I saw a post over on Warcry about a new “Vampire MMO”, apparently called Darkeden. Feeling especially bored, I tried to follow the link to the game’s page so I could sign up, but the site is down — looks like they got too much traffic. Oof. That’s devastating. They likely missed their opportunity to get a large number of people involved in their beta.

But thinking about it, I realized that I don’t try a lot of downloadable MMO’s (or open betas) because the investment is too high. I have to go sign up for some stupid company account. I have to download a large file. Install it. Run it. Probably do some email verification thing, too. Too many steps! As my available gaming time has become smaller, my willingness to jump through hoops has shrunk tremendously.

As a designer, I’ve seen first-hand that most game companies don’t pay enough attention to how their new-player sign-up/download process works. They’re busy making the game. The website is an afterthought. This is a deadly mistake.

This is one reason why I think the long-term future of MMO’s is in web-based games that can be started within 30 seconds — there’s less crap to get in the way. But if you want a 3D game, web-based designs aren’t really viable yet. So what can you do? To make the best of players’ tiny attention spans, follow these rules:

• Your landing page should show me a screenshot, tell me three REALLY DAMNED COOL things about the game, and have a huge TRY IT NOW button. Make sure the page loads fast, too. The goal is to get me to click TRY IT NOW before 10 seconds elapse and I get bored.
• Once I try it, get the downloaded started immediately. Don’t screw around, get it started fast. Once the download starts, AND ONLY ONCE IT’S GOING, I will be willing to spend a tiny amount of time signing up for your service.
• The sign up page should have not more than Name, Password, and Email Address. If you ask for more info up front I’ll probably wander off. You don’t need more info in order to let me try the game for a bit.
• If you need to provide email verification, make it trivial.
• You can ask me for my credit card info when I’ve decided to make a sale — not before that!
• Don’t make me sign up for forums and company accounts and newsletters and all that other crap. All that stuff makes you lose potential customers.

There’s a common excuse for requiring the credit card up front: it helps keep abusive people out of the system. If a player acts inappropriately, you can ban their credit card, thus keeping them from signing up for any more accounts. Very clean!  And it worked great ten years ago, but times change. Nowadays, you’ll just have to design your game more carefully, so that your game doesn’t give free-trial customers any ways to abuse others.

Remember, you need to get people playing your game before they get bored or distracted. Streamline the entire experience with this in mind. Don’t assign this task to interns, either. This is a job for savvy web designers. In fact, the sign-up experience should be at the top of the list to be polished. It needs to be 100% perfect in order to get as many people trying out your game as possible.

World of Warcraft just launched their winter holiday content, aka the Feast of Winter Veil, and that got me thinking about how enjoyable seasonal content can be to develop. But as usual, there are also some caveats. So here, in no particular order, I present my tips for seasonal content development. Note that these are not limited to the winter holiday events — they can apply to summer festivals or independence celebrations just as easily.

1. Develop a consistent philosophy of seasonal events. Most modern MMO games treat seasonal events as generally light-hearted activities accessible to players of all types and levels and with a strong roleplaying component.
2. Make a yearly schedule of events. Work out which seasonal events you will be celebrating — before launch if you can. This way you can schedule the necessary resources from the beginning and space out your events so they don’t all clump up in one part of the year.
   • For example, EQ2’s largest seasonal event is Frostfell, their winter celebration. Unfortunately since that game has settled into a once-a-year expansion launched in mid-November, and much of the team is traveling and on vacation starting in mid-December, Frostfell has become a real scheduling problem.
3. Plan to reuse much of your hard work each year. Develop a basic event that meets your goals (for example, accessible content for all levels, if that’s your goal) and then vary this slightly every year. New players will find the entire thing interesting and new, while players who have been with you awhile with appreciate both the lasting traditions of the event and the new tweaks that keep it fresh for them.
   • The variations each year can be relatively simple. Have a few small side quests and rotate them, one or two in and one or two out each year. Or do the same with souvenir items: this year you can get a red Santa hat or a green Santa hat, but next year it’s red or gold and the year after that red or silver. Remember that rotating items out is just as important as adding new ones, but it’s also fine to bring an item back after a few years.
   • Many teams give an event to a favored designer and turn them loose to “be creative”, but be very careful about that. Seasonal events are fun to design, which means that unless your designer is very disciplined, you’ll soon have sunk more time and effort into it than you have planned. And if the event becomes ‘Bob’s hallmark’ then next year some other designer will want to top it to prove their worth — and there goes your careful plan of efficient reuse.
4. Don’t make the event too short — you need to give the majority of your players the chance to participate. Generally I’ve found that a full week is the shortest appropriate length for a seasonal event. You can easily extend this to 10 days (from Friday morning to the following Monday morning) if you want to encompass two weekends.
   • And there are exceptions: April Fool’s Day, for example, is generally best handled as a single day of festivities.
5. Don’t make the event too long. Jolly music and silly buffs begin to wear rather quickly, and a shorter event will help keep the enthusiasm for the holiday high.
   • There are exceptions here also, of course — because so many players will be traveling during the winter holidays, extending that one to cover three to four weeks may be the best approach. (On the other hand, this means that you need to be even more careful about content that gets wearisome — especially those Christmas jingles!)

