Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Del said:

They did a survey in their discord and the largest demographic of people were 35-44, 25-34 was the second largest.

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I would have thought 25-34 would have been virtually nonexistent. That's great!

Del said:

Mostly negative word of mouth. LOL It's like 4 or 5 of you (half of which have never even played the game) who are just loud and obnoxious as fuck. The majority of people in the thread have enjoyed playing it.

Now I'm really looking forward to EA just so everyone can laugh at how fucking retarded your last couple posts have been. 300-500 total? Yeah, okay. Want to make a wager on that?

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They never take the forum bets bro, trust me.

bolok said:

I forget the channel, but someone has been streaming btop and grafana charts for the last couple open sessions. It's cool to see, but I don't think anyone here is going to offer you a mountain of cash based on the metrics lol.

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It's a hard problem to solve. FF14 probably? does the best job of keeping their entire world alive. But that's just due to the nature of how they do jobs on a character, and it encourages queuing up for "old" content. Given x amount of new players and churn, the hard requirement to do all the previous content before the latest, etc. But given this isn't a narrative or smash your dailies and log type of game- they have a harder road. New classes and races have been teased, and twinking alts is always a good time, which will help some. But on the other hand, that's kind of a tomorrow problem too. Best bet given the constraints is probably to not expand the world too wide, but to make more dense or vertical (teh deep?) zones that keep the higher levels circulating amongst the lower. Introducing interdependencies amongst the levels would help too, but i can't immediately brain a way that wouldn't be alien.

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FF 14 does the best job of making things fun and seperate "theme park attractions" as part of the game to build a whole world instead of just an endless gear treadmill of grind through leveling, hit max level, and then play the end game of raid log to chase marginially better numbers.

All the extra stuff like Gold Saucer, Crafting and Gathering Professions being their own mini games and having fun rewards beyond feeding the gear treadmill, and all the options for esoteric grindy stuff if you want, but arent pressured to do make it fun for a variety of experiences. It creates a fun and immersive world with tons of content thats easily accesable without punishing you into being a mindless time sync of plowing through your vegetables (leveling) to get to desert (end game raiding).

bolok said:

It's a hard problem to solve. FF14 probably? does the best job of keeping their entire world alive. But that's just due to the nature of how they do jobs on a character, and it encourages queuing up for "old" content. Given x amount of new players and churn, the hard requirement to do all the previous content before the latest, etc. But given this isn't a narrative or smash your dailies and log type of game- they have a harder road. New classes and races have been teased, and twinking alts is always a good time, which will help some. But on the other hand, that's kind of a tomorrow problem too. Best bet given the constraints is probably to not expand the world too wide, but to make more dense or vertical (teh deep?) zones that keep the higher levels circulating amongst the lower. Introducing interdependencies amongst the levels would help too, but i can't immediately brain a way that wouldn't be alien.

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Yeah, I agree. This is one of the hardest problems to solve in MMO design, and FFXIV is probably the gold standard for how to keep older content "alive". The way they funnel everyone through the same story, jobs on a single character, and a duty finder that backfills even ancient dungeons. It's all pretty deliberate systems work to keep the world feeling populated.

MNM doesn't really have any of those levers. Instead, they've gone with a very large, very open world that already feels bigger than its population can support. Without structural systems to recycle players back through older content, I don't see how twinking or alts do more than patch the issue at the margins.

You're right that density or vertical design could help, but that would require rethinking zone philosophy in a way that I don't think they've committed to. The "tomorrow problem" framing is what makes me concerned. Because if the playerbase calcifies early, you don't get a second chance to compress the experience. By the time they realize it's an issue, the community may already be too fragmented to recover.

That's what makes the "massive world" pitch ring hollow to me. You can't spread a thin population across a giant map and then shrug it off with "we'll deal with it later." That's not a plan. That's setting the stage for your world to feel empty from day one.