VentureBeat article: MPQ's April Event Analytics

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

I think you slightly misrepresent the article, but let's not go there. What interests me how it maps to our context. Yes, we can accept it that going over "good enough" imposes diminishing returns and no gain comparable to going from "mediocre" to the "good enough" point. The article looks pretty clear that being blow the "good enough" mark is not exactly a benefit.

So where do you put MPQ on the scale? Does your dragging the article here implies they are in the green area?

IMO they are pretty low and keep going in the wrong direction more than the small steps taken for actual improvement. When you read statements like "playing Hunt is less gun than my day work" it sound like good opportunity to run the "stop and fix" workshop. Or at least pay serious attention.

Or am I lost in the past thinking the main value a game provides is FUN?

I agree that the article is not a perfect fit for MPQ, but it does provide a reasonable example of how many modern-day businesses are operated. The posting of the article was for informative purposes for those that were discussing the concept of "happiness" towards the two events that were run recently. It was meant in no way to be a dig at Demiurge or MPQ.

The main argument of the article was that there is a general sweet spot for customer service effort that balances the costs of customer service against the benefits a customer/user obtains from that customer service. Obviously, poor customer service is harmful to a company. However, the article stresses that too much customer service is equally detrimental, as the benefits from excessive customer service are wasted on minimal obtained benefits.

Where do I place MPQ? Well.. I am still here and you are too, which I believe places MPQ firmly in at least the "good enough" category. As long as any person still plays the game, then they are actively deciding that the customer service level of the game is at least "good enough" to them. When their perception of the game falls below that level, people become disengaged and stop playing.

Moving on, your closing question requires a bit of pre-explanation to properly answer.

You asked: Or am I lost in the past thinking the main value a game provides is FUN?

Value is a tricky word in the 21st century in the business world, which defines value in a different way than you are asking in the question.

In your context, you are defining value as a quality that you find desirable. From a consumer perspective, fun could be considered valuable, or perhaps making a purchase at a significant discount could be considered valuable. These are all perfectly fine definitions of value.

From a business perspective, the definition of value is different. Value is an evolution of the concept of profit. Whereas profit simply looks at whether an activity generates more money then it expends, the concept of value recognizes that there are non-monetary actions that are beneficial to a company.

From an overly simple perspective, the value a typical MPQ player invests into the game can be broken into at least two dimensions (keeping this simple), time invested and money invested. Money invested is rather obvious, which needs no explanation. Time invested needs a little explanation. If a player invests time into the game, then they are engaged customers, which is good. But even for a F2P consumer, the time they put forth into the game is valuable because that player can indirectly cause someone else to invest money in the game. A very straightforward example is shields in a tourney. Shields are deployed as a result of other players' actions. Their time investment in the game is causing you to behave in a reactionary manner, which invokes a shield purchase that would not have been required otherwise to reach a given prize bracket. At the end of the day, a dollar directly invested by a player or indirectly invested by the actions of other players in reaction to the player equates to the same result. Thus, the behavior of the community in practice is valuable in generating revenue, even if a player never directly invests money into the game themselves.

Demiurge_Will is correct in his statement about fun from both definitions of value. As a consumer, the perception of fun will make a game valuable to them. People like playing fun games, plain and simple. From a business perspective, players that are experiencing fun are engaged and will either directly or indirectly increase the amount of money that is generated by the game. Therefore, as he correctly concludes, the interests of players and developers should be aligned to generate the most value from both parties in this business relationship.

Just don't expect to them to bend over backwards in the name of "fun" for players. Those days have long past for many businesses.

I hope this answers your question (probably in a bit too much detail).

Unknown

The part I found most interesting was that Albert said it was very surprising that people didn't seem to like heroic much. The surprising part isn't that people didn't like it. The surprising part was that he was surprised about it.

I believe if you did a survey where you asked 1000 forum goers how they thought heroic would have compared to another event. I'm pretty sure at least 950 would have blatantly told him the answer without even having to think about it.

Seems as the CEO he shouldn't be so out of touch.

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

The part I found most interesting was that Albert said it was very surprising that people didn't seem to like heroic much. The surprising part isn't that people didn't like it. The surprising part was that he was surprised about it.

