Five Steps to One Million Subscribers
by Loral on August 17, 2004
I want to see one million people playing Evequest. I want to see Sony Online Entertainment double the subscribers they currently have. I do not have a master's degree in business or marketing but that never stopped me from having an opinion before and it won't stop me now. This article outlines five steps to improve Everquest's success.
Loral's Marketeer Five Step Evil PowerPoint Slide for the success of Everquest:
- Continue to release fresh retail versions of Everqust. Make it clear to the consumer which one they should buy and cheap enough to compete with newer MMOGs.
- Update the PC models and graphics to compete with newer MMOGs and make EQ look like a brand new game.
- Release another Lost Dungeons of Norrath style expansion with scaling content for levels 20 to 70.
- Simplify the interface; perform usability studies; simplify the skill and discipline system.
- Improve Everquest stability; make patches modem friendly; offer updated versions of EQ on DVD as DVD drives proliferate.
Step 1: Market Everquest as a new game every expansion and offer a free version. The release of the Everquest Platinum edition greatly improved SOE's chances for increasing subscribers. For $30, a new player gets the basic game, all seven current expansions, and a month to try it out.
Release the basic game with a one month trial for free to let people try the game out. Pass this single-disc version around like AOL. Have people making coasters out of it and throwing it at that guy hovering over by the fax machine. While the current free download helps, the sheer size of the game makes it almost inaccessible to new players. Offering free CDs in gaming stores, magazines, and bulk mail will bring in a lot of new players.
Continually update this $30 version with everything but the most recent expansion. Pull older versions off the shelves. Make it clear which versions players need to buy.
Step 2: Update player character graphics. There are no graphics more important than PC graphics. When people shop for a new MMOG, player graphics are the first thing they see. Everquest has excellent world and beastie graphics, but the current player graphics need work.
SOE plans to release new player graphics by the end of the year. It is important that they stick to this deadline. EQ2, Worlds of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy X offer brand new and fresh player graphics. New PC graphics is SOE's first chance to impress new players, it is the first graphics a new player sees. New player graphics are the most important change this year.
Player graphics require three things to succeed. They must scale well on existing systems and offer good performance during raids. They must be customizable enough to create unique characters identifiable from far away. They must be good enough to let us escape into the lives of our characters.
Step 3: Release another Lost Dungeon-like expansion. Lost Dungeons of Norrath offers the most highly scalable content in any of the previous expansions. LDON offers usable and rewarding content from level 20 to level 65. Mobs are always blue. Treasure and rewards scale well. Groups are easy to find and the camps are well connected. The dungeons allow for easy corpse recovery but still offer a good challenge. Players can finish an event in between 45 and 90 minutes.
A new Lost Dungeons expansion should use the Gates of Discord expedition system so players can leave if they have to. Like LDON, it should allow players to work towards powerful items in small steps. The storylines should put the players in the role of the hero and not the errand boy. The storyline should progress as the players hunt. Threats should seem real. Adventure types should reward the players equally for equal difficulty and there should be a wider variety of them than the current ones.
Step 4: Simplify the interface. Everquest's interface is very difficult for new players. The basic controls alone require a lot of work but stack on communications and character improvement interfaces and you have one of the most complex game interfaces ever seen.
Reduce the number of windows a player must go through to set up disciplines. Start all skills at 1 so they will raise on their own instead of requiring a player to run back and check with a guild master every couple of levels to see if there is a skill they missed. Tell the player when a new discipline is available and let them scribe it like a spell. Streamline the hotbox macro creation process so it is easy to build complex macros mixing skills, disciplines, spells, and other commands.
Perform usability tests with new players to see where interface elements break down and where they can be improved. Basic usability tests are cheap to perform and can easily improve profits on even simple systems.
Simplify the interface and more players will stick with the game.
Step 5: Improve stability and lower network requirements. When I first played Everquest Online Adventures on the Playstation 2, I was impressed by two things. One, they download patches into three megs of space and it never gets any bigger. Two, they focus almost entirely on game enhancements instead of stability improvements.
Make Everquest as stable as a console game. Improve hardware testing and application testing so that players can reasonably expect the game to work every time they log in. Many players still face a variety of technical issues and these issues are far more damaging to the game than almost any content problem. The chaos of PC architectures makes testing very difficult. Stability should be a number one concern for SOE developers.
The large patches that Everquest players face require a high-speed connection. While the game itself plays well over dial up, downloading two hundred megs of updates cut off a lot of players from playing. As DVD drives become more common on newer machines, offer Everquest with all expansions on a single DVD but lock the content the user didn't pay for. Update this DVD with the most recent large patches so even existing players can go get the updates from a game magazine or from their local game shop. Keep patches small and consider dial up players when they are released. No patch should take longer than 30 minutes to download. Even thirty minutes will cut out a lot of players.
I don't claim that these five steps are the keys to the success and future of Everquest, but from the five years I've played this game, the above steps seem to be the ones most hindering to new players. New players are the key to success for Everquest in the years to come. While a lot of players would rather SOE focus on the top 1%, that 1% is going to go away eventually and only by bringing in new and fresh players can Everquest continue to grow into the future.
