The Plan: A Broad Overview of What's Coming

As many of you already know, I’m back in the game and hanging around Camp Icarus again. It’s good to be back, for sure – and as I (somewhat unofficially) announced in my previous post, my time off has given me a lot of opportunities to start drawing up plans for the economy and the community.

Entropia Revival is more than just a social movement – it’s a movement to make Entropia everything we can be.

To me, this means the following things:

• ·         Help MindArk retain players through strong interaction with newcomers and by providing in-world guidance for players whenever possible.
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• ·         Work to ensure player morale (thus increasing player retention) by executing a series of planned “Economic Stimulus” Projects.
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• ·         Create a new sense of community through interaction with players in the form of on-world parties, a new radio station, etc.

As the third bullet is something that I set out to do from the start, I already have a pretty good plan about what I intend to do here laid out in this post. However, I want to take some time in this post to go over the first two points.

So let’s get on with it.

In reference to the first bullet:

I have been doing a lot of research over the past several days, talking to new players and Middle-age avatars (people playing less than one year). One thing I’ve noticed above all else is that there is not a strong understanding of how the economy works. It seems that new players really aren’t grasping the whole “real cash economy thing”. So, I set out to figure out why this is - and what I found was interesting, but that’s for another post. Suffice it to say that, right now, players are not being properly educated on how the economy works.

Why is this a problem, you ask? The Entropia Economy is like a casino; and, as most of us have experienced, when you play slots in a casino you usually lose.

Entropia is a money-making system like all other businesses are, and Entropia makes money by preventing you from withdrawing. That’s their goal – and I can imagine that MindArk has a plan as to how much money they want to have withdrawn each year. Entropia, like a casino, will always have a house advantage because, quite frankly, that’s how they make their money.

This matters to new players, because it’s drastically different from every other MMO on the planet, where making money is a simple step-by-step process. Step one: Figure out the system. Step Two: Do what that system requires. Step three: reap the benefits.

No, Entropia isn’t that simple – and quite frankly, new players are never told why. All they know is that it’s pretty damn hard to get themselves established and they have no idea why the odds are so overwhelmingly bad.

That being said, my first bullet aims to change that. To accomplish this, I will be putting into motion a series of stop-gaps for new players that will provide them with information – one of these stop gaps will simply be a few people stationed at Icarus regularly to intercept as many new players as possible and guide them towards some useful information. Back in the days of Port Atlantis (When Port Atlantis was the new arrival center) there were a lot of people who did this. We’re going to make that happen again.

My second method of doing this will be to gear many of my economic projects towards benefitting new players, reducing the failure rate and increasing the chances of player success and self-sustainability in-game. Hopefully, between these two things, we can make a difference.

As for the Second Bullet:

I have a lot of well-detailed, fully-fleshed-out plans in regards to our economy that I intend to execute with the help of a new group of businessmen I’ve put together out here in the real world. These plans are aimed at stimulating our economy while generating business. Among many projects, one of these will be working to increase the price of sweat.

For each of these projects, I intend to create an independent blog post, and then create a static page on the site outlining my planned series of events. All of these things will be coming soon – I’m writing a lot of these blog posts simultaneously and intend to release them in a rapid, but measured measured time frame. I will do my best to provide back links to all relevant posts on each one of my posts. I want to make sure that all the information on this page is as readily accessible as possible, so I will be regularly updating each post with links to information as I post it.

Overall, the ultimate goal of the Revival Project is for everyone to win, both economically and socially. Many vets remember the days when the economy was booming and the things that I plan to do now were all things that everyone expected would happen anyway. Although a lot of factors affected the economy and had a hand in its decline, I’ve been around long enough to see most of it happen. The good news is this: if tackled individually and in the right order, most of these factors are reversible.

So, here we stand, at the edge of a change. I hope to see you all make the effort to work towards building the bridge with me. Coming soon will be a step-by step outline of the grand plan, followed by individual blog posts on each part, mixed in with informational posts providing everyone with the data that I have mulled over to come to the conclusions that I have, so that it’s clear for everyone to see why exactly I have chosen to approach certain things the way that I have. Some people are likely going to wonder how we can pull of so much, and to be perfectly honest I’m not yet entirely convinced that we can. But, I’m willing to take the risk – Calypso holds some of the coolest people I know, and I’ll be damned if I don’t do everything I can to make a difference.

Stay strong, good luck, hunt dangerously.

Sincerely,

-Faucon