I have mentioned stacking boxes before. One big pitfall in this though is the fracturing of communities, which I haven't touched really. Still not sure why I didn't but here it goes.
Addon packs, DLC, and anything else of that ilk, which make it only possible for a fraction of your playerbase to enjoy a certain content with one another (not talking single player content) will fracture your playerbase. No brainer, right?
Let's look at a general multiplayer game, such as Battlefield 3. The first pack is Back to Karkand, which coincidentally was given for free to everyone who preordered the main game. Those buying it later, not getting the pack had to shell out additional cash. Some will not. Just like that, you already have two different groups, the one only having the core package and those having the core and the expansion. Fracture started.
Now ok, Battlefield, there it's not so dramatic. For various reasons, but it's a lot more visible on the developers side when we go for MMO's.
Translate this to a generic MMO. Let's say you have three continents to explore. A new addon comes out which will allow you to go to a fourth. There you meet new monsters and get new items, not present in the old continents.
Common logic goes that not everyone will buy the new addon. So you have to make sure that those without the addon can't get to the new world. But players that can could bring back items from that world. So everyone needs to have those items in their client, even if they don't have the addon, or you forbid the transfer to the old world (which would cause a whole lot of customer dissatisfaction, so no go there).
There will be bugs in the new world, so you need to fix them and deploy them to just the users who have that addon. The server backend has to support that all as well of course and distinguish between the world areas. Add a couple more in there, let's say 5 addons each one with a new continent. The 3 basic continents are now outnumber by the 6 addon ones, and you have a jumble of servers, patch nightmares and so on to deal with as a developer. And of course you have to push patches on players never having any of these addons.
Let's ignore the fact that those areas without addons need to have some new content once in a while, as well as each one of the addon areas. That nightmare is something for itself.
No, let's now look at the community. You have people who have all addons or none, but also ones who have any combinations of the ones in between. Players have to negotiate with each other if they want to change continents, if all in their party have that particular addon or not. The larger the group, the more unlikely that is true. It can cause peer pressure for them to buy it, but that is a bad pressure which will rather trigger a reevaluation of "Is the game still worth it?". If you practically force the players to get to that thought, the answer will probably be "no".
It makes it impossible to just "quickly" have a look at another place, as you need to make the decision to buy that addon, go through the often complicated process of buying it, installing, patching, etc, before you finally get there. By the time you are done with the steps above, your usual time you wanted to spend playing is either over or cut significantly shorter. Of course those thoughts go through the head of each gamer in some way and so the answer to doing it is again "no".
This fracturing makes it harder for the players to play together. It drives up costs of development, deployment, support and marketing. So not really a wining strategy all around.
A side note, what also fractures communities is servers. Eve Online does with one collective world for everyone, anywhere. by simply joining the game, I know I can play with any other player. If I meet someone on the street and by chance discover they play the game, I know I can play with them inside the game some time. With servers where your character is bound to that server (or only can jump for a fee) your chances are already that you are not playing on the same server. The cost to make it happen that you can play with that person usually exceeds what you think the fun factor would be worth. Again a "no" in the decision of the users.
Fracturing your community is bad, m'kay?
No comments:
Post a Comment