Loral Ciriclight
15 August 2004
loral@loralciriclight.com
Comment Posted by: AmritaEF on August 17, 2004 01:27 PM
(snip)
Offering free CDs in gaming stores, magazines...
(/snip)
Actually, this is what got me back into EQ two years after I snapped the original CD in half around kunark release.
PC Gamer came with a free EQ CD. I don't think it had any expansions, but after about 10 hours of playing I promptly bought the trilogy, then luclin a month later, then another copy of the whole shebang for my fiancee, and two copies of every expansion since.
That was still a huge number of CD's to buy back then, but when it comes down to it, they make more money on subscription fees than they ever could on box release prices.
*shrug*
It's a marketing tactic that's worked before.
No real reason not to do it here.
Comment Posted by: Orkotan on August 17, 2004 02:33 PM
Well about stability of the game....that would be almost impossible unless everyone have the exactly same PC. Wonder why Mac people are so smug about OS X never crashing? That is because no one but Apple makes the hardware and all of the OS is written for known hardware. While a PC can be a huge grab bag of hardware...that is what causes instability in most cases.
To eliminate this is almost impossible…
Comment Posted by: Amph on August 17, 2004 02:53 PM
Im not sure the game needs to be any easier than it is. It is already dumbed down by a large factor since the orginal came our. (console games are NOT something to emulate in a MMOG).
And before SOE piles another 500k users on this 4+ year old game system, they need to finish fixing the structural issues that have dogged the game, namely the trivilization of the low end content and the fact the low end game is now nothing more than a speedbump on the way to Plane of Time. I cannot see how having 990,000 lvl 65s when 50% of the zones in the game are geared for level 40 and below is all that helpful. That will only get worse once those 990,000 push to lvl 70 ala OoW.
As far as stability is concerned, its funny that PCs havent got all that stable because there isnt that much variety in PC hardware these days
You either have a Pentium or an Athlon
You have either an ATI or an NVidia Vid card
Sound cards are nearly all Creative Labs or built in AC97 codecs
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 17, 2004 04:47 PM
"I cannot see how having 990,000 lvl 65s when 50% of the zones in the game are geared for level 40 and below is all that helpful. That will only get worse once those 990,000 push to lvl 70 ala OoW."
Smedley and Brenlo both confirmed that the majority of the players are between 30 and 50. Though many (level 65 players) argue against this statistic, they feel to me like people screaming that the world is flat and that the sun revolved around us because they didn't like believing that they aren't the center of the universe.
Comment Posted by: Teremar on August 17, 2004 04:51 PM
EQ has a flow of people coming in, and a flow of people going out. Most of the things you suggest are good ideas, but I think it's going to be really hard to substantially change the flow of people coming in to a five year old game.
That leaves the flow of people going out, and if I were SOE that's where I'd put in most of my effort.
I want to comment on the "dumbing down" complaint. I do want EQ to be hard (easy bores me quickly), but hard to me means it requires thought and skill to succeed. It does not mean annoying or time consuming, even as a penalty for failure. Take an encounter. Make it so if you die you spend a half hour on the CR. Did you just make the encounter harder? No, it still takes the same level of skill to succeed. You just made it more annoying and time consuming if you fail.
"Annoying" bugs everyone, of course, but "time consuming" disproportinately affects casual players. A half hour corpse run can be half a casual player's game session, and they log off for the day frustrated. There are plenty of games now that want to steal EQ's casual players, and they've got good ideas for how to do it. If SOE wants to improve their subscription numbers I think the best place to put their efforts is in retaining their long-term casual players.
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 17, 2004 05:04 PM
I agree Teremar. When I talk about simplifying the interface, I mean making the game easier to play, not easier in content. Content should continue to be where the challenge is, not in the UI. It should be easy to get into but the challenges should always be challenging. Right now new players get bogged down with the aircraft-level amount of controls and options. Simplyfing the interface and doing some basic usability testing helps new users get into the game but it won't "dumb it down" (a phrase I hate).
Comment Posted by: Talaen on August 17, 2004 05:36 PM
Amph and Teremar both have good points. I agree with Teremar that making something challenging doesn't mean making it unfun and time-consuming.
But I also agree with Amph that the early game has gotten "dumbed down" a lot. This hasn't happened as the result of any one change, but rather as a result of almost 6 years of changes. Every time new content gets added to the game, it raises the bar on player power a little bit. When that happens, older content gets a little closer to being obsolete.
There are three things I see that are out of whack for the low and mid level game right now, and they're things that players have been complaining about since about a month after Kunark released. Those are:
1. Experience gains are not standard across zones by difficulty. Why bother to play in any of a dozen old world zones when you can level lightning fast in Paludal Caverns almost to level 30? In the old days, players learned important skills like basic group tactics, managing their health and mana supplies, and knowing when to run or fight because they spent time in zones that taught them these skills. If they wanted the great experience, they had to go to a more challenging zone. Now it seems to be the opposite.
