I'm new to this game and when i logged on there were less than a thousand people playing, so is this game dead or was it cause of update or something?

It's a small game that's designed for casual players, most of whom only login in for very short periods. In general, the concurrent population is almost always under 1k, but the retail box being sold in Walmart and Target later this month might change that...

Ahhh i see, just seemed weird cause you know the game was released in like 07 and stuff

And this game is well... different. Eather you like it a lot, or you dont like it at all. Just as Ripper said, a small game for casual players (that are mostly against WoW ) but with a very good community. We like to help eachother a lot, specially in World 7.

Yep it's a very casual game and both the players and the game itself doesn't take it very seriously. The humorous aspect carries over from the game to the players a lot of the time. Personally, I'm utterly obsessed with the game but that's just me. lol

Yeah, I want to play the game, But I can only play for maybe 1- 2 hours before I get restless.
Then again I'm not that big of a gamer.

Since you're not that big of a gamer, then this is the game for you. It's good, casual fun that doesn't require you to spend hours and hours online to finish quests or have a good time. You can always play 1-2 hours maybe 2 or 3 times a week or even go for weeks not playing and the game still pays for itself (or if you're a non-member, no worries about not getting your money's worth at all) since it's only 5 bucks a month, unless you got the box and then you got 2 months free. There are lots of nice people out there on all the worlds, just go into things with a good sense of humor and have fun.

One thing I have noticed in the last 2 weeks is that the player base on all worlds has steadily decreased . looks like a lot of folks bought the game and got bored or what not....... A tad worrying atm but we shall see what happens after all the generic stores start selling DR (Wally-World etc)




Just my 2 pennies.

The resent layoffs is really bad for the game too, especially since Mythos just got canceled and people don't wanna put their time and effort in a game they're not sure will survive to the end of the year. I know several who quit 'cause of that.

Well, if any of those read this: DON'T WORRY! Dungeon Runners will prevail!

Be carefull what you're posting there LM, some people might get nightmares!

I'm pretty dumbfounded by the staff reductions of the Dungeon Runners crew by NCSoft.

It really makes no sense at all.

When a company has a product that people can obtain and use for FREE, and they also market it as such--it doesn't hold much credibility that one of the reasons for staff reductions is that they're losing money...of COURSE they're losing money--that's what FREE games do.

Seems to me that if profits were what was expected of the game, they'd get rid of the 'free' play, and turn it into a pay-for-play game...otherwise, they really have nothing to bitch about when it comes to lack of revenue.

It also stands to reason that a 70% reduction in staff means at LEAST 3x the workload to do the same amount of work that was being done...since a person can't obviously do 3x the amount of work they previously did (assuming they were at least 'average' employees who did their jobs), it's going to take 3x as long to accomplish the same amount of work-- basically boiling down to it taking at least 3x longer till players can expect new content, which basically equates to NCSoft slitting the throat of Dungeon Runners, since many players will get bored of the old content and move on to another game, rather than wait and wait and wait for new stuff. Player loyalty only lasts as long as the company producing the game can keep them entertained...when that ceases to happen, or when it becomes stagnant, players will move on to something else.

While we all would love to see Dungeon Runners grow and succeed, it's kind of hard not to see the 'writing on the wall' when NCSoft seems to see the lack of profits from a FREE GAME that they have totally failed to market properly as a measure of 'success'.

The game has such infinite gargantuan huge (insert a ginormous amount of synonyms meaning 'large' here) potential, and could expand into something far better than any existing game currently on the market. Sadly, it's being hamstrung even before it's really been given a chance to succeed.

Having played EverQuest for over 6 years, and World of Warcraft for nearly 4, it's sad to finally find a game--where you don't have to devote your life to and abandon your family just to 'play' the game--get such a gutting by the parent company.

With that said, it only stands to reason if you cut from the game, you cut from the players, and it really sucks for those of us who have actually supported the game by paying, and buying the retail version to have the expectation of continued content for the game we purchased suddenly ripped out from under us, so quickly after the retail version became available.

It really made no sense at all to have select few vendors become the only way to purchase the retail version when it was released.

Who shops at GameStop anyway?
Gamers. (Very small niche market, IMO, consisting mostly of console games, and an EXTREMELY MICRO SMALL amount of USED PC games, and an even SMALLER amount of NEW retail PC games.--in fact, when the game was released, I visited 3 GameStop stores (all within 2 miles of each other--sheesh, they're all over, just like StarBucks!), and not a single employee or manager of the 3 stores had even heard of Dungeon Runners, and had no idea it was being released, or even shipped to them.)

