Why Cantr failed

General out-of-character discussion among players of Cantr II.

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witia1
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby witia1 » Fri Aug 25, 2017 9:23 am

First point that makes Cantr what is is would be game design. Text based is more difficult for our senses. Cantrians are supposed to be humans, we play them as humans but in many ways they are different. Conecting with their world is more difficult.

Second one for me is lack of this "new world" feeling. It is to well explored to well known and many characters in game seem to be bored "with own existance".
Thats a bit self propelling mechanism, less activity in cantr, more bored/unactive characters, less activity in game..

And this simulation... Is cantr really society simulation?
For me it lacks insentives for society building. Except of player "wish" to make one. That makes them "fake" for me. And that's in my opinion is reason why any city/clan/country can cruble so easly.

Economy in game is.. Or rather there is no real ecconomy. That also affects character's society as trade would be huge factor in their interactions.

Slow paced game is also abit myth. Yes, you migth need few days to travel between locations. You migtht need few days to make even basic tools but also your character can be inprisoned or killed in matter of seconds.

For me cantr is still quite fun but still I see it as something that was not planned well. And for sure not a simulation.
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Chris
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Chris » Sat Aug 26, 2017 12:09 am

Somebody thought it was a good idea to make the game's numbers so ... stupid. How much food do you eat in a day? OK, sure, stew is more filling than carrots. But every damned food has to have its own number. If two foods share a number, it's a rare coincidence. They couldn't just make a few categories (e.g., 25 grams, 50 grams, 100 grams, 200 grams). Nope. We have to have 28 grams, 28.6 grams, 29 grams, 30 grams, etc. This is just one of so many ways in which consulting the wiki is such an integral part of the game. Obviously we here have put up with it, but with most game players, it's a huge fail.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Jaxon » Mon Aug 28, 2017 4:27 am

Millhouse wrote:Having an app in the marketplace would increase visibility, but yeah it works pretty well on mobile ever since mobile responsive mode was added to the game and some other tweaks were made.


Exactly my point. The app marketplace is a way to grow your audience exponentially.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby EchoMan » Wed Sep 13, 2017 11:40 pm

To me Cantr is the (almost) perfect game. Remove the Hit- and Drag-buttons and thief characters, and it would have been everything I ever needed and wanted in a game. ;)

Oh and Cantr didn't fail. It has entertained, taught, distracted, engaged and moved thousands of humans over the years. It is a success story. Thank you everyone who has contributed, however little or much, over the years, from GAB people to the occasional player. You all are my favourite game developers.


(I'll go back to my cave now. I think I still get notified if you send me a PM, if anyone want to say hi)
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Sopel_1 » Sat Sep 16, 2017 6:29 pm

If someone who has been away from the game for a years now but still visits this forum may add theirs two cents - Cantr simply grew stale and boring.
To elaborate let me take you on a little nostalgia trip.
I've joined the game nearly 10 years ago and although I didn't understand it at first I fell in love with it. All this whole new world, with it's whacky laws dictated by the mechanics of the game, whole cities, even cultures, maps, history books, legends, all created by the actions of the actual players. It was fantastic, I wanted my character to be a part of one of those stories someday. One of my characters was part of the cultural clan, other by an accident colonized a desolated village, other was a part of a big colony that was escaping from english zone - one of the best memories of my life.
But at one point, after ~3 years of playing I've simply got bored. I quit the game. Two years later, I've returned for a quick stunt that only lasted for a year and year later I returned for the third time but only for a few months.
Why?
I've just felt that nothing I do really has any impact. You get everything from the start. Every land has been discovered, every place seems to be visited, those who haven't simply don't have anything worthy of visiting. Every building is flooded with resources and there is no need for you to worry about anything - the food doesn't spoil, the clothes don't get ragged.
There simply is no goal in this game, other than mere existance (my opinion) and that's already one of the factors - who would like to escape from normal life where they work, eat and meet their friends to a world where... they work, eat and chat with their "friends"
But ok, that's the limitations of the game, but if we take that out we still have other characters, right? Colorful, interesting characters to role play your cantr life.
But when there is nothing to worry about we're basically are living in the utopia. Without the sense of exploration and mechanics to push players to take any actions we basically have a glorified chat room with some pseudo-mmorpg elements thrown to it. In my experience often the characters are flat as cardboard - everyone is beautiful, everyone is lawful and good, everybody is fantastic at cooking, sewing, fighting and is straight up jacked. I can't count how many times I've met some flirtatious 80 year old woman who - of course - looked like she never aged a day after her thirties. I also can't count how many redheads I've met who always had the same character, nearly the same names.
All this became so apparent for me when for the last time I returned I created a sailor, I had so many plans and dreams for my little guy, wanted him to settle down in a land far far away and try to build something from the ground up. First town, found my captain, was about first expedition, met all of my shipmates (three women and me, male). I've waited for some real life months to embark on the journey, was quite excited and had such high hopes... only to learn the moment we sailed out that in reality it was less of a "royal expedition" and more of a "orgy at the sea" club.
That killed my last hopes for Cantr. But can you blame people, when there is no goal for characters (other than some tedious ideas that never will pay off) it's no wonder that people treat this game as a erotica chatroom when they're in a more private location. (or not, as far as I remember, sexual acts roleplayed in whisper on the main location was not so uncommon)
So yeah, if you look at this from this perspective, Cantr seems to be pretty boring.
And no mobile app will change that, no changed registration system, no PR work, no website makeover.
Cantr fails because very few people find it interesting, they sign up for the game and get a chatroom. They are promised role-play but are given no opportunities for role-playing anything significant.
Cantr has a potential but is simply squandering it.

