Now a detailed post regarding my full views on this matter.
As a USA player, I feel most of the time I'm playing a solo online game. There are several times when I check lft and there are zero ppl on lft at 220 range. If there's 3/4 playesr on lft at that time, there's prolly around zero around tls 1 to tl4. Thankfully, I have a few decent org mates, who can do any pf in the game with only 3/4 players. Why are there so few people?
It's because the active population of ao is shrinking rather than growing. The worst thing is a small population will inevitably lead to a smaller population. Why is that? I believe the reasons to be self evident; however I will list them.
Consider a new player that joins the game at this point. He sees few people on lft and has a hard time getting teams to do things. He doesn't know about neutnet, or other things. When he does find a team, it doesn't have a great leveling rate unless it's with outside pockets and etc. He tries to gear himself, he doesn't make enough credits trying to farm things at lowbie levels. Since all the mobs that he will kill, most likely drop at best monster parts and occasional pearl. He doesn't know about all the little tricks that took us all an year atleast to figure out regarding making money at lower levels. So, he's short on credits, leveling slow with regular teams which he won't get really.
Now he lands in a pocket team, which is also rarish nowadays and gets a big lvl boost; however, he's unable to pay for newer gear. Even imps look expensive to him. He has a couple options, buy credits or scrounge around with monster parts and finding a friendly tser. Option 2 looks really bad. So he then decides is AO really worth it to him? He sees desolated lfts, few real teams, only pocket teams that will level him faster than he can gear himself without having a significant amount of credits.
He will most likely leave the game at this point. Now, people might say, you need to read about ao on 3rd party forums like ao-universe and get in a good organization. Now, to expect people to spend time reading over ao-universe to have a better understanding of ao is sort of ridicolous. How do you expect someone to know what to search for in that pile of information. Most new players don't even know what expansions they have installed and etc. They could spend hours looking at info that doesn't even apply to them. So 3rd party sites aren't useful, since they a wealth of info, and some of which is outdated considering the current times of AO.
Especially those newbie years were written years ago. For example,who actually buys subway loot anymore and etc....
So, 3rd party sites aren't a good option at all. What about a good organization. Most experienced organizations will not recruit new players unless that's what their focus is.
So now, he joins an organization. Most orgs on rk2 have low numbers, while there are some helpful people in the org, they aren't always on, and he feels like a charity case. He'll be sitting around most of the time with very little help from his org m8s, since they aren't on or busy working on their toons which are at a higher tl range.
The best experience would be for him to join an org of people that are just as new as him. So they can enjoy figuring out new things together and leveling together. However, the sad fact is there aren't really any orgs anymore at the level. Why? It's a circular problem. As the appeal of mmo goes down, less new players join, hence lowbie orgs become less common, which leads to fewer new players staying in the game, and lowbiew orgs become even less common and so on.
So it's self-fullfilling destructive cycle of the newbie population of the game.
People wonder why newbie won't stick? Games have an appeal and if someone gets hooked to a game, it usually happens within a couple weeks. However, AO at the current state of things, has very limited appeal to new players (outdated graphics, low population, not newbie friendly, lack of information on official FC sites regarding how to play the game, there's not even the equivalanent of auno.org from FC).
So either way with leveling packs or no leveling packs, there will be very low newbie population in this game that will continue to die out as time progress. Since pocket teams level too fast for new players to adequately gear themselves without turning to credit buying, even then, there's an information problem regarding what to do.
However, now you might think why not give leveling packs then? If it doesn't hurt newbies, who might it hurt it then. It'll hurt the community in the end. Not everyone has the money to buy
a powerleveled toon, but there's a several that do. That means less veterans doing outside pocket teams, which means other veterans who aren't as finacially well off, will have a harder problem rolling new toons. So they would have more frustration with this game.
Everyone that has played AO has some frustration with it at time to time. There are some players who will become more frustrated with the lack of even outside tank kite teams at lower levels, and just give up with leveling alts.
Though, there might be some people who are happy with these boosted levels. However, let's consider this. A veteran player with a 220 quits b/c he can't buy a new toon and it's hard to level one. So there's going to be less toons at the tl7 range. Now, we have this dude with a boosted 199 but there'll be less players(not toons) to do content with to take it to 220, since the veterans that can' t afford buying leveling packs gave up leveling alts. So now both the guy that bought the toon and the guy that can't are frustrated.
So while FC profits in the shortrun from this action, it doesn't look promising in the long run in terms of overall veteran subscriptions.
Therefore, so with leveling packs, we'll have a contraction yet again in tl7 population, as more people grow more frustrated and quit the game.
It's not for the newbies, it's for us.
Supporters to remove it: Note: if there is inaccuracies, shoot me a tell.
Anarchic1
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Originally Posted by Anarchic1