Who shops at amazon.com?
Lots of people, but you still have to wait for the item to ship to you.

Now:
Who shops at Wal*Mart?
Everyone and their brother. Millions of 'regular folks' who walk around and browse...hey--there's a thought--sell your product in a store where people actually shop!

Online Purchase?
OMG! If someone likes the game and wants to buy it, immediately, why in the world would you cripple your own sales by NOT having it availble for purchase from your own website?!?!?

• It really made no sense at all to NOT sell the retail version from the Dungeon Runners store online when it was released.
• It really made no sense at all to sell the game at exlusive stores that had no idea the game even existed or was being released.
• It really made no sense at all to expect profits from a FREE game.
• It really made no sense at all to cut staff by 70% less than 60 days from the date the product was released.

So--players are now feeling that the parent company has bailed on Dungeon Runners, and that the future is bleak--and rightly so--it seems that they had bailed on Dungeon Runners long before it was even released, which is sad, because the game is so wonderfully wonderful in a wonderfully wonderful kind of way...

What lies in the future for Dungeon Runners?

Only time will tell, but I, for one, still hope that things take a turn for the better for everyone involved in the creation and production of the game, and that the players of the game would get at least the same amount of respect in return from the parent company as the gamers give them by supporting their products--otherwise, we all might as well take our ball and go home.

personally i dont want this game to go mainstream it will just get wrecked hardcore like wow did.

I had and continue to have faith that Dungeon Runners can actually be profitable. Quite a lot of games in the f2p MMO market are profitable, and Dungeon Runners could/should be one of them.

...or updates being smaller. It's a lot of work, but I think the people who are left really care about the game, and will work hard to do what they can. On the bright side, it sounds like most of the work was completed on chunk #4 before anything happened.

As Crickette posted, Dungeon Runners is going to show up at Wal-Mart. Already, though, big outlets like Best Buy carry Dungeon Runners.

On the other hand, retailers prefer to carry games that people will buy - if the retailer feels that people won't buy the box because they can just get it online, then they might not carry it, meaning that all those potential customers don't even get to see the sweet box.

Just as you say. It's Stockdale's paradox: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

I, as well, have...well, um...not quite *faith*--but rather *a very, very high degree of hope* that Dungeon Runners will become profitable and succeed. I love this game, and it's irreverent silliness...however, it is very hard to keep on driving when you can see the bridge collapsing right in front of you.

I have no clue what people are being paid at Dungeon Runners, but let's say you had 18 people, making roughly (a wild estimation here)...um...$20,000 a year. That's $360,000 just in employee wages, not even factoring in the cost of equipment, building lease, utilities, taxes, etc. That means that just for WAGES, the company has to bring in $30,000 a month, which equates to having roughly 6,000 active memberships (at $5/month), or selling approximately 1,500 retail boxes per month, or a combination thereof.

Now, I'm no math genius, but I can see a serious shortfall when it comes to income. There's 6 worlds, (1,2,4,5,7,8) which seem to have a capacity of 250 players. I've only seen world 1 as ever being 'full', but 6 x 250 players (assuming all servers were full), is still only 1,500 total players.

As I write this, population levels are: 1:122, 2:20, 4:23, 5:34, 7:22, 8:55.
That's 276 total players online, of which only 20 are playing on the 'members only' server. (I know paying members DO play on the other servers, tho.)

My point (again, sorry for the longwindedness):

With the current level of players who are actually paying to play, HOW can the game be profitable, and even moreso: How can the game continue to have people play for free if they expect/want to be profitable?

They seem to have created their own paradox that comes down to either being a niche casual fun game that doesn't rake in a ton of cash, or becoming a mainstream game run by marketing weenies that generates profits like a bling gnome on steroids.

I, too, love the small game atmosphere, and not having gold farmer spams, and beggars all over the place asking for gold. If we could get rid of the people begging for powerleveling all the time, it would be paradise.

One step at a time, I guess...

They do NOW, but not when the game was first released, which was what my comment was about--related to the firing of staff prior to the game being able to get into WallyWorld.

That's why you actually market the game beforehand and build up hype for the game via print ads, commercials, and other media, offer special incentives for people to pre-order the game and give them some silly useless in-game item that looks cool but does nothing--silly gimicks generate sales!!! (We had an appliance dealer where I live who offered to give you 5 pounds of coffee if he couldn't beat your best deal...I don't think he ever gave away a single ground of coffee, but he had people coming in and buying his appliances all the time.) Alas, I digress...

