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Are mmos changing to meet player demands ?
kjempff
Member RarePosts: 1,759
Most people here can agree to the statement that mmos are not the same as they used to be. Some call it evolving, some call it devolving, it depends on what part of a mmo you focus on - That is not really what I want to talk about, lets just say we can agree that mmos are changing ?
There is one thing in these kind of discussions that is being said again and again, that I would like to challenge. It is that mmos are changing to meet player demands, or that mmos are being designed to a new kind of player.
As that in some areas sound plausible enough there are also in my opinion just as many things I would guess that no "new player" are asking for. You just get the whole package, some of it you like and some of it is rotten - The developers however have a difficult time guessing which was good and which was bad.
The thing I would like to challenge is that developers have such an insight in what players want that they are just reacting to it. I am sure the big ones got focus groups, trend experts and other number crunchers, but does that really reflect what players want in any kind of detail needed to understand them ?
There are x million WoW players so lets do the same.. does not really tell you what parts of WoW they like or which mechanics are good and which are unwanted. This yaddayadda style game is not selling well, so yaddayadda must be unpopular ? not necessarily, it could be all kinds of other faults that makes players choose something else.
Just because some mmo sell well does not necessarily tell that the players want/like everything contained, but more like a pros and cons decision as I am sure most of you use personally.
As an example, you love the combat system in yaddayadda mmo, but you don't like that the game is based on p2w whales... do you play it anyway ? I am sure you the player did not ask for p2w monetization so that is not something the industry is making to meet your demands, but they did make that awesome other thing many players are asking for.. now is that mmo changing to meet player demands or not ?
I am not saying it is a completely wrong statement to say that mmos just reflect what the market demands, but I would like to challenge that this is the entire truth and especially that developers know what "we" want and just delivers it all to us.
Discuss ?
There is one thing in these kind of discussions that is being said again and again, that I would like to challenge. It is that mmos are changing to meet player demands, or that mmos are being designed to a new kind of player.
As that in some areas sound plausible enough there are also in my opinion just as many things I would guess that no "new player" are asking for. You just get the whole package, some of it you like and some of it is rotten - The developers however have a difficult time guessing which was good and which was bad.
The thing I would like to challenge is that developers have such an insight in what players want that they are just reacting to it. I am sure the big ones got focus groups, trend experts and other number crunchers, but does that really reflect what players want in any kind of detail needed to understand them ?
There are x million WoW players so lets do the same.. does not really tell you what parts of WoW they like or which mechanics are good and which are unwanted. This yaddayadda style game is not selling well, so yaddayadda must be unpopular ? not necessarily, it could be all kinds of other faults that makes players choose something else.
Just because some mmo sell well does not necessarily tell that the players want/like everything contained, but more like a pros and cons decision as I am sure most of you use personally.
As an example, you love the combat system in yaddayadda mmo, but you don't like that the game is based on p2w whales... do you play it anyway ? I am sure you the player did not ask for p2w monetization so that is not something the industry is making to meet your demands, but they did make that awesome other thing many players are asking for.. now is that mmo changing to meet player demands or not ?
I am not saying it is a completely wrong statement to say that mmos just reflect what the market demands, but I would like to challenge that this is the entire truth and especially that developers know what "we" want and just delivers it all to us.
Discuss ?
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Comments
The players demanding not to have cash shops have a very short list of MMOs to choose from but are mainly left in the dust.
So going to say no they don't give a shit about player demands, just making money.
(also when I say MMO I mean 100+ players not just multiplayer)
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
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Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/I don't think a genre with 5 year development cycles would ever evolve around player demand. There is too much money at risk and publisher's will always demand development follows their decisions. Microtransactions in a way can bridge this gap after release, but those products are broken by design. How can a game that caters to less than 10% of their population ever be considered meeting the demands of their players?
In a way, MMORPGs have zero resemblance to the rest of the video game industry and many of the design principles and consumer behaviors do not apply.
They don't know what we want , but they know what they want , our money .
I mean, i dont play any crap anymore and i decide critical, where i spend my time into.
In earlier days the internet itself was the new mmorpg game, i bet barely anyone here can remember newsnet polling via zmodem, eh ?!
Ive been there bevore all that already.
