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Suggestion: New Enhanced Support pack

Trenthian

Active Member
Posting this in the forum, because it was asked of me.


Good people of Erenor,

I thank you in advance for taking the time to read all of these words by us. This is the work of several current short and long time players suggestions. I know it’s a wall of words, but stick with it and consider what is being said. I, as well as many people who have worked in the past to bring up these opinions will appreciate your support.

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The ArcheRage Development team may be open to changing things on the server to foster growth and content participation.

The biggest challenge our server faces is new player retention. In its current form, new players are attracted to the server with the host of positive conditions like free labor and a new player support pack.

This is an ok system for attracting new players, but many new players don’t even care about it. They come to us seeking a fun new play experience and leave before seeing what our server has to offer.
BUT when they get here and take the time to start working on their character, they start to notice a few things that don't add up. They realize they face a tremendous grind to start to actually play the game.

Normally on a large server this issue would be balanced by finding people who could help you level up, and gear up and participate in content.

On our server however that does not work because of a lack of players willing to help, and the low population setting the bar too high. Simply put, the burden is too great for a new player to progress quickly enough to want to stay.

Once a player sees this and leaves, they are generally gone forever. In addition to being unable to retain new players, we are having players who have been established leave the server as well. This happens for a multitude of reasons but we cannot have server growth if we are unable to retain players at a rate greater than we have players leaving the server.

Currently the support pack brings people up to about 4.1k GS and gives them a wagon (which is already freely available through questing) And initially this sounds like a great boon. The truth is that they need to bring their gear up to the 10-12k range to have a fighting chance, and even then they need numbers on their side against many of the players who have been playing for years.


Hiram Gear was originally meant to quickly catch people up to be within a few thousand of the current top gear. That was the original intent before XL games repealed the expected changes in favor of a long hard grind intended to alleviate money from wallets.

I propose one top-priority change be made first to actually make our server different from the live servers: A new “Enhanced Player Support Pack” that is freely available to all players. (once per account)

While the proposed pack might seem like a lot, it really isn’t as demonstrated by the live server already, but the goal is to give players everything they need to start contributing to content and community by bringing them to around 12k equivalent gear.

“Why give them 12k equivalent gear? Shouldn’t they work for it?”
Many of us already have worked for it on live. Many of the players coming here are looking for a better than live experience. They are seeking a new home. They came to ArcheRage believing it would be different. They are seeing it is worse and leaving.

“But what about the eCoNoMy?”
There is no economy right now. Without a large player base its literally 5-10 people selling each other stuff on the AH at progressively higher prices. Laughable.

“Why don’t they just swipe?”
More and more even top geared players are answering this already. “Who the f would pay real money on a dead server?” No player-base, no economy, no reason to swipe. This is brain on easy mode.

“12k is achievable in just a few months though!”
Excellent point. New players don’t stick around for the months required to do it because the grind is too long. They’d rather just play something else. To keep players playing we need to help them play sooner.

“But I see new players all the time!”
Alt toons using emotional manipulation to get help is an awful scourge. One or two legitimate new players sticking around is great! We are in fact losing active players faster than we are gaining them, and we are losing more new players than we are retaining. This is unsustainable.

“The population is fine. I saw a full raid yesterday!”
People and their alts logging in for special events, and then logging out for weeks/months after their grind is not an accurate reflection of the active player-base.

One of our Devs said that no one here is going to want this. Yes. Because the people who need it are not here to speak for it. For some on our server it’s true. I think that a lot of established people will fear or admonish this change because it represents a lot of things to them that maybe puts them on edge. And people who have left who would have stayed don’t have a voice anymore. But this is a change mostly intended to fill out our player-base.

People with top gear already shouldn’t feel too threatened especially considering that many of them despair constantly about the lack of challenge or people to play with/against (pvp). And again everyone, not just new players should receive these items.


So what do we do about it?

First, Let’s help people actually catch up.

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The proposed “Enhanced Player Support Pack.”

Available at level 52 (just like now.)

