Attract more players

We were all attracted to this server due to the nostalgia. There are probably at least thousands of players worldwide that would play this server if they knew about it, considering how popular maplestory was. And the biggest difference is this server has 1/1000s of the players that original GMS/KMS/EMS/etc had, so less people are present to explore contents to make the game more "fun" and "nostalgic".

Many people complain about few players doing pqs, empty channels, not being as nostalgic, etc. An universal solution to all these problems and making the game more fun for everyone - attract more players. I am not sure how you would do it, but incentives (possibly abused)+ more advertisements to put the game out there, would grab more players into playing this game. I believe that there are so many people out there that would instantly jump at the opportunity to even try out this server if they knew about it, they just need to be exposed to the idea that this server exists.

Royals is super easy to download - 10 min and is the biggest maplestory private server. That itself is a huge incentive for past maplers to try this server out. So there is a huge population out there that are potential future players if they simply knew about it, and it would be beneficial to all to attract them our server.


TLDR: Increase population, increase fun, increase nostalgia.

 

Fun and nostalgia are subjective.

 

So is a private maplestory server more or less fun with more or less players? Playing a server with 10000 players tends to be, on average (for the majority) more fun along with more nostalgia than playing a server with 10 people, which makes it less nostalgic as well. Fun & nostalgia tends to be directly correlated, with the # of people being a contributing factor.

 

Unlike throwing stars, you want quality > quantity of friends.

Of course, I don't disagree that more people would mean more opportunities, but I think part of the reason a lot of players have stayed is because they met good friends. I did, just like I did on GMS, and it only takes one to make all the difference.

Besides that, how do you suggest the server increase it's population? You can't force people lol.

Edit: I've always thought it'd be cool to add a feature where people would get a 2x 4 hour EXP card once a month. A little "Hey, here's a little boost", and it would stack only up to 1 so you couldn't let an account sit for months to gather a bunch, to encourage people to play consistently.

 

I was referring the # of players, not quality/quantity of friends. It is opportunitites as you speak of to interact with and explore the contents of this game with more people to provide a more nostalgic experience.

And I mentioned I am not sure how to actually increase the population. Marketing strategies? Ads? (not sure if its possible with the budget from the donations) Incentives for new players? But there is a huge market of potential players out there that could be attracted to the server if given the knowledge of this server or potential incentives of joining.



I'm just saying, having 1000 players online vs 5000 players online in this server - I, along with many others would take the 5000 players, no? And if that is the case, why not start making effort towards that?

 

Not necessarily, and I daresay that amongst the old players who are still here, we don't still play Royals because of nostalgia anything. To my perception, the players who have been here, two, three, four years aren't nostalgic about GMS, EMS like the newer players tend to be. If I may speak for those of us who were around in new source, I think we're more nostalgic about old Royals than any official MapleStory server back in the day.

Probably, and there probably have been thousands of players who have been on Royals throughout the past five years. It's important to keep in mind a lot have been banned or quit, and it seems these days the majority of the playerbase are quite new here.

I don't hear any of these complaints except for the declining playerbase from the veterans. We have different social circles and thus different perspectives of course, but I think the most major complaints here are primarily about the economy. You can easily tell by looking at the feedback section and seeing there's what, five, six different threads about HP washing and the cost to start up here.

The thing is, people DO know about Royals. We're always rank 1 on gtop, which is where all the private servers pander to people for votes to get a higher vote rank and therefore get more exposure. Royals has been around for a very long time, and it's been number one on gtop for at least two years if I remember when I first started. There isn't really anywhere else you can advertise a private server. The MapleRoyals Facebook page got closed down. Maybe incentivize players to create more MapleRoyals videos on YouTube? But the main point is that the premier place to advertise hey, I'm a private server, come play me, is on gtop, which Royals has been dominating for so long.

You weren't here when Royals was at it's peak, but let me tell you when Royals had 2000 players online. Yes, 2000. Royals was really big in 2016, far bigger than it is now two years later.

It's hard to describe just how wonderful old source Royals was. I miss it very much. Back then, the server was so populated. Before I had joined, there was an absolute flood of TW players after a famous TW streamer streamed playing Royals. There was a vast Taiwanese community here, and it caused great stress on staff to recruit Taiwanese timezone and Chinese speaking staff members to help that section of the playerbase. Many of them have gone away now. I live in California, timezone Pacific Standard Time (PST). At 10 PM PST, 5 AM servertime, Voodoo channels were completely full. It was madness of people constantly ccing through Sophilia's Bedroom. Now, I can afk to get ready for bed at that same time and there's still empty Voodoo maps and my afk characters can resum farming since no one came by to take my map.

