that instead of installing a 'ready to play' graphic app from Google Play.
I didn't retire Sarrius, strictly because I wanted to show my faith that the game could turn around and get a real pop again. If we are just given normal retirement credits for a potential shut down (of which I doubt the possibility of anyways), I would be very salty.
If the game were to shut down, I'd really like some special type of retirement credits that I can consolidate on an existing character outside of the retirement range. I would really like that ANYWAYS, because if I could put my retirement credits on a non-newbie, I think I might have at this point. I would take a slightly larger hit as a surcharge for such a thing.
-Statpack swaps for less than $10 converted cost.
-More bound credit generation
That's basically what I'd do. If players know they can get to the starting level in whatever profession they feel like trying and then advance by playing without investing, then there's no harm in them playing (and potentially getting baited into investing with Promo#1023012).
A story+soft reset (not artis/levels, but everything else basically) might be okay, but that's gonna make some people leave.
Otherwise, yeah. It's been so dead that I'm seriously considering retirement for the first time. And Mihaly confirmed 3 month out retirement for Starmourn, soooo
With a game this small and the issues as they are, the only thing I actually see drawing people back is to stop being afraid to lose anyone else. Genuinely - really, on the ground level - letting player-driven actions actually leave a lasting impact on the game. Don't code mechanical ways to delete cities; let people roleplay burning the thing to the ground, change the effing room descriptions and let it smolder. Don't release another collect-'em-all promotion; interact with players to give them unique items or relationships with NPCs. Let me roleplay brainwashing a tutor and then actually change the NPC. I've never seen anyone but players do mobposs. This is the kind of thing that will draw people over; a unique experience and one rich with admin interaction. PK and RP is done better elsewhere, culturally if not mechanically. Imperian's only appeal is the QoL that frankly only appeal to a crowd that prefer a game they do not have to be challenged by. I have never seen anyone but players create flavor room emotes. I've never seen anyone but players create wars and conflicts. Imperian has provided the tools, sure, but players are given nothing bigger or more permanent than what can personally be created, and the admin have never shown a willingness to run with the game people have tried to make. Then they have demonstrated that they do not really know what to do with the game themselves for fear of losing the people left.
And honestly, the people left *are* the people who will be upset if the game stops being stagnant, because everybody else has found better things to do. Other games have lasting conflict because they trust that they have enough people around to keep people roleplaying or PKing or what-have-you, even when a portion of the game feels like they've lost. Despite knowing they do not have this cushion, Imperian is also so hands-off with the small playerbase that exists- unwilling to show favortism to the handful of people who buy things, fight,OR roleplay in meaningful ways. Unwilling to consolidate or delete organizations - and subsequently unwilling to take a strong hand in forcing orgs to let in active players they dislike for the health of the organizations. Unwilling to bend on any uncoded creative proposition. Unwilling to let anything escalate or reach its own resolution, unwilling to let the bullies impact the game of the roleplayers meaningfully, unwilling to enforce roleplay on the PKers, and unwilling to engage with any party outside of coded mechanics. And to pop a cherry on top, the players who KEPT their Imperian characters hoping for a reason to come back as they went to other games now look back on that time and investment and hope for Imperian as WASTED, as we have to start brand new characters in the games we are invested in to make any of that Imperian time or money worthwhile. A lot of us in that boat would rather see Imperian deleted, 'cause at least we could have our retirement credits on characters we care about.
I log on after being gone for months and the only things I see are news about *another* new gold-generating system, *another* new farming promotion, *another* codeside update, *another* change to giftbags, all things I can't even utilize without investing time into learning them or money into buying them. Why should I bother? My city is the same. My guild is the same. The news tells me nothing else and I don't expect it to. I love my character and his friends, but we're all bugs in a jar and I'd rather be a single bug in a swarm if we are allowed to go outside.
If it's dying anyway, then you have nothing to lose from doing insane and risky treatments. Literally what do you have to lose?
When was the last major event in the game? I don't remember an event since the chain was moving around the world (which was late last year). After that, what have we had?
