Wow sorry I have not been on here in a few months and did not realize all of the extra replies that were made on this thread. Jos Elkink I will reply to you now!
Jos Elkink wrote:I think the fact that it was just a hobby project created to play by me and a few friends, and then see if some other people on the internet might be interested, which then turned into a game with thousands of players, and then lasting 15 years, is quite a success. Not in the league of WoW or Minecraft, but still pretty exciting. That said, there is a consistent growth in players for the first 5 years and a consistent decline for the subsequent 10, and now I have to admit, to me it feels like it is dying. The game is more boring than it used to be, the forum is remarkably quiet, and on Discord there isn't an awful lot of activity either. So it's not a failure, but it's failing.
The game was definitely a success. When I played it, I loved it. But yes, it does seem to slowly be fading into the background now.
Jos Elkink wrote:I think you have a point here and I consider this a serious weakness. There are actually a lot of discussions ongoing in Game Administration Board (GAB), Players Department (PD) and Programming Department (ProgD) about how this could be improved (fn. 2). For the PD, which is by far the most labour-intensive part of running the game, screening new player accounts is much less work than trying to find issues subsequently.
I do think Seko has a good point, though, that I will bring up for discussion in GAB. It is probably limited damage done in a short time and we could quickly intervene, remove inappropriate new accounts within 24 hours or so from being created.The newbie world should help a lot here, too, as new accounts can immediately be used to explore the game interface etc. and get a feel for the game, albeit not yet with the real characters.
Good to know! Glad you guys are trying to fix that.
Jos Elkink wrote:I think a bigger problem is that vigilant maintenance of the rules has also lead to killing off a lot of more aggressive gameplay, which has generated a more boring game in my view. More on this below. To be fair to the PD, though, it is incredibly difficult to delineate between cheating and interesting mobilization of large groups of characters. It is possible that some of the most exciting times in the game (e.g. the Naronian and Ladvician conflicts, if I'm not confusing names now) might have been partly due to serious CR breaches and that an improved and almost professionalised PD has made such major conflicts very difficult to play.
I agree. I just think that the moderators need to stop banning people for playing the "troll" roll in game. In my experience anyway, when someone was violent, they would just get locked up in a building and forced to either comply or starve to death. I think the characters should have to deal with the punishment. Not the actual players. Also, violence and drama always leads to more interesting gameplay
So you are probably right that the strict rules have made it difficult to have characters experience exciting things.
Jos Elkink wrote:A lot of people bring up the discussion of game versus simulation again. I don't think I find that a very interesting discussion. It's not a simulation, since there is plenty of unrealistic elements, and it is meant as a game, but the game I wanted to play is one where different societies grow and where you can play different roles within those societies. So it needed something akin to societies and I wanted to have those naturally develop. So it ends up being a bit like a simulation. But that was never the goal.
To my mind, the first years of the game were still the best and few of you would remember those. I had a character who was a journalist and developed a newspaper, and, in the same town (this only later became against the rules), I had a police officer, and we had elections and a cabinet, etc. In another part of the game, I had a soldier fighting in a large war (part of the Ladvicitavoi army), eventually killed on a scouting mission. I also had sailors exploring the coast, etc. What was cool was that there were very different societies and political systems (democracies, empires, friendly villages, military orders) and many different roles to play there in.
This seems to have changed a lot. I am only observing a tiny, tiny part of the game world now, but everywhere I encounter friendly villages, a town leader who helps everybody get their food, the main excitement some romantic affair being played out. I never intended Cantr to be like that and find it really quite boring.
Its nice to hear that you completely agree in this sense. I play games to escape the routine and dullness of the real world, and it takes a certain aspect out of Cantr when everything is handed to people. Truth is, it is a life simulator in some senses. When people do not need to fight for survival, they become comfortable, and worry about other things, such as romance, and getting everyone in town to like them. Cantr is still one of my favorite games played, but it would have been perfect for me if things weren't always so 'nice and perfect'.
Jos Elkink wrote:If I were to re-create Cantr, I would apply the same philosophy, but I would definitely introduce money into the game interface. The barter trade in Cantr has always held back the game and social development to a huge extent and this was, I think, a mistake. It also ignored the fact that my original
Lego game only started when we introduced (Monopoly) money.
Money would add a very interesting element to the game!
Jos Elkink wrote:The competition is not pre-defined by the game, so there are no scores in the game and scoreboards (fn. 3). But you create your own competitions. You set your goals for your character and once you fix those, it becomes a challenge to fulfil them - as long as there are some other characters who have similar, competing goals. So if you want to be leader of a large empire, there certainly is competition involved in acquiring that position! At least, that's what the game is about.
