As Earth was the game I grew up with, it is saddening to see FFA dwindled so far from its heyday. The following are reasons for the decline

Divide between the haves and have-nots
Sounds familiar in certain real societies, doesn't it? Big clans hold all the power in FFA. Newcomers are treated badly and suffer serious reprisals for minor offenses. Unspoken rules and game etiquette are hard to learn. It is almost impossible to net even to the top 10 as 16 member tags.

Concentration of techers
Once upon a time, it was possible to get enough of a head start as a industrialist so that the techers wouldn't ever be able to catch up. A lot of people will remember the fat 60k land indies 10 years ago that the 20k land techers couldn't outgrow (anyone remember Hapnam Kinship?). In all the time I've played earth, techer vs indy was probably the most exciting race to watch or participate in. It was the proverbial turtle vs hare. But now, the turtle runs as fast as the hare.

The reason is simple. With record low military costs for techers due to landfarming, it is possible to have 0 military across the board. The demand for military for most of a set doesn't even compare to the demand for tech and food. The land advantage that commies used to be able to achieve just isn't there anymore.

Landfarming
No matter what is said about how people should be able to use their own countries in whatever way they desire, this is one of the most serious problems of the game. Attacking other people is just not even close to as effective as landfarming. The major element of aggression is now solely directed to newcomers and 16 member tags who are helpless.

And unlike in real societies, the helpless can simply leave and never come back.

Yep. It's not just FFA though; the entire game is dieing for similar reasons. There's no casual-gaming here anymore, and don't forget the suicider-mentality problem.

Basically if you're new then you need to know in advance tag all your countries, come to the forums to state your intentions, and get a hold of FA's to state your intentions to them and try to get peace-deals. However if you're new and have few posts then you're a troll so no one will believe you thinking you're really just a suicider. At some point they will assume you're going to suicide, likely because of some mistake you make as a new player (such as demoralizing the enemy before attacking, which doesn't seem like a bad idea when you're new); at which point they will either farm or kill you. If you survive and retaliate, then they declare you a suicider and they kill you.
At which point they'll complain on the forums about the suicider problem and say that they need to keep killing countries like that to prevent suiciders.

Which leads to one of three real possibilities:
1) You join a big clan and continue the cycle.
2) You become a suicider deciding that's the only way you can play until they stop killing countries like that.
3) You quit.


Most new people won't choose option one because it takes time and energy to play a game where they're already being punished for being new, and it's very difficult to be a casual gamer in a clan. So it leads to declining numbers and increasing suiciders.

i call bullfluff - messages are sent out all the time to untagged about what will happen. there are many 16 man tags that net in peace. the larger clans are more then willing to re supply a country and pay reps over and above the damages caused if a mistake is made. the untagged pile is a cesspool of trouble period. If a new player gets grabbed and in return gs or br the country he/she will die, that is not accepted on any server.

there is no punishment for being new... just stupid play and you can be new or old to do that.

look at the numbers set to set... the claim that the game is dying if false - prove me wrong ?

I swear some people just don't keep track on the new changes to Dr and ghost acres and to dict's

Landtrading is still the safest way to get land but its nowhere as good as it was, as such it has hurt techers as the demand for tech is lower

Bullfluff indeed. What do you do to people who attack a player with over 100 000 acres? What do you do to people who retal one hit with three of their own? What do you do when someone uses offensive spy ops in general or before a retal? In my experience in the game and the forums; you slaughter them, despite the fact that those are all things you would do if you were new to the game.

And I really call bullfluff on the messages to untaggeds. I ran half the set with 16 untagged countries because my browser didn't want to pull the clan page up properly and not one of those 16 countries got a single message about it, and I didn't post my countries on the forum or my intentions until long after I had finally tagged up.

And you yourself just said you will kill any new player who returns a hit with a gs or br. Guess what, if you have all turrets and jets and your clan hits their countries multiple times a GS or BR is exactly what they would do because they're new and don't know better. Killing them for is is pure fluff.

