I'll start with a quote that was a bit of an eye-opener for me.
According to the numbers Andy has given me, the "causal" ATITD player plays as much as a "hardcore" AO player. That's incredible...and a bit too much for most people.
- Laka
"Hardcore" and "casual" are fuzzy terms. Some firmer numbers: According to figures Andy gave in IRC, the average ATITD player plays 83-90 hours a month. That's over two and a half hours every single day. The real number of average hours per player will be even higher, since the cited figure counts mules and inactive (but paid) accounts in the total.
These figures are incredible. Given them, it's no surprise that ATITD has a subscriber base of only about 1500; indeed, the surprise to me is that there are so many subscribers. Very few people can afford to invest that kind of time in a single game.
ATITD will never grow unless it can attract players who spend less time in game.
Why aren't "casual" players playing ATITD? They can't. The amount of time required to get to any of the fun payoffs in ATITD is too large. If you don't spend that two hours a day in game, you don't get to have fun.
The remainder of this document addresses specific problems and my proposed solutions.
The base unit of cost in ATITD, as with most other MMORPGs, is the player-minute. All resources boil down to time: time spent gathering, time spent searching, time spent working. Even the "smart" resources like gearboxes or paint, which are intended to require thought rather than clicking, have their costs dominated by time. A gearbox costs the sum of the gears that go into it, with no regard to the time spent on design; a paint costs the materials that go into it and time spent clicking on the pigment lab, with no regard to the work required to find the formula.
Just about everything costs too much.
"Too much" is subjective of course. When I say that things cost too much, I mean that the cost (in time) of most things in the game is sufficiently high as to exclude casual players. The work/reward ratio is too high; it takes too many hours of uninteresting work to reach a payoff.
This situation is the result of a self-reinforcing cycle. High costs cause casual players to leave the game. The costs of the next set of technologies and tests are calibrated according to the remaining hardcore playerbase, which makes it even less likely that a casual will be able to join the game...and so forth.
In order to do most of the fun stuff in the game, you need to learn the skills to do it. Most of these skills are available for free from universities. The university round trip is the first introduction most new players get to mainland Egypt.
Let's consider a player starting in the south of the Valley of Kings, near one of the most dense concentrations of seven universities in the game.
Here are the seven universities in SVoK:
ULead -1662, 4841 UArch -1646, 4961 UThought -1860, 5096 UA&M -1926, 5298 UConf -1931, 5457 UBody -1367, 5391 UWorship -1224, 4942
Starting at the ULead, assuming an as-the-crow-flies trip between each university, and a run speed of 1 coord per second, the complete trip takes:
-1662, 4841 => -1646, 4961 : 121
-1646, 4961 => -1860, 5096 : 253
-1860, 5096 => -1926, 5298 : 212
-1926, 5298 => -1931, 5457 : 159
-1931, 5457 => -1367, 5391 : 567
-1367, 5391 => -1224, 4942 : 471
1784 seconds, or about 30 minutes.
30 minutes of running--nothing but running--is not a good way to start a game.
Three hours, start to finish, to do a single test of brewing beer-- and the kettles will require maintenance several times during that time. The casual brewer will need to spend an entire play session, with little time for anything else, to do a single run of beer,
This was subsequently reduced to one hour (still a fairly long time), but only for people who have invested substantial time into the test of festivals.
Assume you can get one usable gem from a water mine every five minutes, and one gem in forty can be cut into an Aidenn Mask. It then takes ten hours of watching a water mine to get enough gems to build an opticon. This does not include other costs in construction.
I passed the test of obelisk (an architecture test) with an hour and a half of work. It takes more than ten ten to enter this test of art.
Grapes must be maintained periodically to produce certain characteristics. In particular, they need to be pruned approximately every 12 hours to boost concentration. This excludes any player who can only log on once a day.
Working together might be a solution--one person prunes in the morning, the other in the evening--except that players with such different play schedules are unlikely to ever meet each other.
The first test of thought. The Empty Hand Tower has such high resource requirements that it was conceived as a "regional project", and yet it only allows a single person to load a puzzle at a time. A casual player without name recognition or the time to spend making a significant contribution to an EHT has no real hope of starting the test.