It must sound so surreal that people would buy and sell maps. Skele is dead now. But back then, skeles was CONSTANTLY full and you'd always see people S>Skele map 10m on smegas. Hell, I remember several people who would smega B>Skele map 10, 20, 50m. Yes, it was that crazy. People who smega they were leaving a skele map and there were legit five or more people spam attacking mobs trying to get the new mapowner. You couldn't even go get a snack for 5 minutes without having your skele map taken.

Back then, WS were 300m, CS were 300m, AP Resets were 10m at most. You could farm at Deep Sea Gorge II with your bishop and SI (because SI sped up Genesis then) and make 80m an hour. The most money you'd make with leech was 1 hit skele leech at what, 70m an hour? Hardly anyone bought petri leech, ever, and petri was dead.

Sure, old source had its problems. Occasional server lag and crashes, Frederick making items disappear so they had to be refunded, some rare rollbacks and such.

But the basis of the economy and the community was the best Royals it ever was then. Despite how many people played then, it was kinda funny because once you reached endgame, you knew literally almost everyone. I found old screenshots of mine where I had 250 people on buddy list. I screenshotted through the whole thing, probably back when I was making a document to keep track of everyone's names. But it hit me then that almost every single player there was an active Horntail runner, and it made me so nostalgic when I thought back on people only half joking for me to help them recruit a run because my buddy list was pretty much a smega for that sort of thing. It was fun while it lasted.

So what caused the game to come to this?

New source. January 1, 2017, the new source code that was implemented when everyone and their mother knew it wasn't ready.

So. Many. Things. Broke.

I can't even properly illustrate what that was like. January 2017 to what, May 2017? The game was unplayable, skills didn't work, bossing hardly worked, Sila was on shoutbox 24/7 fielding all these angry players, you couldn't even make new characters, yeah it was bad. The lack of an autoban system even now, the lack of logs, the hackers and RWTers got worse than it had ever been in old source. And still, it's going on.

Now we have WS 500m, CS 500m, AP Resets 17m, 150m an hour 1 hit petri leech, and many old players who just moved on. I perceive strongly that most players who play now are new source players.

In a way, it's good that the players now don't mourn over what Royals was back then. I hope they enjoy it here despite how they want Royals to be nostalgic like old official MapleStory.

For me and I feel many old players though, we want Royals to be nostalgic like old Royals. But it's honestly too late at this point.

 

Ah, I just started writing a post about feeling super nostalgic for old Royals instead of GMS only to see that @Shiyui ninja'd me! :c

I just want to add that, I don't know if it would be actually possible to have the same player population size as GMS here. Logistically speaking, Nexon had a paid staff that was able to keep up with the demands that come along with that, both technologically and community-based... and we all know they weren't even able to be active about targeting hackers/scammers/etc. Imagine how overworked the staff at Royals already is... and scale that up to if we really did have 5000+ many players online at a time. I'm not even sure if our server could handle that amount of volume at a time...

 

The server should be able to handle 5k no problem... but all in one map/channel, that's a different issue lol

 

@Shiyui The situation you describe before new source - the server being so populated, players are even selling map ownerships in maps like skele, Voodoo channels are taken, and even the economy was much better - that was exactly the kind of server I wanted royals to be when I made this post. That was what I hoped royals would work towards becoming when I made this post, in the hopes of becoming more populated. It is very unfortunate I missed such an era, but with old > new source having already been a thing, I actually doubt if a similar "golden era" would happen again.

I dearly hope so however, and that why I made this post - so maybe, just maybe we can work out some ways of attracting more players and get this server into a populated era similar to the "old source" era. But people are busy nitpicking ideas like "fun and nostalgia are subjective"... Let's find ways, if there are any (there is always a way), to go into a 2nd "golden era" bros

 

An unfortunate byproduct of playing a private, nostalgic server is that you're never going to bring in 'new' players. Though they may be new to Royals, they're not new to GMS and, if they're one of the people who missed the old days and put even one google search to use, they'd have already found us. We all played this when we were in middle school but there's no way a modern middle-schooler (if they can find time between snorting condoms & eating Tide Pods) is going to find this place, so you're dealing with a marginal community anyway.