As is the idea that you're "more then willing to re supply a country and pay reps over and above the damages caused if a mistake is made."
First you'll only do it if you consider it a mistake, which means if it's killing them for making a typical new player mistake they get nothing. In addition to that even if you get them back to their position you'll try and guilt them into joining your clan, and it takes time to get them back to where they were. Even if you managed to get them the resources it still takes days worth of turns, perhaps a week or two depending how far you are into the set; at which point they're only where they were before you killed them meaning they lost perhaps a week or two worth of growth.
And that's only the players who decide to stick around. A lot of people, I dare say most people, will simply quit the game if a week's worth of effort is instantly destroyed simply for attacking the wrong country or trying to retal for land instead of hits.

So yes, that is punishing new players. You expect every new player to automatically know exactly how they're supposed to act and exactly what types of hits and spy ops are acceptable and which aren't. A new player isn't going to know those things, a new player won't instantly know that GS's, BR's, Missles, and Offensive Spy Ops are all grounds for immediately and total destruction; as is topfeeding, retaling for land, hitting the same clan (not even country, just general clan) more than once in 48 hours, not tagging up immediately, not stating your intentions on the forums, etc. If you don't know the intricacies of the clan enforced unwritten rules; then you die. And that's not fun, and a game that isn't fun is a game that people don't play.

By the way, set to set:
2092 this set
2675 last set
3064 the set before that
2984 before that
3126 before that
3418 before that
4036 before that - one year ago

So in the last year FFA has nearly halved. The year before that was slightly lower but still pulled 3694 which is 1600 (or basically 100 people) more than now. Going back to the first set in Jan 18, 2010 - Mar 20, 2010 this is the lowest set and the first and only set to dip below 2500 countries, and it's below it by over 400.
So there you go: it's the lowest turn out set, the second lowest still had about 500 more countries than now, it's the first the dip below 2500 countries, and it's been on a steady downward spiral for over a year with only one set in that time that had a slight increase of only 80 countries only to lose almost 400 the nest set and almost 600 the set after that. So consider yourself proven wrong.

I won't argue whether the game is waning or not. The numbers show that it probably is.

However, I think it's more about the fact that I doubt there are that many new players coming in.

I remember when the game was biggest, probably the early 2000s. I remember lots of players of all ages, including younger players who were 14-15 years old. Those kids had fire in their hearts to be as powerful as they could in the game and be leaders.

Most of us playing now are the same people who have played for 10+ years. Most of us have led alliances that we've built in the past. I know I don't feel like I have anything to prove. I'm not willing to do the work to recruit people to PAN like I used to when I was running TIE. We have other people who used to run clans like Crippler (not sure if he's still playing), who decided it was easier to merge into CC instead of dealing with keeping FoCuS going.

That's why in the other thread I was trying to encourage Grizzly to join Ares or SOTA. I think we need more clans competing for those top spots.

So basically, it's the same group of us playing, with the veterans leaving faster than the new blood is coming in. Perhaps we do need to do more to cultivate a positive experience for the untaggeds. I don't know how many clans actually actively try to recruit from the untagged pool anymore. I know I've not done a thing on that front with PANLV pretty much ever. The only recruiting I've done is people that I used to play with, trying to bring them back to the game.

I will say I try to be fair to anyone that I have dealings with. If someone hit me with an AB or GS, usually instead of killing the person, I'd try to educate them, and heck, considering if I were to grab someone with either an SS or PS and get a GS retal, I'd come out WAY ahead, I'd consider it a pretty good thing that they threw away their retal.

I guess in this whole ramble my point is: Perhaps we do need to try to be nicer to untaggeds, at least at the beginning of a set. If you have an aggressive build and are untagged six weeks in, then you're probably biding your time to fluff up some TKO or PAN country. But in week 2? Perhaps we need to back off the untaggeds at that time and try to recruit them into clans.

It's a different world today. When E2025 started, there was really nowhere else to play such a game for free on the (young) Internet.

There was just a ton of kids playing and it was cool because they got to just be Players. There wasn't much of a border between Kid and Adult. That had to be cool for a 13 year old constantly being told what to do in RL by Adults and getting to blow them up playing E2025.