2. Even though recent item additions to the game have made good use of recommended and required levels, there's still an awful lot of accumulated equipment out there that is simply too powerful for the players who are using it. I have a level 35 beastlord, wearing many items that come from level 50 zones, and only about half of those have recommended levels. Yet the difficulty of the zones my beastlord hunts in for the most part do not take this into account.
3. Sub-50 buffs don't generally have minimum levels. One of the reasons that people tear through low level content so quickly and easily is that they're walking around with 600 more hit points than they should have. I've met low-level clerics who literally have never even had a chance to use their buffs on a group. The most glaring example of this is Temperance, but even if that got "nerfed", you'd just have folks running around with Resolution or Skin Like Nature. Don't get me wrong, this isn't nearly as bad as when level 1 characters could have KEI, but it seriously lessens the challenge of the game at the low and mid levels.
In order to restore the challenge of the low and mid levels and make them meaningful again for most players, instead of just a "speedbump", the dev team needs to seriously spend some time on the zones, items, and spells that already exist in the game. These things need to be looked at, rebalanced, and restricted so that they're being used by characters of the appropriate levels. A lot of old zones are going to need to be revamped and upgraded some, and some zones are going to need their experience benefits toned down and their challenge level increased. Only when that happens will the majority of players start taking those levels seriously.
Comment Posted by: on August 17, 2004 05:39 PM
This has nothing to do with the article. Just something you may want to consider. I am able to connect to the site fine with IE6, but when I attempt to connect to the site using Mozilla I get denied...not sure if it is your site that is restricting it or not. Thanks.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on August 17, 2004 05:43 PM
Loral wrote:
"Smedley and Brenlo both confirmed that the majority of the players are between 30 and 50. Though many (level 65 players) argue against this statistic, they feel to me like people screaming that the world is flat and that the sun revolved around us because they didn't like believing that they aren't the center of the universe."
I'd be interested to know more about this statistic. Number one, were they referring to characters or to players? I can definitely see it meaning characters - most people have one or two high level characters and up to 6 in the low and mid levels. Number two, how many of these accounts are second, third, or even fourth accounts belonging to the same person? I'd say over 35% of players I meet now have multiple accounts. Of course, many of them also have 65's on all the accounts too, so it may make the population of 65's seem larger than it is. Finally, how do the ratios change when you look at primetime hours vs. off-peak hours? I'm pretty sure there are a lot more 65's on, proportionally speaking, during primetime hours, and of course that's going to skew everyone's perception.
Comment Posted by: Braxis on August 17, 2004 07:36 PM
The pages still do not display in full, unless you hit refresh the first time you load them.
-Braxis
Comment Posted by: Coray on August 17, 2004 09:03 PM
Yeah pages don't load fully in the latest version of IE (sp2). It's also pretty stupid you can't see the post you're commenting on here.
It's been noted already but there is zero chance of EQ1 having any great resurgence for a variety of reasons. If Sony thought there was a chance of that occuring, why would they create a sequel?
EQ2 is going to exist to try to get the hundreds of thousands of people who left EQ, and its certainly within possibility that at some point, combined they have over a million, but either one having that many is not going to happen.
Your first idea is a reasonable one, although I'm skeptical that it would have any great affect on subscription numbers over the long term. They all but offer it for free now, through referral stuff and the like.
Graphics do not keep players around, they in fact can do the opposite. Look at how many people had problems with the relatively minor upgrades done to the game since it came out. Tons do not use luclin models still years later, and the dx9 thing was a complete fiasco.
Lost dungeons type expansions mean nothing and would not help increase subscriptions at all. This is something you personally want, not something that has any great effect on who will play. There is certainly something to be said for being able to play for a relatively short time and get something done, but LDON is not fun, it's the same thing over and over. I doubt that some new player would be content to play the same damn thing every day, the entire existance of these types of games is to see new things all the time, not the same cut and paste crap.
Interface wise, they could certainly make improvements because instead of adjusting existing things, they add something new. So now you have the adventures window, the expedition window, combat abilities, spells, so forth, but again this is not something that is going to make someone quit. You don't have to know everything when you're low level and you learn it as you go, by the time you get to 20ish, you're going to just be used to the controls.
Patch wise, I am not on dialup anymore but the way in which they have patched, is just ridiculous. I detailed one bad example a few months ago here where they forced people to download tons of huge files that could have easily been reduced in size. Again though I doubt this is going to make much difference.
Some of those things would be fine for the game, but others would probably reduce the chance of increasing subscriptions. For example, raising the system requirements, means less people can potentially even be customers, which is a bad thing.
Comment Posted by: Blakyce on August 17, 2004 09:39 PM
I agree with LDON's being a key to the future success of everquest. I believe people spend there time mainly on three things, raids, experience grouping and LDON's. Sure quests and tradeskills take some time, but they are generally not mainstream content.
Raids may be fun, but they are a serious time commitment, and a part of everquest that will not ever appeal to the more casual gamer.I do not believe you will ever grow the subscriber numbers based on needing to get a character through 60+ levels before they reach the meat of the game.
Experience grouping is usually quite fun when trying new zones or trying new ways of fighting in old zones. However, after the first few hours the endless boredom of the Dreadlands etc becomes crushing. Most experience grouping tends to be in places where the exercise of getting through the levels is much more important than actually enjoying your time.