...phew, okay rant ove, just wanted to vent somewhere after years of thinking about this all.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby SekoETC » Sat Sep 16, 2017 7:58 pm

The previous writer raises a good point about Cantr being largely an erotic chatroom.

One problem with Cantr is that real world moralities and knowledge of the mechanics are so dominant that if somebody tries to do something different, they will never find enough in-game support for their idea. There have been some characters who freak out if there are dirty materials or raw meat in the same container as prepared food, but I have never seen a society that would tell everybody to store food separately to prevent disease. This is probably because everybody knows the only remaining disease is the eating sickness, and everybody knows what causes it. There's no need to study medicine because the only illness is trivial. Very few times I have seen towns that did something morally questionable large scale, and eventually someone always came and murdered the leader and that was the end of that. In a slaver town, when newspawns were told that they could either stay and serve and possibly raise in the ranks, or run and get hit, they pretty much always eventually ran.

There are no mysteries in Cantr because everything is in the wiki. Before things were on the wiki, if someone brought you a resource from another island, the only way to know its gathering rate was if you had another character on that other island and used OOC knowledge. There were no Klojt trade rates on Cantr island. In fact, when I started, I didn't even know that Cantr was an island, or that there were multiple continents in the game. I had never seen the sea. Now almost the whole world has been mapped, and every resource found. Sapphires were the last one. Now there is nothing left for explorers to discover. If the game was evolving, it would be impossible to know all the secrets of a jungle location, and even years later, you might discover new species. But such diversity would require a system where recipes aren't entered manually one at a time. So Cantr has always been very much against adding natural resources. I remember when I first had an English character set foot on an island other than Cantr and Treefeather, and there were like 12 or something resources in the same location. That was amazing. But you quickly grow desensitized to that. Resources are only worth something if they have uses, and characters can build faster than RD can add new recipes.

Also Cantr has had cars all the way from the beginning, so there was no upwards climb in technology. There was no penalty to using bone knives and stone hammers, so every town has them. Past day 3000. It's not because they couldn't afford better. There's simply no reason not to use them.

There is nothing in Cantr that would challenge people spawned in the same location to share the same beliefs or appearance. Everybody is a unique snowflake and as long as you don't go as far as making all of your characters exact copies of themselves, nobody is going to notice if you have a blonde you and a brunette you and a childish you and a large breasted you, and these are the only differences between them. It's because when a character spawns, they have no idea of the history of the town and no sense of belonging. If the player knows their friend plays in the next town over, they can just walk there and nobody can tell it's a CRB. Or if they spawn on a hopelessly boring island (cough B****o cough), they can just leave the character to die in their sleep because they have 14 other chances at a better life.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby witia1 » Sat Sep 16, 2017 9:43 pm

I would not agree with with all this food sorting. You are seeing it from player perspective and yes then there is point in sorting resources.
Yes in real life food can be contaminated. But in Cantr? Cantrian world lacks intensive to keep resources separate as it's inhabitants are capable to separate them on demand to single gram. Cantrians are not sorting raw from prepared food because "player knows" it is pointless but because there is no single in game event that would support such behaviour. We, humans have needed a lot of time to "invent" rules that would keep us from harmful germs. To discover how sickness can be transmitted and how to prevent it. Cantrians don't have way to get this knowledge.
If one Cantrian would sort food and other one won't they wont see a difference. So world is promoting not sorting as to do so means pointless effort.
Cantr is assumed as close as possible to our world but some "real world" mechanics are not translated to it or at least not translated good enough.

