When Players log into an MMORPG, they like to play it, not read a book. This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a storyline in the game. But more often than not, the amount of text is way over the top. World of Warcraft limits the amount of text for a quest to 511 characters – and this is still too much. There is a reason why Twitter limits the text to even fewer characters, with obvious success.

If a quest text consists of 150 words in average or 1000 characters, and a player gets like 15 quests in an hour, this is 15,000 characters of story to read. I doubt many players read any of them. So the result is not a game with a deep storyline, it's a game with no story at all, because nobody cares to read it. The players can't judge in advance on which story is important and which isn't, so they usually opt to not read any at all.

A good MMORPG should choose the quest texts wisely and cut everything as much as possible. If most quest texts are short, the occasional longer texts will get noticed and have a chance for players to actually read them. And even then, a "longer" text shouldn't be longer than the 511 characters of World of Warcraft – and even that is too long.

It's much better to have one story line and tell it in a series of quests, than to have a story for each quest and use lots of text to tell it. It's even better, to not tell the story in words but show it in the game.

Kill Ten Rats

There will still probably always be filler quests in MMORPGs. And it's perfectly fine. Players don't even want to be involved with heavy story arcs in every quest all the time. It's ok to have recreational short quests, to just finish them quickly without thinking much about it. Having more fun with actually playing the game and fighting mobs than caring about a story. That's good.

The worst an MMORPG can do, is having "kill ten rats" quests with walls of text, just to tell the players to "kill ten rats". If the quest is about killing ten rats, just say so. Don't try to make up for a shallow quest by using a huge wall of text. It doesn't work like that. If a game likes to improve on "kill ten rats" quests, there should be a reason why the ten rats must go. Not a reason hidden in a long quest text, but a reason in the greater story of a zone.

If the quests are meant to be filler quests, than don't pretend them to be something else and don't bore the players with long quest texts. It's the opposite of what a quick filler quest should be.

There are many different Key Performance Indicators (KPI) used in online games to determine the success of a game. One of the most basic, most common and most important metrics is the retention rate.

Retention rate measures the amount of players who join a game and return to continue playing after a predefined time period.

Most common is the use of three different time frames, the 1-day retention rate, the 7-day retention rate and the 28-day retention rate (some use 30 days but because 28 days is exactly 4 weeks later and some players tend to play always on the same weekdays, 28 days is probably the better metric). Usually the retention rate is given as a percentage of returning players.

A successful facebook game for example should have retention rates somewhere near 40-20-10, which means 40% of the players return on the next day to continue playing, 20% should return after 7 days and 10% after 28 days.

Sadly retention rate is often calculated in different ways and even many commercially offered metrics tools either don't feature this very important indicator at all, or use very different ways to calculate it.

Definition of Retention Rate

I like to offer the definition as it is widely used in the gaming industry, for a better comparison with KPI published by gaming companies.

There are some things to notice:

• Only new players are counted. Only players who joined the game for the first time on the first day of the equation are counted. For the above examples, only players who joined on the first Monday for the first time. All players who played already before do not count, even when they played on the Monday.
• Only players returning on the specific day are counted. For example, it doesn't matter for the 28-day retention rate if a player returned on the 27th day or the 29th day. Neither does is matter if he played for 27 consecutive days in a row. Only the players returning exactly on the 28th day are counted.
• All new players from the first day are counted. If one of these players did not return on the next day and not on the 7th day, he is not counted for the 1-day retention and 7-day retention. But if he returns exactly on the 28th day to play again, he is counted for the 28-day retention rate.

Code Example

This is just one possible way to calculate the retention rate, as an example.

Lets say we have a MySQL database with all Player logins in a Table "PlayerLogin", with fields for "PlayerID" and the "TimeStamp" of the login.

First we get the count of all first time players for each day from the database:

SELECT Date_format(MinDate, '%Y-%m-%d') AS SourceDate,
       Count(pid)                       AS FirstTimePlayerCount
FROM   (SELECT DISTINCT PlayerID       AS pid,
                        Min(Timestamp) AS MinDate
        FROM   PlayerLogin
        GROUP  BY pid) b
GROUP  BY SourceDate
ORDER  BY SourceDate ASC; 

The result may look like this:

There were 29,480 new players in the 1st of January, who did never login before, and 24,059 on the 2nd and so on.