I believe if you did a survey where you asked 1000 forum goers how they thought heroic would have compared to another event. I'm pretty sure at least 950 would have blatantly told him the answer without even having to think about it.

Seems as the CEO he shouldn't be so out of touch.

From a design point of view the heroics are great. They're the closest thing to how the game is meant to be played without all your overpowered bailouts (though it'd be really nice if they didn't design encounters that seem to be anti-Spiderman in mind when he's not usable).

But you don't just expect people to to quit using their overpowered infinite combos cold turkey.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Psykopathic wrote:

The part I found most interesting was that Albert said it was very surprising that people didn't seem to like heroic much. The surprising part isn't that people didn't like it. The surprising part was that he was surprised about it.

I believe if you did a survey where you asked 1000 forum goers how they thought heroic would have compared to another event. I'm pretty sure at least 950 would have blatantly told him the answer without even having to think about it.

Seems as the CEO he shouldn't be so out of touch.

From a design point of view the heroics are great. They're the closest thing to how the game is meant to be played without all your overpowered bailouts (though it'd be really nice if they didn't design encounters that seem to be anti-Spiderman in mind when he's not usable).

But you don't just expect people to to quit using their overpowered infinite combos cold turkey.

Typically every time 1 comes out, all I hear is days of complaining about limited roster size and complaints of no fun.
I personally nearly quit playing MPQ all together every time I see heroic in the news update.

Spoit

Man, it has been so long since phantron went on one of his 'the game is too easy, lrn2play' tears. Clearly all it needed was the right trigger warnings

pasa_ wrote:

for the record the main uproar around boost changes was not the action but method it was dumped on community -- issuing an event that depleted everyone's stocks then changed the prices overnight without telling anyone and not even bothering with confirmation.

Then little later IceIX announced another change and said it will NOT be a price hike, but when it came live it was another 2x.

And the store cap is still the same despite the requests.

Yes, the ubiquitous boosting was not good and cutting it back helped the game -- but the method of introduction was more than terrible. And I see no technical or other sanesible reason why it was not possible to get announced 2 weeks ahead with all details.

Don't forget that it was also following right on the heals of the thorverine nerf, which actually did have some degree of warning. And right after they made the same exact mistake with the rag nerf (have they gotten around to issueing the statement about the big decision they were discussing about for that yet?)

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

The part I found most interesting was that Albert said it was very surprising that people didn't seem to like heroic much. The surprising part isn't that people didn't like it. The surprising part was that he was surprised about it.

I believe if you did a survey where you asked 1000 forum goers how they thought heroic would have compared to another event. I'm pretty sure at least 950 would have blatantly told him the answer without even having to think about it.

Seems as the CEO he shouldn't be so out of touch.

I think the issue is, are forum goes representative of the playerbase as a whole? I get the sense that they are not. So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure? I would go out on a limb and say we aren't a large enough percentage of the base to be statistically significant.

Unknown

altlover85 wrote:

Psykopathic wrote:

The part I found most interesting was that Albert said it was very surprising that people didn't seem to like heroic much. The surprising part isn't that people didn't like it. The surprising part was that he was surprised about it.

I believe if you did a survey where you asked 1000 forum goers how they thought heroic would have compared to another event. I'm pretty sure at least 950 would have blatantly told him the answer without even having to think about it.

Seems as the CEO he shouldn't be so out of touch.

I think the issue is, are forum goes representative of the playerbase as a whole? I get the sense that they are not. So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure? I would go out on a limb and say we aren't a large enough percentage of the base to be statistically significant.

Who knows for sure? How about adding an in-game poll to find out? Seems pretty straightforward

Unknown

altlover85 wrote:

I think the issue is, are forum goes representative of the playerbase as a whole? I get the sense that they are not. So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure? I would go out on a limb and say we aren't a large enough percentage of the base to be statistically significant.

The forums are absolutely not representative.

gobstopper wrote:

Who knows for sure? How about adding an in-game poll to find out? Seems pretty straightforward

Ah, you'd think so, but it's not that easy. It's pretty much impossible to construct a simple poll that would actually yield useful information.

LordWill

ZenBrillig wrote:

altlover85 wrote:

I think the issue is, are forum goes representative of the playerbase as a whole? I get the sense that they are not. So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure? I would go out on a limb and say we aren't a large enough percentage of the base to be statistically significant.