I think we expect sometimes to much from Cantrians cause some behaviors are so natural to us that we don't see that for are characters not nervelessly.
Not everything that is common sense for us will be same in Cantr.

There is nothing in Cantr that would challenge people spawned in the same location to share the same beliefs or appearance. Everybody is a unique snowflake and as long as you don't go as far as making all of your characters exact copies of themselves, nobody is going to notice if you have a blonde you and a brunette you and a childish you and a large breasted you, and these are the only differences between them.

In real life You are grown in to society, you have time to observe as child and learn to fit your surrounding. You are thought what is socially acceptable and what ways you should fallow.
In RPG games it is covered by world lore. You get in rule book, that dwarfs like beer, live underground and like to hoard gold and other "common knowledge".
Cantr doesn't have such thing. It gives you completely blank page of new character to boost your creativity and opportunities but in process it "cuts" any roots that character should have.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Sopel_1 » Sat Sep 16, 2017 10:54 pm

That brings out the topic how Cantr avoids the mechanics that are core to the social aspect to the game and in a way - the whole life simulation.
What actually happens when you are born / wake up / appear out of nowhere at the age of 20? Clearly, the 20 years must have passed so can we roleplay that we remember our past 19 years?
Also, in Cantr age is literally "just a number", there are no drawbacks, no skills are going to go down, not even the physicality. What's the point of game telling us that this character is "old" if there are no limits to how the character acts. As witia pointed out, there is no penalty for eating unprocessed foods that is years old. It doesn't really matter at this point if you eat the rice raw or in a form of a sushi - it's just a novelty, there is no gain in processing that food. There is no nned to be cautious about it either, it won't spoil after all. I'm also surprised that the game has been around for 15 years and yet we still don't have hygiene or thirst implemented. We also have many potions but all of them affect the same two things - energy and health.
Cantr by design and advertisments is supposed to be "limitless". But the complete freedom based on the vagueness and assumptions. Afterall, we can't really tell of Cantrians are supposed to be humans or are some celestial beings that can be born out of thin air at the age of 20.
Cantr has many of those shiny thingies that are there for "RP purposes", but doesn't have mechanics that simply give us information what kind of enviroment are we really in. It's surprising, thinking of it, that for a game that's 15 years old Cantr, by most standards is an unbaked game.
The game should (imho) take a step back, patch up the things that creates logic, system, boundaries. Because I think that this game should be limitless
but inside it's boundaries. It should throw curveballs at us, that would need a reaction from our side - flu or other illness in general, a change of weather and it's effects, the need of repairs, the need of explorations (by the way, the locations are sooo unbalanced - big cities are also situated on coastline because they have both the coast and a handful of resources, while those locations that are located deeper into the land have both less resources and no coast)
Cantr just has many things that would be logical in our world but due to the lack of mechanics it's illogical to waste time on it in game world.
The game and it's mechanics should be like a GM in and RPG session - it should give us something unexpected, create a little drama in the life of our Cantrians. Because people won't come up with everything themselves, they simply get lazy. Because, what's the point of role playing an illness if by the end you'll just choke some potion and say "okay, I'm fine now, thank you" (even better - attack yourself beforehand to roleplay the damage and pain)
The mechanics are the ones that prompt us to creating stories (f.e. like in Middle Earth - Shadow of Mordor) The mechanics would push us to colonize surrounding areas for resources, if they weren't all convinently present on the perfect coastline spot. That way we get nations, not big cities acting as ones. We should have it harder, there's only so much times that bone knife can be fixed, that is only so long you can wear the same clothes. The game should create our short term goals, because that's what's driving us forward while not getting us bored. Because what's fun in sitting in building and working for years to buy clothes we want our character to wear, only to later sit and talk, without much else to do.
Cantr has a big potential, but is squandering it. It would need a few shakeups and many changes in order to create a believable world where we can roleplay our many lives in and Mad Max like world, where we drive cars and shoot from crossbows.
But this is only my take, many people often argued about "Cantr III" and I've noticed there were the same groups of people - those who wanted change and those who are comfortable in this chatroom enviroment. So until we won't create the second, "tougher" server, even if just for testing how that would work, or we don't work out which direction the game should take - everything will stay stale.
And that's my theory on why Cantr is failing - not appeal, not availability on various devices, not PR but simply the game itself got boring and lost it's edge.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby witia1 » Sun Sep 17, 2017 7:50 am

