Suggestion Focusing on New Players and the Economy

[jakeman5]

During this suggestion post, I wanted to focus on the lack of town creation by new players and the economy. Currently, every town is created by a player that is experienced and has connections in Loka. From what I understand about the past of Loka, this seems to directly contrast what used to happen where people would come onto Loka and create new towns. I think that it would be cool to see new towns pop up created by new players.

Another problem is that players can only accumulate wealth at chokepoints like the three resource isles. The ability to only generate Shards directly by mining or selling items in the marketplace is detrimental to the server's economy. As there are only two Shard sources, and one of those is incredibly unreliable, I think there needs to be an overhaul to Loka's economy. As an economy operates, there have to be multiple revenue sources and multiple places to spend said earnings. There are much more places to spend your shards in contrast to a single way of consistently generating Shards. This imbalance leads to a very odd economy with little depth. The lack of variety makes the economy very monotonous. I think it would be beneficial for Loka to make more things available for purchase with orbs.

As always, let me know what you think about these suggestions.

New Players:

Better Starting Kits for New Players

• Either add enchantments to the iron or diamond kits that aren’t enchanted

Ways to Encourage New Town Creation

• I was trying to think of a way to generate some more creation of towns maybe if you have a town that stays alive for a month that 5,000 shards are put into the town balance
• I think it would be good to show people in the tutorial how to create a town or some video that goes in length about the process of how to create a town

Update the NPC Messages

• Make sure that the NPC at the different Isles list the active capitals
• Make sure that the NPC are helpful to new players

Eliminate the ability to show up at Neutrals

• This way it is not impossible for new towns to claim land

Remove NPC Clearing Lore

• Too many accidents, just remove it
• Make one NPC to clear lore in the library or something if you feel like it is needed

Spawn

• Make it easier to navigate around spawn by adding signage or adding a spawn map to the website

Find the T-Gen when you Warp In

• Illuminate the T-Gen outline like the spectral mod for the first 10 seconds of the first warp
  • This would be a great addition for everyone

Wither

• The wither is incredibly difficult to kill currently for experienced players so it would be impossible for new ones
• Most likely needs to be nerfed from what i'm told

Economy

Jobs

• Jobs if implemented correctly could be very cool
  • Progression and levels gained based off of doing tasks
  • Shards awarded for hitting certain milestones
    • Example: Fisherman - Fore every 25 fish caught ___ shards awarded with larger bonuses at 100, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 fish caught

Interactions with NPCs near the Marketplace (Vendors)

• Have a set price that products are bought and sold for
  • Buying prices should be high
  • Selling prices should be low
• Current market system continued to be implemented to undercut the prices at the Servers Vendor

Marketplace System

• Ability to extend time before a sale expires so you don’t have to go to the escrow
• Alerts if someone posts the same item as you
  • Hopefully creates more competition

Orbs

• Purchase Kill Messages
• Purchase Cosmetics
• Idk what doesn't violate EULA tbh

 

[Magpieman]

Almost everything you have brought up is planned. We just don't have the time or resources to implement them all for a while. The first step is server sharding so we can confidently support a larger player base. Then implementing camps which should help to smooth out the intro experience and increase player retention. The order of the next updates may change but currently, we are looking at adding Achievements and cosmetics next followed by town progression. This will modernise the town experience and add a lot of content beyond the max level of 25. Then we'd look at adding more dynamic events (think fishing tournament). Dotted throughout all of this we want to make improvements to the PvP server both for ranked game modes and proving grounds, work on server advertising, add various other bits of content and make quality of life improvements/modernise some systems. There are further plans for PvE beyond all this but it's a long ways off currently.

The concept of new towns not being created by new players has little to do with a lot of this. For the whole 10 years of Loka, experienced players have always started up new projects and towns. Nothing has changed in this regard. Most of the server advertising is currently done through word of mouth so new players to the server are already part of established groups. When we start to do marketing ourselves this will change as it will bring new groups with no connections to the player base.

Ability to extend time before a sale expires so you don’t have to go to the escrow

The reason we make it a pain to re-up sales is to prevent players from using the market to infinitely store items, keeping them safe from ever being stolen. There may be other options we can explore in the future to work around this.

