No wonder no one plays this game anymore

[Yadda9To5]

The attitude in the topic is wrong. Yes the topic starter can "learn to play" by listening to all advice. But right now there is no way in hell a noob in a noob kingdom has any chance to compete, no matter how well a prov he builds he'll always be seen as easy land by a random bigger kingdom. Sure he might retal, and that kingdom moves one, but it's a guarantee another kingdom will try again. So how can a noob in a noob kingdom get any chance of achievement? He cant.

Maybe it's the price of utopia being a team game. But currently bad kingdoms make good players (in these kingdoms) bad. Yes, they can move to a better kingdom, etc etc. But it should be possible for new kingdoms to compete, somehow. I'm at a loss how though. More than a few things that need to be done. One is that everyone playing the game has easy access to all knowledge (the wiki isn't comprehensive, a true guide that holds new players and new kingdoms by the hand could help, maybe even go as far auto start wars (like the tournament server) between equal kingdoms). Another thing needed, much more harder to achieve, is to allow all kingdoms to at-least have a basic level of organisation, this means even marginally competent leadership is available to all kingdoms, and i honestly don't see a solution for that. (I've randomned in ghetto's where the monarch goes AFK for days, where the monarch declares wars the are a guaranteed loss, thereby killing moral, and maybe worst, and hardest to achieve, where monarchy holds little authority (half the players in the kingdom just do there own thing, follow their own agenda, and often the monarch is one of them)).

I really enjoy this game, but if i'd started this game in one of the many ghetto's where new players find themselves in nowadays, i wouldn't last a month and would simply quit. Anyone seriously thinking that this game is enjoyable to new players is smoking something real good. Yes, a few get themselves recruited, but I've also seen plenty gheto provs simply drop their activity to only forget about the game.

Ghetto's don't need to be top kingdoms, but they need to be given a goal. Maybe introduce achievements (say have 1 war in the next 3 weeks, grow all provinces to xxx networth, etc) with little rewards.

Lastly: target hunting sucks big time established kingdoms all have their set of targetfinders, but new players can do nothing but browse through kingdom after kingdom after kingdom after kingdom, often not even having a clue what to look for (and what to stay away from). If you ever wanted to implement one more controversial thing to the game: build in a targetfinder, or just give provs a daily list of 25 provinces their size and in more or less equal kingdoms to choose from. It'll make the hurdles to playing the game so much lower.
Maybe this is part of a bigger problem (again): nowadays, peoples span of attention when entertaining themselves on the pc is short, it's asking to much to have players spend say 15 minutes to browse through utopia. They want an awesome button. Click (attack), click (train), click (build) and see a big popup saying "my lord!!!! Your prov grew 5 inches!! Please come back to repeat tomorrow and collect your reward".

Speaking of hurdles: This game is ancient. Some of this adds to its charm, some of it is, quite frankly, unthinkable in this day and age. Having a very unprofessional looking design, hidden/unexplained mechanics that are to be discovered while playing (no one wants to spends months understanding the game before being able to fully play the game (think how much thieves to send, find out sos/surveys are exact, that learns give little give protection, the whole honor system, etc)), no way to push a player (achievements or tasks) just create an unpolished feel that is hard to look past these days. Look at erepublik (i don't think it can be considered a clone/competition i think it can be mentioned, besides, the clones are a bad example, they suffer the same unpolished feel as utopia) it is much more successful in engaging its players, it looks slicks, gives players tasks, and, unlike utopia, isn't very strategical and therefor boring to me. But it's successfull, and not because it's such an exiting game to play but because it's polished and userfriendly.

[cRs]

Indeed, helping new players getting to know the game mechanincs and the fun of this game should be top priority to the game developers. You cant really start a province as undead and have farms on it and claim thats good, they will read the guide and get used to it... Lets be serious, how many reads the guide from a game? You are joining the game to play it and have fun, not reading long and meanless guides wich in the end you will have to come back annyway cuz you havent retained to much from them. In the end yes, if you wanna be a top player you will read the full guides, get to know the mechanic 100% and so on...

New players who are here to 1st TRY this game - you cant expect them to read a wiki guide from scratch, they will just create a province, navigate trough the menu, enter forum, maybe write few words there and move on cuz there are so many unknown to them like speaking chinese to most of us :P (does the devs learned chinese - there is a wiki "guide" about it...read it :P). Make it simple, explain with pop-up windows or offer achievments step by step, building a good province to new players : do that -receive that... teach them with the game interface. You cant expect experienced players to do all your work.. cuz ussually experienced players goes into good kingdoms while new guys are randomed into new kingdoms.

"No wonder nobody plays this game annymore" - many still play it, but all those "many" are mostlly old players. However more and more retires from the game because of RL stuffs, but there is no replacement for them cuz its so damn hard to learn this game without proper assistance. I myself have big probllems teaching players.. cuz when a guy says "hey Im new to the game" - you dont even know where to start... and again, the game doesnt offer any assitance at all...

"Building infrastructure is absolutely vital to the long term growth of our province. Here you may order the construction different types of buildings, or choose to destoy some buildings so that you can use the land for other purposes. More can be learned about benefits of each building from the guide and the Internal Affairs council page."

what do I get from this? Hey... hmmm... homes.. thats nice, let me make more I want big population and army.. hmm farms, let me feed them properlly, lets get allot more of those too (im undead... oo well I dont know that yet).. umm mills, l create food for my population... AND SO ON AND SO ON.

