[MUD-Dev] Re: COH and others

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Alex Chacha [mailto:achacha at hotmail.com]

> 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

Which seems good marketing, but is it good for the state of a game
to give all the hardcore power gamers who consume content
voraciously a massive headstart? These guys are fickle anyway and
some expect a direct line to god because of their 'achievements'. On
the plus side, it's the only way to meaningfully test large
encounters in a beta, you can't just throw together a disparate set
of players from different backgrounds and expect any meaningful
feedback.

> 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.

That was my point not Davids. However we were talking in terms of
hours online, not whether they were in an uberguild of one specific
game. They aren't the same. I knew people who spent hours in games
like EQ and never got into the big raid uber-guild thing.

Even then, there are benefits of having uber guild type players
around, even if you only see them when they visit town. It is
aspirational, you look at their equipment and want it, you look at
the gates to the areas you can't get to, and you want the key. Its
human nature. I doubt many players started EQ and didn't really want
to see and kill a dragon. Certainly kept me playing well after I
should have stopped ;)

> 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.

I never played it, although I did try to download the free preview,
sadly there are a lot of complaints about the billing company they
use and the preview demands your CC details. Not the kind of
concerns a publisher wants people to have about their game - it
certainly made me cancel the download.

> 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.

It's certainly a nice idea on the face of it, but at what cost?
Metaphorically speaking, I've got a feeling it kills the aspiration
to level up and kill the dragon. You don't have to, you just tag
along with a buddy who's already earnt his stripes. Short term
gratification at the expense of longetivity?

> 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).

Solo content is a real problem imho. If you want to hook people into
your world, you need to encourage them to interact. After all MMOs
are about other people, the games themselves are necessarily fairly
shallow as a single player experience. How do you make it more fun
for a single player than a single player game where you can be the
hero rather than a bit part?  Worse, if you make advancement as
quick for soloers as it is for groups, no one will group. If you
make it slower all the soloers complain.

The correct approach is to streamline the game so that grouping and
interacting with other people is easier. Encourage groups, but
facilitate it better and give them bite sized activities. That's
what CoH seems to do very successfully.

I played AO and no one ever spoke to each other. Just millions of
people running to their single player instanced dungeon. The rest of
the world may as well have been a menu screen most of the time.

> 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.

Sure, but there's already plenty of content in the middle and
bottom, where people have run out is at the top. You can see their
point. Its certainly possible to have too much content at a given
level and end up with your playerbase so scattered that it works
against the game.

> 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 :)

'Ship it when its done' is a great ideal, but very few have the
money to play that game. There are also plenty of people for whom it
would never be done and they'd never ship! Whilst most aren't in
game development for the money, there is a bottom line
somewhere. People want to get paid.

Dan
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