Next we check how many of these players returned after 1 day (change the "1" to "7" or "28" for 7 or 28 days):

SELECT Count(DISTINCT a.PlayerID)           AS ReturningPlayerCount,
       Date_format(b.TimeStamp, '%Y-%m-%d') AS RetentionDate,
       Date_format(a.JoinDate, '%Y-%m-%d')  AS SourceDate
FROM   (SELECT DISTINCT PlayerID,
                        Min(TimeStamp) AS JoinDate
        FROM   PlayerLogin
        GROUP  BY PlayerID) a
       JOIN PlayerLogin b
         ON a.PlayerID = b.PlayerID
            AND Datediff(b.TimeStamp, a.JoinDate) = 1
GROUP  BY RetentionDate
ORDER  BY RetentionDate ASC 

The result may look like this:

11,473 of the 29,480 new players from the 1st of January logged in on the 2nd January etc.

The retention rate for the date "RetentionDate" is now calculated as "ReturningPlayerCount" (on the date "RetentionDate")/"FirstTimePlayerCount" (on the date "SourceDate")*100

So the 1-day retention rate on the 2nd of January was 38.9%, the 1-day retention rate on the 3rd of January was 43.2% and so on. Retention rates for other time frames are also calculated the same way.

Interpretation of the Retention Rate Numbers

Retention rate is just a snapshot at a specific point in time. There is no real value in these numbers by itself. But they are very useful in relation to other, known retention rates and general experience in comparing these numbers. (And they are used for other KPI calculations – which makes it important to understand what these numbers really mean)

Because they only work in comparison to other retention rates, it's very important to get the calculations right and in the same way each time and for each game.

As stated in the beginning, for social games on facebook a retention rate of 40-20-10 is what a developer should try to achieve. If it's 35-18-8 this may still be fine, even 30% 1-day retention should mostly be ok, but if it's closer to 25-10-5 the game is likely in trouble. Then again, of course there are niche games for a smaller target audience and this may result in much lower retention rates while still being successful.

For a new game the numbers are usually much higher, especially if everyone invited his friends first – so it's better not to take the numbers too seriously in maybe the first month. There is also a big impact from marketing. An email campaign to invite players back, who didn't login for 27 days, will probably spike the 28-day retention rate. If there is a big new advertising campaign for new players, there will probably be much more new players than returning players on the first day of the campaign and the retention rate may drop. Even postings on the facebook wall of the game can have a big impact on the retention rate (actually it is a good opportunity to measure how big the impact of wall postings is to a game – and which wall postings have the most impact).

It is very unlikely to boost the retention with game design or polishing after a game is released. It may improve by 1-3% but that's pretty much it. The only exception is if something is blocking the players, like game breaking bugs or a blocking level design.

It is a good idea to measure more than just the general retention rate. It may be good to know the retention by language or the retention by advertising campaigns or marketing channels, by age or gender, by browser or Flash version, hardware platform, gaming performance and much more. This metric alone can help a lot to target the right group of players for advertising or to find the best direction to further improve the game.

I discussed theories about how our brain works and how to use this knowledge in community management, I also showed a method of using Transactional Analysis to measure the health of communities and to aid in the daily work of community managers.

Feel free to send me comments or questions here or by email.

PDF File: Psychology in Community Management

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2mnYbbVF54

Zumindest optisch sieht das Spiel bereits beeindruckend aus und der Stil, zusammen mit dem Slogan “The Fantasy of Asia” geht sehr deutlich in die Richtung asiatisches World of Warcraft. Über das Spiel selbst wurde noch nicht viel veröffentlicht aber es gibt bereits eine Facebook Fanpage.

Er führt weiter aus, dass Facebook die Möglichkeiten zum Spammen für diese Spiele einschränkt und sie dadurch mehr und mehr auf die traditionellen Methoden der kostenpflichtigen Werbung zurückgreifen müssen um Spieler zu bekommen.

