Activity Duration in MMOs (was: [MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Spore and MMOs)

[Michael Hartman]

Damion Schubert wrote:
> FIrst off, I think that's completely inaccurate.  Raiding in WoW when it
> shipped was much better than raiding in EQ when it shipped, and they've
> made significant improvements in the Burning Crusade.  There are
> definitely things I'd like to see improved upon still, but to say that no
> progress has been made is very misleading.

Much better? Much better how?

And how was BC an improvement? There were barely any changes at all. In 
some ways it was made worse.

It is still the same thing. You have to get a ton of people together, 
they have to have the right classes, build, and gear, and then one 
person herds cats requiring that the majority press the 1 button for 3 
hours. Oh, and then as a final bonus, you get to quibble over loot, 
since the drops are always stingy as heck and idiotic concepts like Bind 
on Pickup mean if you don't happen to have people there you can use it, 
it is trash.

And yes, I am speaking from actual experience. I was founder and GM of a 
raid guild on WoW and was the main tank (and frequent raid leader) for 
it all the way through Gruul's Lair. Then I just couldn't do it any 
more. It is not fun. It is not interesting. It doesn't feel epic.

I felt like an extra in a movie. There was a set of rote maneuvers I had 
to do, and I just had to perform them over and over again. The amount of 
trash killing was prodigious and boring. The fact that wiping on a boss 
10 times to figure it out was "game design" was just an absurd laugh.

I was lucky that I actually played the one role (main tank) that had the 
most "freedom" to act. For DPS characters it is even more boring, since 
they do nothing but assist and press their 1-3 attack powers. They do 
this for HOURS. If they do even the slightest thing of their own free 
will - including standing somewhere a tad off - the whole group wipes 
and everyone is pissed off. Oh, and oftentimes this also means the group 
gets to clear another hour of trash or just call it a night. YAY! FUN!

So no, raiding in WoW is not significantly different from EQ or from any 
other fantasy RPG raiding. It is just as boring and just as tedious as 
it is everywhere else. You spend 3 hours listening to one person give 
orders over TS/Vent and have virtually zero free will whatsoever. You 
don't get to "think on your feet" at all. You do exactly as the raid 
leader tells you, or the raid wipes.

Compare that to, for example, the end game content of DAoC. Every single 
player had to be on their toes. Every single player had to be thinking 
about what they were doing, coming up with ideas on how to perform, and 
reacting to the battle field. Yes, this is partially because it is PvP, 
but the point is this was actually interesting content.

If someone wants to come along and make fun end game "raid-ish" PvE 
content, they need to drop this inredibly painful raid style method that 
currently exists.

I don't want to memorize a script like an actor in a play and just 
follow it through identically 9,000 times so I can get UBER ITEM X to drop.

I want to be able to feel like a real player who reacts to situations. I 
want to use MY OWN JUDGMENT rather than simply slavishly obey a raid 
leader for 3+ hours, who in turn is slavishly obeying a guide on some 
web site.

I haven't even gotten into craptacular concepts that arise like DKP, 
loot tracking, raid scheduling, raid rostering, and other garbage that 
is absolutely NOT FUN and makes playing the game feel like working in 
some cubicle farm as middle management.

> First off, they tend to dominate the forums of the game because they
> tend to be the most devoted customers of the game.  When devoted
> customers reach max levels, they don't want to walk away from their
> characters.  They aren't ready to say their character is done - they
> want to continue to move their character forward.

I dispute that they are the most devoted. They just play the most and 
have the highest percentage of their life wrapped up in the game, but 
their "devotion" is questionable and quixotic at best. The heavy forum 
posters are often the biggest trolls and "haters" you will ever find. 
They are the first to jump ship when something new comes along. If, as a 
game developer you think your heavy duty forum posters are your most 
devoted customers, you are in for a nasty surprise.

> Secondly, it's not as tiny a minority as you think.

Actually, it is indeed as tiny as I think. Even Blizzard has admitted 
that the raid population is a small overall percentage of their 
customers. Most of their customers do not even have a level 70 
character. Before the expansion, the majority of their customers did not 
even have a level 60.


> As an example,
> 879K pieces of armor from Attumen (the entry boss in Karazhan, the
> entry level raid for WoW) have been spotted on the WoW Armory
> over time by WoWJutsu.

Wow. That's it? Just 879k? That isn't even 1 piece of loot per 10 
accounts, and you know as well as I do that raid loot is concentrated, 
not thinly dispersed.