Dungeon Runners suffers from an immensely small player base to begin with--which actually is nice, because it's not a mainstream game, and you don't generally have to deal with the morons and idiots that seem to plague most MMO's.--but selling the game in a few select stores that don't generally stock new PC titles in the first place, that generally deal with console and used games doesn't exactly strike me as the best corner in the city to try to sell from.

I'm not slamming Dungeon Runners or their marvelous crew by any stretch of the imagination...I love the work they've done and the dedication to keeping the game FUN! I'm just trying to point out some things they could have done better in a constructive way, so please forgive me if my posts come across as slamming the fine folks involved in creating and working on this awesome game.

:sigh: If only *I* were running things...

(hmmm...)

I wonder if any former Dungeon Runners folks might be interested in discussing the possibilites of a new/different/unique MMO... I'm no programmer myself, but with 20+years of business & marketing experience, game design, publication, animation, and producing, I'm sure we could work out something...

If anyone's interested in discussing such a project, please feel free to e-mail me.

I wish they would have waited too, but WallyWorld is not a magic place that will positively help the game; there are those out there who simply will not shop there at all due to their labor practices. In fact, it's the last place I would look for any type of computer game. I think that Best Buy or even Circuit City would garner more sells, but I'm no expert.

What is most important to remember in all of this is that DR is not really that old of a game in the grand scheme of things and this was their first attempt at a retail store type of marketing. Things will be bumpy and not go quite according to plan, but the game still got out there and is showing up at more places now. I found 4 copies at our local military post exchange (and at a great price mind you) and there are a lot of gamers in the military community; so if it showed up at my base exchange in Tampa, it showed up in most of them I'm sure. I'm sure that the reasoning for having the game slowly trickle out to a growing amount of stores can be explained by someone, I am not sure exactly why. Perhaps it had to do with production and exclusivity. Either that or perhaps some stores wanted to wait and see how well it sold before deciding to carry it. I doubt there's any store out there that wants to carry a product that just sits there collecting dust and eventually lands in the clearance pile.

I would hazard a guess that unfortunately because DR is a "free" game and has a, I assume, rather minimal marketing budget, that they were unable to do the WoW type of hype of commercials, ads, etc. The retail box was the attempt at marketing and I don't really think we can completely judge on how well that is going as of yet. Although the I know the lay-offs don't leave us with a good feeling about it all.

All this being said, I'm nervous about losing the game that I've invested over a year in now, but I'm willing to wait it out some more and see how it goes.



Edited by LadyV (08/18/08 09:45 AM)

Absolutely!

To BigFatKlingon

As it was previously said and has been said many times: This is a casual game that many only play for 15 minutes to an hour a time. You can't literally take "oh there's only 1000 people on right now, what a small playerbase, i didnt realize DR was so small" because in reality, those 1000 may be playing now, but a whole new 1000 may be playing 15 minutes from then, and 30 mins after that 1000 different people, etc; DR has a lot of people playing it, just not 24/7 like WoW or other life-hogger games.

So in this same idea, you can't simply take numbers and add them up for the sake of hoping you're right. Neither you nor I have any idea how the finances work, so blindly guessing won't gain credibility in any conversation.
What if there was some mistake where too much resources were put towards a free game and all of a sudden NCSoft realized they had to cut back on that to minimize profit loss?
What if the made boxes haven't been sold yet or are sitting somewhere?
It cost some sort of money to make the box with the cd in it, so there's more profit in the balance that counts as "loss" until they're all sold. All the effort going into the planning and production of the retail box, creation of Bling Gnome and patches for the bling gnome, etc, most likely leads to paid hours for employees; Not to mention that we're getting a sweet financial deal (Bling Gnome for free, and we're basically paying for 6 months of membership at 20$ as opposed to 30$), There's 10 less dollars the company is getting from each purchaser. I'm sure all of this is adding up ? This isn't a surprise to me.

I think after saying all this, (and im not being disrespectful to the staff that got laid off because they did a tremendous job in helping make DR the best game i enjoy playing), but NCSoft might have made a financial mistake hiring so many people to work on this free game with optional subscription for 5$ a month (and even less if you get the box). That's just too much money wasted on resources for a free game that rakes in little subscription fees per player.

