Sliding down the bell curve

Someone woke up the New Yorker magazine and told them about Ultima Online. In the article I found this quote interesting:

Running the game masters' room is a big expense for Origin and, to a large degree, an unanticipated one. Britannia was supposed to be self-policing, but instead it kept veering toward anarchy...Finally, last year, U.O. gave up on the notion of self-policing. Britannia these days exists in two parallel versions, or "facets"—Felucca, where killing other players is O.K., and Trammel, where, except under very limited circumstances, it is not. Four-fifths of all players choose Trammel.

So much for letting the players police themselves. I guess it doesn't scale well. And while 20% of the U.O. community is nothing to sneeze at, it also shows that most players don't want unrestricted player killing. Sorry Outcast.

Also interesting is this:

Nearly a quarter of a million people subscribe, and each player logs an average of thirteen hours a week, meaning that in the course of a year Ultima absorbs more than a hundred and sixty million man-hours.

If my memory serves, the average hours per week has gone down a little bit from two years ago, but even still, that's amazing. Thirteen hours a week is a part-time job. Personally I'd love to see the median hours per week, which I think is a lot lower, maybe by half. That's because I think the curve of hours people play is pretty skewed by a small percentage of people of play a ridiculous amount.

This small percentage of die-hard players exists in Clan Lord too. The effect these people have on the game, as a whole, is the single biggest problem of the game. It's also not an easy problem to solve due to the game design, a design shared by more online roleplaying games: the degree of game advancement has a direct relationship, if not a linear relationship, with the time spent playing.

So how is a person who plays 20 hours a week prevented from having 10 times the benefit of a player who plays 2 hours a week? Short answer: you don't.

A large amount of Clan Lord game design elements exist to cap game reward payout (coins, items and experience) to a rate that prevents players from advancing too quickly. Any area has to be designed so that either a very large group, or a very strong group, and especially a combination of the two is unable to yield an excessive benefit. That's also why the most recent, very challenging areas, like the deep Orga Camps, Tenebrion's Tower, and the Orga Foothills, are engineered to require large, strong groups working together. That type of challenge is hard to exploit in any way. And, as time goes by, and groups get stronger, the general difficulty of the area can be scaled up to match. Unfortunately, this makes game play for those of us firmly camped smack in the middle of bell curve to be pretty dull.

With world constantly being tweaked so the top 5% don't get too much experience or too many coins from large assaults which go on for hours, you can bet there's only crumbs to be had for the more casual player. That's because anything which could benefit a casual group could probably be exploited by a stronger group. The goalposts just keep slowly sliding further and further away.

I think what I find most disheartening is that there's no real solution to this due to the way Clan Lord is designed. Even worse, there's no incentive to solve it either. Clan Lord is a success for Delta Tao as long as it is fun enough. Fun enough to keep people subscribed, and to obtain enough new people to make up for people who move on for various reasons. Why would Delta Tao invest anything more than the minimum amount of money and time to keep it just fun enough? Sure,the game can be pretty frustrating, and it can be boring too, but if you have one fun experience in a month, if it's enough to keep you as a subscriber, that's perfect.

Ideally, maybe you'll even play a little less, too. Players who play very little, but don't quit, are the best customers.

I suspect there's this large group of people who now play very, very little. On the other side, you have have a small group of hard-core gamers who keep pushing the envelope. Whatever resources are available to be invested in the game get used mostly for the hard-core people. After all, the hard-core gamers are the most visible and most vocal. The larger, quieter, group of merely content players don't generally have specific issues or cause specific game design problems. They just know they aren't having as much fun as they used to. But again, as long as it's enough fun, that's alright. There's just no reason to try and make the game more engaging for the average player. That would lead to players staying online more, and economically, there's no benefit to that.

Delta Tao's business model for Clan Lord doesn't make growth a priority. Instead, it's about keeping costs down. A perfect example of this is prime time frame-rate reduction. Probably the biggest single player dissatisfaction comes form the frame-rate reduction at prime time gaming hours. By throttling down the bandwidth, Delta Tao is yielding a huge savings. So what if people avoid the server during those hours? As long as they keep their subscriptions, that's perfect.

I don't begrudge Delta Tao these economics. Clan Lord should make them money. I just wish they'd focus on making a game that was really fun to play for 3 or 4 hours a week without rewarding players who play a lot more than that. After all, the best customer isn't the rank whore, who consumes a disproportionate amount of resources, but it's the occasional player. How about focusing the game on the type of customer you really want to foster? Ten thousand occasional players are a better customer base than one thousand die-hard players.
posted 2:40 PM | link |