Making “Hardcore” Much Less “Core”
The observation’s been made before, but Moorgard explains it well: The ideal MMO customer isn’t one that practically lives in your game, it’s one that’s happy to keep paying the subscription fees while playing less.
Moorgard lists a few alternate strategies to the somewhat flawed suggestion made on the Fires of Heaven board, but I’d like to add one of my own. First, let’s acknowledge two complications in encouraging less play time in your game:
- Less Investment: it’s easier to leave when you don’t have a deep investment in the game. Investments include social and reputation-based cues as well as time in the game and achievements.
- Lack of Critical Mass: A guild/town with players that spend 20 hours online weekly will have a great deal more concurrent players than one that spends 5 hours online weekly. The less frequently your players are online, the bigger their friends/guilds lists must be to reach that comfortable critical mass of players to team with. Even then, the large list of offline players will create a feeling of abandonment that must be countered.( Now, lack of critical mass also means you could potentially host more players on one server. If you quarter play times, you should be able to have one server handle 4x the players, right? Unfortunately, that strategy makes you vulnerable to massive peak concurrency spikes. What happens the day a much-sought-after release goes live?)
A lack of investment will mean that the “next big thing†(or even the next “tiny shiny trinketâ€) will draw players away. That’s a VERY bad thing if Multiverse succeeds in creating even a few dozen new micro-worlds every year.
A lack of critical mass will make it tougher to establish real social bonds in the game, leading to the game feeling like a ghost town or causing players to seek their social fix elsewhere.
No, you don’t want them online less.
You want them online, but consuming less developer-made content.
This brings us back to what we really need:
Player-Provided Content
Now, that doesn’t have to mean giving every character a level creator (yet). I’d really prefer to see some magic there, too, but let’s start with enriching what we already have.
Right now, PvP’ers and the roleplaying community already create content for their respective groups. Both playstyles spend a considerable amount of time online NOT consuming developer-made content. PvP’ers are content for other PvP’ers, roleplayers are content for other roleplayers, and both groups consume developer-made content at a much slower pace as a result.
Yes, both of these groups are increasingly marginalized. Part of the problem stems from the hardcore in both these communities- both groups have griefers and by lumping them all together we insure that the griefers have the power to scare off the more “casual.” There are things devs can do to counter that.
Devs have also helped marginalize these groups by focusing on achievement-oriented, loot-oriented solutions for their own content. No solid PvP’er would willingly give a dangerous foe an opportunity, so PvP’ers are often ‘forced’ to grind through to the level cap (or zone PvP cap) and gain the uberloot before really going at it on a foe. Roleplayers find that their roleplay resources (rooms, decorations, artwork, noncombat pets, rent fees, “status” costs for the noble roleplayers) have such considerable costs that they’re compelled to go out and adventure just to maintain their roleplay standard of living. Instead of encouraging achievement-oriented folk to experiement with PvP or Roleplay, we’re coercing these two groups to go out PvE’ing.
There are ways to enrich and encourage all playstyles, though. Doing so gives you what you really need- a core player base that’s invested, playing enough to maintain critical mass, but not consuming developer-made content at an unsustainable rate.
I’ll save those ideas for another post…
January 9th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
While you say player content is the way to encourage, I say it doesn’t have to be player content as much as player influence. Players need to feel that their actions actually affect the game. If I plant more than X of a crop and I actually flood the market, the prices will drop. Even if the crop is a highly wanted crop. Unless of course there is price fixing, but that’s something completely different. I don’t necessarily agree with player created content in regards to items or skins if only because of the potential copyright issues, but I do think that players choices and playing should actually impact the world.
January 9th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I agree- player created items and skins are very problematic.
Previously, I’d used examples of a “city mayor” in Star Wars Galaxies being given the ability to change appearance / name (within the city) to make an NPC come alive or script a little of his own story into the world… or spawn a group of (no-XP) stormtroopers to investigate the black market of the town.
In its broadest sense, participating in PvP IS providing your foe with content. You, the opponent, affect his experience and can cause a rather broad range of events to unfold. Roleplaying is even more,
That’s content, provided by people. The devs only created the “playground.” We make it come alive.
January 9th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
I don’t think the best avenue of slowing content consumption is to encourage player-made content…though the social inventions of players (strategy sessions, group events, player ceremonies, etc) are very useful to that end.
