[MUD-Dev] Re: COH and others

[Alex Chacha]

David Eckelberry <deckelberry at turbinegames.com> wrote:

>> 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.

When the summit occurred and re-tuning commenced, SOE devs admitted
that the expansion was intended for people level 70 which was
planned as an increase this year but they were unable to do so (I
assume content balance may have been the issue), max level now is 65
last I checked. As a result, an expansion geared for level 70s was
shipped and marketed to everyone.  You can see how people can get
upset at that.  I have friends who multi-box all the time (use more
than 1 machine/account simultaneously).  They paids for 3 to 6
accounts each only to realize that they just wasted almost 150$ on
an expansion that offered them next to nothing (about that time a
slew of "I want my money back" threads started to pop up on
community boards). SOE has a history of adding huge time sinks in
progression to allow them to finish content for an expansion that
shipped too early.  This can be said for every single expansion,
Luclin being the most glaring example of shipping an expansion maybe
50% complete (there are zones in the game still that are not
finished, quests that are not working, incomplete storylines, etc).
When the hardcore gamers were ranting about Gates Of Discord it was
not the usual: such and such spell is not powerful enough, or
damage/mana ration needs to be improved, or pathing is poor, or
something is not dropping often enough.  This was people complaining
that they could barely survive fights against things that hit way
too hard, time sinks were huge, broken content, and on and on.

Enter Blizzard, they offered few top EQ guilds (and few choice
community site webmasters) a place in the beta (assuming they would
quit EQ but I don't know the if that is the case).  Major guilds
like Fires of Heaven, Afterlife and one other quit EQ as a whole and
left to play World Of Warcraft, converting their sites
accordingly. This is an example of hardcore players swaying the
casuals, since their sites generated a lot of traffic and they
wielded some influence.  This is not the norm but an exception. I am
still puzzled as to why Gates Of Discord was allowed to ship, it was
the most shortsighted thing I have seen in a long time.  It was a
Blizzard conspiracy of some sort I am sure :) ;sacrasm

To your point of hardcore players providing a world rather than a
place, I can present a different point. Most MOGs are split into
zones, the hardcore players will be in the few "high end" zones,
while the rest of the users plod their way through the rest of the
world.  As a matter of fact most hard coreplayers were in zones that
most casuals can't even access due to huge time sinks involved in
getting the right keys to get there. So for a casual player, the
hard core players are out of reach for the most part and only
exposure is via community or public guild boards.  The game where
high levels interacted with low levels was Horizons, low level
players could provide lots of raw materials that high level players
needed, but the low level players could not group with their high
level friends.  Horizons also had a huge contiguous world, I think
it may have succeeded if it was partitioned into level based zones
since there were many newbie starting areas, the population was so
low that people were hardpressed to find someone else to group with
them that was in their level range. Sad really, because I thought it
was a very inetersting and playable game that had a lot of
potential.

Enter City OF Heros, they solved the level problem with the sidekick
concept which I think is one of the biggest additions to the world
of MOGs to come in a long time.  Now you can have people group with
friends of any level and still have some fun.  It is not a perfect
system, but it is a very good one.

Finally, I am not saying don't cater to the hardcore gamers, they
provide a lot of benefits to the virtual world, I am stressing that
the casual players need a reason to keep their subscription going
month to month, after all, some has to provide the revenue to run
the company and more the better (from the CFO perspective).  The
best way to keep the casuals is to provide adequate amount of "solo"
content, something that people can do alone if they don't have the
time to find a group.  Generated missions are one of the best ways
to do that.  Anarchy Online was one of the earlier large scale MOGs
to implement that, but as with everything in that game it was very
configurable and very random (initially that is).  EQ bought into
the idea with their Lost Dungeons expansion (but as usual EQ
required minimum of 3 people to start a task, enter
multi-boxers). City Of Heroes learned a lesson from those 2 and
scaled their generated missions based on the groups and person who
got the mission, it is not a perfect system, but it is a well
designed one, with some fine tuning it could be one of the best on
the market (I think they need a difficulty selector and more
information when picking a mission, but that's just my opinion).

> 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.

I agree with you on that point.  The guilds in question had a very
strong web presence and people from all different servers usually
loitered on their message boards (mostly trolling).  However, guilds
like Fires OF Heaven and Afterlife criticized EQ to no end,
complained about every nerf and every change.  At times I was
surprised people have not quit in droves by the negative picture
they painted every time a patch contained an unfavorable
change. What they did have going for them was the ability to play
the game "full" time in effect providing SOE with invaluable QA and
testing of content that the bulk of the populace will not see for
months. It was a double edged sword.

My point is, you should not ignore any type of a player, but you do
have to moderate how much attention you give to the vocal minority.
Since we are on the subject of EQ (as an example), I would wager
that if the Gates Of Discord content for high end guilds was cut in
half and more zones were provided for the bulk of their customers
(45-60 crowd) along with content for solo casual players who only
have 60-90 minutes to play, then it would not have had such an
undesirable outcome.  I would even argue that if EQ was not driven
by SOE to release "predictable" time-lines for expansions (so that
the bean-counters can be kept at bay) and if they adopted the
Blizzard approach of "ship it when it is ready" (by far a superior
way of doing it), then content would be closer to finished, there
would not be more bugs than features and you would not have
community boards swamped with rants and goodbye messages. There has
to be a balance, because if you show any favoritism to one group
then you are indirectly alienating the other (it is very much like
rasing children :)
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