LDON's are not perfect but they provide a good variety of encounters with a good combination of exp, loot and points. SOE needs to spend time adding more content variety, and tweaking the types and rewards for the different encounters. They have done exactly one expansion with LDON's (for all levels), and who knows how excellent they could become with more attention.
I think it is important to provide content to all types of players, but if they hope to grow the game, adding level 65+ time equipped content surely isn't the answer. If they are only hoping to wring out whatever they can from the already existing subscriber base, well GOD is the perfect expansion.
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 17, 2004 09:40 PM
If people can give me more information on the browser problem, I can try to fix it. Right now it works on IE 6, Netscape 7, Mozilla, and Firefox. I've tested it on both Linux and Windows XP. The site is XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0 compliant and validated but some browsers (IE 5.0) aren't fully CSS compliant and that causes problems. Please post with the problem you're seeing and the browser you're using.
Comment Posted by: Aethn on August 18, 2004 08:52 AM
One more thing to remember, EQ has sold over 2,000,000+ copies worldwide. Of that, only 25 % or 500,000 accounts are still active. SOE needs to survey why the other 1,500,000 people left the game and fix those issues first.
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on August 18, 2004 09:10 AM
That checklists look like a City of Heroes feature list... :P
I got sick of scaling dungeons. I dont want them anymore. You see, it is ok nice and cool that i can always get a dungeon with content for me, but i'd like to see diferent ones as i level up.
This is how it is:
5 dungeon types, each with few dungeons in it, you get to repeat over and over.
Currently people just specialize in one mostly (or at the time i left anyway), leaving the rest unused since they had lame rewards or just not as good as the other one.
So, without placing more work on the hands of the dev this is how they can make the same amount of work but a little more variety to players lifes:
5 dungeon types, each dungeon gets a level range assigned:
Type 1 - 22-35
Type 2 - 32-45
Type 3 - 42-55
Type 4 - 52-65
Type 5 - 62-70
You may see i lowered the initial level requirement here, and also that i am considering Omen of Wars level limit. Also there is a point of overlap where randomly your missions would send you to one type or the other.
Note you can always randomly insert one dungeon of the previous types on the higher levels, but leave the type 5 for the high level folk and so on.
The basic idea is you get the current instanced dungeon, you get the same access to nice enemies, but you also feel progress. I mean, come on, fighting from lvl 25 - 65 on the same area sucks!
You may have 5 areas to choose from but as i told before most people go to one alone, and even if not truth is you will feel like you been hunting on 5 diferent noob areas for 40 levels! If you limit access to diferent dungeon types as you level up then it would make it a lot more interesting to level up, even if it feels linear, since truth is people have been playing EQ linealy anyway for almost it's entire existence and LDON did not much to change that.
OK, also, these types MUST also be sub changed. Idea is you get some type of dungeons within the type. Lets say these are complexity levels. The higher you are the more complex the dungeon is. At 22 you will get the most simple looking dungeon on the type 1 set, but the lvl 35 will get the coolest looking and more complex set on the type 1, altough just a simple one on the type 2. Enemy types also should get cooler and meaner looking on the most complex dungeons. The last dungeon type should always contain a decent count of big enemies.
We must remember progress is not only apreciated on the level spells and equipment, but it is higerly experienced on the areas you are at.
Comment Posted by: on August 18, 2004 02:36 PM
I very much dislike this new post format.
Having a non-threaded view is very unorganized and lacks coherence.
Additionally, the post a comment link would be nice to have at the bottom of the posts with an additional link to reply to each post individually.
That way you don't have to try to scroll up halfway up the screen to make a post that will right back at the bottom.
Comment Posted by: on August 18, 2004 02:38 PM
also, changing the background color of posts to alternate, *and* be different from the main story will visually identify where the story ends and comments begin.
Right now you can scroll down fast and totall miss where the article ends and comments begin.
Comment Posted by: Siins on August 18, 2004 08:53 PM
Smedley keeps saying the majority of users are 30 to 50, but what level players are playing most of the time?
I know that on my server, there is almost no new players coming in, and when you do use /who to see where people of certain levels are, there are very, very few players online below 50. I actually ran into a low level player the other day asking some very basic questions about how to play. It was the first one I had run into in monts.
Now, if you want to look at the toons on my accounts, there are only 2 that are 65 (one on each), and yes, there are 3 that are 29 to 40. And there are 5 more that are below 20. But I spend 90% of my game time on one of my level 65 characters. I spend less than 5% of my play time on any of my alts. But they are the majority of the characters that I have. So that matches what Smedley keeps saying, but its ignoring how much time I play each of those toons.
I feel that SOE needs to hire a small army of programmers, and get serious about EQ stability, bugs and unfinished quests. At least once a day, I either crash or go insta-LD when zoning. There is no excuse for that. Everyone in my guild has seen the "EQ may have detected that you have crashed" dialog boz when zoning so many times we cuss at it every time it comes up anymore. Yet the devs say not one word about it, and of course the /bug system is a massive black hole that should be extensively investigated by scientists.
