Things I Learned from World of Warcraft
johnaugust.com
johnaugust.com
1) Put obsessive attention into making the first five minutes of use of your product awesome. It is the five minutes people are most likely to see. It is also a gate through which all subsequent use of your product must pass. (Seriously, folks, if you value conversion optimization, I want you to play five minutes of WoW and five minutes of any other MMORPG, and take notes on what happens. WoW will drag you around by the nose. WoW will point you in the direction of the next thing to do. WoW will show you success in those five minutes, even if you're terrible at what you're doing. We should all aspire to making products that nail those first five minutes as much as WoW does.)
2) Do not devote disproportionate developer resources to content/systems which the majority of the user base will not interact with. (It took them years to learn this, but they eventually go around to it.)
3) Make it simple. Then, make it simpler. WoW is one of the most complicated pieces of engineering the world has ever known, but six year olds can pick up and play it.
4) People will put up with any amount of drudgery if you give them small, frequent, random rewards for doing so. This is in fact so powerful I'm kind of scared of doing it.
5) If people are bringing their boyfriends into your product so that they can spend more time together, that is probably a good sign you have reached mass market success.
6) Monthly. Billing. Minor discounts for cashflow in advance.
7) High quality visual design can be made rot-proof by using iconic representations, bright colors, and timeless aesthetics. If you chase the leading edge of graphical sophistication, on the other hand, three years from now plan on doing a total graphical rip-out or you'll look dated.
Think of Super Mario Brothers, one of the best selling games of all time. There are a stunning amount of hidden areas, tricks etc (even using an emulator with save+load, and a guide, it's not easy to explore the entire game world), but this is very closely related to how stunning the game world felt (especially for the time). An average player may only come across 10-20 secrets in the game, out of hundreds, but each time they'll have that warm fuzzy feeling where they are thinking, wow, they went to all the trouble to put this here?
Another good example is No One Lives Forever. They did a TON of funny lines with the guards talking to each other and notes that were left around (eg a note to employees saying no fornicating in the evil death ray storage facility). The chance of picking up on each of those was low, say around 10%, but since there were hundreds the game world, each player will have 20-30 moments where they were exploring some back room and they found something cool, which gave the game world immense amounts of character. If they instead made 20-30 moments and forced the players through them linearly, it would have felt cheap.
I'd also like to mention that, unlike many forms of software, it IS actually a requirement that game developers have fun making the games they play, because otherwise making the game itself fun is pretty much impossible. I don't think it's a coincidence that the developers of Diablo 2 took the time to put in the cow level, which most people never see, and spent a huge amount of resources tweaking leveling up for characters all the way up to level 90+, at the same time that they made such a fantastic game for the average player. If they made the game specifically for the average player, I think a lot of that magic that goes into development would have been lost, and paradoxically the game wouldn't have been as fun for anyone.
Of course you have to be somewhat rational about where you spend your development resources, but if you try to make sure that the majority of the players see the majority of the content, it's so easy to make a sterile game. And if you are often completely irrational about where you spend your time in the name of being artistic, it's surprisingly easy to make a game that is actually fun and gets attention. The difference in sales between the former and the latter, without a marketing plan B, will be orders of magnitude.
(I agree with the rest of your post)
The solution Blizzard implemented in Wrath of the Lich King (the newest expansion) is to scale the big dungeons (raids) so that 10-man teams and 25-man teams can do them, and also have easy modes and hard modes, so that Ensidia (the best WoW guild) can be challenged by the Hard Mode and the more casual players can struggle against (but ultimately beat) the normal mode. They also kept adding new ways to get gear, so that people trying to break into raiding on the top level wouldn't have to spend months in the earlier raids, and they were pretty successful at that.
You're absolutely right that a more fully developed world with content that not every player would see is very important, but that content's only valuable if it's accessible to all the players. Anyone can go to the Cow Level in Diablo II, which is what made it great. But not everyone could kill Illidan or Kiljaedan in WoW, which was why it was a waste of money.
But I was talking about the general rule. I'd say that the opposite mistake is much more common amongst game developers, and it's a big reason why so many crappy games are released.
Certainly 0.1% of customers is too low. But I wouldn't call 1% too low - many of the best games ever made include lots of 1% content. And I think that's no coincidence - the mindset that results in developers putting 1% content into a game also results in a fun core game. 1% content only happens when developers care a lot about the game.
I should clarify that by 1% content I mean a different 1% of the audience will see each piece of content.
So even Blizzard has a lot to learn in this regard.
It is a real waste of time.
Having learned this important lesson I never played WoW, thank god.
I've a copy of Mass Effect 2 I bought last week and I haven't played it yet. I fear playing it for the loss of time.
I spend 2 evenings a week raiding, with 1-2 hours throughout the week (plus another hour or two on the weekends, when I can) doing other things. Twice a week, a group of 10 friends get together, log onto WoW and a Ventrilo server, and mess around for a few hours. I think of it a lot like a bowling/poker night for some guys, except you're significantly more likely to invite a new, potentially interesting person to a WoW raid than you are to your weekly game.
Honestly, I find the whole "If it does not have direct monetary value, or somehow advance my career/list of contacts, it isn't worth doing" stance that many people take rather disturbing. No, playing WoW doesn't directly benefit me, but the indirect benefits have been pretty awesome. I've kept in touch with several old friends I otherwise wouldn't have, met a lot of interesting people, and it gives me something I can talk about with at least 10% of the population. And that's all on top of just playing a well designed, pretty fun game.
The #1 lesson is probably the most important to life success, "Don't start something you don't intend to finish." is another way to word it.
This is even more important to startups -- if you are constantly getting features half way done and then scrapping them you should spend time figuring out why.
Yes the "new feature" you thought of today might be better measured side by side than the one that is half way done, but is it better for the effort required?
Would that I had the wisdom to tell the difference between the grinding I have to do to move me forward, and the grinding I keep doing because it's there in front of me as an option.
I pity the players having to deal with the Valentine's Day event coming soon; that was the second worst, IMHO.
The list is terrific advice and preaching it through the example of a game is smart thing as one is hooked on to the reading part. Seems like most people just had a negative feel for the whole thing as they detest WoW as a waste of time. In the process they missed the gem of advice.
"With my newfound time, I had a kid, wrote a couple of movies and directed one of my own."
intriguing enough to dig up this imdb search: < http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0041864/#writer >. I'm sure the proper list is actually on Mr August's site too, but ... This might have more trivia. :)
If you quit wow and spend all of that time that you would have been playing WoW on other tasks, you can actually accomplish some pretty amazing stuff.
(Get in shape, become a hacker, learn music, get girls... pretty much anything.)
Grinding levels in WoW takes discipline. Grinding levels in WoW can be a time investment similar to a second job. You can literally waste YEARS of your life playing WoW.
If you have the energy and discipline to sit at a computer for 8 hours or whatever after you've done all of your daily stuff, you could just as easily be spending that time accomplishing something great or learning.
And you will have tangible rewards that you can take with you everywhere, not just bits on a server.
You're forgetting one thing though, the fun aspect. Working for 8-9 hours a day on a computer and then coming back home to work for another 4 is not the same as playing for another 4. Although the strategy thinking does take a lot of mental effort, it seems to use a different part of the brain.
I agree about the time sink aspect though.