Tribal Wars, A Dying Game?

[Michael Corleone.]

Alright, attempt #2 on this since my last attempt at this for whatever reason was never approved.


Let me start off by saying in by no way am I knocking or mocking the game of Tribal Wars or any of the staff that works here on Tribal Wars. Believe it or not, I do appreciate the work you guys put in to run this game, and for that I thank you for it. But now lets get down to business since I believe this could be a very interesting topic to talk about. Tribal Wars has been around for a few years now, and I remember back when I started playing in 2008, this game was pretty popular on the internet. I remember seeing countless advertisements for this game back in my early days, but as my playing days progressed, I began to see less and less advertisements and today, I don't think I have seen any at all anywhere. I didn't think much of it, and basically ignored that until one my friends here mentioned that Tribal Wars only has 200K+ players, or at least thats what it says on the front page of tribalwars.net. As of today, there are 224,905. However, back in 2008, I do thank Gorth for this link, .net had many, many more players. And to show you all that:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080421105206/http://www.tribalwars.net/

^ That is a picture of the .net front page more then 2 years ago when W19 just came out, and as you can see, there were 800k+ players back then. Now, did I just see that right? 800k+ players back in 2008? We have nearly 225k+ players in 2010, so in the matter of 2 years, where did 600K players go? Did they all just disappear from .net? I found this pretty alarming to tell you the truth. But another friend of mine linked me to a post from Thargoran on the .us forums, yes, there is a .us server in TW just in case you haven't noticed, and he showed that it was not only .net thats been on the decline, but other servers as well:

That's now. TW in general needs some more advertising (beyond the bit of banner exchange, which is done now). UK had 50k after 1 month. .net had far more than 500k, now 200k, the German version almost reached the million users, now it's down to less than 500k...

An example of their traffic/visits:

There's more competition nowadays on the market of browsergames.

Perhaps he is right, there is more competition on the market for browsergames, but has anyone else noticed this? Is the game that we all play, Tribal Wars on the decline, or just hitting a big bump on the road? I want to all of your thoughts and opinions on this matter because nobody talks about it and I feel that its a very interesting topic of discussion that everyone can participate in. So the question remains, is Tribal Wars on the decline for good?

 

[DeletedUser]

Could it have anything to do with a global recession? Of course, that wouldnt be the only factor, and a decline in advertisements is a definite problem.

I think another problem is this:

Worlds are increasingly geared towards premades and "elite" players. Most decent veterans are able to blow out the new players at the start of every world. There is also very little motivation to help them. The best players group together in their experienced tribes. They dismiss players who grow too slowly rather than give them a few pointers.

If you cant learn to play, and experienced players continually blow you away early in every world, how many worlds do you play before you quit? Probably not many. Early on, the opposite was true. Most players were new, or had only played 1 or 2 worlds with any success. Premades didnt really exist, and the few that did probably werent anywhere near as good as some of them are these days.

In order to keep these new players around, you have to encourage players to teach new ones.

 

[DeletedUser]

Could it have anything to do with a global recession? Of course, that wouldnt be the only factor, and a decline in advertisements is a definite problem.

I think another problem is this:

Worlds are increasingly geared towards premades and "elite" players. Most decent veterans are able to blow out the new players at the start of every world. There is also very little motivation to help them. The best players group together in their experienced tribes. They dismiss players who grow too slowly rather than give them a few pointers.

If you cant learn to play, and experienced players continually blow you away early in every world, how many worlds do you play before you quit? Probably not many. Early on, the opposite was true. Most players were new, or had only played 1 or 2 worlds with any success. Premades didnt really exist, and the few that did probably werent anywhere near as good as some of them are these days.

In order to keep these new players around, you have to encourage players to teach new ones.

You are wrong on so many counts it's unreal :icon_eek:

The worlds lately are set towards noobier players. Especially on other servers.
Think about it. .net has included new settings, such as the paladin, archers, and the Church. Although they were created to include variety, you cannot deny that growing barbarians is a change for casual players.

Other servers do even more to cater for this. .uk has released a no-tribe-member-limit world with 7K barbs, and .us let's you pay premium for quicker buildings. :icon_neutral:


Also, wouldn't a recession boost TW's figures? More people without jobs = More people with tons of free time. And that's what you need for this game.

