I’ve been running ads on and off for my game, as well as doing events/promotional stuff and myself and a few members of our community notice new people will join the game, and then leave after a few seconds.
I’m not really sure why this is and if I could get some feedback and insight that would be helpful.
Also, any tips for increasing load times would be great, this is my biggest complaint so far, but I’m not really sure how to fix that. Before the players would be teleported in and they would be driving on invisible parts cause the map was loading, so I added a loading ‘UI’ to force players to wait but the loadtimes are so long…
I would probably introduce an active onboarding tutorial, so that players aren’t forced into an unfamiliar menu to play a game. I think this could be done by letting new players play a quick match with AI bots once they immediately join in so they enter the action first. There should be a quick but brief tutorial on how to drive the car, but it should not force them to follow. Once they finish up the match, it should grant them a tutorial on how to navigate the menu and allow an option to skip it.
I don’t know how to resolve the long loading times for normal matches, but for the initial match for new players, you could trim off unneeded assets so it loads much faster, maybe like a separate map just for the first match for new players.
For your load time you could try making it prioritize loading everything near the player first. You could also try making it so the player loads into for example a garage where they can edit their car to give the main world a little more time to load.
Adding some sort of tutorial or reward that the player can receive early can help people stay in the game a little longer. The load times could also be causing people to leave fast.
@cegberry@mirrorkitty1 Thank you for the feedback. I added a optional tutorial for new players.
I forced it for the tutorial it will load right away so new players don’t have to wait, but the problem I had before was the starting area would load and while driving the game would ‘freeze’ to load in new areas. For the tutorial I think this will be okay since its just to get a feel of the game. I have another thread in here where people were suggesting a make a load UI for this reason, it just sucks I can’t really get around it without that ‘freezing’ happening
I think I may do a tutorial for the menu, but I feel its really straight forward so idk…
You could do what GTA does. I haven’t played your game due to the 16+ requirements however, assuming theres ai traffic you can code it to tell if there is an issue with the loading causing an npc to crash to slow you down. Another way is to make the handling on the car very slippery or ungrounded in hopes the player crashes.
Overall try to be creative with the way you solve it there are tons of ways to do it like that or other ways like optimizing some areas of the map closer to the spawn. Or once again the garage idea or spawning in some sort of area that will take you a second to get out.
I’ve ran some more ads and im still seeing players join and then leave. I see most are going to the tutorial but it looks like they are leaving mid tutorial. I could really use some feedback cause I keep getting dislikes w/ no feedback given…
From my experience a lot of them may be bots, look at their name and notice if some of them walk weird or run into walls endlessly. Ads seem to bring in a ton of these players