It's not the player slot change. It's the lack of updates. When oldfags see their game updating, they check it out. For a while, we had like 1-2 updates per week. Now we're back to the 2000s-style "massive update" format.
idk, if there were updates every day it wouldn't change, people would still stick around for the same amount of time. The random updates just spark people's interest, but the game is still pretty much the same.
We had a full giant server. After the change, people playing those 5v5s on secondary servers got fed up about playing a shitty game when the other guys are enjoying themselves. It didnt take 2 weeks for the playerbase to become arid again.
If that's true, then the total population should tend to go to the size of one server. If there are more than one servers-worth of players (but less than two), then peopl get "fed up about playing a shitty game" as you said. If it's less than one server, then everyone should go, "erma gerd, extra spots 4 fun!" and fill it up. But it didn't do that. Something else fucked it up.
Yeah, Spartacus is right here. I'm not sure what it is, but it's not the reduced maxplayers and that's for sure.
I kinda think zioom has a point. I think people liked the epic larger servers, and despite it being logical, it hasn't worked. I supported it, but I think I was wrong. But there's also something wrong with the game itself. I'm still going to say this because I still think it's true. I still don't know what it is, and I'm hoping someone will randomly come up with the idea or solution.
One of the problems is that the game is not intuitive, I guess we've established this. Get a random new player to learn Empires for 30 mins without any aid except for the game itself, you'd see why.
You'd think it works that way but it doesn't. There are people who just don't like playing with other people, it's evident because back in the day when we had high player servers, with open slots, you'd still see servers with like 10 people on them playing some shitty rounds.
Yeah, but it's always been unintuitive. I'm talking about why games end so quickly and why they often lack for fun. It's not as addictive as it used to be, and yet a lot of the elements in the game have been improved. I feel like something was lost in that improvement. I hesitate to mention that the biggest change has been research becoming free, but perhaps there was an extra layer there of metagame that hasn't been replaced and maybe should be looked into..? Resources used to be a bit more far reaching and have a lot more consequences for the team. Wages mitigated the "waiting for a tank" or "some douche just used up all our res and died" problems, but maybe research being free moved the game in another direction. Resources are just for tanks and buildings now, but no one thinks about its need for buildings except the comm now, which is probably good. Still, that might mean that the main reason to get territory and hold it, or sneakily get a resource node is less important than killing clusters of enemies. If that was the case, what would it do to the game? I'm just throwing this out there, but it might just be that an unforeseen consequence of this change might be undermining the rest of the game. There are so many unforeseen consequences of changes in Empires, and as each gameplay element gets a little cleaner, the complex layers that make up the objectives pulling players become clearer, but we might miss if a layer is missing in the mix.
Whatever do you mean? When we had the giant server, we had more than its worth of players, but after a short while, it stabilised around that 64-63-whatever the fuck the value was. You've got it reduced to 40+, same stuff, got some secondary action that died out and you got one full server a weekend again. Sure, some of those ~20 guys just didnt like the game/came back for a short while/other reasons, but the correlation is just too high for me to interpret it as anything else. If you want to find another reason for why people went as fast as they came, two things come to mind 1) people are still acting like cunts, exploiting and making the games maximally fun for themselves, no thinking about others 2)because how many fucking times can you play money or any of the gimmicky shit in a row.
