Why is everyone quitting

[Saric]

For those that aren't aware the current situation is that we are updating to a new scripting language and every NPC/quest in the game needs to be manually re-written before that happens. In the meantime there is obviously no point in adding to that burden by making more. 

as a software developer myself, i understand the notion of "we need to fix this broken thing before it becomes too difficult to handle" with respect to the conversion from Xanascript to Lua - i know well the struggle of dealing with management who says "no, we cant fix this bad stuff, we have to implement these new features" 

about that: https://prnt.sc/h4f4kn

Yeah, still far from done I would think. Beyond the actual conversion being done I'm sure there's still a lot of bug fixing and testing that needs to be done before full implementation.

On the main post -

You can't pinpoint any one reason as to why people have quit. I was around during the heydays were we reached the 1000 server cap. While yes I'm sure content and progression is an issue, I very highly doubt that this is the sole, only reason.

The fact of the matter is, the events of 2014 and other drama split apart the community as a whole pretty hard. Lots of people quit (old and newer players), PWO lost a number of current and former staff as well as a good chunk of the playerbase.

Before, PWO was more or less the only developed Pokemon MMO. After some time, more got developed and stuck around.

While yes, some of it has to do with PWO being less developed in some areas, there is simply more competition in the realm of Pokemon MMOs. Less people flock to PWO and less people register to it because of the other existing Pokemon MMOs. Either due to them being more developed, more user friendly, or any other host of other reasons.

Onto more of my personal feelings - I've "quit" PWO a number of times in the past. Either due to just losing interest or other further issues. I am a bit different than some other loyal players (I don't battle), but I can see why some of them have quit. I've been around a long time on PWO. PWO has gone through tougher spots in the past and gotten through pretty well. Is the playerbase smaller than in the past? Definitely. Is PWO "dead" or "doomed"? Definitely not. We've gotten through worse.


As you can see in the donation logs PWO is still bringing in a healthy amount of money to keep it alive (even having a surplus to give to charity). It's still being actively worked on and developed. Events still happen every now and again. Rig tries to do a swarm every weekend. I think it's pretty safe to say that it's far from dead or doomed, so don't really count the game out already.

As far as efforts to bring back some older players - that will happen with time. After the LUA update is fully released I imagine sevii can be more actively worked on.

But keep in mind, after we get some more updates, what then? The "old" players will just quit again, maybe raise a stink, until some other updates come out. It is a cycle. Pokemon is difficult to develop and keep players around (there is really no room for endgame activity). So as far as suggestions on adding more content - this is only a bandaid. It will not solve the issue entirely, only put a bandage on it which will serve for a while until people quit again.

 

[Mooo]

we all do the same moo but who doesn't want his best game to develop i think we all in same side here /jobey hhh i always thought the same thing tbh cause it's named RNG=Random but it just appear that luck is always with specific persons

well look. i played pokemon silver and gold for gameboy color and this game is way way better and i am happy with what it is. The people who work on the game they do good work and/or try to. And thats what counts.
The game says BETA so that kinda explains everything.

As for people quitting i dont think people are, or not very many. People are just getting buzy with other things atm. The number of people online jumps up and down threw out the week/day.....month. Im sure we will bounce back in time. People just need to chill. :sleepy:

 

[Shiny!Midou~]

Completely agree 100% (wow it's a miracle ). PWO just doesn't have much to offer or motivate for players that have been here awhile. The best thing about PWO has always been its community. Sadly so many players are bored of the game and they leave and when friends leave there isn't much more of  a reason to stay. So then that person leaves and then when that person leaves another person loses another friend so they leave and that causes another of their friends to leave and its a domino effect.

I'm not going to discount the staff though, there are some staff members that work very hard but then you have some staff members that do absolutely nothing at all once they become a member. Those people simply become staff for bragging rights and a feeling of authority but then proceed to do nothing with their new found power. So what you have is a staff with a descent number of members but only 5 or 6 people that shoulder the entire load by themselves and lets face it, the staff are not machines, they have lives and sometimes things happen and in situations like that it's understandable when they don't do as much work as usual. My gripe is with the staff members that sit around and do nothing at all as the half dozen dedicated people bust their butts to try and keep the game alive. For those staff members that actually do work I truly appreciate your efforts and am thankful for what you do with the limited resources you have.  For those staff members that do nothing, well please kindly go away and never return. Honestly if there is a way to log how much work a staff member puts in I say look over those logs and begin to cut the people that do so little or nothing and try to find somebody to replace them with. I know its easier said then done but its just an idea.