- 3 Full Sets of Cloaked Brilliant Hiram Guardian Adventurer's Armor (30Day)(Epic)
- 8 Cloaked Brilliant Hiram Guardian Adventurer's Weapons (30 Day)(Epic)
- 3 Cloaked Brilliant Hiram Guardian Adventurer's Instruments (30 Day) (Epic)
These are temporary sets to try so you can learn what you like, and try before you commit. These will self-destruct after 30 days and cannot be fed to other gear.



After that open a Permanent Set Crate that you choose when you are satisfied playing around with your different options. ArcheRage makes it hard to go wrong. Just be careful and make it work for you. You can skip the crate with the temporary 30 day items all together if you want, or save it for a rainy day.


- 1 Full set Cloaked Glorious Hiram Guardian Armor (Permanent) (Legendary)
- 5 Cloaked Glorious Hiram Guardian Weapons ((Permanent) (Legendary)
- 2 Cloaked Glorious Hiram Guardian Instrument (Permanent) (Legendary)
- 600 Sealed Divine Hiram Infusions (Expire in 60 Days Gold required – better run some packs)
- 150 Bound Hiram Serendipity Stones (Expire in 60 Days – Only usable in Hiram
lets you try for the stats you want in your mythic sets right away)
- 32 Cloaked Glorious Hiram Lunagems (Custom) (120 Day Gems become Permanent Once Socketed – Gold required. Start grinding or lose them – untradeable – Can be used in Glorious Hiram Only) (you choose the type of cloaked gems like the infusion kits).
- Cloaked Wing Support Crate (choice of Astra Wings, Custom Dye-able Astra Wings Default Color: Light Pink)
- 2 Adventurer’s Rings 2 Adventurer’s earrings (Or something better?)
- Rank 10 proven warrior necklace
- Cloaked Mount Crate (Celestial Pegasus, or Celestial Kitsu)
- 50k honor
- 50k vocation


Prefer that sweet Potato life? We can get you set up for some top Potato Vs Potato too!

- Full-kit Harvester Farmhouse (Custom Bound Cannot sell)
- Farm Freighter Scroll (a wagon is nice, but useless to new players.)
- Adventurer's Clipper Scroll (just give them the boat.)
- Merchant Schooner Design (Design. Grind your mat's scrubs.)

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With this we would be giving new and returning players who were scared away a second chance to consider our server.

I’m expecting a lot of the old guard to dislike this. I can't exactly expect that people who have left the server to leave a comment about why because they are already gone. But please if you normally stay quiet please break your silence to comment about it.

Everyone should be able to get this pack, not just new players. It may not be useful to everyone because a lot of established people won't need it. But it would help keep the server from losing new people in the first week of play.

There are some other things I have suggested attached in there to match and exceed live server’s “generosity” to show how the devs very seriously care about their players.

So what then?
Players can begin the actual grind for Erenor and play the game as Inoch intended. New players will feel a little more relevant in raids and start participating in open content right away.

Established players might make some new friends too. Start turning on the charm. We have a chance to be the first server to fix the game.
Players were not intended to spend years on Hiram in the original gameplan. Erenor was supposed to be the gear to grind over time and Worldboss gear was intended as endgame content you progressed to with your guild. XL games broke this vision for everyone. ArcheRage team has a unique chance to fix this original vision.

How else does this help established players?
Say you already have a complete build but were curious about a different build or class. Wonder no more! This is your chance to make yourself a budget healer, or that tank you wished you had a chance to try. Want to switch to Darkrunner? DO IT. Have an idea for some strange weird hybrid build? Knock yourself out.

What else?
Once we catch people up, rewards for less-played dungeons and instances are going to need to be tuned to make it so players have a reason to queue for them.
I will be making more posts that go in-depth for some more balancing I have worked out, but we can’t afford to lose more potential players to a pointless insurmountable grind. This is priority one. We can work together on other top-issues after.
 
