The MMO Numbers Game 44
Terra Nova has an interesting discussion going, talking about what really matters when we talk about a virtual world's population. Total registered accounts? Accounts logged in since last month? Concurrent users? Interesting stuff. From the article: "In a similar vein we discussed Second Life's 100K+ members, a figure which I and others have questioned here on TN. Cory Ondrejka said that SL's 'concurrency numbers are rapidly approaching 4500, about 17,000 residents were in SL in the last 24 hours, and 50,000 in the last 30 days... If you go back even 90 days you get about 90% of the accounts having logged in.'"
One often overlooked problem (Score:4, Interesting)
You could easily find yourselve on a server with no Image Designers for instance. It always seem that the most imaginative players who organized all the fun things were on servers that I was not on.
The reason for splitting the userbase over different servers is off course obvious if you ever played SWG, everyone centered on one city and that meant that the central hub could become unplayable.
Of course SWG was never supposed to have a hub, just that some bad design decissions and an unwillingness to update the game meant that coronet became the unofficial hub. Now that the NGE has happened coronet is in fact pretty much deserted. What I am complaining about them not updating and then I complain about the update? Well all I would have wanted is for them to make sharnaffs hit with disease to reflect them being overhunted. Disease was bitch and critters that had it were extremely unpopular to hunt. It could have helped spread people out across the universe. Simply make any overhunted critter go diseased and voila, the end of everyone hunting the same. NGE cured that but in the same way decapitation will cure a headache.
Anyway back to the problem of splitting the userbase up among servers. It means you could easily find yourselve on server with a total population of perhaps 10.000. Substract the people who already given up or for whom the character is an alt while they are playing most of the time on another server and you soon realize that the real population on a server is at best a few thousand.
Guild Wars does something similar and like WoW splits the users among continents but does allow you to vist an international hub where everyone from all the continents can meet (usually a pretty empty place). WoW of course does not allow european users to play with american users. Neither does it give european customers a free trial but europeans are used to being screwed.
But the small populations are not just a distortion, they make the games far more vulnerable when a group decides to leave. It can easily mean that a small guild leaving suddenly pulls the rug out under the player run economy. On the SWG I played there was one crafter player who made good stuff for an good price. She (not sure if she was a real female but I always judge people by their avatar unless their behaviour is a complete mismatch) was also easy to sell to offering an okay price with no hassle and not always demanding you rattle of every stat.
For many of us she was the supplier of food buffs and later also armour. Then she left and I was for the first time forced to start looking for my essential supplies. God what a mess that was. Still is.
Same with other proffesions, we had 1 image designer. If he was on holiday or something that service was removed.
If SWG had been one big universe with the game enforcing users to spread out across the planets I think it would have been a far greater success. To many new players on free trials choose the recommended least loaded server and found themselves in ghost towns.
An MMO is hardly massive when you got a max of a few hundred people online at the same time.
The revenue per player may be intresting for your bank, it is the number of people online with you that matters to users. WoW showed us that people who believed the market had topped out were very very wrong. Now remains to be seen wether WoW itself has topped out the market or that another MMORPG game with a different approach might rival its success or even leave it behind.
I still think there is room for a complex deep MMORPG that SWG tried to be. It will be extremely difficult but the simple fact is that people are still hanging on to the complex MMO's even with the lure of WoW. Successfull as WoW is it is not everybody's cup of thee. To much fixatio
Two models (Score:2, Interesting)
For subscription games, the number of people paying for a subscription is a good number. Even if someone hasn't played in months, if they still have an active subscription, that says something. Example: I quit City of Heroes and cancelled my subscription immediately. It's not that it was a bad game, it's just that I knew that I was done with it when I stopped.
On the other hand, when I quit Everquest, I let my account stay active for about 6 months just because I thought I might want to go back. I was attached enough to the game that I was willing to keep paying for it even though I wasn't actively playing. Quite a lot of people do this, and I think those numbers are important. Important enough to not throw them out, anyway. And the fact that those accounts are still generating money for the company is no small thing either.