Until SOE gets the bugs out, quests fixed or added as needed, and gets the games stability back to where it should be, fancy graphics isnt going to help much. Sure it will look pretty, but what good is it going to do to have things looking pretty when you crash just by trying to zone multiple times a day.
SOE gave all the "inactive" accounts a free month earlier this year. Of course, they also released the DX9 patch the at the same time, and those people got to attempt to play EQ while it was in its buggiest state in years. For the entire 30 free days. Sometimes, you gotta wonder if the people at SOE really do walk around the office with real pistols, and shoot themselves in the foot every 30 seconds.
And one other thing SOE really, really, really needs to do is to fire everyone evern remotely involved with their CS department, and then replace them with people that know what CS really is, and for them to get enough CS people on-staff, both in-game on out of game, to actually be able to assist their customers in a prompt and useful way.
-- Looks like this thing strips out paragraph breaks... I tried to break this up some... dont blame me! LOL
Comment Posted by: Braxis on August 18, 2004 09:01 PM
The page does not fully display on IE6 using Windows XP service pack 2.
You mentioned several times now that the webpage is "XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0 compliant" which makes no difference if it doesn't display correctly.
Its like SOE stating that their graphic engine is now DX9 compalint which means nothing if its full of bugs. :)
Anyway, I think change is good but you didn't give it a enough time or testing before forcing the changes live.
As far as EQ goes:
Content, Customer Service, and Polish is what will determine player retention. Everything else is just fluff and if SOE keeps on their current path they EQ will continue to decline as well as poor PR for their next flagship EQ2.
-Braxis
-Braxis
Comment Posted by: Grunx on August 18, 2004 10:24 PM
Actually it does make a difference, it means the browser your using sucks.
IE is a horrid browser, and it has been made even worse with SP2.
Don't install SP2 and don't use IE.
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 18, 2004 11:54 PM
Stylesheets are a pain with IE, but yes, 99% of the world uses it. I tested it in IE and it worked fine but I did dig into the bug and I think its fixed. There are some weird things with spacing and margins and floats and junk on the homepage I want to fix, but for the time being I think it looks ok.
Due to the bugs you have experienced, Mobhunter staff will refund your last two week's payment.
Comment Posted by: Phred Phlinstone on August 19, 2004 12:07 PM
Nope still broken on IE6. Yeah the other browsers are so much better that must be why all the world uses them and why Netscape didn't go bankrupt. Give it a break.
Comment Posted by: Roxx on August 19, 2004 03:02 PM
I think Sony's plan is for EQ2 to be the game you are describing in the main article, while EQ1 caters to those who like to raid.
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 19, 2004 07:29 PM
I played with the stylesheet today and changed a few things around. I put in a few fixes for CSS bugs but I still don't know if this covered everything. If you are still having the problem, make sure you've cached the new stylesheet. If you continue to have the problem after that, please tell me what happened and what browser / OS you use. Thanks!
Roxx, a lot of folks have that same thought and it may be accurate. SOE still pays the two teams royalties on both games, however, so it would make sense that they want EQ to continue to feed single-group content to players. Everquest cannot survive on raid content alone. Raiders burn through content too fast and end up leaving anyway. If they want people to start playing and stay playing, they need to focus on lower and mid-level single-group content and features.
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on August 20, 2004 03:55 AM
Loral,
please don't fall into the same biased self-serving mantra of other very narrow minded people out there.
Go check levels above 20 per class one day of the week and see exactly how many 30-50 are online and how many level 65 are there.
Then we talk.
Comment Posted by: Aladinsane on August 20, 2004 06:40 AM
well
one thing that sony could do in the interim that would help us all I think is to make an iso of a dvd for the game - all the upto date patches and expansions already in it - then those who have the bandwidth can just download it every now and again and burn it out - would make it very easy to reinstall etc
(Could be the same disk that you were talking about as being freely available - the account would lock expansions that you are not subscribed too, and then if people want to add that expansion, they can easily with out trying to source a copy from amazon or what ever)
Comment Posted by: John Clark on August 20, 2004 12:41 PM
Re: ISO of DVD
You realize you can just burn your EQ directory to DVD any time you want, and that's a pretty good starting point for a reinstall. EQ doesn't require any installation besides the EQ directory itself.
Comment Posted by: Teremar on August 20, 2004 04:01 PM
I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this majority is 30-50 bit either. Three reasons:
1) It doesn't match my experience. When I play my alts in this range, finding a full group is the exception outside LDoN. And it takes much longer to fill out a LDoN group than it does for my level 65 main. The couple of low-level people in my guild seem to always be starving for groups--I don't think I've ever heard them tell someone who wanted to log on an alt and join them "Sorry, full group." Duos and trios seems to be the norm for them.
2) SOE doesn't seem to believe it either. What was the last expansion that had a large fraction of its content focused on levels 30-50? Well, LDoN was for all levels, and before that it was Luclin. Even LoY, the supposedly "non-uber" expansion, was focused on 50-60. Droga and Nurga were revamped to become mostly too high for people in the 30-50 range. And how much of their tuning and balacing has been focused on the high levels?
