The business model behind DDO (and all MMOs) explained...

[Xenus_Paradox]

...by Cracked, of all things.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

[p3n1x0r]

nicely done

[Strik3r]

very nice article....and I'm reading it from work!! :D ;)

[Vanshilar]

It's pretty much spot-on. Look at how the renown system works, or the grind for epic items, or TRing for completionist, etc. Taking leveling a character to level 20 as an example, the early levels go by fast to give the player a sense of accomplishment, but the experience per level needed is roughly quadratic (x^2) so the later levels take a longer amount of time. Epic gear requiring four different items -- each of which drop randomly -- basically means that a player that wants a decked-out character will have to spend many hours doing the same repetitive tasks to try their luck at the slot machines and hope that they will get lucky with the last seal or shard or scroll (or base item) that they need to complete their epic gear. Whereas the game initially promises to be "fun" in the sense of exciting or trying out new adventures or whatnot, after you reach the apex it just becomes about the grind in rerunning the same content over and over, with a Pavlovian/Skinnerian set of scheduled rewards (random chance to get something good) to encourage players to be willing to do the same repetitive set of tasks over and over.

Turbine's implementation of the guild renown system also has pretty much all of the features that they mentioned in the article to keep players doing the same things over and over again: a Skinner box where there are virtual food pellets to eat (renown tokens), making the drops random (and hence inconsistent and unpredictable) to entice you to do stuff to get one more token and hope you get a big one (note how heroic deeds are much more common than legendary victories), where the levels are quick and easy early on but few and far in between later on (note that guild levels are cubic (x^3) with respect to renown, so even worse than the character experience needed to level), the use of renown decay so that guilds will need to continually gain renown in order to continue to advance, or just to maintain their current guild level if they want to maintain access to their current buffs (and renown decay is quintic (x^5) across the whole range of guild levels, meaning that powergamer guilds who want high guild levels will have to work extra hard just to maintain the guild level that they have). How renown decay works is especially pernicious in this regard; since it can remove guild levels, once a guild reaches its natural equilibrium (where the amount gained matches the daily decay), it will likely be in between two levels, not quite enough average daily renown gain to handle the higher level's decay, but more renown gain than the current level's decay (since it's unlikely that a guild's daily gain will exactly match the daily decay). The guild will therefore see itself close to the next level at the beginning of the day, and then gradually get enough renown to actually reach the next level every couple of days and see the same "Your guild has reached level X!" message every few days...even though it's always the same level X that they see. They don't even have to release new content, really; it's just a new reward that you can get by doing existing content. So this is somewhat similar to the "Achievements" thing in That Other Game (http://serialganker.blogspot.com/2008/08/achievements-in-wow-patch-30-blatantly.html) that the article touched on and linked to.

Unfortunately yes it seems like nowadays, games are moving in this direction, and Turbine is no exception when it comes to DDO. It does occasionally reduce the necessary grind -- for example by identifying the runes that you get in Reaver's Refuge to be able to more readily make the perfect set of dragontouched armor -- but those changes are more in response to offset the introduction of new grind than anything else. As another article (http://serialganker.blogspot.com/2008/09/ethics-of-mmo-addiction.html) that the article linked to said:



A good game design therefore protracts the fun over as long a time as possible without losing the player. String out the fun too much, and it’s not fun enough to play. Bunch up all the fun early, and the player will have exhausted all the fun too quickly. The better you can balance these two things, the longer your players will continue to pay the subscription fee.

If players feel like they have to grind too much to get the items that they want, then eventually they'll get fed up with the game and go do something else. If players get those items too quickly though, then there won't be anything more to do in the game and they'll get bored and go do something else. Note also how bound-to-character loot works in this regard; if you get bored of one character and start another, you will have to repeat the same grind because the items cannot be transferred to another character. Because Turbine relies on probabilities to determine whether or not a juicy drop occurs, the key then is to tune the probabilities so that they are sufficiently low that players don't get bored too quickly (when they get them too quickly), yet sufficiently high that players are still willing to grind for them. Because the introduction of new content also introduces new items to grind for, the overall time it takes to complete a character also increases; this implies that over time, they have to decrease the previous grind so that players don't eventually burn out.

I would not be surprised if Turbine (since they know the actual drop rates of items) already has a working internal model of the estimated number of playing hours that a player needs to play in order to complete a character, i.e. getting the guy to 20 and decking him out. It's likely that when the number of hours gets too high, based on the release of new content (which increases that number due to the introduction of a new grind), they'll find some way to decrease it, either by increasing drop rates or making the grind simpler, as given an example above.