 

[DeletedUser]

paladin - allows vets to start farming earlier and faster, jumping far ahead early on compared to a player who doesnt know to make pally and begin farming barbs quick
archers - an excellent defense, I use high archer builds to ensure that players, especially newbs who dont make an MA nuke or two, cant break me easily
Never played a church world
Growing barbs allow newbs to noble decent sized villas when they cant fight real players, correct. But it also allows experienced players literally millions more resources from farming over time.
7k barbs? Honestly, newb or not, thats big enough for me to mass noble and Id kill every newb around simply because I was able to noble the large barbs faster
Premium for faster builds doesnt cater to newbs, it caters to players who get premiums, which I think most of the time, are non newbs

As far as the recession goes, I just meant I know a lot of people who are now working multiple low paying jobs instead of working a single middle management position, so they really dont have time to play anymore. Or their spouse is out of a job, so they take more overtime or something.

None of what you said caters to newer players - it simply makes it easier for experienced players to dominate over them

 

[DeletedUser]

Wow those are incredibly scary stats.

I've been in various discussions in these forums, on this topic, just shed in a different light. Some of the various problems that could be contributing to this decline.
But with numbers like those I find it hard to believe that any changes (barring major ones), could really bring back the game to it's former glory of near 1 million users.

I have to admit, I started late on this game, I started on w8 & w14 at the same time, happened across it from a banner advertisement. (something I never see anymore either)
After a small amount of experience, a month or two, I joined up on W19, a different type of world, all of them were really to see what style I really enjoyed.
So I would have joined right about when there was 875k users.

When w32 came out, I decided to close down the first 3 worlds, which were really my learning curve for the game, and put all my effort into w32, and determined it’d be my last, a year and a half ago.

The problem for me, and why I made that decision:
This game for me is more than just about growing an account, it’s about your tribe, the social atmosphere within it, the personalities you meet, the players you can teach, and learn from, the community of the world as a whole.
I’d love to start up these new worlds, and try out some new features, but until I get some closure on w32, I’ll always be leaving some of those bonds behind. I also find it hard to commit to more worlds because of the time commitment involved if you want to be extremely competitive. And yet, I find w32 in a fast decline, where much of the competition has left, and it’s hard to find another reason (aside from those bonds) to stay at all, considering the world will likely last another year and a half.

The two biggest reasons I hear for people leaving?
The accounts are getting too big, boring, tedious, and it’s a time consuming effort in order to send out attacks, supports, scouts because here are so many villages.
There’s no competition left (because everyone else already left), they are moving on to find competition in newer worlds.

The Reality
This game doesn’t cater to those who want to play long term, and instead of fixing the core problem which is making the game playable (time wise) at the latter stages, or making the life of a world shorter, Innogames has gone and opened up more and more worlds to catch those players quitting, which just dilutes the competition, and makes the problems of a lack of competition all that more visibile. Cycling through all the problems all over again.

First Off:
People look for goals, they look for a sense of accomplishment, they look for finality.
People want to be able to rank themselves up against the next person, and be able to measure their worth.
The achievements are a nice start to this, you need to expand those ideas, there’s a great suggestion in the suggestions forum about creating tribal milestones which are updated automatically in game (instead of the community half assed doing them in each worlds forum). This sort of thing allows players/tribemates, to leave a history behind when they leave, instead of what we get now, the dark nothingness as everyone forgets who ran a world, and that’s appealing to many.

Secondly:
People want closure, so they can move on to new worlds without having to carry guilt on leaving mates behind.
Anyone who doesn’t enjoy the initial stages of a world, the new features, and the new experiences that come with it are fooling themselves.
But until worlds start closing down there are many who just hold on until they burn out.

You want to get more people playing, raise the level of competition in your game.
At 20 worlds, you had 850k players. (Hefty 50k player pools across 20 worlds)
At 50 worlds you have 225k players. (Skimpy 4.5k player pools across 50 worlds)

Your player pool is diluted, leaving less competition per world, causing the hardcore gamers to walk all over the lack of competition in the worlds.
This is not appealing for players, new ones get walked all over with out even a chance to learn, while older players don't get the fights that made this game so great.
The experience is not what it once was :icon_cry:


(ok wasnt' meaning to right an essay!)

