Goblin Squad Member
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Can you give us a sense of realistic minimum numbers to be viable in EE? Is there a rough number you could give us, a "floor" to shoot for? Let's say it's the last week before the end of the Landrush, and Settlement A has 50 people, Settlement B has 25, and Settlement C has 12. Would you look at any of these settlements and say to yourself, "These folks are kidding themselves"?
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CEO, Goblinworks
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What does "viable" mean? Since you can't lose a Settlement until territorial warfare begins, there is no catastrophic failure mode.
If you are asking how big a Settlement should be in order to be viable in the game when territorial warfare is enabled my answer is "hundreds of players".
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks for answering Ryan. I mean viable as in "Likely to be able to take and hold towers, train/support members, and be positioned to self-defend when OE starts and catastrophic consequences are in."
Would you look at a 50 person settlement and 15 person settlement and think "There's plenty of time between now and OE--they both have reasonable chances"?
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Goblin Squad Member
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To say that a settlement needs hundreds in order to be viable is based on the assumption that the average settlement will have hundreds.
I think that it is more likely for there being a lot fewer than 33 settlements by OE. The smaller ones will have been crushed or absorbed and the conquerors decided not to split their own numbers to support more than one settlement.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think a more realistic statement is that you probably need to have at least 25% of what population the largest settlements have.
If open enrollment comes up and one settlement has 4k members, you'd better have at least 1k. If they only have 1k, you might do fine with 250 people.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The Towers part is a mini game that is largely irrelevant after the earliest part of EE is over. It is a few bonus tokens to your DI. But I imagine the earliest states of EE will see a huge influx of interested players and we will all have a chance to pick over the new arrivals and try to get to our goal of 500 minimum (<- my number, 10 companies of 50 each +/-) for a successful settlement.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The Towers part is a mini game that is largely irrelevant after the earliest part of EE is over. It is a few bonus tokens to your DI. But I imagine the earliest states of EE will see a huge influx of interested players and we will all have a chance to pick over the new arrivals and try to get to our goal of 500 minimum (<- my number, 10 companies of 50 each +/-) for a successful settlement.
I would like to think that the Tower War will be of small importance. I have doubts that it will be less than 6 months long. I have suspicions that it will be closer to 1 year long.
The beliefs (so far) that they are tying towers (and how many controlled) to training maximums, to PVP windows that have to be attended for some time every day 7 days a week (spread out possibly widely) will start to tell on even the hardcore after that much time.
It will be interesting to compare activity after 5 months to activity in the first 2. Even 6 months is a long time for the average MMO player.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To me, it's broader than that: it's based on the assumption that Ryan says it, and thus it's an appropriate number based on everything he knows about the game that we don't yet know.
Ryan has many jobs, one of which is encouraging as many people as he can to subscribe. If he convinces us that we need 499 friends to keep our settlement viable, he's made that part of his job easier.
Which doesn't say it isn't true. And I'm sure his statements reflect the way they've optimized (or are working toward optimizing) the game. But humans have proved, time and time again, that just because you build it that way doesn't mean it will get used that way.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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My assumption is that there will be enough towers with enough geographical dispersion (and thus issues of interior lines of communication) plus geographical choke points and other features that will make it hard for large groups to hold towers all over the map, that a dozen people could likely manage to control a tower. So during the War of Towers these really small Settlements will be able to do something more than just stand around chatting.
On the other hand I suspect that it will become really obvious really quickly that being in a Settlement with a dozen other people is a really boring and sub-optimal way to play and I think most of those people will not persist in trying to do it. But there are going to be more than 33 people who are determined to be kings and swear fealty to no other man, so I'm sure there will be a few Settlements that are run by one or two people, a bunch of alts, and a lot of ego.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If we take the landrush numbers as a popularity ratio and just multiply everything by 7 or so to get to the full EE population, anybody with 15 votes now is probably looking at over 100 players once there are 8500 live accounts. Sure, there'll be one or two ghost towns running on wishful thinking and hot air, but I don't think that'll be anything like common.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But there are going to be more than 33 people who are determined to be kings and swear fealty to no other man, so I'm sure there will be a few Settlements that are run by one or two people, a bunch of alts, and a lot of ego.
And when I find them I will crush them and take their pudding.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If we take the landrush numbers as a popularity ratio and just multiply everything by 7 or so to get to the full EE population, anybody with 15 votes now is probably looking at over 100 players once there are 8500 live accounts. Sure, there'll be one or two ghost towns running on wishful thinking and hot air, but I don't think that'll be anything like common.
Except it won't be an arithmetic dispersion. Many will be attracted to the largest (for safety and convenience). Some will be attracted to the smallest (where they have a chance to be a big fish in a small pond) The rest might distribute randomly. In general, it's going to be more geometric. Likely 50% or more will continue to be drawn to the top half dozen settlements.
*Minimum Viable Population
The Brits are in on it, too. We've been having a lot of trouble getting rid of those One Direction guys.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If we take the landrush numbers as a popularity ratio and just multiply everything by 7 or so to get to the full EE population, anybody with 15 votes now is probably looking at over 100 players once there are 8500 live accounts. Sure, there'll be one or two ghost towns running on wishful thinking and hot air, but I don't think that'll be anything like common.Except it won't be an arithmetic dispersion. Many will be attracted to the largest (for safety and convenience). Some will be attracted to the smallest (where they have a chance to be a big fish in a small pond) The rest might distribute randomly. In general, it's going to be more geometric. Likely 50% or more will continue to be drawn to the top half dozen settlements.
But those factors are already in effect on the current distribution. If about 50% of currently-active people tend towards the top 6 settlements now- as we see is the case- it's reasonable to think that about 50% of a larger population would also tend towards the top 6 settlements. In other words, we have no particular reason to think that the shape of the distribution of new players will significantly deviate from the shape of the current distribution.
Even if you think that increasing the scale of the curve will also change the shape of the curve... let's say instead of multiplying by 7 we raise the current number to the 1.5 power, you still get over 100 members with 22 current votes. (You also get over 25% of your total population in Brighthaven, so that seems like an extreme case.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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and with the "minimum viable population" what would the effect in the tower phase be if escalations did in fact overrun the town?
just wondering that even if they still own the settlement, is it really still owned if mobs are walking the streets and pitching tents outside the alehouse?
EDIT: also how far can they take over a tower hex or a tower for that matter?