In 2013, you can play EQ, Vanguard, Rift, and a ton of other graphic intense MMORPG's for free. To attract players to this game and retain them in the face of that is a pretty tough row to hoe.

Who plays this game? That's who you have to find. The guys who play(ed) pencil and paper D&D ad relied on a social group and imagination to have fun.

I remember back in the early to mid 80's, most ALL "computer games" were text only. Hell I used to write games then in Basic.

We're 15 or so years removed from the youngest-to-oldest crowd that made this game the fluff back in the day.

I would agree that "we" don't make it easy for "new players" to stick around, but in a way, that argument is pretty weak.

My VERY first set in FFA, I made 15 countries. Made my own little tag. I got grabbed a couple times and over-retalled myself into a big jam.

Nobody said "hey Dragon", we know you're new so we'll let those 3:1 retals slide." No. They commenced to kicking my ass. Which led me to learn Lesson #1 in this game. Make friends and join a clan.

It wasn't so different then. If someone like Potomac or King Wilson, or Bopper, etc got a bug up their ass, they'd kill a string or a clan for pure amusement. And bots like the LuLa bot.

Clans like USIMP had guys whose job was to kill an entire string if they dared retal a USIMP grab and guys like Fiat whose standard FA practice was to basically tell small and solo tags to just be happy that their whole clan didn't get killed or maybe they shouldn't retal again.

And the only reason real, untagged players didn't get picked off like they do now is because there were thousands of bot countries and everyone was running 150 (or more) of their own by hand.

how many people can say they have had a person join their clan in the last year that has said they have less than 1yr experience playing earth.

I'm going to guess it is 0-3 total amongst all of us. Those who do come to our clans, played previously and come back. Thats about it

In ESD, we had some guys who were 1a transplants and a couple other guys who were more or less "new", but you're pretty much spot on.

I hate to be cynical, but I suspect that 75% of these "new players" really aren't new.

That said, I think the Community and Game can stand on their own, but I also think it's a very small slice of Gamers who would be into the game to begin with, but if there's 100 Million
Gamers on the planet, even 1/1000th of 1% is 1,000 players.

Yes I think we could do a better job of retaining "new players", but retaining a few isn't what we need. What we need is a couple hundred new players. I don't know how that happens here in our little obscure corner of Teh Interwebz.

My last few sets in 2025 i ran Doomsdays and my bot. Around 3k countries.

I killed every single untagged country for 2 or 3 consecutive resets.

So to say it was easier back then, is just plain wrong.

The thing now, is that everyone already have played this game, we all invited friends and family, etc. And they played.
So us "oldies" dont have anyone left to tell about this game.

It´s not like people just stumble upon this game...

^^^ +1

some do stumble but different thing is if they stay.

Well.. 5 people a month is not nearly enough..

I hate to say it but maybe the solution is to allow running more than 16 countries but not allow bots.

and Dragon, I too have many fond memories of playing D&D using graph paper and pencils. I recently gave away a complete set of the first books.

Ive had nothing but terrible experiences with this game since ive been back, I played on swirve in 2001, but for example,

This set i tagged up swords, thought we had enough members to make it count, and i played just out of protection and lost all 16 of mine in one night because i was on a flight home from vacation. Idk who did it or whatever the point was, but that was definitely enough for me.

I try one round of team, and i got killed twice in a clan without any sort of idea what happened. I try one round of alliance, and was also killed by the biggest clan on the server for reasons i still have no idea.

Definitely nowhere near as fun as i remember.

how running 50 or 100 countries would change anything?

The nolifers could run the game :)

no i couldn't :P

If you haven't played this game in 10 years, surely you can't expect things to be even remotely the same.

I think a LOT of "old timers" make that mistake. They see a "familiar tag" and just assume that they can join ad things will be like they were a DECADE AGO.

some old timers miss times when they had 3k+ countries and they could solokill smaller tags.

although there are some players who have played decade or longer but there are also alot players who have played only few years and players have now family or something else and aren't that stickied to game and alliances leader- and memberships have changed alot since swirve era and since ee started and what they were 10 years ago so old timer will see new faces even if allliance's name is same as it was 10 years ago.