In fact I think that's generally the weakness of "max DPS" type characters; the time investment needed for those characters, I would estimate, probably gets pretty close to a thousand hours of playing when you factor in the time spent collecting the necessary GS mats (even if they were collected using other characters, that's still time invested for that character), epic gear (learning raids/quests, organizing raids/quests, completing raids/quests, chance of the item you want dropping, chance of you winning the roll for the item over others who want the same item, etc.), leveling up the character (although a relatively modest amount of time compared with the other aspects of grinding), etc. Sure if you do all that you may end up with a 5% or 10% DPS increase over someone else who has "only" spent a couple of hundred hours getting "good enough" gear, but whether or not the large amount of time spent grinding for a marginal increase in DPS is worthwhile is questionable. I would guess that only a tiny percentage of players actually ever complete the "max DPS" builds that they espouse, making the numbers a highly theoretical construct that rarely gets achieved in reality. It would be interesting if the creators of the builds also gave an estimate of the time needed to actually get that character to that DPS level. Unfortunately, like Ferraris, those things are nice to discuss stats about but people are unlikely to ever have them due to the high cost.

The one hope for Turbine is that since they now have a pay-to-play business model as well, not just a subscription-based business model, they also have to find a way to encourage pay-to-play players to continue coughing over cash to buy stuff, which will generally mean the release of new content. Alternatively, they will have to find a way to grab new pay-to-play players and discourage current pay-to-play players from continuing to play, since once you fork over your money, the actual playing time for Turbine is a cost (i.e. their server maintenance etc.) since you are in effect playing on their dime when you are not actively purchasing Turbine Points. So hopefully they will move in a slightly different direction; this being an MMORPG however, which inherently is based on the concept of slowly building up your character over time (and thus spending a lot of time grinding out gear), I'm not holding my breath.

[wax_on_wax_off]

This is excellent.

I'm happy to observe though that my experience of DDO doesn't particular involve the skinner box model. I barely ever grind for an item if I'm not having good fun doing it. Sometimes it's a case of making it fun, going with a good group, running the whole thing with dungeon alert red ...

I think my most repeated quests are Shroud and Shadow Crypt. I managed 13 runs of Shadow Crypt for Devouts on my clonk but honestly I run this quest 5-7 times on every character anyway as it is just that much fun and has such excellent XP. I've run the Shroud almost enough to put together a tier 3 GS item and could probably put a few tier 2 items together. The Shroud is fun though (at least so far it is).

I've done a fair few bloodstone runs but I don't have the dedication that most people have for it. I can manage 3-4 runs if I have an ideal toon for it (something that can cause mass death without slowing down).

All this doesn't stop my fiancee telling me I'm addicted though ...

[sirgog]

Interesting read, think I've seen that before.

One MMO executive a while ago put it very, very differently, however. They said something like "We create a world, a place where people can interact with their friends - and charge them for it". IMO that's the reason that every MMO I've ever played to endgame (granted, not many) has had a very group/raid driven endgame and has a significant focus on guilds.

As an example of the focus on guilds in other games - World of Warcraft recently added a guild levelling system similar to DDO's, where guilds progress from level 1 to 25 (25 corresponding to perhaps 80 or 85 in DDO, but without renown decay). Members of a level 25 guild get roughly 15% more gold and crafting materials and (once certain guild-specific items are purchased) 25% more XP than unguilded players - meaning even players that prefer solo play find themselves in one guild or another, part of such a community.

[Irinis]

It's quite brilliant really. I personally get a lot of flack from certain people due to not wanting to grind for certain things. But when it's not fun to run weapons shipment 36 times and never see a bauble drop it's even less fun to try to repeat it over and over. (Every character I have with a blue bar has pulled at least one arrowhead. No bauble.)

Overall I think DDO has the best balance between grind and fun. But then, I've been decently lucky in my drops and I stop playing certain quests when they're a grind. I avoid amrath for several months at a time, then go in again when I feel like actually playing it instead of feeling "UGH NOT AMRATH AGAIN" and that way I don't care that I didn't get anything again. :D

The friendship aspect of MMOs is equally important for retention. It's simply more fun to play stuff while joking around with people than it is to solo. I think that's the only thing that keeps some vets here after they actually hate the game itself and it's just totally boring running another shroud when you've run it for years.

