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Concerning Player Retention and Realism

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Schwerbelastung:

--- Quote from: Mattilald Anguisad on April 07, 2014, 10:35:50 am ---Yes but high amount of players is making servers go slow or have large lag issues. Thus far the solution was to wait for the number of players to drop aftehr the sales - witch is counterintuiative if you actualy want to keep the players. I don't know is it server issue, or data center issue of the issue of the ISP providing internet to the data center, but it's a serious issue that detracts from the enjoyment of the game.

--- End quote ---

I hear you, after being disconnected from the game and seeing multiple "Steam service unavailbale" messages multiple times in the past days, connection problems can be annoying.

However, it is not completely counterintuitive to wait for the number of players to drop down after the sales. We were given an example in junior high about economics, and especially small-scale service providers. It went a little bit like this;

Hundreds of years ago, a tailor was running a family shop. They had one machine to help them make clothes, and they were doing ok. They weren't generating huge amounts of profit, but they certainly weren't making a loss either. One day, they get an order from no other than the king of their country himself. He needs thousands of specifically tailored clothes for a royal party, and needs them within one month. He has contacted the tailor because he knows he has the skill and the technology to make such clothes.

The tailor now has a problem. He has two options. Either he spends a lot of money to purchase new machines and hire new staff, so that he can fulfill his king's order, or he has to decline the order, and would therefore not get the vast sum of gold the king would offer him for his services. He would also very likely get bad publicity if the story came out. If he chooses to purchase the new machines and hire the new staff, what will he do with them after the order has been delivered? These machines would likely cost as much or very likely even more gold than the king would reward him with, not to mention staff wages. He could certainly use the machines later, but would he actually need that many machines later - ever? Could he sell them? How much money would he get, and how time consuming would it be? Would the pros outweigh the cons?

I've thought of this scenario every time I see people complaining about game developers not buying a lot of servers to handle launch/patch/expansion days. For a (usually) limited amount of time, the servers are completely overloaded and the discussion boards are flooded with complaints, but it dies down as soon as the number of people trying to play the game simultaneously drops to the "normal" level.

As such, it's not always the smartest option to adjust to the largest order of royal clothes - or the highest possible number of simultaneous players.

Furthermore, games that have their playerbase multiplied during a sale are very often in my experience indie games. Large, successful games that get loads of new players during a sale usually have a lot of server capacity, and are trying to perhaps make up for the "unused machines" - make up for the players that have stopped playing the game. Also, these sales of successful games usually have the games still cost a lot more than indie games that are on sale; I've often seen sales of indie games for $1-$5, and also often seen sales of successful games for $15-$30. Sometimes this is not exactly true, as was with the case with The Secret World, a very well made online MMO with a (in my opinion) simply amazing storyline and dialogue in multiple languages.. but it ended up being a flop. The publishers were prepared for a flood of players.. but it never happened. First they had to get rid of the monthly subscription, then cut staff, decreasing the rate of content updates. There have also been many sales since, and the playerbase has been fluctuating, but it never really was what it should have been.

One thing I've been wondering about is why especially large developers / game companies don't at least rent extra server capacity so they wouldn't face the huge negative publicity that comes from server overload. Think Sim City, for instance. I'm not an expert on this, but I would really like to hear their point of view about this. Of course indie developers could also probably employ this strategy, but it would likely cause a bigger impact on their budget compared to a gaming company with an annual turnover of millions of billions of dollars.

HamsterIV:
I don't think the MOBA to GOIO comparison is that great. Individual stats in a MOBA are easier to track since all players succeed (kill an enemy hero) or fail (die) as individuals. In GOIO a crew succeeds or fails together. There is no algorithm to tell if an individual player's actions were responsible for the victory or defeat.

The MVP could have been the engineer who did nothing for most of the match but kept the ship alive during a critical moment, the captain who decided to regroup with his ally instead of meat grind, or the gunner whose knocked out the enemy ship's gun right as it was about to get a kill. The importance of these actions can't be recorded in the game log. It is up to the captain, crew, and sometimes the enemy to give recognition for exceptional behavior.

MOBA's are like baseball where an individual's performance directly effects the game's results in a traceable way. The number of home runs, strike outs, and catches can be tracked. Where as GOIO is more like football (American) and to a certain degree football (proper). The guy who runs into the end zone and the guy who throws the ball get most of the glory, but without the every single member of the team doing their job, nobody wins.

Schwerbelastung:

--- Quote from: HamsterIV on April 07, 2014, 01:20:01 pm ---I don't think the MOBA to GOIO comparison is that great. Individual stats in a MOBA are easier to track since all players succeed (kill an enemy hero) or fail (die) as individuals. In GOIO a crew succeeds or fails together. There is no algorithm to tell if an individual player's actions were responsible for the victory or defeat.

The MVP could have been the engineer who did nothing for most of the match but kept the ship alive during a critical moment, the captain who decided to regroup with his ally instead of meat grind, or the gunner whose knocked out the enemy ship's gun right as it was about to get a kill. The importance of these actions can't be recorded in the game log. It is up to the captain, crew, and sometimes the enemy to give recognition for exceptional behavior.

MOBA's are like baseball where an individual's performance directly effects the game's results in a traceable way. The number of home runs, strike outs, and catches can be tracked. Where as GOIO is more like football (American) and to a certain degree football (proper). The guy who runs into the end zone and the guy who throws the ball get most of the glory, but without the every single member of the team doing their job, nobody wins.