It's like if you own a cornerstore in the middle of New York. Say you hire 5 people to work there during the day shift, and 5 for the nightshift, as opposed to you working it by yourself or with one-2 other people one-at-a-time shifts. Pay check time comes, and the owner looks at the profit record. Oh snap! Profit Loss! No Shit. I think NC has fixed their mistake and things will go on from here , just like before they added tons of staff. Smaller and less frequent updates, obviously, but DR will still go on and hopefully the retail box will bring in some revenue to give NC a reason to make the staff bigger.

The only time I ever see that few people online is very early on weekend mornings... When I log in, I see at least 100 players per server, often nearly 200. The only one that does not have as many is the EU server, but since I log in when it's past midnight in Europe, I don't expect to see a lot of people on there during my hours, especially not during the week.

The number of players you see on each server when you log in is an extremely unreliable number, and is not in any way an accurate representation of the number of players, or of the number of paying members.

I have yet to see an aggregate total of 1,000 people in any combination of servers online at the same time. Maybe 7-800 on a good day, but the max population is well under 1k.
Hope has nothing to do with it. I merely took a random sample of people who were online at the time I made the post, to illustrate my point.
While it's true that I don't know the intricities of NCSoft's financial 'formula' or policies, I have run successful business ventures for over 2 decades. Your assertation that I am 'blindly guessing' about business matters is merely 'blindly guessing' on your part, since you have absolutely no idea who I am outside of the game, what I do for a living, what my experience is, or pretty much anything else about me. Hypocrite.
No one said it didn't.
Problem is, it didn't add up to "enough" to retain all the super awesome folks who worked on the game. It's a shame, since they all had done such an awesome job developing and creating the game, imo. And yes, it *IS* a sweet deal!
I completely agree.
Hopefully it will, but many people get kind of antsy supporting a company that is going along well, and suddenly, without warning (at least to the customers), they seemed to have a quick knee-jerk reaction resulting in all the firings, as evidenced by a lot of people posting their apprehension in these forums. Even StarBucks announced in advance that they were closing over 600 stores throughout the USA--yeah, it sucks that thousands of people are losing their jobs, but at least THEY get a little warning that the axeman cometh...

In addition:

Actually, it was on a monday morning at around 8am EST...
Currently, as I write this, it's just after 6pm EST on a Sunday evening, in the USA. My time zone is GMT-5, so it's about 11pm'ish in Euripe. Server populations are: 1:238, 2:112, 4:115, 7:121, 8(EU):51, PVP:63. That's a total of 700 people online right now: 1 server with over 200, 3 with just over 100 each, and 2 with nearly half that.
Really? I always thought the number of players you see on each server is how many people are on that server at any given time. Seems accurate to me, since when I access the 'who' function in my social tab, I can count the same amount of people...So--forgive my ignorance in this matter--could you please explain to me how the number of players listed on the server population/selection screen is 'extremely unreliable'?
Really?. I'd venture to say it's an EXACT representation of the number of players online at the moment you access that screen. Again, please forgive my ignorance on such matters, but please explain to me how it is "not in any way an accurate representation". Enlighten me...please.
Of course not, since paying members DO play on other servers besides the members server (server 2). which, if you'd have read my post, you could clearly see that I stated:
We can ascertain, logically that server 2 ONLY has paying customers, and can only speculate as to:

• The amount of paying customers who play on other servers
• The amount of players who simply are offline at any given time
• The amount of players who have multiple (free) accounts used as bank storage
• The amount of players who play on multiple accounts
• The amount of players (both free and paying) who simply have stopped playing.

Of course it's impossible to ascertain an accurate amount of paying customers without having access to NCSoft's/Dungeon Runners data, but we can use the obvious data (i.e. 112 players on the members server at the time this post was written (before editing) as a minimal baseline, since we know that each person on the members server has either purchased the retail box, or is paying $5(USD) a month. Anything beyond that is speculation, however, with all that said, I am still saddened that so many people got cut from the Dungeon Runners team, and I too am hopeful that the game's sales and the company's profits would be such as to sustain the game's development and growth indefinately.

It is an accurate representation of the number of players online at that very moment, not of the total number of DR players as a whole. I assumed you were smart enough to realize that from my post, but if you prefer, I will make an effort to spell things out with short and simple words from now on.

