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General: Does Focusing Flourish or Fail?
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com columnist Sanya Weathers continues her exploration of MMOs from the development perspective with this look at focusing the game's design and whether it is a help or hindrance for developers.
One of my favorite questions to ask producers during interviews is, "What surprised you in terms of your player base?" The reason I love that question is because it's guaranteed content. Almost every other question in a standard MMO puff piece has the potential to end in a non-answer, either because the subject isn't allowed to answer or the answer was a null of some kind. The player base surprise question always has an answer, because the demographic reality of every MMO ever launched startled the developers in some way.
Early on in our genre's history, the surprise was, "Girls play TOO!" The developers did not employ girls, had never known any girls to appear down at the ol' hobby shop, and in several cases did not appear to know any girls. Certainly many had never seen an actual naked girl, given the surprising places breasts were attached to supposedly human torsos without supporting musculature.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I'm not sure the "say no" advice of the article follows logically from the "we attract unexpected audiences" beginning.
It's easy to blame catering to a subculture of the player base for a failed or costly change/expansion, but as you pointed out, developers and marketing often makes mistakes about what audience finds them. If the argument had been about how the squeaky wheel too often gets the grease or that when you look at metrics about your player base that it's easy to forget that you attracted a specific subset of that demographic not X of the stereotype, I would understand ... but not reacting with the resources available to keep things interesting for the actual player base you have attracted seems like a recipe for losing that playerbase/niche.
Good read, thank you. I was in a pissy mood this morning and you made my day [grins broadly]. I started to loose you when you started to tell Dev's to say 'NO!'; but then I thought about it, and you are probably right. I think the biggest problem is that in most Beta's, the Beta Tester/Player thinks they can honestly make a difference... and the Dev's tend to make them think so because of marketing ploys. Beta's today are really only testing player load, and are also more of a 'try it, you will like it' marketing approach. Most MMOG's today hitting the closed Beta phase, tend to already have 'most' of the bugs figured out and are just trying to make something work at this point. Anyway, how many Dev's want to appear that they do not listen to their players?... not too many. Instead, they ignore the players or promise things 'in time'. The truth does not come out because they do not want even one player to leave and have the whole Dev's world fall apart.
But, perhaps players also have to learn to say 'NO!'. I know that before, I would try to hang on to a game, hoping it would get better... when in truth, it rarely did. I have walked out of three Beta's recently, saying 'NO!'... so I am learning... and feel good about myself for doing it. I believe that players also have to identify what works for them and stick with it... and not let terms like 'carebear' have an effect on them. "Hey, idiot, I built your damn ship, and if you give me anymore grief, your next one will blow itself up immediately after it leaves the damn station... so shut up and let me do what I do best... keeping your silly butt in ships because you are not good enough to keep them flying for long... get it!!!... a*s*o*e."
With all the sciences we have [myself, a computer sciences and sociology major... go figure] you would think we could figure things out... but we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. One game which I think is a good example of overall development is EvE Online. Instead of taking tons of money and time, they started with a small audience and worked on it. They are not close to the numbers of WoW and all, but they have their base that is not going anywhere. I even saw where EvE was considered one of this year's games with the most potential, even though it has been out for 6 years. I know that based on design, I feel that I have so much left to do in EvE, that I do not want to leave it just yet. So options for me here is a key. I am finding out slowly that level based games where I follow a path placed out before me... just isn't me anymore. With EvE, I do not feel any pressure. With the time-based skill system, if I miss a few nights, it is not a disaster... not as if my group is now 5 levels ahead of me, and I am now alone or need to be power leveled to keep up. Of course, if I am at the BoB/Goon level in EvE, my offline life is doomed and no more... so whatever.
With most MMOG's coming out today, I see at least two years of release before they start finding their own and working up from there... if they last that long. But then, we players are fickled, and we will jump from one game to the next, trying to find the perfect game for us. Every press release of a new game is a spark of hope, only to be extingushed when the real game comes out. I am starting to believe I need to hang on to what I have, perhaps... and contradict everything I said above [grins]. So where is my Guild Wars 2!!!... damn it! I played Aion back in 2002, when it was called Dark Ages of Camelot. I wanted a GW+. [thinks]... oh crap, will they screw that one up as well? [cries]
So anyway, good article... I wish You well;
Lex.
Good read.
I like the telling gmae developers no. You have to stick to design principles or you will never reelease something or release something that is outside the scope of your design.
Say hello, To the things you've left behind. They are more a part of your life now that you can't touch them.
Good read Sanya,
Its so sad when the focus is lost and devs are ordered to yeild to "yes".
Since she's going to keep writing, I'm going to keep responding (and oddly everytime I respond honestly to one of these my rating loses at least half a star, hmmmmm). Once again an annoying read with the same whiney tone they all have. Ya you're a girl and you play games we get it, but at the same time you are worse for the stereotypes then helpfull with all the rants and whining that goes on in every written piece.
The one solid part of the article (and coincidently lacked all whining) was about adults enjoying kids games. And the reasons you post are very valid. However it should be stated that those same adults often times probably wouldn't like any of the main stream games anyways, and many of the mainstream players probably wouldn't enjoy the kids game. It's just bringing in a different audience. But everyone obviously appreciates a more polished, more bug free, easier to use interface and that can be adapted to any style of game.
I would be more interested to actually read the quote of a dev who said "I'm surprised at the number of roleplayers we got" since I have rarely ever seen a roleplayer in my way too many years of playing MMOs. The percentage of MMO players who are RPers is tiny, so for a dev to be surprised at how many roleplayers his project got he would of had to expect 0 and got .01% of the population as RPers.
You see, with additudes like you seem to express, role-players tend to keep to themselves less they be labeled a flake. Role-players don't enjoy forum fighting or getting caught up in a drama with a pvp leeter. They tend to be the unspoken masses that tend to ignore these pubic forums and keep to there little cliques.
Please, explain Sanya's "whine" and how she is complaining. Show me what you see as a grievance by her as I am blind to your take. Explain what is so clearly obvious to you that is negative here.
+1
I am with you, Cowboy... I do not get anything SnarlingWolf said except, 'let's crap on anything that Sanya says!'... and he wonders why his rating get nailed? Oh well... [shrugs]... on to big and better things.
Thank you for stating the fact that devs seem to have forgotten to say "NO".
But I hate to say this Sanya, this time this article is missing a little something! I don't know what it is, but I think one of the things that I look forward to when I read one of your articles, is your humor. Although you did put in some humor in at the beginning with( "Girls play TOO!" part) it seens to be missing throughout. Over all it dose state the facts and yes it is something that the devs need to learn.
..its a guideline, not a rule, as players we must remember: Its a Game.
Sanya love your articles btw.
I'd really like to see you do a write-up on the age of subscribers. In my experiences with many MMO's (WoW, WAR, EVE, and more). I would say the average age of people in my guild(s) was easily over 20 years old. Also backed up by my GF's WoW guild, she says about 2/3's of her memebers are over 18+.
My current WAR guild I'd say the youngest is 17-18 years old. With most of everyone around 23-26.
I really think game designers are incorrect with designing games around the 13-16 year olds. Its foolish when you think about it, that demographics subscription is based off of them convincing someone else to pay the monthly sub for them.
I'd like game developers to start making games for (in my opinion) their largest game audience, the 20+ year olds.
And Im not talking games like AoC. Adult does not mean boobies and dismemberment. I want adult stories, quests, situations. Or a better way of putting it, I want Dark Fantasy not Disney Fantasy, I want "A Song of Ice and Fire" not "Narnia", I want the new "BSG" not the 'ole "Ponderosa BSG".
I really think they are off on their demographics. I'd venture to say its 1/3 eighteen and unders and 2/3 eighteen and overs. Or at the very least at 50/50 mix.
Hell, it really only makes sense that you want to appeal to a demographic thats getting older (you already have them) to trying to appeal to a constenly new 13,14,15 year old crowd.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
"Because unless you have five years and fifty million dollars, your best chance at getting that five and fifty is to identify a niche and serve it well."
In the immortal words of one Robbie Van Winkle (aka Vanilla Ice), "Word to your mother". Gamers and industry insiders who keep comparing new and existing games to that 800lb gorilla in terms of subscriptions only illustrate that they truly know nothing and if you can find something "less than a grain of salt", then that's what you should take their opinions with.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
a valuable point i think would serve any subscription system (from magazines to games) the "Tweens" are going to have a hard enoug htime convincing mom and pop "but it's only 24 dollllllars for MMOGRPG.com The Magazine for a year" now.
Imagine confincing them to pony up 30 bucks for only 2 months?
Recently in Aion, a poll showed that most players in the Beta were between 21-25 years old... with 26-30 coming in a close second. I believe, the younger crowd like the console/settop games better... based on what I have seen. When one starts talking about MMOG's and heavier equipment, I think the age limit goes up a bit.
I did a paper on women and online gaming in college recently [yes, I finally graduated in 2007 at the ripe old age of 58], and the fastest growing online gaming population by percentage was middle aged women from 30-40 years old. Now most of them went to Second Life and other less violent games than some of the MMOG's we have all grown to love, but they are definately working their way in. I had to laugh at one woman's statement about the Barbie-like avatars for women... "I am 36 years old, have had two children, and nature has not been all that kind to me... so let me live like this for a few hours a night, Ok?" [paraphrased].
I did find one new identity that I learned while researching online gaming trends... the term 'man-child'. This, based on what I have read, is a male from 21-30 years old, who is probably a college graduate or has some college, and either lives with other man-children or at home with his parents. He works a full or part time job, but only so he can play his online games. He spends up to 35-40+ hours a week playing online games, which really becomes another full time job for him. For some reason, when they hit 30 years old, something slaps them silly and they tend to come back to reality. They marry and get serious about offline stuff, but still maintains an online existance... just not so much involved. The major complainers about this new identity are women from 21-30, who have seen a steep drop of men in the dating/marrying pool. So I guess many of the women may be saying, 'If I can not beat them, might as well join them" and coming online as well. However, my unscientific anaylsis of this is that it is Nature imposing a form of birth control on the human population, because we are way overpopulated. [grins]
So if you do something stupid like a NGE or a Atlantis expansion the correct response is "no" we are not fixing it? Then watching your playerbase disappear into the ether the correct move?
BTW Lex, you made some good points...
Actually OZ the point there was that they should have said *no* to doing Atlantis in the first place.
I agree completely btw, more game devs need to be willing to make a game to a specific vision, publicize that vision and stick to it....the drive to be all things to all audiences is part of what is driving so many mediocre games.
And then you have the legacy games like Everquest I. I've played this game since 2001. My guild skews mostly in the 30s and 40s with a few in the 50s and 60s. Almost half my guild is female. Being an older game, we see many older players on the server. I went to Fan Faire once and they said they understand since the game is old, their players are older. We have less time for those 10 hour commitments to an event/camp/raid, but we have lots of blocks of an hour or two. We also have the money to have several accounts. I'm not sure everyone there gets it.
I've watched Sony bounce around catering to different groups. One expansion caters to raiders who are mostly younger so there is a push in the population to join raiding guilds and many players without the time to commit to a hardcore raiding guild leave the game. Next expansion is more group content and less raiding so higher raiding guilds lose players. The raiding material is too difficult for the mid-level guilds. Then the higher raiding guilds ravage the mid-level raiding guilds for members and destroy the mid-level guilds. People lose their "family" in the mid-level guilds and leave the game. Or raid content is not instanced and mid-level guilds get blocked out of content by one or two uber-guilds monopolizing it. What is the point of this un-caffeinated rambling?
As Sony jumps around catering to different groups, the result has been lower and lower server populations on top of the natural attrition of the game. They haven’t merged servers that really need it so those that are into the socialization aspect are leaving the game also. Sony, too, need to commit to a niche. It is an older game so embrace the older gamers. Think about the ramifications to the whole ecosystem when you change things. There are wonderful aspects of the game. Loads of content. Relationships with real people that have existed for years because of the age of the game. Many of us in my guild are frustrated by EQ, but we stay because of the friends. The last expansion was great for groupers, but without any mid-level raid content. Sony also changed some vital quests after a few months that made it too difficult for groupers to now complete. These types of things frustrate and drive people away. I’m holding my breath with what they might do to the game with the next expansion. Pick an audience and do it well.
/ramble off
*Dagdas/Laurie
Great article Sanya.
@ Dagdas/Laurie - as Bill Cosby once said:
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody".
Loved the article. Just say No! I love it! They really do need to learn this word. Saying yes everytime I have seen many good games ruined.
Dagdas, you realize that if SOE followed your advice, EQ would still be a hardcore game? Original EverQuest (which I remember, having starting on Thanksgiving of '99) was group focused with only two raids. Problem was, if you weren't relatively hardcore and played a lot (or played a cleric), you probably wouldn't get into the "best" groups (LGuk, Sol B, AoF in Cazic Thule). With Kunark, they added many more raids (in addition to 1-60 content) and Velious added more raids and some pretty neat quests that seemed tailored to the more casual player (ha! Tailored. See what I did there? Shawl quest!). If they had said 'no' back then, you would still have to kill a First Brood dragon to get into Sleeper's (no Shard of Hsagra's talisman dropping off all and sundry and no 'you get in because you can level to X'), you'd still need a successful PoJ trial to get into 2nd tier of PoP and so forth. All they've done since 2002 has been an attempt to appeal to 'the older gamer' (which they often erroneously think is the same as 'casual gamer'). The problems that exist in the game now are mostly a result of that switch in focus. There are no 'mid tier raiding guilds' because nothing they can raid drops anything that is an upgrade over bazaar/defiant/tradeskilled gear or stuff that rots in zones they have access to. No, many of the problems they have today is as a result of their changing their focus and trying to "spread the love around".
