Categorizing Mobile MMORPG Players: A New Idea From First Line Designers
MMORPGs are the thing in the mobile market. The genre with the highest retention, highest average pay per user, is what a lot of game designers dream to work on. In the saturated mobile field, how should we look at the players?
I learned these from a former colleague, a veteran who worked in free-to-play MMORPGs for a decade and created games that dominated grossing rank in all kinds of app marketplaces. And since then, many game starts to take on RPG elements, this is even more valuable.
Theories that always gets abused
There are two theories I hear often, and was taught again and again in game design books and training sessions. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and Bartle’s taxonomy.
A lot of game designers decide to move Maslow’s model into the game field, and state that your daily free rewards are “survival” needs. But really? Actions in any game could not completely mirror real-life actions. Therefore the hierarchy of needs have to be applied differently for each game.
Bartle’s taxonomy of player types is better in the sense that it is used to help better design games. It works well as a foundation for studying players, but certainly not a Swiss army knife. So, in the year 2017, what are some of the new aspects we can look at the freemium players?
Rearranging social status
Mobile games should be fun and addictive. The inherent problem of the platform — battery, control scheme, data consuming — is being dealt with better through the years. I agree that the social in mobile games plays a huge role in the addiction. Although you already have many social apps — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. But those are not as addictive as a mobile game is. Because a game rearranges existing social status.
If you are rich, you still are on all the social networks. If you are intelligent and highly-skilled in your life, you still will be. But in an online game, this is reshaped. Let’s look at this picture:
The value you provide to others determines your social status. The ability to pay money or to spend time (“wealth”) and gaming skills (“intelligence”) are the two major contributors to a player’s value to the others.
Some games simply categorize people solely based on ability to pay. The result is they don’t cater the needs for those who start to become skilled. Players need to, as Maslow suggests when articulating his theory of needs: When a deficit need has been satisfied it will go away. Whether there are anything else in the game to pursuit will decide whether they stay.
The players of each category will try to exhibit their value through different systems. These are some of the activities that each kind of player may engage in:
For example, a lot of MMORPGs do provide team quests. But what they do is let people team together and do nothing. There is no teamwork or commanding involved, and therefore is invalid because they don’t cater to the needs of skilled non-paying players.
Rearranging the social status are the basis for the social activities in the game. But rearranging them does not automatically creates social interaction. You may have all nine sectors of players playing very well, but among themselves in separate systems.
Creating social activities
Two things are the keys to social activities in MMO games:
1. Clear division of work
Most of the games use occupation system to do this. But having occupations or some limit to character’s skill sets does not guarantee division of work. In Diablo III, the team balance does not matter since all you do is keep farming the monsters.
World of Warcraft has one of the best design in occupation system. Many first person shooters do too. The teams you form in these games tend not to change because players start to brew team chemistry as they play their distinct roles.
2. Flowing of resource
The flowing of resource in a successful MMORPG usually looks like this:
They flow from bottom to the top. The top-tiers need the massive population.
Since the resource flows to the top, those who play at the top must do things in return. That obviously resulted in them putting more time or money into the game. Guild leaders spend a lot of time and energy commanding the team, leading the raids. Or, they can purchase gems to buy coins, which then passes on to the bottom players through the market. Whether players are happy does not depend on how much free reward the system gives them, but on how much they are needed.
Many of the games now omit the flowing of resource, but going for a simpler model: the system give out more reward directly to those who pay more. In this way, the players at the bottom are simply ignored.
Why this way, though?
Behind the resource flow, this is actually what happens:
In classic MMORPGs, what ever is given to the highly-skilled or the payers would finally trickle down to the mass amount of players through auction system and trade system. In mobile games you need to help players achieve it differently, even when players won’t know about each other.
Can one stay in the same place for long time?
Interestingly, yes. It is common for people in the real world to stay in there social status for the whole life cycle — and it can be true in games too, as long as you provide enough content for players in each category to consume.
Why do you see players of Hearthstone or Clash Royale deliberately lose to stay in the current rank? Because they feel that they no longer want to scale up their payment, time investment, or improving skills. If you find a way to help them stay in the game without the hassle, they would stay in the game for as long as possible.
Bottom line
With all the above set up, you can finally start to design and implement the infrastructure: chatting, friend, guild, team, etc. And the players will prosper, in the virtual world you provide.
