TNR on life support?

[Misc]

If speaking honestly I would say main problems in TNR are lack of motivation, excess bureaucracy and no clear vision.

Lack of motivation comes in when you can see that some people in content/design side have obviously lost nearly all interest in the game. For example you have chipotle and zanelegend/tdragon86 who more or less went AWOL from what I can gather. Terriator has been pretty inactive and if he wasn't owner would probably also have been dismissed. Aet quit since he was basically tired of doing all of work for nothing with others getting in his way from what I can gather. Even people like me that in the past would have been willing to help now looking at current state of project can generate no real enthusiasm and if anything I would just work on a new game from scratch. Tragically it is fairly contagious so many staff members who start out keen end up losing it and userbase is very fickle and unappreciative at times.

As far as bureaucracy goes there are two problems. Firstly when you have inactive/apathetic people in positions it means no one can replace them. For example as Terriator is "coder" it means that TNR isn't actively looking for a coder as they already have one, even if he does nothing. Second problem is that very quickly teams generate dead weight that if anything just impede active members of staff. If everything is done by committee instead of taking a couple of hours to get it done you have to spend 2 hours making idea, 2 hours presenting it to team, 2 days waiting for feedback, another two days answering points, making a few modifications for no reason other to appease someone's ego and at the end of it you've got something that in many cases is worse than what you started with. Very often people quit just cause they're tired of pandering to other's wishes and that's how TNR loses a lot of it's best staff so they're left with dead weight that accummulated. Evidence is that balancing team has had half members quit and other half get cleaned on systematically when found to be incompetent.

As far as clear idea goes, currently I have no idea exactly what game is aiming to be or why people are expected to login. I think current thinking is if people come to play TNR we need content to keep them happy. However they have it wrong way round and it should more be we need content and/or a game that attracts users and is entertaining. Core 2 worked well when it started although I think with increasing moderator intervention and game mechanics not being tested at higher stats what was an innovative game quickly grew into a sterile environment. As far as combat mechanics go once you're capped it's very dull and CFH just kills any smidgeon of excitement possibly left. Training is impossible once you have capped stats. Villages cannot really be meaningfully improved since only thing you can gain is regen that is pointless if you have capped stats. Clans also seem relatively pointless. Only thing it has going for it is a tavern that is a socialising area although game itself has little redeeming values at the moment and at best is just grinding requiring no thought whatsoever, hence why bots have been so common.

As far as solution goes I think only way TNR is really going to have a future is if they decide to design a completely new core 3. In it there must be a stat reset since having loads of capped players cannot be good. It would need to be thoroughly tested at all points and be designed to have a much more interesting and dynamic combat system, village system, MPvP etc. I think core 2 is pretty much irretrievable as it's a patchwork quilt of updates of which half needs to be replaced. It is also vitally important to get highly competent staff to work on it at least to get it started and imo getting professional help would not be a bad idea. Most games that make money also spend money so it could be viewed as an investment. Kind of question you can ask yourself as to whether it is a good game is if that game had a single player mode with AIs would you want to play it? Games like Call of Duty tend to pass while games like TNR don't and that's what you need to pass so it's a game would play alone that is better since you have friends and rivals

[Laxus91]

misc said it all. well i know none of that will happen anytime soon~

[Zezusa]

Misc i couldn't say it any better, if you look at other MMORPG`s they have expansions quite regularly, if a game has a limit with no expansions for game play it eventually gets "beaten" and becomes obsolete.

[Mortregis]

In response to Zezusa's comment, expansions are mainly a method for an established balanced MMO to stay infront of its competitors.
At the moment, TNR is not balanced at all, and is very far away from being so. Expansion correlates to more content, and adding more content at this point in time is a ridiculous notion.