If the game is to expand the base of players it appeals to, costs need to come down.
This is not a question of adding rewards for casual players. You CANNOT place the casual player on an equal footing with the hardcore player. It isn't possible, and it isn't worth trying. The hardcore players work harder, do more, and will always be ahead. Rewards for not playing the game (such as offline chores) do not work: either they are sufficiently low that they do not provide a substantial advantage for casual players, or they are sufficiently high that mules outproduce real players and unbalance the economy.
The goal is not parity between casual and hardcore players. The goal is to allow the casual player to have fun.
Specific suggestions follow.
People spend too much time running. Fix it. I've talked about this at great length before, and I won't repeat myself here. If this isn't fixed, ignore the rest of this document, since it will not help.
Consider beer: Three hours to brew, and the kettle requires periodic maintenance.
One fix is to make beer instantaneous. Enter the recipe, press "brew", and take out the result. This may be considered undesirable, as it accelerates the overall pace of the game--people can now produce beer faster, and will more rapidly "finish" brewing.
A better fix is to leave the length of the brewing process untouched, but to frontload the work. Enter the recipe: "100 honey at time 3600, 10 light malt at time 10, seal at time 5000", and press "brew". The beer continues unattended; in three hours, it will be ready.
Many other processes may be decoupled in this fashion. Other examples:
Deep wells are a good shared-use structure; few people will build one on their own. By making very expensive items shared-use, they may remain a challenge for the hardcore while being available to the casual player.
Empty Hand Towers are a good example of a structure which should have been shared-use.
In some cases, no clever fix is required. The cost should simply be reduced. Specific examples include opticons and fireworks: I can think of no reason why it would be a bad thing for opticons to be considered cheap buildings, or for fireworks to be a cheap and easy activity for anyone with access to a pyro lab.
The social landscape of a game is created from the game design.
ATITD has a fairly rich social landscape for the long-time player, and a barren one for the new player. This heavily discriminates against new players.
Long-time players will be members of a number of guilds. Most of these guilds will serve not as organizations, but simply as chat channels. For example, the BEDOUINS, Nileside Lounge, and Amazons all exist primarily to give people a place to talk to each other. (The BEDOUINS were formed to run the test of Bedouin; however, this activity does not require a guildhall and chat channel. Indeed, the BEDOUINS have a separate guild for people running the test; the main guild exists primarily as a social venue.)
The problem for a new player is that he will not be a member of any of these guilds. He can't join them easily--joining requires a potentially very long run to the guildhall, and will also take up a slot in the guild. Since large guildhalls are expensive to build, few social guilds are welcoming of people who haven't already "paid their dues" by sticking around the game for a while.
People are very sparsely distributed throughout Egypt, which means that the vast majority of communication occurs in person-to-person chat or guild channels.
Starting out in ATITD is a very lonely experience.
Most regions have a "metaguild"--a guild hall which exists primarily to provide a chat channel to people in that region.
If the game were to provide free regional chat channels, it would have much the same effect--except that new players would be included by default, rather than excluded. To promote regional distinctions, players would be limited to membership in a single regional channel at a time.
Note that metaguilds already exist--replacing them with free chat channels would probably not result in a significant increase in server load.
A chat channel on each of the immigrant islands would also be a good idea, especially if mentors could join it without remaining on the island. There is currently a lack of mentors on the islands. One reason for this, I believe, is that few people want to spend a long time on an island where they can do no productive work, waiting for someone to need their help. It would work better if mentors could monitor the island chat channel, waiting for a question they can answer, while also engaging in other activities.
Concentration of population can be created by funneling people into bottlenecks. A bottleneck is a location where people will tend to pass through or congregate.
A couple examples of bottlenecks from the game Asheron's Call:
These general concepts may be applied to ATITD.
Create travel bottlenecks: all roads lead through Rome--or Cairo, as the case may be. This could be enhanced by requiring people to wait at the bottleneck. If a caravan leaves every ten minutes, people will find themselves standing side by side until it departs.