Yeah, Marshal's right about some of the clans being very different. Juusto and Havoc were both old-timers in PANLV (as was MadMorticia when she was around), but the rest of the leadership in PAN now is me, AJ and Bigwiggle, and we were TIE players and then when we closed the doors to TIE, we all ended up playing together in HalfDead.

In fact, I looked at PANLV as being sort of the Evil Empire for the longest time, when they were the really strong netting clan with 2-3k bot run countries to protect them. Now I'm basically 2nd in command after Juusto.

I wonder what percentage of players are under 25. I got to imagine it's a very very small percentage. Nothing like it was in 2003.

I wasn't under 25 when I started playing in 1998 -.-

Things were even more chaotic "back in the days".. "new" players get farmed to the ground much as they do now.

Probably the only difference is that the rules get enforced more efficiently (i.e., no multis/hacking/bots) among others, basically because a good number of remaining players quite well know what these "rules" are.

And as Dragon said, this among, if not the first, MMORPG for FREE back then, it gained lots of new players as the only choice.. not like today. Now, nostalgia keeps the remaining, also simply because running 15 takes almost no time, since a lot of us are quite too busy also for the newer MMORPG's.

Those, among others, factor into the present situation..

I'm still waiting for EE to go live on FB, hopefully before FB is declared "dead"

sure fb or g+ is option but 1st qz etc need to figure how to prevent multies via multiple fb/g+ accounts.

Another thing to consider is this:

If a game is in a state where it must ask its players to make concessions on playing the way they want to play in order to grow the game, then that's a problem.

Games like World of Warcraft don't have to do that. Earth: 2025 10 years ago didn't have to do that.

Part of this is that this game is a relic. But ultimately the types of things that people think are killing the game are things that need to be addressed via game mechanics, not through players making sacrifices that either limit their enjoyment or their ability to succeed.

That's why self-farming/land-trading has become big: because by the current mechanics of the game, it's the most efficient way to get lots of land fast. If NBK wanted to hold onto their no land-trading idea (I'm not sure if they're still doing that or not) and decided to compete for the TNW crown, they'd be doing it with one hand tied behind their back because PAN, TKO and other clans aren't going to limit their success in that way.

The game mechanics have to encourage people to play nice otherwise it's going to be a dog-eat-dog world as it always was in the older days of this game.

2nd in command 2nd last in activity (you beat pokey).

Maybe we need a server that is truely for new people, allow only a few experienced mentors to play along side the noobs to offer instruction and advice, to let them know what is acceptable and what is not so they can progress to the other servers with some kind of idea of what should be happenning, give them some place relatively safe to play without being killed for rookie mistakes or farmed by vets who are only using them for their own benefit. The servers here that are supposidly for new people are inhabbitted by vets who show no mercy to anyone new, give them a break and a somewhere to learn and play away from vets many of who are loud mouth aggressive keyboard warriors. Just a thought.

When MadMorticia wanted to make me a leader, I told everyone that I was a lazy bastard. They promoted me anyway. I'm still a lazy bastard, now I can just see all the super secret stuff on the Leader Board (ya know, like our plans to first strike NBK!).

I hand painted your name on all my missiles. :)

Now now, Dragon. It's only fair that when you're on the OPPOSITE side of a war from me that you rage-quit just like last time. Don't be subverting the expectations now!

Actually, I'm stealing all their Big War Secrets and defecting to PANLV. Like you and I planned.


*wink*

every1 is stealing but no1 knows for who.

OK - for all you who thing the game in wanking - wank on this....

http://youtu.be/A_sY2rjxq6M


now if you still think the game is phail after watching that then take the words to heart.

also i have played with marshal for many years and it is time i reveled his true identity...

3:16 in the above song.

pfffffffft.

I have NEVER played with Marshal. I personally don't "go that way".

if you haven't been in sol or na then nope, we haven't played together, opposite of fences is possible.

