| The designer's first impulse is to create long- term play with extreme exponential character progression ”one where it gets harder to advance as the game progresses. This is nothing new to gaming, but we MMP designers often take this to an absurd level, sometimes going so far as to double the number of experience points needed to advance to each level. Given that the actual work that a player has to do to gain experience hasn't changed much, this can get real old real fast. Typically, when designing the curve, designers say something like, "It's so steep that I guarantee it will take 6 months to reach level 100!" Also typically, this is often initially compounded by extreme penalties for failure, such as steep death penalties that can undo hours or even days of work. The problem then, of course, is that your game starts to feel a lot more like work than fun. The results of this are stark: -
Players come to resent your game and your staff ” The tedium of doing the same action over and over again eventually wears on the players. It doesn't matter how fun that particular activity is either ”once you've done it eight hours a day for a week to get to your next milestone, it's just not that thrilling anymore. -
Hard- core gamers devour your game faster and demand more ” To your hard-core gamers, the whole concept of needing six months to get to your highest level is a joke ”they figured out how to get there in three months with their first character, and can now do it in one month with their new characters . -
Casual gamers feel they cannot compete ” Seeing another player display remarkable power can actually inspire you to try to reach that plateau yourself ”unless, of course, you realize that it would take you six months to get halfway there. At that point, casual gamers and weekend warriors decide whether or not it's worth it to even try. -
Your game narrows ” Because it takes so much time and effort to make a tiny gain, it begins to feel as if every moment of your life where you are not doing that activity is wasted time. As a result, other features of your game fall away. These features typically offer no reward or aren't very efficient ways of reaching that reward. The best example is when players say that they "can't role-play" in your game space. You can role-play anywhere , even in a parking lot with a broken broom handle. What players are saying is that role-playing takes too much time away from the daily grind, which they feel compelled to do every moment online. -
Bandwidth costs go through the roof ” Finally, this us the reason your bosses will care. Bandwidth is one of the largest costs of running an online game. If your gameplay is encouraging players to log on for eight hours at a time, you are reducing the amount of money you can spend on other things, including additional content, better support, or even development on other games . The end result of this is player fatigue , a situation where the player is sick to death of the game but unwilling to leave. And why shouldn't they be sick of the game? After all, he or she has played the game 5 to 10 times as much as we would expect anyone to enjoy a single-player game. However, the connections the player has to other friends , and the blood, sweat, and tears that the player has devoted to building online characters at that point prevents him or her from leaving. Yes, you then have a whole bunch of paying subscribers, but are they happy? Are they having fun? Or have they become poisonous enemies of the state? |
