[MUD-Dev] Casual Crowd vs.Time Rich Crowd [was: Time Debt]

[David Kennerly]

JC Lawrence wrote:

> There's a curve of diminishing returns there.  The first player is
> worth a lot.  The second player is also worth a fair bit.  The
> 100th player isn't worth quite as much, and the N thousandth is
> worth even less.  Do we have a decent idea what the real shape of
> the curve is?

That's a good item for research.  One hypothesis is that the
function is logarithmic.  In my personal experience, a positive
correlation exists between concurrent users and retention.  At a
user volume below critical mass, players leave simply because
there's not enough other players.  For a few specific MMPs, not MUDs
in general, the 100th concurrent user has been worth almost as much
as the 1st.  But the 1000th was not; and certainly not the
100,000th.

I've never read of a situation where there is not a positive net
value (griefers and macro players are negative) in terms of
retention.  Therefore, the function must be composed of a set of
monotonic increasing curves.  Your additional conjecture is that
each curve is also concave.  Two simple functions, a logarithm or a
root, satisfies these requirements.

The above propositions mean that MMPs, although discouraging for us
underdogs, are a rich get richer medium.  Despite a few skeptical
posters here, this thesis implies that, for example, City of Heroes
will remain popular for years.  Mass is a USP.

The details of the function, such as critical mass, depend on
design.  For instances, Eve Online's Great Scam requires Great
Masses.  Yet Motor City Online's were insufficient.  And Terry Park
has told me that Shattered Galaxy needs a certain volume to make
faction versus faction fun.

You know how they place the number of players on the back of a
boardgame, console game, and others?  Good board games give
explicitly number of players and time to play.  Because of a lower
bound of critical mass, for some MMP, it might read:

    Number of players: 100-5000
    Time to play: 1-12 hours per day, indefinitely

This reminds me of a war story ... </SIGNAL><NOISE> ... In 2000, I
was the sole US staff for two games at once, Dark Ages and QuizQuiz.
Usually I had to host events in QuizQuiz to boost volume to a
temporary mass.  Since QuizQuiz wasn't living up to my expectations,
I put it on autopilot and gave Dark Ages my full attention.  While
neglected and unmarketed, QQ's concurrent users slowly increased.
Several weeks later it started crashing every day.  I discovered the
server was exceeding capacity.  A critical concurrent user volume
alone was sufficient to cause the /derivative/ to increase.  That is
a critical mass.

David
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