mch123
Guest
This is going to be long - something akin to a thesis or dissertation. There are many issues I want to address here and many places I could start. However, I think it is all going to be rooted in 1 simple question...
Why do you play tribal wars?
Maybe what I really mean is 'What emotion(s) are you trying to satisfy?'
I know... it's deep and I'm going 'there'. However, I think it's an important question that forces us to understand not only ourselves but the individuals that make up our community, the members we are guiding as (tribe) leaders and standards we should be pushing our developer to uphold in order to create a friendly game environment and influence feature design.
Why do you play?
I play as a form of escapism from reality. I struggle with depression and I have no idea what to do with my life - especially in the context of work or career. I'm highly introverted and prefer to communicate via text so TW has offered me a social outlet.
In the more recent years I've been learning a lot about leadership. I've been getting feedback from friends, tribe members and generally by testing my theories and observing the reactions. In the more recent months I've been learning about game design and programming.
TW has offered a lot opportunities to not only escape from some of the pains I have in the real world but to learn new skills, develop some strong friendships and grow as a person.
From my many conversations with other players, I know escapism is a really common reason why people play. A number of players fall into the category of disabled/ill (even terminally) and it's a way for them to pass the time and connect with others who are not treating them differently/"trying to help" because of their conditions. The same goes for a lot of younger players who are socially awkward or get bullied and find a sense of belonging in a community such as their tribe or the wider community of the game as a whole.
There are obviously the achiever types too; who get hooked on the psychologically addictive parts of the game and general just want to dominate and destroy others.
These are all extreme examples but I feel like everyone has some level of all those things that they are looking for in this game.
This is just some context that I want everyone to remember as I go over other topics. We tend to get so dialed into the strategies and surface level issues that we forget why we (and other players) play the game in the first place. I think it's a lack of awareness of this that undermines the full potential of the TW experience and creates a lot of the negativity and short term decision making in the game.
Taking responsibility for the community
We've all blamed the developers and toxic players for the decline in the community. It's easy to point the finger. However, if we are all honest with ourselves, can we really say that we did all that we could to promote positivity and make the game a fun and welcoming place for new members of our community?
For a long time, I'd just stay silent. It's my introverted nature. "I'm not the one contributing towards the problem". "It's not my responsibility". However, under that logic, the problem still exists.
The math doesn't check out either. -1 for negativity, 0 for doing nothing, +1 for doing something positive. Well, that's a lot of -1's and 0's and not many +1's.
This is a call to action. If you play the game you are responsible for your part in the community – and you are a part of it, whether you want to be or not. Inaction is a conscious choice. You choose to not do anything and by extension you choose to let negativity triumph.
If you wasn't fully aware of this before, you are now. You also have a responsibility to make other members of the community aware of their responsibility. Go do something positive.
There are so many fantastic people in our community that I've had the privilege of talking to and befriending. I only wonder how many I have missed because I was too busy focussing on myself and staying silent. I also wonder how much more fun this community could be if we all decided to take 5 minutes a day to post something positive. A little conscious effort could resurrect "a dying game" and transform it past the issues it currently has.
This is not purely about "resurrecting the game" either. I'll get to that near the end of this essay but there is value in our community outside of the game itself. You only need listen to the responses of the 2 questions above to realise that.
Leadership and how to get the desired result from your tribe members
Terrible title but it's to the point of this next section. This is one of my biggest pet peeves and 80% of why I started this essay with a question. It's going to seem a little out of place for an article on community and game environment but take it all into consideration with the perspective of tribes being micro-communities within the larger community as a whole. It's far more practical for you as a reader to influence your tribe than it is to influence the whole TW community.
I'd say 98% of leaders are missing the human element when they run tribes. It isn't that black and white but even the leaders who are aware are missing parts of it. The majority are purely in strategy mode and forget that tribes are made up of people. They don't account for human error, real world commitments, how trust is truly built, friendships outside of the tribe and why the majority of us play in the first place.
By far the worst part is that most leaders don't foresee internal issues. Issues of culture, trust and purpose. Every tribe is out to "win the world" and few are building the core foundations that keep communities and friendships together long enough to do just that.
