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Mindurz
Member UncommonPosts: 37
So im really leaning towards trying this out but i just wanted to know how is the pop. looking?
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population is pretty low at the moment.
If everyone subbed played it would be pretty high.
In the next week or two there will be a huge patch.
If it is good people will come out of the woodworks in droves.
oh okay nice .....are you playing right now?
I am playing right now. Overall population has declined, and by a large number.
I'm amongst the players that still enjoy the game very much but I can also understand the people that have left. The game is in a critical situation, not enough combat for the combat oriented players, too few people for the social oriented players, too easy crafting and building for the crafting minded people.
The game's still good for exploration and role-play but exploration will also reveal how much the population has declined since "launch".
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
oh okay...did they say anything bout a update or patch to address some of the issues soon?
I honestly dont know why people think the population has declined.
It hasn't.
The only difference that has changed since release is the fact that Global (world) chat has gone, so its a little harder to communicate with every single player game wide, this might make it seem like there is not many people online.
And May I add, this removal of the World Chat, was highly requested from the community.
The game is in a critical moment in its development, but I know for sure that given the devs past, they are working furiously to get issues fixed and resolved.
There is an event tonight laid on by the Guides, which will encourage players banding together to kill animals, and encourage those who want to PvP to do so.
This is rumoured to bring alot of players to that area, and give the players something to work towards at the moment.
But at the moment the game is fine the way it is. Sure everyone would love more features, but from a team of about 3 devs I think we can all understand that changes might take time.
You could then go onto say, 'well pay for more devs!' however this costs money and from an indie dev that might rely on sales/subs to pay for more devs, then i think its in our own best interests to hype this game up as much as possible.
Just my 2 cents.
I agree with Saintbob, the population is good. The players who have left are the PvP oriented ones who are frustrated by safe zones and the combat problems. I play every day and there are always players in my hearing range, and new players appear and settle down time by time.
You've said that several times so I was wondering if you could share your source for that information on which players left the game. If you went by the posts on this forum, many people that left are quite the opposite - crafters who ran out of stuff to do because either everything was already made or they hit the end of what they can really do (build walls and tents ad nauseum).
Now, I normally wouldn't use these forums as a reliable example of anything MMO, but in the case of Xsyon, the game very much matches in feature list and description what many in this forum were are looking for in an MMO.
And speaking of the feature list, it's interesting you keep bringing up the PVPers as the site never mentions the game even has PVP so it's odd there would be this large group gravitating to it for that and then leaving because it didn't meet their expectations - no PVP feature was ever really stated or implied on their site.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Then our experience is a very different one, where we settle (zone 777) the large majority of the neighbours don't log in anymore, there settlements are empty.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
I went by the posts of the official forums and personal experience. And while I agree with you that the feature list doesn't even mention PvP that didn't keep some players back to advertise the game on Darkfall and MO forums. Thats why there was a huge influx of PvP players who came with the impression that Xsyon was a Darkfall-type game. These players are indeed frustrated and angry, just check the complains about safe zones on the official forums. These players were expecting a game with politics and territory control and they are the ones who find the game boring without these features.
The crafter population have a lot more to do, since they are not orientated so much on combat which is clearly broken right now. If they finally implement item decay then crafting will get its purpose.
Edit: I checked the OP of the thread you mentioned, this is from the OP: Only proper pvp mechanisms and rewarding could help tribe life be interesting with Tribe Wars.
Now that sounds to me like a PvP and warfare oriented player. He mentions Tribal wars though he should know that it was promised after Prelude. So yes, even the thread you linked proves that its mainly the PvPers who find Xsyon boring. I'm sure there are crafters as well, but much less.
I am still playing and having fun.
In reply to Sainbob I have a tribe of 33 members and only about 6 log on regularly.
So there is a good amount of players not playing; we are not a PVP tribe at all.
But I do think that the game is still healthy and can easily bounce back once a few things are adressed.
To answer the person who asked http://www.xsyon.com/forum/showthread.php/1440-Xsyon-Updates
Is a link to the post that said that a patch is coming (April 5th it was updated).
As to what exactly will be in the patch noone cept the devs can say; though I guide informed me that it will contain both fixes and new content.
My guess, and this is just a guess, is that animal AI will be adressed in this patch and crashes/lag from moving across zone borders will be adressed.
Anything else I can just speculate on; like combat/PVP revamp, which they said they had a guy working on, but I doubt they would have it finished this quickly.
Truthfully if you look at this next few weeks/month as just a time to learn the game, it has a rather steep learning curve, and start getting yourself on track and a head start on crafting you will not be disapointed. If you expect a full featured AAA game with no bugs then you are deluding youself; this is an indie developer. But I do have faith in them over all other devs I have seen in the past in other games; they seem to at least work hard and have a decent vision.