Create resource bottlenecks: there is one spot in each region to acquire a certain oft-used resource, or perform a certain activity. (Consider the local shopping mall--you meet people there not because you intended to, but because you both have a reason to be at that location.) This requires a fix to travel, of course; if it is difficult to get to this common location, people will go to it as seldom as possible.
ATITD lack economies of scale.
Production of just about everything scales linearly. It takes ten times as long to make 100 glass jars as it does to make 10.
People can increase their production bandwidth by running multiple buildings at once. This does not produce a true economy of scale, however: The person with 20 kettles can produce 100 potash 20 times faster than the person with 1 kettle, but it will take him just as long to produce 100 more potash as it did to produce the first 100. Increased production bandwidth through use of multiple buildings simply provides a way to convert wealth (by investing in multiple buildings) or skill (by running more buildings at once than other people can), into increased production.
Lack of economies of scale hurt trade. Assume, for the same of argument, that 1 glass jar and 1 medium gear take the same amount of time to make. A person who needs 10 jars and 10 gears can either make them all herself, or make 20 jars and trade 10 of them for gears. Most people will do the former, for two reasons: Firstly, trade has built-in inefficiencies (you need to negotiate the trade and meet the other person), and secondly, it's more fun to spend 20 minutes doing one thing and 20 minutes doing another than 40 minutes doing just one.
Lack of economies of scale hurt new players. Certain resources can be made by anyone (vegetables, slate). Certain resources can only be made by advanced players (glass). A new player can trade base resources for advanced ones. However, the advanced player selling resources that take him 30 minutes to produce will want more than 30 minutes of basic resources in exchange--because he could have spent those 30 minutes making the basic resources, and not bothered with trade. The new player has no leverage.
There are two parts to my proposed solution.
First off, make it more efficient to produce a large amount of a single resource than it is to produce a smaller amount of two different resources.
One way to do this is to use traditional skills and specialization. ("I'm a level 7 farmer, so I grow vegetables seven times as fast.") This seems approach seems counter to the overall game philosophy of ATITD, however.
A better approach might be to give each player a certain amount of fast-production per day. Allow people to spend this production on only a small number of activities--only one or two.
For example: A player could--once per day--do one and only one of the following:
Integrate this into every activity; anything which takes time may be done using normal time may be done using fast-production time.
This has the effect of flattening the achievement curve. If fast-production allows the equivalent of three hours of work per day, it means that a player who plays for five hours a day will have access to only twice as much production capacity as one who plays for one hour a day.
In addition, it introduces an economy of scale. A person can create a vast number of carrots--more than they need. They now have an incentive to trade with someone else for other goods they need.
Mules will, of course, allow players to greatly increase their production. This is pretty much unavoidable, and should not create a significant problem: while a player with a stable of mules will be able to use fast-production to produce everything he needs, without recourse to trade, this should not harm other players. The people who own mules are likely to be the most hardcore players anyway--in other words, the ones who will outproduce everyone else under any circumstances.
Economies of scale have one great downside: By making it easy to produce more of a resource than a person needs, they encourages stockpiling. If someone can simply grow carrots today, cabbage tomorrow, leeks the next day, and so forth, they don't need to trade for vegetables.
The way to prevent stockpiling is item decay.
All resources which may be produced with fast-production should have a limited lifetime. The actual items produced will be marked with the day on which they were created. ("leeks (23)", "wood (82)") This lifetime expires fairly rapidly--after about three real-world days, perhaps.
Anyone can produce a couple week's supply of carrots in fifteen minutes--but they have to use them or trade them, or they go away again.
This makes perfect sense in the game world, of course--vegetables rot, wood warps, and so forth. Certain items might be exempt from decay; for example, the output of a casting box might be immune to decay on the grounds that the primary cost of these goods is the material that went into them.
Many projects require that goods be assembled over a long period of time. To permit this to still work, construction sites would no longer expire. Goods loaded into a construction site would not be recoverable if the site is torn down, but would be immune to decay.
Salvage would also need to be changed. Rather than permitting a building to be torn down to recover the resources that went into it, it might instead be possible to collapse the building to a single object, pick it up, and transport it elsewhere. (If buildings could still be torn down to recover resources, they could be used as inefficient storage silos for decaying resources.)