You need a purpose, a hierarchy of values, a culture, a way of handling the interpersonal issues and good communication. You need to put in the time and effort to define it all to yourself. The tribe doesn't necessarily need to know because it will be translated over by your decisions and actions. However, you need to know what you stand for and where you boundaries are. Afterall, you are the one who will be laying down the rules for everyone else and nothing shakes trust faster than not treating everyone fairly or moving the boundaries when it suits you.
The consequences are you'll have issues of belief and trust followed quickly by inactivity, poor communication and self preservation. This is typically when leaders start blaming the members but is really a reflection of the leader not understanding all the parts required to build these foundations of a tribe.
Leadership is a burden you carry. You work for the members. Everything you do is for their benefit, not yours. Good leaders understand that. By empowering others, you naturally benefit in the long term anyway. You lead because there is a cause or an issue that need solving and maintaining.
Personally, I can't stop myself from jumping in. When a tribe is sinking and all chaos is breaking out, I feel forced to jump in and create some stability. It's not for my benefit (directly) but I see my friends suffering and I just can't sit by and do nothing.
Avoid anyone who gets into leadership for glory or victory type reasons. Leadership is not a form or method of achievement. It's a commitment to helping others and uniting people under a common cause.
So, how should you build a tribe?
One to one conversations.
You need to understand the people you are dealing with.What makes them tick, why are they playing, what do they know about the game, how much time and effort they have to commit. These are your resources and your limitations – find them out before you are at war and need something they don't have.
It's basically the same process as making friends. You talk to people, you find out about them and then you do stuff that's mutually beneficial. Most of you start small tribes like this but your vision is so focussed on solving short term strategic problems that you undermine the trust and culture you've built."You need more members and more troops" so you start recruiting in people you barely know or making alliances with tribes who look the part.
This is the problem with the way the majority of tribes recruit. I'm entirely against the idea of elitist type recruitment and membership requirements but the open door policy is just as terrible.
Open door allows players in, most of them recreational because you have no filter, and when they don't meet your high expectations as a leader, you blame them for the failure of the tribe.
When they don't communicate, are slow to react (if at all) and only think of themselves - it makes other members question if it's fair that they have to pick up the slack. They start doubting and distrusting each other. It creates a lack of belief in the cause, erodes away at tribe culture, dilutes trust in the leadership and lower participation rates further.
These issues usually only surface on the outbreak of a war whereby the increase in pressure starts to show the faults and speeds up the process of the tribe falling apart.
My solution is to think longer term. The majority of leaders are fully bought into the game. You'll still be here in 10 worlds (although it's interesting to see who does quit after w100 but that's a little off topic). If you understand you are here for the long term, why not spend a few world building up a team of trust and competence to play a later world? Get everyone educated on these principles, of the actual game skills and build a proper team.
The following is an excerpt that I use when setting up trust and outlining the culture of my tribes when I recruit new members. I'm including it like this because I'm not sure how to rewrite it for the context of this essay but it gives you a concrete example of how to execute this strategy for building solid tribe foundations.
I did this from w90 to w94 and it was fantastic. 80+ players with 95%+ activity, trust and communication rates. Best team I've ever been apart of and it's not even close. I failed as a leader on a strategic level but that's another issue entirely. Many ex-members and friends still message me every time a world opens to see if I'm running anything again. I would love to run something similar but unfortunately, I still have those real life issues to deal with and they take away my ability to lead for any consistent period of time. I have also been feeling a greater burden to deal with the wider scale issues that I am writing about in this essay. This is probably my best avenue for killing all those birds with 1 stone.
To reiterate the first chapter, people are here for reasons other than "winning the world". They want to make friends, work with people that they can trust or simply have some fun away from their reality. As a collective, we do a pretty poor job of fulfilling these needs just so we can chase after achievements. It's about time that changed.
Lastly, I just want to highlight a statistic that shows the major flaw in the widespread "win the world" mentality. Only 1 tribe is able to win a world, it usually means less than 0.5% of the total players on a world can win. That's 1 in 200. Yet everyone is out to win and gets disappointed when shit hits the fan. This is why we need a conversation about how silly it is and why tribes need to adopt other purposes for being on a world.