Born in a time without every family having a TV, in time when you had to unplug it from power when there was a thunderstorm, there was just no internet.
Enjoyment out of your very personal phantasy is a real ability in my book, and the tool to get there must not be a computergame at all, but it can be a game and if its done right, its a great experience for the players.
The industry should focus on exacly that - make us happy.
That said, its the end for cash-shop game2, the end of p2w, the end of %-modifiers.
It will be mutch more entertaining when we just ignore games that are based on industrial greed mechanics. We should only focus games that serve our demand for playing.
Sorry, but its true.
One thing I learned when writing stories and creating music was that everyone (regardless of education, experience, profession, or merit) has an opinion and if I changed my characters or my music to fit the mold to every generated opinion out there, then the final product would be the farthest away from my own mind by the time I am finished.
If a person loves my work, good for them.
If a person hates my work, good for them.
I will not sell out those who like my work in order to convert those who do not like my work.
Otherwise you would be dealing with publishers, editors, producers and other professionals who most definitely would be asking you to change your works to make them as polished and marketable as possible.
Nature of business, applies in gaming as well.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Some changes are made due to business demands
Some changes are made due to designer intuition
As others said, online games companies collect a crazy amount of data on their players and go to great lengths to analyse this data. I remember during SW:TOR closed betas, the devs showed us heat maps of where players had been going in the starter zones. It highlighted whole sections of the map where 99% of the players never went, so the devs acted on this to improve the quests to take us there.
However, data and feedback from the playerbase can only take you so far. If your data shows you that 95% of your playerbase only ever solos, and 5% group on a regular basis, what is this actually telling you? Does this mean that players want to solo, or does it tell you that your implementation of grouping sucks?
That is where the designer intuition comes in.
Then you have inevitable business needs. Development costs money and the game has to make money, so there will be plenty of business decisions that affect the game. Monetisation is the obvious one - we switched to F2P to makeup the shortfall in subscription revenue as well as to prevent having to maintain two codebases (east and west). But then, consider developing a new raid. Is it worth having a team spend months building a new raid that only 5-10% of the population will ever attempt, let alone complete? Or should that team instead build new quest chains, new mounts, new cosmetics for the store etc which maybe 50-60% of the population will see?
You can't measure player preference for a 100 person raid unless your game actually has one to begin with.
No open world PVP, can't be sure players don't want to, especially if implemented correctly, which few MMORPGs have gotten even close to right.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
In AAA developed MMO's or games that hope to get huge, they will bend wherever they need to, to try to get as many players as they can. So they cater to the wants of the majority, or the group that would provide the most possible players. Or they attempt to mix and get every group and you get something like modern WoW.
In smaller MMO's, they change to meet the specific niche's demands. They will try to grab all the aspects that the majority want in that niche, to try to get as many players to jump to that game that they can.
The overall problem to me seems to be that while they all change, they all make the same dumbass mistakes, which I'm sure there's some business analytic that will show that it isn't a mistake, but in my eyes, most of these games randomly pop out a cash shop with pay to win items. Completely randomly. The company will promise over and over they will never add pay to win or anything, but then they allow the items to be sell-able without some way to not have it directly effect the economy of the game, so prices just jump the hell up and cause normal players to quit. The only game I've ever seen stick to their word with the cash shop is Path of Exile. That game has absolutely 0 pay to win in there, no reason to buy things unless you really want them, and they still make bank off of it.
However, that doesn't mean they've been changing to meet EVERY player's demand. Or every group of players' demands even.
Ironically, the views expressed on forums probably have little to no effect on the game's direction, unless those views happen to reflect what the majority (90% of the players never visit forums) wants.
Data metrics and BI will tell what the players are actually doing. It's up to the devs to interpret what those data points mean in terms of game play. However, interpreting data is closer to an art than a science.
Also data analysis does not say much about more complex issues, such as features that players may want but they dislike certain ways to execute it (devil is in the details).
It is no surprise what @DMKano think about this as he always represents the case of mmos are just the way the players want them to be
Also I am not talking about the minority here (which I am certainly one of) that wants a very different kind of mmo than what is currently being produced; this is meant to be a more general discussion that questions whether players are actually getting the mmos they really want or just play the ones they are given.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
And it is tricky, sometimes people enjoy a feature a lot so you add more of it only to find that too much of something good can be a bad thing.
