Tag: MMORPG

About the Laws of Online World Design – Part IV

This is the fourth installment in a series of posts I’ll be making about Raph Koster‘s The Laws of Online World Design, as explained in this introductory post. I will start at the top of the list, and work my way down until I’ve poked and prodded every law in the list, not skipping any unless I really feel like it, or unless I should happen to be distracted by a pretty butterfly or something. Which is exactly what happened after I wrote Part III of this series in July 2009!

In this long awaited (right?) Part IV of the series, I’ll concentrate on the following law:

  • Macroing, botting, and automation

Continue reading “About the Laws of Online World Design – Part IV”

Ownership is Key

A study (published yesterday) from the University at Buffalo School of Management, which followed 173 players who were part of a large MMORPG community to figure out strategies in which to increase player loyalty/retention, concluded with what everyone who has actively played Ultima Online and/or Star Wars Galaxies (and/or MUDs) have known for (a) decade(s) or longer:

“It [the study] examined whether two different game-playing strategies were successful in producing loyal players.
One strategy found that giving players more control and ownership of their character increased loyalty. The second strategy showed that gamers who played cooperatively and worked with other gamers in “guilds” built loyalty and social identity.

“To build a player’s feeling of ownership towards its character, game makers should provide equal opportunities for any character to win a battle,” says Sanders. “They should also build more selective or elaborate chat rooms and guild features to help players socialize.”

It doesn’t take a brain-surgeon to figure out that this isn’t rocket-science:

  • Ownership is, has been and will continue to be a key ingredient to player retention.

Sources: The Escapist, University at Buffalo

Woho, I be unhacketh

It’s now been a week and a day since I logged in to find my World of Warcraft account hacked, with the gear of my characters sold off to vendors and the gold sent off to some unknown third-party.

Today I logged back in to see if I’d gotten any new responses from Blizzard (last one was basically “We’re investigating; don’t call us, we’ll call you.”, and I can now verify that Blizzard have restored all of my World of Warcraft-characters to their former glory, returning all the gold and gear that was lost in the incident, including stuff that had been taken from the guild bank, and some stuff I hadn’t even realized I was missing.

Thanks, Blizzard – and well done!

In other news, I went haywire on Steam over the Holidays and bought 14 games in total – only being slightly disgruntled at having to paying more for those games than friends in the US, since I have to pay in Euro instead of Dollar (due to Valve deciding Norway should belong to the “Eurozone“.)