Now, competition here often involves cooperation and mobilizing others. So in that sense, maybe it's more about cooperation than competition. But that also depends a lot on just how you define your characters. It is true that the game has become all about friendly cooperative playing, which I commented on above.
I agree with this! That's why I've always loved sandbox style games. The freedom to create the competition yourself, is a great part of the fun.
Jos Elkink wrote:Most games are much more fast-paced, but I think it is nice that there are alternatives, like Cantr, and are different.
To my mind there are a number of reasons why speed is an issue, but also why I disagree:
- Building something big takes indeed ages. But the point was never that individual characters would spent ages building, but that people cooperate. Once you cooperate, building isn't that long at all. So the focus should be on the social, cooperative, mobilization side, not individual building.
- The game is partly slow because there are now too few characters spread over too many locations. This means that there are few that will respond to anything you do and this is seriously hurting the game. This has of course two causes: a) we lost too many players and b) I enjoyed created new lands so much that in the end I went crazy and created far too much land. My plan was to make much of it largely inhabitable (many, violent animals, for example) but this has subsequently been tempered and now there is just too much land (fn. 4).
- The game is slow when you focus on construction instead of interaction - there are no speed limits on social interaction in the game.
In fact, for me the game is too fast paced
... Now that I have a job and play only to a very limited extent, I have a choice between two kinds of characters: a) boring ones who live in quiet communities and don't talk too much, or b) interesting ones who try to establish themselves in busier locations as politicians or merchants or journalists. But the latter takes an enormous amount of time, so I only do the former, and that makes it a pretty boring game. Making the game faster would make it worse.
I understand your points, and see how this adds to the quality of the game. I just think that it shouldn't take a week to create some tools for yourself and a basic t-shirt. It should be difficult, but not AS difficult. But to each their own, and I'm sure a lot of players like that aspect. It's just that when you are online, theres not much else to do besides stand around and talk to other characters doing nothing, since building something takes lots of hours.
Jos Elkink wrote:Although I agree with most of your comments, this one I found a bit annoying. Yes, Cantr marketing is a bit of a failure and yes, we should have created more of a hype around it. But you seem to suggest we didn't care or didn't try. This is actually a hugely difficult thing to do and most attempts have, in a way, failed. It's also something I personally focused on less - when I still played a more central role in running the game - because I was more interested in the programming and staff organisation side.
We have ongoing discussions in the Public Relations department (PR) about how to improve this, in particular how to make better use of social media. One thing that I think has hurt us, is that we have very strict rules about sharing in-game information, but within sharing those, it is very difficult to explain outsiders what makes Cantr cool and interesting. We are going to try to change that a bit in the near future, I think. So that relates to:
Genie wrote:One of the problems I had to face has been making people familiar with Cantr.
But basically, jfrizz, if you're still around, you should consider applying to PR and help with this! To my mind, the only thing that can really save Cantr is a massive increase in player numbers.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to annoy or offend. To be honest I wasn't expecting to hear a reply from anyone who had actually created the game, so I was just rambling my thoughts out loud. I understand that you have attempted to market the game, but in my opinion, no where near enough. For example, most really popular games have social media accounts on every type of social media possible. They make several posts that are entertaining and insightful a day. They are actively engaged with the community at all times. Not that you aren't active on the forums, but potential players aren't going to discover the game on the forums. I understand this is something that is incredibly time consuming, but would be worth it. I meant it all as constructive criticism, so if someone of importance did actually acknowledge my post, to realize that marketing for this game needs a FULL makeover in order for the game to truly be saved.
I'd be interested in applying though! I'm quite busy, and I'm not sure how time consuming taking on a role like that would be, but that does sound interesting!
Jos Elkink wrote:jfrizz51423 wrote:Also, make an app.
Yes, definitely agree, and working on it. But this is going to take time and we have a really serious shortage of active programmers at the moment. My idea is to start with a very simple app that is basically the equivalent of opening a browser and accessing the website, but at least it would be listed in app stores etc. We can then subsequently think of more app-style features.
10 years ago this was obviously not a concern ...
I understand. An app would be great, but I get that it's hard without having people to hire. Honestly, if you guys ever did a Cantr 3, I'd charge players $5 to buy the game... super cheap, but gives you some income to work with
Jos Elkink wrote:So here it was suddenly made personal
Ok, I have to admit, and admitted above, that the level of passion has dissipated. 15 years is a long time!
I was very actively involved only for a third of that time. To me there are a number of reasons I could not keep up that level of passion - but I should add that several staff members over time have invested huge amounts of effort with great passion!
