Maintaining a Solid Player-Base - WarZ

Hey guys, I'm making this thread because there are many threads with ideas about reviving WarZ. However, based on personal observation warz always has fluctuations in its player-base. Most of this fluctuation involves a high jump of players, followed by a steady decline, with a depression for some time. The depression then sees a steady rise in players, and a jump is done usually when there is an update or an event. So based on these observations I came up with this thread.

The Player-Base itself:
As of right now on February 8th, it's been about two months since I came back. I've seen various fluctuations in player count throughout this time period.

Right now: Overall, the amount of players online has shown a sharp increase since the all time low in mid-late 2016. Over the past year, I can safely say the peek in players was shown through very late December of 2016 until the end of January. As of now, the player count is steadily decreasing. This does not mean that players are "quitting" now, just becoming less active.

Why was there such an increase entering 2017?

Obviously we have these types of questions with this type of answer. Of course since "warz 2.0" is coming out we want it to be populated. Sig says that he wants to increase the warz population when asked why warz was receiving coding attention.

Because of this, there was a significant jump in updates throughout this time period (Dec. to Jan.) for the sole purpose of increasing population.

Personally, I love updates - good ones. Good updates keep the game fresh, new and equally enjoyable to older players who have enjoyed the game when it was new. Good updates also keep a sense of eagerness in a returning player to stay and continue to play warz. I, myself have returned to warz entering into 2017 upon hearing of the updates (this is not the only reason: I will go into that later). I think this personal opinion of updates is greatly shared among most of the players.

Updates included:
- Adding ladders. This new update made way for a whole new style of playing. Sneaking up buildings, or entering locations that were otherwise un-accessible to unlock new fighting are just some of the many ways you can use ladders.
- Removing grappling hooks. This update occurring at the same time as ladders was community decided - a point I will get into later. The seemingly skill-less strategy of grappling into someone's face to kill them was removed as a result, and I've seen little negative reviews about this update.
- Re-addition of airdrops. This was a necessity since airdrops was just yet another fun thing you could do within warz. When it was removed, I'm sure a lot of objectively-minded players were upset.
- Various map edits https://www.brawl.com/threads/63651/ This thread details the changes made to the map which was a great New Years present to the community. There were so many complaints about the map, and these changes (and more actually are needed as well) are what the community wanted.
- BOOSTERS. This change has proven to bring people back when they are active. From personal experience I can say that the player count doubles, perhaps even tripling at its peek concurrently when a booster is active. I activated one myself yesterday and the servers blew up with optimistic looters, exciting high-tier loot fights, all with a lack of frustration from losing my "not-so-hard-earned" loot.

Now these are just a generalization of some of the various updates that happened to warz over this short period of time. Let's take a look at a frequent word I used: community.

Why did these updates cause an increase in players?
The community is very powerful. In real-life markets, the community (or the consumers) control the market via supply and demand concepts. In warz, the community is also in control. However addicting this game is, players have left in the past due to poor updates, and players do, and are coming back to warz due to good updates. Good updates mean a high approval rating (unlike Trump) from the people. A high approval rating usually means that the community had already voted for the update to take place.

I see so many threads now mostly from sig asking the community what they wanted. From what I believe, the update making zombies OP was not asked for by the community, and a very negative reaction was produced from this.

We can easily see that updates such as removing grapples, adding boosters, and other community-discussed ideas (connections between the staff and players) increased the player count.

There must be other reasons why there was an increase in players.
Let us take a look at other things that happened.
- Brawl actually gained some sense regarding banned players.
THE GOOD 'UNS: Player's such as Dash who clearly aren't hacking have made a return following his very long and unnecessary appealing process that very overlooked by staff in an ignorant way. From his return I can see 1 team returning as well. We got dash, bagel, donut, mellow, bootyism, strift, shadow, fluffy - and I know there is more. From this reduced list, I already see 8 older players returning; 8 active, rank-buying and contributing members of the community, all stemming from the rightful unban of 1 player wanting to play with his friends.

THE BAD 'UNS: Players such as dean and other banned players who regularly alt are being banned quicker by staff. This is a good thing because it causes frustrated players who die to these teams to play with more ease, and are less likely to rage quit by dying to these xrayers. Besides, if they alt this frequently, that means they buy ranks for their alts more, gaining Brawl more money over time from that certain player. Obviously the alting problem could be avoiding by banning all VPNs, but we all know how that idea went.