We also know how long it takes for a world to work down to that little number of remaining players. It's another argument for contributing those 'secret' strategies (that I’ll address in the next chapter) - because skill isn't as big of a deal as you would like to think it is. Consistency is a more determining factor in winning a world. Teamwork and the ability to communicate are bigger factors too.
Hopefully that loosens your ego enough so that you can show the community how good you are through your effort to help educate newer players and create a more positive environment.
New players and new members to the community
Thanks to my terrible editing abilities, you already know I’m about to ask you to divulge your “secret” strategies to new players. First I want you to think about the TW experience from a new players perspective to give you the context as to why you should share.
There's so much negativity in the game directed at new players; calling player names for a lack of skill or activity, creating exclusive tribes via membership requirements and the short sighted backstabbing/spying for personal advantage. It makes the game unbearable for new players. If your first experience is getting insulted, excluded, lied to and used - of course you are not going to stick around.
Then there is the pretty poor quest system, mentoring system and general lack of information for someone to learn about the game strategies. I'm only going to tackle these quickly because they are less about community and more about player retention. Something needs to be done and as a community we have the skills and knowledge to put some of these resources together.
For those of you who care about the game but don't want to give away all your 'secrets', I tell you this:
The mentoring system needs to be incentivised for the mentor. Mentors have little reason to make sure the advice they are giving is good. I have no idea if apprentices get to choose their mentor based on the rating system but there should at least be a bio and opportunity to see past apprentice reviews. I haven't researched this enough but it's a secondary concern in regards to incentivising mentors to educate properly and create positive experiences for new players.
Again, maybe you could incentivise players to contribute on the help/wiki pages too.
Either way, there is currently a poor selection for new players to learn about the game. The inability to learn how to compete kills most would be fans before they ever really buy into the community and reap the benefits I mentioned before.
Influencing the developer to build a better game environment
I want to doubt that the only thing Innogames cares about is their bottom line but I can't say I've seen a whole lot to suggest otherwise. It's a problem for us as a community and the key reason why all past protests (mostly crying on the forums and collective non-participation) hasn't created any solid change. We keep playing because there are no good alternatives. Innogames keeps making their money and the worlds keep getting smaller.
Now I'm a realist, I understand business and recognise that no other model will make as much profit as "Pay-to-Win". This doesn't mean that there are no other viable models that create a happy medium between developer profit and a balanced positive game environment for the player.
I've been collecting my own ideas to solve the financial issues for over 6 months now so I'm just going to throw them out here for you (and hopefully Innogames) to consider. Please also consider the effects of each idea under the conditions of a little more conscious effort towards branding, a growing player base and a well designed and balanced game.
If you consider that the starting point for what to do, the next question is how to get Innogames to implement it? Personally, I think we need to threaten their profit margins to make them sit up and listen. Non-participation hasn't worked but I believe there is an alternative.
We have many smart and skilled members in this community. If united together, I don't doubt we could find the right people to build an alternative. There's enough money being pumped into premium points and enough passion about creating a fair game that I'm sure we could finance a project to match our ambition. It could potentially even be open source. Built and maintained during each of our free time.
It's an option that I'm presenting seriously. As I mentioned earlier, I have spent the last 6 months learning to code and theorising about different aspects of game design. There is a lot of potential and it's completely achievable. My issue has been that I can't learn every skill needed fast enough.
Now my intention isn't to overthrow Innogames here. I just want them to start taking the calls for change seriously and understand what makes a truly great game – something that Tribal Wars has the potential to be.
They already have the expertise and financial clout available to implement a lot of these ideas. I just want to show them that they need to change or the community will put them out of business. I'm not talking just about Tribal Wars here either. Done correctly it would be the only game in the market that is truly free to play, with a balanced and competitive game design.
In my eyes, Tribal Wars is the leading game in the MMO RTS space. I've seen many comments that state the whole genre is in decline due to a move to mobile gaming as well as Pay-to-Win models. My personal opinion is because none of the existing games create a fair playing field or an engaging, appropriately paced, PvP environment. Each falls short on 1 aspect or another.