A few sects came into being (okay).
We had one sect war (there was much moaning from all sides but at least people were invested in it).
Bunch of individual bashing related promotions.
It's as if the whole game is waiting for the next major event. Holding its breath for resolution.
When the game lacks population, I do think it is imperative to focus on RP than QoL improvements. I do think its important to make people feel they can make a difference. Right now, I don't think there is any such desire or drive. A lot of it also goes back to @Owyn 's point that combatants are needed to make a stand and to defend interests.
At this point, it may be time to move on from the three-way conflict system to a two-way conflict system. The game has to adapt to the population base and at this time, the population isn't big enough to support more than 2-3 cities (let alone 5)
I object to this statement @Sarrius - A reboot will not fix any of this. A reboot will merely inconvenience players by returning us to 'the Old Country' for no other reason than because.
Perfect combat balance is boring as ****. I left because shifting the focus to group combat inevitably led to the boring as hell combat system you have now, amongst other things.
No identity? We didn't give a **** about identity years ago when the game was peaking. We WERE the combat MUD, whether that was intended or not. It was everywhere and we thrived. Honestly if you need the administration to give you an identity, that's pretty pathetic. Live your own way.
'no other reason than because.' There's plenty of reason to consider it other than 'just cuz lol'. The only thing that is going to stop the closure of Imperian whether you accept it or not (I'm sure the citizens of Pompeii never thought their volcano would destroy your civilization either) is DRASTIC changes. While a reboot to an earlier game era and a complete wipe might not be the answer (I think it is but accept it might not be) it's the level of action that needs to be considered if anything is ever going to improve.
Poll your playerbase. Send out emails. "Have your say in Imperian's future!" Ask people what they want. Come up with some ideas, present them for people to vote on and get the information you need to make a decision.
A heavily 1 v. 1 game seems to need harsh consequences for grouping up at all (think Proficy hunting down every last newblet that took him down in an event and making them pay dearly). I wouldn't want to play that game, but I've said before that that seems to be how you skew a game in favor of 1 v. 1. You don't have to go quite that far, maybe - you still provide lots of engagements where you can't just be hunted down afterwards. But maybe you do have to go that far. Maybe you actually can't have a game that does lots of group combat (at least not group combat that anyone who isn't also a strong 1 v. 1 fighter can take part in) AND lots of 1 v. 1. Maybe you definitely have to pick an audience. You might or might still not have a beef with combat being well-balanced, but I think your bigger beef might be this form of tension between group combat and 1 v. 1.
I'm just really disappointed in how the adminstration have refused to respond to the desires of the playerbase beyond bugday and gold creep. I understand that other games have and can support paid staff, but that shouldn't result in the stagnation that has existed even if only Jeremy is at the helm. Plenty of players have wanted and tried to contribute to the game and been refused the chance. The only things that'd make me come back right now is Bellini returning, or finally being given a way to permanence items for my house without having to hunt down an increasingly rare currency, dependent ON an active playerbase, to leave any sort of lasting mark on Imperian (and being hardline refused to make furniture out of 'free items' in the first place). I'd find and volunteer to write more flavor stuff if it hadn't been seven months since the last thing I volunteered to write was sent in and ignored. I'd design if anyone I cared about was around to look at my designs. I'd claim a territory and fight for it, even my own people, if I didn't know I'd be scolded immediately. And I feel like I'm one of the more self-motivating and creative people remaining (not to toot my own horn), and I'm sick and tired.
Drop an effing meteor on it then. Maybe literally - that'd probably spice things up. But honestly, I think the kindest thing for Imperian to offer its playerbase is a drastic change accompanying a free retire. Short of Bellini coming back, I got nothing to log on for except to be sore about all the credits I'd rather use elsewhere and be hesitant to BUY credits elsewhere because so much of what I've invested is gated off.
Not facilitating 1v1 through champion better.
Not doing pointless changes like profession slots and gold-sink statpack swaps (lol 50c) to get people doing silly things like rolling new chars to try out tritrans in different classes.
