Posts: 295
Threads: 37
Joined: May 2018
Reputation:
8
(10-06-2020, 05:01 PM)Haxus Wrote: Free to play, hoping for sufficient donations on Patreon, isn't a sustainable business model. The amount was encouraging but 20% of that was being paid by one player. Thank you Jakbruce2012.
I checkmated myself by setting up a Patreon account. I did not consider what would happen when I went to Steam. The old pay-to-play system via PayPal would have been more harmonious with Steam. Then I could have kept both systems of payments. Now I will likely use Steam exclusively, for purchases and distribution.
Also, I was painfully reminded of one huge problem with free to play. It allowed griefers to drive players away without consequence. One of the most demoralizing aspects of developing a game like this is the spiteful people who willfully try to destroy what you have built, even making it their personal mission in life.
The one-time $25 fee was kind of a trial balloon to see what people thought of the idea. Many of you expressed what I have always felt, that the continuous nature of game play called for a continuous system of payments. The one-time-fee idea might be abandoned. A monthly fee makes more sense.
However, if the monthly fee is $10 but most people play for less than three months, a $25 fee might be a better choice. Or maybe a $20 download fee then a $5 per month maintenance fee.
I have been working toward a Steam release for a long time. If not for that goal, I probably would have abandoned the project some time ago. That goal has kept me going. I was ready to quit at the end of last year but I couldn't do it without having at least tried Steam.
I know I'm going to take it in the face on Steam. It's the way I have gone through life. I don't ask permission to do anything. I do what I want to do. An old friend used to say, "The school of hard knocks has a high tuition." Was that a warning?
A change is needed. My flight instructor taught me: when things aren't going the way you want, make a change. Then wait to see the result. That rule has saved my life, literally. If you want to find out if the reaper is waiting to cash in your chips, take flying lessons; you'll give him the opportunity.
So this move to Steam represents a change, hopefully for the better. I expect turbulence. I just hope Shores of Hazeron survives the initial onslaught. If player numbers look encouraging, I can add servers. The architecture is highly scalable. It just takes more computers.
Steam is a great platform. It supports Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). Their method of updates is really slick and efficient, both from the developer side and the app store side. More people will try Shores of Hazeron just because of the visibility and their trust in downloading software from Steam. It's a big leap for people to download a program off the Internet and run it; some would call it suicidal.
The poll is showing a preference to restart the database, currently 13 to 9. It is easier to keep the universe database than to restart it.
There is possibly a technical reason to force a restart. I was toying with the idea of restructuring the universe so the pvp and pve dimensions each have 10 galaxies. It was encouraging to see similar comments from players. It's a lot of space for both dimensions and then it doesn't give the impression that the pve dimension is somehow less than the pvp dimension.
Shores of Hazeron has certainly accounted for more than 20% of my entertainment over the last several years. I can only hope that the project survives the move to steam. It's a big step.
PVP in both attack and defense leaves much to be desired. It is much too easy to wipe out an entire system without much resistance, leading to those who do not have the time and resources to defend quite frustrated. Likewise there is little reward for taking over a system that does not have high quality resources, currently the only reason for this is to reduce a competitor's world count. Perhaps some kind of timer system, similar to the asteroid timer, is necessary before civilian buildings can be captured or destroyed after all military targets are destroyed.
Some kind of mechanic is necessary to allow a defender some time to assemble and respond to attack. After such time, if they cannot defend, then they would have the chance to fly away and rebuild elsewhere, but they would not have been wiped out overnight without any warning.
Posts: 80
Threads: 13
Joined: May 2018
Reputation:
9
The whole hunting dean absolutely cannot be used to justify the move to pay to play, as the whole hunting dean gameplay mechanic happened WHILE the game was pay to play. This concern must stem from something else.
Posts: 131
Threads: 37
Joined: Jan 2019
Reputation:
12
10-06-2020, 05:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-06-2020, 05:56 PM by Vooker525.)
