1stly, thank you for taking the time to respond
before I can initiate a proper response in that comparison, we must know what constitutes an active player. are these players that have played at least 100 games in that week? 50 games? more than 10?
I didn't hope to imply that people play toribash to make real money, that is why in that quote I mentioned: "competitive reasons, or sell TC", not grouping competitive gameplay as associated with creating some small income from the game itself. additionally, we have to put into consideration that 90% of the active players you mentioned within that week probably do not even know they have that ability to become a verified seller. just the other day, a newer player asked while I was dueling if they could make real money off the game (I explained in detail that if you are good at the game and choose to duel, some players are willing to put up real money in some game modes, or earn more TC in order to sell them in a player to player transaction) they had no idea because you wouldn't know unless you 1st got on the forum (which as we know the majority of the players actually don't use).
maybe I did not articulate myself correctly, but it was not my intention to group competitive play with TC sales or to say that there is one or the other when it comes to how players want to spend their time on the game.
entertainment gameplay in my opinion:
- playing game modes in which the goal of the gameplay is altered (xspar, basketball mods, or baseball mods, etc) / for example, playing a basketball mod, players can switch objectives, defending a shot attempt or shooting. this I categorize as entertainment because you are not exactly trying to best or outsmart your opponent and losses are 'soft'. any mode essentially that can be played where even if you lose it can be as enjoyable as winning.
- single player replay making
experimenting with mods that allow you to complete obstacle courses, attempting to break single-player records, or developing new ways to dismember the bodies.
competitive gameplay in my opinion:
- playing game modes in which the purpose is to outsmart and beat your opponent in some way
- dueling
- tournament participation
I hope that makes more sense in regards to what I said previously, in no way do I think it would be ideal to market the game as something you can make money off of. I just think that it is worth mentioning that there is an aspect of the game in which, if you learn the mechanics and meta for many official modes, you do not need to be a streamer or influencer to profit. you can make money simply by playing the game well.
right, but you can mitigate that by introducing strategies for player retention, giving more reasons to be active, reasons to purchase things through the company, etc. new players are valuable because of the potential they bring. if they enjoy the game and continue playing at some point they will spend money on it.
ok, I got you, and I agree. to laser focus on 1 aspect of playerbase is not an ideal strategy.
events probably shouldn't and wont be 'white belt friendly' ever. battlepass is cool, it is one of the best implementations in a long time in my opinion, as an incentive to play games.
personal ranking and clan ranking definitely needs some updates. additionally, since clan squad died whatever time ago there are very few (if any) clan based events. I think this aspect is heavily neglected because there is almost no reason to join a clan other than associating yourself with your online buddies.
sure, not overlapping. but my point was that there are circulating funds of thousands of dollars that are just no being spent at nabi, so I know that in order for the business to grow and the game to update funds are necessary. I think as far as business strategies go, introducing a plausible item/feature that players are willing to pay the company would be beneficial if the game is to continue it's necessary updates and overall promotion.
yea, this would be the 'easiest' but as you explained not beneficial at all. I wouldn't support something like that. but there are such few things in the torishop worth buying for real money at the moment.
yea agree, what you guys are doing with battlepass is/was much needed.
yea, of the 20 players I personally know selling, flipping items, dueling whatever I believe there has been at least $20,000 that have fluctated over X amount of time (I wouldn't know where to begin or end, and I really don't have the data to back that up). not saying that the amount you can make as a top player is life-changing but its definitely substantial enough to at least have that aspect as a spotlight on the game. I believe it does encourage users to learn more strategies and mechanics to get better.
I get you, and I am definitely not claiming you guys don't do shit like some other players here. but if it is possible, rather than the transparency report on infractions, I believe that giving us some monthly updates on suggestions that are being worked on and linking to those suggestions to give the community a feel that they have a presence would definitely have a positive effect on morale on state of the game.
I should have been more specific, I meant league of legends in comparison. and with that I meant that difficulty from game 1 is high.
heres a thought:
upgraded general tutorial
more tutorials that can be unlocked as players level up their belts. so as you play you are able to learn about more and more aspects of the game so that you can play better, because with toribash, the better you play and understand the mechanics and meta the more fun you can have (just like any competitive-oriented game)
last game I relied on the tutorial to get the grasp of the game was smite. I believe it is very necessary the more difficult the game concept is. especially with something as unique as toribash. ghost, grab mechanics, and basic official mod strategies are very important to learn in my opinion. and understanding the game syncs with player acquisition and retention.
going in with that mindset (which is the current that I see being promoted through tiktok) only can last for so long. I don't agree that you don't need to understand what every joint does. it is important, its just something that can be learned through multiple tutorials as a suggested above, please let me know what your thoughts are on that.
totally agree, and I'm glad you noticed.
again, I believe it would be beneficial to be open on all the suggestions being worked on from month to month with timelines and open discussion. even if something such as ranking is set to be worked on with an ETA of 8/1/2023, we would like to know that the suggestions or ideas deemed plausible are being taken into consideration.
I hope you'll find the time to respond as well, every other response in this thread is just going to be a dumb meme and a waste of time to engage on. so I hope I am able to bring up thoughts and ideas that can better grow the community and gameplay.