The economy will never be perfect with vanilla blocks/items in Minecraft due to its infinite nature. If you cannot limit supply, you will always have problems. MMO's get around this with long cooldowns on nodes etc. which is not a direction we want to go with vanilla items. Having to wait until tomorrow to gather more wood because you have chopped your quota today would become very frustrating. Our focus therefore will be around a balanced PvE economy of custom items etc. but this is a ways off yet. However, this doesn't mean we don't also have plans for the vanilla economy, like you say adding more shard sources is an important part of improving it. Quests and vendors will help with this a lot. It's tough to balance making conquest accessible early on to new players while also giving things value.


Below is a previous post explaining some of our thoughts on the new player experience.

We are well aware the new player experience is something we have not touched on in a long time and that currently, we leave players to go it alone very early on. As a result, the younger audience tends to drop out early on as they don't have a clear direction. This is something we are going to be addressing next, so I'd like to give everyone the opportunity to leave some ideas and thoughts on what it should look like (in your opinion) below.

The Current Intro Course

As you know we've been running this server for over 9 years now and in that time have tried pretty much every intro experience under the sun. As a result, we are fairly confident we know what works and what doesn't. We believe the intro course should accomplish the following 3 things:

1. Tell them the most basic rules and server concepts/aims (e.g. don't hack, it's PvP survival etc.)
2. Engage new players with something exciting and give them a taste of the server to get them hooked. (at least willing to give the server a shot)
3. Weed out people joining just to spam, advertise and hack.

The current course clearly hooks new players, gets them engaged, and a large number of them comment on how cool it was once they arrive on Loka. It is also long enough and hidden from enough from the community to prevent spammers, advertisers and hackers causing problems (the intro fight has also been quite effective at stopping bots getting through). Finally, it tells players the most basic rules (which is more than adequate) and that it's PvP survival, but an area it could improve is explaining more about what the server is and its aims/goals.

What a lot of comments from the community appear to suggest is that the intro course should act as a giant tutorial, teaching players the servers custom mechanics. We strongly disagree with this and even the notion of teaching them some more basic mechanics. It is critical that the intro course is short. People have short attention spans and if it's any longer than it currently is, people will leave before completing it. Players are also are going to have no interest in trying to take in the info and learn new things if they don't know if they are going to stick with the server or not. It's incredibly naive to think that we can teach people T Gen mechanics or how towns work when a player joins for the first time.

What We Plan On Adding/Changing

Other than small tweaks to messaging to players in the intro course our planned changes are focussed on the player experience post-intro course. This will start with taking over Minecraft's advancements system and using it as a guide/tutorial on what to do next. This would start off with things such as go to the docks area, get on a boat etc. and possibly reward players along the way with things like the basic keep on death armour. Then move them towards our next new feature which is camps.

Camps (which stem from froggyfruits original suggestion) can be started by any nomad in any non-town tile (perhaps some further restrictions) and would be a land claim on a 'mini hex' within a tile (wouldn't appear on the map). This would grant block protection and could be run with a single member. Advancements would be used to show you how to progress your camp and provide tasks to do. Any nomad can be invited to your camp (this may unlock an extra mini hex per player). You would be able to talk to other camps through a global camps chat channel, which would hopefully encourage them to join each others camp so they could form a town. Once you have completed the progression and have at least 3 players in your camp you can upgrade it into a fully-fledged town. (This means the new town fight will no longer be a thing and instead, you have to build a camp and work up to a town)

This would then unlock a new advancements page for towns and would contain advancements that would help build up your town and in the process teaching you about the various town mechanics. Once they are complete NPC's within the town will replace the advancements and help players by suggesting things they could be doing. This would also start to lead in to post level 25 town progression but I won't get into that here.

Other ways we will be improving the new player experience is expanding upon our dynamic tips system and using it in as many places as possible. These tell players about a mechanic as they discover it. For example, if you walk into a red wilderness for the first time, a tip will pop up telling you about it. This way players are not overwhelmed with info and are only told what they need to know when they need to know it.

The final improvement comes in the form of YouTube videos. We want to produce some quick, to the point tutorials, that explain various mechanics on the server. These could be linked when dynamic tips show up and act as a more accessible Wiki page/tutorial. We could also make them accessible in a /help menu. In a perfect world, we would also have multiple in-game tutorials, in the form of a command that takes you to a special tutorial world. This would take you through each mechanic and have you physically do it, such as locking doors or setting a town zone. However, currently, we feel this would be a waste of time/resources (would mean we couldn't work on other things as our time would be taken up on this) and 95% of players would ignore it, preferring to watch a YouTube video. As a result, the current plan is to only do YouTube videos.

