When Psychochild put up his design challenge this past weekend, I immediately had an answer and sat down to write it out. Then … (?)

Anyway, a few days later, here’s my take on this week’s homework:

Inspired by my two olde tyme posts, Acting Casual About Casual Gamers and Why Socializers are our Comrades, this weekend’s challenge is this:

What long-standing problems do you still see in online games? Now, go a step further and propose a solution.

Sparked by the discussion of procedural content introduced by GameCareerGuide, Jason Booth, and Lost Garden last week, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the content problem in massive games. That was in my head when I first read this question, and coloured my response a great deal. Also: I should point out that as a person who’s never worked in the games industry it’s really easy to me to construct castles in the air. My apologies if my approach here seems flippant/insulting/totally ridiculous. Just talkin’.
Problem: Massive gamers consume content too quickly. Game-makers spend big bucks on a game launch or expansion, only to have their content consumed by the majority of players in half to a quarter of the time they’d hoped.

I’ll use the Burning Crusade as an example. It took the hardest of the hardcore about 72 hours to hit 70, and it took Tobold about a month. I’d imagine the ‘average’ player is a little over that, then, clocking in at about 1 1/2 months to hit 70 from a standing stop at 60. Figure they make an alt and tool around in the new starter zones; maybe another month before they get bored with that character. They take their other alt, pre-BC, up through 60 and into the Outlands to hit content that they missed the first time through. Maybe another month? They’ve got characters at 70, so from a month and a half in they’re raiding with the other max-levels. Mileage will vary a lot there, but assume that once they’ve played a dungeon the content is consumed. Another month to experience all the high-level stuff. That puts us at about four and half months … which is far, far short of the year (or more) it’s going to take Blizzard to put out another expansion.

That seven and a half month gap is the problem. Everything is static, there are never any real changes, so players have no incentive to stick around once they’ve burned through your content.

Solution: Design Your MMOG To Have An Ending.

Don’t make ‘fire and forget’ games; every game needs a live team. But, instead of building a game and then working on it for the next five years, design your game from the get-go to have a limited lifespan. Then, give the players lots of things to look forward to. Have weekly events, shake things up. Make the leveling curve fairly shallow (ala Guild Wars?) so that latecomers can participate. Make sure people who have been in from the beginning still have some advantage. Most of all, be dangerous. Make heroes of your players: individuals swaying the course of in-game events. Individual servers have different outcomes!

Most of all, make news! Look at Perplex City. The first season’s over, and people are already looking forward to the next. ARG fans are always going to remember PC season one, though, because it was special. MMOG aren’t special because they’re always around. I cannot stress this enough: The reason events/people/things/memories are important is because they are fleeting. If I come back to your game, and it’s been a few years since I played, and nothing is visibly different … what is the point of playing again?

So: build a game that lasts for a year or two. Big events, important happenings, make news. Put a team on it to maintain it, but don’t let them rock the boat too much. You have your plan and you’re sticking to it. Meanwhile, get a team working on ’season two’ of the game. They’ve got the entire length of the current game to make a new story, new context, etc. Re-use your engine, because it’s going to be just fine in a year anyway. Re-use as much as you can, but make it a fundamentally different game. Do a fantasy setting the first year, and then a modern game set in the same world the second, and then a post-apocalyptic game in the same world the third. Make your players build new character, have new experiences. Make them care about your game because it won’t be there ‘tomorrow’. Use blogs and player sites to preserve character accomplishments past the end of the game, but otherwise wipe the slate clean.

EVERYTHING ENDS. Nothing shapes a community like knowing they have to face real trials. The ‘end of the world’ will get people talking like nothing else will. If you do it right, when your planned cycle is over and you want some downtime to think up new stuff, players will be begging you to charge them to play the first game in the cycle over again.
Any thoughts? The obvious holes here include frustrations of the hardcore, the problems with live events, making sure that players stay informed, and of course the good old asshattery of people.