I also think there is another solution to the cost of things like opticons, and that is sharing and renting. There are loads of opticons out there that have passed, and could be reused by someone else. Public camps allow new players to get a rapid leg up on the tech tree. The problem is that most new players are unaware of these services, or would have to travel distances to find them. We need to put this information in the faces of new players, and it needs to be done in game. We cannot rely on the forums or wiki to do it. My proposal on this is the "Points of Interest" feature up on the atitd.info list. It suggest a mechanism by which useful landmarks could be labled onto the ingame map, and so be visible to new players. Public camps and regional / actively recruiting guilds would be the main contenders.
I invite other solutions than decaying resources. The problem is that any system which introduces true economies of scale to material production will inevitably lead to stockpiled resources--if I can make more widgets than I need, I may as well hang on to them until I do need them.
An alternate system might simply do away with scarcity entirely, I suppose. Let people have all the wood and potash they could want, and limit progress by requiring custom resources (like gearboxes, paints, and treated boards) for just about everything. I'm not certain that would be a good idea, however.
Sharing and renting is a "blame the victim" solution. "What, it's difficult for someone to find an opticon to put a design on? Well, it's the fault of the players for not making it easier for people to share. It's difficult for someone living in Sinai to learn beermaking when the only university with it unlocked is in Seven Lakes? Well, that's the fault of the players for not unlocking it elsewhere." I reject such solutions; players should be encouraged to work together for everyone's benefit, but the game should not demand that players fix design flaws that devs could repair with five minutes of coding.
There is a better way to improve the economy and to create a more effective economy of scale. The idea I have come up with is relatively large but I think this is as good a place as any to post it since it is a direct counter to the idea of goods decaying as a necessary effect of greater mass production.
The element lacking from the game currently which could theoretically solve the issue of creating an economy of scale is twofold. We need production design and quality.
First of all the only way in which economy of scale works in the real world is if one devises a scheme for creating an automated solution to part of the production process. This automated portion allows significantly more goods to be produced. We already have this in distaffs, brick machines, now auto-looms and sawmills. To improve the economy everything should be able to be automated.
This would eliminate trade completely, however, because everyone would have everything. Two things must be added in order for this to work. First of all, automated machines would be player desiged, and secondly a new characteristic must be added: QUALITY of goods, which is by default inversely proportional to the QUANTITY of the output of the machine (although better design could improve this).
Now, below I give examples to support this, if you "get it" then don't bother reading the explanations.
Now consider for a moment that in order to achieve a higher level of production through automation one must first master the skill of producing an item by hand, and then devise with a new tool in game a specific, unique machine for producing this item. This would be like the Beer Brewer already suggested, where a program was fed into the machine and then the machine would automatically follow these instructions. Using these methods with the added existance of machine parts (for input, movement of goods, sorting, storage)one would be able to create myriad different machines to do the same task. The machine would then be devised according to a list of systems (which would produce a resultant cost of construction) and program (an order of operations for the systems).
For instance, with this system a flax automaton could be created which given the input of rotten flax would produce set ammounts of rope, canvas, and linen. The ammount of input, processing speed, output etc would all be controlled by the ammount of hackling rake, distaff, and loom were constructed in the machine, and the chutes or conveyor belts to move it, and the output quantities must be devised by the program.
This would then allow a player to essentially produce unlimited ammounts of anything, however the catch would be needed as follows: Depending on the variables in the demand there would be WASTE, and loss of QUALITY.
Waste would result from any quantities in the processes in which a whole conversion could not be made in the timetable allowed. Therefore if the program for the above flax machine was not well written, a lot of twine and thread might be left out when the timer signaled the looms to convert it, and that would be destroyed. This would create the possiblility of more or less efficient machines. Furthermore according to variables such as the efficieny, time of production, and perhaps the various proportions of inputs, there would be a score of quality attached to this product.
A machine which produced unreal ammounts of goods would have low quality by default, perhaps the spining is happening so fast that the rotten flax is becoming brittle. This could be improved perhaps by adding additional water as an input in the machine but only experimentation in game would yield these discoveries, and so if one found a really wonderful factory design one would want to keep it secret so as to try and sell high quantities of good quality goods.
