[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Freeman]

> From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at verant.com]

> Jonathan Baron calls them microcommunities; he always wanted to
> make a game where they were centered around a capital ship in
> space. I would guess they fall under that theoretical magic number
> of 250 in size.

What's so great about that number anyway?  As I recall, that's the
theoretical limit in community size before it breaks into
sub-communities - which in theory makes it "as big as an online a
community can get".

But why try to make communities form that are "as big as they can
get"?

If a community of 10 people achieves the same goal, shoot for that.

My feeling is that the size of the clique which achieves the
mystical function of "retention" is.... (wait for it)... TWO.

I saw it in UO and EQ and WoD and Ackadia over and over again:
Partnerships would form between two people, and they'd play forever.
Three was too many, and one was not enough, but two was just
perfect.

In UO we (my partner and I) went "newbie hunting" and looked for new
people we could help get started - and after a couple months of this
we noticed that people who "partnered up" stuck around.  Those that
didn't partner-up left - and this was within a guild of 70 or 80
people.  We started playing match-maker trying to get people to
partner-up (and gender didn't matter).  The guild of 70 or 80 people
wasn't useful in terms of retention, but partnerships were.

All in all, I think cliques are good for retention.  Open
communities are not.  The trick is to get people that aren't into
cliques to form new cliques of their own.  You can't get them to
join existing cliques (since the purpose of a clique is to keep
people out), and it would destroy the usefulness of cliques if you
could.

But for retention, I think it's best to encourage people to
partner-up, and not more than that.  The magic number isn't 250.
It's 2.

Hmm... perhaps with some other, more open sub-set of players, above
the two.  But only *slightly* more open - otherwise it won't be a
sub-set of players.

Anyway, in all the above, downtime was only useful to us in terms of
finding newbies: They were parked at the whacking-dummies.  If it
hadn't been for those dummies, the newbies might have been out
playing and having fun, and so it would have been slightly more
difficult to locate them.
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