--- End quote ---

That is both true and a little bit untrue. While in a MOBA, it is far easier to track individual performance (tracking kills, deaths and assists is enough), the problem I think GoIO has in comparison that it offers no way to track relative individual performance. When I'm thinking MOBAs k/d/a, I'm thinking kills/component destroys/accuracy for gunners, rebuilds/fire extinguishes/buffs for engineers, and possibly crew kills/ram kills/time survived in combat for pilots? Note that these are just things I can come up with off the top of my head, but examples of things that could be used to determine the relative efficiency of the different classes. And no, this does not account for the gunning engineers etc. It's just a short and simple example.

You give examples of MVPs in GoIO, but suggest that tracking actual game performance in a MOBA is relatively straightforward. What about the person who destroyed the barracks/inhibitors while the others were killing the enemy heroes/champions elsewhere? What about the support who healed his team and kept the carries from dying? Supports who disabled the enemy so that their team could escape in peace? People who TP'd to critical fights in order to have the enemy retreat? What about the support who placed the most wards, saving allies from ganks and prevented enemies from doing roshan/dragon/baron etc. in peace? People who did the most damage in a fight, yet lost the kill to a nuker support? People who jungled most of the game and didn't get many kills, deaths, or assists, but got all the crucial kills and did the most damage in late game, perhaps even almost single-handedly destroyed the enemy base, because they were so strong? Supports that actually sacrificed themselves and died in order to protect a carry?


--- Quote ---Where as GOIO is more like football (American) and to a certain degree football (proper). The guy who runs into the end zone and the guy who throws the ball get most of the glory, but without the every single member of the team doing their job, nobody wins.
--- End quote ---

I could go on, but I think you've gotten the point. Nothing in a MOBA that I just mentioned can be defined from k/d/a accurately, and that is part of the reason why watching competitive games with experienced commentators is so much fun for a lot of new players. Not only is it definitely and absolutely certain that you don't win a high level competitive MOBA match without efficient teamwork, there is a level of depth in the game (as there is in GoIO) that goes way beyond the stats.

The stats are there so that people can get a leaderboard. Something they can be proud of, something that shows they need to step it up. Something to make their performance more visible, something to make the game more fun.

(Disclaimer: your personal mileage and opinion may vary when it comes to stats being fun in games)

The Djinn:

--- Quote from: Schwerbelastung on April 07, 2014, 02:08:30 pm ---The stats are there so that people can get a leaderboard. Something they can be proud of, something that shows they need to step it up. Something to make their performance more visible, something to make the game more fun.
--- End quote ---

Stats are fine. That strange number that judges how fine is a problem though. I've gotten a score of .8 for Piloting during a game where we got only one kill and died about 6 times...but it failed to account for the fact that each and every one of those deaths was a several-minutes long chase that kept the capture point in our hands and/or prevented an enemy capture, allowing my team a 650-0 victory. That's not bad piloting: that was a case of knowing that my ship alone couldn't defeat the enemy team, and thus deciding to focus on surviving and trick piloting to hold the point as long as humanly possible.

The thing that MOBAs do is display a stat screen that shows all the information about total contribution. To use League of Legends as an example, it shows the following:

Kills / Deaths / Assists
Total Creep Kills
Total Tower Kills
Total Damage
Total Damage to Champions
Total Damage Taken
Healing Done
Gold Earned
Longest Killing Spree
Inhibitors Destroyed
Monsters Killed
...
...and so on.

What it doesn't try to do is put a value on this. It doesn't say "Oh...you only got 1 kill and 8 deaths, so you get a 1.2 out of 10." That's because those deaths might have come as a result of single-handedly backdooring the enemy's base while the rest of your team distracted them, resulting in a net gain for your team even though you died every time.

GoI might want to take a leaf out of that book. Don't give use a score: let us figure out the value for ourselves. Instead, simply display numbers:

Engines/Balloons/Armor/Guns destroyed
Engines/Balloons/Armor/Guns rebuilt
Ships destroyed
Total deaths
Fires lit
Fires extinguished
Points contested
Points defended
Ram kills
Crew kills
...and so on.

Even if you merely display a few...say, a players most impressive three at the end of a game. Just don't attempt to make a system that judges the quality of their gameplay by the result.

Schwerbelastung:

--- Quote from: The Djinn on April 07, 2014, 02:22:45 pm ---Even if you merely display a few...say, a players most impressive three at the end of a game. Just don't attempt to make a system that judges the quality of their gameplay by the result.

--- End quote ---

Well said. The same things you described apply in DOTA. There are numerous different statistics spectators and casters can track in a match, many of which are similar or identical to the ones you listed. There are even graphs showing how the game has evolved, so you can see if someone goes from being the underdog to actually being on top.

The problem with the k/d/a is exactly as you described; in a lot of public games, supports who performed near flawlessly may get a lot of flak since they actually want as few kills as possible - yet, the "crowd" usually just keeps track of kills and deaths. The supports certainly want to assist their team with kills, but as they are the player who needs the least gold, they want to let the carries get the killing blows (which earn them more gold).

Most of the time, people actually tend to more or less ignore the assists after the game and just go "omg noob support u got 0/4 u suck uninstall". The support might go "Well, I actually got 0/4/28..", and the first guy usually either goes silent, says that assists don't count, or simply insults the guy ignoring the argument.

If you had more sophisticated in game statistics or a playerbase that is universally able to read between the lines when it comes to simple statistics (let's be serious here; this might not happen), this would not be a problem. The problem, however, is that complexity breeds confusion; I believe there is a reason why the advanced statistics in DOTA for instance are only available to the spectators and casters.

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