As for the player base, those that are still active, do your best to help one another. Stop the senseless bickering and get along. Stop trying to degrade one another, stop the childish play ground behavior and unite to keep the dying community alive. Nobody wants to play a game with a dwindling community that is anywhere from 25-35% toxic. Everyone should take care of themselves and each other. I also think the staff should be stricter with the toxic players. A slap on the wrist with a one day ban for harassing a player pretty much does nothing to punish them and they pretty well just laugh it off and continue being just as rude and spiteful as before. So when that happens friendly players leave because they see the staff as not giving a care about them and feel no more of a need to waste their time, on the opposite side that same toxic player gets to stay and spread their poison on to another victim who then leaves, the end result is a dying community.

Now let's turn that around. Say the staff bans a harassing player for a week if its their first offense, then two weeks for a second offense, 4 weeks for a 3rd offense and then a permanent ban after that. That player will then understand "hey this staff doesn't mess around." From that point they will either straighten up and learn or they will simply quit and in doing so make the game a better place and leave a chance for a more friendly player to take their spot and strengthen the community. Another issue is some of the staff being too close with certain players and pretty much letting them get away with anything. Players make friends with a staff member and then when ever they get in trouble the player simply turns to that staff member, plays them like a fiddle and gets off with out any sort of consequence. That player then knows they can run rough shot over others and have no fears of penalty. Basically staff members need to be staff first and friends second if they truly care about helping this game.

Anyway, as usual  I made a much too long post LOL sorry about that. I do hope though that one day this game can thrive again and grow and have full servers. I've made a lot of good friends on here, some have become close personal friends and i never would have met them if not for this game. That's why I don't want this game to die, that's why I wish for the best. Because without this game others may miss out on such an opportunity as I was blessed to have.

ok i wll make it clear as much as i can here this topic is not to attack any staff cause :
1. they are not getting paid for what they are doing 
2.each staff one as much as i know is trying to do his best and this topic is just to make them be warry of the game lately cause in just this passed month i have like 7 friends and all of them quit game 
now pass to that friend who have staff friends i am one of them and i got banned twice for some reasons but i have never talked to anyone to unban me except that time when fonty said in community watch i will get you unbanned cause i didn't worth a ban over 1 day and i just remind him in discord cause itjust looked that he forget nothing else and i don't think ther's anyone who make some of friends ( staff) unban him cause he is a friend of them and best example come to my mind is GE Dovakip who get banned while he was GE so please we don't want any other drama .-. here

 

[shodan21]

yeah, think we're getting a bit derailed on the concept of staff that dont do enough work.  for one, RL things happen that take staff away from their assignments, but some of the staff (i think GEs and DEVs in particular) just dont need to interact with the community to go about their work - its simply not necessary.  just because the community doesnt have visibility of a particular staff member doesnt mean the staff member is lazy and not doing anything.

in my mind, the problem is not that staff isnt working, its that they arent working on the right things.  was the massive effort to overhaul the npc scripting system necessary?  sure - from all accounts ive heard, xanascript is a huge dumpster fire.  but thats not an update that will keep players around or bring new players in, and if the playerbase completely dies out by the time its released, that makes it all a huge waste.  i mostly agree with what Saric pointed out, except for one part - there is endgame content in PWO, and thats PvP.  Of the upcoming updates we're aware of (namely, Lua, Sevii, and Hoenn), which of those will fix the broken PvP system?

 

[Tasigur]

You can t argue with staff they will always have 2nd plan 3 promises and 4 excuse
Some people are really bored of fake promises and lazy staff.That s the real reason why people leave

Maybe some staff are really tired of entitled players and that's the real reason we don't do as much work as you would like.

I'm going to take a second to stop playing casual, relaxing, overwatch so I can respond to this thread that has made me even more demotivated to do any work for this game. I have a few things I want to get off my chest, and perhaps this may be super unprofessional of me to do so, and maybe some of you don't give a damn about me or what I am going to say, but at least it will make me feel better.

For those that don't know, I use to go by the name of mad, durnam, tecknician, and probably a few others I can't remember. Why so many names? So I can avoid interaction with the community because often times it causes stress that can easily be avoided. I've been a player since October of 2008, my freshman year of college. During that time I was a brief cg, gm, ge, admin, and some other crap positions that don't even matter. There was nights during college that instead of going out and getting drunk with my friends I would stay in and work on the game, there's was issues people came to me to deal with while I was in the middle of class or studying for tests. I've made friends, I've lost friends. PWO has been a big part of my life up to this point.

If you are still reading this, please note this may be a little long and you might just want to stop reading now and go back to your complaining. I wouldn't expect anything less from you. For those that don't though give me a bit more time before I get to the point.

Many people have wondered why I quit admin when I was known as Teck, I've given a lot of ******it answers since them, some of them half truths (irl job related stuff) but the main reason was you guys are the reason I left. The stress this community caused me during college was fine during college. I had a lot of free time on my hands and could deal with the stress. Going into the adult world though, I didn't want the stress of being an ADMIN for this community. I didn't want the stress with being responsible for this game. I took the easy way out and up and quit as admin.