Instead, the best route is increasing replayability through variation within static content. It’s an old challenge, and one developers have tried and failed to overcome numerous times, to make content less linear, but it is achievable. SWG allowed a great deal of lateral exploration, and that game didn’t explore half the methods I would use.
Here’s an old example of mine: Imagine that players are exploring an Egyptian-like tomb full of statues of various sizes and representations. Each of the statues are inanimate until triggered to come alive by player presence or actions. Each has a different probability of being triggered, ranging from very unlikely to very likely. Those probabilities are not static…they are adjusted weekly, monthly or however often the developers desire (and those adjustments could be randomly determined by software, so the devs would not have to spend time on that). This means that the same player can explore this same tomb many times and continue to enjoy fresh experiences in doing so (assuming that other elements of the tomb experience vary as well). It also creates uniquely individual player experiences for memory (important to player retention) and social discourse.
Variation can make old content into fresh content. In Mario Kart, I enjoyed the same racetrack countless times because there was enough variability to make it fresh. In Counterstrike and Gears of War, players enjoy the same maps over and over because of the variation brought by their fellow players.
In MMOGs and RPGs, replayability in small experiences, not just the cumulative adventure (i.e., playing as an undead warlock instead of an orc warrior), can greatly reduce the average rate of content consumption.
That is not to say that it will prevent the most fanatical achievement-oriented gamers from continuing down a linear path. But personally, I don’t consider that small population to be a great problem as long as you’ve got enough loyal, equally-vocal fans to counteract the publicity impact of ranters. The majority of achievement-oriented gamers, who are not so fanatical, would be able to enjoy the replayability.
Imagine: The first time your group traverses the main hall of that tomb, the avian statue and the wolf statue come alive for two separate battles. The second time through, four statues come alive, two of those at the same time for a bigger battle. The third time through, only one statue comes alive, but you also trigger a boobytrap that makes the single statue more difficult to fight (combinations of triggers could be limited in advance by developers to control the range of difficulty…though some of that control could be offered to individual players). The fourth time through, 6 statues come alive, three of them together and one of them a particularly formidable foe…but a trapdoor is discovered, allowing the group to escape.
That’s the sort of gameworld I want to play in. =)
January 9th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
While I normally don’t like replayable locations, I do like it with variations like you mention. Raids, for example, are repeatable content that really rely on predictability. You’re expected to mess them up, learn from it, return and do it better. Mastering a pattern can be a fun challenge, but I’d much rather adapt to something new.
From the storyteller’s side, I don’t want repeats. I don’t want “let’s go farm castle X” tonight. I’d much prefer that people explore a castle as if it was an abandoned castle, record it as done, and then move on, perhaps only returning to the castle when rumor says something new has moved in.
Finally, let me stress that “player provided content” is NOT in the sense of dev-made content. I’m talking about the things that players do in the world with one another- when they’re interacting with one another.
Looking back at SWG, what amazes me isn’t some of the broken templates, but how much of my time was consumed by stuff the devs really didn’t do much to create. I wasn’t a hardcore roleplayer or a PvP’er, but I did both- and both comprised a lion’s share of my gaming time… not running dev-made lairs/theme-parks.
January 9th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
That’s a good point about the lore effect from replayability. I don’t enjoy performing the same quest repeatedly either, but every setting does not have to be tied to a quest or strong lore effect. As a writer and casual roleplayer, I perceive a lot of importance in story and impact. But everything doesn’t need a story or lore/environment impact. Some dungeons and such should be just playgrounds, oblivious to the greater gameworld.
In regard to the social and explorative inventions of players, I’d like to see a game offer more toward that end and not advertise every possibility. It would be nice if players were encouraged to discover on their own how to employ in-game assets to produce new experiences.
January 9th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Great points, aaron. I was just thinking about the “playground” analogy as I got your comment. We certainly can have both: playground and event.
I’m a bit torn on the “discover on their own” part of this. I certainly don’t want to burden people with all that up-front, and I did like discovering some of the ingenius ways players learned to decorate homes in SWG, but I’ve also faced the frustration of searching the SWG knowledge bases, forums, and fansites for a simple “I know it CAN BE done, but I can’t find anything to tell me HOW!” That’s a difficult balancing act to follow
January 9th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
There is alot I want to say here… but its too big. I’ll link back when I post on my blog.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
[...] Some days I wish I could remember to write stuff down. I had alot I wanted to say concerning this post over on Tattered Page, but I could only remember one part, so I’ll just go with that. [...]