It's my humble opinion that the server would be best served to consider commuting lifetime bans for less egregious offenses (mistake-level account sharing, taping the hit key down for 10 minutes, voting on two accounts while genuinely misunderstanding the whitelist rules, etc) to one-year bans instead of lifetime. Part of what makes our server awesome is the regulation that combats players who unfairly progress in the game (either destroying the economy with vote abuse, hacking their way through the grind or hogging maps whilst macrobotting), but we also must come to terms with the fact that there are maybe 20,000 humans on earth who want to play on a gMS private server in 2018. If we've banned half of them for life and there's no chance whatsoever that they could ever return, we're hurting our numbers. I'm generally a stickler for a rules but I also acknowledge that attrition, if it kills the good guys in the process of killing the bad guys, isn't always the way.

The answer, in the meantime, is to be a friendly person and encourage newer players to join. Stop and say hello when you see someone with whom you've never had a conversation; you'd be surprised how many friends you could make by simply saying hello. Never KS, don't snipe maps, don't degrade each other and you'll help boost the overall reputation of the people on this server (many of whom are incredibly nice people who all want the same thing). I offer any new player a bit of free stuff to get them started and I encourage others to do it as well. 3m to most of us means absolutely nothing but it could make a huge difference for a new player who otherwise doesn't have start-up funds for things like potions, stars, arrows, weapons, etc. I also PM people if I see a rogue thread on reddit asking about private servers to let them know what we have here. You can do these things too - be the change you want to see in the world.

There are also downsides to getting too large. Before we went to this new source code, you had to wait at least 10 minutes to get a map in most popular training areas and, many times, you just had to buy one. That disproportionately benefited richer, older players and dissuaded new players from staying around. Copyright makes it difficult to advertise in a formal/traditional way and there's the ever-possible chance that NX corp rallies the lawyers.

So, I think we all carry part of this mantle and need to help out when and where we can. Vote every day (but only once), befriend new players, don't jack up prices to unreasonable rates, don't steal kills, maps or drops and be a friendly player. Don't wait for the staff to do something to fix all of our problems - get in line and help us do that together.

 

Sad when most of the stuff people miss from old Royals could still be fixed but is either taking forever to code or the owner simply doesn't want to add it back. Rip 24 hour patch.... we at 15 months now. But will we reach 24 month patch?? Find out next time on dragon ball z

Oh also developers (if any read this) please add gobies. Don't forget about the little fish!!

 

Can the ban system actually be revised/reconsidered though to lessen the severity of ridiculous permabans like "account sharing"?

We barely reach 1000 players nowadays, and seeing permabans after permabans just disheartens me. Yes permabans should exist, but people should also be given more chances as many games (i.e. league) have demonstrated although that people who cheat are more likely to cheat again, but the majority of people are likely to reform after being punished after first offenses.


We are at a point where server population is getting a little low and in many levels declining. I am literally asking for ways we can attract and retain more players, but responses (especially staff's responses) show that everyone's brushing this issue to the side.

With no reforms to the old ban system and everything continuing as is, playerbase will slowly decline & you will soon see 500 online players in a few months/soon-to-be future....

Stop brushing this issue to the side, and get yo asses together and RELEASE NEW CONTENT, REFORM RULES, DO SOMETHING not just brush issue to the side, sit back, and wait for playerbase to decline please.

 

You probably don’t know, but account sharing used to be an instant permanent ban. The rule was changed to a 30 day ban for minor account sharing (merely logging on and talking on someone else’s character) and the permanent ban has remained for unfair advantage major account sharing, like getting exp (buying or selling leech), taking items (taking gear or other expensive items which would potentially devolve into bitter scamming scandals), and muling (using someone else’s buff mules like SE).

I think the ban system should remain as is.

As for attracting more people to Royals, Matt made a new MapleRoyals Facebook page today so maybe that will help.

 

Back when I joined the server, getting 800 online at once was an achievement, and I had a lot of fun.
Before me, there were those who played with less than 100 online at once, and they've always claimed to have had fun during that time.
When I quit, the server was usually around a 1.1k average. It was also fun.

Dare I say, perhaps the number of people online doesn't directly influence the amount of fun one has?

You might have nostalgia for thousands of players. I came with nostalgia for exactly three friends I had made during my time on GMS. Getting more players certainly wouldn't add to that. For me. This doesn't make you wrong.

You just can't be objectively correct for something like this.
TL; DR

 

Okay my bad, I apologize to you all. I give up. I wanted royals to expand in popularity and increase playerbase by finding ways to attract new/retain old players, but I made a big mistake. I believed that it would be very feasible if we all work towards finding ways to improve the system, but I am sorry to all the staff and players for attempting to fix the declining playerbase of this server.

I learned a big lesson these past 2 days: fun and nostalgia are subjective.

End thread please.