Personally, I like the general idea of what you all refer to as a "suicider". Most of the "suiciders" are apparently new players who got knocked about a bit by some jerk playing in an alliance somewhere that decides to farm or otherwise abuse the guys countries, thus, putting him in the position of making a decision to retaliate using what he's got on hand that will work (which I regard as completely fair when used judiciously), or laying there like a fluff and just taking it. Then, the "alliance" mighty as they are with all their veteran players back up that asshole and help to kill the guy.

I'm just patiently waiting for there to arise a whole alliance of "suiciders" that are able to field the numbers to be a competitive fight for their rights to play without having to deal with players that are so greedy for land that they will hit any newbie for way too much of that newbies land and keep coming back day after day and just pissing the guy off, some even send smart alecky messages in all their proud glory of being a bottom-feeding, scum. The guys who do this know who they are, so I'll just leave that there.

You ruthlessly farm a newbie into strike somehow, or just be that guys landfluff the rest of the game. Not much of a choice is it. The game in this day and age just isn't as attractive as an Xbox, or playstation for games, so, screw you the guy thinks, and he never comes back. I'll wager that if someone was to look there would be a large number of "abandoned" accounts in the security databsse.

Trot out those stats, right?

Okay.. For the small percentage of people who ARE truly new and somehow know enough to figure out HOW to suicide in some flash of brilliant inspiration, I agree with you.

This is not the normal case on the FFA server Cerberus. You can argue that all you like, but we all know the truth.

Maybe you should reach out to all these "innocent newbies" and create a "Suicider Clan" that just flat out fluffs up all the evil people on this server.

Or maybe you should just shut the fluff up if you're not willing to go there. This ain't 2001. Get over it or don't.

sometimes you have to gs or br to stand your ground. Sure i might if i was going to be someone's landfluff, sure i will die but i bet when i tag the same tag next set he will think twice about hitting me. So sometimes you have to " sucide " to get peeps to leave you alone. My point is sometimes you have to get killed to get your point across... but i would not fluff and complain when i died. suck it up and truck on. i chose to die and i know my actions will get me killed.

Was running clan:MADD at the beginning of set.Was running turns and building my countries not bothering anybody.Logged on one morning and all 16 were dead.Again hadn't hit or spied anyone.I log on now every 2 days just to suicide a few NBK countries.Big clans have made ppl like me either quit the game completely or turn to suiciding.I used to love this game, NOT ANYMORE!!!!

If you do build for war and fills up your country with warfaretech and you don't announce your tag you should expect someone to target you.

tex: You're not new here. You know that many of the tags here are being proactive and trying to get the suiciders before the suiciders attack.

Furthermore, I don't think there's anything that cares enough about coming after you at this point that if you announced your tag, they'd come after you for past issues.

Does it suck that this is the situation we're in right now? Of course it does, but with 16 countries for a suicider to use, it's really easy to mess up someone's set for no reason, and considering what LaE used to have for suiciders (somewhat deserved) and TKO used to have for suiciders (which was almost completely UNdeserved from what I can tell), it's obvious that some people are suiciding not based on being mistreated and getting a point across but just because they want to grind an axe from years ago or because they simply want to ruin something that someone else has worked all set for.

fluffs

OK, I'll do just that. Anyone looking for revenge against a player or alliance that has unjustly beat you up, PM me, if there is enough interest, I will begin setting up a clan that does just that and beats the cowboy fluff out of people like those above railing about the "suicider" problem. We can change the suicider problem into a homicidal problem instead. :)

Killers and people who want to be killers are encouraged to apply.

Rise warriors of vengeance. :)

What I have noticed as a returning player.

This game used to see activity almost 24/7 real lively interaction. clan sites forms messanger etc... noticed not like that any more.
Good probability cause people arent running 3k+ countries now so they dont feel the need to be around as much.
I feel the interaction is what made this game thrive the forging of friendships that last for years. just what I see. the game is what it is even with the many good improovements that have bern made still pretty much the same game ...miss the tight knit clans and interaction that made yhis game great.

those days with 5-20k players are gone. today avg size of alliance is ~30 members and ~10 years ago it was ~60.

I know those days are gone. doesnt mean the interaction has to leave... this game can get boring without friendsips and alliances to keep it going.