And then "no market" like IRE games haven't dived off the top 10 of tms except Achaea with the bronze medal, then floating some outliers from other games (like the 5th highest real money item auction lol) like people haven't dropped thousands and thousands in auctions (or Wyll in a gambling promo)? Telling us that "hey they did coding!" like we can't see that most of that time was forced onto promo BS that didn't address game issues?
Yes, correct, no market. TMS is all-but-irrelevant to incoming traffic. Until you've thrown $10s of thousands of dollars trying to market MUDs, you don't really understand what it's like trying to generate new players for MUDs in 2018.
Of course people have spent a lot in our games. Our games are just not remarkable in terms of players spending a lot of money. It happens in thousands of games, and to a much higher degree in some.
As for promos - without promos we would have been forced to do this years earlier, so I'm unsure what your point is. The choice wasn't, "Risk losing more money by developing systems that don't generate sales or do promos." It was, "Generate revenue or remove paid staff" which is exactly how the games industry works. If the revenue isn't there, the staff won't be there either.
@Sarapis what constitutes it losing money? Jeremy is the only salaried staff here and he's the VP of IRE. He's point-blank said it costs nothing to run imperian, which I assume means it runs off of a shared server with Achaea. If the cost to run it is 0, and Jeremy's salary is fully covered (which it should be, since he's VP of the company and not producer of specifically Imperian), then Imperian wasn't losing anything. Imperian was just money.
I could be 100% wrong. But define "losing" money. I find it hard to believe that you're losing out on something that costs you nothing to run (or produce, for the last 2 years while Jeremy has been the only staff.)
Every minute anyone who is paid spends working on Imperian costs Imperian money. Same with any of our other games. It's not like their time is created out of free air. When they do something in one place, they can't spend that time anywhere else, and paying for peoples' time is by far IRE's biggest cost.
He was not being 100% clear when he said it costs nothing to run Imperian. There are relatively fixed costs, such as the server, tech support, the forums, the website, etc, as well as occasional spikey costs like spending time doing server upgrades in the background, etc. They're just not that big.
We're assuming Imperian will now still be losing money, but without any paid people on it, it will lose a lot less money every month.
So Aetolia in 2007 with 2.5x the activity of 2016 Imperian got helped, got staff from other games shifted to improve it...
Why didn't Imperian get the same help before it got to the point it was in 2016?
You seem to have the idea that "saving games" is a matter of throwing staff at it. It's not. We would have loved to see Imperian (and MKO) not fail, and we were spending way more on Imperian a couple years ago than we ever have on Aetolia, but it happens. Hopefully it won't happen again, but as I said earlier, no game company can promise you that.
Microsoft, for instance, is currently the 2nd largest company in America, and yet even they couldn't keep Asheron's Call or Asheron's Call 2 running - they had to shut them down entirely.
@Sarapis Yes, anyone who is paid. Who was paid to work on Imperian? Jeremy was not paid to work on Imperian (specifically.) Jeremy is paid to be your VP. Which leaves no one else being paid to run Imperian, which leaves Imperian at a cost of 0. Your server is shared by all of your games (I know, because if you were to try connecting to starmourn.com port 23 it'd redirect to imperian, and there's no way that a brand new game is going to get put on a server specifically for another game(s) unless they share one.) The website team for a company would be company-wide, not game-wide. The tech-support is the same.
Basically, what I'm pointing out very clearly, is that the costs to your company generated by Imperian is 0. You cannot lose on imperian itself. I appreciate costs of maintenance, but those are shared costs which are covered by your other games (that you say are generating money not losing it.)
@Sarapis Yes, anyone who is paid. Who was paid to work on Imperian? Jeremy was not paid to work on Imperian (specifically.) Jeremy is paid to be your VP. Which leaves no one else being paid to run Imperian, which leaves Imperian at a cost of 0. Your server is shared by all of your games (I know, because if you were to try connecting to starmourn.com port 23 it'd redirect to imperian, and there's no way that a brand new game is going to get put on a server specifically for another game(s) unless they share one.) The website team for a company would be company-wide, not game-wide. The tech-support is the same.
Basically, what I'm pointing out very clearly, is that the costs to your company generated by Imperian is 0. You cannot lose on imperian itself. I appreciate costs of maintenance, but those are shared costs which are covered by your other games (that you say are generating money not losing it.)
