I wanted to create a thread on this, because I've been a bit concerned.

I came back to Lusternia out of mostly retirement in the fall of 2010, around the time of the Anniversary. I was impressed with all the changes particularly the new cities and the new people around. My favorite event was the big Gnafia event. During that event climax, I believe I saw close to 170 people, and if you count people with cloaking gems it was perhaps over 200 people.

Something however, seemed to happen this particular year. I don't know what but if I had to take a guess, more people are leaving Lusternia than are logging in. I thought at first it might just be my imagination, but I've seen the following factors.

• Mudstats, which is perhaps the most objective ranking system--they actually polls the servers with a special protocol, shows a big boom in 2010 and then a decline. For more details, see here: http://mudstats.com/Game/Lusternia.aspx
  
• Our ranking on TopMudStats has dropped--we used to be higher up there, After Achaea for all the IRE games, but we are being beaten by at least one game and we are averaging around 14. Granted, IRE is in part to blame for this with the DIGG campaign taking priority, but it shows voting is down.
  
• Forum Traffic is Really down, as opposed to last year. People say it's the rise of the social media sites, but I can't really think it's solely because of that. Long time players like Shiri (who I think is the last of the player forum mods), for instance, have almost completely disappeared.
  
• I've noticed an usually amount of retirement from players--this to me was most notable in Hallifax, as several names disappeared, both here and on the forums. But it seemed kind of unusal, especially since Hallifax is one of the most solid orgs regarding RP and enthusiasm.
  

I'm just curious what happened? What made 2011 different from 2010? I haven't seen any significant change here that would cause a negative reaction. Is it just a bad economy? A lot of players graduation High School or College? Is there some new game that's taking up people's time? People suddenly jumping to another IRE MUD? Did the events not please people this year? I'm just curious about it because it seems things have gotten better--people got the lost cities they've been wanting since the game opened, for instance. Or is it just bad luck?

I'm interesting especially in hearing from people who've been away but might still be reading the forums. I'm curious if there's anything the administration, IRE, or the playerbase can do to improve things. Someone opened a thread about why the novices don't return, but I'm more curious at what might be pushing away right now.

My first guess would be people have just got annoyed with some of the changes the admins are doing (or not doing). It has long been said some of the great ideas of the game are good in theory but have been poorly executed out. Another thing is the old login days promotions I know some hate just because people are logining for that sole reason - but that aside, there is also the fact that most events are for the high level people mostly (at least the major ones anyways) so you have true newbies (which I even go and say that most of the people that come out of the portal are just alts. ) who already have this learning curve but now having this major event that they are told they should focus on the learning quests rather than helping in said event.

I wonder if the populations getting stretched so thinly across all the extra orgs without many additional players is causing burn-out in some of the orgs faster than when there were bigger populations.

And additionally how many new players that join one of the guilds without many players decide to leave because they can never find a guildy. Granted, collegiums were supposed to remedy that, but it is a complaint I hear sometimes about the shofangi for instance.

Edit: Xenthos quoted me when I added in the second paragraph, too fast!

Turnus:

I wonder if the populations getting stretched so thinly across all the extra orgs without many additional players is causing burn-out in some of the orgs faster than when there were bigger populations.

That theory's been floated around for a while now; even before the new cities opened, the new guilds caused that feeling.

Agree with the above reasons given.

Also, Lusternia is way more credit-heavy than the other IRE games. The average person right now has a worse economic situation than years back. Granted, that started several years before 2010 but the effects of this are long-term as savings buffers and what not can take the initial shock.

Play to play rather than pay to play is worse of an option than ever, and that during time of crisis. Similar situation in EVE Online. And while that game also ironically made some poor decisions around the time that IRE did, well, similar developments are seen. Play to play there is seeing severe spikes in PLEX, the ingame item that you can buy and turn in for your subscription. While Lusternia is not a sub based game, you currently are almost forced to spend cash or play smart or no credits for you. And while older players -can- get around that, it are our newbies that suffer and you need those for when the old guard burns out and retires.

