[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: David H. Loeser Jr. [mailto:daklozar at home.com]
>> Michael Tresca Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 9:42 AM
  
>> From http://www.gamespy.com/devdiary/january02/uo2/ regarding
>> Ultima Online's new player "lifespan."
  
>>   "In order to gain insight into the new player's challenges, we
>>   focused our exit survey research on why players
>>   left. Specifically, we focused on those players leaving early
>>   within the first month of play. We quickly realized that we
>>   were losing most of our new players within the first three play
>>   sessions due to a lack of clearly defined goals upon entry. "

> Looking back, I don't think that the goals were really the issue
> -I had played Zork and had dabbled with MUDs before- the real
> issue was being in this great big virtual world and no one
> speaking to me :) Everyone was running around doing their own
> thing and I was simply 'lost'.

That completely mirrors my experience with UO except that I didn't
meet anyone and I only played for a few hours during EQ server
downtime (!) to check it out. I found myself completely isolated and
the user interface was alien, slow and unintuitive. Its a shame I
couldn't get into it at all as I wanted to gain some insight into
Ultima's dynamics, I just found the barriers to entry too high and
I'm a pretty hardcore player. Everquest was my first graphical game
and I very very nearly gave that up. Comparatively I found AC,AO &
DAoC much easier to interact in, probably due to my Everquest
experience (My UO experiment post-dated my EQ playing).

I agree in some ways with your proposition that the game should make
efforts to hook up newbies, but it also needs to set them manageable
goals they can co-operate on and hand hold them whilst they do
it. There is a quest like this in DAoC for newbies, and it assumes
you can navigate from one town to another successfully and requires
you to be grouped whilst doing it. I had no clue which way to go,
and half the other people starting were not true newbies and just
wanted to skip it. I guess I'm looking for multiplayer tutorials
where you get shown the ropes whilst interacting with others. The
DAoC problem was lack of others interested combined with the false
distinction between game & player knowledge (my character should
know which way to head, but as a player I didn't and was given no
real directions).

Of course if you give them lots of single player style 'training
missions' (even if you integrate other players into them), you are
setting up an expectation that doesn't tie into the game. I'm not
sure how to manage that effectively.

Dan
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