Even with such a seemingly simple topic as seasonal fluff content, there are a lot of factors to think about. But a modicum of planning up front can make the holiday just fly past smoothly, with no muss and minimal fuss.

I find it very interesting that WoW’s death penalty is much harsher than the death penalty in EQ2, which goes against our preconceived notions of these two games. Let’s look at the facts:

World of Warcraft Death Penalty:

• Death causes damage to your equipment.
• You are expected to run a long way to your corpse and then reappear in a dangerous area, taking time and risking a second death.
• Your other option is to resurrect at a graveyard, whereupon your equipment suffers serious damage (likely requiring you to trek back to a repair NPC immediately), and you are unable to fight for ten minutes.

Everquest 2 Death Penalty:

• Death causes damage to your equipment.
• You accrue a very small penalty to future earned XP.
• You respawn at a safe spot.

WoW’s “travel back to your corpse or sit for ten minutes” mechanism, combined with the danger of dying again when you reach your corpse, makes it more of a nuisance than EQ2’s penalty. But here’s the real kicker, the reason that puts WoW’s penalty high above EQ2’s: WoW’s graveyard spots are not particularly safe. I remember my first trip to Scarlet Monastery: I got very lost and ended up in extremely dangerous territory, and died. And then I died again and again. Finally I respawned at the graveyard, only to discover to my horror that horrible monsters found me in the graveyard, too! I was instantly killed AGAIN. In WoW, when you’re in an area that’s much too high-level for you, monsters will come for you from miles around, and they are nearly impossible to escape.

In fact, I would have been stuck at that graveyard forever, except for a glitch in WoW that they’ve never bothered to fix: if you log out and log back in, your ghost can then travel to a different graveyard spot and respawn there instead. But you have to log out and log back in first, and you have to know about this trick. This is well-known among a certain part of WoW’s audience, but is certainly not known to everybody playing WoW. And when a game’s death penalty can result in effective perma-death of your character (unless you know how to exploit a bug), it’s hard to call your death penalty “casual”.

Compare it to EQ2, where death is a mild nuisance and then you get on with your evening. It’s much more casual friendly. You don’t have to run out into the same horribly dangerous spot and risk your life a second time. On the other hand, I’ve heard people complain that death in EQ2 is so tame that many people become careless, which gets groups killed.

Just to be clear: I’m not complaining about this. I don’t mind that WoW is more aggressive in punishing death than EQ2 is. (Neither of them are anywhere near as tough as, say, EQ1’s death penalty, which was so punitive that it regularly made people quit the game forever.) But it does go against our stereotyped assumption that EQ2 is more “hardcore” than WoW.

The Purpose of Death Penalties

But what should the death penalty be? What’s the point of a death penalty?

Some games don’t have much of any death penalty at all, such as Dungeon Runners. These games are aimed at players who are looking for a game that engages and entertains them, but doesn’t particularly challenge them.

Most MMO’s, however, have relatively punitive death penalties because they are designed for players that want to be challenged, not just engaged. The theory goes that if a game doesn’t punish you for playing poorly, then your rewards for playing well will be hollow and without much significance. That’s true to an extent … but of course, that’s only true if “playing well” is your motivation for playing the game.

