[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[adam]

on Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 12:05:35PM -0700, Terrence Martin wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Ted L. Chen wrote:
>> Paul Schwanz ruminates:
  
>>> .....  Of course, we tend to value items based upon the work
>>> needed to aquire it and this new paradigm could indeed cause
>>> players to value possessions or skills less.
  
>> I agree with most of the stuff you said.  But if you think about
>> the stuff players get when logging in as 'gifts', I think it
>> might be useful to point out that people probably value gifts
>> based on uniqueness, not necessarily the work required in getting
>> it.  That is, a set of expensive socks might be worth the same as
>> a DVD of my favorite movie.  The first is almost ubiquitous, the
>> later is more unique (to some extent) to me.

> First I am very much in agreement with the original poster. I find
> it extremely unfortunate that the current crop of MMOG are limited
> primarily to power gamers or people who are regularly online for
> 4-6 hours a day.  Particularly when, from personal experience,
> most of that time is spent executing the kind of repetitive tasks
> best left to a computer or machine.  It is not suprising most
> games suffer from macros soon after launch. Who can blame people
> for wanting to give their wrist a rest from drag and drop crafting
> hell.  

...

> Generally in order to make something more "rare" you need to
> restrict access to it. In my experience this is done through
> requiring many hours of in game time. If it is not handled this
> way the casual gamers would get their 1 item, and the power gamers
> would aquire thousands thereby making that item not that rare at
> all. Since rarity is the only measure of value the item becomes
> worthless. The familiar result is much complaining and the devs
> add yet another layer of time sink to slow down the power
> gamer...of course the side effect is the casual player is left
> wondering why they are paying $15 a month to run around the world
> like an infant beside gods.  

Or you can assign items based on a frequency per real-world
hours/days elapsed. This way, if you play for 24 hours you will have
no greater or lesser chance of getting a unique than if you play for
1 hour at the end of the same 24 hour period.

This action would tend to reduce the nubmer of pwoer-games online at
any one tiem by a factor of up to 10 (pure guesswork, based on the
assumption that power-gamers tend to aim for efficiency in their
GoP, and will reduce their online time by the greatest factor
possible whilst still achieving maximum reward.  I'm estimating the
ratio of "hours spent online" by casual players to the same value
for power gamers - I'm sure Nick Yee's studies could easily provide
a much more accurate estimate of the ratio :). Note that once
power-gamers realise they get no additional benefit from spending
additional time in game, not only will they reduce their playing
time to be more efficient, but there will be a further reduction
because with current schemes there is a strong element of what
Stephen King calls "the Gotta" - as in "I just gotta read one more
page before I go to sleep...". That additional incentive is removed
entirely once the reward vailable becomes capped.)

from your original mail, I can imagine that you might consider this
reduction in hous-spent-online-by-power-gamers an additional
benefit.

Adam M


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