We Can Fix That with Data

In addition to your friends’ scores, Rock Band song leaderboards provide some interesting business data.

Every time you play a song in Rock Band while connected to Xbox Live, your score is applied to the song’s leaderboard. What’s interesting about that is that the number of entries on the leaderboard can tell us how many users have played the song. And what’s interesting about that is that it tells us how many users have purchased the song, if it was downloadable content. (Not counting people that purchased the song and never played it, and not counting if the users-played count is over 100k because the leaderboards don’t go that far, but hey.)

Rock Band DLC Statosphere adds it all up.

skedastic of the Qt3 boards massaged the numbers a bit to remove time factors and to group by artist. There’s some debate in the thread over his statistical methods. I would like to debate because Rush and Nine Inch Nails are relatively low, and goddammit, I want more Rush and Nine Inch Nails.

Am I not getting more Rush and Nine Inch Nails because the team can see that they’re poor investments? I don’t know, but I haven’t seen any patterns in the DLC releases that would imply they’re trying to provide more songs by proven bands — yet. I wonder what their lead time and content production pipelines look like. Is it harder to get assets out of studio musicians than it is artists?

I played the demo for Civilization Revolution, Civilization revamped for the console. The demo’s up for download on Xbox Live. It is awesome.

From one playthrough, I get the sense that it’s been streamlined but not simplified. For example, the two biggest changes that come to mind, given the way I play: your newb galley ship now comes complete with exploration units — you don’t have to build a ship, then build guys to put on it. (Don’t know if that holds true for later ships, but it’s a very welcome feature in the early game.) And road building is automated — pay out some money in one city, pick the connecting city, and it’s done. (I’m actually kind of sad about that, because I goddamn love building roads … I goddamn loved building roads and sewer systems in SimCity when I was a kid too. Hmm.)

Still, it’s a thoughtful feature as well, because the game has lots more going on. There are events popping up all the time. It helps break up the early game monotony — okay, I moved my explorer warrior one space, I moved my settler one space, next turn, do the same thing again.

I’m really looking forward to the full game next month. I just wasn’t expecting a console revamp of anything, really, to turn out so well. On the next playthrough, I might notice more stuff I don’t like, but for now, I’m delighted.

Firaxis has also announced that the next iteration on Civilization 4 will be a remake of Colonization. I loved Colonization when I was a kid. I’m really looking forward to that too.

I have to give credit to the Age of Conan folks — I’ve never heard this one before.

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?

I haven’t seen anyone else point this out, but after many years, Guild Wars has opted to create different PvP and PvE versions of abilities. I’m not familiar with the scope of the problem, but it must have been pretty bad to cause them to choose such an ugly and inelegant solution after so much time without. Looks like the first revised data rolled out a few weeks ago.

In the future, you’ll be able to store saves for your Steam games on Valve’s servers.

I don’t know how often people play the sort of games they’d want to save on multiple machines — in other words, narrative games as opposed to multiplayer. I can understand burning some time at a friend’s house with a fast game of Some Multiplayer Shooter, but I don’t think I want to sit down and pick up a story where I left off. Narrative games would seem to lend themselves to longer and less social sessions.

But since Valve knows what you’re doing all the time, they must know how often people play the same narrative game on multiple machines, so maybe they see some demand.

Or … maybe there’s another reason. What can they data mine out of save games that they don’t already know? They already know how far you’ve gotten — if that’s what “Highest Map Played” means. There must be something interesting in there …

There’s been some discussion on the Age of Conan newbie experience, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about the biggest problem — at least, what will become the biggest problem for the people who are counting the money.

It’s an intensely anti-social experience, and that’s going to cause problems in the future.

A lowbie Conan character will spend half of her time soloing in solo instances. Solo instances have chat — sometimes (it seems buggy). Chat is a good way of staying in touch with the world — it reminds you that there are people out there, even if you’re playing on your own. (As an aside, this is also why chat notifications for events are awesome — they give people something to talk about, and they show newbies that there’s stuff going on out there. Cool stuff that you might be able to participate in someday!)

The rest of the time, our Conan lowbie is running around in town, doing quests. Sometimes she gets sent out of town — there is a group-oriented zone with some group quests nearby. It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of people grouping there, though. Besides, once they get to the next level band, they would have to drop group anyway to go finish their next batch of solo quests.

