No, I don't think so...
Below I am explaining what our projects are and I'm explaining why we choose to do it this way.
As you know, Terra has been slowly going down hill for quite some time. We have tried to remedy this a number of times over the past 2 years, with things like:
- The monster system
- The browser based client
- Improvements to the quest engine
- A completely new website. Both layout wise and functionality wise
- The Somnium project
- The plan to create a better 'main island'
- The airship transportation system
- The client layout redesign
- New tutorial
- .. and a lot more like mapping project and events.
Some of these things failed, others are pretty popular. But the bottom line is, it didn't make people stay, and it certainly doesn't make new people stick around.
I strongly believe this is what is wrong with Terra:
- We focus too much on small updates and bugfixes
- In the essence of the game nothing much changes
- Veteran players get bored of new things more quickly than we can build them, this is very demotivating for the team.
- Currently I cannot justify time I spend developing for Terraworld because of the size of the community and costs of the game. As a full-time game developer I need to earn my wages. Terra doesn't do that.
At the start of this year I decided it was time for another approach. I believe Terra needs 2 things very much at the moment:
1. A steady stream of new players trying the game out.
2. A steady stream of goals for players while preventing them from having too much goals at the same time. Because that is equal to having no goal.
If we manage to do that, more players will stick around, the community will grow again and the game will become more interesting for the older players, the staff in general, and I will be able to justify development for Terra again.
That is why I've started too separate projects:
1. A Facebook game based on our Quest Engine (Mainly me, Ceebs and a team of freelancers and volunteers are working on this)
2. Improving Somnium by adding more goals and throwing less information and tasks at the new players at once. (The admin team is working on this)
Besides the fact that we will hopefully be able to make some money with it, the Facebook game we're working on is very important for Terra too because that is how we're planning to generate a stream of new non-FSO casual players for TerraWorld.
This technique is called 'cross game advertisement'. You give a reward in the popular game for achievements in the less popular one. Most of the players trying out Terra will leave again, but if Terra is more accessible for new players, this will mean that some of them will stay too. Most facebook games get a lot of monthly users (> 50k unique players a month). We only need 1% of those players to try out Terra and stay playing it, to bring back a decent community to Terra.
This is a screenshot of the alpha version of the Facebook game:
Because this Facebook game and another project I'm working on take up all my available time (and more) I have no time to be involved with the improvements on Terra itself. So I have delegated that completely to the admin team. The success of this project is completely in their hands.
Some of you might agree or disagree with this plan. But I don't see any other way. History has proven that some of the projects we start working on lead to a dead end. But both the team of myself feel very confident in these 2 projects. It will be a lot of work. But I think we can do it.
Feel free to post your thoughts in this thread. But I will remove posts that are non-constructive.
Cheers,
FVANtom
Well, I wish you the best of luck in your goal. I wish I had the time to help but oh well. Life happens. For some reason I still care about Terra, even after 6+ years, so if you need or want what help I might be able to provide, feel free to ask. *shrug*