Why is the game dead?

    To give a simple, recent example: The last test server just had a complete meltdown, they did a survey whether players wanted to continue with heavy lags (right as ww started) without requiring you to be in the server to vote. Ended up closing the server in early WW phase and just declaring the people with most VP winners.


    & in general just horrible management. From my understanding, the multi hunting team is now consisting of very few people, if not even a single person. Even if its clear as day, massive abuse of multis, scripting or similar has little to no consequences for the player. So over time, almost everyone gets burned out by this madness, while hearing the same repetitive replies from staff on the forum. xD

    Many experienced players leave this game cause they grow up and get responsibilities in life that aren't compatible with the game. I am starting to become one of these. I used to play two or more servers at a time. I stayed up nights to arrange things for the kingdom and could do so without any conflicts with real life.

    Other players follow cause they don't want the responsibilities and find that new teams just don't have as good management as they were used to.

    The small amount of players that are actually good at the management of a kingdom play together so they can share responsibilities. This usually results in few big kingdoms, which makes it hard for other players to learn those responsibilities. The only way you can get some management experience is in a team that already has lots. These existing teams should split, but they grew together so they likely won't.


    The menhir system encouraged these big predefined kingdom playstyles.


    New players can't really get a good foothold in any server. If they join at server start they will likely be overwhelmed by how much is going on. "treasury activated, new village settled, blablabla" and they only had a very basic tutorial that is completely outdated.

    If they join in an ongoing server they will be overwhelmed by how strong everyone already is. They have to join an existing kingdom, but the tutorial never explained how the menhir system works. Ofc you prompt them to contact a king and he can explain, but to force social interaction so early is... not good.


    The menhir system could be explained in the tutorial so new players better understand what is going on.


    Another thing is that the card game is extremely bad for getting new f2p players. The cardgame rewards seem extremely OP to new players. They take one look at it and think "oh another pay2win game" and leave.
    A solution could be to make the cardgame rewards purchasable and give new players a bit more starting gold.


    The underlying problem of it all is that development is non existent.

    The only changes are ones that we didn't ask for. Edit: The recent changes were indeed what we asked for. There were some serious bugs fixed. However, it still takes way too long for problematic features and bugs to get fixed.

    Issues that are problematic to the game aren't being addressed. Think people registering just to fast settle a cropper and keep it occupied for the entire server whilst doing nothing else. Or people abusing the vacation system to train insane day 30 hammers that nobody should have to deal with. Or, my favorite, kingdoms using 1 duke to make a bunch of huge treasury villages, fill those to the brim, and then let that duke get banned so the treasures are untouchable.


    But hey, we got halloween hats...


    And finally there is the terrible community managers who pretend the problems that we address are not really that problematic.

    Entire threads where 90% of the posters agree on something and then the community managers come with the "oh but we have to also consider the 10%" simply because the 10% vote to NOT do anything, and not doing anything is what the Travian Kingdoms team is pretty darn good at.

    Thank you very much for the analysis Pinkguy#NL.


    I am not going to say things are perfect, but they are a bit better than what is exposed.


    We have been reacting quickly to the exploits found in several occasions during the last few weeks, and we installed fixes for things like massive attacks stopping WW for been able to function or the king/duque exploit, just to mention 2.


    We are as well working on improvements for the vacation mode and have been looking at improvements for the menhir function.

    The vacation mode receive further testing in the latest test game world and we went back to the drawing board for the menhir function.


    These are just a few things we have done in the past few weeks, while we worked in the background to improve performance that needed to be addressed.


    So it is not as gloomy as it may seem.


    Yes, there are less players than before, once the pandemic restrictions were lifted is normal that many players step back a bit from playing full on for a while.


    We are hopping that what we learn from this test game round and HaHu game worlds will help us improve in general for the future.


    So many new players will be able to enjoy the game and, who knows, many veterans may come back and see the improvements. :)


    So it is all a bit of perspective, from the team's side we will keep doing our best to improve in all sense, not only in our communication with you here in the forum and in Discord, but as well in the game performance and features.


    I hope that is enough to improve player numbers in future. :)

    Quote from Unknown

    We have been reacting quickly to the exploits found in several occasions during the last few weeks, and we installed fixes for things like massive attacks stopping WW for been able to function or the king/duque exploit, just to mention 2.

