[Mud-Dev] Virtual Suicide (Was: Money supply in game economie s)

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

On 06 April 2001 17:24, Dave Rickey wrote

> *If* the analogy holds up, the obvious conclusion is that the
> stronger your game's community is, the lower your churn.

This is almost certainly true, however you could equally state that
the more interesting content in the game, the lesser the churn rate. I
know for a fact that I stuck playing Everquest for far longer than I
would have, merely so that I could go the the planes and kill gods and
dragons. This may be due to some desire to conquer the game, but it
was a nice distant goal that almost everyone aspires to from the
earliest levels. Sure, the actualisation of this goal gets very boring
after doing it a few times, but its certainly a good carrot.

I really don't think I can overstate how effective a tactic this was
by VI.  The only down side is that it might encourage powergaming, but
then again thats how most of the game tends to be set up anyway. In
balance though, I consider epic encounters a good thing as they
encourage team work and socialisation.

Of course then you get onto the topic of 'uber' guilds when a subset
of the population decide to play the game harder. Frankly I don't see
the issue there as the only real objection seems to be that they
monopolise epic encounters. If there are enough encounters though then
its really a non-issue. The unity of purpose when working within one
is actually pretty cool.

Dan

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