Do players know what they want, c.1985
(Visited 7592 times) Game talk
Jul 022008
I love the serendipity factor of the Internet. Right after I post the last post on whether players know what they want, I see that Richard at QBlog has a ranked list of survey results from players on what they said they wanted in their muds back in 1985. Here’s a sampling:
Intelligent mobiles 25
Conversing with mobiles 22
Regularly improved 19
Messages to pick up later 15
Lots of rooms 14
Lots of players 11
Speed of response 10
Long textual descriptions 9
Never crashes 9
International game 6
Built-in adverts -3
Graphics -3
Check the link for the full list. 🙂
13 Responses to “Do players know what they want, c.1985”
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heh. I like that last item on your quote… we should be very glad these days that nobody followed that player desire.
Bear in mind that they were talking about 1985 style graphics, which is about — say — Ultima 4? Tiles, CGA, blobs…
Is that really NEGATIVE 3 for graphics?
Stuff that has happened (From Richard Bartle’s full list):
* More magic 21
Cheap per hour to play 19
* Regularly improved 19
* Messages to pick up later 15
* Lots of rooms 14
* Different starts 13
Access speed 13
Cheap registration fee 12
* Lots of players 11
* Free sample games 10
International game 6
Built-in adverts -3
Graphics -3
* Never crashes 9/2 (the server?)
* Special offers for cheap time 9
Lots of books/documentation 5
Speed of response 10 (I assume keyboard response, NOT product support response)
And hasn’t:
* Intelligent mobiles 25
* Conversing with mobiles 22
* Understand complex sentences 11
* Long textual descriptions 9
* Never crashes 9/2 (the client?)
Not quite sure about these:
Reputation of author 13
Friend’s recommendation 12
What magazines said 3
Summing up “Stuff that has happened” results in 175.5. And stuff that hasn’t is, 71.5. So, even though MMOs put both graphics in advertising in against their players’ wishes, they have done about 3/4 of what players wanted. (And if players pay an extra $10/month, they can get gameplay WITHOUT ads or graphics.)
Mike Rozak wrote:
Novamente.
Not sure, but I know Len Bullard has talked about this before…
EverQuest II has lots of walls of text.
Never? Hoo hoo. Ha ha.
These are actually high up on the list of what consumers look for when deciding whether to buy products.
So, while it’s funny to look at it and think ‘the things that were not important and not asked for by people back then turned out to be the biggest deals and the biggest selling points today (see: graphics)’, consider the profile of the average customer/user of a MUD back then versus the average profile of an MMO user today. A whole hell of a lot more people play MMOs today than played MUDs then.
My point is that THOSE PARTICULAR PEOPLE who answered the survey in 1985 might still not have changed their opinions even today and that intelligent mobiles and conversing with mobiles is still what they want to see. Along comes accessibility and ease of use and pretty graphics and a whole bunch of new people get into the online world scene. Now, those original 1985 MUD players amount to a tiny number compared to the current numbers of MMO subscribers who are legion.
I think the real moral of the story is that asking your current players what they want only helps you attract and please those people that are already there. They can’t help you at all when it comes to attracting new people who are… not them. I would in fact entirely believe those players when they tell me that’s what they want. I wouldn’t listen to them if my goal was to grow my market beyond just them.
Actually, I think it would be a highly interesting question if phrased as a percentage of the addressable market! Did a higher percentage of network-connected computers (e.g., ones with Telnet access) access MUDs than the percentage of Internet-connected machines access virtual worlds today? I have no idea of the answer!
Spaz wrote:
Actually, current MUD players are (to be flippant) the same people that answered the survey in 1985. As was discussed before on Raph’s blog, not many new players are coming into MUDs. And, MUDs still don’t have “intellgent mobiles” and “conversing with mobiles”, and MUD players don’t seem to care… probably because people who did care stopped playing MUDs (and MMORPGS, and computer games in general) or decided that their wish would never be fulfilled.
Oddly enough, the text interactive fiction fanbase (my own multiplayer graphical IF included) has taken to “intelligent mobiles” and “conversing with mobiles” even though MUDs/MMORPGs have not.
I agree.
Funnily enough, you tell your current playerbase this and they’ll get really upset. (Just look at what changes to SWG NGE did.) It’s only slightly less offensive than telling people that they’re about to be permenantly unemployed because they’ve spent their lives practicing a profession that’s gone extinct with the dodos. (Although dodos have a chance of being cloned and brought back.)