 

[DeletedUser]

I actually thought a lot about this and discussed it with some friends that I played with. One reason we were tossing around might be that there are more and more local servers, and players might have migrated to those servers - for example, I have stopped playing .net version and am currently playing only .hr servers. But I see you mention even .uk, .us and .de servers losing players, so this might not be correct.

Another problem that might be relevant to this is that TW basically didn't change too much in past years, all the changes were very minor, or complete failures (growing bars to 12k, Churches...). It has this fundamental flaw that early on offense is much more powerful than defense, and as the time goes by, defenders get stronger and stronger, with the ability to stack against incoming attacks. Also, there's really little variety to the game, it's always the same builds, the same tactics. What I liked about Grepolis for example was a bit more complex teching system with a more diverse unit selection. Maybe a core change is needed, to bring something really new to the table? Not sure really. What I also think would be a good addition is worlds that actually end, so the players can have a feel of accomplishment if they win the server. These never ending worlds kill any sort of interest for the game, as there is always a cycle of one tribe being dominant, then its players going inactive out of boredom, then dissolving into many smaller tribe, out of which one tribe comes out being dominant and so on...

But I think the biggest problem of TW right now is that it's catering to masses and with that alienating their core customers. It's just a feeling I have, today I posted a new thread in this section but it still isn't approved, so I'll put my post here also, as I do think it relates to the OP subject

'I don't know how many of you tried out Grepolis, another InnoGames game. The game really looked promising and I was really eager to keep playing it and take a break from TW. But there was one option in there that completely killed any sort of competitive play in that game - the ability to halve the build time by using premium points. What happened is that the players with a lot of money were able to build their towns up very fast, get to nobling state ahead of most players who were reluctant to spend their money in such a fashion and create a large gap that later just grew even more. Once a player, just to make a point, reduced the build time of a building from 26h to 5 minutes.

I had cases of attacking a player, taking out his walls, and him just buying his walls back to full lvl in couple of hours.

So I said screw that, I'm going back to TW, where if I'm not doing that good, it's because others are just better than me, and I need to improve my game.

But today a new world opened up on Croatian servers, and in that worlds description there's this little line:

+ additional premium feature: in the list of construction it is now possible to halve the build time of the building with 10 premium points


Now, I would really, really like if someone could tell me this won't be happening, and it's just some kind of mistake, or whatever. Because if this happens, I'm sure many will leave this game. But I somewhat fear it really doesn't matter much, because if InnoGames have decided to implement this in TW, it means they made a bunch of money on it in Grepolis.'

 

[DeletedUser]

I completely agree with you AYK on the matter of players not having a closure. There shouldn't be so many worlds, all in a state of massive inactivity and prevalent boredom.

I always wished that for example w13 had ended, and INSO were declared winners, because they deserved it. Now what will happen is that with time they will go inactive, new tribes will form and it will start all over again, and no one will give INSO their due credit for that world. I feel it would be much much better if worlds had ending, and if you could have in game awards that would state 'Rank 1 in w17', 'Tribe rank 3 in w36'....

 

[DeletedUser]

So I said screw that, I'm going back to TW, where if I'm not doing that good, it's because others are just better than me, and I need to improve my game.

Oh your back?
I have an account if you need it bud ~

Been a long time.
I definitely share your sentiments about finality to a world.

 

[DeletedUser]

@AYK - Lord Hellz suggested a 4K by 4K world before. Personally. I'd love that. But the idea got shot down.

@ Odo - Same with .us and the asian servers. The real reason for the Premium change is because they wanted to use that new feature on new servers, and having two premium tariffs is confusing.

@Ankaar - My first world was a paladin archer world, and I still managed to work out the benefits of both. Not all newbs are thick. They look at the help page and work stuff out. With the paladin (especially bonfire), and archers, newbs have a much greater chance of putting up an early offence than they otherwise would.

 

[DeletedUser]

But today a new world opened up on Croatian servers, and in that worlds description there's this little line:

+ additional premium feature: in the list of construction it is now possible to halve the build time of the building with 10 premium points


Now, I would really, really like if someone could tell me this won't be happening, and it's just some kind of mistake, or whatever. Because if this happens, I'm sure many will leave this game. But I somewhat fear it really doesn't matter much, because if InnoGames have decided to implement this in TW, it means they made a bunch of money on it in Grepolis.'

That is honestly a terrible thing for the game to do.