[Zezusa]

Mort so what you're saying that instead of adding more game play, focus on balancing??? I understand your point but balancing wouldn't affect end gamers much since there is no game play for them and since end gamers capped everything they can just use the most powerful of everything without being bothered. But in no way i was suggesting an expansion btw, i was just stating that other MMORPG`s maintained interest ti experienced players because of their expansions, something tnr will never have hence a core 3 would be a plausible option

[Misc]

Expansions are important for a game to keep players, or at very least updates. However first you need to have sound foundations and a game that you can expand upon. Actually that's one of the main reasons I think core 3 is needed.

If you look at war system one of reasons there are so many problems isn't just that war system itself is a bit dodgy but it's fact that villages have vastly different sizes and even if you exclude numbers the quality of ninjas in villages varies a lot. Theoretically it's possible to add fudge factors in to take into account population, XP, ranks etc although this is far from perfect and requires a lot of work just to counteract existing imbalance without even adding any new content.

Ideally when designing core 3 you could put checks and balances into original implementation so that if for example one village starts getting too powerful you could get a counter-mechanism. For example instead of regen being a base amount per user it could be an amount per village that is then divided by the number of ninjas using rank as an indicator. This would mean that if everyone joined glacier everyone's regen would be useless and if everyone left it's regen would go up encouraging new users to join meaning that each village ends up with an optimal population. You could even end up with kage tweaking regen ratios and in theory could even give priority to anbus etc. Same applies with many other aspects of game and it's why it needs a clean start. I would possibly even propose that people are initially place in villages at random or alternatively everyone joins an AS academy and only when they graduate do they join a village (or even create one, possibly when you have enough allies etc) although that would require a new map and a much more complex inter village system and users skilled in diplomacy. That is kind of potential core 3 would have that is impossible for core 2 as too much is in place that prevents it.

WoodEdit: I love your ideas.That regen fail-safe sounds cool.

[Raja]

Many valid points and ideas have come up from Misc & others, the issue here is definitely not the lack of ideas within the community...
A lot more game features and content could've been implemented just if the community could make it's voices heard so to say and if someone actually cared enough to listen and apply into game.
This would encourage the community to come up with more ideas and after all the players know the best as they spend the most time playing the game.

Most games that make money also spend money so it could be viewed as an investment. Kind of question you can ask yourself as to whether it is a good game is if that game had a single player mode with AIs would you want to play it? Games like Call of Duty tend to pass while games like TNR don't and that's what you need to pass so it's a game would play alone that is better since you have friends and rivals

This is a very good point and should be addressed forward, for example something like a storyline with quests/missions to progress upon while playing is one thing that sounds to me like it would work in a game that is based on a story. We already have an event staff that could work on this and i'm pretty sure players would appreciate things which they can do on their own time instead of trying to somehow be online at certain unscheduled rare occasions.

Cfh is a major issue here and should've been worked upon already a long time ago, many plausible ideas have been presented to tweak cfh into something more tolerable(such as one of mine?) but nothings getting done, I don't think there's any successful online game's that neglect the views of it's customers as much as tnr does.

MPvP is a wonderful feature which just happens to be presented in a totally wrong way that encourages trolling and imbalanced gameplay. How hard is it to implement bearable ways to have MPvP battles? The possibilities are near endless, you could have territory type of battles for anbus, team based leagues with rankings and just so many more ideas that would work x100 better than mere lolcfhwins-umad?

It's not that I'm ungrateful for tnr but it's a nice game going down the toilet when it could be so much more, I've spent a hefty amount of cash in the game in hopes of sponsoring it into something greater, not to see it die because nobody who could make a difference doesn't care.

I think the question everybody's wanting answer for is, where's Terr and is there a plan?

[WAWA]

Solution:

Form a corporation with like minded TNR'ers... buy TNR and do what you want.

[Rourke Saito]

I don't care what happens but i'll be here until TNR's demise.
As i posted in the suggestions we should promote the game on other websites to get more people on it
When that happens raiding will be more efficient and quicker.
But we need Terr to make the game look better and do a much more advanced theme update