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i agree the grind in the game to get 12k GS is time consuming but getting that bump to start doing more content and enjoy the game! i love the idea of getting a house and pack trading thing going a lot, its one of the biggest reasons i played AA and ArcheRage
 
As someone who spends a lot of time helping new ppl I can confirm, hardly any actually stick around once they realize the grind. I feel like im meeting new players every day, adding them to my friends list, then they never login again after a week. =|

I want to play with more people. If that means giving them stuff I had to work really hard for then I'm all for it. Trenthian is right. If they join, feel demoralized at the 3-6months catchup grind 95% of those people will just not bother. And we're not likely to ever see those people ever again =[
We absolutely need to do more to hook the new people by removing the barriers to entry to competitive fun play.
If we could actually queue for content, find groups, and have active pvp at all hours then we all win.

Lets make it happen!
Make the changes suggested to the support pack, then send out an email to all inactive accounts registered inviting them back and refreshing support pack allowances for those account that claimed the old one. :D
 
While i'm not totally in agreement with the suggested contents of the pack, thats purely down to the technical limitations of the game and making things have expiry times.

I'd love to see more people given the opportunity to actually participate in the game. Hiram was introduced as a way to make the game accessible for more people, but through years of power creep it has itself become bloated and unmanageable.

Theres always going to be people that will oppose something like this because they had to 'work' for their gear, and they're not exactly wrong. But they're not considering the fact that for the majority starting out the bar was significantly lower. We all had the advantage of finishing our T1 hiram before T2 was released, then ample time to finish that before T3 and so on. Even erenor players had it relatively easy when castle land allowed production of many times the number of archeum and sun/moonpoints.

As an 18k gs player i'm 100% in favor of giving people a significant boost to bring in fresh blood and get them to a position where they feel they have a chance. Sure its funny for a brief moment hitting 30k+ damage on under geared lowbies, but theres no satisfaction in it for either party and nothing quite beats down your morale than getting instagibbed by an AOE that wasnt even aimed at you.

Making the pack available to all players may also encourage people to explore other classes and diversify. Right now it is prohibitively expensive for the average player to respec from one class to another. Particularly if that involves a full armor change. Offering the pack as a one-time deal to every player would benefit a melee thats unhappy and always wanted to try mage but cant afford the time/cost commitment of a full gear switch, for example.

The most important thing would be to ensure that whatever equipment is handed out should remain bound to avoid players using new accounts to earn gold from the pack. But i think the effort is worthwhile and would really help with player retention, particularly among players that dont have 18 hours a day to sit in WHM punching the same mobs to death for scraps.
 
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We do seem to have pretty poor retention rates, and while some of that is down to a lack of consistent application of the rules and reversal of bans for the lols, the awful gear grind and lack of hand holding definitely makes up the rest.

Kudos for trying to do something about it; I'm not convinced 100% about what you suggested to be in the packs but qualified support from me.
 
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I was bored of playing healer and restarting the grind on Hiram was one of the reasons I didn't swap classes to keep playing. This pack might make people like me return to the game. I don't mind the rest of the stuff, but alleviating the grind time to not be a mediocre one-shottable crash dummie would be really nice.
 
- 1 Full set Cloaked Glorious Hiram Guardian Armor (Permanent) (Legendary)
- 5 Cloaked Glorious Hiram Guardian Weapons ((Permanent) (Legendary)
- 2 Cloaked Glorious Hiram Guardian Instrument (Permanent) (Legendary)
- 600 Sealed Divine Hiram Infusions (Expire in 60 Days Gold required – better run some packs)
- 150 Bound Hiram Serendipity Stones (Expire in 60 Days – Only usable in Hiram
lets you try for the stats you want in your mythic sets right away)
- 32 Cloaked Glorious Hiram Lunagems (Custom) (120 Day Gems become Permanent Once Socketed – Gold required. Start grinding or lose them – untradeable – Can be used in Glorious Hiram Only) (you choose the type of cloaked gems like the infusion kits).
- Cloaked Wing Support Crate (choice of Astra Wings, Custom Dye-able Astra Wings Default Color: Light Pink)
- 2 Adventurer’s Rings 2 Adventurer’s earrings (Or something better?)
- Rank 10 proven warrior necklace
- Cloaked Mount Crate (Celestial Pegasus, or Celestial Kitsu)
- 50k honor
- 50k vocation


Prefer that sweet Potato life? We can get you set up for some top Potato Vs Potato too!