Not more frequent class-based classleads to fix things like Engineer being the ugliest class I've ever encountered.
Not in-game bound credit generation beyond ungodly long achievements or things the megabashers like myself keep on lock.
Not making typical roleplay mechanics more accessible (a la dropping credit costs to gold costs on things like pet cages/ambience/crafting licenses [lol "pay us $80 multiple times to create content for our game!"]).
Not an exp sink so people won't feel like non-gold activities are a waste of time (bashing is more profitable than pk, even if you win the rl month streak token ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
Not giving minigods more storyline agency so they don't feel like sect familiars that will poof if you kick them.
Not events, big and small, to give people something to talk about other than rehashing philosophy, discussing their sicc bashing gains, or writing their own smut.
No. We need more. Fricking. Promos. Especially with new items that take coding time. When Wyll, Galt, and Ohm buy them, ho boy everything will be fixed. The thing that has always attracted people to IRE is the ability to spend thousands on a character every month, amirite?
</rant>
These are mostly systemic IRE issues, of course, except the minigods bit, (I think) others have both exp sinks and exp loss (ew) still, and it seemed like events have been happening regularly at least via newsletters and what I heard when flopping around Aetoolia.
I said PERFECT BALANCE is boring. I did not say you can't have a well balanced game. I think it funny that stating Imperian has never been more balanced and the utter lack of players speak volumes. Perhaps it's a little too balanced. People enjoy being powerful and people enjoy winning. There is a reason we have abbreviations like FOTM and Meta. People will always choose the strongest option because they don't want to lose. The best game is not one that hammers everything flat so it's even, but keeps everything in a constant state of flux so that people CAN be powerful and win as well as keeping things interesting so it doesn't get stale.
Now you're naturally going to come back and make some claim like "But then it's a perpetual cycle of people constantly hopping and changing to the strongest class/race/city so that they always stay on top!" Except history proves that while people do move around, they do get attached to their Cities/Guilds/Classes and stay put, making this statement not true. A small percentage of people will always move, but we've always been able to pick them out of the pack anyway.
@Oystir the game was dead long before they killed off the Gods. That was one of the big things they tried to change things up. Didn't work though.
@Swale I absolutely have a huge beef with group combat. Dig back in this forum a bit for my post on 'Shifting Focus'. I maintained then and still maintain that Imperians downfall was in large part due to the administration listening to a select group of people who had had their fun with 1v1, been there and done it all (props to em. It's great that they were good) and wanted to move onto group stuff. By taking the focus off the individual and putting it on the group/org they made the story less about how any Joe Shmoe could become Murderking of the World and more about how you had to be a group of people in order to prevail.
having said that, I don't feel you can't have some group stuff while remaining focused on the individual players. I accept I may be wrong and that you might be right about having to pick your audience however.
Bottom line is this: I -don't- think it was people growing up or moving away from games or the world changing or other games coming out that made Imperian dwindle to the husk that it is. Good intentions or not, I believe it is the culmination of multiple changes over time that has contributed to the type of world Imperian is now versus then. I do feel that removal of Circles (those were a fatal poison that was one of the first changes in all of this), a revert to previous skills/classes (enormous wall of text regarding which ones so I'm not going to bother writing that unless someone asked me to), a reset to certain City deletions, and a complete wipe to characters (everything. Gone. All of it. Start over from Day 1.) would bring me and many, many people back. That is my opinion. It is a radical opinion. it is a hard to stomach or accept opinion. But it is not an opinion formed one one afternoon after saying "wouldn't it be cool". It's the culmination of many, many discussions with ex players, players from other IRE games and much, much thought on the subject.
But even though I'm so sure about all this, I could be wrong. That's why I say they should ask their customers. Send out emails and polls.
The truth of the matter is that making Imperian more fair was something that generated a wave that made it successful during its last big point of popularity. We focused on team combat mechanics to make the game more inclusive. We released autocuring for the same reason. We took classes in different direcrions so there was something for everyone in every circle. None of these changes were detrimental to the game.