Originally Posted by sir
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.
before I can initiate a proper response in that comparison, we must know what constitutes an active player. are these players that have played at least 100 games in that week? 50 games? more than 10?
I didn't hope to imply that people play toribash to make real money, that is why in that quote I mentioned: "competitive reasons, or sell TC", not grouping competitive gameplay as associated with creating some small income from the game itself. additionally, we have to put into consideration that 90% of the active players you mentioned within that week probably do not even know they have that ability to become a verified seller. just the other day, a newer player asked while I was dueling if they could make real money off the game (I explained in detail that if you are good at the game and choose to duel, some players are willing to put up real money in some game modes, or earn more TC in order to sell them in a player to player transaction) they had no idea because you wouldn't know unless you 1st got on the forum (which as we know the majority of the players actually don't use).
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.
maybe I did not articulate myself correctly, but it was not my intention to group competitive play with TC sales or to say that there is one or the other when it comes to how players want to spend their time on the game.
entertainment gameplay in my opinion:
- playing game modes in which the goal of the gameplay is altered (xspar, basketball mods, or baseball mods, etc) / for example, playing a basketball mod, players can switch objectives, defending a shot attempt or shooting. this I categorize as entertainment because you are not exactly trying to best or outsmart your opponent and losses are 'soft'. any mode essentially that can be played where even if you lose it can be as enjoyable as winning.
- single player replay making
experimenting with mods that allow you to complete obstacle courses, attempting to break single-player records, or developing new ways to dismember the bodies.
competitive gameplay in my opinion:
- playing game modes in which the purpose is to outsmart and beat your opponent in some way
- dueling
- tournament participation
I hope that makes more sense in regards to what I said previously, in no way do I think it would be ideal to market the game as something you can make money off of. I just think that it is worth mentioning that there is an aspect of the game in which, if you learn the mechanics and meta for many official modes, you do not need to be a streamer or influencer to profit. you can make money simply by playing the game well.
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.
right, but you can mitigate that by introducing strategies for player retention, giving more reasons to be active, reasons to purchase things through the company, etc. new players are valuable because of the potential they bring. if they enjoy the game and continue playing at some point they will spend money on it.
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.
ok, I got you, and I agree. to laser focus on 1 aspect of playerbase is not an ideal strategy.
events probably shouldn't and wont be 'white belt friendly' ever. battlepass is cool, it is one of the best implementations in a long time in my opinion, as an incentive to play games.
personal ranking and clan ranking definitely needs some updates. additionally, since clan squad died whatever time ago there are very few (if any) clan based events. I think this aspect is heavily neglected because there is almost no reason to join a clan other than associating yourself with your online buddies.
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.
sure, not overlapping. but my point was that there are circulating funds of thousands of dollars that are just no being spent at nabi, so I know that in order for the business to grow and the game to update funds are necessary. I think as far as business strategies go, introducing a plausible item/feature that players are willing to pay the company would be beneficial if the game is to continue it's necessary updates and overall promotion.
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.
yea, this would be the 'easiest' but as you explained not beneficial at all. I wouldn't support something like that. but there are such few things in the torishop worth buying for real money at the moment.
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.
yea agree, what you guys are doing with battlepass is/was much needed.
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.
yea, of the 20 players I personally know selling, flipping items, dueling whatever I believe there has been at least $20,000 that have fluctated over X amount of time (I wouldn't know where to begin or end, and I really don't have the data to back that up). not saying that the amount you can make as a top player is life-changing but its definitely substantial enough to at least have that aspect as a spotlight on the game. I believe it does encourage users to learn more strategies and mechanics to get better.
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: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.
- 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".
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.
I get you, and I am definitely not claiming you guys don't do shit like some other players here. but if it is possible, rather than the transparency report on infractions, I believe that giving us some monthly updates on suggestions that are being worked on and linking to those suggestions to give the community a feel that they have a presence would definitely have a positive effect on morale on state of the game.
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?
I should have been more specific, I meant league of legends in comparison. and with that I meant that difficulty from game 1 is high.
heres a thought:
upgraded general tutorial
more tutorials that can be unlocked as players level up their belts. so as you play you are able to learn about more and more aspects of the game so that you can play better, because with toribash, the better you play and understand the mechanics and meta the more fun you can have (just like any competitive-oriented game)
last game I relied on the tutorial to get the grasp of the game was smite. I believe it is very necessary the more difficult the game concept is. especially with something as unique as toribash. ghost, grab mechanics, and basic official mod strategies are very important to learn in my opinion. and understanding the game syncs with player acquisition and retention.
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.
going in with that mindset (which is the current that I see being promoted through tiktok) only can last for so long. I don't agree that you don't need to understand what every joint does. it is important, its just something that can be learned through multiple tutorials as a suggested above, please let me know what your thoughts are on that.
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.
totally agree, and I'm glad you noticed.
again, I believe it would be beneficial to be open on all the suggestions being worked on from month to month with timelines and open discussion. even if something such as ranking is set to be worked on with an ETA of 8/1/2023, we would like to know that the suggestions or ideas deemed plausible are being taken into consideration.
I hope you'll find the time to respond as well, every other response in this thread is just going to be a dumb meme and a waste of time to engage on. so I hope I am able to bring up thoughts and ideas that can better grow the community and gameplay.
teeth marks on my goosebumps, the chains frostbit me.
lets be honest sir you know a lot of people quit because TC is deemed worthless to those who cant sell it, for instance if people want to duel USD vs TC it usually has to be a much higher rate than what TC sells for in the verified sellers market, because TC is literally worthless, and useless to many players including myself.
Originally Posted by mwah
1stly, thank you for taking the time to respond
before I can initiate a proper response in that comparison, we must know what constitutes an active player. are these players that have played at least 100 games in that week? 50 games? more than 10?
Those stats are all people who played the game, be it in Free Play or Multiplayer.
If we look for players who played at least 10 games in multiplayer during past week, it's 1159 users with Green Belt or above. There's surely going to be less people as you set the bar for "activity" higher but people making real money from Toribash would still be a tiny fraction of the community.
I hope that makes more sense in regards to what I said previously, in no way do I think it would be ideal to market the game as something you can make money off of. I just think that it is worth mentioning that there is an aspect of the game in which, if you learn the mechanics and meta for many official modes, you do not need to be a streamer or influencer to profit. you can make money simply by playing the game well.
It does make sense, yes. Though I don't necessarily agree on competitive gameplay being a completely separate thing from entertainment I see your line of thought.
right, but you can mitigate that by introducing strategies for player retention, giving more reasons to be active, reasons to purchase things through the company, etc. new players are valuable because of the potential they bring. if they enjoy the game and continue playing at some point they will spend money on it.
Correct, that's why we keep updating existing game features and do events. I understand they may not always meet the expectations but we still primarily keep existing players in mind, especially with events.
personal ranking and clan ranking definitely needs some updates. additionally, since clan squad died whatever time ago there are very few (if any) clan based events. I think this aspect is heavily neglected because there is almost no reason to join a clan other than associating yourself with your online buddies.
Clans currently have pretty much no purpose now, I agree. I'll try to fix that in future but currently it's just not feasible from the dev side - and as you can guess there's been no movement within volunteer staff team to do anything about clans.
I get you, and I am definitely not claiming you guys don't do shit like some other players here. but if it is possible, rather than the transparency report on infractions, I believe that giving us some monthly updates on suggestions that are being worked on and linking to those suggestions to give the community a feel that they have a presence would definitely have a positive effect on morale on state of the game.
Well, moderation transparency report isn't something that anybody but the Tori Agents team are in charge of. Hanna thought it'd be nice to let people know how reports get handled so the thing happened.
Issue with updates on suggestions is that there's often just nothing new to add.
Last major Toribash update was released almost a year ago and since then I had to work on a number of other Nabi projects which meant there was no Toribash development going on for roughly half a year. Then there was mobile version development that I didn't want to talk too much about too early (historically doesn't do any good in our case).
Keep in mind that we also have our own vision of how Toribash should evolve which doesn't always coincide with what is being suggested right now. It's likely that what we're working on has already been suggested some time years ago but I don't see any point in going through the S&I board digging for some old thread and randomly bumping it with "ok we did this".
heres a thought:
upgraded general tutorial
"Get better tutorials" is an obvious but pretty useless suggestion, I'll explain why.
We know tutorials could be better. We also don't know how exactly to improve them to get a guaranteed better result.
When we were updating tutorials to their current state, it took us an unreasonably long amount of time (we're speaking almost two years from the idea inception to its final execution). I am not willing to spend even a half of that time again on tutorials rework, other Nabi people are busy with other projects that I wouldn't want them to drop in favor of tutorials and there's been no volunteers to do it for us (not that I think there should be).
There's been a few attempts to make some new tutorials but in my opinion they've had even more flows than current ones do - already slow pacing was even slower, instead of teaching actual game mechanics and explaining why player needs to do something they literally just throw a list of moves for the player to execute and then say "ok you won congrats" and so on.
again, I believe it would be beneficial to be open on all the suggestions being worked on from month to month with timelines and open discussion. even if something such as ranking is set to be worked on with an ETA of 8/1/2023, we would like to know that the suggestions or ideas deemed plausible are being taken into consideration.
As you likely know, we're not exactly good at giving time estimates. Aside from all the personal reasons (which affect a team of 1 or 2 way more than they do, say, a team of 10) development isn't always 100% predictable, especially when doing something that wasn't done in Toribash before. Some parts of Toribash code are now almost two decades old as well and sometimes adding new features means rewriting that old stuff first - which I don't think anybody but a few people in the community would frankly care about (lol devs just use UE5 you idiots).
Originally Posted by KlausSchwab
lets be honest sir you know a lot of people quit because TC is deemed worthless to those who cant sell it, for instance if people want to duel USD vs TC it usually has to be a much higher rate than what TC sells for in the verified sellers market, because TC is literally worthless, and useless to many players including myself.
I concur good sir. Glad to know there's at least two intellectuals that play this game.
