daskew's thoughts on server-list

Heya I have never made a suggestion before but I thought I wanted to say something about this KAG feature:



Specifically what it is
The server-list filter automatically filtering out modded servers when you access it if you are already in a server. This post is about it coming on by itself.

Possible issue I think there might be
I believe this could be a difficult feature which lowers overall kag player numbers

Reasons for position
I think a lot of new players will not realise this is automatically coming on without them clicking it until they have engaged in the game for a while. I personally didn't realise about it for a while myself.

A few times even recently I have looked to see how many players are online and gone "oh my only 53 (or something)" and thought about turning the game off to do something else, only to remember "Ah yes its the automatic filter", then finding there's like nearly 40 more players online, and 1 or 2 other servers populated I might want to visit.

Suggestion
I am not completely sure if this feature is overall a negative thing for KAG. I do not claim to have the correct judgment on this. But I have heard quite a few times in-game people getting confused when talking to others saying "I dont see the server" when trying to find one of their favourite modded servers. This comes up a lot more than you would think.

I believe someone in the forum even mentioned this recently, I will find the quote...

I think in this thread the user found out that he was not turning off the filter that comes on automatically.

Conclusion
I think the development team of this game are brilliant and they make a lot of great decisions. I might be wrong about this one being a bad idea, but I thought I would just bring it up here in this thread and it seems from my perspective to be hampering the game.

Thanks for reading.

 

^^^ +1 I heard a lot of complaints from some starting players on the Official/just nonmodded servers that they cant find modded servers, so they have to play nonmodded
This nomodded server setting could be good for learning starting game, but it cuts off posibility of getting fun from modded servers for those who dont know how to use those buttons

 

Yes, definitely. And it means making small changes, like putting Blowjob or changing one variable, can make your server invisible to a lot of the players. It only encourages the same old vanilla while the devs are saying "TRY IT IN A MOD FIRST".

 

IFKR? Devs are so worried about mods ruining the first time experience of newcomers, but in their actions they have probably done exactly what they were trying to prevent. You don't need to be a KAG veteran to know that player retention is horrendously short-lived. Looking at the player population graph on Steam sale days, you might think that 90% of newcomers have buyer's remorse. Population always goes from 200-300 back to the original 50-100 after just a few days.

Frankly I think many of them would rather play one of the many wonderful community mods than the vanilla game, but the devs have done everything in their power to prevent newcomers from even knowing that mods exist. At one point you just flat out didn't have the ability to join a modded server for the first day. Now we have a filter called "Non-Vanilla" (which I'm sure has completely unknown meaning to most gamers in general), ticked to "red" (which *activates sarcasm mode* is totally self explanatory as well) by default, AND it gets reticked when your autoconfig.cfg file decides to randomly reset.

I petition for the modded server filter to be completely removed from the browser. The gameplay variety of the mods is so great, from slight tweaks to total conversions, that there is really no reason to have that filter ticked red unless you just hate the idea of community driven content. We already have a fat warning that you are about to join a modded server and that it requires you to download files. I doubt anybody is going to say "I didn't buy the game for this shit" when they join a plain-as-day modded, blue-listed, server. If they don't get the hint, I'm sure someone in chat will be happy to redirect them.

 

Just a small addition^
If a player joined server with ppl (heaviily modded server) and asks how to play, players (until those 'r' not-talking Russian scumbags) will definitly redirect him to blue/gold servers and willl tell to join those to learn gameplay. Its just ridiclous that Geti thinks that the deleting Mod servers without changing options will be better then the help from community on modded servers (and on a small note, only the experienced players enjoy most of the modded servers, so the community in it is more friendly-to-player)

 

Sorry about the "devs are out to get us modders" rhetoric. When I was writing it I was thinking of design choices for the browser during early beta unintentionally making modding very frustrating. I will agree the situation has gotten a lot better and there are very few things currently keeping community content from entering the lime-light. As you can tell from my tone, I don't think it's perfect, but I don't think "devs are out to get us" either.

I still think there is very legitimate concern for the clarity and ease of use of the mod filter. With the above bug that daskew is describing (I have personally experienced it maybe once or twice as well), I think it needs to be more obvious what this filter does. "Non-Vanilla" doesn't really have a universal meaning, despite what those within the close-knit THD community may think. The color codes also don't immediately register in my mind. You might think that "red" indicates that the filter is off and "green" indicates that it is on. Instead there should be a drop-down list with text options including "Show Modded Only", "Show Unmodded Only", and "Disabled".

 

I just formulated the sentence wrong, I was gettting an opinion out that about you think like that ^
Sorry for mein wrong and weird grammar and sentence-building

 

Very good suggestion Daskew, which I also noticed some time ago.
Many kag players leaving because of the number of players.

I often see on steam some players who complain about the number of players and do not understand why there is only a few, as they said "on this awesome game !"

Once a player has written "there are only 20 players on kag currently this game is dead" 2 min after he posted his comment i disabled the filter and there were actually more than 100 ... this feature must be correct, it would be corrected since long time ...

 

Well thanks everyone for adding your thoughts to this conversation, including geti - thanks for letting us know the developers side of this debate.

To summarise my opinion - It's not that it stops people all the time from going into modded servers (e.g. roleplay), I just think from my perspective it's a burden on the game and interferes with the 'smooth-running' of a players experience, new and sometimes veteran players. I think it would be better if it didn't come on automatically - just when people choose to use it.

Oh and also the developers have a much different perspective sometimes to kaggers because they have got "bigger-scale" things to consider and clearly are aware of issues peasants are not . I just thought I would throw this out there because I do believe in what I mean with this particular issue.

Thanks all