1) Put obsessive attention into making the first five minutes of use of your product awesome. It is the five minutes people are most likely to see. It is also a gate through which all subsequent use of your product must pass. (Seriously, folks, if you value conversion optimization, I want you to play five minutes of WoW and five minutes of any other MMORPG, and take notes on what happens. WoW will drag you around by the nose. WoW will point you in the direction of the next thing to do. WoW will show you success in those five minutes, even if you're terrible at what you're doing. We should all aspire to making products that nail those first five minutes as much as WoW does.)
2) Do not devote disproportionate developer resources to content/systems which the majority of the user base will not interact with. (It took them years to learn this, but they eventually go around to it.)
3) Make it simple. Then, make it simpler. WoW is one of the most complicated pieces of engineering the world has ever known, but six year olds can pick up and play it.
4) People will put up with any amount of drudgery if you give them small, frequent, random rewards for doing so. This is in fact so powerful I'm kind of scared of doing it.
5) If people are bringing their boyfriends into your product so that they can spend more time together, that is probably a good sign you have reached mass market success.
6) Monthly. Billing. Minor discounts for cashflow in advance.
7) High quality visual design can be made rot-proof by using iconic representations, bright colors, and timeless aesthetics. If you chase the leading edge of graphical sophistication, on the other hand, three years from now plan on doing a total graphical rip-out or you'll look dated.
As a game developer, I'd argue that thinking along the lines of #2 is very dangerous. Great games have a ton of subtle touches and content that only a small percentage of players will appreciate. The trick is that each player will notice a completely different set of features/content, and it makes them really happy when it feels like the developers went out of their way to polish some little bit of the game.
Think of Super Mario Brothers, one of the best selling games of all time. There are a stunning amount of hidden areas, tricks etc (even using an emulator with save+load, and a guide, it's not easy to explore the entire game world), but this is very closely related to how stunning the game world felt (especially for the time). An average player may only come across 10-20 secrets in the game, out of hundreds, but each time they'll have that warm fuzzy feeling where they are thinking, wow, they went to all the trouble to put this here?
Another good example is No One Lives Forever. They did a TON of funny lines with the guards talking to each other and notes that were left around (eg a note to employees saying no fornicating in the evil death ray storage facility). The chance of picking up on each of those was low, say around 10%, but since there were hundreds the game world, each player will have 20-30 moments where they were exploring some back room and they found something cool, which gave the game world immense amounts of character. If they instead made 20-30 moments and forced the players through them linearly, it would have felt cheap.
I'd also like to mention that, unlike many forms of software, it IS actually a requirement that game developers have fun making the games they play, because otherwise making the game itself fun is pretty much impossible. I don't think it's a coincidence that the developers of Diablo 2 took the time to put in the cow level, which most people never see, and spent a huge amount of resources tweaking leveling up for characters all the way up to level 90+, at the same time that they made such a fantastic game for the average player. If they made the game specifically for the average player, I think a lot of that magic that goes into development would have been lost, and paradoxically the game wouldn't have been as fun for anyone.
Of course you have to be somewhat rational about where you spend your development resources, but if you try to make sure that the majority of the players see the majority of the content, it's so easy to make a sterile game. And if you are often completely irrational about where you spend your time in the name of being artistic, it's surprisingly easy to make a game that is actually fun and gets attention. The difference in sales between the former and the latter, without a marketing plan B, will be orders of magnitude.
The issue with WoW in the original WoW and The Burning Crusade wasn't that only a small fraction of the people saw the content, it was that only a small fraction of the people could see the content. If I wanted to even set foot in the final dungeon, I'd need 24 other players with me, and all 25 of us would have had to have beaten all of the previous dungeons many times (and they're limited to being done once a week) and done a pile of quests to even get into those dungeons. So I'd literally have to have been max-level for about 4-6 months and playing 20+ hours/week during that time before I could attempt the final dungeon, and then the bosses were so hard that only a few hundred teams could beat them.