Für die Zukunft bedeutet das Nachteile insbesondere für neue Entwickler, die weder bereits die finanziellen Mittel für Werbefeldzüge zur Verfügung haben, noch über einen Stamm von Spielern verfügen, bei denen sie Eigenwerbung machen könnten.

Die Überlegungen von Alex St. John sind nicht neu aber in ihrer Form deutlich ausgesprochen. Ich stimme ihm in vielen Punkten zu, denn ich halte den aktuellen Spam-Trend der "Social Games" ebenfalls für eine gefährliche Blase, die dann platzen wird, wenn der Spam durch die Anzahl der Spiele noch weiter wächst und die Spiele ihrem eigenen Ruf zum Opfer fallen. Der Unmut vieler Facebook User über die ständige Berieselung mit Farmville & Co Werbung durch Freunde wächst bereits stetig an, auch wenn sich der Spam durch den User abschalten lässt – wer möchte schon gerne seine Freunde dadurch verärgern, dass er sie ständig mit unerwünschtem Spam berieselt?

Wenn Beispielsweise Zynga über "Social First" spricht, drängt sich der Verdacht auf, dass damit weniger soziale Interaktion miteinander oder Spiel-Innovationen gemeint sind als vielmehr noch weitere Schneeball-Methoden um Freunde ins Spiel zu bringen aka. Spam. Zwar macht es tatsächlich einen großen Teil der Motivation für diese Spiele aus, sie mit Freunden zu teilen und sich natürlich auch als guter und hilfsbereiter Spieler zu präsentieren, das findet aber dort seine Grenzen, wo es anfängt die Freunde zu nerven.

Allerdings wird das nicht gleich morgen zu einem Einbruch bei Social Games führen. Facebook wächst auch weiterhin so schnell, dass selbst im schlimmsten Fall sehr viele neue potenzielle Spieler nachkommen, die den Platz von Aussteigern einnehmen.

Den großen Run auf Social Gaming von vielen Entwicklern sehe ich aber durchaus ebenfalls mit einiger Skepsis, denn es ist fraglich, ob das Angebot eines neuen Spiels alleine und weiterer Spam noch lange von den Spielern angenommen wird. Was fehlt ist die nächste Generation von Social Games, die diesen Begriff ernst nehmen und mit intelligentem Spieldesign eine echte Nachfolge der Gesellschaftsspiele antreten können. Die mehr Zeit darauf verwenden, die eigene Positionierung zu überdenken und ein schlüssiges Konzept zu haben anstatt Bestehendes nur zu kopieren und um noch mehr Spam zu ergänzen.

Facebook ist und bleibt aber eine faszinierende Plattform für Casual Games und es besteht kein Grund sie als solches schlecht zu reden. Die Frage ist, wann die Social Games wirklich sozial werden, mit gutem Game Design überzeugen können und Freunde wirklich aktiv ins gemeinsame Spiel einbeziehen. Das Gleichgewicht zwischen den Entwicklern, Facebook selbst und den Usern ist eine zarte Pflanze, die man nicht mit Schneeball-Systemen überstrapazieren sollte. Dann sehe ich aber keinen Grund dafür, warum Social Games auf Facebook nicht langfristig einen sehr soliden Erfolg haben sollten. Der Vorteil liegt ja gerade darin, bereits einen Freundeskreis zu haben und nicht auf einer autarken Gaming-Plattform im Internet erst nach Freunden suchen zu müssen. Letztendlich kann es für Spiele nur von Vorteil sein, dorthin zu gehen, wo die Spieler sind und nicht umgekehrt. Ich denke wir befinden uns hier gerade erst am Anfang dessen, was möglich ist.

Weiterhin prognastiziert die Studie, dass in den USA im Jahr 2009 rund US$ 1 Milliarde Umsatz mit virtuellen Gütern gemacht wurde und sieht noch weitere Steigerung für die Zukunft.

Link: Inside Virtual Goods – The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010

Under the working title “One Earth” the TV show should interact with the game world and vice versa. Because of the enormous differences of the production of games and TV shows it will be interesting to see if the result of the combination will be twice the fun or half the experience.

