[MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Raph Koster <rkoster at austin.rr.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Saturday, June 03, 2000 1:29 AM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.


>Pretty much every flat fee company out there is trying to reduce average
>hours lpayed per session and per week in their next games. As Gordon Walton
>(ex of Kesmai and now running UO) put it to me, "UO is the perfect game for
>an hourly fee scheme."
>
   And much luck to them....  Problem is, they're trying to pull on both
ends of the same thread there.  You want a game that is so compelling that
people will play it month after month, paying along the way.  But at the
same time, you want to make it so easy to stop playing the game that people
will play only 5-10 hours a week.

    There's a truism in commercial fiction that every time a reader sets
down a book, there's a small but finite chance he won't pick it up again.
And if he does put it aside unfinished, the odds are he won't buy the next
book from the same author.  That's why many authors write novels without
defined chapters, others write chapters only a few pages long, and most try
to make the end of a chapter the last place you want to stop reading.  You
want the reader to keep reading as long as is possible, setting the book
down only if he must.

    Every single time a player logs out of an online game, there's a small
but finite chance that will be the *last* time he ever logs in.  Make your
game so ephemeral that players will log out simply because there doesn't
seem to be any point in playing any more that night, and he's going to start
wondering if there's any point in playing (and paying) at *all*.  You can
reduce average hours per player only at the cost of increasing churn, if at
all.

    Anyway, it's eventually going to be a moot point.  The amount of
physical hardware and consistant bandwidth needed to run one of these games
is not going to rise nearly as fast as the cost of that equipment and
bandwidth is going to drop.  Right now those costs eat up the lion's share
of subscription fees, in 10 years they'll be trivial.

    I once calculated that EQ's bandwidth costs could have been cut by
2/3...by halving the population per server and running twice as many.  It
takes more bandwidth to keep players apprised of the position and actions
of other players than it does to keep them updated on the status of the
world, and that bandwidth rises exponentially with population density.  And
both UO and EQ could have had order of magnitude improvements in the
integration of client prediction, LOD, and network code, which would have
both improved gameplay and reduced network traffic.

    Factor together the facts that we can do more with the same bandwidth
than we have been, that over-population effects start damaging gameplay
about the same time they start to ramp up bandwidth requirements, and that
bandwidth costs are certain to continue falling for at least the next 10
years, and the whole problem of players spending too much time online (in
terms of the costs incurred by the operators, disregarding social issues)
becomes a complete irrelevance.

    As far as the social issues?  Alarmism.  Yes, some people are just plain
psychotic in their hours played per week.  But for the *vast* majority,
OLRPG's are cutting into their TV time, not their social or professional
lives.  They're playing UO or EQ instead of watching reruns, that's all.

--Dave Rickey




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