3) There are so many wrong ways to count characters (or perhaps it would be better to say irrelevant ways) this statement means little without some explanation of their methodology. How exactly did they deal with alts? Bazaar mules? Inactive characters? The way this statement has met with widespread ridicule and yet we've heard nothing in its defense from SOE makes me doubly suspicious.
I could be wrong, and it's always fun to learn something new. So bring on the evidence. In the absence thereof, I think revamping the low level game would be a misallocation of resources. I suggest the low level game (1-50 or so) should have thee main purposes:
1) To teach people the game and their class (including twinks).
2) To show people as much as possible of the cool content SOE has created.
3) To allow new players to have fun!
Once upon a time SOE had to worry about people getting to 50 too quickly, running out of content, and quitting. That's no longer the case. In fact I'd say the bigger danger today is that if it takes too long to get to 50, people will feel like they'll always be isolated from the mainstream of EQ. Few people to play with, few guilds who will give them the time of day, expansions with no content for them, etc.
On the other hand, they need to learn, and we don't want all that cool content to go to waste. And there's that very valid comment that xp grinding in DL is awfully boring. I some suggestions for that, all involving ZEMs, so they would be easy to do.
1) Rebalance the ZEMs to even out risk vs. reward. The goal is to not punish people who'd like to see more than Paludal Caverns. Include travel time as a factor so it's worth it to go visit out of the way zones like Paw. Let the players help--watch where they choose (and don't choose) to play. Maybe even ask!
2) After evening them out, bias the ZEMs in favor of dungeons. First off, I'd rather play with someone who spent three months leveling up in dungeons than someone who spent a year leveling up in outdoor zones. The dungeons give you a much greater variety of tactical situations, and just plain push you harder. More importantly, the challenge and the variety make them more fun. Make the xp better enough to make up for a few wipes and CRs and you'll end up with better and happier new players than the current DL refugees.
3) Move the hotspots around more often--every two weeks, maybe every week. If people like a zone they're welcome to stay, but it doesn't take more than a couple weeks for a new zone to become more or less familiar. Yes, they won't be intimately familiar with every detail, but there are huge numbers of zones they've probably never seen at all. Exploring new zones should be one of a new player's greatest pleasures--they can settle down to grinding when the novelty of the game in general has worn off.
Will this get SOE a million subscribers? Not remotely. But it might help reduce the rate of decline.
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 20, 2004 09:37 PM
The summit folks grilled Smedley pretty hard about the statistic and a lot of them still don't believe it. These active 30 to 50 players don't include bazaar mules and only include active characters. Even if its an alt, its an alt played more than the 65 main.
All of your observations are true. It is harder for a mid-leveler to find a group because mid-levelers aren't on as much as a level 65 folk. High level folk play a lot longer than 30 to 50, but there are more active 30 to 50 than there are 65.
Kunark, Velious, Luclin, Legacy of Ykesha, and Lost Dungeons - five of the seven current EQ expansions - had a fair amount of content for 30 to 50s. Mid-level hunters don't require more zones, they have more than they can hunt in as is, but they do need new features like 90 minute adventures, 60 minute task systems, the Knowledge Stones, and the tribute system. Mid-levelers needs features more than they need zones. They need content that fits their short online time.
Rather than a focus on level lets focus on the length of time people play. More people play a couple of hours a week than play for 20 or 30 hours like many of us. More content needs to support short periods of time. New features have to help connect players with limited time and get them into a good hunt with a group. The LFG tool, the Wayfarer camps, the closeness of LDONS, and the Knowledge stones are good examples.
This isn't about "dumbing down" Everquest, it's fitting Everquest into peoples' already overtaxed lives.
Comment Posted by: Kraevin Morbluud on August 22, 2004 01:25 AM
I dont want new graphics. The Luclin ones lag me out as is. I would prefer they just keep adding content to keep us interested.
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on August 24, 2004 10:50 AM
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Nope still broken on IE6. Yeah the other browsers are so much better that must be why all the world uses them and why Netscape didn't go bankrupt. Give it a break.
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Reason most people use IE and Netscape went bankrupt was because MS using unfair tactics by bundling IE on windows and not distributing any other browser. Note this is what started the Anti Trust case against MS. It is not about being better, it is about being pushed up your nose.
As for those that still dont believe most players are on the 20-50 just because of how many they see online at once do this:
Turn chat log on
do a macro that does all these:
/who all 20-22
/who all 23-24
/who all 25-26
/who all 27-28
/who all 29-30
/who all 30-32
/who all 33-34
so it all the way to 60, i know this will take more than just one macro.
Reason you want to limit it to short level range is so you get as many names as posible from the searches instead of the plain nunber of characters.
Do this every 10 minutes, once you are done, make a parsing of the log file and try to see how many unique characters you find on the 20-50 range and how many you find on the 50+ range.
Remember that online numbers dont mean much, you must consider that a player may play for 30 minutes a day or just one hour, for every casual player that logs in maybe one or two log out. That does NOT means these are not their mains, this just means they play casualy.
Comment Posted by: hoshisabi on August 24, 2004 11:30 AM
I think the key is that there may actually be more people between levels 30 and 50 than there are total level 65.
