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The Lineage of Ideas: Holiday Weekends
June 6, 2008 2:55 pm
Remember how way, way back in the day, the Shadowbane team was promoting servers with different rulesets? We ended up not doing that until some time after launch, but we had the tools all along — we had cool server config files that allowed us to change all kinds of variables quickly and easily. One of them was an experience multiplier, so we could, say, jack up the experience rate on the Korean servers while leaving the North American servers alone.
If I remember correctly, we first temporarily changed that variable to make up for some server downtime — “sorry the server was down for so long, but here, you can have more experience for a few days!”
Eventually, we started doing occasional weekend events just for fun (and increased server populations and press and drawing people together and all that). I don’t remember when they started, but here’s an announcement of one in 2004.
A while after that, we started doing various events every weekend — repair costs are reduced this weekend, experience is increased next weekend, and so on and so forth.
City of Heroes picked up on this concept and started doing their own special-occasion double experience weekends at some point, but I can’t find a record of when. Here’s one in 2006 and the article phrases it as something special — was it their first?
It’s spread into other NCsoft games too.
World of Warcraft uses the concept for battleground weekends — I suspect they wanted to speed up battleground queues by encouraging players to congregate in a single battleground. Not quite the same thing, but I mention it so you won’t in the comments. 
And finally, today, I see that Call of Duty 4 is having their very own double experience weekend on Xbox Live. That’s a long way for that idea to travel.
What are some other examples of holiday weekends, where a single variable is temporarily changed to encourage players to log in? Was Shadowbane really the first to try it?
Sandra Powers wrote:
AC1 and AC2 both did similar things during the runup to our (respective) 2005 expansions, so either late 2004 or early 2005. AC2 may have done some before then — I’d need access to Perforce to double-check, which I no longer have :> — but I seem to remember Elliot fiddling the AC2 treasure variables for special bonus weekends starting not long after AC2 launched.
I don’t remember being aware of other games doing anything like that back then, but at the same time I certainly don’t reember thinking we were being particularly original either.
Posted on 06-Jun-08 at 7:03 pm | Permalink
J. wrote:
Surely there’s trainloads of precedent for it happening in MUDs. But oddly enough, I’m recalling A Tale In The Desert turning on its combat system that was there all along but never activated, for a day, just to see how players reacted.
With Shadowbane, the real appeal was to have breaks from the relentless consequence for actions. I wonder what would have happened if there had been real “hell nights” like the founders originally envisioned, where everything would be reset at the end of each night, and everything that happened, wouldn’t have mattered.
Posted on 09-Jun-08 at 2:16 am | Permalink
Sandra Powers wrote:
We unintentionally had such a hell night in AC1 once. We introduced a nasty bug that was going to require a database rollback. (Okay — *I* introduced the bug. *sigh* Stupid tinkering system.) But coding and testing the fix was going to take several hours, so we left the worlds up — and let the players know that they could do whatever they liked in the meantime, because when the fix was done it was all getting rolled back.
Many players had a blast that night, and let us know it. Unfortunately, deliberately scheduling that kind of reset seems a bit problematic to me — either you do it on its own world, where it doesn’t have the same impact, or you do it on a normal world and piss off the parts of the population that ‘only have one night a week to play and was planning on leveling tonight!’
Of course, that might have worked out rather differently for a game with different emphases, like Shadowbane.
Posted on 09-Jun-08 at 1:20 pm | Permalink
Sara Jensen Schubert wrote:
Haha, I forgot. Ultima Online had a hell night every night.
The servers were rebooted every night around 5 AM PST. Everything that happened within about an hour of a reboot wasn’t saved. So every night at about 4 AM, people would go to the graveyard north of Britain just to mess around — this was in the days of the reputation system, so normally you wouldn’t go PKing with wild abandon on your main character.
Of course, since they didn’t announce when, exactly, the server was going to go down, you didn’t know when, exactly, to go have fun. I think that was a little bit of the appeal … the danger.
Posted on 11-Jun-08 at 11:57 am | Permalink
Muzadi wrote:
You may be amused to know that the source of CoH’s double xp weekends was me in that meeting at Cryptic pushing heavily for it on the basis of Shadowbane’s use of the technique. (I always thought it was brilliant when I played SB.)
Posted on 12-Jun-08 at 12:04 pm | Permalink