[MUD-Dev2] Re: Activity Duration in MMOs (was: Spore andMMOs)

[Damion Schubert]

On 10/17/07, Michael Hartman <mlist at thresholdrpg.com> wrote:
>
> Mike Sellers wrote:
> >
> > On one hand, I agree with you: I find very little "fun" in raiding as
> > constructed in WoW.
> >
> > OTOH, clearly many others disagree, as shown by their behavior
>
> But that is the thing. There are not "many" others that disagree. The
> population of WoW that participates in raids is extremely small as a
> percentage.


The population of WoW that participates in raids is somewhere between
5 and 15%, depending on whose numbers you use.  It would be easy to
say that that number is really low, and blow off the whole concept.  But
don't.

Of the characters that have reached max level, my rudimentary research
suggests the majority of them have raided.  According to WoWJutsu,
there are 29K ranked guilds in Europe and US combined that have
made 'significant progress' (WoWJutsu only tracks your guild if you've
have roughly downed the third boss a couple of times).  If we assume that
most of the guilds killing Gruul are at least 30 man guilds, it's pretty
easy
to see that this number probably exceeds 1M characters who are, or
have, raided.


Blizzard has admitted that the percentage of people with even a single
> level capped character is small. I don't recall it off hand, but it was
> the minority with even ONE character at cap.


According to WowCensus, 34% of all characters above level 10
are level 70. WoWCensus is not perfect (it depends on people running
the tool on their server), but should be vaguely representative
as a sample.  (Incidentally, 45% of characters are above level 60.
Also incidentally, these numbers are both up 5% from when I looked
at them just a couple months ago).

         http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

What you are ignoring, however, is the following.
1) Of the people who reach level 70, a huge percentage of THOSE people
raid.  People want to keep playing their character, even after it hits the
cap.
2) The people who reach level 70 are far more likely to be devoted players
(i.e. play daily and be reaching the end of available content to consume).
3) When your capped players get bored, you lose not only your most
devoted characters, but the nucleus of your game community.

There are at least 2M characters out there that are level 70. The owners
of these characters would prefer to not have to mothball them - they have
serious emotional attachments to those characters, as well as to their
guildmates.

People who hit max level want to keep going.  People who do so in a PvE
environment would prefer a means to do so in a PvE fashion.

So the available data shows that raiding is NOT popular in WoW, and yet
> for some reason the majority of their new content is raid oriented. This
> really boggles my mind.


That's easy - the majority of people who are not raiding still have not
finished
the core game content!  They still have a ton of content to consume!

Blizzard has actually announced the opposite - they are increasing levelling
speed and adding some content to get players over some key humps.
The goal is to clump up people even more at the top end.  After all, there
is a ton of content available there for the players who aren't there yet -
not
even counting the raid system (BC quest content, a wealth of 5 man
dungeons, etc).

In any level-based game, stratification of content becomes a problem.
Making level-agnostic content results in making content which is trivial
and uninteresting to your most devoted customers.  Blizzard is making
a strident effort to narrow that gap, so that more players can experience
the new content they are building.

All that being said, I sure wish they'd add some more 70 5-man dungeons.
Zul'Aman looks promising, though.

--d