There are other things to do in a few other zones that are PvP enabled on PvP servers. People are grouping there! The PKs are grouped together, anyway. So far, it’s generally true that if I run into a solo player, I’m okay. If I see a group, I need to be ready to switch instances.

So that’s another thing — the entire world is instanced. You can switch to (the entrance of) another copy of the zone you’re in at any time with a few clicks. On one hand, this is pretty cool (if a little morally dubious) on PvP servers. On the other hand, it splits players up. I see people asking where their friends are, because they should both be in the same place — player confusion I haven’t seen since the launch of City of Heroes. (At least you don’t have to go to the tram to switch instances in AoC.)

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with solo play. But things are different for open PvP games. In worlds where players can’t make it on their own and don’t know who to trust, it’s vitally important to hook them up with potential friends and guildmates. Repeated gankage, with no recourse and no support network, in a game that’s supposed to be about more than that is bad for business. People quit over that kind of stuff and they don’t come back.

Here’s the business outcome of weak social features, and new player experiences where new players aren’t welcomed with open arms by a waiting community.

They create a Recruitment Problem. New players need to be directed into guilds as soon as possible. L33tz0r PvP guilds need a reason to take newbs under their wing, rather than giving them a Darktide introduction to the game. (Remember? The camping of the new player start locations on the Asheron’s Call 1 PvP server was legendary. Players said they did it to discourage the weak.) So the game needs to provide valuable roles for new, inexperienced, or just plain bad players. Give the newbs grunt tasks that the guild wouldn’t want their best PvPers doing during the siege.

(This is also a really compelling argument against PvP l33tness ranks for guilds — if the guild’s ranking will fall when you invite your newb little brother, you won’t invite him. You won’t invite him and he won’t play, and that’s a lost subscription.)

I’ve heard that Age of Conan sieges are limited to 50 on 50 players. That means only the l33test of the l33t get to participate. Sure, it lessens technical headaches and makes people think it’s “fair,” but in the long run, it contributes to a recruitment problem that hurts profits.

Over time, the playerbase dwindles into the hardest of the hardcore, ever more hostile to outsiders. Outsiders that are worth $14.99 a month … if they make it past the first month.

And when there’s no reason to recruit or even communicate with anyone outside of your little group, we get the Us vs. Them Problem. Picture a social network. Picture a sad, stunted little social network with no links outside of a single guild. Now, give that guild a catastrophe — city gets burned down, guild leader gets hit by a bus — and every $14.99 in that guild has nowhere to go but the unsubscribe page.

A robust political system, with meaningful alliances, allows players to enjoy the magic of the PvP server — the armed and polite society — while knowing how to interact with others. You want players to make friends far and wide so they have support when their guild falls through, while still allowing them to kill the players who need to be killed. Without political systems, players have to fall back on the relationships they made before they joined the guild — “hey, I did Scarlet Monastery with that guy when we were wee little lads and he didn’t totally suck.” These casual bonds don’t form when the entire game is instanced and nobody groups and nobody talks, and every time you see another player, you get ready to run.

I fear that that dwindling, ever more hardcore, and ever more hostile playerbase is in Age of Conan’s future because of that antisocial new player experience. “It was supposed to be a single player game until 20″ nonetheless, this weird hybrid, where nobody communicates and the most meaningful player interaction is getting three-shot by somebody five levels higher than you, is bad for business in the long run.

There’s nothing wrong with getting three-shot by somebody five levels higher than you on a PvP server. You signed up for that when you chose the PvP server. But there is something wrong if you haven’t already been welcomed by a guild that’s sending five bored level cappers his way — a guild that wants you because game systems encourage it, with people you met because content was designed for a social experience.

And to be fair, AoC has a couple of things going for it — I believe it’s the first MMO to ship with a looking for guild feature. (Everquest 2 added theirs after launch, right? And Shadowbane’s was long after launch and not really a proper looking for guild feature anyway. Yeah, sorry about that.) Players can also link guilds in chat, which is really cool. Click on the guild name in chat to get an info pane. (Remember that Anarchy Online, not WoW, was the first MMO with item links in chat.)

I wish AoC the best of luck. I’m delighted to see somebody carrying the open PvP torch again.