The solution Blizzard implemented in Wrath of the Lich King (the newest expansion) is to scale the big dungeons (raids) so that 10-man teams and 25-man teams can do them, and also have easy modes and hard modes, so that Ensidia (the best WoW guild) can be challenged by the Hard Mode and the more casual players can struggle against (but ultimately beat) the normal mode. They also kept adding new ways to get gear, so that people trying to break into raiding on the top level wouldn't have to spend months in the earlier raids, and they were pretty successful at that.
You're absolutely right that a more fully developed world with content that not every player would see is very important, but that content's only valuable if it's accessible to all the players. Anyone can go to the Cow Level in Diablo II, which is what made it great. But not everyone could kill Illidan or Kiljaedan in WoW, which was why it was a waste of money.
WoW was spending literally tens of millions of dollars on content seen by a fraction of a percent of its player base. That was unjustifiably bad. That it continued for quite some time was a problem of the dev team culture and also, probably, a symptom that they did not have good metrics. (I have been there, done that, and got the T-shirt. Not to the tune of tens of millions but I've certainly frittered away man months on things seen by less than .1% of customers and, even worse, 0% of trial users.)
It does sound like they took it too far (I've not played WoW after losing a significant percentage of my time as a teenager to Diablo 2).
But I was talking about the general rule. I'd say that the opposite mistake is much more common amongst game developers, and it's a big reason why so many crappy games are released.
Certainly 0.1% of customers is too low. But I wouldn't call 1% too low - many of the best games ever made include lots of 1% content. And I think that's no coincidence - the mindset that results in developers putting 1% content into a game also results in a fun core game. 1% content only happens when developers care a lot about the game.
I should clarify that by 1% content I mean a different 1% of the audience will see each piece of content.
Yet interestingly enough only 30% of people make it past level 10 and keep on playing the game according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98245-Only-30-Perc...). Also related to this is the issue that WoW seems to have peaked in its growth.
So even Blizzard has a lot to learn in this regard.
I'm not sure if that applies here. Most people "waste" a certain amount of their week on downtime, and that's probably healthy for them. Whereas in ages past that was checkers at the general store or a bard's stories at dinner or listening to the radio, today it's TV and video games. A person who watches 40 hours of TV a week for fun is in just as much trouble as a guy who plays WoW or EVE for 40 hours a week.
True, but at least an interactive game like WoW engages the parts of your mind that are responsible for strategy, social interaction and goal-setting. Not saying it is much better than TV, but I would be willing to bet it's not at the same level of brain-rot.
I'm always a little confused about how much people love to bash WoW, and call it such a waste of time. Sure, there are people who throw away massive amounts of time into the game, but there are plenty of other people who play a reasonable amount.
I spend 2 evenings a week raiding, with 1-2 hours throughout the week (plus another hour or two on the weekends, when I can) doing other things. Twice a week, a group of 10 friends get together, log onto WoW and a Ventrilo server, and mess around for a few hours. I think of it a lot like a bowling/poker night for some guys, except you're significantly more likely to invite a new, potentially interesting person to a WoW raid than you are to your weekly game.
Honestly, I find the whole "If it does not have direct monetary value, or somehow advance my career/list of contacts, it isn't worth doing" stance that many people take rather disturbing. No, playing WoW doesn't directly benefit me, but the indirect benefits have been pretty awesome. I've kept in touch with several old friends I otherwise wouldn't have, met a lot of interesting people, and it gives me something I can talk about with at least 10% of the population. And that's all on top of just playing a well designed, pretty fun game.
Please read the post before making a comment on what you don't like about the game. He just used WoW examples to contrast with life lessons.
The #1 lesson is probably the most important to life success, "Don't start something you don't intend to finish." is another way to word it.
This is even more important to startups -- if you are constantly getting features half way done and then scrapping them you should spend time figuring out why.
Yes the "new feature" you thought of today might be better measured side by side than the one that is half way done, but is it better for the effort required?
"Grinding is part of the game ... but grinding is not the game."
Would that I had the wisdom to tell the difference between the grinding I have to do to move me forward, and the grinding I keep doing because it's there in front of me as an option.