I used to play uc.gamestotal.com, a game in which you fought other players for planets instead of villages. It was a great game, player count growing for a while. Then players were given the option to buy special things for donation points (same as pp's)
They could buy planets, max out their system count (giving huge defensive bonuses, basically making them unbeatable), as well as a number of other things of that sort.

Giving premium players any advantage over other players is stupid in my mind. The advantages tw gives currently I think are enough - no point making it so a rich guy can waltz in and get a 12k village in half the time it takes even the most skilled player who is unable to buy their way up

 

[DeletedUser]

+ additional premium feature: in the list of construction it is now possible to halve the build time of the building with 10 premium points

'

forsure in croatia??

I´m from .de and the German CM told to us that these "feature" is only for the asian market?

But I think Innogames wont do that to .de (i dont know about .net) because they would loose the last loyal players who fall in love with this game...

hope so

 

[DeletedUser]

You are wrong on so many counts it's unreal :icon_eek:

The worlds lately are set towards noobier players. Especially on other servers.
Think about it. .net has included new settings, such as the paladin, archers, and the Church. Although they were created to include variety, you cannot deny that growing barbarians is a change for casual players.

Other servers do even more to cater for this. .uk has released a no-tribe-member-limit world with 7K barbs, and .us let's you pay premium for quicker buildings. :icon_neutral:


Also, wouldn't a recession boost TW's figures? More people without jobs = More people with tons of free time. And that's what you need for this game.

Lol, firstly archers and paladins were introduces Feb 07, growing barbs Dec 07. By no means are the updates to be blamed on this since they were here way before the 'peak of TW'. Lack of advertisement is the main reason. Unless i google tribalwars i rarely get hits. Even if i google 'browser based strategy games' or 'best real-time strategy games' etc.. i most of the time end up with E***y or T*****n, and those games are yuck yuck and i intend to never play them.

I also think Ankaar was spot on (or close), the level of the 'average' TW player has risen in the past years tremendously. When back in 07 you had very few (not that few, but few) players who could farm correctly and were aggressive enough to kill vast number of newbies, then now every other player can launch 'that' attack be it efficient or not thanks to the various guides on the forum. I remember as a newbie i never read 'these' forums, it took me more than half a year to visit the forum for the first time and start reading guides and 'leet' opinions. I was only able to survive thanks to my neighbours being as nooby as i was. Now the newbies get killed a day after BP ends. They never have the chance to evolve to a good player and more than likely quit as Ankaar said.

This game has gotten way too aggressive on the 'average game play level'.


EDIT: I'm a slow typer. ._.

 

[DeletedUser]

@Ankaar - My first world was a paladin archer world, and I still managed to work out the benefits of both. Not all newbs are thick. They look at the help page and work stuff out. With the paladin (especially bonfire), and archers, newbs have a much greater chance of putting up an early offence than they otherwise would.

Of course not all newbs are idiots. There are those players who spend all day online playing games, so learning this one is simple. But we need to cater to everyone.

One thing that might help -
Dont allow players to choose starting location. When a tribe full of experienced members pp up in a K, there is no way they are going to recruit someone who has no idea what theyre doing. They will eventually noble just about all of them.

 

[DeletedUser]

@the1nd1ly

Yes, I even asked the CM there to confirm it, and he says the new world that opened yesterday has that option enabled

And I do agree with Gorth, those are some good points. When I started w13, I was really horrible. But really, a classic noob. But I had enough time to get my town up, while learning new stuff from guides, as no one was attacking me early on. If I started a new world today, I would become a farm after BP ends and would probably give up the game eventually.

Maybe a good Video Tutorials would help new players survive, and they should also be an integral part of start up tutorial whenever someone starts a new world, as many people skip on reading guides and tutorials and especially the current Help that pops up when starting a new world. An option of not being able to choose your location would probably be good as many of the newer worlds had that, and it just allows experienced players to group together and just kill off new players instead of helping them.