You obviously very much want to be seen as as intelligent man who knows what he is talking about. To that end, I'd suggest staying away from downward spirals of "please enlighten me, oh you who know so much more than I do"-lecturing of anyone, whenever someone has the temerity to ask you to back up your claims of being well-informed and intelligent. If you really were, that should be easy for you to do, and there would be no need for you to make such a big deal out of it either.



Edited by Khazandra (08/24/08 07:12 PM) — reason: removed some of the acid

The numbers on each server, however low by your standards, is still higher than when I began the game almost a year ago. The player base is growing and I would suspect it would continue to do so. Especially once the retail box hits Wal-Mart and the like. Xmas is just around the corner as well.

Meanwhile, as others have said this is a casual game. If you are that "gung-ho" about determining how many players the game has you need a better-organized and more thorough test. You could very well spend an entire day logging to the server selection screen every five minutes. Document each result and average. As maniacal as that sounds, it would still not give an accurate amount of players, there are too many factors (single players running two instances for example) to gauge. The DR team would know the numbers, and more accurately than any of us could test for. However, I remain firm in my assertion that the player base has grown, not dwindled.

We can all speculate all day long as to why so much of the team was let go, but it is only guessing. It matters little how much business experience one has, how many ventures one has been in or who's cousin's brother's uncle's mouse knows what. The only ones who know the real answer is the NCSoft corporate leads.

I think what i'm trying to get at, which I may not be explaining totally clear, is that none of us have any rough clue how BIG the playerbase is. I tried to explain that the majority of DR players only play for a short time (15 minutes to an hour) and then log off. With this in mind, counting up the number of players on at the same time isn't accurate for judging the size of the playerbase at all.

For example:
Say 1000 people are on at one time, A. Given the assumption that 60-80% of these people will only play for no more than an hour, that means an hour from A, there will be 200-400 people on that were still on from an hour ago. Given that DR has a pretty stable flow of players all day (people coming in and out of the servers, always keeping current player counts around 500-800,and in our example, 1000) that means 800-600 NEW players came in to play, to keep the current count at 1000; So now we have 800-600 new players, and 200-400 players from an hour ago. Staying for 2 hours or more is pretty rare for 200-400 players at a time, so for fun, let's assume that 80% of THESE players leave as well, along with 60-80% of the other 800-600 players. I'm not going to do the math, but let's say 200-300 are left. So that means ANOTHER 700-800 players will come on to play, 2 hours from A. So my point is, you may see 1000 players tops playing at once, but in that 2 hour period, we saw almost 3000 different players play the game.

To make my point clearer, let's pretend that DR was a game that people played for hours on end, like WoW, or Runescape. That portion of the original 1000 players leaving after an hour would be MUCH smaller, around 20-40 percent, which means that less will leave, and more will come on to play, resulting in a much higher current-player-count. So instead of 1000 at a single time, after 2 hours you'd probably see 2000-3000 players on at a single time. This would greatly change your judgement about the "size of the playerbase", but it would be flawed, since in both examples , we have the same number of different people playing. So this is why you can't simply count how many are on at a given time and determine that the playerbase is small.

You mean it *ISN'T*????

Thanks. Us Klingons sometimes have a problem with reading intent into what was actually written. Ka'Pla!

During the summer, right after the box came out, I'd log in and see 1000+ during primetime hours. When the box hits walmart, we should see another surge.

For whatever it's worth, which isn't much, there are at least 27,824 game accounts. We don't know how many of those are member, mules or abandoned, so it's of limited use. But anyway...

I say, before we all get too aggravated with each other any more about what basically boils down to our love of the game and worrying about it ending or how many people are playing at any given time (as it almost seems silly to be going back and forth about it when you really look at it) and simply move on from here.

We all know these facts:
1. There's not a really clear way for us, the members, to know how many people "officially" play total or at any given time; never mind that many of us have more than one account. As as soon as we look it all up, two minutes later people could sign on or off changing the numbers all over again (even if by a small margin) or someone could have 2 of their own accounts signed on at the same time.
2. The game will be going to bigger retail chains, such as WalMart, and that opens up the potential for a larger player base.
3. We are not privy to all the internal workings of this game or NCSoft. We really don't know all of the whys of the situation, nor how long they were in the works. We also don't know when the recently laid off employees of DR were given notice, beyond two weeks prior to their last days. I'm sure that while they love this game, like we do, they were concentrating more on their futures than letting us know first. I'm sure, the rumor thread jump started our notification of the changes and of course because of that they seemed rather abrupt.
4. Our little casual game is still going.
5. That Klingon picture was rather funny and made me laugh.