Mailbag

Public responses to emails sent via the contact form.

(Tuesday) Mailbag: forum posters, churn, betas

 Posted by (Visited 16649 times)  Game talk, Mailbag  Tagged with:
May 272008
 

Mr Koster, I am wondering if you can help me with a bit of online Mythbusting? I have an interest in statistics with relation to gamers and beta testers. This quote: “Something like 90% of the people playing an MMO never post in the forums.” was recently made here and attributed to you and Rich Vogel here. (please read the thread to see why I am interested) So, I was wondering if you could confirm this? How did you collect this data? And if so, what other data can you share? Do you know of any other sources of this sort of data? And, yes. I would be very happy to see this email posted and commented on in your blog. Thank you for your time and effort.

Regards, Guy Russon

Well, as far as how that stat comes about (and it does vary game to game — don’t take 10% as gospel, becaus eyou are right it’s a “whisper stat” at this point), you simply measure your subscribers, measure your active forum posters, and derive a ratio. 🙂 In the case of forums where they require a game registration in order to register for the forum, this is pretty easy.

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Mailbag: marriages, links, China…

 Posted by (Visited 8585 times)  Mailbag
Jan 092008
 

Hi Raph: I am not sure if I’ve ever thanked you in my visits to your site before or when you had your old site up…so here goes now! I met my husband in Ultima Online in 2001. We are still together – in fact he made me his RL wife two weeks ago in Las Vegas with our family present to give our blessings. (Had a blast – wish you were there!) So, I don’t know really, how involved you were with UO. Richard Garriott also received my thanks but hasn’t written back yet. He’s probably busy with his Tablula Rasa (which i didn’t like at all SHHHH!). Anyway…thank you for creating that world and naming a shard “Catskills.” As fate would have it thats the place we both chose and there we met. HAIL RAPH! *hugs* Thank you for bringing us together!

Well, congratulations! And take that, everyone who thought that Catskills was nothing more than an iniquitous den of PKers. 😉 Though I suppose that by 2001, it wasn’t anymore. And for what it’s worth, I am sure that Richard would offer his congratulations as well.

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Monday Mailbag: constructive fallout

 Posted by (Visited 8424 times)  Gamemaking, Mailbag
Oct 152007
 

Quite a lot of the mail I have gotten recently relates to the quickie design outline I did for Penny Arcade… a few of them were pretty interesting, so I am just reprinting them here.

 Dear Raph, I am a huge fan of the SimCity series (worried about the loss of technical details in the new Socities) and read your words on Penny-arcade.com. PLEASE BUILD THIS. I know, i know, you are busy writing the code to run an actual world like this, but as someone who is both a DIY homeowner and a lover of constuction, the game you propose would be fabulous. Thanks for your time, Fred

I can assure you that I have no intention of rushing off to make this game, anymore than I did when I tossed out the Healing MMO as an idea. Sorry! Besides, the real point is to make Tycho do it, not me. 🙂

Now, this one, I thought was really fascinating:

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Monday Mailbag: a neat graph, producers, UO, UO…

 Posted by (Visited 7968 times)  Mailbag
Sep 172007
 

Gene Endrody of MaidMarian.com pointed out this cool Alexa graph that shows how much seasonal trends matter for virtual worlds:

Alexa traffic graph

I did an Alexa compare of traffic for the last six months for MaidMarian.com, ToonTown.com and Habbo.com. Habbo’s traffic is from the US site only – compared with MaidMarian.com’s worldwide, so it’s not a fair comparison per se. What I found very interesting was how close the three correlate. You can see the boost that summer holidays provide, however the ebb and flow of web traffic is really obvious. I would be really cool if we had a Dow Jones Industrial Average for web traffic to compare against.

Yeah, I think any of the operators who have been running more than one world have noticed this. There’s definite seasonal trends to virtual world usage. We need some worlds popular in the Southern Hemisphere to even out the curves! 🙂

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Monday Mailbag: WorldsInMotion, postures, games as art

 Posted by (Visited 6809 times)  Mailbag
Jul 022007
 

Hey Raph, Just wanted to note that the CMP Game Group (who runs GDC, Austin GDC, Gamasutra, Game Developer magazine, etc!) has launched WorldsInMotion.biz, which is a Game Developer Research-branded online worlds blog. In my post over at GameSetWatch announcing it, I particularly mention your commentary on web-based online worlds passing the game biz by – we’re going to do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen, while documenting the most interesting bits of the current online worlds.

This is looking quite good, and another one to add to the virtual worlds-specific news sources that are rapidly springing up. In particular, the Online World Atlas that they are putting together looks like it could be extremely useful. For those keeping track or interested in the space, here’s the list of other ones that I am hitting pretty regularly these days:

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