Feedback

One thing that our changes doesn't address, is getting the key concepts of the server across to new peeps. Such as, teaching players what the goals/aims are, what gameplay is like etc. Perhaps encouraging them to watch a server overview video in the intro course would satisfy this, but it's definitely one of the harder problems to solve.

Hope this helps everyone to better understand our views and why things are the way they are. I want to encourage everyone, but specifically, those of you who have given feedback in the past on this subject to respond. Do you agree with us? Have ideas on how to improve it? Are there things missing?

Appreciate the time you have put into the suggestion and it's good to hear you are on the same wavelength as us when it comes to improving the server and moving everything forward.

 

[FoxyBearGames]

All these suggestions are things that I myself as LCR as the PVE team have both discussed or thought about at one point or another. Much of it is stuff that I'd love to see, but as Mag said it's going to take a lot of resources to implement. A lot of this is stuff that I'd love to see in the future.

 

[jakeman5]

Almost everything you have brought up is planned. We just don't have the time or resources to implement them all for a while. The first step is server sharding so we can confidently support a larger player base. Then implementing camps which should help to smooth out the intro experience and increase player retention. The order of the next updates may change but currently, we are looking at adding Achievements and cosmetics next followed by town progression. This will modernise the town experience and add a lot of content beyond the max level of 25. Then we'd look at adding more dynamic events (think fishing tournament). Dotted throughout all of this we want to make improvements to the PvP server both for ranked game modes and proving grounds, work on server advertising, add various other bits of content and make quality of life improvements/modernise some systems. There are further plans for PvE beyond all this but it's a long ways off currently.

I am so glad to hear that you guys are planning to do some of this stuff. I didn't realize that there has only been word of mouth. What has the progression been on sharding so far?

 

[FoxyBearGames]

I am so glad to hear that you guys are planning to do some of this stuff. I didn't realize that there has only been word of mouth. What has the progression been on sharding so far?

A lot of sharding is preparation on Crypt's end from what I've heard in LCR meetings, however it's definitely a huge priority for the server right now.

 

[Cryptite]

What has the progression been on sharding so far?

Sharding is currently in active development and will be for the upcoming weeks, probably month. Hence why, beyond various bugfix updates, there hasn't been much to talk about (nor will be).

Ideally it will be in by May, in time for a fresh Conquest month. The work is going to come in phases, where each phase is complete, will be pushed to live so that there isn't just "one massive update" one day. Unfortunately, barring some tech that will be better due to cross-server communications (like being able to /m players regardless of where they are on the network), sharding won't look like much as a final update since it's almost entirely backend work.

It is, as said in other posts, fundamental to have in and working before we advertise, hence why we've finally pulled the trigger.

Also 150 player fights...

 

[jakeman5]

Sharding is currently in active development and will be for the upcoming weeks, probably month. Hence why, beyond various bugfix updates, there hasn't been much to talk about (nor will be).

Ideally it will be in by May, in time for a fresh Conquest month. The work is going to come in phases, where each phase is complete, will be pushed to live so that there isn't just "one massive update" one day. Unfortunately, barring some tech that will be better due to cross-server communications (like being able to /m players regardless of where they are on the network), sharding won't look like much as a final update since it's almost entirely backend work.

It is, as said in other posts, fundamental to have in and working before we advertise, hence why we've finally pulled the trigger.

Also 150 player fights...

Amazing. Looking forward to you being able to not have to worry about lag as much and focus your efforts to improving and innovating Loka.

 

[FroggyFruit1357]

Better Starting Kits for New Players

I think that the starting kits are pretty balanced as is, considering they're keep on death. I know for a fact most everyone has a few shulkers of this gear sitting around in already established towns. I would like to see a quest after the tutorial showing a player how to create a town, including a step to get a better, not KOD set from Lenrith or the apprentice.

Ways to Encourage New Town Creation

I think the already brought up idea of camps should do a better job of easing players into full-on town ownership rather than encouraging players to create a town without knowing ahead of time you need three people, or you need 3 actives, how to defend yourself. I would much rather have an extended tutorial phase for newer players rather than them jumping into full on ownership.

