Time Is Not On My Side
A worthwhile thread popped up on the Fires of Heaven boards in which someone suggested that limiting the number of hours subscribers can play on MMO servers would ease the feeling of grind and the drive to race to max level. Though the OP’s suggestion is receiving a number of negative replies, the post touches on some valid issues that should not be ignored out of hand.
Since there’s no point in condemning a nearly lucid post to FoH obscurity, I decided to duplicate my opinion here for you lucky few.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the way you make a profit in a subscription-based MMO is to keep subscribers for as long as possible. Because some of the most avid MMO fans invest considerable hours into these games, and the resources required to implement a steady stream of unique content on the part of developers are considerable, traditionally a good deal of that content is made to be replayable. You don’t kill one orc for a quest, you kill ten. You don’t collect one piece of an ancient medallion, you find eight. Despite the claims of some, no devs I know of desire to make people grind through mindless content; yet due to the systemic need for rewards to be based on a certain time investment, grinding ensues.
But as the OP points out, the long road to uberdom has downsides. Chief among them is the resulting chasm between those who have lots of time to invest and those who don’t, which manifests itself through the endless hardcore vs. casual debate. The person who reaches max level and can raid daily is going to blow past the person who can only play a handful of hours a week; that’s just how the game works. If two such people are real-life friends, they very likely can’t even play together due to the reward disparity (unless the more advanced player rolls an alt or there is some sort of mentoring system in place a la EQ2).
Placing a time limit on how long someone can play on the server addresses the resulting disparity, but it doesn’t touch the real cause: some people just have more time to play MMOs (and therefore achieve more) than others. And I agree with posters in this thread that such a solution does not address the core of the problem, but instead trades one set of negatives for another.
So what is the right thing to do? There are certainly options, though they affect the fundamental nature of an MMO:
- You could do away with levels. This would help, though in a subscription-based MMO you would need to retain some other form of delayed progression.
- You could switch models. A microtransaction-based MMO doesn’t need to be about time-based progression, since you could make the win-condition of the game the acquisition of items and prestige through small payments. The goal in this case is not to keep subscribers for a given period, but rather to encourage your subscribers to buy every available premium within whatever timeframe they see fit.
- You could offer some other reason for players to come back to your game on a regular basis. This would likely involve a frequent enough schedule of content (events, storyline, etc.) or new features to make a continued subscription worth the money.
- You could accept the fact that you have a finite amount of content and decide that it’s okay to let subscribers be finished with your game. (As you might imagine, this is not a terribly popular alternative among MMO providers.)
- You could come up with some other new and fancy approach that nobody has done yet. That’s what we get paid for, right?
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While the goal of subscription-based MMOs is to keep players paying, note that this doesn’t mean that the devs want them grinding away 24/7. I daresay that the perfect customer for most MMOs would be one who plays a small number of hours each week but stays subscribed for a long period of time. After all, this would allow devs to produce smaller amounts of more enjoyable content but still pay the bills.
The ideal, then, would be to create a game that players found absolutely compelling for years on end without feeling like they need to play a large number of hours per week to enjoy it or match up to other players in the world. They would limit their own time in the game spent performing repetitive tasks as a natural result of how the game is designed to play. In other words, that they would play a given number of hours per week because they want to, not because they need to.
Sounds simple, but it does require changes to–you guessed it–the subscription-based MMO model. The key is that these changes have to be organic rather than artificial (such as the forced limitation of playtime through the current model), which would largely be counter-productive in the long run.
For the record, I’m writing this late at night from a strange house in Vegas after a long day of meetings and hacking up green stuff from a nasty chest cold. So if I made no sense or introduced a few dozen typos, I throw myself upon your tender mercies.
What you describe as the ideal would be a welcome change for many of us. Like other gamers I have known, I find myself going through life changes that make it harder to put in the gaming hours. Between work, school at night, and now visions of a ring in the near future, I just don’t have the same amount of time to devote to grinding. Yet, I still enjoy MMO’s, and would like to maintain in-game relationships in a more involved way than just chatting in guild (grouping will be out as an option as I fall farther behind).
An organic MMO model like you have described sounds ideal. People in my situation could still be active, paying customers without being “left behind.” Folks who had more time available for gaming could maybe explore the content more through alts, or even *gasp* play OTHER GAMES occasionally! Blasphemy, I know
Anyway, first post here, and probably not as coherent as I’d like, but my 2cp, which is about 2cp more than it’s worth
Let’s compare this to another business model that uses subscription fees. Television. Most television shows run for 30-60 minutes a week and run for what? 12 weeks twice a year? And if they are really good they will gather a following that will watch that show (religiously sometimes) each week.