New orgs spreading people thin is not the main reason why the game population dropped from 2010-2011. Hell, if anything the new guilds and recent game changes (2012) brought more people over from other IRE games and also brought back some players who retired (Like me, I came back from Achaea) in addition to that.

And yeah... we're pretty credit heavy. >_> It's kinda daunting at first. Especially when considering how many arties you need to become competitive (depending on archetype).

Also, the skewedness of credit rewards. Contests hand out big chunks, and it seems like the same people winning them. Not that I don't think they should win because they put in lots of time and effort, but well, danger of discouraging new / casual players and those who play outside of peak timezones.

Combat has always been the heart of Lusternia, but it was never all of Lusternia, and it was always about something. We sold meaning way too cheap without realizing what we were giving away. When was the last time your fight was about something? When was the last time it mattered who won, other than domoths and villages, to the extent they actually matter? When Lusternia lost the people who cared about the stuff it used to have and gave away for so little, it must have hoped it would attract more of the people who like what it still has. But it seems that those people just keep moving around from role to role, but few new ones ever join.

But is that a bad thing? If they're enjoying themselves, and if skill/guild/orghopping provides a sustainable business model, then Lusternia's just fine even with a smaller population and very little new blood.

That said, I really think that there was some incredible stuff that got short-sold at a fraction of its value, and it was just the kind of stuff where it would take years to realize it was a mistake to sell it so cheap, and that's where we are now.

tl;dr: While combat isn't everything, having perpetually frustrated combatants doesn't make everyone else happy campers either. Also, I agree with Lendren that fighting has totally lost its meaning, there isn't any actual point to doing any sort of struggle anymore.

@Calixa IMO, they fixed a LOT of that particular problem by introducing tiers to the great hunt-type events. That makes things way way easier (like, it enables them to do it, period) for newbies to participate in big events.

I agree with the burn-out thing, I also think a lot of people have gotten burned out on combat, hoping that it will improve and getting disappointed when it doesn't. If you notice, raiding has come to a near-total halt across the game. The combat atmosphere has become completely toxic and boring. Zerg combat that consists of spamming damage/hindering attacks during massive walls of text that lag the heck out of everyone gets boring really fast. As a result, you never do real combat outside of recurring events like domoths or villages (though why bother fighting in a village, if it comes to blows the village is over, it takes more time to def then it takes to recapture a village). There is no such thing as small group combat anymore, no one wants to fight until they are sure to win.

A huge draw of Lusternia and all IREs are the polished, complex, and constantly updated combat system. Lusternia's system of balancing rules out some of the completely unique skillsets (and a huge number of flavor skills, tbh) of the IREs in exchange for more fluid and easy skill balancing, but the more unique combat mechanic skills in those sets still present a huge draw to the average MUD-goer (from what I can tell). This means that many, if not most, players want to participate in combat at some level. It's part of what makes the game a game, struggling and conflict with other players! Debate is a really gimpy way to do this, and most other methods of 'conflict questing' involve being more of an annoying git then anything else. Not to mention that the majority of those are greatly helped by being combat-ready :P. When the combat players get frustrated or bitter, it tends to trickle down to the non-comms also, as the elder members of your order/guild/nation/family/pack/hive/whatever are somewhat liekly to be in a bad mood after combat, or be bored at the sudden lack of conflict. I know that when I log on, the only semi-enjoyable fights I anticipate partaking in are wargames. Is this a symptom of being frustrated with druids?