No, Jeremy was paid, specifically, to be the producer of Imperian and to spend the vast majority of his time on Imperian, which he did until now. It's funny to listen to someone with literally no knowledge of our financial structure lecture me on it though. And I should also add that until a couple years ago, so was Garryn, but he got moved off because the game simply couldn't afford him any more.
It seems odd from a business standpoint that a company would put funds into another MUD when a mud of their own is failing or at least not as productive as their other games. This I cannot understand why the company would not shuffle some pieces to fix this issue then focus on a new game unless we are strictly talking about a pure money making based scheme banking on the SCI-FI aspect. This view is more brutal and honest, but I just can't help but feel since it was acknowledged that "Imperian costs nothing to run" that it's just easier to sweep it towards the side and label it as a free game now. (Imagine if the people working on Starmourn would've been working on Imperian this whole time)-edit
Let me address this, as I think we have already talked about the rest of your comment in other responses.
The Sci-Fi genre is very different than our current games and it's possible we should have done a different genre earlier instead of opening 5 fantasy worlds in a row. I'm also not convinced adding resources a couple years ago would have helped Imperian keep going. Maybe it would have, but another game may have dropped off in exchange. Those resources are limited. We could go round and round on that forever. We have 4 fantasy games that are not significantly different from each other in terms of genre and mechanics. As a company, we decided we need to offer something different. Starmourn is a new genre with reimagined combat and features and will be different than our other games. It will draw in players from other scifi muds and appeal to players on current IRE games as something new. In summary, no company is going to stay alive putting resources into existing products at the expense of creating new ones.
You forgot to scroll down to the Imperian section. The majority of my time is spent working on Imperian. You could say the revenue from Imperian was then going toward my salary.
Your part in this thread is over. If you would like to discuss this further, please email me at jeremy@imperian.com.
Why not simply rebrand Imperian into Starmourn? You could've taken Imperian that way but chose not to. Can you explain why?
Heh. That would be impossible for a variety of reasons.
Just trying to come up with the story to make that work would be impossible. How would we transition from current combat and classes into a completely different version of combat? How would we deal with the current fantasy classes and things like magic?
Why not simply rebrand Imperian into Starmourn? You could've taken Imperian that way but chose not to. Can you explain why?
Heh. That would be impossible for a variety of reasons.
Just trying to come up with the story to make that work would be impossible. How would we transition from current combat and classes into a completely different version of combat? How would we deal with the current fantasy classes and things like magic?
Yeah, sounds cool, but would be impossible.
Doh, you edited, but it would still be impossible for the same reasons. Even if we kept a fantasy setting. Moving to a new form of combat is a couple of years of coding. Then retrofitting all of the existing classes. You cannot change any of the current classes while coding the new system, because those changes would not move into the new system which would have been frozen when you started working on the new system.
It is just not possible to do something that radical in a live game.
Perhaps a wild imagination, but crazy things happen. The story in Imperian has been non-existent so it to me isn't out of the realm of possibilities stage. Thanks for all the replies though, appreciated.
EDIT: I was told you would take it as literally Starmourn so I adjusted my post. I understand your point though.
Even if the shift weren't that drastic, it would have been nice if something happened to make Imperian stand out from the other IRE fantasy muds. Achaea has sailing and everything, Aetolia has vampires and all the associated stuff, Lusternia is all about planar stuff and is unique in its own way.
Imperian was mostly the "PVP mud" of the lot, but with the rules for PK relaxing elsewhere that niche fell apart. It was a bit of a shock when I came back from a 5 year stretch of hardly playing and realised the story had hardly moved forward at all and that the world was much the same, other than Stavenn being gone.
Possibly in the minority here, but I absolutely welcome the ability to generate credits (and lessons, by extension) completely by in-game means. The financial and economic realities of my country of residence doesn't really make it justifiable for me to spend constantly on US$-based games, so in my whole time in IRE, I've only bought very rarely (no-brainers, and a couple of months of subscription).
This means that I'm heavily reliant on the CFS markets, which, in turn, are reliant on other players buying credits OOC and selling them on there. In a small game like Imperian, the CFS market was (and is) very small and it just wasn't realistically feasible for me to grind-and-buy my way to Great Success. But with credit generation moving in-game, that's a big draw for me.