Does anyone actually pay for that one show? No. We pay for a service that provides us with dozens-hundreds of channels worth of shows.
Does anyone actually watch them all? Yeah right.
Could MMOs be successful using this kind of model? Look at SOE and their Station Pass. If you want to play more then one of their MMOs then it is a great deal. Some of their MMOs probably couldn’t survive without it. Planetside and EQ:OA probably would have died years ago if it wasn’t for this. I doubt that they have the playerbase to support the servers and internet bandwidth that they require.
I would love to see a service made available that would allow me to pay $30-50 a month, but I get access to all of SOE’s titles, WoW, AO, Eve Online, FFIX, etc. That way when I get bored with one I don’t have to cancel one subscription and start another.
Personally, I think the MMO market would explode if they adopted a business model like this. Because no longer would the companies be competing for each individual user, but they could start making niche games that would have a smaller fan base and still survive. I would compare these to channels like Discovery or the History channel.
The companies would have to change their business model significantly for this to happen though. I know that I would not be willing to pay $30-50 a month, plus $20-30 every 6 months for expansions of each game. Once per year or every other year or lowering the price to $5-10 would be more acceptable, but if you consider that someone is paying $30-50 per month as it is (or in my case $60-100 one for me and one for my wife) that companies might need to start working the cost of new material into their budgets instead of charging for additional expansions.
Ruling the result instead of the source is always bad mojo for both side of the fence. IMO, this is a question of speed and not time. Beside, time in a virtual community is exponentialy relative, no way to regulate that zone
The whole speed aspect is regrouping people of the same play style philosophy together. You have RP servers, International Servers, PK servers, Exchange Servers. Why not have servers listed in terms of playing commitment. Perhaps not something as bold as HardCore servers, Casual Servers etc. But re-defining specific environement of play styles for the players would be the way to go.
Hell, you could also create a Server progression, the equivalent of a character progression in terms of Levels, based on time spent.
What creates playstyles collisions is not time, it’s speed. But the problem is, the virtual world does not run on the same time-frame as the real world does, as odd as it sounds.
But I can see how in, let’s say 10 years from now, when praticly everything will be accomplished by technologies or nearly. Time resctriction might become popular…for employers.
“You could switch models. A microtransaction-based MMO doesn’t need to be about time-based progression, since you could make the win-condition of the game the acquisition of items and prestige through small payments. The goal in this case is not to keep subscribers for a given period, but rather to encourage your subscribers to buy every available premium within whatever timeframe they see fit. ”
Wouldn’t it be to encourage your subscribers to buy every available premium within as short a time as possible? What am I missing?
I’m in favor of non-traditional content; players who have reached the effective end or maximum of their adventuring days should have an opportunity to enter into city administration or other action which effects the game world.
E.g., in a fantasy world, fighter types might administer a keep; priests a temple or grove; rogues run a thieves’ guild, or mages an academy or wizard’s tower. This would be necessarily a complicated endeavor to integrate into a MMOG as one doesn’t want players to ruin the gameworld nor leave them powerless.
Such ‘retired’ adventurers could even become adventuring content creators of a sort (a la City of Villains where evildoers’ lairs become challenges for heroes) within tight constraints.
Otherwise the ‘hardcore’ people with too much time will always consume content faster than any team can create it, become bored and discontented (and therefore low-hanging fruit for one’s competitors).
Be seeing you,
No.6
(P.S. as a subnote to my first post to your blog, Moorgard, I hope Garibaldi is still OK. I was once named Skean in this post… http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/print?board.id=Non-Gameplay&message.id=2188&page=1&format=all … sorry about the auto-print option, but the message is too old to be viewable in the normal fashion)
Or you could let evolution take its turn and kill off those with the wrong business model.
Content is what make games fun, and people will pay for that as long at it is fun – whether you call it grind or casual adventuring, if it is fun it works.
But most content in MMOs is in a sad state – without the online aspect of the game, MMOs are quite crude and belong back in the mid-90′s. The AI (script != AI), the rules systems etc. are simplistic and can not really uphold a varied crowd (hardcore, medium and casuals).
Same deal happend in the 90′s with standard computer games – every studio struggled to get the new content out in their games, but most failed miserably due to the strain of building a complex piece of software that a game is from bottom up.
At least until the market consolidated itself and the studioes were ‘forced’ to buy 3D engines, Audio/Video components, networking components etc. from specialised vendors and focus on the content instead of focusing on every little technical bit ( Same thing has re-cycled in these days – AI becoming a selling factor – and vendors are popping up with specialised AI libraries. )
I wonder if (rather I predict* that) MMOs will go through the same phase – studioes buying rules engines, world / GIS systems etc.. and concetrate on the actual content to keep the subscribers focused on their game, instead of spending 50%+ of the resources making the game functional.