Non-subscription games are a totally different ballgame. "Registered accounts" isn't a useful number, unless you're trying to track how many people have tried the game. For non-subscription games, I think you need to look at how many people have played in the last 30 days, or maybe how many have logged in multiple times in the last 30 days. That gets you a fairly good number of how many people are playing the game, even if it's just to try it, and it also avoids ridiculous statements like Internet Pong has 400 million users!
Different Wants, Different Numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
From the gamer side, the number that matters is the number of people that can be online at once, and how steady those numbers are throughout the day. A game like EVE ranks very high in this regard. They have 22,000 players at peak hours and due to their international market maintain a very high average because the game is well covered from both the US and Europe (less so from Asia though). WoW on the other hand does not score as high as it splits its mass of users up into separate shards and has separate servers from different time zones. This results in a smaller online user base per shard and sharp dips and peaks in user numbers.
Current users online is a pretty important number IMO. The fewer shards you have, the greater ability you have to tell a divergent story line.
This was shown pretty clearly in Asheron's Call. Asheron's Call was the first MMORPG to really make it a goal to tell a story. I recall early on years back when during one month's events players were tasked with retrieving a certain item in a PvP area. On all the shard's but one, the players quickly retrieved the item clearing the way for the next month's events. On one shard though, a group of players defended the area and prevented fellow players from retrieving that item. In effect, they created a divergent story. On all the other shard's the story moved forward according to the developer's plans. On one server though, the story diverged in a different direction. So what happened? Exactly what you would expect to happen. Not wanting to maintain multiple different stories at the same time, the development team congratulated the players who had defended the item, but told them that they lost anyways. The story moved forward the same on all servers.
A single server offers a greater deal of freedom in terms of shaping the story. The developers are not bound to keep dozens of different copies of the same story. Nor do they have to worry about divergent stories. I think that this contributes strongly to how WoW has been extremely ineffective at creating a dynamic world changing stories for its players. World changing events are extremely hard to deal with when you have multiple servers.
The downside to a single server game is that it places a MUCH greater stress on expansion, especially if the game does well. In the case of WoW, it means that they would have had to of built their world with at least half of a million players in mind, and then rapidly expand it as their player numbers grew. Further, they would not have been able to expand contact only upwards. They would need to expand not only high end content to deal with the ever increasing number of players achieving higher levels, but also expand lower end content to deal with over crowding as the number of n00bs continues to expand. Dealing with such expansion pressures would require either a complete rethinking in MMORPG design such that a greater emphasis is put on world expansion and design, or innovative new strategies in game play design. EVE for example opted for innovative gameplay. EVE is very sparse in traditional content and instead opts for a sandbox approach where players generate much of the content.
Personally, I want to see MMORPG shoot for single shards. The technical and content challenges that this will create will drive innovative MMORPG design.
Interest (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a pretty good reply, provided they clean the userbase occasionally.
I run my own online game. It's not as big as any mentioned in the article, but the numbers mean something to me:
It would probably be very interesting to run more statistics, but I don't. I can generate a bit of data from what I have, for example I can say that about 6000 accounts or almost half of them were made in 2005, so the game is getting much more publicity than before.
The point I'm trying to make is: Numbers mean nothing. You have to look behind them and find what they mean. I could say I have 13000 registered users (actually I don't, because I clean out inactive accounts) or I could say I have 1500 active players. It depends on whether I want to appear big or have a more honest number. I could also say I have 950 active players (the number logged in yesterday) if I wanted to appear smaller.
(*) Note: "Concurrent users" doesn't have a meaning for my game because it's a web-based game, not a MMORPG and you don't interact real-time anyways. That's another point: In some MMORPGs, you don't have to be online to be able to be interacted with. Your shop in Second Life or some other games may still be open, you can travel or go about automated tasks in other games. It all depends on what the game is.