Haxus, patreon is floating but steady income, based on "word of mouth" and people who like and those who will like the game in future. With steam you will get some money at launch, bunch of good, bad and joke reviews and thats it. Nothing more. It will be dead. Sci-fi fan base is small compared to shooter fan base. New players will quickly run out.
Anyway, im tired of watching things that get good being stomped just for lols. With such approach i wont buy game from steam in near future
TLDR - Stop it.
Report or Exploit
Posts: 435
Threads: 42
Joined: May 2018
Reputation:
14
(10-06-2020, 05:01 PM)Haxus Wrote: Also, I was painfully reminded of one huge problem with free to play. It allowed griefers to drive players away without consequence. One of the most demoralizing aspects of developing a game like this is the spiteful people who willfully try to destroy what you have built, even making it their personal mission in life.
Just so you know, this also happened during the pay-to-play "subscription" period last Universe (5). Mortius, the leader of Weltreich, not only took it upon to himself to grief Dean, but multiple times intentionally crushed new players to force them to quit when he disagreed with your decisions. If somebody wants to grief and ruin other people's fun, they can and do dish out hundreds, sometimes thousands if needed to achieve this. Many other games and MMOs have proven this, so you can't use this as a reason to move away from f2p
What even
Posts: 402
Threads: 13
Joined: Jun 2018
Reputation:
12
Abandoning Patreon seems like a wrong move to me. Aside from having an alternative for players, who wish to express their gratitude in monetary form, I know people who don't trust Steam, and they have reasons not to.
Posts: 10
Threads: 0
Joined: Nov 2019
Reputation:
8
My concern for steam...
Steam requires a slick launch - if there's not a slick launch in the first week, there will be problems.
Firstly, refunds could actually result in Haxus losing money if the situation is bad enough. As far as I know Steam always takes a significant cut from the developer, and it doesn't give that cut back if a copy of a game is refunded. Each refunded copy could be a loss of $8 for Haxus at a pricepoint of $25, unless I'm wrong about how that works.
Secondly, it takes an extraordinary turn of events for games to recover from a bad launch. Generally, after a bad launch, the reputation of that game and studio becomes permanently tarnished even if the issues are fixed later. A bad launch for a game can potentially result in it being permanently dead-on-arrival.
Unrelated clapback to Haxus.
The comment about "free-to-play griefers"... if this comment is in relation to a few people from Syndicate recently coming back to the game, you should know that they did nothing untoward. There was no griefing. There was a pretty amicable conflict over a piece of territory and one side won. -- you shouldn't let people screaming bloody murder sway your opinion, because frankly many of the people that have screamed bloody murder about Syndicate over the past decade will personally admit in hindsight that they were wrong about their opinions on us. Many people will admit that the times Syndicate have been involved in the game were actually the most interesting due to the emergent social gameplay we provided.
Posts: 3
Threads: 0
Joined: Oct 2018
Reputation:
1
Why are more galaxies even necessary???
its fine how it is.. and if this requires wiping all our precious civilizations out of existence then it just seems like madness
Senusret of Zetidar
Posts: 10
Threads: 0
Joined: Nov 2019
Reputation:
8
We need a much smaller game area. Right now the game might as well be single player, except there's a possibility of a griefing coming from an unknown dark corner of the universe and deleting your empire with no way to respond to that threat.
The smaller game area like at the start of U5 (the box) actually had politics, social interaction, trade -- most people remember it as being a period of fun and excitement.
As soon as you have the open 20 galaxy universe, everything just stops. Nothing happens anymore, no one interacts... it's just a boring.
Posts: 131
Threads: 13
Joined: Jun 2018
Reputation:
7
To be honest I have no objection to expanding the veil of targoss, I would definitely back shrinking the war dimension though. In fact I would be fine if things were entirely flipped and the war dimension was much much smaller than the veil.
Posts: 20
Threads: 3
Joined: Jul 2019
Reputation:
1
Why would you open the floor to haxus, he might fall through!
|
