Thought Requestion #NB002
Dynamic, temporary content… Is it worth it? By dynamic, temporary content, I mean things like live events that can only happen one time. Events that are highly entertaining, but take quite a while to develop. Sure, they sometimes resonate with the community for quite some time after they are over, but is it worth the development effort to create dynamic, temporary content often? Something that won’t be there a week later, but was fun as hell while it lasted?
Does it keep the game world fresh? Does it make you feel more like you’re part of the world? Does it make the game more fun? Even if you would answer “yes” to those, is it worth dedicating time to this temporary content rather than putting in more permanent content?
Worth it from a player-standpoint … from a developer-standpoint …? A developer would have to answer that. I personally think that it would engage a segment of the playerbase that is currently searching for “fun” in these MMOs. Even the grinders enjoy the occasional event if it is something unique and significant. That’s probably the important thing – there has to be “value” toward character development, I think, for most players to get on-board with it. I know you’re not *just* talking about events, but since you mentioned it as an example I’m focusing on that. I am probably one of the players who fall into the “looking for the fun” category (although I can allow myself to be mildly entertained by just grinding every now and again). Although I had been playing MMORPGs for some years, the first “event” I participated in was an EQ Hallowe’en invasion in Kunark. It was one of the most engaging experiences I had ever had in a game (of any genre). I don’t know if it fulfilled my requirement of “value-adding” above, but damned if I didn’t immediately forget that I was just about to cancel my account.
I’m going to assume that this applies to temporary content in any aspect(either holiday type or leading up to an event)…
From a dev standpoint, sparingly, they’re great. But the stretch of time between Halloween and St. Patties day is tough on my title because there are *so* many holidays and anniversaries and stuff, we got to the point this year where the playerbase is complaining that we haven’t been putting in any content. And since we celebrated them once, it’s imperative we do it again or we’re grinchy.
From my perspective, we put in a LOT of content…2 halloween quests, a thanksgiving-y type quest, a boat load of christmas content, anniversary content and lead up, none of which were the usual fed-ex or kill ten rats quest. All while working on a bigger project in the background. But once it’s out of game, it’s a fun memory and a cool, unique, and fun reward that gets used up or sits in the bank if there’s room or gets deleted if not…and all the time the dev team spent created it is now all but forgotten.
However, a lot of people loved the events and had fun. So it was worth it? Maybe. Next year are we going to reuse the temp content and put something permanent or more important in instead? Most likely.
So yeah. Sparingly. If 90% of your stuff is not permanent updates, people wont apprecaite it down the line, imo.
I’d have to argue that “no, it isn’t worth” developing absolutely unique content for a single live event. However, it WOULD BE worth it to develop a generic “toolkit” of reusable content that could be used to stage many live events or facilitate player-organized events. Assets developed for single-use are rarely going to be a reasonable investment, but assets that offer significant reuse potential can be.
Unique live events take ALOT of effort to organize and put together, and each one tags only a very small part of the server population. They either weren’t on, weren’t in the zone, just barely missed the event, or the word spread so fast that zone overpopulation made it impossible to attend.
How many people can possibly effectively attend one “live event?” Most MMO’s I see seem to start having significant display issues at well under 60 players within visible range of one another. If you have a server managing 6,000 concurrent connections, that suggests that even if you double the 60 mentioned above, your event will reach less than 2% of the people that happen to be logged in at the right time… and if you scheduled an event to service more people, you risk significant clustering that can really cause the experience to frustrate more than it entertains. Then there’s the resentment from the people that “missed the event-” particularly if it included unique rewards…
Now, a live event that’s run on a dozen servers, hitting 120 people per server that’s 1,440 people- hardly a small number- their monthly fees of $15 contribute $21,600/month before any processing fees or costs… but how much money went into producing the assets for that live event, how much of that $15 is already spent, and how much are we willing to consume in a 1-time-only-per-server, 1-hour event?
Even assuming the art assets are all reused, how many hours in planning it, scripting it, defining the actions of the NPC’s under the event coordinator’s control, and organizing the event with the people who will run it, how much prep time is needed for the server admins to be ready for a potentially imbalanced load? How about test runs? Heck, an hour-long event that can be run by 1 coordinator still takes 12 man-hours to hit a dozen servers… How many take a team of coordinators to run? Now, add in a few art assets- maybe a recolored asset or two….
I’m not a production manager, but it’s pretty clear that we quickly reach a point where we’ve overspent our audience.
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That said, there’s something mysteriously alluring about that 1fps moment, when you’re left barely able to play and knowing you’re sharing this…. shared hallucination… with so many people, even if they don’t render well or you can barely make use of the chat tool…
There’s something to the mystery of KNOWING you just might encounter something totally unpredictable… totally unique. Even when you feel like you miss every live event… there’s always that CHANCE.
Perhaps in the “BIG PICTURE” of marketing and long-term retention, the potential of a live event, even if not experienced directly, will keep people around… or maybe that’s just the philosophy behind it.