I also think that strategy is relatively limited in an "even playing field" version of Tribal Wars - which I'll happily accept given the current state of the game. However there are options for increasing variance in strategy with some small changes and additions. Something simple like 3-6 different classes that you choose when signing up to a world that open up access to different troop types. The strengths and weaknesses of each type get rebalanced from world to world based on pick and success rates.
It would just add another dimension to the game that keeps it fresh. It's one of many ideas I would suggest implementing if the community decided to band together to create a solution itself. I'd list them all but this is long enough and it wouldn't be fitting the original purpose of this essay – which is to make TW great for the community again. (here come the memes)
Closing thoughts
I know it's a hot issue but I don't want that last chapter to be the predominant take away or the topic for the following discussion that ensues. It's just a window into some of the things I have been thinking about and a little something to give you hope that we'll find a solution. If necessary, I'll write another essay in more detail covering my thoughts on balanced game design, branding, income generation and other related topics. We can discuss those issues there. You can also message me directly.
What I really want to see are your personal responses to the questions at the very start. Why do you play Tribal Wars? What emotions are you trying to satisfy? Stories of how the community and game have impacted you? The things you can personally do to make your community (and micro communities) a more fun and positive place, especially for newcomers.
Answer those first and then add your 2 cents on the state of the game.
I really hope this can spark some changes because I really love the community and the game on a fundamental level. I see so much potential and so little being done to improve things.
Martyn
Why do you play tribal wars?
Maybe what I really mean is 'What emotion(s) are you trying to satisfy?'
I know... it's deep and I'm going 'there'. However, I think it's an important question that forces us to understand not only ourselves but the individuals that make up our community, the members we are guiding as (tribe) leaders and standards we should be pushing our developer to uphold in order to create a friendly game environment and influence feature design.
Why do you play?
I play as a form of escapism from reality. I struggle with depression and I have no idea what to do with my life - especially in the context of work or career. I'm highly introverted and prefer to communicate via text so TW has offered me a social outlet.
In the more recent years I've been learning a lot about leadership. I've been getting feedback from friends, tribe members and generally by testing my theories and observing the reactions. In the more recent months I've been learning about game design and programming.
TW has offered a lot opportunities to not only escape from some of the pains I have in the real world but to learn new skills, develop some strong friendships and grow as a person.
From my many conversations with other players, I know escapism is a really common reason why people play. A number of players fall into the category of disabled/ill (even terminally) and it's a way for them to pass the time and connect with others who are not treating them differently/"trying to help" because of their conditions. The same goes for a lot of younger players who are socially awkward or get bullied and find a sense of belonging in a community such as their tribe or the wider community of the game as a whole.
There are obviously the achiever types too; who get hooked on the psychologically addictive parts of the game and general just want to dominate and destroy others.
These are all extreme examples but I feel like everyone has some level of all those things that they are looking for in this game.
This is just some context that I want everyone to remember as I go over other topics. We tend to get so dialed into the strategies and surface level issues that we forget why we (and other players) play the game in the first place. I think it's a lack of awareness of this that undermines the full potential of the TW experience and creates a lot of the negativity and short term decision making in the game.
Taking responsibility for the community
We've all blamed the developers and toxic players for the decline in the community. It's easy to point the finger. However, if we are all honest with ourselves, can we really say that we did all that we could to promote positivity and make the game a fun and welcoming place for new members of our community?
For a long time, I'd just stay silent. It's my introverted nature. "I'm not the one contributing towards the problem". "It's not my responsibility". However, under that logic, the problem still exists.
The math doesn't check out either. -1 for negativity, 0 for doing nothing, +1 for doing something positive. Well, that's a lot of -1's and 0's and not many +1's.
This is a call to action. If you play the game you are responsible for your part in the community – and you are a part of it, whether you want to be or not. Inaction is a conscious choice. You choose to not do anything and by extension you choose to let negativity triumph.
