Suggestion : How to attract a lot more players to HWS

My personal experience is completely in line with the results from the survey.

Let me explain from my own experience.

“Hmm which server has high population ? Well HWS seems to be nice, lets check”

“Ummp… origin ? What the heck is that ?!? Well pirate sounds nice, but PVP in starter zone ? After two years of daily ARK PVP i dont need trolls chasing me on the beach with death stars and plasma cannons. Trader ? Sounds a bit boring. Guardians have directly heavy armor, yes, thats nice !”

Then the really cool starter quest, was fun and motivating. Broke a leg when jumping down from the station but had a med kit, so everything fine.

Started building a base and then i experienced what 99% of players testing HWS will turn away, even me the first time : There are WIPES !!!
This is the word that no human likes. We want to build up something and keep it. That these wipes are only for starter planet protection and the players are expected to build a CV and leave, so that these wipes are basically something positive…

… is not relevant for a new player testing the server…HELL ! Wipes ! They will leave, and you know it is true.

So my suggestion is to improve new players finding themselves in the origin idea better and replacing the current RP system by something that works for everybody.

And replacing the starter planet wipes by building limitation. Just allow 1/1/1/1 structure of size 1 max and delete all others after warnings. This will take the “wipe stress” from new players but still encourage then to leave the starter planet into “real HWS” space as soon as possible.

What i also found annoying that i had no EVA from the beginning and that the starter planet has no moon to farm Neo. So i was always short before freezing, grabbed some Neo from an asteroid and back into the warm heated CV. Someone told me the trick with the drone mining from inside the CV later, but i did not know that and i did not find the starter POI to get an EVA.

What you say is interesting but what you havn’t taken into consideration is the actual amount of people joining the server per month, its in the thousands if my memory is correct if each of them only have 4 cores its still a hell of a lot and that 7 day wipe period isnt enough to curve those cores to acceptable levels. Hence why wipes are still the most effective way of dealing with them, if you can find a different method that will handle it then by all means :smiley:

Yes, but you understand that we are faced with spawn camping, I started after day 1 after a restart of the season, on the planet a bunch of bases and flying sv who want to kill me, a veteran is not a problem, but for a beginner I think this is not good :grinning:

@Kogami
If your (unfinshed :upside_down_face: ) HWS guide would not have been in the net i would not have joined HWS hehehe :smiley:
Well if we have “thousands of new players” joining HWS …

… why not installing more HWS servers ? Financial foundation could be a revamped donator system.
So the cores wont overwhelm the server and it would not bring the “wipe frustration” to the new players.

Another approach could be to rework the starter planet system altogether. Their original meaning was, giving a safe PVE experience to new players before they fly out into the mouth of the big bad hungry wolf lurking in HWS PVP space.

Good idea, but lost its meaning currently, as there are more than enough PVE planets in “real HWS space”.

@Mak
What exactly do you mean ? I fly into PVP space daily several times and have the feeling that the warp spawn point (where you spawn after warping) is not always the same but a little bit random ?
Ok yesterday some ganker boy was really camping in Golden Globe, but i dont think that it is possible to penetrate the triple layer combat steel of my main battleship faster than i can warp out ?
Ok for noob trash CV the gankers could be an issue :slight_smile:
On planets : you will hardly meet someone on desertworld, lavaworld, iceworld and waterworld.
You will be under permanent assault on homeworld and golden globe planet. To survive on these two i recommend placing two bases with full weapons and overlapping firing arcs on Golden Globe and three on Homeworld. You should not store stuff there, its just a safe landing bridgehead for your expeditions.
As alternative you can fly in naked in a trash SV, spawn a trash drill HV, get the gold and fly out again.
If the big bad wolves appear you have just lost a few iron bars.

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The Warp-Entry-Point depends on the direction you are warping in from. If you enter a system from Point A you get to Warp-Point A, if you enter from Point B you come to Warp-Point B, and so on… Thats why Warpcamping is possible, the Griefers only need to wait at the location where the most traffic is.

I’m only a pleb so not sure of these things, but I feel with the current focus and testing of CSW there will be a time when more servers could be added to the the server-verse (:stuck_out_tongue: ) and the population could grow, but I feel it would be extremely risky on the admin side financially, unless they built up a donation buffer of maybe 6-8 months worth of server funding (as backup) before expanding the server’s and had more donation options, because atm I feel if planet donators all of a sudden got pissed off and stopped donating there would be problems :confused: .

P.S: I’m glad my guide was able to help :] I’m unable to add to it as there is no edit option anymore so no way of finishing it lol…

Thanks for your suggestion.
You are quite new to HWS I see and saying

makes me wonder why? What is NOT working?
It is a work in progress non stop but if you would have seen the RP system in HWS 4 you would know better, I think.

As Kogami said already. We have 20-40 player joining HWS per day.

People coming to HWS is infinite but the resources we have is finite.

Also did and explained in the past. Or let me copy it

Server can be bought infinite but admins we have are finite.

At least for my part I work almost 100 hours per week for Empyrion for the seven servers I maintain. If I would need to carry even more servers I would either burn out more faster than already or die or just say nope.