That's a pretty useless statistic, though. All it's saying is that there are more people that are NOT 65 than there are that are 65. However, there's more level 65 people than any other level. If you're level 40 and you're trying to find a group, you'll find less people than you will when you're 65 and trying to find a group. Make the range small enough and you'll get a more fair comparison.
People always level up, there's a constant creep towards level 65. Once people hit level 65 they will stay there (until OoW). That's the one level range that has people coming into it and never leaving. I don't just say that because I am level 65, but because I've experienced life from level 1 up to level 65 multiple times now, trying to get groups all the way up. (The cleric is the only one where it wasn't a battle getting a pre-65 group.)
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 24, 2004 01:18 PM
I completely agree, Hoshisabi. Statistics are a dangerous thing when misused. There probably are more 65s than players of any other level, but when considering the types of players they want starting and continuing to play, they must consider that a large group of their players are under 65. This is important when you consider Planes of Power and Gates of Discord, two expansions with the majority of their content past level 65. Consider Gates of Discord, an expansion with only two zones that players below 55 can even zone in to.
Players below 55 have no reason to buy Gates of Discord beyond tributes and those two zones and none of those features make it worth $30.
Future expansions must always have something worth while for players between 30 and 50. It doesn't have to be zones, but it has to be something more than tributes. The task system from Omens is a good example, but SOE needs to spend some real time on it to make it worth while.
If more than half of the players of Everquest are below 50, SOE should make sure that half of their work on an expansion supports those players and gives them something to make the purchase worth while.
More raid zones, bigger raid content, more flagged zones, none of that will sell as well as an expansion like LDON with content for almost everyone.
Comment Posted by: Marrgill on August 24, 2004 05:25 PM
One thing I would like to see more of in EverQuest are quests. Lately it seems like expansion are tailored towards making people grind for points, whether it be DKP with their guild or Adventure Points with the Wayfarer Brotherhood. I like what they did in Veeshan's Peak with the new quests in there -- though I have issue with requiring everybody to kill Suled Dar's Shade to enter.
Comment Posted by: Blamfoozle on August 24, 2004 06:30 PM
I have no doubt that there are more players with mains 30-50 than 65s. I also have no doubt that at any given instant, there are more 65s on.
This is actually the reason why gaming companies "cater to the ubers" - they are the ones who make the connections with friends that keeps them playing. It's also why they emphasize group play over solo, and why guilds are important. This is not only true in EQ, it is true in MMORPGs in general.
They pay little heed to the 30-50 "casuals" because they don't believe that it's worth the effort - if you quit, the theory goes, it's no skin off their nose because you were going to quit pretty soon anyway, regardless of what they do.
And you know what? They're right. That's why the whole "most players are 30-50" statistic is true, yet meaningless in terms of game design.
Comment Posted by: on August 24, 2004 06:44 PM
bingo
Comment Posted by: Loral on August 24, 2004 06:48 PM
That's an interesting theory. I still think a larger focus on the mid-levels and single-group hunters over the high amount of resources spent on raid content would raise EQ's success.
Comment Posted by: Stan the man on August 25, 2004 04:17 AM
I think that any hopes of EQ ever growing to 1 million susbscibers, or even getting back to near 500,000 is a pipe dream. EQ is old. There is so much wrong and broken with the game it would take a year to fix it all even if they stopped making expansions and concentrated only on fixing EQ, which will never happen. The fact is that Sony has severly hurt their reputation this year. GoD was junk (requiring large amount of tweaking which wouldn't be necessary if they TESTED it right to begin with), the DX9 change was junk (pathing/getting stuck broken for months), classes still remain horribly unbalanced (and have been so for years), CS stinks (this is self expanitory to anyone trying to get a petition dealt with), and their communication with the player base still stinks despite the superficial changes made (I don't think saying We're discussing/considering it as a reply to top 10 lists every update is communication).
It's all an attitude problem and talent problem with Sony. They don't have the right attitude to deal with serious player concerns and their programming talent looks like graduates from a junior college. No amount of putting dressing on this game will get new players to try it or older ones who have quit to come back and stay back (they know better). There is just too much good competition now from games like City of Heroes and upcoming titles like World of Warcraft for Sony to just slide by with substandard efforts. Look at the subscription numbers, even as of March (the last time they reported numbers) in decline to 420k and most likely a lot lower than that now. Idealism is nice but it's not realism.
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on August 25, 2004 09:20 AM
--------------------------
And you know what? They're right. That's why the whole "most players are 30-50" statistic is true, yet meaningless in terms of game design.
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I entirely disagree.
Let me state my own story. I played EQ for 5 years I think (bought the game one month before Kunark came out, still have the original box and CD the game cam in). In all those years I NEVER got ANY character over level 46 (and the 40s where something I achieved only once LDON was in).
You can say I am one of those perpetual 30-50 guys. I did not quit for a long time, and I left a lot of money on their pockets.
So, why did I quit recently?
1) Lack of places to hunt in. Due to XP modifiers everyone decided to hunt on the latest expansion, this made any non-newest expansion zone hard to find a group to hunt at.
