Suggestion: Refer a friend bonus ?

[Razorbeam]

So with the end of lockdown happening in the UK its clear to see the numbers have dropped pretty hard from the server, its still in a good place but everyone is feeling the difference in the market and it got me wondering what's an effective way to seek out fresh blood to come to a private server and based on my experience with many mmo's over the years nothing was more effective than referral schemes that awarded exp bonuses and premium currencies. What the exact ingredients would be to fit Arcadia I'm not 100% sure on, but the carrot needs to be juicy if you want people to be motivated. A rough idea off the top of my head would look something like this -

Link a new account to your own as a referee (these will prob need to be checked for unique ip's with the threat of abuse ban), when new referee reaches lvl 120 and purchases a 1 month sub you both receive a 1 month 100% exp buff, lvl 130 a wedding style teleport ring/console command, when the referee reaches lvl 140 you both receive 300gg and when he reaches lvl 150 you both receive 1000gg and some type of fancy looking cosmetic aura.

as a fairly newish player myself one thing I really enjoyed was the border patrol experience, without it I might not be playing now but what made it as positive as it was depended on the effort of a few higher lvl players bothering to help out and organise content, I think these people need to be recognised and have some sort of benefit for the effort they put in, not so much to reward but to encourage more to do it, perhaps a way for people inside border over a certain lvl to be able to apply for a mentor title that allows them to set messages on the guild board, ally other guilds and changes the colour of their text in guild chat ?, maybe after 1 month of mentoring you receive a different coloured name with some angelic aur effect or something.

I think a few systems to help encourage more fresh meat to the server cant be a bad thing, I certainly don't think the game is dying and this dip was inevitable after convid and I'm sure once people are used to being back to work we will see a smaller spike, I just think Arcadia is good enough to warrant exposing it to more people.

Thanks for reading

 

[zad48231]

Some great ideas there. As a side note, the player count as you correctly point out have taken a sharp dip the last couple of weeks which can probably be put down to lockdown ending, but is still actually higher than it was this time last year, which is fantastic!

The mentor idea and the reference idea have both been floated before in various vague forms, but kinda died off as it proved difficult to balance between making it worthwhile enough for people to actually do, while making it not worthwhile enough to be worth cheating it (people making new accounts and "helping" from their main char, to receive benefits), it's a very difficult thing to get right, but it maybe could still happen with some work. So the more ideas we can throw at this the better, I'm sure GMs will be reading with interest!

As for helping lower level players, for me seeing the server busy is reward enough. It always makes me sad if I hear of someone who quit after a couple of weeks because they couldn't figure something out or didn't feel they were getting the right support. There's always people throwing handouts around but handouts really don't help and in many cases can actually hinder, I find just spending a little bit of time with someone is worth so much more. As they say, give a man a fish etc.

Plus it's a nice little bonus when people you helped out when they just started get some good levels and buy your old kit, create the market!

 

[Rezkin]

Maybe introduce GG drops from reg lvling mobs but very infrequent or something of the sort being as most desired stuff past 130ish is only for sale with GG. or in another server i played they had a cave you went to every hour i think to kill a boss non pk zone everyone got like a 1-2 pts. if your motivated for a few weeks you could get enough points to get a rare box that had gear in what ever lvl range the box was for. higher lvl boxes needed more points. it was a random item but it was a super rare. needed several hundred or even 1k points to get. So wouldnt be a quick thing to farm but gives people a chance to work hard for a few weeks towards getting a random rare in that lvl zone there in.