World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

So welcome to your first D-Mail.  The term grew out of the early years of The Syndicate® when many of the ideas, concepts, and lessons we will discuss in the coming weeks emerged from.  All was not roses in those early years; it was not uncommon for me to login and deal with drama.  Doing so invariably resulted in an E-Mail to the offending person.  Rather quickly that became known as getting a D-Mail.  Since then, drama has ceased but the term has stuck around and has affectionately come to refer to any time I get a bit long winded about a topic I am passionate about.

In this D-Mail, I'd like to touch on part of my thesis that strong communities make the MMO more profitable for business.  That concept is most easily demonstrated by the antithesis which is weak communities (or communities that implode and cease to exist) are bad for business. 

At their core, guilds are about personal relationships.  The overarching purpose of defeating content as fast as possible can mask that underlying purpose, but it is still there to some degree even if that purpose is a pissing contest over who is more l33t or who has the better gear score.  Many people join guilds not simply for help with content but also for a desire to belong to something greater than themselves and because they want the social aspects of the group.  Playing MMORPGs means a desire to establish a social connection; otherwise why not play another round of Dragon Age and try to sleep with all the women at once for the 12th time? 
So because we all generally want that social aspect we begin to form those personal relationships.  We may not realize it but we often come to count on JoeTheBlacksmith to make our items and SuzieTheRaidLeader to setup our hunts and so on.  We build them into our virtual lives as necessary components to our happiness and as part of our vision of the "rightness" of that world.

Lets imagine the scenario where we have joined a guild, we have built personal relationships whether we realized it or not, and all is right in the world. Then we login one day and all of the sudden all is not right in our world.  The GM quits and the guild ceases to exist, or that JoeTheBlacksmith turns out to be quitting the game so he takes all of your uber rare crafting components and Ebays them, or SuzieRaidLeader tells you how much you really do suck at raiding and bans you from all raids or denies you any upgrades, or maybe they all up and quit because there was some massive fight over loot and everyone is mad at everyone else that they didn't win UberPixelsOfDestruction. In the end, you are left in the guild virtually alone.  Regardless of the cause, you logged in and the virtual world of personal relationships you built up changed in a sudden and dramatic way.

We as humans, for the most part, really don't like change.  While there are some exceptions out there who thrive on change, most people work really hard to establish things into a set routine that exactly matches their needs and desires and when that pattern changes, they come under great stress.  If you have ever read an article about the biggest stress factors that can happen to a person then you have probably noticed the big ones all deal with change such as job change, buying a house, divorce, or having your first child.  The same concept applies to online gaming.  We don't like change to our "perfect" virtual world.  We have invested hundreds or thousands of hours building our world into the shape we wanted it.  It may be dysfunctional.  It may be something others would look at and wonder why we do what we do.  But, for us, it's awesome.  We are comfortable there. 

So, you logged in and your "perfect" world has imploded.  Your guild suddenly doesn't exist, your "buddy" ran off with all your phat l00ts, and you are banned from raiding for all time.  What happens next is something many of us have observed.  Accounts are closed, characters are deleted and, in some cases, when the perceived betrayal is large enough, gaming itself is tossed out the window.

From a business standpoint, the failure of that community results in a loss of revenue.  In some cases that loss is temporary, but in other cases it is permanent.  Individually, none of us make a hill of beans worth of difference to the bottom line of any MMORPG, but collectively we are the SOLE reason the games exist.  When communities are not afforded the tools and structure and rule-sets they need to thrive and succeed, the instances of major failures causing loss of revenue go up.  So back to part of the original thesis of this column:  strong communities make for a more profitable game.

Let’s take a look at a fact based example. EverQuest (EQ) was the progenitor of raid content. As we will discuss in future articles, making that content conducive to growing and strengthening a guild is critical to a title’s success and to player enjoyment. EQ did not do that back in 2004. At that point in the game, everyone fought over every boss. By early to middle 2004, EQ was at the height of its popularity with an ever increasing number of people fighting over the same few loot drops each week.

Then, the bottom fell out. In almost the blink of an eye, one hundred thousand people quit the game. To make matters worse, late in 2004, along came World of Warcraft promising instancing and with it the chance to do every boss, every week, regardless of what other guilds did. Another two hundred and fifty thousand people leave EQ. By 2006, the game had lost 64% of its subscribers.

However, over this time SOE was hard at work addressing those mistakes. They added in new options for players to adventure in small groups via instancing. The hemorrhaging stopped and while EQ will never regain its former glory, it is still around today and still has a loyal fan base. Applying those same lessons to EverQuest II, SOE has been able to see that title constantly grow in subscribers over that same period and it is still growing today. Making decisions that support guild stability can and does affect the profits of an MMORPG along with all of our enjoyment as players.

You might be saying: that this is all common sense!  Players are the reason games exist!   I would agree with you.  It is common sense.  Yet, why are there so few advances in tools for communities or in game design that minimizes potential explosive drama?  One could argue that everyone inherently knows that players are the reasons games exist, but many game developers don't yet appreciate the link between successful communities and player retention. 

So in future articles we will look at a large number of aspects of this issue - how communities are effected by loot systems, raid and content design, user interface design and add-ons, to recruiting practices and tools, to in-game and out-of game support - with special attention given to games that have done it right and games that fail at it miserably. If you really think about it, there is not a single aspect of an MMORPG that we cannot directly tie into how it positively or negatively affects community success and as we have established: Community success can and does drive revenue.

Join Sean Stalzer for D-Mail, a look at the intersection between online games and player communities,
twice a month at Ten Ton Hammer.