As you may recall from previous posts, one of our top development goals for Spirit Crossing is to reduce loneliness in the world. We truly believe that this is one of the most important and wonderful things that games can do for players. To accomplish this goal, we need to do everything we can to ensure that we’re keeping players of Spirit Crossing in thriving, joyful Waystations.
From playing Spirit Crossing ourselves, from listening to our players, and from studying the analytics data from our Alpha playtest, we’ve learned that this is more than just an important aspirational goal for our studio. Waystations are a double-edged sword. When they are active and full of people working together, Waystations make the game feel dramatically more fun and meaningful. But conversely, when Waystations are mostly inactive, you get the opposite effect. Not only do the few active residents of those Waystations feel more lonely, but their whole gameplay experience suffers. If you’re a member of a dying or dead Waystation, there is a high chance that you’re likely to feel depressed by the experience of spending time there, and a high chance that you’ll ultimately stop playing Spirit Crossing.
None of this is surprising, but it’s always good to confirm our beliefs with real data and with community feedback. In 15.1, we’re taking further steps to help ensure that as many Waystations as possible are fun, vibrant communities for long-time players and new players alike.
What’s happening in the game right now
- 20% of our Waystations are thriving: These Waystations exhibit strong weekly engagement. And high inter-member communication.
- 35% of our Waystations are “just getting by”: These Waystations have a handful of active players keeping things going, but if those few active players let up for even a short while, their Waystations will rapidly begin to feel dead. That is too much pressure; nobody should have to feel like if they don’t play all the time, their community will collapse.
- 45% are “Zombie” Waystations: These Waystations are almost completely filled with players who rarely log on, and rarely if ever contribute to their Waystations. If you’re one of the only couple of people who actively participate in a Waystation like one of these, you’re likely feeling very unhappy with the experience. And if you’re a new player who gets added to one of these Waystations, there is an extremely high chance that you will decide Spirit Crossing is not the right long-term game for you.
What are factors that have contributed to the large number of “zombie” or “barely getting by” Waystations?
- Mistuned inactivity metric: Our measurement of inactivity was overly constrained. People had long ago stopped playing the game, with no intention of returning, but we were still marking those players as “present.”
- Putting new players in dead waystations: Even worse, due to a quirk of our Waystation placement algorithm, we were putting new players into zombie waystations, instead of putting them into Waystations that are “getting by” but would benefit tremendously from some new blood. Thus, what should have been an exciting moment for these new players (“wow, check out my new neighborhood!”) was instead a depressing arrival to a desolate, storm-wrecked Waystation with no active people in it. Not surprisingly, those new players tended to leave the game.
What we are changing in 15.1 to improve
Luckily the Waystation system doesn’t need a big revamp. We are simply tuning some balancing knobs.
- Fine-tune our inactive player detection: We added better tracking of inactive players. This will immediately mark obvious zombie waystations as candidates for merging. Note, even if you do go inactive, you won’t lose your stuff and if you are a member of a healthy Waystation, you’ll generally return to that same Waystation. In the less common case the Waystation is low activity and gets destroyed in a storm, reactivated players are sent to another waystation.
- Increase beacon energy drain: Beacon rank was not reflecting player activity. We want folks to be able to look at their beacon health and have it correlate with actual player activity in the Waystation. So we needed to substantially increase the energy drain. We expect average Waystations to settle around a stable level of rank 6 or 7.
- Allow more players to join their Waystation of choice: We’ve added an additional buffer that lets folks join a different Waystation without running into a population cap. Hopefully this gives folks a bit more flexibility. Remember: to join a different Waystation, visit that Waystation and talk to Eudora.
The end result of this? Very inactive Waystation members will be alerted that their Waystation is at risk of dying. And if that situation doesn’t turn around, they will eventually be offered an opportunity to move to a new, more active Waystation. As a result of all these changes, we should hopefully see dramatically fewer marginal Waystations, and more thriving Waystations that are a source of joy for everyone.
Let us know how the new tuning feels to you, and we can always make more adjustments in the future!
Daniel (Designer Fox)