The forums are absolutely not representative.

gobstopper wrote:

Who knows for sure? How about adding an in-game poll to find out? Seems pretty straightforward

Ah, you'd think so, but it's not that easy. It's pretty much impossible to construct a simple poll that would actually yield useful information.

I don't think it needs to be complicated...It can be done.

I'm guessing you work at Microsoft on the Windows 8 team..... (Just kidding ya)

Windows 8 is a perfect example of a company not listening to feedback and look how that turned out...

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

I don't think it needs to be complicated...It can be done.

I'm guessing you work at Microsoft on the Windows 8 team..... (Just kidding ya)

Windows 8 is a perfect example of a company not listening to feedback and look how that turned out...

Go for it. Show me a sample poll question and I'll explain exactly why it won't tell you anything useful.

Btw, you already have a logic failure - just because Microsoft put out a bad product by not listening to feedback (we'll assume that's true for the sake of argument) doesn't in any way prove that listening to feedback would have produced a *good* product. Windows 8 was destined to crash and burn regardless, because it's a tablet OS. No amount of feedback will produce a good product if it's for the wrong market or audience.

Nemek

Yeah, it's definitely the question that would likely be the biggest problem. How do you write it?

Do you like PvE scaling?
• Yes
• No

90% of the playerbase wouldn't have a good idea of what this could possibly mean. Obviously not enough information in the question.

You'll probably need to add more to show how scaling individually affects a person's levels as compared to how it used to be before scaling. For the majority of players, it might look something like this:

For the last level of The Hunt...
With scaling start: level 70.
With scaling end: level 100.
No scaling (constant): Level 230

But, getting that information for every individual player is probably not particularly easy.

My example doesn't really matter, but the problem is that having an actual informed decision from the player would be incredibly difficult.

Puritas

then what about

Do you find it fun to fight PvE enemies twice the level of your characters?
• Yes
• No

short sweet and easy to understand

Unknown

Nemek wrote:

Yeah, it's definitely the question that would likely be the biggest problem. How do you write it?

Do you like PvE scaling?
• Yes
• No

Even if you assume that everyone knows what scaling is and what it does, it's not an informative question, because you can't tell what this means for their behavior.

Don't like scaling:
Case 1. People that don't like scaling are driven away from the game. Bad for Demiurge.
Case 2. People that don't like scaling are driven to spend money on boosts to overcome it. Good for Demiurge.

Like scaling:
Case 1. People like the challenge of scaling, and so don't want to spend money on boosts to 'cheap out of it.' Bad for Demiurge.
Case 2. People like that scaling allows them to compete on a level playing field with long-time players and are thus inclined to spend money to expand their rosters. Good for Demiurge.

LordWill

ZenBrillig wrote:

LordWill wrote:

I don't think it needs to be complicated...It can be done.

I'm guessing you work at Microsoft on the Windows 8 team..... (Just kidding ya)

Windows 8 is a perfect example of a company not listening to feedback and look how that turned out...

Go for it. Show me a sample poll question and I'll explain exactly why it won't tell you anything useful.

Btw, you already have a logic failure - just because Microsoft put out a bad product by not listening to feedback (we'll assume that's true for the sake of argument) doesn't in any way prove that listening to feedback would have produced a *good* product. Windows 8 was destined to crash and burn regardless, because it's a tablet OS. No amount of feedback will produce a good product if it's for the wrong market or audience.

Perhaps but it might have been prevented from happening at all if someone with a little common sense would have spoken up Just makes me wonder what were they thinking...

Back to MPQ... If polling isn't the solution, what do you think is? How do you make changes for the good of your player base and game? Blindly? Just based on the numbers? What is your solution?

Demiurge_Will described this as a relationship which I think is a fairly accurate. But when one person stops communicating with the other, that's when problems start to happen.

I don't see anything wrong with voicing our opinions and feedback.

Nemek

Puritas wrote:

then what about

Do you find it fun to fight PvE enemies twice the level of your characters?
• Yes
• No

short sweet and easy to understand

How does getting rid of scaling change that, though? It'd probably make it even worse. Pre-scaling, probably a third of all missions were level 100+, and then about a tenth of all missions were 230s. Now we've made levels five to ten times the level of the characters of a very large percentage of the playerbase.

