Originally Posted by
mwah
beg to differ, vast majority, including some staff play for competitive reasons, or to sell TC. The other percentage of players that play for entertainment, rarely stay for long. There are always new players playing some fun mods between their personal friends in private servers, but they rarely make it past 1,000 games.
We've got 226 verified TC sellers total since the system was introduced back in 2018. Out of those 226 verified sellers, only 43 have had an active selling thread in past 6 months.
For comparison, this week we've had a bit over 2K active users with Green Belt or higher, 831 active users with Black Belt+ and 161 active users with 10th Dan+.
When I say people don't play Toribash to make RL money off of it I don't just say what I
assume is happening, I base it on the data that we have. Only a minority of (typically old and high belt) users sell TC or items to gain real money from it, and that does not reflect typical Toribash player experience.
Now I never denied people playing for competitive reasons, though I'm not sure why you're putting then in the "play to earn money" camp.
Of course they'd be competing against each other, that's pretty much the nature of PVP games - but they do so to have fun (even if it's not
always the case, e.g. when losing).
We may have a different criteria for what can be considered "playing for entertainment reasons" vs "playing to make money" here, but for me the latter means you're essentially trying to replace your job with an online game. We're not going to try and market Toribash like that.
not saying I agree to any other points but my own. however, I think your statement on player retention is incorrect. if the business model focused on existing player retention it does not negate new players joining, and it would in theory prevent the old players from leaving because the game would be focused on those players interests.
Old players will always be leaving the game, you can't fight that. You can slow the process but it will inevitably keep happening as people grow older, get more stuff to do in their lives or just move on to new games.
I've specifically said that focusing
only on retention is a bad choice as that's what Felnin said we should do instead of trying to attract new people. It doesn't mean that the plan is to focus exclusively on getting some 12-year-old kids play the game and ignore all the existing players. Toribash events are normally not exactly white belt friendly and even though we're actively looking into making them more accessible (Battlepass is an obvious example), stuff like ranking will still be primarily oriented at pro players.
simply have to make it worth players to spend money on the game. as you are well aware there are already thousands of dollars in circulation among duelers and TC sellers. none of this money goes to nabi, and it feasibly could.
Users spending money on the game and users selling TC are two barely overlapping groups. Users spending their money in official shop and those who spend it in player-to-player market are basically non-overlapping groups of people.
Easiest strategy for Nabi would be to prohibit
any third party USD trading on our platform, same way many other games do. We don't exactly want to do that because it ruins the "open economy" part of Toribash.
Another option that's frequently being mentioned is to lower official TC rates. In our opinion all it's going to do is lead us into some sort of a race with third party sellers where they'll always be winning because they have no other option other than to keep lowering their rates so it's more competitive than the official shop. Side effect is further TC inflation which is bad for pretty much everyone, both players and Nabi.
So far Battlepass premium has been showing the most promising results in that sense as it's attracting players who aren't the typical money spenders. It doesn't beat TC/ST sales through the official shop but it's some extra income on top.
I get his point, but I don't agree. (and I think top .01% is a crazy over-exaggeration, even facetiously) to my point above, give players a reason to spend their money at NABI and not amongst themselves. if I personally know players that have put down payments on cars or homes with the TC they have sold, it means that there is money to be made, but the profits are not going to the business. and as we know, if a business does not have cash flow, it is much more difficult to implement the necessary strategies to increase the playerbase and retain ALL playerbase, new and old.
I honestly don't know where one needs to live or how much a car/home needs to cost for one to use TC money as a down payment for it.
Now I get it that it's perfectly reasonable that some duelers have made a few thousand $ by selling TC they've won and I'm happy that they could turn their hobby into a side gig where they can make some extra cash, but again you can count these people on the fingers of one hand. They are the
absolute minority of Toribash playerbase and rightfully so - if they weren't the best of the best they wouldn't be able to accumulate that much TC on their accounts.
I'm not entirely sure how exactly we as a company are supposed to convert
their profits into ours though. As long as they're verified sellers Market Squad say their TC is fine they're free to sell it to whoever they want and claim all the money. If you mean that the fact that they can find people to sell TC to means there are people in the community willing to spend money on the game, yeah we know that they exist. Some of them also buy stuff from the official shop, even though it's obviously not Toricredits.
also, I saw that you linked the community outreach thread earlier. be real, has any suggestion actually been implemented from that thread? we have had the suggestions board for a while and I can think of maybe 2-3 (that I know of) ideas that were actually put into action, and it was years ago.