As to the credit costs of things. Yes, I do feel that for some archetypes, credit costs in Lusternia are really high. I also feel that if combat were less zergy, there would be a bit less need for super high skills. While I do think that Avechna is a nice system for stopping harassment or hunting people into the ground, the system and the general combat atmosphere wipe out any sort of low or middle tier combat/conflict. There is no such thing as a fair fight on prime, it's only ever one guy against an entire nation, or a handful really really high tier combatants against several other really high tier combatants, for a few minutes. Combine that with absolutely no reason to raid prime territories (except for forests, who are less well defendable. I facepalm every time I think of this.), and you've got the only conflict left is a few people being.. enormous gits again. Why raid Ethereal Serenwilde/Glomdoring when you can harass people in Catacombs or Faethorn for no reason (enormous gits)? Why raid Elemental (I'll just leave it at that). Why bother attacking Cosmic planes? Either they are uber-fortresses, or stomping grounds. In either case, no one will actually engage the other party. It's not as if raiding parties can do any harm. At least Nil and Celestia do cause the raided party to lose very small amounts of power when their mobs are killed, not so for the two new cosmic planes, who have stronger ents anyways. I don't really want one org to be able to consistently stomp another into the ground and grind them to dust, but currently none of the conflict quests have any meaning beyond minor convenience. Not to mention many of them just don't work well, from a player standpoint (Evidence: Special Report).

I love the heck out of Lusternia, it's my favorite of the IRE games, hands down. I'm really hoping that there isn't some sort of 'natural' decay going on here that cannot be checked, and that with fixes to combat and conflict problems things will get better. I know that a lot of these things trouble admins also and are probably being worked on, but it sometimes seems like it's us vs. you.

Regarding the drop in Forum Traffick, I'd like to theorize it was due to the removal of the Rants board. The Facebook groups are really only so active compared to the forums because people can rant their little hearts out there, heh.

As for the bit about needing to buy lots of credits - I have never bought credits OOC. But now I've reached Transcendent in 12 skills (even after guildhopping a number of times, before skillflexing was available, too!). I have just 1 combative artifact to my name (Rune of Gripping), but I like to think I'm a bit competitive, too. Granted, the average price of credits when I was learning most of my skills was 8k, but the point is, you don't really need to be super-credit-rich or have lots and lots of stuff to begin enjoying the game.

About the raiding bit Enyalida was talking about:

I feel like there's no point to raiding now, really. Back during the hai'Gloh Zemordia / Xion Initiative era, raiding at least had some significance: OMG the fae/Raziela is threatened, ohsnap Nifilhema wants a new harem!!!!!. Now, though...

Sure, we get threats like the Gnafia, or the Forsaken/Zenos, but those are more of The World Vs. Them. Personally, I enjoyed it when conflict between player organizations was pushed around. Yes, we're aware of the possible outcry of 'omg, forcing arghpee, I hate you admins' scenario, but really, we've gone a really long time with these same alliances (with the outstanding exception of Hallifax/Gaudiguch, and even that, I feel, was because both were just starting out and finding their own feet).

I don't think that mixing up alliances will help, really. We're essentially always going to settle back into a 3v3 format, or perhaps some sort of weird 2v2v2 that probably wouldn't work out as well. At this point, we are essentially shooshing people who bitch about Magnagora, they've been really great allies of ours for such a long time there isn't really any reason to. Throwing up a "YOU MUST FIGHT AMONGST YOURSELVES" is likely to just piss off players. I've sometimes considering moving to break away from some faction or another to mix things up, but there isn't any guarantee that it'd work out well, and no faction can really stand on their own. We've got a somewhat large but very quiet contingent of players who want Serenwilde to be totally isolationist/separatist. Too bad we'd promptly be stomped by the 5 other factions to varying degrees.

I'm going to reiterate my long-held view that group combat in Lusternia needs a bit of an overhaul.

The simplest (and this is a relative term) way of making group combat more fun is to discourage the "divide and conquer" paradigm that dominates large groups. Smaller groups (wargame sized) allow for more tactical and interesting combat, and I beleive that this sort of combat should be promoted. How to do this? I recommend implementing a system in which a player being targeted by multiple foes (more than two) gains progressive resistance to vitals damage and a progressive shruggign rate on afflictions (with afflictions costing power having much reduced shrugging). This damage resistance and aff shrugging would start if you have been targeted by three different people in the last 10 seconds, and would quadratically increase so that by the time six people are targetting you, they are seriously inhibiting each other, and by the time ten target you, they have all but made themselves ineffective. A change in this vein would eliminate the bunker based group combat that I find makes raids so boring, and would instead make large confrontations based on multiple small combats.