2) Graphics that made my eyes bleed. Lets face it, after trying out ANY other mmorpg out there, even some of the older ones like AO, you realize how awful the graphics are.
3) Lack of innovation. All new expansions did was add more ways to grind and more zones to do it. Look at the constant updates done on CoH for examples on how you can actually upgrade the product and not only expand on it. DAoC also shows very good signs of this, by adding entirely new mechanics to the game, like their redesigned (and really all new) battlegrounds and player/guild housing expansions
4) Lack of variety on the encounters. No matter what, all fights are the same once you start on a camp or ldon. There may be varieties but truth be told you ALWAYS do the same things during any battle without any variety. Most games today offer more strategy than just auto attack, or chain nuke.
5) Desolations of the foundations - I would have expected after the years that the main starting cities would grow in importance rather than be entirely robed of any. Things like the Luclien Bazzar literally killed the Freeport economy (thanks god the game has no real economy else Freeport would be out of NPCs now since they all would had died of hunger). LDON managed to do this further, although bringing trivial gimmick life on the wayfarers camps, that life should had been injected into the city cores.
Of my points I know 1-4 are the ones that affect most players, specially the ones that are new to the game and want to play casually.
Now, note, some one told that the fact that there are more 30-50 players but more 65 characters than of any given level means that the only important thing is the amount of characters on a given level.
You must note 2 things: first you CAN’T look at levels specifically; you MUST look at level ranges. I bet you will find way less characters level 60-64 since the ones that get to 60 will blast their way to 65 very fast. Does this mean there should be nothing for them? But is not the level 64 content mostly accessible for the level 60? Look in the ranges and find how many characters are 30-50 and then 51-65.
Now, you say the bigger amount of players are unimportant since the only important thing is the online ones at a given time... so, that means if they all quit the game will loose no money? You realize you MUST convince these players to keep playing without the promise "cooler content is at higher levels" because they will simply cancel their accounts if you do?
Comment Posted by: on August 25, 2004 10:17 AM
levels 1 thru 55-60 have sooooooo much content now that zones are so desolate that people can't even find groups in.
And then you people want even MORE content for the people who don't even use the vast majority of content that IS available.
/boggle
Comment Posted by: netnomad on August 25, 2004 01:33 PM
As far as the player graphics go, I would be happy if they just brought their dye colour picker out of the 486 era. I am horrible with colours and having more than 16 or so choices would save me a lot of messing with sliders. I'm not expecting Adobe by any stretch of the imagination but even a drop-down menu with 100 or so pre-defined common colours would be a better launching point than the colour picker we have now for dyeing. I end up running around the PoK looking at what other people are using and then begging them (or bribing them) to give me their RGB codes. /sigh
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on August 30, 2004 09:00 AM
Please note that content does NOT equals new zones. That is an aweful missconception that has gone crazy since every expancion really just add zones and call them content.
Content can come in redesign of these zones, new enemies thrown to the unused zones, new adventure types, with new original objectives (hell use the same maps just an original concept), new INTERESTING quests, maybe even instanced quests (ones that the combat parts only happen inside some instanced dungeon).
I agree there are laods of unused zones, but it is not because there is just too much content, but because those zones have been regarded as obsolete since they have no ZEMs or are too dificult compared to x zone, or the loot sucks, or a combination of these.
Work should be placed on fixing all of these problems where they are, remember, placing enemies to "redesign" a zone is way easier than making a new zone entirely since geometry is realy not needed.
Comment Posted by: Sleestok on September 2, 2004 05:11 PM
The reason most of my friends and myself quit was because of the 51-60 grind. If they made 56-60 (my main is currently 56) go as fast as 61-65, I might return to the game, but right now I have better things to do than spend days and days of /played killing "A Di'Zok whatever" or "Froglok Krup yadda" over and over five million times, just so I can get to the point to see the new PoP content. Oh wait, even then I'd need to spend days and days more racking up 50+ AA to be able to see most of that... pounding sand in my backyard would feel more productive at this point.
Comment Posted by: Zkar on September 6, 2004 05:08 AM
Unfortunately, suggesting ideas to improve EverQuest is a full time job...
and no one's hiring.
Comment Posted by: Spleenventor on September 14, 2004 04:27 AM
Actually, I think the best improvement in EQ would be consistancy in mob conning. If its dark blue then it should fight like a dark blue mob. It shouldn't be a yellow con in disguise. What is the point of conning if its unreliable? I realize this isn't a new issue, but is a frustrating one.
Comment Posted by: Darwin Practice on October 18, 2004 01:03 AM
Why not, just, give up?
Everquest is great, but it's past it's prime, the most recent expansions have been a panic-action to keep it's hardcore playerbase funding eq2 in nice steady incriments.
And really, the things you suggest would make for a lot of major work, when there are games out there with all the features you want already built in.
I played EQ for ages, and I know how hard it is to realize that in 3 months from the last payment your years of work will fade away into nothingness, but really, EQ players are dedicated, intellegent, and gifted with a perserverence most gamers could never understand.
The rest of the gaming world needs you to help whip the newbies into shape!
anyway... just a thought...
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