Newbie Statistics

I had a brainstorm the other day for how to pull a certain class of statistics from the various logfiles and other data we track in the game. The idea is that we grab all the new characters created in a one month time period, then see how many of them continued to log in for successive months. I decided to try this on four month time periods to filter out storage characters and other infrequently used but legitimate pfiles.

Here's a chunk of sample data, looking at how many of the players we got in January continued to log in for February, March, and April:

Total created in 2009-01: 230
Total last saved in 2009-04 or earlier: 198
Total last saved in 2009-01: 146 Average Total Levels: 8
Total last saved in 2009-02: 21 Average Total Levels: 22
Total last saved in 2009-03: 16 Average Total Levels: 28
Total last saved in 2009-04: 15 Average Total Levels: 30

Some quick observations to distill it down:

- Of the 230 characters created in January, 198 have not yet logged in for May. Only 32 of 230 (14%) have been active this month.

- Nearly all of the dropouts are in the first month, with 146/230 logins (63%) never bothering to log in again.

- Once you get past that critical first month drop out period, we lose people at a relatively steady rate.

- The first month players actually get more than one level. They get 8 on average. Even having leveled multiple times, they still don't return.

When I looked more closely at the data, I found some obvious patterns for nearly all of the people that drop out in the first month. In particular, they play the game for a reasonable period of time (15 minutes to two hours), get a handful of levels, learn a few things, then log off. About half of these never sign in again. The remainder sign in a small number of times, generally for only a couple of minutes, then sign back out.

There's a really obvious reason: The game isn't fun enough to hook newbies at low levels. They're bored, and don't know what to do when they return.

Ways to improve this:

- Add more really low level quests in the encampment. (I already have a couple ideas for this.)

- Add more quest guides for the Vemarken and other Sloe quests.

- DClient changes to make quests and other things more obvious and interesting (in progress.)

- Build the low level generic skills (cooking, skinning, etc) and make them useful. This may involve some form of low level crafting.

- Possibly give return bonuses. I believe I saw a game at one point that gave increased experience if you returned after a long absence.

This is more than enough stuff in the short term to keep me and probably several other people busy. Unfortunately, the only things I can offload onto others are the first two, and I'll probably still end up being involved at least incidentally to do cleanup and monitoring. I generally have a better idea of where the dropout points are for really low level players, because I spend more time watching them.

If I get all of this done before the end of May, I will be very surprised. It's a good short term goal though. (The return bonuses are excluded for now, as I don't know if we want to go that route. I'll have to think about that one a bit more.)