In the first 2 months of raiding Karazhan, our one guild killed him once 
a week, sometimes twice a week (when we added a second team running 
Karazhan). He drops 2 pieces of loot. That is 18-36 pieces of loot right 
there from one guild in just 2 months. People have been raiding Karzhan 
heavily since February - approximately 35 weeks. A single group of 10 
people could have killed him 35 times by now, generating 70 pieces of loot.

You would only need 12,577 characters to generate that much loot over 
the last 35 weeks. Not accounts.... characters. Most raiders I know had 
at least 2 raid capable characters, and often a lot more who were 
Karazhan attuned. I had 4 Karazhan attuned characters. If you 
conservatively assume the average raider has 2 raid characters, now you 
only need 6,288 accounts to generate 879k pieces of Attumen loot. If 
half the loot is garbage, and gets dested, you are only back up to 
12,577 accounts needed. Considering Blizzard claims 9+ million ACCOUNTS, 
your information just points out how trivial the raiding population is 
compared to their actual population. 1% of 9 million is 900,000. So 
we're talking about somewhere in the ballpark of 1/100th of a percent of 
accounts needed to generate 879k pieces of Attument loot.

Yes, you can say "but not everyone raids Karazhan every week" and you're 
right. But the point is that it only requires a VERY SMALL percentage of 
their customer base to generate that much loot. And since the hardcore 
raid population IS the group that raids constantly, using every raid 
reset available, that just further illustrates my point.

Those numbers indicate that the % of people with even a SINGLE piece of 
loot from Attumen is incredibly small. And as you said, he is the entry 
boss of the 1st raid dungeon. Honestly, now that you've presented that 
data, it is clear that the % of raiders is even more miniscule that I 
suspected.

Is it really good business to focus the majority of your development on 
something 1/100th of a percent of your customers will see? Look at some 
of their latest development. They are adding MORE raid dungeons at the 
top end of the scale. These are dungeons that the overwhelming majority 
of their customers will NEVER, EVER see. Most *RAIDERS*, not to mention 
average players, never even saw the last 2 or 3 raid dungeons of the 
pre-expansion game. And yet they continue to invest enormous amounts of 
resources into adding more and more higher end raid dungeons for the top 
.00001% of their customers. Genius.


> * Raid bosses require complex strategies to beat, with much
> experimentation and learning.  This appeals to Explorers.

Exploring what? The Web? Nobody "learns" the bosses. A raid leader reads 
the strategy online and then dictates it to the group on Teamspeak of 
Ventrilo

> * Raid bosses drop ph4t loot and give bragging rights, and are
> one of the few things in an MMO which are truly HARD, appealing
> to Achievers.

What bragging rights? Maybe the top 2 or 3 guilds on an entire server 
have bragging rights... that's it. That's an infinitesimally small 
percentage of your population.

As for the loot, have fun fighting over it, wrestling with DKP, arguing 
who should get a piece of loot, being mad that the character you left 
home was the one who really neded it, but it gets disenchanted since it 
is Bind on Pickup, and all sorts of other things that ruin what little 
nugget of joy the "loot" might bring.

> * Raid bosses require cooperation between players, and require
> coordination, socialization and strong incentives for group play,
> appealing to socializers.

There is almost no socializing. There is one person giving orders and 
everyone else following. In fact, in many raid guilds (and almost all 
the top ones), socializing is expressly FORBIDDEN and speaking 
privileges are limited to the raid leader and a couple of assistants.

> * Raid bosses create a strong metagame on a server, which acts
> as a huge motivator between guilds, as evidenced on sites like
> WoWJutsu.  This appeals to killers.

What metagame? You can't just call it a metagame without saying why it 
is one. Nobody cares about sites like WowJutsu. Those sites are places 
the top .00001% of players even know about. Heck, I had never even heard 
of it and I ran a pretty hardcore raid guild.

WoW is a huge success IN SPITE OF its painful, crappy raid system.

In fact, they are darn lucky that such a tiny percentage of their 
population raids. If more of them did, then they'd actually have 
problems. But luckily for them, the overwhelming majority of their 
population is in that 1->69 range where the game is actually quite good.


-- 
Michael Hartman, J.D. (http://www.frogdice.com)
President & CEO, Frogdice, Inc.
University of Georgia School of Law, 1995-1998
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, 1990-1994