I think that's why game was more alive before. Before resources got so abundant in storehouse it took effort to make something done.
There was this drive that kept cities going, to explore to form some kind of caravans to get resources.
Life in Cantr is to easy. It is hard to be surprised by it and doesn't really punish for neglecting even basic things.
Game at some degree wants to simulate humans but cuts its inhabitants from things that made us humans.
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Tiamo
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Tiamo » Sun Sep 17, 2017 10:33 am

How to make, and keep, a game interesting?

Competition is one way. Duels, races, rankings. This is what drives the majority of games.
Cantr is not about competition.

Exploration is another. Discovering the unknown, solving puzzles, searching and finding things, the sense of wonder. Every game has a phase where things are new for a player. Some games are completely based on a journey of discoveries.
Exploration is a kickstarter for making a game interesting, but eventually cannot last. Once you have 'seen it all', this source of interest in a game always comes to an end. There is a lot to discover in Cantr, in terms of concept, mechanisms/options, gameplay and of course the Cantr world. Enough to keep the game interesting for at least months, if you are inspired by what the game has to offer. Exploring the whole world literally would take a lifetime. Unfortunately Cantr also dents players' curiosity by having become less accessible over the years (it is not a 'sit down and play' type of game, new players have to wait before being accepted, there is no comprehensive, easy to find, beginners guide, there are rules that are not supported by game mechanisms and have to be learned by experience).

Interaction. Character to character interaction makes players return to the game. It is usually different every time, not predictable, and includes real people's reactions. Interest through interaction is renewable and can last for a long time.
This is where Cantr excels, or should excel. The game actively promotes playing a role for each individual character and build up a personal background/personality for them. However, although many options are deliberately left open for your character to play, there is little to no support in terms of game mechanisms for expressing, fleshing out and sustaining a chosen role. By design, i must add. I think this is a serious misconception, hampering the buildup and consistency of (public) character personalities and, on another level, the buildup and perseverance of social structures (there are more reasons for this). Apart from this i think cooperation (thus creating social structures) is pretty much undiscovered territory in Cantr. Unfortunately, there is a world to gain in this respect.

Accomplishment. Accomplishing things in a game are a major drive to play and keep playing. Collecting, making/building, reaching a new level, changing the world, reaching self-named goals, solving puzzles, being the talk of the day (within and/or outside the game itself), the list is endless. In a way this is the ultimate motivator, the one that rules them all and in gamejoy binds them.
For new players Cantr offers plenty opportunities for accomplishing things, from basic life necessities to useful items and wealth, social acceptance to a position of importance, even shaping parts of the world and be part of the in-world history. This is good. On the downside are the fact that setting goals is completely left to the initiative, and creativity, of each individual player (which can be a serious threshold or even limitation for some players), the sometimes very long time it takes to reach a goal (which discourages players who don't realize how long things can take sometimes) and currently the notion that about everything that can be realized within the game already has been done (probably many times) by others, or even one of your own characters (resulting in a sense of fulfillment, even closure for the game). I think an endless game like Cantr should be designed in such a way that there always is, or seems to be, something new to accomplish for the players.
I think ...
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Rmak » Sun Sep 17, 2017 7:47 pm

While in its hay day it was popular its been running at a loss for years - bottom line failure.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby witia1 » Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:01 pm

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. End of life is natural part of life it self.
Even when I don't agree to treat Cantr as "simulation" I still don't think Cantr failed. It has entertained a lot of people. Gave us space to express our ideas in form of characters.
Could it be done better? Always, but as is anything ever made.
And there always be some mechanics or other parts of Cantr world that at least for some could be different.

