Speedy Start - Development Log #514

Michi talks about the new player experience and how the team wants to improve it gradually.

Michi (molp)

This week I continued working on the upcoming maintenance release. You can find the release notes on the forums. I'll add more items to the release notes as I implement them.

The new player experience is something that we want to improve regularly. There have been countless discussions about it, both, in the community and also in the team. For this round of improvements, we focus on a few key elements, as there is not enough dev time to re-invent the early-game. One of the most common complaints we receive from new players (mostly in the form of negative Steam reviews but also on Discord) is that the game feels too slow and that there isn't enough to do in the first few sessions. We totally understand that, but there is only so much we can do about it. If we artificially speed up the game for new players, they'll get used to that speed and might expect the game to stay that way forever. That is why the "grant new players a slowly fading 1000% production efficiency boost" idea is off the table for now. Instead, we want to make use of existing mechanics and apply one or two speed-ups very deliberately.

In the early days of a fresh company the growth can be almost exponential. That exponential growth can feel very slow while still being in the "flat" section of the curve. Every bit that pushes one to the right will make it faster. There are players and corporations from all factions now that offer (free) loans to new players. This is an immense boost for the newbies and also a great way to hook them to the game and let them be part of the community. To make it easier for new players to accept these loans, we decided that players with the FREE license will be able to accept loan contracts from now on, without having a BASIC or PRO license. This will only work for contracts where the FREE player is the borrower and the contract cannot have any other contract conditions than loan installments and loan payouts.

We also want to speed up the early game for players that didn't receive such a loan offer or simply haven't heard about it. I increased the number of initial buildings each profession can build and also added more starting materials. The introductory contracts received from the faction will now also contain a few luxury consumables for increased production output. Although these measures are tiny in comparison to a large loan, every player will be able to use them without any interaction with the existing player base.

Talking about speed-ups: I haven't implemented that yet, but plan to do so the next days: We noticed that a large portion of new players drop out of the game relatively quickly, without finishing the first production order or even the whole tour/tutorial of the game. So the change we have in mind is that the very first production order and the very first flight should be relatively short, only a couple of minutes or so. There will be an extra hint in either the tutorial or maybe even in the PRODCO command. We hope that this change might keep players to stay longer in the (first) game session and thus be able to see the next part of the tutorial and more of the game in general.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!