[MUD-Dev] Time debt

[Vladimir Cole]

On  Tuesday, August 17, 2004, "Darkwolf" <darkwolf at neo.rr.com> wrote:

> The problem I see with that is that it penalizes people with odd
> schedules.  If I can only play 3 nights a week, but on the days I
> can play 12h/day why should I be penalized beyond what someone who
> plays 8 hours per day 7 days a week is penalized when I'm playing
> 20 hours less?

....

> I don't understand why some people have a desire to punish the
> biggest fans of their game by limiting their play time.

It's a desire to build a "fair" game. Let's say you were forced to
play chess with an evenly-matched opponent. You're given just thirty
seconds to consider and make each of your moves while your opponent
is given unlimited time to make each of his moves. You'd probably
call it an unfair match.  Similarly, let's say you love to play ping
pong but can only play 30 minutes per week. That's not a problem
with ping pong as we know it, but what if the rules of the game
required an elaborate, 30-minute ritual cleansing of your paddle
prior to every match? You'd be unwilling to play.

Similarly, subscription-based MMOs are often designed to eat up your
time, but often these contrived timesinks are frustrating and
off-putting to the casual player who resents spending a good portion
of his time simply tending to basic timesinks (travel, weapon
repair, sustenance gathering). This sets the casual crowd against
the time-rich crowd and game design attempts to give the casual
player a boost are often met with hostility by the time-rich crowd
(who, as we know, derive no small amount of self-esteem and
satisfaction by admiring the gear/level gap between themselves and
the game's casual player.)

Think of the problem in economic terms: I think that most of us
(extreme libertarians aside) agree that the government provides
important and vital services such as health care and education to
lower-income people by taxing higher-income people. None of us like
taxes, but most of us appreciate the fact that public education
helps people in poverty move themselves out of poverty.

The "time poverty line" in many MMOs is somewhere between 1 hour a
week and 15 hours a week. Players that fall below the poverty line
will quit unless they're given a boost of some sort. Players above
the poverty line will generally be rewarded for their gameplay and
will remain loyal subscribers so long as there's enough fresh
content.

Timesinks are designed to tax the progress of a game's most
enthusiastic players so that they won't exhaust available content
more quickly than game developers can churn it out, but often
represent a barrier to entry for the time-impoverished player. (The
real-world equivalent of the MMO "boat travel" timesink is sales tax
on food -- sales taxes eat a disproportionately large portion of
poor families' income.) The casual player in Everquest often wonders
why he just spent 30 minutes waiting on a boat or an hour trying to
put together a group when he's only got two hours of playtime per
week.

Designer attempts to recapture some of these lost subscription
revenues are founded in good business sense. There are a lot of
different ways to solve this important design problem. Ideas like
Time Debt and World of Warcraft's "Rest State Bonus" are on the
right path.

Your question is therefore unfair and biased.

> I don't understand why some people have a desire to punish the
> biggest fans of their game by limiting their play time.

It's not that designers want to punish anyone. They want to convert
a struggling segment of their playerbase into happy, loyal
subscribers. A small tax on the top 2% of the gaming population is a
necessary evil.

- Vlad
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