If you wasn't fully aware of this before, you are now. You also have a responsibility to make other members of the community aware of their responsibility. Go do something positive.
There are so many fantastic people in our community that I've had the privilege of talking to and befriending. I only wonder how many I have missed because I was too busy focussing on myself and staying silent. I also wonder how much more fun this community could be if we all decided to take 5 minutes a day to post something positive. A little conscious effort could resurrect "a dying game" and transform it past the issues it currently has.
This is not purely about "resurrecting the game" either. I'll get to that near the end of this essay but there is value in our community outside of the game itself. You only need listen to the responses of the 2 questions above to realise that.
Leadership and how to get the desired result from your tribe members
Terrible title but it's to the point of this next section. This is one of my biggest pet peeves and 80% of why I started this essay with a question. It's going to seem a little out of place for an article on community and game environment but take it all into consideration with the perspective of tribes being micro-communities within the larger community as a whole. It's far more practical for you as a reader to influence your tribe than it is to influence the whole TW community.
I'd say 98% of leaders are missing the human element when they run tribes. It isn't that black and white but even the leaders who are aware are missing parts of it. The majority are purely in strategy mode and forget that tribes are made up of people. They don't account for human error, real world commitments, how trust is truly built, friendships outside of the tribe and why the majority of us play in the first place.
By far the worst part is that most leaders don't foresee internal issues. Issues of culture, trust and purpose. Every tribe is out to "win the world" and few are building the core foundations that keep communities and friendships together long enough to do just that.
You need a purpose, a hierarchy of values, a culture, a way of handling the interpersonal issues and good communication. You need to put in the time and effort to define it all to yourself. The tribe doesn't necessarily need to know because it will be translated over by your decisions and actions. However, you need to know what you stand for and where you boundaries are. Afterall, you are the one who will be laying down the rules for everyone else and nothing shakes trust faster than not treating everyone fairly or moving the boundaries when it suits you.
The consequences are you'll have issues of belief and trust followed quickly by inactivity, poor communication and self preservation. This is typically when leaders start blaming the members but is really a reflection of the leader not understanding all the parts required to build these foundations of a tribe.
Leadership is a burden you carry. You work for the members. Everything you do is for their benefit, not yours. Good leaders understand that. By empowering others, you naturally benefit in the long term anyway. You lead because there is a cause or an issue that need solving and maintaining.
Personally, I can't stop myself from jumping in. When a tribe is sinking and all chaos is breaking out, I feel forced to jump in and create some stability. It's not for my benefit (directly) but I see my friends suffering and I just can't sit by and do nothing.
Avoid anyone who gets into leadership for glory or victory type reasons. Leadership is not a form or method of achievement. It's a commitment to helping others and uniting people under a common cause.
So, how should you build a tribe?
One to one conversations.
You need to understand the people you are dealing with.What makes them tick, why are they playing, what do they know about the game, how much time and effort they have to commit. These are your resources and your limitations – find them out before you are at war and need something they don't have.
It's basically the same process as making friends. You talk to people, you find out about them and then you do stuff that's mutually beneficial. Most of you start small tribes like this but your vision is so focussed on solving short term strategic problems that you undermine the trust and culture you've built."You need more members and more troops" so you start recruiting in people you barely know or making alliances with tribes who look the part.
This is the problem with the way the majority of tribes recruit. I'm entirely against the idea of elitist type recruitment and membership requirements but the open door policy is just as terrible.
Open door allows players in, most of them recreational because you have no filter, and when they don't meet your high expectations as a leader, you blame them for the failure of the tribe.
When they don't communicate, are slow to react (if at all) and only think of themselves - it makes other members question if it's fair that they have to pick up the slack. They start doubting and distrusting each other. It creates a lack of belief in the cause, erodes away at tribe culture, dilutes trust in the leadership and lower participation rates further.
These issues usually only surface on the outbreak of a war whereby the increase in pressure starts to show the faults and speeds up the process of the tribe falling apart.