About a year and a half? ago I decided to come back, because frankly while I hated what this community put me through, I enjoyed being part of the staff and working on the game. Rig was talking to me and said that another GE was leaving, so I told her under strict circumstances I'd be willing to come back and do some scripting. Some of the requirements were not interaction with certain people, made it clear my time I would be able to devote to this game was very limited because of my job and the fact that I didn't want to get caught up in everything. My expectations was to do small scripting work for the game. I apologize to you, the community, for not devoting as much time to this game as a volunteer as you would like for me to devote. I work in application development for a full time job. My job here is to write code. I code for all day at work, then I am expected to come home and code for pwo? Pass. For those of you who have jobs, and has had a job for longer than 1 year, how many of you would choose to go home and do the same thing you do at work but for free and deal with this community and its expectations?

The worst part is, even the enjoyable parts about being a staff member was no longer there when I came back. EVERYTHING felt demotivating and demoralizing. The pressure of the game surviving, the pressure of being the main scripter and having the responsibility of improving the game in the area that was blocking so many other content additions got to me. I felt alone on an island, with not even other staff members to turn to because they were also the source of my demotivation. I wanted to come back and put 2-3 hours a week into helping out the game and I felt like everyone expected me to put 20-30 hours into the game instead. 

When working on project frostbite I was enjoy my time back, then Lua came around and I was initially excited for the change over. I was working those 20 hours a week I didn't want to work.. and that burned me out. I started taking breaks. Then I felt negativity coming from staff for my slowed down progress, and perhaps that negativity was just my imagination but that started to demotivate me. Then the community got to me with it's negativity towards lack updates and the hate towards staff. Quickly I realized I was going a month at a time without even thinking about pwo because well... when I did I was stressed out again. 

Donar eventually took over the conversion of the script because he was getting impatient with me and knew that had to get done. I was told to go back to working on project frostbite. The fact that I failed to complete Lua and Donar took over for me was really demoralizing, and with the start of the NFL season I went silent again. I recently decided I had enough time away and wanted to complete project frostbite before winter. When I tried to log into our test environment (not sure if the public knows we have a test environment) I sent a message to one of the DEVS for help. I haven't heard a response in a think nearly a week. 

Today someone reached out to me and said "youve been so quiet lately its scary, whats up", and being my stubborn prideful self I tried to redirect the convo and just avoid answering. The real reason? Because pwo just seems like a place of negativity so I tried to avoid it. 

You want updates and changes to this game? How about motivating staff with positive attitude instead of threads like this. This current staff does more for this game than I have ever seen previous regimes because in part we have devs who can actually get real changes done, yet the negativity is at an all time low. I'm getting stressed out just by the fact I can't say what I really want and cuss every other word. I use to work on pwo because I enjoyed the game, the community, and doing the work I did. I didn't get paid, I didn't get any form of compensation for my time, if I was lucky I only received minimum amount of complaining about an update and a few thank yous. You guys have possibly removed every single reason I enjoyed about being a staff member. 

I'm still committed to getting project frostbite done. Project frostbite will come after the Lua changes go live. I am hoping between project frostbite and the new features for lua the attitude around here will change and there will be more positive energy. Speaking for the staff, the things we do, we do because we believe its the best thing for pwo. People may disagree it's the right thing to do and that's fine, but it's when you question the intentions of staff members is when I start to have issues.

edit: Sorry for the post being mostly off topic. Now back to overwatch to relax. Maybe take a poop first.

 

[shodan21]

I wanted to come back and put 2-3 hours a week into helping out the game and I felt like everyone expected me to put 20-30 hours into the game instead. 

When working on project frostbite I was enjoy my time back, then Lua came around and I was initially excited for the change over. I was working those 20 hours a week I didn't want to work.. and that burned me out. I started taking breaks. Then I felt negativity coming from staff for my slowed down progress, and perhaps that negativity was just my imagination but that started to demotivate me.

ultimately, that part of it comes from the fact that PWO just doesnt have enough staff, which is really what makes any of the solutions proposed by the non-staff-bashing members of the community difficult to do.  and thats also a problem that the community cant really provide solutions or suggestions to.  it further provides a bit of a catch-22, because a smaller playerbase means a smaller pool of potential candidates for staff positions.  thats part of why i think the Lua conversion was done at the wrong time - the playerbase was already dwindling, and as i mentioned before, its not by itself an update thats likely to attract new players or keep existing ones.  now, im sure most of that is 20/20 hindsight etc., and despite my other posts in here im not convinced PWO is past the point of no return yet, but the continued requests for patience with very little to show for it is demotivating to players too, and when players are sufficiently demotivated, just like staff they can and do quit.  fixing the battle system to me would be the best way to restore the playerbase, but from what i gather, thats terribly low on the priority list.  i know its probably foolish and naive of me to push for changing that, and certainly better than me have tried and been met with... unsatisfactory results, but since i havent completely quit yet, i figure its still worth a try.

