Azaroth

Identifying your potential audience and appealing to them successfully with your design can actually be a little trickier than one might assume.

Having a design based around giving 30 different types of people one little feature each is going to net you a lot of trouble. And more important, not a lot of profit.

I, personally, will not be happy playing an MMO where 95% of the content doesn’t appeal to me just to get at the basketweaving - since, of course, maybe I tend to be a basketweaver in real life. Or have always dreamed of basketweaving but have been held back by my corporate nine-to-five lifestyle.

Either way - knowing your target audience and appealing to them, as well as continuously building on your strengths with your design, is going to be an important factor in designing any game. The days where everyone and their dog could be thrown into one MMO are at an end unless your budget is absolutely massive. If it is, I fully encourage the attempt to create a melting pot style MMO world where everyone not only has their own corner, but they find themselves interdependent in different ways with everyone else playing the game.

Until you want to undertake that massive design goal with about $90m under your belt somewhere (and, more importantly, being willing to risk that amount of money in the precarious world of MMOs) there’s a simple truth to present-day MMO creation: Appeal to your niche.

Now, this can be a big niche (if you have big dollars). Like, say, Achievers. It can be a small niche (if you have small dollars). Like Basketweavers. It can even be a type of accessibility. Free browser games are very hot right now, mostly because they’re incredibly accessible - and the two hardest parts about bringing a new customer into an MMO are getting that credit card and getting the client onto their computer. When those two hurdles are eliminated, and if you can find a viable alternative revenue source that fits your philosophy (I, for example, cannot, because I’m a complete dinosaur) then you have what is likely, and has been shown to be in practice, A Good Thing™.

An example of the fact that things can boil down to minute details like On-Screen Maps. Eric Heimburg notes that this simple feature leans heavily on the decisions of many people, and especially women and less experienced gamers, about whether or not to play your game. Or even continue playing. Because if someone is attracted to your game for other reasons, the lack of features like an on-screen map may eventually frustrate them enough to leave. Every single aspect of your game is going to be constantly in the user’s face 24/7, and you have to think long and hard about that.

Case in point, at one time I was actually designing a system aimed at the oft-ignored section of MMO gamers called Explorers. Making a long story short, I was actually forgoing the inclusion of an on-screen map in most (out of city) areas in favour of what I considered an interesting twist on a mapmaking skill that allowed players the ability to gain better and better tools to create maps, and sell their maps to players (which would then, once in the player’s inventory, remove the Impenetrable Fog of War).

However, as I realized shortly afterward, I had been living in a Fog of Bad Design. And that’s aside from the fact that the “Time To Cock” on this particular aspect of the design was incredibly low.

While I accounted for the fact that new players would be pissed off with a complete lack of aided sense of direction via on-screen map, I didn’t sit down with myself and get real over a cup of coffee and a slap in the face like I should have. I favoured too much the idea of adding another creative outlet for players into the game, another crafting skill, and, to myself, possibly more importantly… another feature for the “other people”. I was literally extending my design to meet the needs of people who were not only NOT part of my core target audience - but I was pissing people off the second they stepped into my game to do so.

This is A Bad Thing™. Or maybe just a stupid one. Luckily my own doubts and an insightful girlfriend led that one directly to the recycle bin. But this is just one example of many when talking about both playing to your strong suits and becoming overambitious enough to design things that really, really suck.

In the end, my personal situation probably leads to more confusion than I’d like it to regarding this particular topic. My audience is the audience I know, and that’s “Oldschool UOers” - or people who enjoy level playing fields and a variety of player pursuits within the game that don’t completely stomp on “lesser” pursuits.

An example of this being that the PvE game completely and totally overlaps and suffocates the crafting game in World of Warcraft. This is what I call Not Fun for crafting-oriented people. Working away to raise a (both monetarily and time-wise) skill only to realize that any item you can create is soon made completely obsolete by players simply running dungeons, and that you have to run those dungeons anyway to get the materials to craft the items you’re after… soon becomes… discouraging.

However, this is an example of targeting audiences. Blizzard simply decided that crafters suck and only get in the way of raiders - and that more importantly, raiders are a larger audience. They also realized that it’s a highly complicated pursuit to attempt balancing crafting with PvE (not to mention PvP with PvE). So they didn’t really try. They just went with the direction that’d be seen as the most fun for the largest amount of their potential audience.

This is smart.

If you know me very well, it may be slightly redundant to mention that this is not the direction I am going in. As stated, my design direction has a lot to do with melting pots, balance between playstyles, worlds vs. games, and all of that jazz.

This is not only an extremely difficult and slightly confused design direction, but it creates a lot of conflict when attempting design. Highly complicated and non-traditional MMO systems are often a burden because MOST players are interested in something they’re familiar with, something that’s easy to understand. Reading manuals and websites to decode intricate systems that are “way better” (ie easier to understand) in most other games is, again, Not Fun™. The biggest problem with this is that the CORE of any core audience must be NEW USERS. Getting people into your game is often a very important factor when attempting to achieve success.

Of course, this is the part where I warn to abide by the “Do as I say, not as I do” sign on the front of this blog. Eschewing conventional wisdom and common sense has gotten me so much thus far, why would I ever want to change?