- Full-kit Harvester Farmhouse (Custom Bound Cannot sell)
- Farm Freighter Scroll (a wagon is nice, but useless to new players.)
- Adventurer's Clipper Scroll (just give them the boat.)
- Merchant Schooner Design (Design. Grind your mat's scrubs.)

After a little thought and discussion i'd be more inclined towards Glorious Hiram at epic grade, and enough lunacharms to fully equip gear up to T2 charms. This ensures the gems cant be pulled and reused later, but also gives people room to earn and upgrade their gear further. Gearing is (and should be) a large portion of what AA is about, so while people should be helped forward to a competitive position as quickly as possible, helping them too far would also have a negative effect on the player experience.
 
Yea to a better pack, but distribute it to everyone. There’s plenty of people still under geared that play the game regularly. Legendary t4 is a hard no. Epic t3 would be a great start and still encourage people to either farm or do daily’s.
 
The support pack isn't getting improved. At least not for a while

It will not be getting improved to anything close to that level of strength.
 
Something that could work is a T3 Epic set, like the pack of gear they gave on Live/Legacy once Kakao took the game. This way ppl anyway will have to get piece from 0 to get the rolls they want on their sets and use these T3 epic pieces to feed em once they hit Brilliant Hiram. Is a big help not having to farm Unique > Epic from Hiram.
 
The support pack isn't getting improved. At least not for a while

It will not be getting improved to anything close to that level of strength.
No offence but why do you respond to things in such a way? Hard nos to impassioned/reasoned appeals without acknowledging any of the points?
Do you disagree with the premise that player retention is a problem? Do you disagree that giving an improved support pack would make a difference?
Do you personally get to make the decision? Has the team already thought about such issues and come up with better solutions? Is this thread done now?
I wonder how many potential longtime player (credit buyers) quit playing when they tried to support the server they care about as they watched it die and then got responses such as that.... =[[
Once again, no offense meant. Just would encourage you to be a bit more kind to the people who take the time to try to take responsibility for and/or gift their time to trying to brainstorm ways to keep this community alive. I doubt Trenthian cares whether you go with his suggestion here or not, as long as he knows that the problem is acknowledged and is actively being worked on by the team.
 
I'd love to see more people given the opportunity to actually participate in the game. Hiram was introduced as a way to make the game accessible for more people, but through years of power creep it has itself become bloated and unmanageable.

I would like to see our developers clearly define what Hiram is supposed to be on this server - is it meant to be "catch-up" gear in any way (as currently it is not), is it meant to be "bait" gear that makes new players do tedious game activities with little to show for it (until they try to switch to Erenor and/or quit due to the state of endgame), is it meant to be "alternative" to other end-game gear (Erenor, boss gear - which it's laughably inferior to), or something else entirely? It is difficult to suggest improvements when we don't know their vision.

A new player right now either gets baited into the endless Hiram grind (as you've said, we - the players who have been here at least since the introduction of Hiram - did it gradually over a few different patches, when there were multiple reset raids daily and it was still fun to participate in something that most of the server was doing) which is almost completely disconnected from the game economy, or has to immediately start participating in the game economy that's controlled by a handful of people to craft Erenor (which is terrible due to the removal of most Auroria land and other things that have been removed from the game since).

Whichever option they choose, they will start wondering why they bothered in the first place at some point in their journey, for reasons which are beyond the scope of this thread.

The only other options are to P2W for a full character or P2W for Erenor (both of which were likely created with resources gained in a much better economy and overall server state and have been hoarded since). A new player will obviously not do either unless they're specifically here for endgame PvP, and if they are, they'll quickly quit and sell it to the next noob when all the issues with it become apparent. Hopefully this is not supposed to be the intended path.
 
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I had disagree with the freighter for one. Cause if that's the case every single person who has a freighter should get reimbursed for the credits they had to spend to get the freighter. Also giving someone 12k gs from the start plus infusions is a hard pass. Sure put them at 8.5-9k so they can farm eastern Hiram. But so not invalidate the grind the current players have put in either that will make them quit at an even faster rate than you will attract new players.
 
