GameDevMike

As a Dark Age of Camelot player I wander over to the Camelot Vault once in a while just to see if anything interesting is posted there. Usually, there isn’t. Reading the posts, I often get the impression that most of the people who post there are teenagers, though I know that’s not really true. I mean, I really do know teenagers that are more mature than many of the Vault posters. Reading through some of the garbage they post, though, I wonder what it’s like for some of the DAOC team who have to read it all as part of their job.

Think about it - you’ve just spent two or three years putting your heart and soul into the game you want to make. It’s your baby. You release it to the world. Every day you check the forums and see posts like, “Wha class balance, wha wha overpowered, wha wha the devs suck”. In the back of your head you are telling yourself that this is just a small percentage of the player base, mostly a bunch of morons, and it’s a shame that you have to share oxygen with them. But they’re insulting your baby! When you post replies in the forums, no matter how much you want to flame the freaks to hell and back… you can’t.

Radu Privantu, creator of Eternal Lands, wrote a five-part series of articles over the course of several months about his experience developing a small MMOG. He describes how reality did not match his expectations, many of the problems he encountered and how he attempted to overcome them, what he could have done differently, and so on. Overall it’s a fascinating read. But the bit that’s relevant to my topic today comes at the end of the last article, where he summarizes his mistakes. One of the mistakes he lists is “Listening too much to player complaints”:

As mentioned in the previous parts of this article, the players are usually unhappy with any changes, unless of course, the change simplifies things or makes things easier to do. But whenever the change requires them to change their strategies, there is widespread complaint, cries that the developers don’t listen and want to ruin the game, threats to leave the game and so on. The mere announcement of future changes makes them very nervous, and they usually don’t bother to read the full announcement, but rather immediately jump to [wrong] conclusions. There are, of course, some players that do like changes, and there are some players that don’t care. But the bulk of the replies to any “future change announcement” is usually “Omg omg teh devs want to ruin teh game!11!!”. Often times we just gave up modifying some stuff that we believed would be good for the game, but the players cried about it.

There are several aspects of the article that give the impression that Radu is not a big fan of his player base. I’m sure that’s not entirely true, but reading some of the stuff he went through, and some of the hard lessons learned, I wouldn’t blame him for getting frustrated with them sometimes. But I think he’s right about ignoring the players, to a point anyway. There has to be a line that you will not cross, but at the same time if a large number of players are not happy with a particular feature then you need to take a good, hard look at it. The players can be pretty harsh in expressin their opinions, though.

This is something I have seen in most of the MMOG community forums I have visited (one notable exception is Puzzle Pirates, which, at least when I played it, has a fairly civil forum environment). What the players want and what is best for the game are usually not the same thing. But the players don’t see the big picture, they only see what affects them. If they can’t max out their stats/skills/dps or whatnot, if they don’t win every PvP fight with a couple of mouse clicks, then they cry. Never mind that they aren’t supposed to be able to do any of that easily.

So I wonder, what is it about Puzzle Pirates that the game’s community forums are actually pleasant? Is it the genre? The target market? That would be my first guess, since PP has a more casual playerbase. As likely a reason as it sounds, a visit to the Minions of Mirth forums makes it not so obvious an answer. MoM is a game in the vein of DAOC, but I haven’t seen the forums there break down into name calling and whining. In fact, most people refer to the developer, Josh Ritter, by his first name. He often gets compliments and praise. So with a little more reflection, I think that it’s a matter of scale and market ‘purity’.

I suppose larger games will always have that noisy minority and silent majority just by virtue of having a larger player base composed of all types of players - caual, hardcore, min-maxers, PvPers, PvEers, RPers, explorers, and so on. It’s an ‘impure’ market because there are so many player types to keep content. By contrast, I think the smaller games tend to attract smaller, more ‘pure’ groups of players, i.e. a majority of one or two player types. For example, Wurm Online seems to get a lot of PvPers (since PvP is part of the game), whereas MoM tends to attract a less hardcore crowd (though I’m not entirely sure of which types - PvEers and RPers I’m thinking).

The next conclusion is that certain player types are more likely to complain than others when the game doesn’t do what they want it to. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that hardcore groups like PvPers and min-maxers would tend to be have more of the complainers amongst them. I’m not suggesting that all PvPers whine, so I don’ t need comments pointing out that you like PvP but don’t bitch and moan on MMOG forums. But I do think that those groups tend to have more members with assertive personalities and, therefore, are more likely to assert their opinions.

Now for the point of all of this postulation. When you are making a small-scale, commercial online game, like EL or MoM or Wurm, you have to be very aware of what kind of player base you want to attract. The features and ruleset you have in your game is the largest determining factor, moreso than genre I would guess. If you don’t take this into account during development, you could be in for a major shock after release. Every feature addition, every rule, needs to be weighed against your target market. Every feature you add has the potential to turn away one type of player and to attract another. Since your player base is going to be small, you need to cater to the player type you want most. Trying to cater to everyone isn’t going to help you. You aren’t making the next EQ, so get those delusions of grandeur out of your head early on.

Once you’ve gotten the game online and people are playing it, you need to be prepared to suffer that which you have wrought. If you’ve managed to attract a friendlier player base, then you’re golden. If you’ve attracted a hardcore crowd, intentionally or otherwise, you’d better have your thick-skin buff handy. No matter how diplomatically you deal with the whiners, they will always whine. You could give a whiner god powers in your game and he would still whine. But most of the whiners do understand good logic when they see it, even if they don’t agree with it. They might stop whining, but they’ll probably keep playing.

That’s another thing to keep in the back of your head: if some players are paying for a subscription and whining in your forums, at least they aren’t subscribing to another game and whining in someone else’s forums. People will threaten to leave the game all of the time. Some actually will. For a small shop that can be painful. But when players are leaving sporadically, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway, so just write them off. Most will continue to play as long as they feel that you do hear their complaints and as long as they are getting some sort of challenge or entertainment from your game. If you don’t egage the players at all, or if you pull the rug out from under them with massive changes to the game, you may be asking for trouble. Players leaving sporadically can’t be helped, but if players are leaving en masse, you’ve only yourself to blame.

It’s a tricky business keeping the player base happy. I’m not speaking from personal experience, here. I’ve never developed an MMOG and neve worked in community relations for any game company. But I have participated in several game communites, MMOG and otherwise, and have taken notes on how the development/community teams, both large scale and small, interact with the players. I’ve thought about what makes one game’s forums so hostile and another’s so friendly. All of this is important to me for the future as I develop my own games, perhaps one day a smallish MOG. So whether or not my observations are accurate, I do believe that the developer who understands his target market is going to be more likely to have a happier player base. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you surely can please your specific target market most of the time if you understand them.