To prolong its life, to bring new energy I think game would need some serious rebuild but it doesn't make whole game bad.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Rigel Kent » Sun Dec 17, 2017 8:28 am

It was always greed. Town leaders not stepping aside and hoarding everything. Merchants Overcharging. Not enough want Or need.
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby Jos Elkink » Sun Dec 17, 2017 11:33 am

This is a bit of an old thread just now bumped up by Rigel, but that did make me read it and there are a lot of interesting points here. So just to comment on a few.

I hate when people on the forum ramble and most discussions that I actually find interesting, I just don't have the time to read. Now I'm doing the same here :-) so this is a really long post.

jfrizz51423 wrote:Hi everyone, so as you probably know, for the past few years, cantr has gone majorly downhill. The game in the past that used to seem pretty lively, now has so little players.


Tiamo wrote:I disagree with you on Cantr having failed. Actually the game has been, in its own way, a real success. Cantr has been running since, i think, 2002. Not many games can say they are running for 15 years straight!


I think I agree with both of you. 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.

Creating new accounts

jfrizz51423 wrote:I always felt that instead of the game devs trying to convince ME to play, I had to convince THEM that I wanted to play, which is just so wrong.


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.

SekoETC wrote:But seriously, what harm can a person do in one day? ... A new account has two characters and will need to wait an extra day for each new character. It usually takes less than 24 hours to investigate an account, so even if someone was auto-accepted and created multiple accounts just because they can, the accounts would be spaced close together timing-wise and would stand out.


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.

Maintaining game rules

The biggest challenge in running Cantr is a difficulty that is there by design: the game stands or falls by players properly roleplaying. I have played games like WoW or Second Life and all the chatting there was players talking to each other. I hated that and never wanted to play like that in Cantr - but a lot of new players are used to this from other games they play. So I think it was essential to be quite quick in stopping this, telling players to use the forum for OOC chat, not the game interface. I still think that's crucially important.

jfrizz51423 wrote:Also, look, I get that OOC speaking is the most awful crime anyone can commit but people should not get banned or completely shunned from the game just because they don't quite get it like everyone else.


Sure, banned or shunned is a bit strong, but they should be told to stop. It would quickly grow to very common practice if one didn't, and then the game would, in my view, be ruined.

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.

jfrizz51423 wrote:I've also seen people get banned from the game for doing things like hitting every person, picking up all the notes on the ground, etc. I get that that's trolling but it's A PART OF THE GAME.


I agree. Is this currently against the rules?

Game play

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. So I kind of fully agree with:

Sopel_1 wrote:All this whole new world, with it's whacky laws dictated by the mechanics of the game, whole cities, even cultures, maps, history books, legends, all created by the actions of the actual players. It was fantastic, I wanted my character to be a part of one of those stories someday. One of my characters was part of the cultural clan, other by an accident colonized a desolated village, other was a part of a big colony that was escaping from english zone - one of the best memories of my life. ... Two years later, ... You get everything from the start. Every land has been discovered, every place seems to be visited, those who haven't simply don't have anything worthy of visiting. Every building is flooded with resources and there is no need for you to worry about anything - the food doesn't spoil, the clothes don't get ragged. ... In my experience often the characters are flat as cardboard - everyone is beautiful, everyone is lawful and good, everybody is fantastic at cooking, sewing, fighting and is straight up jacked.


I do wonder whether part of this has also to do with the age of the society. I do recall that when the English-language zone started to get much more boring, the Polish-language zone seemed to have much more exciting game play still going on. I don't know how that is nowadays.

witia1 wrote:Economy in game is.. Or rather there is no real ecconomy. That also affects character's society as trade would be huge factor in their interactions.


This is quite true and something I could never quite solve. Although Cantr has been strictly designed so that everything that is physical is in the game interface and everything that is social should be developed by players (fn. 1), this is one regret. 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.

One of the former GAB members, Jur Schagen (you can search for his posts), I think had the best understanding of why there was a limited lifetime to Cantr - about 10 years ago when the decline started to set in. The problem is that resource deterioration / depletion is not present enough (and if you increase it, would lead to even more boring "repair" play), such that there is now just far too much and things are far too easy to create. There are no good motivations to develop much. The few characters I have are in towns with a handful of other characters, but loads of boats, buildings, vehicles, tools, etc. There is no challenge to survive, develop, collaborate, merge with bigger towns, etc. I'm side-tracking now, but I think the main point by Jur was that the way the technology is designed in Cantr, there has been a built-in life time limit in the game right from the start. In other words, the game design, unconsciously, created a game to last 5 years, not 15 (see also fn. 4). I can't say I have the full insight to judge this claim, but I think there is something to it. There certainly is something majorly wrong now with the huge abundance of space and goods in the game, removing scarcity and therefore reason for conflict and competition.