- Brawl has been replacing lost staff for warz.
We got iMacro making his return as staff, which is much needed for the AU region. We got snax, a great mod in my opinion becoming mod, rightfully so. We also have new additions chicknslayer and overkill. Depending on how often these "hack tests" are given, I think we are ready for a new wave of promotions. Chicknslayer knows what hacks are, he's played warz for a long time. Should he pass the hack test would mean a lot because a third mod is much needed. Then, promote cloudy to jmod. He regretted resigning off the bat, and he is now back and applying for staff. I honestly think he should be accepted back as a another staff member for warz in the NA region. We also got greenpeas, who was excellent back in the day. Now he's back and seems even more professional now. He was one of the few mods who actually listened to what I had to say as opposed to waiting for me to finish in order for him to reply. He does seem to be focussing on warz which is important and very much needed as well.

- Brawl has been hosting events.
WarZ never saw an event since way2 left, and even when he was staff there was no event for quite some time. Over the past few months I have seen events, with a large room for improvement. However, these events draw a guaranteed 70-80 player constant for about two hours on one server. After an event, the player count stays at a constant high for a few days. These events (and frankly, the free loot) have helped brawl revive the excited player count.


THE BIG "HOWEVER"
Like I said earlier, the player count has increased overall. But since the end of January, it has slowly been decreasing with active players. Lately, there have been little to no events (the past 3 weeks or so), from what I seen. If there have been, then there has been little to no communication for me as a player not to hear of them. After the booster adjustments, we have seen no updates other than some proposals to armor repairing. There has also been a decline in bug fixing, if there was any incline to begin with.

Bugs include:
- Lag-back glitch. This is a bad glitch because a) players cannot run, jump, or fall; b) players can pvplog with no punishment
- Whitename glitch. Although I do not know the cause, the glitch is very annoying because most of the time it happens without your knowledge. If I die, I have to find out the hard way that the glitch is there before I can tp. The fix is to /logout. However if there is an enemy in new spawns, the logout time will be 10 seconds: that IS if it goes uninterrupted. That is some lost time that can be absolutely crucial in fights when instant tping is necessary.
- Whitename/Lag-back glitch combo. This is the worst of them all. Basically it is the two glitches above combined with no fix.
- Dropping guns won't work while reloading. This is annoying in fights that are fast-paced.
- No pending tp glitch, this has already been discussed multiple times.
- Many more minor glitches I cannot think of as of now.

Finally, although we have seen an increase in staff, there are still so many hackers in the NA mornings (EU afternoons, AU evenings) and NA times around midnight (EU early morning and AU noon).

THE POINT OF THE THREAD
This thread basically summed up some stuff over the past few months. Now I must live up to the title, and list how we can maintain the overall increase in players, and stop players from leaving (including new players):

- Continue accepting/promoting new staff.

- Frequent updates are a must, most of these should be community-powered. An update once every month or every three weeks, no matter how small and minor, should keep players on edge to play warz.

- Events need to continue with a schedule. With wario resigning there is less room for event planning. We need some admins or developers stepping up and temporarily taking the manager position and plan some events. The play count increases drastically with events in place.

- Fix bugs that appear; prioritize bug-fixing. Of the bugs I mentioned above, all are very frustrating and make me not want to play at times.

- Accept some appeals. My whole team got banned for hacking a long time ago. They have since changed and wish to play warz. Players like Meuhina (velvetlounge, YuSeFa), MildCafe, AKGkamikaze, rusk, noataro and others have been banned for hacking and/or ridealong and haven't come back. If you show more encouragement for these players to get unbanned quicker should they play legit, teams could come back. My whole team would play again, fully legit and clean if that were the case.

I will update this thread more, but Im going to work now

 

Thanks for all the responses guys.
@GreenPeas can't wait to see what you have in store for your event ideas. The one issue with the oldschool staff vs. player events is that they always turn out laggy, so I'm interested to see your new ideas, and if they are less demanding in terms of server dedication.

@Aboves yep you do in fact speak for me and the majority of the community, these are bugs that are absolutely crucial in most fights and they could cost you heavily.

@wtfhow you are right but that bias is just based on their history, they have always xrayed but they've even told me they don't need it because they don't camp and they do wish to actually clean up and play legit because they love warz and they, too hate seeing it decline in players. I told them they could kiss me goodbye if they persisted on hacking

 

The title is maintaining a solid player-base.