New Player Question...Relaunch ect.

[Pure_Dunga]

Forgive my ignorance if this is a silly notion, before I say my suggestion I'll explain how I came to know the game. A friend of mine received an email to say the game was relaunching a week or so ago and suggested it would be the sort of thing I would enjoy. He played the game years ago when I asked him why he doesn't still play, or come back to playing, he said that he'd put a lot of time into building his characters up first time round and when he couldn't tend to them due to a spell in hospital they died, and he didn't think he could put the same effort into making a new bunch of characters with the same influence.

He reckoned as the game developed it became harder for newspawns to achieve things in overly active area's and even harder again to achieve anything in a quiet area, when he didn't have time to mould them into the people he wanted them to be.

I myself had about 3 days of game time before the site went down and found in terms of character intereaction an excellent response for one of my characters, an average response for one, and very minimal response for the third. As I don't really know the game I was just playing everything as it came, hoping for a bit of in game guidance.

Finally arriving at my question, as I have no idea how big the Cantr world is, or how active, IF server problems and other internet issues that I have no knowledge of persist, would people play is the world was started over? Instead of day 3015 or whatever it is, with buildings and vehicles and weapons and everything around them there from the people who lived before them.

If the only way the game could continue was from a complete restart, would everyone who was active with their well developed characters, be happy to start from scratch?

[Doug R.]

If the only way the game could continue was from a complete restart, would everyone who was active with their well developed characters, be happy to start from scratch?

Not remotely.

[CrashBlizz]

1. The way I understand what happened its a server problem. The game is a backed up on a regular basis so a very recent copy of whats happened is saved somewhere - meaning a complete restart will never be needed.Just a new server ...and the forum is on a seperate server (meaning we have two at are disposal????)

But I know nothing of Dos attacks so...

2. If a restart was needed a lot of old players have said they'd quit. I myself dont see this happening no matter what they say, the oppurtunities presented by a fresh start would be too tempting for them. Personally, I think a restart would be more fun than carrying on how it is.

3. Not that you exactly asked but:
Most towns on the main english islands are now (especially after the long downtime) owned/ran/ruled/etc by 2 or 3 established characters of long term players. Don't expect new charcters to gain authority in these places fast. The less populated islands generally have far too charcters to grow quickly, so don't expect cross island expeditions in jeeps any time soon. Arguably the best time in cantr is in the middle. Lots of newish characters in a place not too populated, though because of how old cantr is these places are hard to come by - especially without causing a CRB...

[Pure_Dunga]

If the only way the game could continue was from a complete restart, would everyone who was active with their well developed characters, be happy to start from scratch?

Not remotely.

Why not Doug? I take it from your post count and your name in red writing your a long time player of the game. Do you enjoy your characters more than you enjoy the game, if you know what I mean? I don't really understand it, but I can see your indignation in regards to it, as my friend met me with a similar reason as to why he does not play now.

[Doug R.]

You're mistaking bluntness for indignation.

Do you enjoy your characters more than you enjoy the game, if you know what I mean?

I know what you mean, however, the characters ARE the game and therefore the two are inseparable. If you remove the characters, you don't have a game. You're essentially asking me if I would continue to play Cantr if you took away the only reason I have to play (my characters), and the answer to that is no. I would much rather leave Cantr behind than put effort into starting over, especially given a "restart" circumstance where my characters were terminated in an artificial way. If it happens once, what's to stop it from happening again?

Players love debating the scenario, but there is a 0% chance that Cantr will ever be reset. It will continue, or it will die, but it won't start over from scratch, for more reasons that I could possibly enumerate.

[Pure_Dunga]

Oh, it was naive of me to think the idea of a restart had never been mentioned before. I completely see your point, and I am hugely regrettable that I wasn't introduced to the game a few years ago!

I've scanned through the forums, and there seems to be a pang of distaste for the number of inactive players/characters/towns, do you think there is any way around this? I seen one post about the spawning system, another about the ingame size of the Cantr world. Would a simple(probably not simple at all) rejig of these help anything?

Looking through old posts it seems the game has went through spells where it thrived, I hope whenever (if), the game begins again I can enjoy a similar spell of enjoyment!

[Doug R.]

There's two problems - player retention and player recruitment.

Retention of new players has, in my opinion, been fairly constant over the 9 years Cantr has been around. About half the characters in any town simply never wake up. That's true now, and has been true forever. A newbie island has been suggested to increase retention of new players, however, my belief is that most new players leave because it's not what they though it was, not because of some bad experience that they had at the hands of other characters after spawning. If they really liked the concept, most would spawn another and try again. If Cantr isn't what they thought it was, there's little that can be done to keep them.

Most of the players that stay past sign-up don't stay past their oldest character's 30th birthday. There's tons of reasons for this, and not all can be addressed. Tons of players quit when their characters experience emotional trauma. Not much we can do about that, except make it harder to reflexively quit. That seems like a no-brainer until you get into the issue of personal rights - shouldn't players have the right to quit whenever they wish? So, that problem is plagued with ethical and possibly legal issues.

The only people we have a chance of salvaging at this stage are the ones that are bored, and a comprehensive overhaul of the game mechanics is meant to target retention of longer-term players by keeping the game open-ended.

Recruitment is difficult. Cantr relied heavily on word of mouth, and after a few years, people simply ran out of friends to bring into the game. We pay a modest fee and have a Google Adwords campaign that's responsible for a large share of our sign-ups, but any other advertising we do must be cost-free until we see an increase in donations, which won't happen unless we increase the player base. It's a catch-22.

[Marian]

Short of a Cantr 3 being released or some kind of mirror Cantr universe we're never going to get a clean slate to play on, no matter how interesting I find that idea. Though I am obviously biased since I've just recently started up a new account, I'm afraid only the handful of players around since the old old days will ever get to know what it was like to get out there and build towns and form governments and generally just make things happen, everyone else basically plays savages picking through the ruins of former civilizations now.

Doug did post an idea....somewhere I'm too lazy to find, about keeping characters intact but destroying everything they weren't holding an restructuring or just plain deleteing a lot of the empty locations to encourage people to band together and build things again, like with an IC explanation of a huge earthquake, but it was all just theoretical. And too bad, because I would totally play that game.

[Doug R.]

Short of a Cantr 3 being released or some kind of mirror Cantr universe we're never going to get a clean slate to play on, no matter how interesting I find that idea.

The first character I spawned on the second go-around with this account actually spawned in the middle of nowhere and built up a town from absolutely nothing, counting every last scrap of iron and leather lest he miscalculate and be left without bellows. Granted, that's rarer today that it was at the beginning, but it's not impossible to experience.

Edit: That said, the town is built, and other than looking for resources he hasn't found yet, there's not a whole lot to do since there are no other towns around. I tried making strict rules so most newspawns would leave and start their own colonies that would ultimately prove antagonistic and therefore interesting, but all that left were eaten by animals...

[Armulus Satchula]

I'd probably play more (assuming the server was up) if the world was wiped. So many towns just have stock piles of resources, while boats and cars nearly seem useless task to build, as they never break. A lot of this game is RP, of course, but when everything is nearly provided to you as need, there isn't much of a drive. I enjoyed when Cantr more was new and what are simple goals now, were long enduring tasks then with a grand satisfaction at the end.

[FrankieLeonie]

I would love to have a second smaller world be created for people who want to try a new primitive place. Then it wouldn't be a choice of giving up the old for the new, just a different experience in a different world

[Cdls]

It would be nice if Cantr had that option built into it, and considering the necessities for such a function exist, its just about coding it in (as well as getting it approved).

Basically, upon creating a new character, an extra spawning option could be "primitive" in which the character would spawn in an area defined as "primitive"

[Pure_Dunga]

I guess it would be nice for every generation of new players to get the same opportunity to create as those who played the game first. But I imagine 8(?) years of progression haven't been made so all of a sudden we can go back to day dot.

The game is textually stimulated, I suppose the actions that taken within in, e.g building and what not, are a by product of what we 'talk' ingame. So in that line of thinking, it shouldn't really matter what is around us, if players and characters are active enough there should be no reason things get stale or boring. As I haven't a clue what lies around the land of most of the Cantr world, bar my knowledge from the forums, I don't see why Empires and Clans of old can't be reincarnated in newer versions and ideas of rule which will again breed the great excitement that was there before.

I'm really looking forward to the game getting going again!!!

[Armulus Satchula]

It won't happen though because the Cantr player base is too small to support really anything like that. These hacking and DDos events don't help increase it either. :/

[DylPickle]

The pros of a wipe for me would have to include a smaller world, with a resource allocation that made sense with the much larger variety of resources now. A second mirror server would be pretty cool, same with a cataclysmic event of sorts... But it's not exactly necessary. Starting in a primitive area of the existing world doesn't really have that same thrill to it, I find, because if you're like me you'll get tired of other language groups, or you'll realize that your spawning out in the boonies means one less potential spawn to bring a developed area back to glory. It'd be nice to see places lots of places with 15+ populations and strong regional rivalries again. I just think there is simply too much land for the current player base right now.