player-retention
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Officers' Quarters: 7 ways to stop the bleeding
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. The good news for raid leaders these days is that so much help is coming from patch 5.4, if what's on the PTR is any indication. Flexible raiding could be a lifesaver for guilds who stalled out in today's challenging normal modes. Virtual realms could inject new blood into every realm. The Throne of Thunder raid should see an across-the-board nerf from the patch, too. With all of these changes on the horizon, what raid leaders need to focus on right now is holding on and keeping their teams intact. The bad news is that no one knows when the patch will drop. We are likely at least six weeks away from 5.4, and probably longer than that since Blizzard has new systems to test and a new raid to tune. This week's email comes from a raid leader who isn't sure he can make it: Hello Scott, I am the current Raid Leader of a 10 man raid guild that considers ourselves to be progression-focused, semi-hardcore, or whatever you want to call it. We raid 3 nights a week for 3 hours a night, keep logs of all our runs, and really push to be successful. In the past, this worked out fairly well for us, as our guild maintained a top-10 place on our server according to wowprogress.com all through tiers 12, 13, and 14. However, since the release of MoP the members that made up the original progression team have been slowly bleeding away for one reason or another. At first, these losses could be absorbed by the extra standbys on our roster as well as a few people that swapped from our more casual 2-night-per-week team. Eventually we had to start recruiting out of guild in order to fill our raids each week. Generally speaking, for each player we lost the replacement we found was of a lesser caliber, whether it be in skill, gear level, or dedication. With the release of ToT and the difficulty of certain bosses (Horridon for example), our progression has begun to seriously stumble.
Officers' Quarters: Beyond recruiting
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. If you create a guild with a very specific type of player in mind, keeping those players should be easy, right? As one guild leader found out, it's not as simple as it seems. Hi Scott. ... I've got a guild of 50 people (10-30 people and their alts) and I seem to have hit a wall. I put posts up, I scour WoW Insider for ways to market my guild (thanks for the shoutout, drama mamas) and I try to keep things interesting but nobody ever signs on anymore. We've got a core group of about... oh I'd say 5-10 people who still sign on every few days. How in the hell are we supposed to be a guild for disabled people and friends of the disabled when nobody signs on?
Forge developer diary discusses the state of the game and what comes next
Forge isn't your typical MMO, set up as a straightforward PvP arena without niggling little issues like outside quests to get in the way. The development team behind the game has been looking at its current state, and in the newest address to the players they state what the game is doing wrong and how to fix it. The diary makes it clear that while the number of people playing Forge is down, they believe a lot of that has to do with the steep learning curve new players experience. To fix this, there are plans for a new starter area in which players can practice against bots to get accustomed to the combat and the game mechanics. The team also plans to improve the tutorial and the UI so that what an ability does is more transparent. For players already at the higher end, this is still good news -- the matchmaking system will be updated, visual customization will be improved, and you'll be able to respec at any time to ensure that you aren't stuck with poor choices forever. Check out all the details in the latest development diary.
Officers' Quarters: 5 ways to retain members in Mists
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Mists of Pandaria represents a unique and unprecedented era for guilds. It will be the first time in WoW's long history that a player can see all of the game's instanced raiding content without a guild, by simply queuing up in the raid finder. Many people mock the raid finder experience. It's easy to make light of it, but to underestimate its impact on the game could cost your guild dearly. Guilds are no longer the gatekeepers to content. To keep those members who are on the fence about staying, you need to offer more. You need to add value to their WoW experience and make sure that members have confidence in the guild's leadership. Let's look at five ways to help you do that.
WonderCon MMORPG industry panel explores key topics of the day
At last month's WonderCon in San Francisco, three MMO industry experts sat down to do a panel on many of the pressing questions and issues that players have these days. The lively panel, moderated by PC Gamer's Josh Augustine, consisted of Dirk Metzger (Zentia), Scott Hartsman (RIFT) and Nick Huggett (Runes of Magic), each taking turns to address some of the questions that are commonly asked about these games and the industry at large. These topics included player retention, free-to-play vs. subscription business models, the endless comparisons to World of Warcraft, why MMOs tend to be fantasy-based, some of the biggest mistakes in the genre, how to appeal to both hardcore and casual players, the differences between the Asian and North American market, and the struggle to provide player-created content. The rise of social media also has a significant effect on MMO development, according to Hartsman. "What that kind of forces us to do, bluntly, is make better games right off the bat, because people will tell you if your game sucks." You can watch the video highlights of the panel after the jump.
EVE Evolved: Power players and player retention
As I mentioned in our coverage of the EVE Online Fanfest, the best part of the experience for me was discussing EVE with players who are as involved in and enthusiastic about the game as I am. On my first night there, I got into a fascinating discussion with a few players on a topic I hadn't really considered before -- power players. Every MMO has players who get heavily involved in their chosen game. EVE's Fanfest really highlighted this, as around a thousand of EVE's power players flew to Iceland just to talk about the game, contribute ideas in roundtable discussions and find out what the future holds for the game. Ultimately, the fate of EVE lies in its community. EVE's main strength as an MMO is the fact that with so many players in one game universe, people form very real ties with each other. Corporations and alliances are more than just collections of people; they're sub-communities with their own aspirations, internal politics, playstyles, personalities and even senses of humour. These organisations give people support and a place to call home in an unforgiving universe, and it's the power players of EVE who make all of that possible. In this week's EVE Evolved, I explore the importance of power players in MMOs and what the concept means for EVE's development.