Basically we can turn this around and say: are people THAT lazy to read nowadays? Is english THAT of a burden to learn / understand?
Since it is easy that

  • there are PvE orbits straight after the starters. No camping, no gg
  • there are PvE planets to play minecraft on them
  • fly tuesday to planet -
  • fly wednesday to space to circumvent any wipe (a small base on a starter plan is more than enough)
  • starter planets are not meant for minecrafting. It should be a FPS smooth, new, fresh experience for STARTERS and not 300 playhours guys I see here and there

Well not all of these points are written in the Information Center or the guide but then again, any MP game might require to play the Tutorial before joining (at least non-FPS games)

You can’t imagine how much I tried to get rid of the “wipe phobia”. I really wanted to help lazy people even.
But in the end I invented the one way jumps what almost all big servers are using now, I tried no wipes, custom starts, custom tasks, custom custom.
NOT possible.
End of story.

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Didn’t realize handling those servers required so many man hours, do you feel that in the future those hours could be reduced with automation?

Roughly time spent:

  1. 50% crawling through community stuff like Get support, (toxic) dramas, ingame intervention, questions, official servers
  2. 25% bug reporting / QA
  3. 25% working on HWS / improve Empyrion with ideas I have or building stuff for HWS 6.X.X for example

Do you see any automation there? Me not. Only in fixing bugs to prevent 1. what will move the time to 2. which will luckily allow me to do more in 3.
It’s a circle where I can only break out to stop offering so much help to people and say “it’s alpha, you know” etc.
But that is not why and how HWS is HWS.

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I’m not new to this game, you can say I’m a veteran of this server because I play on it almost from its opening, but I care about the fact that the novice who join the server will not be able to start the game quietly, after starting the server all landed on the planet and it is pvp (pirates), it is very difficult to survive in the first hours after launch, not to mention what will happen in a few days, I’m talking about spawn camping not in space, I’m talking about the planet because the capsules appear in one place.

Re XX you are doing o a Great work👏
I have a suggestion to help preventing wipes on starter planet:
When you are reader to Leave you use A command like the
csw, when you Leave all’ your stuffs in the area private or pubblic will be deleted automatically.
And you put limi1tations like 1cv1ba1sv1hv. Is ti possibile?
Faction has a limit of 1 ba1cv0sv0hv and the base will be deleted By the members otherwise it will be 1 lessi in the entire galaxy.

From what I can see you really don’t like 1. then its a good thing is so high becuase I can easily see a trusted group of people handling that side for you, but I guess the guestion is would you be willing to trust a few people playing the game to have admin powers but not abuse them, a type of interstellar management council, I know its risky as hell but i’m all about crazy idea’s xD

Ok i start answering what is wrong with the RP system.

First there should be a list in connect, when you did receive RP and why. Or spent/lost RP. At the moment with daily trade/gold mining i am just now coming close to the 2 million credit line, means i will close the season with maybe… 7 million ?
And thats for a pro gamer, a casual will maybe close with 1 or 2.

So i could buy a few RP, but for me RP have only 2 purposes,

… have at least one to receive the weekly supply packages
… have at least 100 to live on the cheaper reward planet.

Certainly i will never gain enough RP to stealth my ships several times per day.

As i stated, the only valid chance to gain RP as a guardian is to hunt/buy the white boxes for +3. Or kill Walloud90 for +3 ( rofl).
Boxes go for 100-150k and are quite rare, so i really dont see how to reach the 100 RP.

On the other hand traders just have to place a few stacks of resources on the blackmarket… pling pling +3. Relaxing a day in peacekeeper and collecting from M31P autominers… pling another +1.

So i dont think that RP gain has the same difficulty level for all origins.

Concerning finite admin availability : argument accepted

I can’t remember where but it was said that RP gain will be different next version just read back a few posts and you will find it.

Replacing the current RP system sounds like get rid of all of it.
But your little drama is the guardian gaining.

Look closely to the image here:

And well, wait for 6.X.X.

It is about forcing people out. Not a command, not restrictions, not removing stuff.
Otherwise you didn’t solve the root problem.

Not true at all. I am in general a helpful person.

But if you do this day for day, week for week, month for month and come across people even insulting you? Not saying one single thank you? Stress you? Accuse you of bullshit? Dealing with kindergarten toxic crap? That is what might be too much which I will on the other hand work on it now.

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Yea I can understand, I like helping people as well, but too much and it becomes a job, maybe there is a way to divide up the work load or some type of in game mechanic for normal players to help others out of bugs without the need for admin(teleports) or something. About the toxicity what if players had a toxic button that they could press on someones comment, and if that person get’s to many negative votes, they get a negative ingame RP multiplier (or just loose certain amount of RP) that slows down their RP gain so it’ll be in their own interest to not be a troll/toxic person :stuck_out_tongue: (Since forums are technically reputation as well : ]) And maybe visa versa if someone is always helping people a way for people to vote to add RP to that person, so people are more accountable for their actions.

Rex brought an important fact i think, so

THANKS for modding an average survival game with fantastic potential into a fantastic game inspiring players to explore day by day

THANKS for reducing your RL biker time for enriching our space travel time

THANKS for gifting us a living universe with exploration, fights and trade

THANKS for the OCD, i just love it. LOL really did not use it in the beginning, half of my base were just containers :smiley:

THANKS for the autominer , makes life less grindy harhar.

THANKS for the fantastic POI design (despite the survey results) Was really frowning about that ?!? Hey guys, if you dont like the HWS POI then just raid abandoned favtory the 68234th time hehe:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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As a suggestion: what about if a timer starts once someone joins the server, they have 7 days to warp from starter zone or their character gets reset and their structures destroyed.

I can see how if somebody joins 1-3 days before wipe maybe that doesn’t give them enough time [in their eyes] to get off the planet and they might go play on a different server instead.

I doubt it’s a big problem as it is though :man_shrugging: