Sardu (Page 57)
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Wed, Feb 23, 2011Sardu
Depending on which developers you talk to, they'll be more or less up front about how their company factors "churn" into their business model. The idea here is that you have to account for X number of players entering and leaving your game from month to month.
With a subscription model, you want lower churn since the goal is ongoing subscription revenue. But with FTP you always want a good mix of both stable and new customers. Long term players have a greater investment in the game, so are likely to spend cash on things like cosmetic upgrades over time. New players are more likely to purchase quality of life improvements (boosts, inventory upgrades, etc.). So your model has to account for both.
A reason why churn is considered OK is that something like an XP boost or inventory upgrade costs the developer less up front resources to implement when compared to new armor skins, or items more likely to appeal to ongoing players. So having X number of players leave and Y number entering on any given month means more opportunity to sell the low production cost items.
You bring up an interesting point with Guild Wars 2. When I had spoken to ArenaNet pre-launch, the idea was to make core systems like dynamic events so that they helped foster those kinds of bonds within a given server community. In the live game, quite the opposite has happened, where I see a very fragmented community outside of maybe regular participants in WvW.
The thing with player reputations is that you need to give players reasons to tools that help them interact more directly outside of basic combat situations. For example, while many players bemoaned the original crafting system implementation in EQII, there were plenty of others who really enjoyed the system of dependencies between trades. On my server at least, I knew most of the dedicated crafters simply because the game gave me a clear reason to interact with them.
Likewise, in EQ I met and interacted with people on my necro due to game mechanics since I could help recover corpses or even provide a rez for partial XP recovery. Buffing as a social mechanic also helped, as did the more direct sales style of marketplace.
We've hit a point where too many companies are attempting to leverage social media and mobile markets to expand their user base, but at the expense of community. If I send an in-game alert to Facebook, only my current friends will see it, and they probably already know I'm playing your game. Or if I can interact with things like an auction house, skill training, crafting, or other stuff on my phone, you also just cut out even more reasons for me to interact with my server community.
Finally... as much as I used to grumble about the unpredictable nature of Gather Shadows, I do miss the "oh crap!" moments of running through an unfriendly city and having it drop, turning travel into meaningful gameplay in the process.
I regularly grouped with a somewhat non-standard party like that too. I played a necro, and then there was always a shaman and druid in the group, with other people rotating in here and there. A cleric meant we could mess around with having my pet tank for us, or tossing in a bard let us pull some pretty zany kiting antics that just the druid and myself might not otherwise be able to pull off.
The entire notion of the "holy trinity" stemmed from classes each having more specialized roles. Even when two classes could serve a similar function - necro / monk FD pulling for example - there were endless debates on which one did it better.
As you noted, even filling a DPS role was somewhat of an art form. Sure, mages loved to brag about massive damage during boss fights, but they also didn't have lazy gaming tools like threat or DPS meters baked into the UI so it really did take a bit of skill to balance the two.
Now we basically have the equivalent of "dummy lights" on car dashboards. A "Check your oil, dumbass" warning light isn't all that different from "Stop pulling aggro from the tank, dumbass" meters. Don't even get me started on things like Spell Alert...
Long story short, classes should have specialized abilities and roles if we ever hope to see a return to actual social gameplay in MMOs. I personally prefer a scenario where classes don't need to be balanced to the point of sameness as a general rule though, but sadly the nasty word "normalization" came into existence and individual classes have lost a lot of their coolness-factor as a result.
I played a necro in EQ for a long time, and to this day still think there was a lot of genius behind the death mechanic in that game. What's now considered to be a hindrance to gameplay - or a slap on the wrist at best - actually *created* gameplay. Sure, recovering from something on the scale of a full raid wipe could be a very slow, painful process, but that was also a time when MMOGs had an actual risk vs. reward component for attempting that kind of content. Now it's more like you pay for item repairs, shrug it off, and go do something else because obviously your game sucks if everything isn't about instant gratification or moving a progress bar with every action.