The ultimate application of this is that designs for truly excellent machines could replace the options of building everything beyond basic machines. These designs could be named and packaged, and then sold in units where the schematics inside the design were not revealed but the design could be sold and another person could produce the machine. Alternatively the schematics could be sold, perhaps for research. Better designs would mean faster production and better quality.
The reason for quality becoming a factor is the inclusion of the newbie in the game. Assuming no measures are taking to improve quality, the more hand-made a product is the higher its quality will be. Therefore newbies who hand use a hackling rake, and hand-use a loom, are only losing a certain ammount of quality based entirely on their distaffs. The distaffs could have a setting added for speed versus quality, and a very large number of distaffs could be made so that slow speed still produced good product, or the speed could be ignored.
Every building in the game would then have a quality associated with it that was based on the quality of the goods input into it, and the quality of the building would affect the performance of the building. Therefore to get a better furnace one might not just build a precious furnace, but search high and low for master craftsmen who offer goods for it at the highest quality.
More skills could be created along a system like stone blades, where you gain proficiency at crafting the item, to encourage specialization. However instead of success/fail rates, your proficiency would start at perhaps 75% quality and raise steadily as you made more goods. Goods could fall into 10 categories or so, and the percentage skill you have in each would decay slowly naturally, and a bit faster if another skill is being raised. Therefore you could raise all your skills in time, but really only maximize quality in one or two goods categories. Mastering one good would not be too hard if you made it alot, but mastering two would be quite challenging, and mastering three nearly impossible, so that one could establish onesself as a master of __________ whatever you want. This would also mandate trade as quality would become important in many materials and one could not produce master quality everything.
Wikt says: "Very neat ideas, especially the subway thing. But I don't really like the decay thing. OK for natural resources, not really for handmade ones like gems or something."
Is a 30 minute run for new arrivals to egypt such a bad thing? Personally, I think not. Bear in mind that at this point, most players have (typically) just been through a 2-4 hour session of intensive tech-tree advancement in a very space-restricted, low-tech environment (i.e. a welcome island). I find that most of the people I take on for post-island mentoring are *desperate* to do a bit of exploration as soon as they get to egypt. The uni-run is a perfect outlet for this wanderlust, and a very welcome change of pace to new starters.
The concept of quicktime brings into sharp focus the fact that a large part of this game is about waiting: waiting for END timers, FOC timers, metalwork cooldown, water mines, palm trees.
Who said "If something demands my attention, it should deserve my attention"? Charcoal needs more sparkly spinny bits like an arcade game. Glazier benches maybe as well.
Yargh say:
Gigemohsix, I'm afraid your proposal has one big flaw in it (although mostly due to the design philosophy of this game), the skills you introduce with all their levels apply to the avatar and not to the player. Teppy's explicit wish is for most of the skills to be learned by the player and not his avatar. I do however like the idea of adding inefficiencies to automated buildings : the auto-loom should waste thread and twine for example.
Anax says:
All good points. Another thought I'd like to suggest, although this (like most) has both good and bad sides, is that more casual players can have a harder time trading with others even given that certain changes could make trade more common. This means that trade in general is somewhat tied-in to other concepts, like the "subway"-style meeting place that's quick to get to, or other such things. Another possibility is a building like the contest booth that allows for both offers and bids to be made and satisfied while the player is offline. The drawback to such a building, of course, is that it *might* lead to a reduction in community as people wouldn't need to talk to establish trade. But, well, the problem it would try to address is precisely that a casual player has less time to make such contacts. They might know that they can trade carrots with their neighbor for charcoal, but have no idea who needs carrots and can provide gems, or... you get the idea?
As a final note, I left the game a while back (sort of drifted away), partially because there were a lot of goals at the time that were too big for me to really handle. (And I was by *no* means a casual player.) Two really good examples you mention, wine making and beer brewing, were among those that were available when I really stopped working. I think that I might still have drifted away for a while if things had been more casual-friendly in some of the ways you describe, but I also may very well have returned to the game instead of moving on to other things.
Maximus says:
Very interesting. One way to "enforce" which regional chat channel you belong to is "where your home (tent/house) is located".