Apparently this was some how never suggested, as I searched related key words and couldn't find it. So, what do you think about incorporating a referral system that gives rewards to players who bring new people into the server? It could be a great incentive for players to bring their friends or advertise the server in forums and such. An example of a reward system would be to give the person who referred the player some NX for the achievements of the new player, this way it is way harder to abuse and self-refer. For example; if he reaches level 30, you get 8K NX. If he reaches lvl 70, you get 25K NX etc... I believe that in the long run, this would be a great boost to the population of the server.
I would be in favour of something like this to come into the game, HOWEVER, after all the RWT things going on recently, and one of the people who macro-botted a lot coming forward and explaining just how bad it really is (this is a single person, just imagine how many there are right now), this will just add even more abuse on top of what is already going on, so I really don't think this system can ever work here.
Interesting. So how would you go about preventing abuse for such a system? I mean, I could "refer" myself and still get rewarded.
I don't think Royals need anymore popularity boost. In fact, we need some other way to make it less popular because of RWT abusers coming in LOL!
Without a fool proof way of preventing the system from being abused and you referring yourself like Kai mentioned, I don't think this is feasible to implement.
Systems like this require a stupid amount of constant maintenance and overlooking in-order to prevent any sort of abuse. This is something I'm assuming the staff of royals do not currently have. It's too full of abuse loopholes, and royals in itself doesn't really need a popularity boost anymore, it's a pretty big server with a loyal playerbase.
The same way you stop vote abuse? or RWT abuse? there would probably be some amount of abuse, but it comes at the advantage of having a lot of new people on the server. If someone refers himself and you can tell by IP/MAC/whatever, it should be bannable just like vote abu
Although you make some sense there, I don't think it's something we want to direct our resources to for now. Perhaps it can an extra feature after everything's in.
I mean, it's not like we're struggling for new members. We're the #1 server on GTOP and we usually have 1,000+ players online concurrently at any given time. This suggestion might be a better idea if our numbers were low, but there are so many people on that it's hard to manage as is at times.
oh i hardly consider that a lot, maybe in comparison to other servers. there used to be servers with twice the amount of people online at any given time, and even they felt empty because of the 20 damn channels. it'll never feel like old GMS until 6 people are fighting for 1 spawn point in a map :\ sigh..
The only server I can think about that had this kind of population was ExtaliaMS, the server had 2k+ players online at one point. The truth is, this server will never feel like old-gms mainly because we've grown up and we play smarter now. It's hard to find the same nostalgic feeling when we know how to play the game efficiently and do things efficiently that we didn't know of in the past. Maplestory of the past, had a population that stomped on this servers, so yes that is one of the contributing factors to the spawn point camping in the past but sadly most of those players are already gone and grown up / moving onto something else (not necessarily a bad thing) and regardless of how you advertise MapleRoyals / Refer them, it won't grow by a huge amount.
Talking about channels, reducing the amount of channels would make the game feel more populated without actually increasing the population.
From personal experience, the only referral systems that didn't get exploited were ones where you had to pay to receive full benefits (WoW, you got everything once the person bought the game), meanwhile games where you didn't and it was based on levels (LoL), you have people like my older brother with almost 500 referral league accounts, all level 5+ to get the benefit of the free Riot Points given. Just my 0.02 cents lol. Not that I'm against it... it's just... very hard to do in a way that won't be broken somehow.