- The game never quite moved in the direction I wanted to, which makes it difficult to stay passionate. Except for the first while - where people later claim all excitement was due to serious CR breaches - there is too little politics, war, empire, trade, competition, and too much gathering, farming, romance, cooperation, and now I understand erotic episodes. That was never the game I intended to play - these elements were only there to make the trade, war, politics, etc. be about something ... It's very nice that different players get different things out of the game, but in the end a too small proportion play the former.
- Whatever we tried, we could never get the marketing right (and we tried!). In fact, regardless of marketing effort, the player base just grew for 5 years and then declined for 10. This is not very encouraging.
- I had promised early on to keep the game free, and want to stick to my promise, but this has meant serious limitations in what you can do to promote or improve the game. If we could have invested in marketing or hired temporary programmers for specific features, that would have improved the game - instead we relied entirely on volunteers.
- Some ideas I have about the game design now could not be implemented in the existing game design, so that makes it less interesting. In particular, I want free roaming instead of towns and roads, and in my dreams I would like a visual, not a text-based version of the game. Not being able to implement your main ideas about the game and instead having to focus on maintaining the game as it is, is not very motivating (fn. 5). The basic framework of Cantr II became too constrained. I had ideas how I wanted to develop the game, but that was not possible without completely rewriting the game. I started doing that in 2008-09, but that never progressed far enough to take seriously.
- The most important thing is just that I do not have the amount of time I used to have. In the first years, I spent about 20 hours a week running Cantr, i.e. a halftime job. Now I have a fulltime job that takes all my time and energy and even absorbs most of my creativity. I'm trying to change my work-life balance a little lately, but I will never have the kind of time available again that I used to have, so I am a little powerless - observing all the problems you outline but not able to fix any of them.
Moonflame wrote:Maybe Jos doesn't want to spend all their time on this game, maybe the idea was to always use volunteers for staff and not charge the players. If you want a marketed game, maybe this is just not what you want it to be.
Well, "want" is the wrong word, it's more "promised". I've regretted that promise many times
... I would prefer to charge a little every month instead of nothing, so that with enough players, that really generates some income that can be used for marketing or paying designers or programmers. I do think it is a bit sad how few players actually donate on a regular basis. There are enough now to pay the server costs and some very minimal Google AdWords marketing, but that's it.
I understand, and you make valid points in everything that you say. I'll try and reply to each of them.
- It's a shame that this game has never become quite what you wanted it to be, but know you have created endless enjoyment for many people, even if it wasn't the exact image that you had envisioned. I think you could create a game that had these elements, but Cantr would need a lot of changes in order to create that kind of environment.
- I get that failing to attract new players isn't encouraging and must make it difficult to maintain motivation after such a long time.
- Yeah, not having any money go towards the game is difficult. I understand that too.
- Man, a visual version of this game is my absolute DREAM. It seems like what you wanted from this game and what I want for this game are the same. Although probably some of the roleplaying would be different since you would actually see the world, I believe this would make the game so interesting. Obviously a visual 3d or even 2d world is a whole other beast though.
- I understand that. You have a full time job, a life, etc. I get that you feel powerless due to the lack of time you have, but maybe communicating your ideas to the volunteers who do have time, would be an idea. If you could give the power to someone else to make the big changes you want to see, then maybe they could actually happen.
Jos Elkink wrote:witia1 wrote:No, it's not failure. Nothing is ment to last forever and even when there will be day for Jos to pull a plug it won't mean a project failed.
As I said at the beginning, I agree on this. I think it's failing now, but it's not a failure overall. What is a slight problem, though, is that there seems never to be a good moment to "pull the plug". There would always be some volunteers who would recently have invested loads of time and effort to keep the game going, so it would be unfair to them, and it would always have some players that are really invested in their characters, and there is no really good objective reason why they should be stopped. So I'm not sure there is a "pull the plug" moment
... At the same time, I feel the game has now become too quiet, the forum too quiet, the game world too stagnated, to make it still an interesting game to work on.
I agree that it is not a failure. Sorry, I think I phrased the title of my thread incorrectly. The game is not a failure. It has provided me with a lot of fun times, so I know it is not an "overall" failure. But yes, as of right now, it is failing, enough to make me sad that this game could possibly become completely dead some day. I get that the Cantr scene is dying, and it seems like it is too late or no use to invest any more time than necessary to intensely work on the game, but I think you are wrong. I think that this game can be saved, and that there is hope for something greater.
Maybe you feel that the current Cantr is too old to be changed, but I don't understand why a new Cantr III wouldn't be more than a consideration! A complete makeover of Cantr II is also a possibility. If you ever do feel like trying again to create that ideal game of politics, war, drama, trade, empires, freedom, role-play, etc, etc, I think you should give it a go.