A Game Devs Suggestion for improving Player Retention & Longterm Playerbase Growth

[polar forum]

I have ~40 hours into the game but thousands in similar games and will suggest things based on my POV of how things should be improved to improve Player Retention and Longterm sustainable growth of the playerbase.

Suggestions:

• Create a "Guide" button in the game and make it open either the official website with a proper updated guide or a guide in the guide. The guide must explain basic game mechanics past the tutorial and how to level up early on so people don't feel lost. I promise you you've lost THOUSANDS of players within the first 10-15 minutes who simply felt lost and didn't know what to do.

• Early game leveling feels like a chore and not very "Naruto" like. The lack of early game offensive jutsus and how everyon recommends you to go full agility for the first 15 levels (which will take a good while for new players) probably kills a lot of the player retention. A good fix for this is adding an extra offensive jutsu early on along with increasing base chakra pool so the game provides viable leveling options rather than simply being full taijutsu only early on. I guess clan will sort of fix this??

• Chakra feels really low / like a chore I get it that you don't want people to just spam jutsus but only using 2-3 jutsus and running how of chakra early on is probably killing player retention, again, it doesn't feel very fun to cast 2 jutsus then having to hold "C" for 10-15 seconds to charge up your chakra. Easy fix would be adding passive chakra regeneration and/or increasing base chakra pool+regen rate when holding C.
  Passive chakra regeneration heavily ties into player overall quality of life at all stages of the game (or reduce how long it takes to charge ur chakra), while increasing base chakra pool ties into quality of life only early on exclusively (since the increase wont be that meaningful later into the game).

• Some missions feel unreasonably hard/long to achieve without external help A perfect example is the hawk talons / feathers from the level 30 Arc. A NEW solo player would easily take 12h+ of farming them to finish this quest. All while dying multiple times in between.

There's a big difficulty increase along with really low drop rates makes things REALLY frustrating. IMO you should focus on 1 of these when designing these missions, either make the drop rates low but the mobs easier to kill OR make the drop rates high but the mobs hard to kill. Doing both low drop rates + hard mobs to kill (as in kill 2-3 then gotta wait 2 mins to heal up) makes things extremely frustrating and slow for a solo player.

• End Game Content. I'm not there just yet but from the last week alone I've seen more than a couple people complaining about lack of end game content, the game needs end game content to keep people entertained, be it in the form of village warfare, be it in the form of grinding to achieve long term goals (like gear that give extra stats or whatever). Some will stay just for the pvp but that's a minority. A good idea would be to uncap the levels, make leveling extremely extremely hard and create some talent trees that give you minimal bonuses per level.

• Allow clanless ninjas to get a clan I know it's been said that players without a clan will not be able to get a clan later on, personally I think this is a mistake. You always want to give players the option to switch things like these instead of forcing them to create a new character when leveling to 60 is already quite the significant time and effort commitment. Even if you lock it behind a paywall the option needs to exist. It's also a kick in the butt to old players who created a character before the clan feature came out and don't get the option to join a clan with their character just because they're veteran players

• Don't split playerbase These games thrive on community, IMO creating more servers where the characters are completely different/new kinda defeat the point of it. Instead if you feel the need to create more servers to keep up with the growing playerbase ensure players get to keep their characters and only pick servers based on how full/empty they are

[ornate scroll]

tbf, this aint the game for solo players, coming from an all time solo player. u have to socialize and team up or get stronger. also the stronger u get the easier the tasks, farming etc. gets. most informations are available ingame, on the discord or can be asked, there are plenty veteran players and GMs active, you only have to read and be able to comprehend what u read, and esp, in the tutorial there are video clips u dont even need to read all 😄
reaching lvl 10 is even for new players a thing about 1-2 hours depending on village and reading comprehension, again you have to socialize and party up with others.

what im agreeing with is def. the chakra , the endgame content and to not create another server before the game has an quite high daily player count/base.

the clanless part is tbf a double sided thing tho. i agree in terms that player, should get at leastsome sort of a second chance to join a clan, bc there are alot ppl which missed the clan part while creation, but on the other side, its again the reading comprehension part and being focused and not just brain afk clicking and skipping all and everything + refering to the series, unless someone would marry into an clan, a character would need to be born into one to be part of it. the better option would also be to give clanless player not to reward them by let them simply rejoin a clan, but rather give them the chance/option, to either marry another player which is part of a clan to enable the clanless to join their spouses clan, or by some sort of clan trial in which the clan leader / council will decide if a clanless player can join their clan or not.

[polar forum]

You are absolutely right, it isn't a game for solo players but it's not always easy to find someone who can help you out that's the biggest issue. When I was leveling I was frequently looking for aid both in this discord AND in the sand specific discord and I most of the time I still had to do things solo, only exception being for the Arcs where I managed to find people to lend me a hand for those pretty easily.