 

[DeletedUser]

What a shame, its getting nearer :O

 

[DeletedUser79062]

Even thought this would prolly kill the game, wouldn't it be a better idea to set a time limit your allowed per day on an account. Then it'd be more strategy.
You guyz will prolly hate this idea but it may help

 

[DeletedUser]

Even thought this would prolly kill the game, wouldn't it be a better idea to set a time limit your allowed per day on an account. Then it'd be more strategy.
You guyz will prolly hate this idea but it may help

Youre right - I hate that idea lol. Limit my time on a world and Id have to play all 50 worlds Coplayed accounts would be hit hard though, I do like that

 

[DeletedUser]

the "halve construction time" premium feature is only on the national asian/ american servers, doubt it will ever make its way onto .net, there's a thread about it somewhere that I'm too lazy to link too

regarding the main topic: As many have mentioned before, I think the problem lies in the fact that alot of players are "stuck" in the older worlds. It's always hard to quit a world you've spent a lot of time in, primarily because you never get that good ol' accomplishment feeling that makes us think "great, now I'm done and can put this thing behind me". in short, the game lacks a climax where the tension that has built up over the months/ years get released in a way that leaves all the players feeling like they can move on without feeling like their giving up and throwing away all the effort they laid into the game.

This doesn't mean you have to close down the worlds when a tribe reaches X points or the like, doing so would only encourage point whoring and the like, but instead there should be an option available to the general population of a world where they can say "we're done", I've seen many worlds where you have a gigantic war, followed by a long peace streak while the entire world sinks into inactivity for a few months until the dominant tribe from the previous war is weakened enough to make another war happen. This is a sure-fire way to make people slowly get sick of the game, instead of giving them a finish that might motivate them to retry their luck on a new world while they're still "in the zone" or whatever you want to call it

edit: a time limit is silly, why don't we add an inc limit while we're at it and call it a day? o.o

 

[DeletedUser]

What about a world where hauling capacities of units are drastically reduced, and the resource production of pits is increased? This would attempt to solve the problem of experienced players farming 24/7 and just over running any players in their area - it would allow even the casual players without much time on their hands to try and compete with others, and most players would have similar income. I feel this world would be more geared towards new players, the vets would probably hate it as they would feel the skill ceiling is relatively low.


Also to follow up Eyoh post, what I've noticed that many players, when they finally decide to quit, they hate this game so much. I know when I quit w13 after 2 years of playing, I was exhausted, I hated the game, I hated the fact that the accounts just keep getting bigger and bigger, and there was no end in sight. I'm sure the ending worlds would reduce this problem a bit, it would give players a chance to take a break after ending one world, and then they would come back for another one. I keep following w13 and I can not realise why people still keep on playing 15+ million accounts, when there's only barbs to noble, or inactive players, and there's no end in sight, you can't win anything, you might with this next war, but what about after that, and after that, and when players start quiting, your tribe dissolves...it's hard letting go, I know, it was really hard for me to drop my 6mil account. But luckily I was pretty much forced to do it by real life issues, so I had that privilege, otherwise I would probably still be playing it.

TW Team needs to force people to give up their massive accounts, and tell them 'hey here's a great new world, you won this one, why not start a new experience, maybe even better than the last on?'

 

[DeletedUser]

the "halve construction time" premium feature is only on the national asian/ american servers, doubt it will ever make its way onto .net, there's a thread about it somewhere that I'm too lazy to link too

regarding the main topic: As many have mentioned before, I think the problem lies in the fact that alot of players are "stuck" in the older worlds. It's always hard to quit a world you've spent a lot of time in, primarily because you never get that good ol' accomplishment feeling that makes us think "great, now I'm done and can put this thing behind me". in short, the game lacks a climax where the tension that has built up over the months/ years get released in a way that leaves all the players feeling like they can move on without feeling like their giving up and throwing away all the effort they laid into the game.

This doesn't mean you have to close down the worlds when a tribe reaches X points or the like, doing so would only encourage point whoring and the like, but instead there should be an option available to the general population of a world where they can say "we're done", I've seen many worlds where you have a gigantic war, followed by a long peace streak while the entire world sinks into inactivity for a few months until the dominant tribe from the previous war is weakened enough to make another war happen. This is a sure-fire way to make people slowly get sick of the game, instead of giving them a finish that might motivate them to retry their luck on a new world while they're still "in the zone" or whatever you want to call it

W12 is finally ending. Or should, assuming DNY does not break into a bunch of other tribes. Thats a huge problem - the breaking up of large tribes. Every time a tribe is doing well, it seems that they break up. That prolongs worlds for ages. I think having smaller worlds mixed in would be a great idea, 4x4 would be a great size.