What they got wrong was short term profit taking by extreme pay to win monitisation.
Very few people will play a game that they have no hope of being competitive in. So when you start ratcheting up the pay to win you are risking your long term activity levels. Go too far and you can kill the game.
We have a thread running atm where it is suggested that one player has bought all three .com servers. Whether has or not is up for debate but the fact that people are willing to consider the possibility says all you need to know about current game balance and how utterly broken things are atm.
The games themselves speak volumes on this. They largely inactive now. Player numbers are extremely low and nothing significant happens on servers for months on end.
If we weren't busy driving players out of the game with the extreme monitisation we give them virtually no new content, new things to do and reasons to keep playing. What few updates we have are pretty very minor and they generally just add a new troop bonus locked behind a pay wall or shop only items and months/years of speed boosts. They exist not to add content but to drive a new way to extract money from mega coiners (which I guess keeps the servers running but it doesn't retain any players). Give players nothing new and they will get bored and leave.
It feels like we are meandering to 31 Dec when the servers will be switched off because Flash went end of life.
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To turn all that around would require:
a) A published and regularly updated roadmap, for the porting of the game from Flash to new technology (presumably HTML5 / WebGL
b) A desire to start prioritising long term profitability over short term profitability (i.e. design a good game = people want to play & play longer = more activity = more time in game = more profit .... but also happy players because the game is getting better and better).
c) Start looking for smart and clever ways to monitise the game that don't unbalance or damage the game. The key maxime to measure that by is that "Everything should be earnable and achievable by simply playing the game". As soon as you add shop only content, red flag you are adding lazy monitisation.
- More customizable items / graphics / skins etc (look at castles, people pay money to personalise things even if it carries
- Focus on "hygiene" factors" to extract money from bigger spenders.... e.g. thieves reduce travel time so raiding become less of a chore but they don't prevent other players from putting in the time and effort to complete raiding (so money doesn't buy and advantage that can't be overcome by time effort, or skill)
- Consider wrap around revenue streams (e.g. providing leagues with private forum functionality, or voice comms embedded in the game but for a fee).
That is just 3 ways to monitise without damaging the game and I thought of them in the time it took me to write this post. If they really want to, they must have some people who can do this stuff, they just have to care enough.
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Have played enough games in this genre to see good features and to have ideas of what new content could look like:
- give the map meaning by putting strategic resources / key locations into it. Have those controlled by a sphere of influence exerted from castles. If you successful kill a castle then it's moved away as a result of the fight ...... suddenly the placement of castles matters, and there would be a reason to PvP on them (but you would have to fix the mess of walls and insane castle bonuses before that would get meaningful).
- PvE locations that are linked to quests (maybe a series of special BGs). Following and completing the quest lines earns quality armor / champs (PvE content gives ppl something to do each day, cause PvP doesn't happen consistently / not always available).