Link: Peacock Fund fuels Syfy & game guru Trion venture

Brian "Psychochild" Green on the other hand argues that failure is part of the gaming experience and there needs to be a feedback loop for the player. A game of Chess isn't fun when the opponent loses on purpose.

I like to look at the topic purely from an MMO standpoint:

To understand the level of difficulty in games one has to take a step back and look at what is behind motivation in games.

Playing a game is about emotions.

Failure (usualy) results in bad emotions and a good game designer wants to prevent causing bad emotions.

But winning doesn't cause good emotions for the players by default. At least for most players it wouldn't be too much fun to beat their 6 years old nephew in a game of Chess, would it? Well, it may, it may also be that failure is fun too, but that's because socializing is involved with Chess, not because of the game design for the level of difficulty.

The joy comes from winning hard battles, not just any battle.

Players should be as close to the edge of losing as possible but win in the end. That's the sweet spot of the level of difficulty and where winning is a real (emotional) pleasure (involving dopamins in the brain but this would go too far for now). Take any football match as an example where the game turned around and the victory came in the last seconds. That's so much more fun than a safe win from the beginning – but both would still be much better than losing in the end. Hard games are only satisfying in the end if the player wins.

So this is the goal, the real challange comes with two "minor details": how to balance the difficulty so every player will face hard fights and still win in the end? And even if this would be possible for every player, it is boring again because they will notice that every battle is staged and there is no edge of failure and as a result no feel of victory and no emotions again.

Things start getting even more complicated if you try to balance a (Free2Play) MMORPG.

• Letting the player chose a level of difficulty for the game is no option in an MMO
• There is no "real win in the end" because there is no real ending
• The extremely long duration of play is very important
• Free2Play MMOs have an item shop, players will start to complain that you just want to make more money from the item shop if battles feel too hard.

In (F2P) MMOs the sweet spot is to make the game as easy as you can afford it to be.

It's not all about emotions. The content in MMOs is usualy limited. Being too easy without having enough content to support it will result in the game becoming a grind. Kill 5 Giant Rat Mutants may be difficult but kill 500 Rats instead is not an option for fun, neither is it an option to allow the players to fly through the content in a matter of minutes.

As the content is limited, the level of difficulty is a main option for balancing the progression. The good thing is, over time it becomes much easier to balance the level of difficulty in MMOs, because lots of data comes in from the database and from your community and the game gets more content from patches.

If you are wrong with your level of difficulty, better be sure that the game is too hard at first and not too easy. There are little issues with making the game easier in the next patch but your Community Managers will face a tough time if you require the nerfbat.

There is another point one can see with MMOs, players love to go back to lower level creatures and do some easy fights and farming. Even when grinding is bad by definition there needs to be the option to do some easy grinding. The reason is, it would be exhausting if every battle would be long and difficult even with a glorious victory in the end. MMOs are often played over long sessions and there has to be some recreation time even in recreational games.

To also give an example of a different approach to deal with failure, in many 2D Adventure games there are so lodicrous ways of dying, it is almost more fun to take every chance of getting killed and watch what happens than to "win" the games without failure – but then again, is this still a "failure" then?

Summing up everything, a game should be as easy as possible – but not easier!

There must be some risk of failure involved and for it to be a real risk, there must be real failure – but not more than neccessary! (not taking this for granted and thinking about alternatives often pays off very well)

And finaly, there should be options to vary the pace. Either by directly chosing the level of difficulty or by indirectly chosing what you like to do next in the game.

If one keeps the goals and restrictions in mind, it's easier to think about what should be hard and what shouldn't. Failure by itself is bad, it's just required to make success feel good – but think about other ways to achieve this and where required means really required.

Unabhängig davon, was man von Social Games und Web 2.0 halten mag, spielen, kommunizieren und das Internet rücken weiter zusammen und persistente Welten erorbern auch die Social Networks.

Civilization Network bei Facebook

P.S.: Wer mich gerne auf Facebook besuchen möchte, ist natürlich herzlich eingeladen

Level Design Tutorial bei TenTonHammer