Its very hard to motivate someone at this stage in the game and the server to gear up to BASIC pvp .then the server go potato.Unfortunatly nor everyone agrees thats the case.
 
Its very hard to motivate someone at this stage in the game and the server to gear up to BASIC pvp .then the server go potato.Unfortunatly nor everyone agrees thats the case.
This.

As i've said repeatedly over the years, us long-term players having to grind gradually over a matter of years does not compare to a new player having to start from 0 today. The gear situation now is why the vast majority of potential paying customers quit before ever getting to experience the game. for what it could be. Thats lost income, and lost potential.
 
As exemplified over and over on this server and live, its pointless to give out free hiram gear that doesn't have the proper rolls, even if you give players 5 rerolls per piece, you still typically won't get what you want so you'll have to end up making at least some explorer pieces and then just using the "support pack" as EXP to put in your correctly rolled gear.

While I am a fan of improving the support pack to an extent, the proposed contents in the original post are way too much. Should be like tier 2 divine max (with the player having the ability to choose the rolls), which will at least get you past the hump of doing sungold/exeloch/reedwind dailies probably by yourself for a week at least.

In my mind the ideal support pack would let you skip the explorer gear process, because lets be honest, it is extremely click intensive and disliked to make 100-200 pieces of shitty gear to get the rolls you want. I would be a fan of a serendipity stone that only works on tier 1 or tier 2 of hiram which consumes a comparable amount of labor to explorer gear.
 
Should be like tier 2 divine max (with the player having the ability to choose the rolls), which will at least get you past the hump of doing sungold/exeloch/reedwind dailies probably by yourself for a week at least.
That's 2 weeks of doing the bare minimum (WHM/EHM/castle, and DS/Reed/Exe/SGF). Then the new players are right back into a grind comparable to Live and they quit or go potato. People came here to get away from standard 1x gameplay and what you suggested essentially turns 26 weeks of work into 24 weeks of work. All T2 divine would give them is the ability to skip a couple weeks' worth of grinding...it's literally a job at that point and it's still 6 months until they're in a competitive spot.
 
That's 2 weeks of doing the bare minimum (WHM/EHM/castle, and DS/Reed/Exe/SGF). Then the new players are right back into a grind comparable to Live and they quit or go potato. People came here to get away from standard 1x gameplay and what you suggested essentially turns 26 weeks of work into 24 weeks of work. All T2 divine would give them is the ability to skip a couple weeks' worth of grinding...it's literally a job at that point and it's still 6 months until they're in a competitive spot.
Its far better than anyone else received. Beggars can't be choosers. There are plenty of mechanisms besides the support pack in the game already to make progression here light years faster than live or any other archeage server.
 
Its far better than anyone else received. Beggars can't be choosers. There are plenty of mechanisms besides the support pack in the game already to make progression here light years faster than live or any other archeage server.
Like what? 40 labor per tick? New players coming to here don't have boosted Larceny so they're getting trash for opening coinpurses, so the gold they MIGHT be making is going to immediately vanish putting infusions into their gear from the get-go. Aside from the labor increase, the grind for Hiram is still retail-like as far as I can see. If I didn't have a friend who fed me a hefty amount of gold at the start of my Hiram grind, I would've quit because it was exactly as I remembered on other servers: dailies, run out of gold, run out of labor opening coinpurses to infuse, log out until the next day. New players who played Live in any form don't want to come here and play Live 2.0, but with more labor per tick. When playing on private servers with boosted rates, you're still bound to the lower rate. If a server has 10x gold drops, 10x resource gains, but 1x XP rate, then you are still improving at a 1x rate if there's no way to speed up the XP. Same as if the server is 1x gold rate, 10x resource gains, 10x XP rate. You'll be max level but your gold gains are still 1x and so that's your limiter. The grind is still comparable to Live, players who left Live don't want to come here and be subjected to Live's experiences in any fashion, saving them 2 weeks on a 6+ month grind is negligible.
 
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