People say I'm unnervingly optimistic, but I have high hopes this won't be the catastrophe people seem to think it is! (At least, nowhere to go but up!)
currently tentatively active (may vanish for periods of time)
Possibly in the minority here, but I absolutely welcome the ability to generate credits (and lessons, by extension) completely by in-game means. The financial and economic realities of my country of residence doesn't really make it justifiable for me to spend constantly on US$-based games, so in my whole time in IRE, I've only bought very rarely (no-brainers, and a couple of months of subscription).
This means that I'm heavily reliant on the CFS markets, which, in turn, are reliant on other players buying credits OOC and selling them on there. In a small game like Imperian, the CFS market was (and is) very small and it just wasn't realistically feasible for me to grind-and-buy my way to Great Success. But with credit generation moving in-game, that's a big draw for me.
People say I'm unnervingly optimistic, but I have high hopes this won't be the catastrophe people seem to think it is! (At least, nowhere to go but up!)
Thanks. The vast majority of emails and messages have been very excited. I totally understand why some people are nervous about it though.
Perhaps a wild imagination, but crazy things happen. The story in Imperian has been non-existent so it to me isn't out of the realm of possibilities stage. Thanks for all the replies though, appreciated.
When I was very first thinking about what became Achaea, half my life ago, I was toying around with a fantasy/sci-fi realm where you’d go between a portal or something and your fantasy gear would be translated into sci-fi equivalents (or anything really, could be modern day, age of sail; a differen fantasy setting etc) and vice versa.
Even when thinking about building both realms from scratch intentionally to have characters move between them was going to be way too restrictive though unless all you wanted was a reskin, which is lame. You need/want different mechanics and that makes translation between them really really hard, verging on effectively impossible from a feasibility standpoint.
Again, you have literally no idea what you’re talking about. All the positions on there aren’t even paid ones, and if we didn’t have new things for Jeremy to work on, either he’d have to go down to part time work or someone else would.
Warning: I've been gone forever and only recently come back, so feel free to disregard my opinion.
I genuinely don't see how this is a bad thing. From my perspective, and with all possible respect to the hard working staff, the best content during my time in Imperian was always generated by players. When Imperian was at its population peak, the game was mechanically in a far worse shape than it is today. We all groused about it, but generally made our own fun. To be perfectly honest, most attempts I remember by the admin to 'create fun' by organizing events led to more complaining than anything else.
There's a vocal group of players for whom the game is stagnant every day there isn't a classlead round running. I get how this is disappointing for them and I hope that some admin occasionally glances in to do bug fixing and the occasional balance patch.
As for 'new features', my take as a returning player is that this game is already groaning under the weight of its own systems (and as one of the idiots who ran Lithmeria into the ground, I know a little something about that). Shards, Influence, Raids, Belief, Monoliths... We're not some new clever system away from being 'fine'. Sailing wouldn't have fixed it.
On the flipside, I think this change creates for Imperian an important niche among the IRE stable. This will now be the game a broke college student can play over a summer and actually eventually stand a chance in. Gamers tend to be rich in either time, or money. Rarely both. Every other IRE game's financial structure heavily skews toward those rich in the latter, provided you can devote at least enough time to reach level 100.
If this leads to an influx of players who want to devote time in the game, maybe all that player generated fun we all remember could start making a comeback.
Two last things: - If the optimistic projection above does take place, and the player-base rebounds I hope @Sarapis and @Jeremy will give some thought, down the track, to alternative revenue raising models for Imperian which generate a bit of money (allowing slightly greater time investment from staff) without reversing this change. - Deleting Stavenn was bad and you guys should feel bad. I will die on that hill.
I will just say that it is heartening to see multiple players here, most of whom have been incredibly loyal IRE "whales", if you will, posting completely valid concerns about the kind of relationship you should rightly expect when you go "all in" on a company's product - and what it looks like when you realize you're not getting that kind of relationship at all (it hurts, but he's bad news gurrrrrl ). At the very least, I guess we can try to be more discerning in the future! And maybe help others to be as well.
I see way more collective self-awareness from players than I've ever seen on one of these forums. Way to go guys.
If Jeremy were still getting "paid" by imperian, and imperian is always losing money, then he'd already be out of a job.