What learning curve? Please share what took you more than a couple minutes to figure out - heres mine:
Chalk is a resource that spawns rarely in dry limestone patches in the mountains
That was a cool one to figure out when one of my tribemates logged off with the only starter chalk our tribe had, never to log on again. A somewhat interesting mechanic since no one in our area had spare chalk to trade for since we weren't near mountains. Can't trade for it... can't kill for it... Unfortunately, this interesting mechanic got completely trashed by the fact that NOTHING DECAYS, so I went to the mountains and filled my bags with chalk. Problem solved for the next 6 months.
They might work hard (maybe, if we are to trust what he says, which doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to do given the past year), but they definitely don't work smart. They made some minor progress around last winter when they added tribes, but they've actually REGRESSED since then. Virtually nothing has been added to the game in the past year that didn't get pulled out before launch. This lack of progress was blamed on network problems... which were still a major problem at launch.
And a decent vision... that's just too funny. His 'vision' for combat was to implement a mount & blade style combat system, after 5 people posted in a thread requesting one. His 'vision' was to have the feature page (except the 'evolution' section) implemented for prelude. They made promise after promise that the game would only release when it was ready, and that it would be ready when those features were in. His 'vision' of tribe placement and purpose is a joke and changed drastically days before launch when people started vocalizing the massive problems with the existing system. I could go on and on about this topic, which is absolutely hilarious considering he has the most control over his game and the 'vision' than any team before him since he is basically the only developer and has no other stakeholders...
I for one like the idea that the sky is the limit in this game. Im not picking it up for pvp so much (but would be a good aspect if fixed). It seems what need implemented is a way that players more or less have to pick a niche instead of the fact everyone can master everything.Thus making room for a economy and a reason to invited certain tribesmen and of course encourage player interaction
By learning curve I meants things like: open the resource tab and stand in a river to drink, or the coordinates system, or how to get food (as it isn't always evident what foragables are edible and how to eat them- right click).
Little things like that can confuse a new player fow minutes to hours depending
Otherwise I can see why your post got hidden Mirokata; if you don't like the devs vision then this isn't the game for you other people like it and enjoy playing.
These things consitute a steep learning curve to you? Christ. I would agree that the UI is unimaginibly poorly constructed, though.
I don't think Mirokata doesn't like the vision, only it was a 'vision' and it stopped at that.
There is no sign of mount & blade combat, the idea of collision detection, the mechanics involved in M & B, is a farfetch from what the game has now, and everything else that is promised is... well, again, as Miro said: not there...
Given that it is a indie company, I personally think the game isn't off to such a bad start, and as usual it's the 'potential' syndrome where people just expect it to get better over the course of time... But who knows, it migt be too late.
This is an accurate clarification. Yes, I actually LOVED the original 'vision', aka the original features page. Unfortunately this world does not operate on what we can dream, but what we can create. Even most of the features that are implemented clearly do not meet the vision and intent of his original features page.
He very well might wrap up his year long war on playability issues and start quickly putting in well thought out features -- I highly doubt it though, and the history doubts it too.
Its not just that the game is boring now, though. I wouldn't be posting this if that was the case. The game is in a state that would require a wipe or massive changes to the resource system to reintroduce a feeling of worth to items. Decay isn't enough, since there is already a huge amount of existing items. There are a handful of aspects with this issue: safe zones, skill-ups, macroing, container permissions, etc.
I am not a PvP player and I have cancelled my sub. Just not enough to do in the old Xsyon sandbox to really make me want to log back in. I still wish the team the best of luck and I really do hope they can keep improving the game so Xsyon can reach its true potential. I for one will keep an eye on it and check back in a month or so.
And just a quick thank you rto Saintbob. Excellent set of guides made the learning curve a lot less steep...
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
We've noticed a big drop off of logins by regulars in our area over the last week. I did notice the other day when I was out wandering during US work hours that there are both active and deserted zones. Swam around the lake and in about an hour's time saw around 50 different people in general chat (late morning early afternoon US time).
In our area the main reasons folks aren't logging in appears to be #1 Tribe collapse/politics and #2 Terraforming complete. All that said we've also seen a ton of new settlements though none of the new settlements appear to have folks who play when we mainly play. We've also had quite a few come through looking to settle because the zones around us still have trees.
The zone lag can be really bad at times and at other times you hardly notice it (we live in a corner and cross into 4 zones regularly - 1 border being inside our homestead). It doesn't appear to matter how often or how recently you've been to the zone sometimes it's just really bad. There is supposed to be an update soon that fixes this.
My best suggestion to anyone wanting to play who hasn't already is to wait for the rest of the animals to be released. I expect that's what a lot of current players are waiting for. Can't release the animals until the lag issues are fixed, can't release new content such as Animal Taming until the animals are released...etc. New combat system can't be worked on until the new combat guy is done with the new animal ai...etc. It's a small team and lag/performance issues are the toughest to fix, hopefully an update comes soon.