So we just simply have to wait for a MMO studio to make grinding fun and the world will become a better place (of course many studioes will fail in the process but those that make it, will learn and live).
* Since there is no silver bullet** in software development, the rules of essential and accidental complexity still goes.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
I think, and I am one of the people who doesn’t always have the time to play hours at a time, that most of the fun comes from leveling. Hitting that next level and seeing what spells or abilities you get next is a huge draw to playing. Running around trying to get items would be like questing, which is fun as well, but still would not be the same as leveling.
When you say “buy premiums” are you speaking of this as an in game aspect or like something you would do to your subscription? I see problems with either way. It would cause the rich to still do better and the poor to still be poor if it were in game, and if it is sub based then you have some people unable to proceed as they may not be able to afford it, or they could be younger and their parents will only pay so much for a “game” You know… parents just don’t understand:P
OH and… well, what happens in vegas, stays in vegas! We don’t need to know what you were doing in a strange house in vegas with green stuff all over your chest!
[...] Quoting from this recent post by Moorgard… The ideal, then, would be to create a game that players found absolutely compelling for years on end without feeling like they need to play a large number of hours per week to enjoy it or match up to other players in the world. They would limit their own time in the game spent performing repetitive tasks as a natural result of how the game is designed to play. In other words, that they would play a given number of hours per week because they want to, not because they need to. [...]
I think it’s safer to say that different people enjoy different things in these games, and some may be more time-dependant than others. For example, I love exploring dungeons. I could care less about leveling other than that it lets me go to new dungeons. So it’s not a big deal if it takes me 3 weeks to make a level, but if I don’t have enough time in an evening to go on a good dungeon run, I get cranky.
Other people focus on leveling, or on their gear, or on raiding, or crafting, or whatever…
I think that moving forward, game designers are going to have to start thinking along multiple threads when putting their games together. Where it makes sense, they should try to divorce aspects of the game from the time-to-play paradigm, so that people can engage in those activities regardless of whether they only have one night a week or 8 hours a day to play. Likewise, for the parts of the game where you still have to go with time invested, they’ll need to look for ways to find a happy medium – how do you make something feel meaningful for the guy who plays all the time, and still make it doable for the working stiffs who get weekend time when the wife lets them alone for a bit?
Here’s an interesting parallel. I once played a web-based game called Utopia (which is still out there), where your goal was to build a bigger province than your neighbors. Utopia worked on a hourly basis – based on the choices you made, every hour, more soldiers would be trained, more taxes would be collected, more lands would be explored, and so on. If you attacked another province somewhere, it took several hours for your troops to come back from the attack, and so on. You could log in as little as once every couple of days and still be effective, or you could log in several times a day and really micromanage your province, but with diminishing returns, because most of the time you were ending up waiting on your troops to come back, your taxes to be collected, your land to come in, etc.
It’s not hard to take this sort of concept and apply it to an MMORPG – EVE Online does this exact same thing with its skill system. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a reason to play more – it just means that playing more doesn’t bring you an advantage in the same ways as it does in a more traditional game. For example, in EVE Online playing more doesn’t earn me skillpoints any faster, but it sure helps me make more money, which I can then use for better equipment for my ships.
Anyway I think the best way to handle the time debate is to make it not matter for as many parts of the games as it has in the past – it will still end up mattering somewhere, but if you find the right mixture, players end up being happier overall about the time they have to play.
You could accept the fact that you have a finite amount of content and decide that it’s okay to let subscribers be finished with your game. (As you might imagine, this is not a terribly popular alternative among MMO providers.)
Here’s a thought, since everyone pays the same, but the less they play the less they cost you isn’t it more cost effective to get shot of the high time investors?
Design the game to appeal to the not-so-much-timers, let the lots-of-timers rush through it all, but make it clear they won’t be getting enough content for their playstyle and that they should clear off. After a short time you will find you have 75% of the subs, but only 25% of the loads due to restricted play time.
You’ll have a lower income, but significantly lower server, CS and development costs (you need less content with no-one wizzign through it) meaning you actually make more profit than before and have a more successful business.
I could accept parents having the ability to limit the time their children play — I think that is a good idea.
EQ1 had the ability to set a timer and I used to use to limit the time I played and I am sorry that no other game has put in such a feature.
I think it is easy to play too long — you know “just one more thing” — a timer buzzer as in EQ1 is a good thing
I saw Raph’s small worlds slideshow from 2003, referenced from Wiki’s definition of “grind”. Interesting stuff, particularly about the 80/20 rule.
