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The more things change…June 18th, 2006 |
(Raph’s player lifecyle) + (If players spend less time in each MMORPG that they play, since all the MMORPGs practically the same) =
1) You’d expect to see MMORPG subscriptions get more “bursty” as everyone tries the new game, gets bored of it in 2 months, and goes on to the next new thing. (This effect is offset by new players that have never played MMORPGs before.)
1a) The burstiness encourages guilds to form social structures outside the game, such as their own BBS and chat rooms (or voice chat). Thus, guild members can socialize no mater what game they’re playing. => “Social ties” don’t lock players into a game as strongly as they once did. (Is this true?)
2) Those that get permanently bored will (a) stop playing altogether, (b) go directly to PvP in something like Halo2 or a PvP-specific MMORPG (Eve online), or (c) go directly to a free chat room.
3) It all leads back to innovation and pushing the envelope so that (a) and (c) players come back.
The burstier subscription bases is definitely happening; that much I can verify from statistics.
Again, this is a pattern we have seen before in the days of “stock muds.” The phenomenon in the early to mid-90s was that a codebase was developed – DIKU – that was relatively easy to set up because it used standardized data forms that were fill-in-the-blank templates. You could just download content and put it into your world. You could have a game ready to roll in a matter of hours. But to make something siginificantly different gameplay-wise, you had to hack the code, because rules were all hardcoded.
The result was an explosion of muds of the Diku variety, and along with it, an explosion of variant codebases that each attempted to streamline or otherwise refine that codebase: Circle, Merc, etc etc.
The result of that was “stock mud syndrome,” where there was a vast sea of muds that all largely played the same. Stock muds came to be regarded derisively as the detritus of the mud world – if you logged in and saw Midgard the stock starting city, it did not bode well for the creativity you would see in the rest of the game. Better Dikus made a point of adveritisng “all original areas.” The really good ones advertised themselves as “Dike-derived,” “originally based on Merc,” or some such, and boasted of the many hacks that had been done to the codebase in order to completely change the nature of the game, usually whilst retaining the ease of content creation that templated data implied.
Ironically, it is the Diku model that was then imitated by EverQuest, and has now become the default gameplay mode for MMORPGs. To anyone who played in those days, the differences between EQ and WoW are very much akin to the differences between any two Diku-derivatives: mostly in polish and minor game changes. There is nothing new under the sun. WoW and EQ seem very different until you have literally 4000 other games very much like them, set in contrast to some games that are very very different.
Diku populations were extremely bursty — a new popular mud would come along, be the subject of everyone’s conversation for a few months, and then usually fade away. Often they imploded under their own weight as popularity drove problems like bad administration, reckless code changes, lag because of overloaded servers, and so on. The muds that lasted a long time were the rare ones, and are mostly still around today.
The burstiness phenomenon is perhaps most easily seen in non-MMO communities like the first person shooter world. There we saw that not only were all communities formed outside the games proper, but that long-term loyalty to any one given game is next to nil in most cases; it’s all abut trying out the new shiny, and then perhaps returning to the prior love if the new one doesn’t satisfy. This is the common pattern for most games and hardcore gamers, where we see butterfly-like flittering from hit to hit, long-standing communities centered around one game notwithstanding. Taken as a statistical whole, the number of people fiercely devoted to, say, Quake II, is nothing compared to the number of people who just sample and do not develop loyalties.
The idea that people are more tied to their social circle than to a given game is likewise very old; again, the mud days showed this very clearly, because the games really were so similar and in some cases identical. There was a lot less of the “run the community outside the game” thing going on, perhaps because the communities were basically the size of the game (each game was smaller) and because there was no huge infrastructure for supporting out-of-game communities (it was mostly Usenet and listservs — no web forums because, well, no Web).
It wasn’t unusual to see the tight linkage between games and communities thus play out with actual games undergoing cell-like division and growth. The games that inspired EverQuest directly were of this sort: Copper begat Copper 2 (and many Copper muds) which begat Black Knight MUD (and many Copper 2 muds) which begat Sojourn which begat Toril and Duris, and Toril begat Sojourn 2 and Duris begat Duris 2, but not before Sojourn and Toril effectively begat Everquest.
It was common indeed for community splits to result in a group of mixed admins and players migrating off to create a new game with the issues they were upset about theoretically addressed. To simplify, the Toril/Duris split was over PvP. To simplify, the number of Fires of Heaven guild members who formed part of the core community of WoW suggest splits based on other issues. To simplify, the following Vanguard sees today exhibits much the same sort of approach: it’s that segment of the users that prefers a harder core experience and therefore splits off and follows those admins who share their feeling. The expectation in all of these cases is “give me the same game but with my issues fixed.”
Perhaps the most schizophrenic instance of this would be the UO split, which happened internal to the team and remained internal to the team, creating a two-headed game. (On the other hand, the dramatically large number of UO gray shards demonstrates the ways in which this process of splitting occurs).
As far as keeping people… This argues (as has long been established as best practice) that regular game refreshes with rule updates and content are necessary to keep a given population around. But there’s also tools you can use to tie the playerbase more tightly to a given world – a sense of ownership or investment that provokes a sense of responsibility. If a deep philosophical split develops, you can either surrender to the forces of nichification, or attempt to provide scope for both experiences within one world.
One can predict that there will be WoW folks leaving in at least three broad streams eventually: those who want more of the PvE linear experience, those who want more of the raiding, and those who want more of the RvR. We’ve already seen the dev teams splitting off, of course. And those players who have seen enough will indeed say “OK, now I am waiting for something new,” keep sampling new games with ever-shortening lifecycles, and perhaps abandon the hobby altogether. In Asia, we see popular MMOs bursting up and fading back away in the space of a couple of months, which is a matterof some concern to Korean developers given the difficulty in recouping their investment.
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If you want to play a Diku model graphical MMO you should play WoW, at least until you hit level 60.
) precise that “adding” should be taken as “adding to the game as a whole”, not as “adding stuff onto the end of the (levelling) game to make it longer”, which I believe is what you mean anyway.
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[...] Raph Koster has a nice little piece on the cyclical nature of audience behaviors in MMORPGs. [...]
[...] Comments [...]
[...] [Quote by: Ralph Koster] Ironically, it is the Diku model that was then imitated by EverQuest, and has now become the default gameplay mode for MMORPGs. To anyone who played in those days, the differences between EQ and WoW are very much akin to the differences between any two Diku-derivatives: mostly in polish and minor game changes. There is nothing new under the sun. WoW and EQ seem very different until you have literally 4000 other games very much like them, set in contrast to some games that are very very different. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/18/the-more-things-change/#more-541 [...]
[...] Citation: Tu aura toujours un contre-exemple prcis, mais je te redirige sur le site de Raph Koster qui explique trs bien que ce sont, quel que soit le systme, toujours les mmes 20% de joueurs qui remportent 80% des combats. J’ai pas l’url sous la min mais sur Google ca doit se trouver facilement. oui j’est dit a la fin de mon prcdent message que globalement j’etait dacord. Sinon tu parles de ce site ? http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/1…hange/#more-541 [...]
[...] The Lifecycles of a Player The More Things Change…and if you haven’t read it before, Players Who Suit MUDs. The first two are articles by Raph Koster, who was a lead designer on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. The last one is by Richard Bartle, who created the first MUD.Personally, I agree with most of what these articles say, at least in my experience. I’ll probably comment more on these later, but that’s a fair amount of information to digest. [...]