As for the clanless part, there's a lot of old players who are still playing today and simply don't have the option to join a clan BECAUSE they are old players which is unfair in my POV. Changing clans should have some sort of penalty, be it in Ryo be it in IRL $ cost or whatever system the devs think will be fair, but the option needs to be there imo

[ornate scroll]

yea i really get your point, but as hard as it is sometimes, we as solo players have to suck it up and get strong enough asap to deal with our progress. ik what u mean, sometimes you ask and ppl just plain ignore you, but in my exp. there is always a kind player helping out, it really depends on the daytime.

yea as i said on one side youre absolute right, but if there is this information already in the character creation, not being able later on to join one, its imo the players responsibility to read mindfully the given information. like i said, in the series, the probably only possible way to be part of a clan, was being born or to marry into one, and few different special occasions.
so yea, the prob best and fairest way to give players a chance would be exact such addition, to join a clan as clanless by marrying a player from a clan, or via the individual current clan leader / clan council, if clans have something like this, doing some sort of trial/vote etc., which would would be quite fair for players while not completely rewarding their mistake not reading mindfull. also something like this engages more into community building and to socialize with others instead of just, hey pay 10k ryo and your part of a clan benefiting from coming clan jutsu etc. bc player which had chosen a clan would also need an rejoin chance to another clan, since they would stick with 1 or maybe even more clan jutsu which absolute doesnt fit them while other clan jutsus would, and this is imo as unfair as for clanless not being able to get into one later on. which could be ofc prevent if the said marriage mech would also count for them and enable them to join the spouses clan and giving access to their clan jutsus, but this would end up in players with either access of 2 different clan jutsus or the decision to leave their old clan and join the spouses one to be able to use their clan jutsus, which also could be considered both as unfair 😄

[pearl flicker]

1. There is a guide, it's in the ESC Menu, you see it every time you logout and also when you reach certain levels there's prompts to tell you to open to read more.

2. We've recently added where new characters start with a bunch of jutsu, including offensive.

3. Players can do this by adding stats into the Chakra stat. What you've described there is exactly what the Chakra stat does.

4. A lot of mid to late game content has already been simplified immensely from before, we will continue to see how we can improve the solo experience.

5. There's a lot more content being worked on. We spent the few years creating a game engine that would support the expansions to come. Raising the level cap arbitrarily without expanding on content would be shortsighted, when players hard grind to 70 for example, and we release a Level 60 quest arc, they would have no reason to complete it anymore, they'd be severely overleveled and hence the balance would be bad for them, and they'd feel cheated as other people level in a more satisfying and faster way than they did.

6. Clanless ninja will not get a clan in the way that players want simply because you cannot join a bloodline, and that's what the clan feature is. If people want to honorarily make their friends part of their clan, they can RP that. Otherwise, clanless players are born clanless, they are just like TenTen, Rock Lee, Jiraiya, Kabuto and the countless other Genius ninja in the Naruto world. They will get their own benefits.

7. With the servers reaching 400, it leaves no growth potential by not splitting servers. If we constantly are hitting the cap of the servers, people can't download and cannot play the game, or log into to a degraded server performance or in an oversaturated landscape with no places for them to grind or complete quests. The plan to expand the game past 1 single region is solid, we know what we are doing and will execute those plans as it becomes viable.

[polar forum]

1. I think the button needs to be a bit more intuitive, such as either including it in the main HUD (such as replacing the camera with it for example) or a maybe a large popup once players finish the tutorial asking if they want to read the guide (along with an explanation of where they can find it if they press no if you keep it in the ESC menu)

2. Yea I missed this since I had an old character so I was missing those jutsus, that does help, and I think clan jutsus will help the issue as well 🙂

3. I know they can but it takes a few levels to make the chakra pool "feel good" even early on in my opinion which you'll be sacrificing killing speed to do so. But I think the biggest issue overall with Chakra is how long it takes to regenerate your Chakra it's a large time consumption, I personally hate how long it takes and how often you have to do it after just a few jutsus early on, and REALLY slows down your grinding early game which makes it not really viable compared to other options (agi stacking or str stacking with a weapon) till u get some sort of AoE Jutsu and more levels. IMO some sort of passive chakra regeneration would go a long long way even if it's "slow", just do that u dont have to stand still for 15+ seconds to go from 0 to full

4. I gave the increasing level cap as simply an idea, I didn't really think too much into it, but what I was trying to say is that even in the end game there needs to be goals for players to strive towards, to keep them playing. Increasing player level from 60 to 70 and adding the lvl 60 ARC IMO doesn't really do that, yes, it makes players "take longer" to reach the max level but it still doesn't fix the overall issue of needing things to strive toward to once they reach 70 other than just pvp. Some games have gear min maxing due to stats(almost every single MMORPG), others have infinite levels (BDO), others have infinite levels under a different leveling system once u reach max level with talent trees. (MU Online), etc...

6. I get it, you want to keep characters consistent with their choices for RP purposes but IMO it's really punishing considering how long it takes to grind characters to max level and how many players have no idea about the bloodline abilities before they are released. In my opinion the issue is not that clanless can't compete, I know they'll have benefits too, it's just that the lack of option for already existing players to later switch once we know more about the bloodlines feels kinda bad (for me in my opinion at least).

7. I'm not saying you shouldn't split server the way you think I am, I think adding more servers its fine, I just don't think they should be "fresh" start servers, IMO they should simply be "world channels" where people can either pick to login to world 1 or world 2 and still have their character there. This allows for player growth and doesn't really split the playerbase, which will ultimately happen later down the line. Player base splitting by making actual different characters in different servers will also introduce issues if player base ends up going down as you'll have to merge later on and that's usually a big headache.

[safe lily]

7. I have to disagree on the "Fresh" servers. Imo this game needs "Fresh" servers.
   I have 800 Hours since steam release. Please delete it all an gimme a fresh EU server. ^^

[ornate scroll]

depending on point 5, i posted some days my first series of suggestions with endgame content, atm am working on series 2 which also contains a lot of content. probably keep doing this for a while until i get bored or @pearl flicker says its enough xD.

point 7. it should be a fresh start server, for new players and vets which feel nostalgic and wanna do a fresh char in a fresh world, but also third server which is like the current toad, so players can either log with their chars into toad or the second one, while on the fresh start players are only able to play with a fresh created char, enabling them later on to migrate to the other "open" servers.