Battlepass is a thing that was first suggested in that thread. Mobile version of Toribash has also been suggested there, even though by that time we had already started work on it. Several events had been hosted based on suggestions in that thread as well. I'm sure Ancient can tell you more on what's been done based on suggestions from that thread as he's been dealing with it firsthand.
I check S&I board whenever there are new posts there, but it has
a lot of suggestions that either require tons of work that we're not ready to commit to or which are (in my opinion) straight up bad.
A few recent examples of good suggestions:
- THE MVP AND SPOILS OF CLAN WARS is a good suggestion and will likely be implemented in some form when I get to updating Clans system again, but currently we have no plans to work on that. Updating Clans was one of the routes we had in mind for 5.53 and community chose Market instead.
- INVENTORY COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER is a fair suggestion as well as forum inventory is extremely outdated overall, yet again that's something that will take quite a lot of time to get working the way I imagine a good inventory to work. Does it mean it'd never happen? No. But it also doesn't really mean that there's anything I'm comfortable saying about the suggestion other than "good suggestion, we'll consider it when we have time which there's no ETA on".
There'd always be a typical "make tc gain easy" type of thread every now and then where we're asked to remove all timeouts on auto tourneys / give out more TC for everything and so on. I typically don't respond to these threads, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there will be no changes done
at all. For example, I've added periodic broadcasts for auto tourneys a while ago to make it easier to know when a new tournament is about to start without having to sit in there waiting. We keep tweaking Battle pass rewards and XP progression to allow more players to claim prizes. We've also increased game client event rewards (primarily base tier) to allow players to get better prizes and are currently working on an updated ranking system that will provide more periodic payouts to players (which will hopefully launch later this month). In general the plan is to create more ways for players to get TC / ST by naturally interacting with the game instead of forcing them into a few specialized rooms that only have certain mods and have them farm there.
I also usually only respond to threads which suggest either something we're 100% adding in next release or something that's 100% not being implemented in any near future.
There are two main reasons for that: it's not always easy to plan things half a year (or longer) ahead and that I feel like saying the suggestion is bad (when I think it is) just kills any potential (better) ideas that people may voice in the thread later. Understandably this all may make it seem like the board is just being ignored, but yeah, that's not the case.
there is a golden goose here and it's just not being managed to full potential when it comes to where the ideas are places. league and all those games also have high skill ceilings, obviously the reason they are successful is the team and resources behind those games. toribash really should be no different. most new players that come will quit, due to difficulty. that's a fact, it has been said that the concept of toribash will never change, so why not play on the difficulty? you guys are marketing the game as if it is something entry level that anyone can pick up. it's literally hard to learn AND hard to master. and I'll mention this again: NEED A BETTER IN DEPTH TUTORIAL.
Ok now that's just another comparison of Toribash to something that (imo) you can't really compare it to.
Rocket League is a type of game that you can get into with minimal knowledge about how games work. It's also fun and engaging to look at when you've never played it. Toribash isn't that type of game
by design and there's nothing that can be changed about it without altering what it is at its core. Better tutorials are surely still needed (while I think current ones are better than what we had before, they're clearly not good enough and have their own issues), but they will not make gameplay easier. Let's be honest, what is the last time you actually relied on an extensive in-game tutorial to get the general grasp of how things work in a game?
In my opinion it's way easier to get into Toribash if you start playing it as a goofy game where things go boom and there's blood all around the place. You don't need to understand what exactly each joint does to mess around with your friends when everyone has sword arms or when floor is lava and you're standing on a ledge. You just click some joints and hope it works out - and when it doesn't you go "haha rip me". Eventually, after playing a few fights like that you'll naturally learn what at least some joints do and may become interested in more competitive mods.
What's also been long neglected in Toribash is its sandbox aspect with modmaker being inexcusably bad for 2023. Hopefully I'll be able to finally get to it after we push out the mobile version as there are a lot of ideas we've had in mind, starting from just making UX not suck and ending with server-side scripting to allow mods feeling like actual
mods with custom functionality and UI rather than just maps to play in.