Remove NPC Clearing Lore

I would rather see the NPC have a prompt verifying you want to clear the lore or shift-clicking it to bypass this prompt. I clear a lot of lore on my industry-produced items so they can work in my new brewer design, and other hopper-sorting based Redstone stuff.

Spawn

PLEASE ADD THIS
I can't list the sheer AMOUNT of times someone has said "where's town portal" and they somehow happen to be in the cave behind spawn or over at the bandit tent.

Marketplace System

I see no reason why sales should expire or why you should have to leave your town to sell stuff in bulk. If I say I want a void storage market panel as a town level buff, it'll never get done, so make it an industry for crafting

 

[FoxyBearGames]

I see no reason why sales should expire or why you should have to leave your town to sell stuff in bulk. If I say I want a void storage market panel as a town level buff, it'll never get done, so make it an industry for crafting

I would really like to see the void storage buff that you speak of as a town perk in the future. I do see the sales expiring as semi valid, however I think most of the stuff that had been going on with that was stopped when you stopped being able to sell Shulker Boxes with items inside.

I think the already brought up idea of camps should do a better job of easing players into full-on town ownership rather than encouraging players to create a town without knowing ahead of time you need three people, or you need 3 actives, how to defend yourself. I would much rather have an extended tutorial phase for newer players rather than them jumping into full on ownership.

Agreed here. Many new people don't know what to do when starting their town just due to not being acclimated to the server just yet. Hopefully something to come here soonish.

I think that the starting kits are pretty balanced as is, considering they're keep on death. I know for a fact most everyone has a few shulkers of this gear sitting around in already established towns. I would like to see a quest after the tutorial showing a player how to create a town, including a step to get a better, not KOD set from Lenrith or the apprentice.

I think an idea for these kits that would do some good would be to make them so that they either do not break, or are diamond gear to help out with durability as an iron set's durability is way too low.

Orbs

• Purchase Kill Messages
• Purchase Cosmetics
• Idk what doesn't violate EULA tbh

Definitely a lot of area to grow here. Tons of possibilities exist in the realm of cosmetics.

Alerts if someone posts the same item as you

• Hopefully creates more competition

This would be a really nice idea, could definitely increase competition. I'd also like to see the #market channel as a followable channel (like #announcements and #media), and while we're at it, make #conquest followable.

Interactions with NPCs near the Marketplace (Vendors)

• Have a set price that products are bought and sold for
  • Buying prices should be high
  • Selling prices should be low
• Current market system continued to be implemented to undercut the prices at the Servers Vendor

Personally I don't think that this is an amazing idea, what might be "high" or "low" now could certainly change. I remember a few years ago a row of shard clusters was a good bit, but now a row of cores is a good bit of money.

Jobs

• Jobs if implemented correctly could be very cool
  • Progression and levels gained based off of doing tasks
  • Shards awarded for hitting certain milestones
    • Example: Fisherman - Fore every 25 fish caught ___ shards awarded with larger bonuses at 100, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 fish caught

Definitely something that could be cool. Daily quests are something that might not seem super valuable/amazing, but in reality they would give players something to do each and every single day outside of conquest/grinding.

Find the T-Gen when you Warp In

• Illuminate the T-Gen outline like the spectral mod for the first 10 seconds of the first warp
  • This would be a great addition for everyone

Some more visual cues all around the server would be nice, especially for newer players.

Spawn

• Make it easier to navigate around spawn by adding signage or adding a spawn map to the website

This map idea is awesome and could be super useful, as well as cool looking.

Ways to Encourage New Town Creation

• I was trying to think of a way to generate some more creation of towns maybe if you have a town that stays alive for a month that 5,000 shards are put into the town balance
• I think it would be good to show people in the tutorial how to create a town or some video that goes in length about the process of how to create a town

Little milestones for camps/towns like this would be great, would feel even more rewarding for towns beyond just the perks you get at each level.

Eliminate the ability to show up at Neutrals

• This way it is not impossible for new towns to claim land

If more modes of conquest are ever added (similar to Rivina and such) I would like to see this for said modes of conquest.

Update the NPC Messages

• Make sure that the NPC at the different Isles list the active capitals
• Make sure that the NPC are helpful to new players

Lots of small fixes like this would be great to see, and wouldn't be that hard to implement.