No, we were willing to continue investing in it even while it's losing money, just like we are going to likely be doing now, but hopefully less as Jeremy's time (and thus the money we pay him for it) will be more profitably invested elsewhere
Is this really that difficult to understand for anyone else?
Two last things: - If the optimistic projection above does take place, and the player-base rebounds I hope @Sarapis and @Jeremy will give some thought, down the track, to alternative revenue raising models for Imperian which generate a bit of money (allowing slightly greater time investment from staff) without reversing this change.
That would be the absolute best possible outcome and we'd be extremely psyched to put paid staff back on the game if it looked feasible to do so. There'd have to be a lot more players though, at a minimum.
I'm a little miffed Imperian got to this stage, and irked that of the four games, it's the one I play changing so drastically.
Equally though, for the non-whales, and people with lots of free time, this is pretty great if the game still does get bug fixes etc.
EDIT: Change makes me nervous and this isn't a whales vs non-whales thing, I phrased that weirdly.
Galt, we can still try out "new free Imperian" (former whales included), but I doubt a "whale" character is going to make sense on a game like that (it really -can't- make sense and is antithetical to the new model), even if it is fairly successful, which I think everyone hopes it will be. IRE also can't really afford to have a game like that compete directly with their paying games, so there is that.
EDIT: changed to include Galt's edit (in short, we all agree)
Why not simply rebrand Imperian into Starmourn? You could've taken Imperian that way but chose not to. Can you explain why?
Heh. That would be impossible for a variety of reasons.
Just trying to come up with the story to make that work would be impossible. How would we transition from current combat and classes into a completely different version of combat? How would we deal with the current fantasy classes and things like magic?
Yeah, sounds cool, but would be impossible.
Was this bait? It looked a lot like bait. Disclaimer: I understand that the direction of both games is already set and this was just for fun. With a few core assumptions (basically Starmourn as is being currently developed as the result and with minimalist aka current company attention spent on Imperian), here are a few throwaway narratives:
1. Aetherius merely exists on one of the many planets on one of the many galaxies in Starmourn sector. Spacefarers make contact. One of several scenarios possible: (a) The planet has an underlying core problem and will eventually cease to support life. Refugees escape to the stars. (b) Evil aliens destroy the planet! Refugees escape to the stars OR no one actually escapes but benevolent aliens gave us the neato cloning technology they use to revive after death. Unfortunately, these clones don't retain the same attunements to Aetherius' unique energy and no one knows what this "noctu" or "diachaim" you're speaking of is. (c) Some choose to join up with visiting spacefarers. Those who do so retain their current identities - but lose their skills for reasons similar to those noted in 1b, forced to learn to survive in the wider universe. Those who do not join are "left behind" and their players are able to create a new galactic identity (with the same invested value!)
2. None of it was ever real. Avasyu was one of the original Empyreals (the name even fits). The entirety of Imperian's history was a dream, part of his attempt to proliferate himself throughout the galaxy after the fall of the Empyreals - a simulation inside himself to prepare the spirits of his children for a tumultuous spacefaring existence. Imperian ends and these souls are created and truly "born" into Starmourn's universe as a unique race due to: (a) Legion succeeding OR being permanently defeated. The manifestation of Avasyu's anger and despair during the fall of the Empyreals, Legion was created to temper the world against the dangers to come. With his defeat, Aetherius' last "true" divine falls. (b) Entity apotheosis. An entity or several entities become aware of the nature and parameters of the simulation and enlist the help of mortals to end it so that everyone can begin their "true" lives. (c) Literally anything that involves the world being destroyed/reality breaking/the end times.
3. The Gods come back to take us to space, I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea and someone out there has a book on it.
That would be the absolute best possible outcome and we'd be extremely psyched to put paid staff back on the game if it looked feasible to do so. There'd have to be a lot more players though, at a minimum.
As a character that retired two Imperian characters to create one Imperian character, has had Elite for several years, has played since 2005, and has spent way more money on this game than I'd like to admit - I'm glad on the aspect I won't be spending any more money on Imperian or any other IRE games. I'm not interested in any of the others, and I'm losing interest in Imperian (due to lack of RP reasons).
