[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Jessica Mulligan]

At 12:06 AM 12/10/2002 -0800, "Kwon Ekstrom" <justice at softhome.net> wrote:
From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>

>>> What they have done, and done pretty well, is build a
>>> large-scale lobby.  This lobby connects many instances of
>>> small-scale networked games.

>> I agree that they have a massive lobby, although I doubt that it
>> connects to each small scale game.  From my experience, it
>> appears to be p2p with a central repository.  Or I suppose
>> several central repositories (since they split battle.net into
>> separate locations).

>> Which I suppose would be equivalent to several "instances" would
>> it not?  It's a technology they're good at, I doubt they would
>> abandon it for the more conventional centralized server approach.

>> The only question is... can they maintain the network traffic
>> required?

>> I don't know about other people but I've had trouble with
>> battle.net during peak hours because the servers were so jammed.

>> If they required paid access, I imagine they could maintain the
>> network better.  I agree that Blizzard does make excellent games,
>> they're one of the few companies that has multiple titles on my
>> shelf.

This is still a far cry from maintaining a persistent world and
client/server model.  It looks like what Blizzard wants to do is see
how far they can carry the p2p model they are using right now into
developing something sightly more complicated for subscription-based
gaming.  The problem, of course, is that the client is in the hands
of the enemy, as we've all seen with the rampant client hacking and
cheating with Diablo, Diablo II, et al.  If they carry the current
client model over to WoW, they'll see the same thing, only worse,
because subscription gaming brings with it all the eBay, real-world
cash issues, etc.  Much will depend on just how robust their backend
tools for logging and monitoring are.  They have a lot of experience
in p2p gaming; subscription-based gaming is a whole other thing.
I'm not sure the Korean PC baang model, which is what they look to
be trying to tap into on a distributed, Internet basis, is going to
translate over.

And getting into subscription gaming online for the first time, they
also have the enhanced customer service, player relations and NetOps
problems to worry about.  Once you start charging money to play,
everything changes and it can be tough to understand just how much
until you've been through it a time or two.  I find it amusing that
instead of hiring experienced people to advise them in this regard,
Blizzard is using a class at UC-Irvine to research and tell them how
to develop GM functionality for the game.  This seems mightily like
being penny-wise and pound-foolish.  Not to dis the UCI students,
but would you hire plumber to tell you how to build out the guts of
a car?

It'll be interesting to see just what happens; Blizard has huge
goodwill among consumers, which gives them some leeway to make
errors and recover.

-Jess



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