    That's a strange way of phrasing "SINCE a few weeks we have started doing what we should have done ages ago.". But hey, I'll take what I can get.

    Quote from Unknown

    Yes, there are less players than before, once the pandemic restrictions were lifted is normal that many players step back a bit from playing full on for a while.

    Pandemic has very little to do with this. We've seen a steady decline for a long time.

    I've had a discussion a few weeks ago about how big servers used to be.

    COM2 right now has 370 and will be over within a week. From what I hear it is quite representative of the current state of the game.

    GetterCOM1_2018 527 at end of the game. I believe this server was very representative of the time but I am not sure.
    GetterBeta2015 This was either one of the beta servers or one of the first official Travian Kingdoms servers. These statistics are off but if you select some players you will see over 100 tile radius. This was also in part due to the fact that spawns were more sparsely distributed and many players hopped on to see the new Travian Kingdoms. Still, there were easily thousands of players on a game world.

    GetterArchive2015 Here you can see, COM2, 23.060 players deleted, that means they were at some point playing. Now that is around the 1700 per server, bit more for speed servers.

    Quote from Unknown

    I hope that is enough to improve player numbers in future. :)

    "I hope..." exactly, you can only hope cause you don't know anything.

    It most likely won't be enough to have a noticeable effect. Because of: the biggest mistake you ever made in the development of Travian Kingdoms.
    Sure, it gave a huge boost in how much everyone actually spent on the game, but you could have achieved similar results by not making it a lootbox system and just having an in-game shop for those items.

    Make the premium features less intimidating to the new players.

    Quote from Unknown

    We are hopping

    Hopping like bunnies XD

    I for one have been enjoying com3x3. The server has been stable and there's plenty of action.


    The main reason I don't play multiple servers at a time or even back to back is due to real-life constraints. I have a full-time job, etc. and those things are a priority.

    Quote from th0mm#NL

    When you will stop cheating, so never?

    Regardless of whether that guy cheats or not is irrelevant, Unknown is actually pretty bad at his job xD


    And I don't mean this as an insult, I have experience in customer success and community management so it's especially glaring to me all the mistakes and stupid things that he says on the forum that make me think "oof that's not how you should be approaching this issue".


    Obviously he's still (relatively) new and everyone can't be expected to do their job 100% straightaway (or to live up to GeorgeG's excellent customer service skills), but front-facing customer engagement is a tough job and the TK team needs to provide better training to such staff or risk embarrassing themselves even more.

    I think we all have our roles to play in encouraging a new audience to the game.


    Players need to be more honest, reports problems when they spot them & not look for ways to exploit the game.

    Also people need to stop coming on here (the forum) just to post negative comments all the time & then carrying on playing the game, just looking for other ways to come & be more negative about the game again. People read these comments before signing up & then don't bother & find some other game to play instead


    if you like & continue playing the game, then also look for positive things to write about too (there must be some reason you keep playing or you would just quit)



    Admins need to react fast & be as transparent as privacy laws will allow them,

    recently they have been doing a much better job of this, I have seen them being more reactive to fixing things, than we had a few years ago.


    They also need to apply harsher punishments for anyone seen to be abusing the game multiple times, 3 strikes & you're out kinda thing

    anyone can make a mistake (we're all human)
    2 times is questionable

    3 times though is a serial offender & need to be gone from the game


    Devs need stop adding new features until all the current features work as intended.


    Then when everything is working & we're all in a happy place, a marketing campaign/re-launch should be considered, to bring fresh players into the game


    Lets face it, there is a reason why we come here and take time to post, kingdoms is a great game, it needs improvements from the whole community & if we can come together to make it more positive, then server numbers will probably show better numbers of players signing up too

    The main problem i.m.o. is the obvious cheating and the way bans of such (repeat) offenders get handled.


    People don't quit because of menhir being unbalanced, people dont quit because of vacation mode.

    People quit because of the people that are almost looking 24/7 looking for ways to abuse mechanics and take pride in it.


    I.m.o. cheaters should be banned/deleted from a server immediately with no chance to get back. Some have proven to not behave better even after 10+ bans, so get rid of them.


    People on these forums that keep cheering for people to actually get fired, lmao little kids.