Best Posts in Thread: Incentivizing New Players

As the server seeks to expand its playerbase with advertisement campaigns, there's some things that we must keep in mind. Is this server fun for new players? Will they understand enough to play properly? Are they going to want to stay? With the server the way that it currently is, I'm concerned what the answers to these questions are going to be. By no means do I expect the server to be perfect in the beginning. Still, there are definitely improvements that can be made. The main two problems with the server that I've found are how to make money, and how to use all the features present in towny. New players are not going to want to learn the hundreds of niche details of how our server functions when they can easily just play on an easier server.

The way I see players learning how to play the server is only by being shown by another player. The server is much too complex to learn from just tutorials, no matter how good the tutorials are. Players will only read or watch so much before they think "I'll just find a simpler server." The difficulty in having players teach others is encouraging players to be teachers. Having a system where players are given rewards for teaching other players won't work. There's no way of telling if a player was actually taught other than having someone manually check on and test every player, which is boring and a waste of staff time. I believe that having players want the newer players they teach to actually play on the server is the only method, and the easiest way of doing that is through friendship.

A great way to have players make friends with current players is through minigames. Towny is confusing, but minigames are not. Almost any player can pick up and understand a well-made minigame within minutes. If we have enough minigames to incentivize a new player to play them for a while, they will inevitably bond with and make friends with other players. These other players may then want the new player to play towny with them as well. They will naturally help the new players understand what to do in order to play towny. This will likely result in a new active player. For this to happen, we need minigames that incentivize both old and new players. Simply having 4-6 fully fleshed out minigames will incentivize new players. For old players, maybe items or buffs can be gained exclusively from minigames such as custom enchantments, haste potions, etc..

One more problem with the current state of the server is making money. The rate in which players can make money with skills slows, and within just a few days it is an absolute grind. There are other ways to make money, but they are all not intuitive to new players. So, making money needs to become easier to understand. I think back in how to make money in 2013, when the server was most popular. You could get a bunch of materials from playing the server and then sell it all at the admin shop. This system was great, it works like the real world where physical materials can be sold for cash. Jobs and skills are not intuitive like this because they both track actions of the player and then subtly give cash for it. Plus, admin shops gave a huge dopamine rush after a long session of gathering materials. There was no better feeling on the server than spending hours mining, and in one click you see the message "120,000 meebles was added to your account." Jobs and skills don't give that incentive.

The main problem with an admin shop is that it caused inflation in the past. However in the past, there were almost no money sinks. The server almost only generated money, and rarely took money away. Now, we have rankups and perk buying (and hopefully an eff7 tool rental if my other suggestions go through). These provide more than enough money sinks. With ~20 perks costing 150k to have for 3 days, a player will need to spend 1,000,000 meebles a day to have all perks. The money gained from an admin shop wont simply be stored up for the player to have a big number to look at in /bal, it will be used in the various money sinks there are.

In conclusion, two main additions should be added to the server: More minigames, and admin shop. The minigames will have players stay long enough to make friends, and admin shop can make it easier for new players to understand towny. Of course, there are many other features that players have access to. But for the new player, simply being able to join a town and make some money to build on their plots and save up for their dreams of owning a town themselves someday will be a good start.