miss the glory days of 30+ players on a server at a time.
It reminded me of the satisfaction and fun of being part of a community within the Evoverse as opposed to just being part of the Forum community. Since the lack of players found on MP servers seems to be a regular cause of frustration/concern that it is worth starting a new thread dedicated to ideas about how to increase the number of MP players.
Any and all comments, suggestions offers are very welcome
My first response was:
I agree that the old, well populated days would be good to see again, but from what I remember it was due in a big way to some dedicated players creating activities that attracted crowds. We had treasure hunts (Marvin), PvP tourneys plus a PvP playground in Sapphire (King Arthur) as well as Last Man standing (in space, in asteroid caves and on planets), some TW vs TW and TW vs ship combat as well. There was also a fairly frequent opportunity for military combat against the Vonari where newer players could join in big(ish) rumbles in WZ's with the advantages of getting experience, military rank points (giving access to the better mil frames) and surviving combat against groups of Vonari for more that a few seconds.
In EL and EM and EMII Clan wars were intended to lead to group combat and system development. On the whole (and a reason for its demise) clan wars ended up de facto as Pizza Delivery Star Systems Maintenance Contract Grinding plus forum based grumbles about enemy system attacks when no defenders were online. I actually found the lonely pizza deliver quite therapeutic but not a popular group activity!
Therefore I suggest that we might open a thread to explore the creation of some activities that might attract groups of players to a given server at a given time ...
Options (including the ones mentioned above) are:
- treasure hunt
LMS in space
LMS in caves
LMS in the atmosphere of a planet
LMS amongst station modules (hide and seekish)
PvP arena
group vs group contests
system acquisition and control for FDN or ALC groups - a bit like clan wars in EM and EMII but with NPC interference instead of players defending
system acquisition and control for FDN and ALC groups - one faction defends the system the other tries to take it
Vonari bashing
Multiplayer races
PvP racing knockout contests
Given the number of servers and the global spread of players (and related spread of timezones) I think that large groups aren't likely to congregate at random. We can't just grumble or wish for large group activities in MP and expect someone else (the infamous 'they' as in 'what are they doing about ...) to organise things on the off chance that players will turn up. I think it needs volunteers to offer to coordinate an activity and and then the rest of the MP community to support them by turning up, acting as judges or whatever might be needed. At some point we need players to put join the they's
If there's a positive response I'll start a thread for discussion, ideas and offers
Marvin responded:
So now it's over to the forum members ...Marvin wrote:Supersaturation is the problem. Even when a server offers a very specific type of game play (pick any of the above options) and the type of game play is listed when scanning servers, often those servers show zero players on line. With hosts (dozens of them) just waiting around for somebody to log on. If you're lucky, one guy either picks from the Lotto or logs on to a known server ... then other players, seeing somebody on that one server, join in. One by one.matchbox2022 wrote:miss the glory days of 30+ players on a server at a time.
Do we think that it's worth putting a bit (or a lot) of effort to resurrect a well populated MP Evoverse?
If so, what are you suggestions or comments about how it can be done?