IKICKAYOUWASSNOW wrote:So that is what this is all about. Aesthetics.
No. I was responding to your remark:
IKICKAYOUWASSNOW wrote:You'll only be left with a larger sea of inactives and vmodes
If you want to know what is all about, here are the latest 3 topics on the issue (starting from my 1st reply)
viewtopic.php?p=119754#p119754 (this topic)
viewtopic.php?p=119012#p119012
viewtopic.php?p=119011#p119011
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Nautilus, its all about creating an active game. So far, it is working out. Things are going better every month while it used to go worse. Again, I am not saying that this is due to the inactives deletion. It is the general recipe. We are now applying the same receipe to Speed and we expect it to improve fast. We are actively trying to improve the activity of the old universes. It is not paying as much as a new universe would but at least we do not let down our active playerbase.
medal, these plenty of 0 point accounts are not dropped. These are real persons. Sadly, browser games do not appeal that much to the mass as they used to do. This is not a ZE-experience. This is the general situation. In the old times, you could post a link on a forum and you would get 2000 signups. Out of the 2000 signups, you would get about 500 active players. Now, to fetch 2000 registrations, you need professional approach with advertisement. And from the 2000 players about 200 will stay. That's the metrics, the universal browser game metrics. Not ZE metrics, our metrics are better.
I will repeat some fundamental reasons. I know the feeling of losing a good farm nearby... and I know that is can be devastating. So I want to reassure you that this is for the best of both you and the game:
1)Farming an inactive player is not exciting (unless some other player decides to punish you for farming his farm).
2)This leads to general interest drop. Which results in reduced activity.
3)Next step is game retirement which eads to fewer players.
4)If too many people leave, we do not manage to renew them on time and the game active players are reduced.
5)This worsens the retirement rate.
In the contrary, fewer inactives and fewer good farms can lead to many quite interesting events:
1)More surprises for those raiding the inactives (more people are probable to decide to punish you).
2)More excitement
3)More people actively seeking food on active players
4)This creates conflict which boost interest.
5)Boosted interest keeps players active and entertained.
6)This improves player retention and fewer people retire.
It is worthwhile to mention that we have not yet reached our objective of 45 days old deletion. While this is possible, this has not happened yet. We have mostly deleted accounts that were inactive for over a year! I don't think there are any excuses for saving such accounts. Slowly we will move to 6 months and then to 3 months till we are able to meet the 45 days objective.
The key in achieving this is to always keep a positive activity rise. We are still manually skipping some deletion cycles. Generaly though,there is 1 per week. We are doing this because we do care for the game and the playerbase and we want to be certain that we are making the right moves every time.
Finally,here is a nice link back to about a 1year old post of mine that worths the time reading it:
viewtopic.php?p=111705#p111705