Aug 11 2008
Summer Doldrums in MUDs, MMOs, Online Games, and Virtual Worlds
It is a commonly held belief that usage drops for MUDs, MMOs, Online Games, and Virtual Worlds in summer time. The reasons are somewhat obvious - people want to go outside, college kids go home and have less internet access, younger people take on summer jobs, families go on vacation, etc. With all of those things taking up people’s free time, they just don’t login to their favorite MUD, MMO, or Virtual World as often. I think all of these reasons are real and significant. In over 12 years of running online MUDs/MMOs/Virtual Worlds commercially, I have noticed drops in usage over the summer.
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But what about the ancillary effects of this phenomenon? Other than simple usage drops, how does this affect the gameplay on MUDs, MMOs, and other online games? I have been reading more gaming blogs than usual lately, and one of the more interesting negative effects of summer appears to be GUILD HOPPING.
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From what I have been reading, guilds/clans/linkshells/player groups on various MMOs are experiencing the same problem. They are losing members to larger guilds because it has become harder to put together enough people to do the traditional raids/end game content that are the only thing for maxed out characters to do on most MMOs. I could take this opportunity to rant on how lame I think it is that raiding is the default end game for graphical MUDs nowadays, but I will save that for another post.
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So I have a question for those of you reading who are leaders, officers, or members of guilds/clans/etc: what do you do about this? What have you tried to minimize this phenomenon? Do you have any stories about this happening to your guild/clan and how you dealt with it? What was the long term effect of such things?
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Also, I have a question for game developers (like myself). What can game developers do to help players minimize this problem? My immediate answer is to try and schedule events and activities in the summer months that do not require large groups. Shift your focus in the summer to individual or small group challenges. That is definitely one way to help out. All too often developers go for the Huge, Massive, Sweeping Event type stuff when they want to generate usage. That can be effective, but that might not always be the way to go. From some of the things I have been reading around the gaming blogosphere, summer might be the WORST time to do this sort of thing.
Do these drops in usage in MMOs, Muds, Online Games, and Virtual Worlds have lingering effects once summer is over? I’m just curious how many people might fade away for the summer months and then not return at all when autumn rolls around.
I think a lot of this drop off in player numbers depends on the playerbase of the game. WoW for example has a significant number of players that are under the school-leaving age, and as they still live at home with their parents, so there is no real change in internet connection availability.
You also mentioned people wanting to go outside more, but I’m not sure how true this is either. Nearly two decades ago now I convinced my mother to buy me a Sega master-system (God how I miss the good old 8-bit days!) because I was just awful at football, tennis, rugby and just about any other outdoor sport you care to mention and wanted something else I could spend my leisure time doing. Sure I had other activities I enjoyed too, but reading and sketching are all-weather pursuits as they’re done primarily indoors. In my experience the old stereotype of gamers being rubbish at sports rings pretty true, although it’s a rule of thumb more then a 100% certainty, so weather shouldn’t really effect the amount a person wants to play.
Of course, this doesn’t work for games that have age-limits for players. The most common of which being the obvious 18+ limit, and the parents who play the game having to spend more of their time taking care of the kids who’re no longer in school for a good chunk of the day, but given the popularity of WoW and how many of it’s players are under 18 it’s interesting you still see this fluctuation.
I have played WoW and was in a small officer group in a guild that was doing 40 man raids.
Solutions I can remember we have tried were:
- Cut down on the number of raiding days since several of our members only want to raid X days a week so cutting a day or two heighten the number of people who are signed up for the remaining raids.
- If you guild has a good reputation it’s easy to recruit more members. In my experience you end up losing some people for good over the summer, so it won’t give huge problems when summer end.
- I have tried to merge guilds over the summer as well if things were looking bad to begin with.
- In my early raiding days we actually teamed up with another guild to try to take down some bosses together. After a few months we split up and handled things on our own. I believe that this was during the summer, but never thought about it like that.
I have never experienced any of the above to cause any long term problems for the guild. What I have experienced causing problems for the guilds I have been involved in is the balancing between having a place where you can invite your casual friends and they can play too and at the same time having raid progress for the hardcore players in the guild.
As an answer to Elganjey:
In my experience very few young players have the discipline needed to be a worth much in a raid group. Surely some 15-17 year old are OK, but even at this age most of them tend to lose focus way more often than what is seen among the older players.
I like your page, im responding to a comment you left of my blog the other day.
{{{{ EDITED BY MODERATOR: This was a response to my post on the poster’s blog that was about current international events. It is an interesting issue, and the poster has a very interesting blog. But since Muckbeast is about game design, I don’t want it to get derailed by potentially divisive political discussions.}}}}
Thanks for checking out my blog
@elganjey - I think that the summer disconnect is actually a known phenomenon that is recognised by more than just the gaming industry.
“It’s worth noting that [the telcos] stopped promoting their broadband plans in the second quarter because that’s when students are leaving school and disconnecting … it’s a seasonal disconnect period.” - BMO Capital Markets-Canada analyst Peter Rhamey.
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/08/us-broadband-sp.html
You can be sure they ramp up their advertising in August, though!
what’s the purpose of games ? practicing for the real thing. If u make a game where people experiment with things they will encounter in real life, i think that game will never loose its fan base.
like WoW - creating an organisation (party/raid/guild) where each individual has a specific role, developing connections and negociating with other individuals/organizations and power leveling or mounting a raid on a capital or an instance is nothing else than practicing for real life, where u may get in the position of doing the exact same things, with the advantage of those months of practice/experimenting in WoW.