Second, I feel that the cost of entry in Lusternia is too high, and worse, obviously too high. I feel that the fairly outrageous amount fo credits required just to have sufficent skills to enter combat scares of a great many players. I would highly recommend doubling or even tripling or quadrupling the number of lessons gained through level up; enough to actually become seriously competant in your guild skills if nothing else. I'm not really going to complain about artifacts, most archetypes can get by with fairly minimal artifacts; I've seen mid-tier combatants of every archetype with rather few artifacts.

Actually, I would rather like to see alliances be stirred up on occassion. I feel that allowing alliances to stagnate too long, especially when one side can control, say, the vast majority of the aetherbubbles, leads to a lot of resentment from the losing side and boredom on the winning side. I feel Lusterna's narrative would also be more interesting with fewer "save the world" type events and more politically motivated events from the orgs themselves.

Glomdoring has been the 'top org' for at most three years. Pretty sure not four. Glomdoring started rising between Viynain's and Fillin's Ascension. (Viy -> Fillin -> Akyaevin -> now)

/nitpick

Hmm, okay, I can't fault that reasoning. It feels longer though, and I seem to remember Lendren said it was "half the game's duration" at some point on the forums and I'm pretty sure this is our 8th year (as in, we've been around for 7.) So that's my reasoning. But I probably just misremembered Lendren's post. (either Lendren or Xenthos will be annoyed at me for something I posted, I can almost guarantee it :()

We've gone through Ayridion - Ilyarin - Shuyin - Viynain - Fillin - Akyaevin - (now), if that helps!

I suppose I'll be the minority voice in the mix and say I've little to no interest in combat what-so-ever, further voicing the somewhat objectionable (?) opinion that focusing solely upon 'fix group combat' and 'many combat meaningful again' at the expense of maybe 'give non-coms more robust options' mechanically and 'if you feel things are meaningless, then -give- them an RP rationale and make them meaningful.'

I joined Lusternia -because- there were options external to combat (particularly PvP) available to work through the game. And moreso because the game-world offered seemed interesting from a RP level. And I think in the least, if you're saying 'combat is meaningless' or 'the alliances should change' then there is plenty of ground to actually get on with that in an RP-centric way. RP-enforced isn't just a lovely frosting across your combat cake... you're playing a character, running cities, backstabbing political dissidents, writing cheesy tabloids, et cetera.

Now, do I say people being annoyed with combat isn't a problem. No. I've no mind for combat, so if the people who know what they're talking about say its a problem then it probably is. I just think considering combat as Lusternia's biggest selling point (and by extension its biggest problem) is a problem in and of itself. If combat is the only consideration, then this game begins to look like all the other IRE games (and a lot of other MUDS) and... I'd really not have been too interested.

Incidentally, I agree with Shiri's observation about University/College age people. As I've recently graduated myself and once employed will have less arbitrarily free time than I did over the past 4-6 yrs.

I am pretty sure it's because many older people have graduated from University and so have much less free time.

If you have to blame something, blame whatever is the cause for IRE games (Lusternia in particular) to be less of a draw for new players than anything else.

I firmly believe that many people who have posted are looking at the wrong end (old player retention) compared to the actual issue (new player getting).

Halli/Gaudi came out Winter 2010 right? There was evidently a huge boom in players from Fall 09 to Winter 10, which fed into the next half year. That's to be expected, but I think the drop off since Fall 10 could also partly be contributed to the extra orgs; it takes time for people to realise that there aren't actually as many people playing in their orgs as before.

And sure, it is harder than ever to get into the game as a novice. Lusternia has, over time, become more and more complex and we've discussed this point in multiple threads. Unfortunately, that's not really a player issue, as there is only so much we can do.