My solution is to think longer term. The majority of leaders are fully bought into the game. You'll still be here in 10 worlds (although it's interesting to see who does quit after w100 but that's a little off topic). If you understand you are here for the long term, why not spend a few world building up a team of trust and competence to play a later world? Get everyone educated on these principles, of the actual game skills and build a proper team.
The following is an excerpt that I use when setting up trust and outlining the culture of my tribes when I recruit new members. I'm including it like this because I'm not sure how to rewrite it for the context of this essay but it gives you a concrete example of how to execute this strategy for building solid tribe foundations.
I did this from w90 to w94 and it was fantastic. 80+ players with 95%+ activity, trust and communication rates. Best team I've ever been apart of and it's not even close. I failed as a leader on a strategic level but that's another issue entirely. Many ex-members and friends still message me every time a world opens to see if I'm running anything again. I would love to run something similar but unfortunately, I still have those real life issues to deal with and they take away my ability to lead for any consistent period of time. I have also been feeling a greater burden to deal with the wider scale issues that I am writing about in this essay. This is probably my best avenue for killing all those birds with 1 stone.
To reiterate the first chapter, people are here for reasons other than "winning the world". They want to make friends, work with people that they can trust or simply have some fun away from their reality. As a collective, we do a pretty poor job of fulfilling these needs just so we can chase after achievements. It's about time that changed.
Lastly, I just want to highlight a statistic that shows the major flaw in the widespread "win the world" mentality. Only 1 tribe is able to win a world, it usually means less than 0.5% of the total players on a world can win. That's 1 in 200. Yet everyone is out to win and gets disappointed when shit hits the fan. This is why we need a conversation about how silly it is and why tribes need to adopt other purposes for being on a world.
We also know how long it takes for a world to work down to that little number of remaining players. It's another argument for contributing those 'secret' strategies (that I’ll address in the next chapter) - because skill isn't as big of a deal as you would like to think it is. Consistency is a more determining factor in winning a world. Teamwork and the ability to communicate are bigger factors too.
Hopefully that loosens your ego enough so that you can show the community how good you are through your effort to help educate newer players and create a more positive environment.
New players and new members to the community
Thanks to my terrible editing abilities, you already know I’m about to ask you to divulge your “secret” strategies to new players. First I want you to think about the TW experience from a new players perspective to give you the context as to why you should share.
There's so much negativity in the game directed at new players; calling player names for a lack of skill or activity, creating exclusive tribes via membership requirements and the short sighted backstabbing/spying for personal advantage. It makes the game unbearable for new players. If your first experience is getting insulted, excluded, lied to and used - of course you are not going to stick around.
Then there is the pretty poor quest system, mentoring system and general lack of information for someone to learn about the game strategies. I'm only going to tackle these quickly because they are less about community and more about player retention. Something needs to be done and as a community we have the skills and knowledge to put some of these resources together.
For those of you who care about the game but don't want to give away all your 'secrets', I tell you this:
- Having these materials are a form of marketing and player retention.
- The majority of players are not going to execute your strategies effectively, if at all.
- You are mostly just giving newer players the hope that they can learn to be competitive in the game instead of allowing them to feel like the deck is stacked against them.
The mentoring system needs to be incentivised for the mentor. Mentors have little reason to make sure the advice they are giving is good. I have no idea if apprentices get to choose their mentor based on the rating system but there should at least be a bio and opportunity to see past apprentice reviews. I haven't researched this enough but it's a secondary concern in regards to incentivising mentors to educate properly and create positive experiences for new players.
Again, maybe you could incentivise players to contribute on the help/wiki pages too.
Either way, there is currently a poor selection for new players to learn about the game. The inability to learn how to compete kills most would be fans before they ever really buy into the community and reap the benefits I mentioned before.
Influencing the developer to build a better game environment
I want to doubt that the only thing Innogames cares about is their bottom line but I can't say I've seen a whole lot to suggest otherwise. It's a problem for us as a community and the key reason why all past protests (mostly crying on the forums and collective non-participation) hasn't created any solid change. We keep playing because there are no good alternatives. Innogames keeps making their money and the worlds keep getting smaller.