No, EQ1 has been steadily moving toward making things easier for the older gamer (which they assume is what they want since they're 'casual players', right??? <- sarcasm). That's why you have raid quality loot dropping off of the modern equivalent of gnoll pups. That's why you can assemble a full suit of near-raid quality gear without ever so much as seeing a raid. That's why you can progress to almost the very top tier of current content without raiding for a second. That's why even the raids were made so easy that the remaining "hardcore guilds" completed the expansion in record time. It's expected that even a moderately motivated mid tier guild can complete the current expansion before the next expansion is released. You know as well as I do that that was unheard of years ago.
Great article, Sanya. Ever consider going to twice a week?
I think one aspect of this, at least with those games that were being reasonably successful in the past and then got messed up by expansions, is they focused too much on what some people disliked about their game without making absolutely sure first of all what the bulk of their subscribers most liked.
As long as you know what your player base's favourite bits are then you can judge any potential major changes against the criterion of "does it mess up any of the favourite bits". So maybe finding out what the bulk of your players most like is the most important step.
I think one of the reasons it's so important not to annoy your existing player base is the "word of mouth" war. If a person is looking to try a game and knows four people and three of them say it's great and one says it sucks then they might try it. If the person asks the same question and gets the opposite response then they probably won't. I imagine it's theoretically possible for a game to have a very unpopular expansion that does actually make it a better game, (in some sort of number of potential subscribers sense), but because of p***ing off huge numbers of the original players the game dies through losing the word of mouth war.
Also... my theory on Everquest (and I think WoW has made the same mistake but it hasn't completely filtered through yet).
I think EQ's big mistake was constantly adding more stuff on the top of the existing game. I think they should have had a PoP type expansion where level 50s went through a one way portal into a separate realm with separate banks etc. That way you'd have the 1-50 game as a kind of self-contained first chapter and the PoP type expansion as the first stage in the 51-100 2nd chapter. The original game would have gradually found a perfect balance through minor tweaking without all the later stuff constantly messing it up. They could even concievably have had a 100-150 3rd chapter and ad infinitum.
Almost every other question in a standard MMO puff piece has the potential to end in a non-answer, either because the subject isn't allowed to answer or the answer was a null of some kind.
I've never understood why this is allowed to happen, if the goal of the reporter is to, you know, report, and not serve as an extended marketing arm of the company being interviewed.
Do these producers threaten to never grant future interviews if you ask them tough questions? Are they surrounded by publicists and other PR-tards who exist solely to obfuscate the truth?
Honestly, I'm waiting for the day that game journalists realize they have just as much power, if not more, than the executives they're interviewing. Maybe then puff pieces will be the exception rather than the rule.
In any event, a good column as usual, this is one of the very few game journalists that actually says anything.
You're mistakenly comparing gaming jounralists to 'main stream' journalists. Main stream journalists get paid by adverstisers who they don't interview. Gaming journalists have to stay in good graces of the game makers and equipment manufacturers, because those same companies pay 95% of their pay checks.
Am I the only one who reads her articles and thinks "Yeah, right. Who said that to you?" She deals with so many stereotypes it's extremely difficult to take anything she says seriously.
Seems even the columnists have their trolls and fanbois - should call this forum "Sanyafall".
I'd have to agree that, without even anonymized attribution, the "quotes" Sanya uses to back up her thesis have limited value. These seem to be generic comments, recreated from memories of conversations that may have taken place years ago. Without context, they really don't shed much light on anything.
I am a firm believer that the future of the MMO genre lies in niche games. I think that, as off-the-shelf development packages become available, small indie studios and start-ups should, if they keep their focus, be able to produce solid, commercially viable virtual worlds to meet the needs and desires of any number of audiences. We saw the proof of concept with Neverwinter Nights; it just takes a step up from there.
However, I disagree strongly that that means a successful game company, with the money to invest, can't then diversify within it's own product range to widen it's customer-base. The example of an "adult" server in a child-friendly game is a poor one, because one thing the internet is not good at at sorting people effectively by real-life age, and because child-protection is a media hotbutton issue. Sanya's right to say that that would be a mistake.
If you are running a successful hardcore, PvP game, though, and the fantastic screenshots of your beautiful landscapes and the reports of the intriguing lore and clever mob AI are attracting much comment from people who'd love to get into that world, but fear the stress of the PvP ruleset, how can you lose by opening a team-rules PvP server, or even a PvE server? That doesn't dilute your brand, it enhances it.