But the death penalty has other side-effects, too. If the penalty is lenient, players find themselves experimenting with more tactics, exploring the landscape more, and poking into nooks and crannies of the game. If the penalty is harsh, they tend to stick with the strategies they know. Good survival strategies become more valuable, and in many games, players find that grouping together makes for a better survival strategy. So we often find that strong death penalties correlate with more grouping.

Correlation of death penalty to other aspects of MMO gameplay.

The exact death penalty should be based on the target audience you want to reach. This is a gross simplification, of course, but it helps point out some of the ramifications of a particular death penalty. There are many other correlations, too, such as Time Expenditure, Opportunities to Zerg, and Rewarding In-Game Knowledge. None of these are hard and fast rules, and will vary depending on the exact details of the death penalty, but I think they hold up pretty well for a large number of penalties and games.

I think both WoW and EQ2 are towards the “lenient” end of the spectrum. But is WoW’s death penalty too harsh or too mild? Well, the current death penalty is obviously not a deal-breaker for 9 million people — then again, we don’t know how many more people they would have if it was harsher or more lenient! If I were making a new game, I’d make it more lenient. EQ2’s more-lenient death penalty was more enjoyable to me than WoW’s, and I’m not exactly casual, so I think going lenient is the safer bet for modern MMO audiences.

I love Star Trek. I worked as the systems designer on Star Trek Online during its early preproduction period, and I was (and am) excited about the design we had come up with for the game. But that said, it seems that Perpetual is dying more all the time, and it looks like Perpetual will succumb to its mortal wounds before STO gets out the door.

That’d be a shame, but it wouldn’t be the first such tragedy to befall people who attempted a Star Trek MMO. There were two MMO attempts before this one, both by other companies which eventually collapsed.

At first glance, Star Trek seems like a perfect setting for an MMO. It ranks up with Star Wars, D&D, and Lord of the Rings as one of the top four nerd IPs that cross over into mainstream acceptance. But appearances can be deceiving. It’s actually a huge landmine of problems.

The Double Game

In order to do Star Trek right, you need to make two games in one. You need to make a space game and a ground game. This means Star Trek is a “double game.” What’s Star Trek without space battles? What’s Star Trek without away teams exploring strange new worlds? You need both. This is almost impossible to pull off, especially by a team that doesn’t have a stable engine to work from. Even SOE couldn’t pull this off for Star Wars Galaxies — they launched with only a ground game and added the space game later (to which most people cried “too little, too late”).

Space Is Hard To Do (Well)

Space MMO’s are actually relatively easy to code, but that doesn’t automatically make them fun. Space is inherently boring. This is a psychological problem: on Earth we have waterfalls, spooky forests, pits of magma, rivers, and on and on. We have hundreds of instantly-recognizable terrain features to use on the ground, and each of them comes with preconceived notions of how we should feel. (Dark forest = spooky, rickety bridge = tension, idyllic plain with butterflies = relaxing, etc.) We have a huge vocabulary of concepts that can act as shortcuts in world design.

However, in space, it’s hard to come up with more than a dozen easy-to-name features, and they don’t carry much emotional impact anyway. So even if you make up lots of space phenomena, players don’t feel differently about them. In the end, space tends to feel homogeneous. In order to overcome that, you have to work very very hard.

For Star Trek, this is compounded by many additional factors that make it even harder! For instance, there are insane size disparities. Players want to pilot capital ships like the Enterprise-D. But these ships are so ridiculously massive that they dwarf smaller ships that should also be pilotable, like Deep Space 9’s “Defiant”. Allowing both sizes of player ship would be like having playable races of tiny hobbits and 100-foot-tall giants in the same game. It’s not easy to make content that makes sense for both large and small, so you have to compromise. Everybody gets a big ship, or everybody gets a small ship. Or you split your content between big-ship content and small-ship content. Or you cheat on the sizes and all the purists complain.

Another big problem is that 3D space combat is actually very hard to comprehend by many people. It’s one of those “you get it or you don’t” things. So a space MMO needs to work out a compelling combat solution that’s fun for people even if they have a hard time telling north from south, let alone up from down.

Any of these problems can be solved, but it’s the compounding of problems that makes it tough. And we haven’t even talked about the fan expectations yet.