Of course, it might look that way to somebody that doesn't play or hasn't played in a long time. It isn't like this person has been present for the actual issues that heralded waves of retirement. The issue has always been one of direction and resources, nothing more. Imperian lacks the firm direction and attention it needs; somewhere down the line, players with less eye for detail became city leaders. Risk averse mindsets began to rule the day.
The environment is the issue. The game is fine. The environment is not; it is dominated by people that don't want the game to move forward. Like @Oystir said, they don't want to risk not playing the leading role in a one man show. The environment is also the fault of the Admin for not taking a firmer hand and caving to outrageous things like letting their 'customers' abuse volunteers sent forth to improve that environment. It falls on their heads that the game became an endless rabbit hole of the issues Kabaal alludes to.
If you haven't been here, you don't know **** about what this game needs or what ruined it.
Group combat was good for the game. Shardfalls were one of the few things that existed to motivate the PK and Roleplay crowd into interacting together and it was one of the few things where individual PK ability wasn't the only way to contribute to org health and goals. It has also been an entryway for a lot of non-comms to learn to make aliases and stop being afraid of death (especially in Imperian where it means nothing). I personally set up at least six non-comm people with bones of a system to help them learn combos, upkeep defenses and be able to come out of their comfort zone in combat. 1v1 didn't die because of group combat; it died because 1v1 isn't rewarded or meaningful and that has nothing to do with letting new players compete. Other games do group combat/1v1 well, and it's because they know what they're doing. They came out with caravans too which were also awesome for that purpose, then the admin bastardized it because of a classlead (written by someone who retired within weeks) and took literal months to make them possible again, and by then I was the only one who cared.
I have to agree with @Sarrius that you have a biased perspective hung on your inexperience with the game's meta. I don't mean that to say that you do not have anything to contribute to the conversation, but you'll be hard pressed to find somebody who was actively playing around that time who doesn't agree that Stavenn being deleted was better for the game on the whole. People crop up occasionally with starry-eyed memories of Imperian and try to argue against its necessity but, sorry, you just don't know. I started in Stavenn and the Nobility rp is some of the best I've ever interacted with in IRE, but 1. they ruined that roleplay well before the city was deleted 2. it is an objective fact that more orgs need to be deleted, and least one of the circles in its entirety and 3. they tried to pull a do-over with one aspect of the game and couldn't even manage that properly. Entities were an attempt to bring back the Gods in some capacity and they were treated like **** because, even though we knew that's what they were for, the rp was established terribly and they were given nearly no power in-game to establish their authority as such. And there was no place for them in this game honestly. You can't just hit reset. It's too late for a lot of things and the people telling you that right now are the most prominent players left from the last several years. If you want to open a discussion about fixing Imperian it will do you a lot of good to listen to our experience and opinions. I haven't played much in the last year, but I played a lot in the last five, and I know how the game was and I know how the game is *now* because it hasn't changed and that's the problem.
I felt actually, genuinely bad when people from MKO migrated to Imperian; most of them ended up eating the additional retirement loss and moving on to Aetolia/Achaea/(god forbid)Lusternia. That was probably our best opportunity in the longest time to grow our playerbase and that was the month before earrings came out and they were so effing cool and I was given like 20 of them when one of the MKO whales got fed up with Imperian and left to Achaea and that *was* effing cool. Except for how terribly I felt for the actual hundreds of dollars she spent trying to get situated on a character she realized wasn't even going to enjoy.
I stated in my original post I'm not interested in what you have to say, other than the question I asked. You answered. The rest of this thread is an attempt to try and shake the administration up and expose them to some thoughts that I honestly don't know if they've been exposed to. That's probably arrogant on my part. Oh well.
I could be wrong about it all - I've maintained that all along. Maybe Jeremy will be able to come up with something that truly reinvigorates Imperian and brings people back. It may not be my idea, but I'd put money on it being something equally drastic.
You haven't maintained that at all.