[frznvimes]

I don't know if I should feel good or bad that this is the first thing I thought of after reading that article.
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/20000/3000/800/23891/23891.strip.gif
This comic is 16 years old.

[FoxCourier]

I don't necessarily disagree with the article, but I'm not really a big fan of how it was written.

And a lot of it only makes sense because it's kind of obvious once you stop to examine the situation anyway.

[Doxmaster]

Its an old article, but yes. That's entirely correct, in the normal Cracked.com way...you know, fartjokes, sexuality jokes and advance physics. Or not so advance, in this case. Cant remember if the conditioning Random-interval part was accurate either...

You might also enjoy the BoyBand's ode to Masterchief vid, the new Kickboxing article and that crazy Build-your-own-adventure article from a few months back.

[Crystalizer]

ddo designers have really shaped the high-end content to become addictive enough, but powergamers asked for it. even if this article is frightening, this is what players want & deserve.

[Sabberlodd]

A related presentation:
The board of innovation ranked the "Free with in-app-sales" in mobile games as business model #4 in 2010

http://goo.gl/BxJ0L (slides 29-32)

[bryanmeerkat]

Yada yada yada ,Unfortunately yes it seems like nowadays, games are moving in this direction, yada yada yada.

Umm not wanting to be the one to put out your fireworks but this is hardly a nowadays thing , its how mmporpgs work ,how they have always worked , if they didnt work like this they wouldnt work at all .
If you can create a better system go ahead , but they need to keep players playing in between updates of new content so that they can generate the money to fund the updates and make the company enough profit to remain viable .
If the players leave then you no longer have a game , so letting them level to ( lets take ddo as an example ) 20 in 20 times what it takes to reach lv 20 ( lets call it 20 hours ) . Get all your items from shroud for completing it once ( 1 hour ) . Get all your epics on a one run , one item basis (lets call that 10 hours ) .
Realise the Game has nothing left for you to do (another hour of running about ) . So 32 hours of game play into your DDO experience you are capped and epicly equiped and ready to leave . If you are hardcore you might do that once on all 9 charahcters classes .
That comes up as under 300 game hours ( not taking into account each time you do it you will be more quest savy so may even speed up ) to get to the stage where you have done everything , have everything and no longer have any reason to play the game .

On some weeks I sometimes rack up 30 hours of game play , some people would rack upwards of 100 .
So the game if played to completion would have between 1-3 months shelf life per player .

It would atract a lot of instant gratificationists but there would be nobody playing the game after 6 months , there would be no subs , and the game would die .

[Crystalizer]

if the game is purely about grinding stuff and shaping your character, to me then the game dies, maybe later but if the only offered gameplay is building characters then to me there is no interest in it, and ddo is reaching that state where the only thing left is grinding. future games will have to offer us more than some grinding, even if players still accept it, what we need is immersion, fun, adventures, but not to kill a zillion times the same boss to gain 2% dps that we won't use because we stop playing when the character is completely geared.

[Ratnix]

Articles like this are kind of disheartening for somebody like me.

The info isn't anything new, but knowing that more and more game companies are turning to this type of game development just sucks.


As much as I would enjoy spending countless hours a day playing games, I only have an hour or two, at most, a day to play.
Even at my worst, when I was living across the street from the factory I worked for and was doing nothing with my time but playing, I always made sure I went to work and did anything else that needed to be done before I spent my time playing.
Back then I actually had more time to spend playing games.
At this point in my life, I just don't have all the extra time to waste playing.

Because of this, as the rewards start to stretch out, I lose interest fairly quickly. What takes most people (X)hrs to accomplish, generally takes me (3-5X)hrs to accomplish.

One of the articles in that one mentioned WoW raids. The amount of time those take are one of the (many) reasons I don't like WoW. Any activity in a game that takes longer than an hour from start to finish is generally something I cannot do. Because of this, the amount of activities avaliable to me in games are severely limited to me. This in turn limits the reward part of playing the game and thus causes me to quit playing.

The one redeeming quality of DDO, and other games, is the F2P model. While this does enable the altitis and thus extend the interest in a game, it still only extends the interest in the game for so long. Eventually doing the same things over and over with no change will cause me to lose interest.


I fully understand why companies chose to create their games this way. I would do the same if I was a game developer, but it really is disheartening to know that these games are being designed in a way that basically phase me out as a player.