A lot of the current MMO market overuses good ideas that makes them less fun. Take quests for instance, rightly done it is awesome but overuse it and people will just run boring pest control and FEDEX quests all the time until they tire.
So you can't even be sure that working more on the feature your data tells you people enjoy is a good idea (it still usually is unless you go overboard but sometimes adding more will be bad).
The best thing would probably be to have the devs make the game them themselves want to play and ignore any data until you have a working game and then use feedback to see what to improve. That keeps the game from being a compromize at least.
Also that if players never get something different to choose from but just variants of the same, then of course the analysis will give the expected results.
@Gdemami I know, it was meant to say the same thing in different ways, because on these forums you got to be very clear to not get misunderstood.. haha guess I failed on that
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Then there's the whole issue of measuring the player base. Generally speaking, we're a fractious bunch. We can't decide on what we want and express it well enough to be measured. The best way to start an argument is to try to define what an MMORPG is and isn't. There's probably been a thousand threads like that on these forums, and there isn't a generally recognized consensus. It's incredibly difficult to analyze a situation where every individual has a different definition.
A business can measure the success or failure of individual bits of content that they have implemented, but that doesn't necessarily coincide with the wants and desires of the individual. The crafting system might be popular based on the time I spend with it, but that doesn't measure my desire for systems to expand beyond combat and crafting. The metrics that businesses can collect may be misleading if used incorrectly. Does anyone trust that any development team always uses the data available to them appropriately? I'm totally unsure about that.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
In your opinion, haw CU been marketed as something other than a niche game?
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Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
You are right in that PvP focused MMOs have historically done poorly. Yet, PvP games from just about every other genre do extremely well. To me, that indicates poor implementation, rather an a poor idea. Both Crowfall and CU are taking very different approaches to try to fix the problem.
Crowfall is going for its short campaign idea. Login, jump to the action, PvP for a while and log off. Next time you login, the campaigns might have changed, giving you a different experience. This ever changing terrain and short play sessions is their way to appealing to a wider PvP audience - just like shooters who change maps all the time to keep things fresh. Sure, you can distract yourself with the Eternal Kingdoms, but most people will be in the campaigns.
CU is going for horizontal progression and world building. Like other PvP genres, CU is aiming for balance between players so that everyone can easily play together, regardless of how long you've been playing. Combine this with their world building so that you get attached to your houses / castles / outposts etc and you've got two features (balance from shooters, building from survival boxes) that should help the cause.
I personally think Crowfall is going to have the better initial success but will die quite quickly. CU I think could be a steady grower - it is more intellectually engaging, more balanced, larger battles and the building aspect allows player creativity to flourish - but will probably peak at 120k subscribers. I think if CU gains enough players, they may well invest in PvE or other new features to try to appeal to a wider crowd, which could prove their downfall.
Toss in a touch of gathering from DF2 and crafting you have pretty much the whole game.
Mark originally felt the entire game could be delivered for about $6M, my guess is it will end up closer to $10M.
50K subs at 15/month is $9M per year. Seems a bit light if the costs to build it are close, and relies on several assumptions including one which hasn't been true for over 10 years, maintaining or even growing sub numbers from launch for 2 or 3 years steady.
Mark also mentioned discounted sub prices and absolutely no cash shops so keeping the game properly monetized does appear to be in question.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
With CU, don't forget the initial sale price either. I doubt they'll be doing boxes, just digital distribution which they can do themselves. I would guess that they'll probably need to sell 250k - 400k games in order to end up with a stable 50k playerbase. Even if they only made $20 per game sale, that would still be $5m from initial sales, then you get your ongoing subs.
My guess is they're aiming to break even within 6 months which I think is definitely achievable. If they work the hype train hard enough pre-launch, they could very well break even on box sales alone.
CSE also have the option of licensing their game engine. If CU ends up running well and actually supports 1000+ player battles, then the engine will become an attractive prospect for other developers and CSE could start licensing it for big money. That money could then be re-invested into either the engine or CU itself.
Might need to factor in an advertising budget as well, word of mouth only goes so far.
Licensing the engine is a great idea, maybe Chris Roberts could be pitched to, last I read SC is struggling with 13-25 ships per server/instance.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon