How do we get new players ?

[boorish commoner]

how about ditching RNG player selection on Boss loot.

instead of rng on legendaries, everyone in the team defeating the boss gets 1 legendary material, which can be forged into (a random?) legendaries

defeating odin and looting with a bit of luck results in everyone looting  1 legendary piece. This was loot is fairly distributed and not totally luck based.

instead make it luck based what legendary item one gets: 1 random legendary from 50 legendary parts, or if one wants a specific type e.g. Head armor = 60 parts, Body Armor = 80 parts, or if one wants a inf Class legendary= 100 parts

some might not want these pieces and instead sell them for better gear (rookies for example) or sell unwanted legendaries for pieces (WTS Dwarf Axe for 20 pieces, WTS AGS for 40 pieces, WTS zephyr for 200 pieces, WTS dragon axe for 50 parts)

maybe for sturgian invasion

How about 1 legendary piece per every 10 boss kills? for example you need to kill prince 10 times for 1 legendary piece.

[Zocki]

I have already started to do the Official Events again, hope that helpes a bit Last time it helped

[DR.]

This does make me think tho.

If we needed 10 pieces to craft EVERY loot and each part only works for 1 loot people would be in theory looting 10x as much. (if the drop chance was put up as well) 

Being able to see I only need a few more pieces until I can make Exc... Hmmm Idk if this would help with the RNG or not lol

Given each drop needed the same amount of eg. You need 10 x Shards Of Exc to get it crafted maybe this would help with feeling the high of looting more often.


This could make more people salty tho so we may have a problem... You could be stuck with 9 pieces for years... 

Guess it would be fine if it was something you could trade? People i would hope would just try to value each part 1/10th of the normal price they agree on. 

Eg. If we agreed we valued Exc "30m" then we could agree that its 3m and go from there.

This may be good for new players. Rather than getting 1 small/big item at 500 hours or 3k hours like me, he got small parts along the way.

Also could make it 15-25 of them to craft the upgrade. 


This also may push up prices of the most wanted stuff as i can see people not caring and just "overpaying" for a part. This, in turn, will put the price up and it could keep on going up as other less wanted items get used to buy parts for the more wanted ones.

No idea if that would be much different from now but guess you can think about that. 

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The way upgrades change maybe we could have the drops change that way? Maybe Odin only drops one 1 thing for (x) amount of days or hours.

It would need to be very often otherwise you will have weeks where no ones on because of "shit" loots.


Also doing this will mean you will update us on who drops what.

People may end up farming "wave 6 of Rag" or something so I'm not sure if you want that to be a thing.

[Alphaa]

I liek Wody

[Peleus]

I liek Wody

i think you could have told him by pm

[Moose]

A lot of great ideas here. An insta/twitter page should be made so u can post about it and maybe get people more exposed to and gives NI a look and realizing how much of an in depth grind playing game it is ,people might be intrigued to try it out. I've got 2 people who ive tried to "put them on" with NI they like it but as well they feel like they're so far behind but that should be with any game at first. NI just needs people know about it to try it. Exposure is what NI needs. #SaveNI

[DR.]

A lot of great ideas here. An insta/twitter page should be made so u can post about it and maybe get people more exposed to and gives NI a look and realizing how much of an in depth grind playing game it is ,people might be intrigued to try it out. I've got 2 people who ive tried to "put them on" with NI they like it but as well they feel like they're so far behind but that should be with any game at first. NI just needs people know about it to try it. Exposure is what NI needs. #SaveNI

[Terath]

When it comes down to it, it's not just NI that's losing players, it's also Warband. Warband is very old and survives through its cult following, and is most likely bleeding even more players due to the wait for Bannerlord. It makes sense that people would want to distance themselves from the gameplay so it feels fresh when they play the sequel. NI is in the same boat - it's been around too long without any form of -accessible- endgame to most players. After all, Warband is a niche game and NI is an even more niche mod.

Besides that, the slow grind of NI certainly isn't appealing to everybody. There's been some ideas that have been tossed around (I favor some form of Nord kill points), but no definitive decisions. There are some more things we can do - one of my favourite choices would be a quest rework. Being able to do things like having daily / weekly or house quests that all players in the house could participate in, or maybe even 2-4 person participation quests, would at the very least reward players more for playing. Even further, though, daily quests could establish a rewarding routine beyond just logging in to clock your hours every day. Having loot be obtainable outside of RNG and through effort would absolutely make the game seem more appealing, in my eyes. This same idea is applied in NKP (Nord Kill Points) as well, in which you get NKP for killing / being alive for boss kills and a certain amount of NKP can net you legendaries. Again, would allow players to obtain loot outside of RNG - it wouldn't really matter how long it would take because it is a GUARANTEED loot instead of something you have to pray for on every boss death.

Besides the grind, the new player experience is relatively poor. It used to be worse, as there didn't use to be a beginner mode or training equipment for players to try out. Beyond that, though, it's very lackluster. There's no in-game tutorial for players beyond players setting up their character, there's no videos to watch, nothing tells new players that the forum is the central hub of trading and communication, nothing tells players what materials and legendaries are and what players can do with them, nothing that explains the three crafting trees and what they contain, the wiki doesn't have an introductory / explanatory page for new players explaining game concepts and notions (although it does have a lot of good pages about the marketplace, the auction hall and crafting rarities), and new players get punished and ridiculed by old players for placing barricades incorrectly and not knowing the importance of barricades / BP. If you don't have a friend to explain everything and show you how to manage barricades and when to heal and what drops are rare or not, you're essentially lost, and it's incredibly hard to know what to do unless you ask someone. It's fine if old players teach new players - but new players shouldn't be FORCED to take that route. The lack of any real tutorial in this mod, inside or outside of the game, is incredibly detrimental to new player experience, and more often than not is a deciding factor if a player stays or goes.

Edit: A really long time ago, I planned to do a tutorial series on YouTube way back in 2016 to attempt to solve some of these issues. Beyond tutorial videos for new players, I was going to do a long video on barricade management and how bots interact with them, how to place them anywhere effectively, and how to heal effectively (before it was an ability). Basically, I'd take threads from the Strategies and Guides part of the forum and put them into a visual form as to more easily allow players to access it, understand it and learn. Extended tutorials for things like boss handling, barricade and healing management and usage, cavalry tactics and shieldwall tactics would be a large boon to the mod.
It'd be incredibly cool if a player / group of players made an introductory and extended tutorial series. We would most likely endorse the videos and put them somewhere very visible, like the front page of the forum or the website itself. I believe there's a NordInvasion community channel as well, where multiple people can have their videos uploaded instead of on personal channels. Beyond tutorials, if people want to make gameplay videos, stream VODs, or any other visual content for NI, that would be great as well. I would be more than willing to endorse and manage a NordInvasion community youtube channel if people are interested and make videos for it.

Outside the game, though, there's a couple of things that could help. The mod doesn't really have any active outside communication with typical mod areas, such as ModDB or the Steam Workshop - updating those and keeping them up to date could certainly help, as a ton of people browse for mods there, and active multiplayer mods for Warband are rare these days. Updating the visual style on the website / forum / other accessible areas could help NI look more modern, although this probably won't appease anybody but me. Updates to the game are certainly a factor, as it can make the mod appear more active. It's been a long time since we've updated because we've all been doing real life stuff, so ideally once all that's through we can get back to updating semi-regularly.

This is all my personal opinion, of course.

[DR.]

For some time I've been think about making a page on how to kite as it seems even old players have trouble.

I did put down some ideas like that on a doc. From memory it was so far.

What makes a good cade spot/how and were to place cades.
How to be helpful when you don't have the best gear
What should you buy gear wise/what do you do with your wealth
How to maximise your chances of winning/being in good runs. 
Links to things on the forum. Just like a full list. Crafting trading etc..
Suggested goals you can achieve
Suggested play styles for each class and heros. 


And some others I have in my doc idk I'm on my phone.


If people want to make threads on them feel welcome it's not like mine would be perfect anyway.

[Moose]

A lot of great ideas here. An insta/twitter page should be made so u can post about it and maybe get people more exposed to and gives NI a look and realizing how much of an in depth grind playing game it is ,people might be intrigued to try it out. I've got 2 people who ive tried to "put them on" with NI they like it but as well they feel like they're so far behind but that should be with any game at first. NI just needs people know about it to try it. Exposure is what NI needs. #SaveNI

`No insta and it doenst mean some of us dont know people that will actually expose NI if it got a shout out

---

A lot of great ideas here. An insta/twitter page should be made so u can post about it and maybe get people more exposed to and gives NI a look and realizing how much of an in depth grind playing game it is ,people might be intrigued to try it out. I've got 2 people who ive tried to "put them on" with NI they like it but as well they feel like they're so far behind but that should be with any game at first. NI just needs people know about it to try it. Exposure is what NI needs. #SaveNI

`No insta and it doenst mean some of us dont know people that will actually expose NI if it got a shout out