 

[HitmonFonty]

What exactly is broken in the battle system?

 

[Georgelzr]

You see ,you can t argue ,you will always have you re excuse ,,we don t get paid ,deal with it" .
Always bring personal life in the game ,personal stuff and other things.
You just hide your lazyness under the fact that you are not getting paid ,you re demotivated and you dont have there people who consider you gods or very good lads for thing you don t do .I am not blaming only admins,or others ,i blame everyone including me ,everyone should have said something when things has started to go down
Now people ,the few ones ,that are still playing are good with the ,,lazy things " that are not happening cuz they are used to them ,used to don t happen .Ofc you re ok with something bad ,you re ok with it because you don t know how is it to be good,and when i say good i mean monthly improves,new pokes,new events ,new people.
You can t be sad when you see 10-12 payers active because you re entire game have seen the same people on ,and you can t expect to see more,and when you see them you know that something good has happened ,but when you want to say something guess what ,they are gone and you talk all alone ,and that is gonna happen this month,next month ,after 1 year and you don t complain,cuz you re gonna be used to lazyness ,inactivity and promises
If logg in now i am gonna see 2,3 players online and i am gonna spend 62626255515899092827 hours to find a scyther ,not a bagon or something where is the hapinnes?
Market is dead
People are gone
But ...who cares ,let s catch them all

 

[Shiny!Midou~]

ok enough of this chlidness george we all know they are not getting paid and i am so sorry if i made any problems with this post we just need to stick around if we want the game
to develop just the same years staff have worked for it all this time and they are still doing it
close topic plz <.<

 

[Jobey]

Are people even reading past what I said about the staff? I did not attack the staff, I even said I don't discount them. My comment was there are a few staff members that do not do their fair share. Let me bolden the positives stuff I said and and underline the negative to simplify the message for some who just read one negative thing about the staff and assume I'm attacking them all.

I'm not going to discount the staff though, there are some staff members that work very hard but then you have some staff members that do absolutely nothing at all once they become a member. Those people simply become staff for bragging rights and a feeling of authority but then proceed to do nothing with their new found power. So what you have is a staff with a descent number of members but only 5 or 6 people that shoulder the entire load by themselves and lets face it, the staff are not machines, they have lives and sometimes things happen and in situations like that it's understandable when they don't do as much work as usual. My gripe is with the staff members that sit around and do nothing at all as the half dozen dedicated people bust their butts to try and keep the game alive. For those staff members that actually do work I truly appreciate your efforts and am thankful for what you do with the limited resources you have.  For those staff members that do nothing, well please kindly go away and never return. Honestly if there is a way to log how much work a staff member puts in I say look over those logs and begin to cut the people that do so little or nothing and try to find somebody to replace them with. I know its easier said then done but its just an idea.

Oh, and what about this quote?

"if there is a way to log how much work a staff member puts in I say look over those logs and begin to cut the people that do so little  and try to find somebody to replace them with." Yeah this likely wont solve any issues about the players that have been lost but it may help the future of how well PWO may be maintained and perhaps help with the witch hunt and backlash the staff receives from the player base. Also would help with the same old unfair complaint of "lazy staff this" and "lazy staff that"

I find it funny that so far only one staff member has condemned what I've said while several players though claim its an attack on staff. The staff knows I'm not attacking them. The know if they are doing their best and fair share that the statement does not apply to them. And if all staff are giving their best commitment then I'll be the first to say ignore my statement and take it with a grain of salt. I truly do appreciate teh effort that the staff members put in, I really do and have praised quite a few of them often and defended some of them as well. The problem is I'm a very impulsive speaker and I always say what I think and what I feel and dont try to dance around my opinions.

Anyway as I stated in my original post, I think the main issue is a rapidly shrinking community were the percentage of toxic players is stay the same as friendly players dwindle. That and the domino friend effect of when one friend leaves another soon follows and another after that and the friends of those friends leave as well and it just spreads.

 

[Sushy82]

you ask for patience, but the time of patience has been exhausted, and nothing new has appeared.

you are exhausted from the complaints of the players, for this I give you a solution that as you can not withstand the pressure of the demands, make your place available, make contests to acquire new elements of reliable staff, because to many willing fans to improve the game

you are in need of a valiant reform, and I also advise you to make an audit with clear reports, to know which of your elements has not fulfilled their obligations to the fans of the game

completed these steps, and as soon as possible

because players deserve staff members who meet their obligations and requirements so that the game's improvements come in good time

Now, do not come up with excuses that you do not have time for this, because that's excuses for children under the age of three

greetings from Sushy82

 

[HitmonFonty]

Topic closed at request of original poster.