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

Demiurge_Will described this as a relationship which I think is a fairly accurate. But when one person stops communicating with the other, that's when problems start to happen.

I don't see anything wrong with voicing our opinions and feedback.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with voicing opinions and feedback. However, the true value in it is in the ideas the feedback contains. Thinking that the feedback represents some greater truth about how the player-base is going to behave in the future is a very dangerous way to run a business.

Puritas

Nemek wrote:

Puritas wrote:

then what about

Do you find it fun to fight PvE enemies twice the level of your characters?
• Yes
• No

short sweet and easy to understand

How does getting rid of scaling change that, though? It'd probably make it even worse. Pre-scaling, probably a third of all missions were level 100+, and then about a tenth of all missions were 230s. Now we've made levels five to ten times the level of the characters of a very large percentage of the playerbase.

Er, I thought we were talking about finding out what the majority of players enjoy/hate rather vs just the forum population, rather than keep scaling as-is vs cutting it out completely
Going back to pre-scaling 230s would still be people facing PvE enemies twice the level of their characters ;P

LordWill

ZenBrillig wrote:

LordWill wrote:

Demiurge_Will described this as a relationship which I think is a fairly accurate. But when one person stops communicating with the other, that's when problems start to happen.

I don't see anything wrong with voicing our opinions and feedback.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with voicing opinions and feedback. However, the true value in it is in the ideas the feedback contains. Thinking that the feedback represents some greater truth about how the player-base is going to behave in the future is a very dangerous way to run a business.

I disagree. Either you are in touch with your customer base and you provide the products and services they want or you don't. I am sure along the way by asking your customers what they like and don't like about your company/product/service could help you for the future. If I'm so out of touch that I don't understand what my customers want or I give them what I think they want and not listen to what they are telling me is just bad business sense.

I certainly not saying to not use the numbers but numbers by themselves doesn't give the whole picture. Asking for feedback or taking a poll costs them very little compared what they could stand to gain. I've never heard of a company that doesn't listen to feedback or invite it. We get surveys ALL the time asking "How can we do better?" they value your opinion because they can't afford not to.

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

altlover85 wrote:

I think the issue is, are forum goes representative of the playerbase as a whole? I get the sense that they are not. So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure? I would go out on a limb and say we aren't a large enough percentage of the base to be statistically significant.

The forums are absolutely not representative.

gobstopper wrote:

Who knows for sure? How about adding an in-game poll to find out? Seems pretty straightforward

Ah, you'd think so, but it's not that easy. It's pretty much impossible to construct a simple poll that would actually yield useful information.

It's incredibly easy to answer the question that I originally responded to. "So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure?"
- Which event(s) do you enjoy? Select from the following...
- Which event(s) do you not enjoy?

Then the Devs can take those results and conduct more polls about why people didn't enjoy events.
- Why did you not enjoy this particular event? ::List options::

Unknown

gobstopper wrote:

It's incredibly easy to answer the question that I originally responded to. "So maybe the majority of players do enjoy heroics and don't mind scaling. Who knows for sure?"
- Which event(s) do you enjoy? Select from the following...
- Which event(s) do you not enjoy?

And as I pointed out, this is a completely meaningless answer. Suppose that players most enjoyed the events that made Demiurge the least money. What do you do then?

Then the Devs can take those results and conduct more polls about why people didn't enjoy events.
- Why did you not enjoy this particular event? ::List options::

Again, you'll get meaningless answers. What Demiurge cares about is what gets people to pay, both in the short and long-term, and there's absolutely no way to draw a line from there to something as nebulous as "enjoyment."

What you don't seem to understand is that there is no point in Demiurge making a game that everyone thinks is fun if no one will pay for it. And since most F2P games (including this one) basically trade time for cash (you pay to save time), there is no way of avoiding the reality that Demiurge has to make things that take lots of time to do if you want to do it for free. Most people would describe being purposefully delayed as "not enjoyable" or "not fun." The best any F2P company can do is hope to disguise it.

Honestly, it can actually be argued that if too many people enjoyed an event, then it was, by definition, a failure for Demiurge.