[MUD-Dev] RE: CoH and others

[David Eckelberry]

Alex Chacha writes:

> The ideal users are the ones that pay the same monthly fee and log
> in for a short duration, the cost of maintaining these types of
> customers is far less, but the fees they pay are the same [...]

I think this is true for the finance department, but I'm confident that
it won't make for a healthy MMP--i.e., a game that will maintain its
subscriptions.

> I would even wager that letting the power gamers get bored and
> either start a new character or quit, while concentrating the
> efforts on keeping the larger casual populace would be financially
> more advantageous.

Perhaps. I'm not confident that a truly casual audience exists for MMPs
yet, given the barriers of subscription and persistent gameplay. And I'm
not at all sure the semi-casual, or less hardcore, players have goals in
most MMPs that differ much from the hardcore 40+ hour players-they just
have less time to complete those goals, whatever they are.

But ignoring that for a moment, the real problem here is when you say
"let the powergamers get bored and make a new character or quit."
Because maybe you're right, but I think you discount the effect that
could have.

Your customers don't live in a vacuum. Hardcore players, for good or
ill, are the alphas of the gaming world. Other players listen to their
opinion on games because (1) they're right more than anyone else, and
(2) the hardcore market segment talks louder than anyone else. This is
especially true for MMPs, where most players choose to play or not based
on who else is playing. So, when those hardcore players leave your MMP
and spout off on its flaws, well, casual players are likely to follow.
No, not all of them, but enough.

It's true that the hardcore eat bandwidth, CS time, and everything else.
But they also act as a recruiting magnet for your game. Why do you think
Blizzard gave beta accounts to EQ's hardcore guilds? It wasn't just to
get those 1000 users, but to capture a percentage of the hardcore to
preach their game's virtue. And at the moment, the strategy appears to
be working pretty well.

> EQ made this mistake by releasing the Gates Of Discord expansion,
> they catered to the tiny percentage of the people that have gotten
> to the relative end of the game (last plane in Planes Of Power).

In my observation, this wasn't quite the flaw you make it out to be.
Yes, it was an expansion geared more toward the hardcore, raiding
player, but such expansions have come and gone before. This one was
even more so, and explicitly for the absolutely highest-tier raiding
type guilds. And I do think that that over-emphasis was a mistake,
but it wasn't the fatal flaw of the expansion.

Gates of Discord, putting it delicately, "experienced deep,
persistent flaws in both its design and execution of that design." I
don't want to go into every detail here about the broken content,
unbalanced content, ridiculous timesinks, etc., but suffice it to
say, I don't think it was really the focus of the expansion that
doomed it to rewrites and castigation. It was just very poorly done.

Alex, you go on to say:

> People started to quit at a higher rate and when finally entire
> high end vocal guilds quit, only then did [Sony] do anything.

Where I would argue that those two events are tied intimately
together.  When the most well known guilds and personalities of the
game began quitting in droves, that caused many of your silent
majority to follow.

Can you take this too far? Cater too much to a hardcore audience?
Provide an experience only they enjoy, without providing an
enjoyable player experience for more casual players? Of course you
can. The point I'd make is that for a large, commercially successful
MMP, you ignore that "vocal hardcore" at your own peril.
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