Evidence-Based Design

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?