[MUD-Dev2] [Design] [REPOST] Food in MMOs

[Vincent Archer]

According to Michael Hartman:
> Then I guess you aren't keeping up with all the major MMOs out there.
> Because on every one, the discussion of "the end game" is always of
> titanic importance and is clearly a major focus of the developers.

And that's understandable. Except for the most casual crowd, it's where
the players spend the majority of their on-line time in your game.

Let's look at WoW's latest expansion. It's supposed to last a year
before the next one. Let's say you're mildly casual. 50 weeks at 12 hour
a week, or 600 hours of game play over the year.

It takes to an average player 6-8 days of /played to go from 60 to 70
(more hardcore players do it in as little as 3 days). That's about 200
hours of game play to reach the maximum level.

The breakdown is simple: for a relatively casual player, he will spend
33% of his time "before" the end-game, and 2/3 of its entire play time
at the end-game.

> In WoW, you'd think level 1->69 didn't even exist any more. Blizzard
> sure doesn't give a crap about it. Their entire focus is on end game
> raiding with a little end game PvP tossed in.

1->69 doesn't feature in the Blizzard plans... because it's done. It's
complete. There's enough content for a player to do it all, and some
more (much more so at 60->69 than, say, 40->60). You can add to that
content, but then, people below 70 will not experience all of the
content that's in-game.

There's enough content to avoid doing any part of the game twice until
you reach 70. Adding content means there's part of the 60->70 game you
will not see.

Adding content targeted for the level 70 crowd is far more necessary
than creating some targeted below. 

> > Reaching the endgame in current MMORPGs, usually mean you cannot
> > continue casually playing you charater.
> 
> I agree. That's my point and that is part of the problem. The mid-game
> is far too often garbage, and is designed as merely a time sink to get
> to the "real game" at the end.

Not so in WoW. The mid-game is perfectly enjoyable. There's plenty of
quests, plenty of instances to visit. The biggest difference between the
mid-game and the end-game is that you don't have to repeat anything in
the mid-game - whereas the end-game is all about repetitive content.

That's why you have to focus on the end-game in WoW - to reduce the
repetitive factor (well, to dilute it somewhat).