I’ve been thinking about this lately.
Approximately 2.5M people in NA play WoW, which is around 50% of the MMORPG market. So approximatly 5M people in NA play MMORPGs. To make a nice round number, that’s basically 1% of the population, or 2% of the internet-connected population.
I’ve heard reports that early Internet surveys showed 10%-20% of all packets were for MUDs. (Is this true?) If it’s the case, then I suspect that slightly more than 2% of all people who had access to the internet were playing MUDs. (Or maybe MUDs used proportionally more data?) I wouldn’t expect more than 5% of the population though… and don’t forget, most internet-connected machines were at universities. I can easily imagine 5% of all university students today playing MMORPGs.
This is a really really important point, and it’s dead on. You learn more from asking people why they *don’t* play your game than you do from even talking to people who *do* play your game. Not that you should ignore your existing player base. I really think you should do whatever you can to support that group, to the point of using the non-player feedback to make a different game rather than try to adjust your pre-existing one to the point that it’s no longer the same game. SWG’s NGE nicely illustrates that point. You don’t make changes to try to get new players at the expensive of your core. You really need that core to stick around because they’re the biggest evangelists that you’ll ever have, and if they turn on you, they’ll scare people off. But there’s no reason you can’t take those lessons learned and do something *new* with them.
Mike wrote:
Actually, current MUD players are (to be flippant) the same people that answered the survey in 1985
I think you’d be surprised. We have a lot of players in our MUDs who weren’t even alive in 1985.
Not crashing was a big deal back then. I understand why it ranked so high on the list. Remember that a large percentage of MUDs were flying under the radar on some backroom server at a university until the network admins discovered the increased bandwith. This is a very long ways from having a professional development environment with three staged development of patches and a full quality assurance department. If you had an alternate test instance on a different port, you were lucky and as such most MUDs had some sort of memory leak somewhere that persisted enough from patch to patch to cause frequent crashes. (On the order of daily in some cases)
The good news there was that the code base was small enough (15 – 20MB or actual code in most cases) that reboots took less than a minute or so. Unlike todays massive big iron installations for MMOs that take many minutes to boot after a crash.
Spaz>I would in fact entirely believe those players when they tell me that’s what they want.
It’s what they thought they wanted. Sometimes, though, what they think they want isn’t what they actually want, it’s expression of something deeper.
For example, if you ask members of hard-core raiding guilds what they want, their views are going to be entirely coloured by the fact that they’re members of hard-core raiding guilds. You might, from conducting a study an analysing their responses, conclude that you could pull in large numbers of high-end players if you built an MMO without the levelling game – one which began at the point where everyone was maxed-out in their class and advancement was through gear obtained from raids rather than “experience”. People often say “the game only really begins at level X”, so why not start it at level X?
Now would this be giving the players what they wanted? Yes, it would – they usually do enjoy participating in raids. However, the better question from a designer’s point of view is not what they want but why they want it. What these people want is to feel that they are making progress. The raid system is one way to do that, but there are other ways (the levelling game, a skills system, conspicuous consumption, quest/narrative chains , …). It’s entirely possible that one of these would be more appealing to the players you asked, and to relatively casual players, too, but the players don’t know that, and won’t until they experience it.
Another thing about what the players want is that it can come with side-effects that they don’t want, but that they don’t see. Players don’t like having to run back to town to get their gear fixed and drop stuff off at the bank, it wastes time that they could have spent having fun. So if you were to ask them what they want, they could say that they want to be able to access their bank from their backpack, and to be able to repair their stuff in the field. Yet when MMOs (eg. AC2) have tried this kind of “take away everything that isn’t fun” approach, the world has felt dead. Sure, players want to be able to avoid tiresome runs back to town, but they want the world to feel alive even more, and tiresome runs back to town give you that (when you get to town).
Richard
Careful, remember a cardinal rule that has been learned the hard way:
“design for the community you have”
Still waiting for MMO AI to catch up with FPS (single player mode) AI, although from what I’ve witnessed. Although, even that area has back-slidden in favor of more time spent making stunning graphics and flashing brightly-colored bloom in my face. Still hoping for a next level of interactive and dynamic influence with the world environment while watching more and more products come out that feature little more than blatant ego-strokage (and the type of community that tends to foster).
Sadly, bread and circus sells well.