Player Count Recovery is essential

[RickAvory]

Hi guys. I am making this post to allow for us forum users to brainstorm for a recovery of the active users for this game.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, ever since the game released on steam, the amount of active players have dropped significantly. This is to be expected of course, a free game becoming paid is expected to have a drop like this, but it is only getting worse and worse. Even players such as myself are losing the desire to play due to the shrinking community, which I am now realising is what made me love the game in the first place. The shrinking community could be a run away effect that only gets worse and worse.

Some suggestions I have are as follows...
-Get some youtubers to play the game (already a trick being used)
-Allow for Players to have a free weekend so they can try it out and see how they like it.
- Advertise the SFD trailer by using Googles Promote Feature in order to get the word out.
-Add More content to bring back some of the players that are leaving.

I’m sure individuals such as myself would be happy to help in any way that we can. I want to see this game succeed.

[Pricey]

Free weekends work wonders for games, especially smaller indie ones that people wouldn't normally risk paying money for (even more so at the price SFD is marketed at). I have plenty of games in my library that I have gone out and bought after free weekends (Crusader Kings 2, Monaco and Payday 2 are a few examples). However I also believe that once the problem of pirates having the power they do (and the loading time issue) is fixed that a lot of players will begin to play more frequently. I certainly play less because of these problems, hell, I can hardly play the game for 10 minutes without it happening.

As for YouTubers playing the game, well, there's only so much that can do. Cryaotic streamed the game in December last year (the original Twitch video can't be viewed anymore), he has almost 800,000 Twitch followers and 3 million subscribers, but here we are today with the problems we are facing. Could it be because it was a temporary stream and not a permanent video? Who knows. It still would've gotten a lot of publicity.

[Gurt]

We have never had many players during the Alpha or Beta period of the game. There are more servers now in average than Alpha or Beta. The game is slowly waking up as players find it.
The old players you happened to play with that you know and like will move on, find other games to play and leave this game behind.

If we had all the time in the world we could bring more content to the game in a faster rate. We have advertised SFD on around launch, but nothing we can pour money into every day. Better focusing our time, effort, money and energy on some bigger updates.
Free weekends is surely something we can look into.

In the end we're only 2 guys working on this in our spare time. Competing with larger games that has this "game-as-a-service" concept is just out of the question for us.

[RickAvory]

We have never had many players during the Alpha or Beta period of the game. There are more servers now in average than Alpha or Beta. The game is slowly waking up as players find it.
The old players you happened to play with that you know and like will move on, find other games to play and leave this game behind.

If we had all the time in the world we could bring more content to the game in a faster rate. We have advertised SFD on around launch, but nothing we can pour money into every day. Better focusing our time, effort, money and energy on some bigger updates.
Free weekends is surely something we can look into.

In the end we're only 2 guys working on this in our spare time. Competing with larger games that has this "game-as-a-service" concept is just out of the question for us.

Cmon Gurt... are you sure that there are more players playing your game? Whenever I click “browse servers” there are literally only 10-14 servers to play on. I get that you are only two People and don’t find it worth the money to invest a lot in promoting it, but it seriously doesn’t have to be a lot.

[Gurt]

We have never had many players during the Alpha or Beta period of the game. There are more servers now in average than Alpha or Beta. The game is slowly waking up as players find it.
The old players you happened to play with that you know and like will move on, find other games to play and leave this game behind.

If we had all the time in the world we could bring more content to the game in a faster rate. We have advertised SFD on around launch, but nothing we can pour money into every day. Better focusing our time, effort, money and energy on some bigger updates.
Free weekends is surely something we can look into.

In the end we're only 2 guys working on this in our spare time. Competing with larger games that has this "game-as-a-service" concept is just out of the question for us.

Cmon Gurt... are you sure that there are more players playing your game? Whenever I click “browse servers” there are literally only 10-14 servers to play on. I get that you are only two People and don’t find it worth the money to invest a lot in promoting it, but it seriously doesn’t have to be a lot.

I'm curious for what your idea of "but it seriously doesn’t have to be a lot." is ? We will keep reaching out to different streamers ourselves and we're working on these kind of questions already.

[RickAvory]

We have never had many players during the Alpha or Beta period of the game. There are more servers now in average than Alpha or Beta. The game is slowly waking up as players find it.
The old players you happened to play with that you know and like will move on, find other games to play and leave this game behind.

If we had all the time in the world we could bring more content to the game in a faster rate. We have advertised SFD on around launch, but nothing we can pour money into every day. Better focusing our time, effort, money and energy on some bigger updates.
Free weekends is surely something we can look into.

In the end we're only 2 guys working on this in our spare time. Competing with larger games that has this "game-as-a-service" concept is just out of the question for us.

Cmon Gurt... are you sure that there are more players playing your game? Whenever I click “browse servers” there are literally only 10-14 servers to play on. I get that you are only two People and don’t find it worth the money to invest a lot in promoting it, but it seriously doesn’t have to be a lot.

I'm curious for what your idea of "but it seriously doesn’t have to be a lot." is ? We will keep reaching out to different streamers ourselves and we're working on these kind of questions already.

When I said that, I meant things like unlockabke clothes items, ranking systems to allow for players to have a drive to progress, different challenges, etc etc. for the promoting, you can probaby drop 10$ on advertising and it will be shown to a few thousand people. The whole youtuber thing has been good already, I guess just consistency.

[Tom Th3 Assasin]

prolly doing another more enthusiastic trailer with new campaigns in play. with better title messages,transitions and game mode showing much more versatile use of map editor,would definitely gonna attract more newcommers where the present trailer is lacking.

@RickAvory its become harder to recover those players who left sfd for gud,either they couldnt afford the game for real or just gave up after experiencing how the current game has changed in vital stages,regarding mostly the great-melee and server side movement which are the major factors i hold today as for the loss of players.but lets not break

[StarNord]

... or just gave up after experiencing how the current game has changed in vital stages,regarding mostly the great-melee and server side movement which are the major factors i hold today as for the loss of players.but lets not break

Oh man... Server-side movement has been a thorn by my side for so damned long, I live in the middle-east and have horrible connection in many servers but before, having 200+ ping wasn't a death sentence, now it absolutely is, I still love this game but I hate going to other servers because I know they're most likely going to be hosted server-side and I'm going to get my ass whopped so I resort to making my own server(hosted client-side), tabbing out of the game and watching a show or making textures until I hear the sound of someone joining my game which often takes hours...

making servers host client-side by default would finally make me, and probably lots of other far-away folks, actually consider joining other people's servers for more than a few matches because we won't be as overwhelmed by the lag