Fan Expectations Are Impossible To Meet

The hardcore fans want an MMO that is far different from a typical MMO, and I don’t just mean the difference between a space game and a fantasy game. Let’s just name a few places where the hardcore fan base’s expectations cause tension in the design:

• There’s tension about economy. Captain Picard famously said in “First Contact” that there is no money in the Federation and human beings no longer concern themselves with the acquisition of wealth. Purists want a game that meets this requirement, but your average WoW player would be pretty disappointed by a game without loot, money, trading, and auction houses.
• There’s tension about the setting. Star Trek is a Utopian future. It is in fact pretty much the only popular Utopian future — most sci fi worlds are pretty grim. MMO’s need conflict to drive them, but when you add permanent conflict to the Star Trek world, you damage that “Utopian” feel. In Star Trek, problems generally get solved within an hour and the world returns to a happy place once again. This puts extra requirements on MMO content creators.
• There’s tension about what you’re supposed to be doing in the game. A hardcore fan might want to be in a crew with 20 other people working together aboard the USS Enterprise, taking shifts in real-time, climbing through Jeffries Tubes repairing minor problems, and doing survey missions. A more casual fan just wants to be a Captain Kirk figure with their own ship, gallivanting across the sky killing bad guys and hitting on green chicks.

Okay, so you can find workable compromises for all of these with enough effort. But it gets worse when you realize that even the hardcore fans all have different takes on Star Trek. See, most fans like one series but not others — for instance, they may love Deep Space Nine but hate Voyager. However, the universe works pretty differently in each show, and you can only understand the big picture of Star Trek by taking every show into account. But they don’t want you to do that. (e.g., “Don’t use Voyager episodes as canon, that show ruined Star Trek!”) In other words, it’s basically impossible to make all Star Trek fans happy, or even a majority of them.

And should you even try? The active Star Trek fanbase has been plummeting for years, ever since Voyager ended. (”Enterprise” did not provide a noticeable boost in fans.) The next movie(s) may strengthen it, but that’s just a “maybe” for now. Right now, even if you could make all Star Trek fans happy somehow, you wouldn’t have a successful MMO. An MMO that costs 50 million to make simply must reach a larger audience. This means doing things like adding player economies and letting everybody be a ship captain — moves that piss off the hardcore Star Trek fans.

Star Trek MMO is a Kobayashi Maru

Making a fun and successful Star Trek MMO is incredibly hard. It will take brilliance, experience, patience, and lots of money to pull it off. Even if Perpetual had the game-shipping experience and monetary backing of a company like Blizzard or Turbine or SOE, the Star Trek IP would still be a tough nut to crack.

Although Perpetual has made some clever choices and has brilliant art, I suspect that their fiscal situation dooms them. This makes me very sad, for obvious reasons.

If Perpetual doesn’t make it to the finish line, that’ll make three failed attempts. Will we ever see a Star Trek MMO? I suspect it can only happen when there are cheap commercial MMO engines, so that making a “double game” isn’t such an insanely difficult undertaking, and so that the game can be monetarily successful even if it doesn’t go after the broadest-possible market. Some day…

EDIT: to clear up some misconceptions I’ve been seeing, I no longer work for Perpetual, although I wish them the best of luck. I wasn’t fired from Perpetual; I left when my wife was offered the position of Producer for EQ2. It was a difficult choice and not one I made lightly — I still have friends at Perpetual and I hope they make a great game. I just have a hard time being optimistic these days. :)

Cameron Sorden on Random Battle asked a very good question recently in his post How Raiding Hurts WoW More Than It Helps:

So why does Blizzard make a community with a majority of non-raiding players raid, given all the problems it causes? Why do they spend so much time and effort on designing, developing, and tuning zones that only 1-6% of their subscribers ever use?

But Blizzard has answered this question themselves. I’ll paraphrase from the AGC talk I attended a couple of years back: Their audience is a donut with the hardcore in the center and the larger, fluffier casual crowd in a ring around that. The hardcore is especially important because they are the ones who convince other players to try the game out. These people are, in the language of The Tipping Point, mavens and connectors. They know the game inside and out and they sit at the hubs of the largest guilds, eager to recruit others into their world.

