Thanks for the feedback -- it's the only way we can learn to make campaigns people actually will enjoy.
First, the numbers showing up for Reclamation are certainly not what we'd hoped for, but it's going to take time to rebuild the OP player base. A lot of players will never come back, and the number of potential "new" players for OP is something approaching zero, I'd guess. With even EAW campaigns unable to draw more than 20-30 players consistently, it's no wonder Reclamation peaked at about 8-10 players. Plus, the numbers will trend whichever way the wind is blowing. If there are low player numbers, then they will generally get lower simply because it's not that much fun to play against the AI all the time and never see another player to attack/defend against. If the player numbers are decent, then more will be drawn in by the action.
What we probably need to do with OP is start small and build up. That's what we wanted to try to do with Reclamation. I think the reasons it is not working quite as well as we wanted are simple matters of translation. While I was scrambling to put together the campaign settings based on the forum polls and the SFCX crew's stated preferences, storyline, and map, I started with cheaper ships, better shipyard production, and more affordable supplies. Then, with the old lessons from when OP and the D2 in general were booming, I found myself increasing prices. Shipyard production went down to fit the campaign story and (necessarily) map economy. At the same time, I wanted to take advantage of FireSoul's fine shiplist without restricting too many ships, since more ships is what draws many people to it in the first place. The end result is a shipyard production that makes sense for a limited scale campaign, but doesn't cycle often enough or offer the "right" kind of ships all the time.
Meanwhile, supplies seemed reasonable to start based on being able to outfit a K-F5C or Z-DD with medium drones and full supplies. What I didn't take into account was that as players got larger ships, they would have to spend more on those supplies to the point where they could not make enough prestige to pay for it all without running boring "gimme" missions. The neutral coop problems only made this worse, since players couldn't help each other out unless they didn't care about taking hexes. I think if we had consistently working neutral coop, a lot of the cost issues would work themselves out as players paired up to get out of their starting ships.
I reacted to people's complaints about starter ships being too hard to fly by bumping them up to CL/CW sizes, but the true problem wasn't the size of the starter ship but the supplies and shipyard production. So, looking back I'd probably change my approach to supplies and production.
Next, the map uses 20 DV hexes as the norm and goes up from there. In the days of a dozen nutters and 30 part-time players, these would have been cake. Today, however, we have to start lower. Perhaps changing the DV effect per mission from 1 to 3 or even 5 would help in the interim, but I don't see the value in constantly changing settings on a short-run server. It only confuses and annoys people.
Finally, we wanted this to be a fairly "light" campaign, to sort of test the waters and get people used to OP again. So, we didn't spam the boards and lobby for people to play. The laid-back approach just doesn't work when you've got a set of campaign settings built with the old player-base thinking.
To me this is all a learning experience -- a chance to push the improved OP D2 to its limits and find out what does and doesn't work so we make better games in the future. With that in mind, we've definitely learned some things. Next time we offer up an organized, VC-oriented campaign, we'll be able to put these lessons to good use.
Topic: Reclamation: 2275 is here. (Read 10494 times)