Tiamo wrote:Cantr is not about competition.


Ah, but that in my mind is a total misunderstanding of the game. 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.

jfrizz51423 wrote:Lastly, the reason this game has failed, and I feel like I will definitely receive the most backlash for this, is the slowness of this game.


computaertist wrote:There does seem to be something off about a game so hard to establish yourself in that most people can't before growing effectively apathetic.


I think I really disagree actually on this one, but it is one of the factors that makes the potential audience for Cantr more niche. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.

Tiamo wrote:This is where Cantr excels, or should excel. The game actively promotes playing a role for each individual character and build up a personal background/personality for them. However, although many options are deliberately left open for your character to play, there is little to no support in terms of game mechanisms for expressing, fleshing out and sustaining a chosen role. By design, i must add. I think this is a serious misconception, hampering the buildup and consistency of (public) character personalities and, on another level, the buildup and perseverance of social structures (there are more reasons for this). Apart from this i think cooperation (thus creating social structures) is pretty much undiscovered territory in Cantr. Unfortunately, there is a world to gain in this respect.


This point I really do not understand, but sounds interesting. So I'm curious to hear what you mean, what a game would look like that does this differently.

A lot of online games create social structures. WoW has a formal implementation of player groups; EVE Online has corporations or teams with implemented systems (e.g. how leaders are elected, listed, etc.). I forget the terminology and systems they use, but it means the game interface allows you to "create a group", "elect a leader", etc. I have always strictly avoided in Cantr, as this completely undermines the idea that it should be a playground to experiment with different types of organisation, both friendly and aggressive, and one where society is formed by the players. Now how would you expect to see this?

I also think "pretty much undeiscovered territory" is really putting it much too strong - but I do agree that it is not common enough.

Marketing

jfrizz51423 wrote:Another HUGE reason I believe that this game never really took off is the marketing. ... It's like you guys have always tried to keep this game some secret, like a part of some extremely secret society and don't want new players.


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.

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 ...

The maker

jfrizz51423 wrote:Because the maker should realize that their game is failing and they should be passionate enough about it to be willing to save the game. The maker should love this game and love its players enough to realize that this game could be so much greater, if just executed properly.


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!

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

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.



Sorry for rambling!!


Footnotes:

  1. Not too long before developing Cantr I had learned about the philosopher Searle's distinction between epistemic objectivity and ontological objectivity, which became an important influence on the game design: money objectively exists, but only because we intersubjectively agree that it does, it's not ontologically objective, and therefore the game interface should not create it but players should.
  2. All these departments made sense when we had about 70 or so volunteers. Now it looks a bit funny, talking to the same people in the different departments ...
  3. Although I have contemplated giving scores where players evaluate each other's roleplaying quality and this leads to leaderboards.
  4. There is a suggestion in this thread about creating some kind of natural disasters. I actually wonder whether that is indeed a good idea. To almost wipe out continents, make them temporarily uninhabitable, etc., to reduce the amount of land in the game and increase game play. The problem is that it will also hurt many characters that are well developed and those players might well get disillusioned and leave the game.
  5. See also roadmap, and a thread on Cantr III that I now cannot find.
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sherman
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Re: Why Cantr failed

Postby sherman » Sun Dec 17, 2017 12:08 pm

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.


The problem with this is as I see from my own experiences: It takes time and skills to do this. And motivation and a reason. Why would you want a war on cantr when you can choose from many games that center around war and instead be a general and commands many units into battle? Everyone wants to be the top guy and not the one following. And that's the issue I have seen myself, all want to lead but few want to follow. It just doesn't work that way. And we also have people with limited time to play which means other things are more reasonable for them to do.

I think issue is also in the playerbase of the game, be it irl reasons or whatever but few seems to even care about such things. Even if there were reasons for war, empires etc. Those need people with time to do them and if we got people with not so much time in their hands... It just won't work. Empires and wars need lot of effort and skills and other things that I think are too much for your average player
Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.
-Erwin Rommel-

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