So to answer Cameron’s question, Blizzard builds content for a tiny fraction of their subscribers because those particular subscribers are directly responsible for recruiting and maintaining the other 94-99% of subscribers. So it’s not a waste — it’s actually quite economical!

Except, of course, that the theory is wrong.

Hardcore players are not universally recruiters. They don’t have a monopoly on knowledge or social networking. Mavens and connectors exist within the hardcore population, sure, but they exist outside this population as well, and in greater numbers. Nor are casual players always the passive recipients of this game evangleism. Players recruit other players who value the same kinds of gameplay — hardcore raiders recruit other hardcore raiders; PvPers recruit PvPers (aka victims); roleplayers recruit roleplayers.

In the past — say, before WoW — it may have been true that the raiders had the most organized social connections and spent the most time talking about their obsessive hobby, and that their efforts caused a ripple effect through the interested-but-slightly-less-hardcore that was the rest of the smallish gaming world. But it’s simply not the case any more. We’re seeing the same shift in focus in the gaming press, and for the same reasons: Look at the growth of the narrow niche fan site, or the widespread growth of personal gaming blogs as compared to the slow but steady demise of print magazines and gaming megasites.

So yes, I believe in Blizzard’s donut model — I just think they’ve mis-labeled the rings. And given that, I also am puzzled as to why they keep pouring so much time and money into creating content that only the tiniest fraction of players will ever see — or care to see. I suspect it’s because life on a live team is often too fast-paced to let you step back and really think about what you are doing.

(And for the record, I swear we’re not picking on Cameron on purpose. It’s just that he keeps writing interesting posts! And commenting on this post of his, inspired as it was by one of Eric’s posts, gets points for being pleasingly circular as well.)

Cameron Sorden recently opined that the word “epic” is overused. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt “epic” in an MMORPG, so he feels it’s false advertising. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really give any good suggestions on when to use it, and I don’t have a lot, either.

For me, “epic” means “overcoming impossible odds”, and that is in direct conflict with the usual pace of MMO’s: the plodding advancement of your character; the calculating choice of skills and equipment; the avoidance of any battle you are likely to lose. Not that I dislike those things — I like them a lot. But they aren’t epic.

To me, “epic” means I got an adrenaline rush! It means I didn’t think I was going to win, but I somehow did — I overcame impossible odds and succeeded. I can remember the last time this happened; it happens a lot when I try to tackle boss monsters that are way too dangerous for me, but I somehow make it work through judicious use of potions and buffs and cleverness. It’s more epic if I do it on the first try, but it’s still epic if it takes a few attempts.

Good luck artificially manufacturing that in your MMO, though. It’s found gameplay, not something that can be planned for very well.

That said, I don’t mind when developers use “epic” to describe their game. It’s just another word for “really really fun”, because it’s hard to get really accurate about your goals in a quick interview or magazine article.

I do mind when designers try to make “epic” quests that are little more than really long fetch-and-stab quests. These designers are working under the misguided notion that just making me work a long time will make the quest feel epic. This is a fallacy.

There’s certainly a place for long quests — but they had better be damned interesting all the way through!

Zubon from Kill Ten Rats recently posted about why he doesn’t use the test server. His points, valid or not, are pretty common-place: I’ve heard similar complaints from other players over a broad swath of games.

And that’s unfortunate, because a test server can be a wonderful tool for developers to check their assumptions and straighten their collars before their work goes before the entire playerbase. On the other hand, a lot of current games are not making terribly effective use of their test servers, so I completely understand where Zubon is coming from.

So, what are the most important factors behind a successful test server?

1. Know your goals.

   Are you setting this thing up primarily to promote new content or to find bugs? What kinds of bugs? The kind that require lots and lots of players just playing normally (i.e. a stress test)? Or the kind that require intelligent investigation by the players (for example, finding exploits)? Are you looking for feedback? On specific items or on general gameplay systems? Only on the new stuff, or on everything in the game? And if you answered “All of the above”, you need to prioritize!

   In addition, you need to communicate your goals, not only internally — QA works best when they know why you just made their lives hell by adding a test server — but also to the players who might use the test server. Set their expectations accurately and they’ll give you a lot less grief and a lot more help.

2. Work out your processes and priorities.

   How do players report bugs? (And how do you respond when they report bugs in other ways, which they will?) Who is responsible for vetting the reports? How do the bugs from the test server line up with new development? In other words, will the development team drop everything until this update has made it out the door? Or will they continue blithely on their way developing new content while the bugs from the test server rot in a queue somewhere? Or do you hope to handle both new development and the test server at the same time — and if so, how?

   Once you have the bugs fixed, what then? How often do you push a new build through QA? What determines when you push a new build to the test server itself? A fast turn-around makes players feel good about their efforts and makes it easier for them to continue testing. But push too fast and you’ll lose control, introducing more additional new bugs than you fix. Again, setting expectations is a big help here. If you can’t update but once a week, for instance, then let players know — and perhaps post a list of issues that will be fixed in the next build so they can still see that you’re paying attention.

3. Write decent change notes.

   I know this one is hard — believe me, I know how hard it is! — but it’s essential. I’m speaking to the producers here: If you seriously don’t know what’s in the patch that you are foisting on your players, you fail! Try again. (And if you have so many changes going in with each patch that it’s not feasible for you to keep up, you need to slow down your development cycle — your players can’t keep up either.)

   If you do know what’s in the update, you need to tell your testers. You don’t neccesarily have to describe every typo you fixed (especially if you are using the test server primarily for stress testing), but you still need to give them a decent idea of the broad areas that may have changed. Indeed, full disclosure of changes is your best route to avoiding potentially embarrassing unintended consequences.

   Now for my mini-rant: Surprising your players is not an acceptable excuse for leaving things out of the notes. Wanting to give them the joy of exploration by hiding new content is not an acceptable excuse. (If they read the patch notes, their going to read the spoilers that go up 9.5 seconds after the patch is live.) Finding and fixing bugs trumps lore.

Test servers are a useful tool, but they aren’t nearly as simple as just standing up a server and letting players poke around. You either put some thought into what you are doing (and how!) or you’re just wasting precious time and money.

Most MMO developers are worried about seeming “money-grubbing.” Whenever they introduce a new pay feature, they are stung by people who say the company is nickel-and-diming them. But in general, this is just another case of MMO developers paying too much attention to a tiny percentage of their audience. The general audience of WoW or EQ2, for instance, would pay good money for certain luxury services. But you need to know how to present these services in order to make them happiest, and in many cases this can be surprising: more expensive is better.

Let’s take in-game weddings, for example. One company I was close to planned to add in-game weddings for a small fee, say $20. Doing a simple $20 version isn’t where the real payoff is, though. Perhaps that makes it nice and accessible to roleplayers who want to have a half-dozen “marriages” in their character’s career, but it isn’t particularly appealing to people who are actually getting married. Diamonds aren’t the traditional wedding ring because they’re prettier than other rings. It’s because they’re also really expensive, and they make good tokens of tribute. At times of celebration or gathering, many people want to spend top dollar in order to have top-dollar accommodations. The $20 marriage package comes off as cheap.

Not that you shouldn’t have a $20 wedding package if you feel strongly about it. But have better versions, too. If the $20 version gets you a room, cake, and costumes, then the $50 version should get all that plus an NPC band, catering NPCs, a fountain that buffs everyone in the room for a week, etc. But that’s small potatoes. Go further. Let people have really special events. The $500 version has a customer service rep on-hand for two hours, providing services such as crowd control (keeping rowdy players off the stage), creating custom effects as desired (perhaps the bride and groom want to ceremonially kill a monster together?), and to perform any other wedding roles desired, such as the emcee, DJ, whatever else you can make work in your game. Make it special. Put some time into it.

Then go further. The $2500 version has all of that, plus it’s attended by two game developers who will make short remarks at the in-game reception. This version also includes a real-life framed photo from the wedding, signed by the entire game team. Maybe a unique in-game trinket, too. Add whatever else you can think of to make it feel worthwhile and special.

It’s not really about making money. Even at $2500, the development investment combined with the disruption to your dev team means that your ROI (return on investment) is probably pretty low compared to other things you could do. But man, will it make people feel special! In a game with 100,000 players, I’d expect you’d get 10 or so $2500 weddings a year. Those will be events that participants talk about for many years to come. Plus, you have a good chance of turning those people into lifers — dedicated fans that will stick with the game through thick and thin, and who keep other people playing, too. You should always work hard to create lifers. And the best way to create lifers is to give people personal attention.

Anyway, I got a bit distracted. But the point is this: make your luxury services luxurious! Services in this vein can include weddings, bar mitzvahs, company meetings, funeral services, memorials, sweet 16 parties, and so on. Don’t skimp, and don’t worry about people saying you’re nickel-and-diming them to death. Those people weren’t going to buy your luxury services anyway.

 PS - a tip: start by designing and implementing the most elaborate version first, then create the stripped-down versions second. Don’t try it the other way, it’ll be much harder and a lot more frustrating for everyone involved.

Damion Schubert, an old-timer in the MMO development world, posted an excellent discussion of some common ways that designers misuse Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of MUD players over at his blog Zen of Design.

Now I’ve expressed my opinion of the Bartle types before: useful as a very quick shorthand, but of limited value for really understanding your audience in depth. So as you might imagine I was pleased to see Damion reinforcing some of the points I’ve made myself — especially since more people listen to him than to me!

The most important point he raised (aside from the catchall #9: “Don’t assume that Bartle’s is the answer.”) is to my way of thinking a combination of #1 (”Don’t assume that players are only one of the above.”) and #2 (”Don’t assume player types are fixed.”). Unfortunately, I don’t think Damion goes quite far enough in his caution. In my experience, players don’t just change over time — they can shift dramatically from moment to moment. And yet, at any given moment a player may well be interested in only one of the major areas. It’s for this reason that I find it easier to think in terms of motivations rather than player types.

On the other hand, I think that I am going to have to steal #6 (”Don’t be too literalist with the title names.”) for my future rants. It’s a great point. The example that Damion gives — that explorers are not just people who want to sight see — is one I run into all the time myself. I like to sight see and explore the complexities of game systems, but my moods and motivations when I do each of those activities are very, very different. Sightseeing is for relaxation; system exploration satisfies my urge to solve puzzles and show off in front of other gamers. Similarly, killers aren’t necessarily all about killing — there are other types of competition — and socializers are often the people running the guilds.

At any rate, it’s a good read when you have a chance!

Not that kind of grouper!

It was a classic example of learning the wrong lesson. EverQuest was huge — HUGE! While Asheron’s Call was small. EQ was all about forced grouping, while AC was all about soloing. It is easy, therefore, to see what our conclusion was. When it came time to make AC2, obviously it needed to be a grouping game!

Even as I speak, developers are making retarded mistakes just like this. They look at what WoW did and make leaps of logic. Correlation is not causation, but we developers fall for this rookie mistake over and over.

World of Warcraft has shown us that we were wrong about grouping: MMO players do not need to be pressured into grouping in order for an MMO to be successful. But on the other hand, when you reach WoW’s level cap, you are almost forced to be a grouper (and a raider, to boot) if you want to do fun things. Now, this approach doesn’t seem to be particularly successful if we look at how many players leave the game when they hit the level cap. The players don’t want to switch from soloing to grouping, so they go away.

So what’s a useful lesson to learn here, if you’re trying to make a new game? Is it “our game should start out as a soloing game and then graduate to a grouping game?” Personally, I think WoW succeeded in spite of that, not because of it. The current wisdom is that you can’t possibly provide enough solo content to keep everyone happy, so you shouldn’t try … but keeping everyone happy isn’t the point. The point is keeping the most people possible happy. Would WoW retain more people if they added new solo content instead of new raid content? We can only guess at that.

Asheron’s Call puts out monthly solo content and has always had extremely high player retention. Would Asheron’s Call have even better retention if it had high level raiding instead? With the tiny number of data points we have, any conclusion like this is just a guess. Nevertheless, we’ve already created “conventional wisdom” about the topic!

Here’s a better lesson to learn from WoW: they did all kinds of things that went completely against the conventional wisdom of the time, and yet they succeeded. You know, stuff like having a clean launch (their post-launch stability was terrible for the first six months), offering fast transportation (WoW has more travel time than EQ2 by almost an order of magnitude), or forcing people to group. Does that mean your game needs to do these things exactly like WoW? That would be a pretty naive interpretation of the known facts, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t a better conclusion be “the conventional wisdom we have right now might actually be wrong, or overblown, or irrelevant?”