Thats a pure example of what you offer... the question is: how do you expect new players coming to your game???

[Jonzilla]

I think you're over-stating it but in essence I agree - it's very much an old boys club...

[Korp]

Lastly: target hunting sucks big time established kingdoms all have their set of targetfinders, but new players can do nothing but browse through kingdom after kingdom after kingdom after kingdom, often not even having a clue what to look for (and what to stay away from).

I use the random button :D

[Palem]

+1

random kd button ftw! (sorta)

[Landro]

.....

PEBCAM, You choose to grow big and into range of better kingdoms. Why not stay small and be rarely bothered by them?

[Luc]

It's counter productive to make it too easy to compete. The owners actually want people to login and spend time on the game, and there's no incentive to do that if any idiot can do well without an effort. I do agree that focus should be on making it easier to understand the basics of the game though. A playable tutorial would greatly increase the game's appeal imo.

[Anri]

Ok, here's what's going on: Top kingdoms want to be big. They hit people who won't hit back because that benefits their goals. There's fierce competition at the top and they just can't afford to waste a wave to kill a nub. The trick is that they make you think they can and most of the time it works. So if you're getting hit by a kingdom fighting for the land or netw crown, just hit back and they'll offer CF so they can look for easy gains elsewhere because trading acres isn't in their best interest.

Not that true

[MorbidAngel]

>yea ill retal then get gangbaned down to 0 out of spite.

not really, that kd wouldn't hit you anymore, so you'd end on 50-100 acres positive, depending on your size

[Relic]

A causality of NW based gains, used to be you could build a decent province and protect your land, now the game is completely unintuitive for new players, train more def to defend yourself?, no, that will only inflate your NW and make you a target for even bigger provinces!

[brickwolfman]

What have you guys done to this game? I start the age late making my return from years ago,grow perfectly fine to about 3500 acres with about 690k nw running 120dpa raw. get suicided on from a powerhouse kingdom. cant do anything about it as my kingdom is a big sub par atm. then the same kingdom suicides me again whilst im 140dpa.

These suicide strats in powerhouse kingdoms r ridiculous, SO basically unless im in a fully organised kingdom, im to be fed off the entire age once i reach a certain size. These organised kingdoms im sure r good in terms of making u money, however your player base has shrunk and id estimate it continue to, u either need to drop organise kingdoms which to be honest i preferre u didnt as it is cool playing with friends,or u need to deter suicide attacks, require a certain dpa to be held at home when sending an attack or something for. Excuse my venting but this is obv a massive flaw that can be abused in the game right now for the people in less organised kingdoms.

i have a couple of questions for you.
#1 are you a faery who out grew all of the attackers in your kingdom?
#2 are you an elf who decided to run a full def spec army?
#3 are you an elf who decided to run a full def spec army and out grew all of the attackers in your kingdom?

there is nothing wrong with playing a full defence army T/M as long as you dont do any of these things above. if you decide to do any of these things(specificly 1 and 3) you will get owned 100% of the time all age as you nor none of your KD mates are able to retal as the people attacking you will be to big to break by any of the attackers in your KD, so your doing two things wrong by outgrowing your KD, there is no one to retal the hits you take and when you go to war your spells and theif ops will be less effective due to NW gaps.

my advice if you have done any of these things is simple, dont grow out of range of your top 2/3 attackers and if your in situation #2, train some offence

[nooblet]

#3 suck up the random bottomfeeds and, if you're lucky, they won't wreck your science. People get hit and opped... you can't make the game so that you never, ever get hits or people trying to stop your growth.

There are many aspects of the game that are hostile to players who are not playing at the top, I can agree with that.

[Anri]

I can assure you that if i was playing in a ghetto i would do it 10 times better then they do.
I can assure you that most people in the top plays there for a reason and deserve to be in the top.

There is plenty of ghettos that is proof enough of how they can play if they want. Watch Trollfags, hell watch Outplayerz.
People have to little understanding of this game.

*yawn*

[CounTerOrdeR]

Yadda9To5 - Its my first age and if this game had any of that i dont think i would be playing. Other games have stuff like that do get people who just joined caught up and in a safe position since most of those games are persistent worlds. This game resets every 3 months. Anyone who plays games should know attacking will win over defending.

[Dolgil]

There was a time where you could turtle your way through an age. Some top provinces were pure explorers. Those were the ages of all elite provinces and endless pumps to keep your nwpa high since gains were based off of acres. It got very boring and stagnate. So, things were added to try and counter that. Net worth gains was one of those. Getting defense specs or offensive specs into the mix was also a major focus. Then you could not turtle behind a wall of elites. These changes brought about the "suicide" tactics you complain about. But, it has brought about a much more dynamic game. And gives some incentive to actually form a team. This team thing was after all Mehul's vision for the game, that people from all over the world would learn about each other.

As for this causing the loss of players, that was more the fault of Jolt and company than any other thing. Be glad at least the code isn't ancient Egyptian. The current graphics are left over from Jolt. Yes, the graphics suck. Better to have left it alone. Also, Jolt lost the old player's guide.

This game has always been hard on newbies. But, having newbies quit in large numbers is a problem of all games.