[MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Dave Rickey
> Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2000 5:26 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the
> Ugly.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Raph Koster <rkoster at austin.rr.com>
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Date: Saturday, June 03, 2000 1:29 AM
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad
> and the Ugly.
>
>
> >Pretty much every flat fee company out there is trying to reduce average
> >hours lpayed per session and per week in their next games. As Gordon
Walton
> >(ex of Kesmai and now running UO) put it to me, "UO is the perfect game
for
> >an hourly fee scheme."
> >
> You can
> reduce average hours per player only at the cost of increasing
> churn, if at all.

I am not entirely sure that is the case. Let's break it down...

First, we're speaking of average play sessions, and average hours per week,
two distinct figures, with very different sorts of causes and different
sorts of issues to them were we to try to minimize them.

Hopefully everyone agrees with the premise that shorter average play
sessions opens us up to a larger audience? Most adults have trouble setting
aside blocks of 3 to 6 uninterrupted hours to do anything at all, especially
play a game. Reducing this seems eminently desirable, and may actually
*increase* the addiction, because the current length of play sessions
usually includes a lot of "set up time" at the start of a play session
(locating and assembling a group, traveling to the points of interest, etc).
I would bet you could reduce the average play session of EQ by a third by
putting in a really nice "matcher" system for forming parties, for example.
An MMORPG that has satisfying play sessions of only one hour will hit a far
broader audience than the ones today.

Another tactic for tackling average play session is to have exactly the same
mechanics in smaller bite-size chunks. If it normally takes six hours to get
the Sword of Lambada, make it take three. And so on. The addictiveness will
likely not change much from scaling this.

Neither of the above tactics alter retention much, IMHO. The third might,
but in which direction is anyone's guess.

Consider leaving in your time-consuming mechanics, as above, but put in
other mechanics and forms of play that do not require time. For example,
allow offline mass production for crafting skills, or ways of doing guild
management via a website, etc. These will tend to drive down your average
while leaving all the other mechanics intact and able to addict. Some
players will play for these other mechanics exclusively, and even the
addicted players will likely use them to some extent, reducing the time
spent online. Some play sessions will consist entirely of doing these brief
activities.

All of those things could be done without actually reducing hours per
week--in fact, the availability of half-huor quickie things to do in the
game might well push UP the hours per week.

As far as tackling hours per week--again, the third approach, of allowing
greater interaction and play with the game when not actually logged on--has
great potential. There is a LOT of stuff one currently does on a mud that
could be done offline or via a website, reducing bandwidth usage and hours
logged per week. You could even "play" this way, depending on the mechanics
offered.

>     Anyway, it's eventually going to be a moot point.  The amount of
> physical hardware and consistant bandwidth needed to run one of
> these games
> is not going to rise nearly as fast as the cost of that equipment and
> bandwidth is going to drop.  Right now those costs eat up the lion's share
> of subscription fees, in 10 years they'll be trivial.

Demand for bandwidth worldwide, last I heard, was rising a lot faster than
physical infrastructure construction. This would, eventually, lead to higher
costs for bandwidth (likely not to the end user but to people higher up the
chain). Anyone have recent figures on this?

>     I once calculated that EQ's bandwidth costs could have been cut by
> 2/3...by halving the population per server and running twice as many.

It could be cut by 2/3 by just sending less needless data, I suspect. :)




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