There are some people that are upset over this change because this is not the Imperian that they signed up to play. In my opinion, making a change this large - there should be something more than the 'standard' 50% retirement offer, which is offered all of the time. Another thing I don't understand is, why would people want to increase their retirement value by '2:1'? Wouldn't it make more sense to just buy it for full value when you create your next character, instead of only receiving half value?
I would really like to see Imperian/IRE step up and offer something like 75%-90% retirement values. I know some want 100% back, but Imperian isn't shutting down, it will still be here whether you retire or not. I feel 50% isn't enough. It's not our fault Imperian is making this change, and I feel confident saying this because I've tried on three different characters to create RP scenarios and each character was hit with rejection. We want RP. We want PK (although I suck). We want activity - hell, some of us have been able to recruit our friends to play!
All I'm gonna say is that reading this thread has made me remember how much I love snarky Matt. It's truly the best, and was an amazing thing to wake up and read.
Comments
Of course people have spent a lot in our games. Our games are just not remarkable in terms of players spending a lot of money. It happens in thousands of games, and to a much higher degree in some.
As for promos - without promos we would have been forced to do this years earlier, so I'm unsure what your point is. The choice wasn't, "Risk losing more money by developing systems that don't generate sales or do promos." It was, "Generate revenue or remove paid staff" which is exactly how the games industry works. If the revenue isn't there, the staff won't be there either.
He was not being 100% clear when he said it costs nothing to run Imperian. There are relatively fixed costs, such as the server, tech support, the forums, the website, etc, as well as occasional spikey costs like spending time doing server upgrades in the background, etc. They're just not that big.
We're assuming Imperian will now still be losing money, but without any paid people on it, it will lose a lot less money every month.
Microsoft, for instance, is currently the 2nd largest company in America, and yet even they couldn't keep Asheron's Call or Asheron's Call 2 running - they had to shut them down entirely.
The Sci-Fi genre is very different than our current games and it's possible we should have done a different genre earlier instead of opening 5 fantasy worlds in a row. I'm also not convinced adding resources a couple years ago would have helped Imperian keep going. Maybe it would have, but another game may have dropped off in exchange. Those resources are limited. We could go round and round on that forever. We have 4 fantasy games that are not significantly different from each other in terms of genre and mechanics. As a company, we decided we need to offer something different. Starmourn is a new genre with reimagined combat and features and will be different than our other games. It will draw in players from other scifi muds and appeal to players on current IRE games as something new. In summary, no company is going to stay alive putting resources into existing products at the expense of creating new ones.
Your part in this thread is over. If you would like to discuss this further, please email me at jeremy@imperian.com.
Just trying to come up with the story to make that work would be impossible. How would we transition from current combat and classes into a completely different version of combat? How would we deal with the current fantasy classes and things like magic?
Yeah, sounds cool, but would be impossible.
It is just not possible to do something that radical in a live game.
Imperian was mostly the "PVP mud" of the lot, but with the rules for PK relaxing elsewhere that niche fell apart. It was a bit of a shock when I came back from a 5 year stretch of hardly playing and realised the story had hardly moved forward at all and that the world was much the same, other than Stavenn being gone.
This means that I'm heavily reliant on the CFS markets, which, in turn, are reliant on other players buying credits OOC and selling them on there. In a small game like Imperian, the CFS market was (and is) very small and it just wasn't realistically feasible for me to grind-and-buy my way to Great Success. But with credit generation moving in-game, that's a big draw for me.
People say I'm unnervingly optimistic, but I have high hopes this won't be the catastrophe people seem to think it is!
(may vanish for periods of time)
Thanks. The vast majority of emails and messages have been very excited. I totally understand why some people are nervous about it though.
Even when thinking about building both realms from scratch intentionally to have characters move between them was going to be way too restrictive though unless all you wanted was a reskin, which is lame. You need/want different mechanics and that makes translation between them really really hard, verging on effectively impossible from a feasibility standpoint.
I genuinely don't see how this is a bad thing. From my perspective, and with all possible respect to the hard working staff, the best content during my time in Imperian was always generated by players. When Imperian was at its population peak, the game was mechanically in a far worse shape than it is today. We all groused about it, but generally made our own fun. To be perfectly honest, most attempts I remember by the admin to 'create fun' by organizing events led to more complaining than anything else.