I think ultimately the best system will provide a much wider variety of ways to reach the top 20%. Time can be a default, but there could be paths requiring tactics, twitch skill, managerial/political skill, marketeering, artistic creativity, problem/puzzle solving… so you could have the top 20% from each of those, balanced against the grind. And that would give you a much broader base of players than picking any one of those skills to reward, or time rewards, exclusively.
So instead of tearing down the gate, or making a gate that every chimpanzee can pass through provided they quit their job, drop out of school, etc… you make as many different gates available to people as you can think of. And even maybe explore allowing ways to progress that you don’t realize when you design the thing. Metarewards.
Vanguard sort of looked like it was going to go that way – adding a diplomacy path. Sort of, but no, upon further examination, Vanguard’s concept is there are many gates and each player has to go through ALL of them, not just the one they enjoy going through for its own sake. Typical.
Xbox Live shows promise but that’s kind of a framework for different games, with apparent seams. Which is what I’m talking about except for the network in my mind would share the same graphics engine, lore, virtual/social space and cutscene campaigns as well as the reward framework.
It is past time games get back to time investment improving player skill as opposed to avatar skill.
Quote:
“Could MMOs be successful using this kind of model? Look at SOE and their Station Pass. If you want to play more then one of their MMOs then it is a great deal. Some of their MMOs probably couldn’t survive without it. Planetside and EQ:OA probably would have died years ago if it wasn’t for this. I doubt that they have the playerbase to support the servers and internet bandwidth that they require.”
Actually i believe they get a percentage of the subscriptionmoney equal to the amount of playtime for their game. But on to my little writeup now.
I am hoping for a splitup in MMO development between the casual and hardcore kind. Many people like myself are so damn tired of grinding levels and farming rehashed content over and over again.
Quality and quantity don’t mix in the MMO industry. At least not with the subscriber numbers and budgets most MMO’s can look forward too at launch since WoW took half the market.
Some good examples are Vanguard and also EQ2.
Vanguard aimed for a huge world, they put massive resources in developing it for over 4 years, and it looks awesome. However basicly everything else in the game is lacking. Animations, characters, mechanics, quests, userinterface, population, testing and sound FX, all of those are severely lacking. The music is very good though. But the game is far from finished and not polished at all due to them running out of money. Rumour has it they spend nearly as much as WoW on developing the game. They aimed for quality and quantity and failed.
EQ2 started out quite alright in the quality department, but after the subscriptionrate dropped it got worse each expansion with the rehashing of content in instances. Instancing isn’t bad if it’s to prevent overpopulation and lag, but re-using zones to create raid zones is a sign that the quality can’t keep up with the quantity that hardcore people are demanding. And this is leading into a downward spiral of negative feelings about quality again. I’ve seen it enough times. Of the original 35 or so players in my raiding guild during the original EQ2 t5 raids, only 5 are left over in the game.
My hope is for a developer to step up and adapt a business model of weekly “Episodes” with new and unique high quality content at a monthly fee. Kind of like the Everquest 2 Adventure packs, but on a weekly basis. With the right development aproach this would be a realistic goal. The idea is to provide something people would look forward too all week long, and can’t wait to complete. Something like Half Life 2 Episode One in Co-op mode, but then MMORPG style, advancing through the episodes. Completing each episode should take like 8-10 hours with a mixture of questing, adventuring and even raiding(though nothing of the difficulty level like contested targets in EQ2). Rewards would be the completion of the episode and some nice gear for everybody. Be gone with the grind, welcome to real progression in gear and content. Meanwhile to give an oppertunity to build a community a more permanent world should be created with all sorts of mini games and competitions to pass time. I’m sure you can all think of many small games from the past that could provide such entertainment. The target audience would be the casual player. Hardcore players could go on playing their grind and farm games.
I would gladly pay as much for that MMO as i’m paying for 3 different ones atm. I would see the same amount of new content then.
I think having two server rulesets, one where you’re limited to X amount per week of Gold/XP gaining ability, and the other unlimited would ease the crowbar separation between those with restricted time, and those who have all the time in the world to play.
On the limited servers, you would restrict the player to a maximum of say 20hrs per week.
The player would be allowed to continue to play after his/her allotted time expired, but would be prohibited from (if we were to take WoW as an example) accessing the auction house, looting non quest items, tradeskilling, entering an instance (if no corpse was inside), gaining xp from kills, or non-instance quests, gaining coin on kills, and rolling on loot.
Essentially, you’d be limited to chatting, maybe helping out friends or guildmates with non instance tasks.
You could even include a once per month/billing cycle command to add an “emergency” 2hours to the playtime (for when you just can’t miss out on da phat l3wts!)
I think having the option to artificially level the playing field would be of great appeal to a number of players who perhaps don’t have the time to pursue uberness when compared to others.