[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: "McQuaid, Brad" <bmcquaid at verant.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 8:01 PM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

> Matthew Mihaly (the_logos at achaea.com) wrote:
> > On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, rayzam wrote:

>>> There's a simple reason why this has also been the case however,
>>> and how it skews this stat. When you want to quit EQ, you don't
>>> quit and let the character go away, you sell it off on Ebay to
>>> someone else. So the characters persist from the beginning, but
>>> who's behind it may be changing.  Granted, I doubt that matters
>>> for the bottom line $$.
>>
>> So, you think that a 70% retention rate is achieved because people
>> sell their characters when they quit? That seems awfully unlikely
>> to me. I just went to Ebay and was trolling through the 4000+
>> listings of Everquest related items, and I found almost no
>> characters for sale. Lots of items, few characters. There is no way
>> that sold characters represent more than a tiny fraction of
>> characters on Everquest.
.
> Totally agreed Matthew.  I just found 34 entries under 'everquest
> character' and 'everquest account'.  Now, I probably missed a few,
> but to extrapolate that this accounts for our low churn rate is
> pretty ludicrous.  It's the same type of creative logic used to
> explain away our total subscribers: 'oh, they really don't have that
> many players, because so many people have multiple accounts' :) >
> That's not my point. People who got into the game early on may have
> handed off or sold their characters to friends/others, when there
> was a market for it. Or when they moved on. The players who are
> still playing now are immersed and hooked and have a low quit
> rate. Are there any figures for churn rate over time, since EQ
> started? That'd be a better indicator, because you'd want the churn
> rate to decelerate with time, see if it reaches an equilibrium. But
> that's economics.

I also do not claim that 70% retention rate is due to pass-on
characters. But a portion of hte difference between that 70% and the
other retention rates [which were intimated to be lower, but no
figures were given], is due to this passing on. If game A has a way
characters are recycled and game B doesn't, then a lower quit rate in
game A is going to be partially accounted for by that
recycling. That's why it's a 'skew' of the statistics. It's not
'creative logic', it's not an extrapolation to account for all 70% of
the retention rate. How much is actually due to recycling is something
only Verant/Sony could know [albeit that wouldn't be 100% accurate
either, but the names paying the monthly fees, since inception of an
account?].

It may be sad, but I feel that one sign of success is when a game can
get its characters sold in real life... Hence, other games could have
had their character accounts passed on to others, but they weren't
successful enough for that to be the case. The game has to be good
enough that you want to hand your character off to someone who can
continue him/her, or for someone else's enjoyment, or the game has to
be good enough that if you went through the effort to sell your
character, you'd be remunerated enough for your effort. There are
psychological/economical tenets that describe all this....

    Rayzam


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