There's a vocal group of players for whom the game is stagnant every day there isn't a classlead round running. I get how this is disappointing for them and I hope that some admin occasionally glances in to do bug fixing and the occasional balance patch.
As for 'new features', my take as a returning player is that this game is already groaning under the weight of its own systems (and as one of the idiots who ran Lithmeria into the ground, I know a little something about that). Shards, Influence, Raids, Belief, Monoliths... We're not some new clever system away from being 'fine'. Sailing wouldn't have fixed it.
On the flipside, I think this change creates for Imperian an important niche among the IRE stable. This will now be the game a broke college student can play over a summer and actually eventually stand a chance in. Gamers tend to be rich in either time, or money. Rarely both. Every other IRE game's financial structure heavily skews toward those rich in the latter, provided you can devote at least enough time to reach level 100.
If this leads to an influx of players who want to devote time in the game, maybe all that player generated fun we all remember could start making a comeback.
Two last things:
- If the optimistic projection above does take place, and the player-base rebounds I hope @Sarapis and @Jeremy will give some thought, down the track, to alternative revenue raising models for Imperian which generate a bit of money (allowing slightly greater time investment from staff) without reversing this change.
- Deleting Stavenn was bad and you guys should feel bad. I will die on that hill.
I see way more collective self-awareness from players than I've ever seen on one of these forums. Way to go guys.
(may vanish for periods of time)
I'm a little miffed Imperian got to this stage, and irked that of the four games, it's the one I play changing so drastically.
Equally though, for the non-whales, and people with lots of free time, this is pretty great if the game still does get bug fixes etc.
EDIT: Change makes me nervous and this isn't a whales vs non-whales thing, I phrased that weirdly.
Is this really that difficult to understand for anyone else?
EDIT: changed to include Galt's edit (in short, we all agree)
1. Aetherius merely exists on one of the many planets on one of the many galaxies in Starmourn sector. Spacefarers make contact. One of several scenarios possible:
(a) The planet has an underlying core problem and will eventually cease to support life. Refugees escape to the stars.
(b) Evil aliens destroy the planet! Refugees escape to the stars OR no one actually escapes but benevolent aliens gave us the neato cloning technology they use to revive after death. Unfortunately, these clones don't retain the same attunements to Aetherius' unique energy and no one knows what this "noctu" or "diachaim" you're speaking of is.
(c) Some choose to join up with visiting spacefarers. Those who do so retain their current identities - but lose their skills for reasons similar to those noted in 1b, forced to learn to survive in the wider universe. Those who do not join are "left behind" and their players are able to create a new galactic identity (with the same invested value!)
2. None of it was ever real. Avasyu was one of the original Empyreals (the name even fits). The entirety of Imperian's history was a dream, part of his attempt to proliferate himself throughout the galaxy after the fall of the Empyreals - a simulation inside himself to prepare the spirits of his children for a tumultuous spacefaring existence. Imperian ends and these souls are created and truly "born" into Starmourn's universe as a unique race due to:
(a) Legion succeeding OR being permanently defeated. The manifestation of Avasyu's anger and despair during the fall of the Empyreals, Legion was created to temper the world against the dangers to come. With his defeat, Aetherius' last "true" divine falls.
(b) Entity apotheosis. An entity or several entities become aware of the nature and parameters of the simulation and enlist the help of mortals to end it so that everyone can begin their "true" lives.
(c) Literally anything that involves the world being destroyed/reality breaking/the end times.
3. The Gods come back to take us to space, I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea and someone out there has a book on it.
There are some people that are upset over this change because this is not the Imperian that they signed up to play. In my opinion, making a change this large - there should be something more than the 'standard' 50% retirement offer, which is offered all of the time. Another thing I don't understand is, why would people want to increase their retirement value by '2:1'? Wouldn't it make more sense to just buy it for full value when you create your next character, instead of only receiving half value?
I would really like to see Imperian/IRE step up and offer something like 75%-90% retirement values. I know some want 100% back, but Imperian isn't shutting down, it will still be here whether you retire or not. I feel 50% isn't enough. It's not our fault Imperian is making this change, and I feel confident saying this because I've tried on three different characters to create RP scenarios and each character was hit with rejection. We want RP. We want PK (although I suck). We want activity - hell, some of us have been able to recruit our friends to play!