I promise you that 'reboot the game', 'delete a circle', and etc are thoughts he has likely entertained multiple times. I'm sure he knows that Imperian is dying, if not already really just a corpse moved by a few strings. You aren't revolutionizing the game by telling him any of this. If anything, you're muddying the waters asking for us to return to a stone age whose features were not the cause of its population boon. The game was very happy and very healthy during the era of decisions that you seem to so abhor. The game lost its way some time after that due to an endless rabbit hole of problems. Problems that had to do with how Imperian markets itself (or lack thereof), the way it decided to generate revenue over the past few years, and the decline of many structures in the game that don't have to do with PK. Once your PKers feel like they've conquered this mountain, truly and utterly, they will leave. Go read some 'here's why i'm retiring' posts and get back to us.
If you would like that 'old country' feel on homework assignments from your guild, a long grind to 100, and a million other things that make the nostalgic aspect inside of you drip with anticipation, go to Achaea. Hell, go to Aetolia - they actually did right everything Imperian has done oh so wrong.
edit: at least the homework part is facetious, that ****'s all gone from everywhere.
But IRE does have a very successful history of catering mainly to its top tier fighters in ways that DO alienate most of the player base - very importantly through harsh consequences for losing a fight. And most of the top tier (with a few exceptions) does seem to crave the dynamic that creates. Very few top tier players are consistently in favor of inclusiveness by way of not having harsh mechanical penalties (like XP loss) for losing.
XP loss has all sorts of far-reaching implications, but one of the most important ones is that it has a pretty strong chilling effect on an often cited, but rarely used "solution" to "murderking" bullying - the top tier loves to suggest teaming up and taking him down (while reminding people that he'll hunt you down later and make you pay for "teaming"). Even in a game like Imperian where it really is possible to hunt down a murderking, it's not easy for a bunch of regular players. Someone like Owyn or Sarrius can easily slice through a bunch of non-coms or lowbies. But an Alvetta can grab a couple of people (me, for example) and have a great chance of doing it. But people like us won't even -exist- in a game that has harsh XP loss. Certainly, we'd have never grown into PK-ers who could threaten Owyn. You need arties, a passable system, and plenty of low stakes PRACTICE in real world teamfighting to kill a guy like that. People like us existing pisses off (most of) the top tier crowd. We're not considered "good enough" to be in fight club and it's an insult to them that we exist and could have a shot at murdering Owyn in the face.
Sarthan has other gripes, yes, but one of his big ones is the 1 v.1/murderking issue. Favoring murderking play (obviously) alienates a lot of players, but many of them also can't quite bring themselves to leave. Pellerins stay because they're Pellerins, and Alvettas stay because they're Alvettas (though they would be less likely to have ever become pretty good PK-ers). Most players occupy themselves with non-PK things, even if they're interested in PK (this was me before Imperian).
All you have to do is make occasional minor concessions to the regular player base so that most of them don't actually reach tipping point and leave - but really, you cater to the top tier PK-ers. You have XP loss that stings. You provide PK-ers with ways to initiate fights when the other side absolutely does not want to play, but feels obligated to engage, either due to RP (this is an important role that RP can and does play) or mechanical reasons, or both - things far more powerful than "you need ways to instigate sometimes" buttons. You make bashing a restricted resource and then create richer bashing areas (that happen to be Open PK). Your population is healthy so you get a trickle of new people (who definitely aren't fully aware that they'll probably play the role of "fodder" at some point). And the top tier PK-ers are pretty happy - but will actually still campaign for more loosening of PK restrictions, at which point you have to decide whether you should indulge them, or if it might be a bridge too far. And the Owyns and Septuses stay simply because there are people to fight.
I couldn't possibly hate this system more than I do, but it works because of the things I just mentioned. Too bad I didn't fully understand that many years and many thousands of dollars ago. I understood a good part of it, but consistently underestimated how you can pretty reliably count on -enough- of the regular player base to not actually get mad enough to leave (some do, but you're fine as long as you have that trickle of new players). Now it needs to be said that I am not saying Imperian couldn't have "made it" as a game that is more inclusive. Imperian suffered from so many other things. I am just saying "this has been an incredibly successful model".