That's what made me give up WoW myself a few months ago, after playing for about year and getting my sister hooked worse than me. I played rather leisurely until Blizzard added Achievements. My play style changed drastically afterwards, especially with regards to holiday events. My desire to get titles (especially the Loremaster one) really burned me out. Brewfest was the final straw, since you have to do several annoying grind quests every stinking day for the two week duration. Really ruined the game for me. (Blizz had to extend the holiday for a few days even due to glitches that really screwed up the acquisition curve.)
I pity the players having to deal with the Valentine's Day event coming soon; that was the second worst, IMHO.
I've never actually played (long story, but essentially my gaming tastes have been permanently stuck in 1998), so I was referring to the broader lesson in life. Glad to know the lessons continue to apply specifically and generally.
The post is not about WoW. It is about his take-away from the game which applies to everything in daily life and for bigger things.
The list is terrific advice and preaching it through the example of a game is smart thing as one is hooked on to the reading part. Seems like most people just had a negative feel for the whole thing as they detest WoW as a waste of time. In the process they missed the gem of advice.
"With my newfound time, I had a kid, wrote a couple of movies and directed one of my own."
intriguing enough to dig up this imdb search: < http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0041864/#writer >. I'm sure the proper list is actually on Mr August's site too, but ... This might have more trivia. :)
The biggest thing I learned from world of warcraft:
If you quit wow and spend all of that time that you would have been playing WoW on other tasks, you can actually accomplish some pretty amazing stuff.
(Get in shape, become a hacker, learn music, get girls... pretty much anything.)
Grinding levels in WoW takes discipline.
Grinding levels in WoW can be a time investment similar to a second job.
You can literally waste YEARS of your life playing WoW.
If you have the energy and discipline to sit at a computer for 8 hours or whatever after you've done all of your daily stuff, you could just as easily be spending that time accomplishing something great or learning.
And you will have tangible rewards that you can take with you everywhere, not just bits on a server.
Hi everyone, my name is Alaa and I'm a recovering WOW-holic. I have been WOW free for about a year now.
You're forgetting one thing though, the fun aspect. Working for 8-9 hours a day on a computer and then coming back home to work for another 4 is not the same as playing for another 4. Although the strategy thinking does take a lot of mental effort, it seems to use a different part of the brain.
I played quite a lot for the last half year, until I got scared when I started looking at my /played and think about what I could have done in that time. With a double course load and a full time job coming up this semester, I knew I was going to be in trouble if I kept up the pace I had. In contrast to what many others say, I don't think cold turkey is necessary, but you do need some outside assistance - going at it by willpower alone is hard. I asked my girlfriend to set up the 'parental controls' functionality and set a hard limit of 4 hours a week. When your game time is up, you get kicked out. Clock is reset on Sunday night, so Monday evening is usually my game night, rest of the week I just check wow.com sometimes or do some occasional research on gear. You'll never get far in the game at this rate but if you get someone to check your gaming habits it's very doable to keep control over it.
1) Put obsessive attention into making the first five minutes of use of your product awesome. It is the five minutes people are most likely to see. It is also a gate through which all subsequent use of your product must pass. (Seriously, folks, if you value conversion optimization, I want you to play five minutes of WoW and five minutes of any other MMORPG, and take notes on what happens. WoW will drag you around by the nose. WoW will point you in the direction of the next thing to do. WoW will show you success in those five minutes, even if you're terrible at what you're doing. We should all aspire to making products that nail those first five minutes as much as WoW does.)
2) Do not devote disproportionate developer resources to content/systems which the majority of the user base will not interact with. (It took them years to learn this, but they eventually go around to it.)
3) Make it simple. Then, make it simpler. WoW is one of the most complicated pieces of engineering the world has ever known, but six year olds can pick up and play it.
4) People will put up with any amount of drudgery if you give them small, frequent, random rewards for doing so. This is in fact so powerful I'm kind of scared of doing it.
5) If people are bringing their boyfriends into your product so that they can spend more time together, that is probably a good sign you have reached mass market success.
6) Monthly. Billing. Minor discounts for cashflow in advance.
7) High quality visual design can be made rot-proof by using iconic representations, bright colors, and timeless aesthetics. If you chase the leading edge of graphical sophistication, on the other hand, three years from now plan on doing a total graphical rip-out or you'll look dated.