Now I'm a realist, I understand business and recognise that no other model will make as much profit as "Pay-to-Win". This doesn't mean that there are no other viable models that create a happy medium between developer profit and a balanced positive game environment for the player.
I've been collecting my own ideas to solve the financial issues for over 6 months now so I'm just going to throw them out here for you (and hopefully Innogames) to consider. Please also consider the effects of each idea under the conditions of a little more conscious effort towards branding, a growing player base and a well designed and balanced game.
- Merchandise (Who doesn't want a hoodie with a quote saying "feel my spear nuke"?)
- In-game cosmetics and collectibles (themed overlays, seasonal backgrounds, collectible playing card side game?).
- Community workshop – get the community to make the cosmetics and collectibles.
- Competitive speed/high performance rounds with entry fee and prize pool.
- Custom servers.
- Youtube shows – No idea how much youtube ads make or what you could get for other forms of sponsorship, but for a straight branding and marketing exercise to grow the player base and increase other methods of income, it would be worth it. Topics could be reviewing worlds, player interviews, strategy discussion, hyping up events, general news. And yes I know about the attempts by a few members of the community.
- Tiered Membership (as a form of donation) – from standard premium features to any number of the combined products mentioned above. Can keep the single purchase premium options and add monthly subscription tiers that are over-priced but offer a middle ground between merchandise and donation.
If you consider that the starting point for what to do, the next question is how to get Innogames to implement it? Personally, I think we need to threaten their profit margins to make them sit up and listen. Non-participation hasn't worked but I believe there is an alternative.
We have many smart and skilled members in this community. If united together, I don't doubt we could find the right people to build an alternative. There's enough money being pumped into premium points and enough passion about creating a fair game that I'm sure we could finance a project to match our ambition. It could potentially even be open source. Built and maintained during each of our free time.
It's an option that I'm presenting seriously. As I mentioned earlier, I have spent the last 6 months learning to code and theorising about different aspects of game design. There is a lot of potential and it's completely achievable. My issue has been that I can't learn every skill needed fast enough.
Now my intention isn't to overthrow Innogames here. I just want them to start taking the calls for change seriously and understand what makes a truly great game – something that Tribal Wars has the potential to be.
They already have the expertise and financial clout available to implement a lot of these ideas. I just want to show them that they need to change or the community will put them out of business. I'm not talking just about Tribal Wars here either. Done correctly it would be the only game in the market that is truly free to play, with a balanced and competitive game design.
In my eyes, Tribal Wars is the leading game in the MMO RTS space. I've seen many comments that state the whole genre is in decline due to a move to mobile gaming as well as Pay-to-Win models. My personal opinion is because none of the existing games create a fair playing field or an engaging, appropriately paced, PvP environment. Each falls short on 1 aspect or another.
I also think that strategy is relatively limited in an "even playing field" version of Tribal Wars - which I'll happily accept given the current state of the game. However there are options for increasing variance in strategy with some small changes and additions. Something simple like 3-6 different classes that you choose when signing up to a world that open up access to different troop types. The strengths and weaknesses of each type get rebalanced from world to world based on pick and success rates.
It would just add another dimension to the game that keeps it fresh. It's one of many ideas I would suggest implementing if the community decided to band together to create a solution itself. I'd list them all but this is long enough and it wouldn't be fitting the original purpose of this essay – which is to make TW great for the community again. (here come the memes)
Closing thoughts
I know it's a hot issue but I don't want that last chapter to be the predominant take away or the topic for the following discussion that ensues. It's just a window into some of the things I have been thinking about and a little something to give you hope that we'll find a solution. If necessary, I'll write another essay in more detail covering my thoughts on balanced game design, branding, income generation and other related topics. We can discuss those issues there. You can also message me directly.
What I really want to see are your personal responses to the questions at the very start. Why do you play Tribal Wars? What emotions are you trying to satisfy? Stories of how the community and game have impacted you? The things you can personally do to make your community (and micro communities) a more fun and positive place, especially for newcomers.
Answer those first and then add your 2 cents on the state of the game.
I really hope this can spark some changes because I really love the community and the game on a fundamental level. I see so much potential and so little being done to improve things.
Martyn
