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

[Vincent Archer]

According to 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?

(damn this flaky connection and having to retype everything three times)

Now, where was I... Oooh yes! (sorry, WoW raiding in-game joke)

EQ at launch... had no raiding game. At all. The perennial "raid targets"
of original EQ, Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen were intended originally more
or less as "very very hard single group targets". It just happened that,
given their magic damage and fear effect, the most efficient way of
doing them was throwing bodies at them (in waves), which required multiple
groups. So, they became raids, in an unintended change.

The first real raids, Fear, then Hate (I think in that order) came much
later.

So, yes, raiding in WoW was much better, because there were two raiding
zones at launch, Upper Blackrock Spire and Molten Core. Onyxia was almost
done, but finished after launch, I think.

> 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.
...
> 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, 

Note that WoWjutsu indexes exclusively the US and euro population.
Which accounts for about 4 million accounts, not 9. And the asian
situation is very different. In China, for instance, you are billed by
time, not a flat fee. Most people tend to have one account per character;
it's not much more expensive, and it helped at times to transfer
things between characters, or even two-box.

> your information just points out how trivial the raiding population is 
> compared to their actual population. 1% of 9 million is 900,000. So 

That'd be 10%, not 1% :)

> we're talking about somewhere in the ballpark of 1/100th of a percent of 
> accounts needed to generate 879k pieces of Attument loot.

I think your bias is showing. :)

Mathematically, you need 251 accounts. After all, each account can have
50 level 70 attuned characters, each capable of looting each week. And
if we assume people can two-box attumen who is relatively easy, then raiding
game is only 125 people out of 10 millions?

Back to reality.

First, WoWjutsu can only count equipped loot. At best, if you have
been lucky with Attumen, and unlucky (or unable to advance) with the
further bosses, some classes can have 4 piece of loot from him equipped.
People who've been raidin for 35 weeks have probably *replaced*
their Attumen loot by now, and were not counted by wowjutsu.

People who did datamine have arrived in august at an estimate of
between 400k and 550k people having raided. From a 4 million
account total, that means 10 to 15% of the total WoW population.
Numbers below 400k require a heavy bias in error counting toward
lower numbers, number above 550 a large one in the other direction.

For instance, there's a minimum of 5850 people having killed Illidan
Stormrage (the biggest boss of the extension so far). That's taking
the amount of different guilds who have killed him, times 25 people.
Compare that to your "you only need 6288 accounts" number.

I somehow doubt that 90% of the people who raid at all have killed
the end boss of the extension :)

> 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.

Actually, from Wowjutsu's numbers, the hardcore raid population is
a minority of the entire raiding population. Only 30% of the guild
that raid have set foot outside of Karazhan.

> 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.

It's not that minuscule. A minority, yes. An insignificant percentage,
no.

> of their latest development. They are adding MORE raid dungeons at the 
> top end of the scale. These are dungeons that the overwhelming majority 

Actually, given the problems of scaling, far more people will enjoy
the transition to Zul Aman than people will ever see the Black Temple.
I would even suspect that more people will end the expansion in Zul
Aman than in Tempest Keep.

> 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.

A bit more (as I said above, you have already at least 0.13% of their
customers having killed Illidan. But no, I don't think you're going to
see it ever reach 2%, for instance. But then, we're talking about the 6th
raid endboss).

Diregarding hyperbole, then yes. I'd rather have them adding more things
at the low end of the scale than the high end. But the percentage of
raiders in WoW is far more significant than EQ ever was, and that's
probably due to one big factor: instancing.

People didn't raid in EQ because it required organising 50+ people,
*and* racing every guild on the server to your raid targets.

-- 
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)