Playerbase and Userload

When it comes to growing a playerbase, I've become more convinced than ever that it's got to be a staged process unless you have a LOT of money to blow on it. Having a lot of money is in fact how a lot of big MMOs handle growth - when they officially open, they basically go to full capacity overnight. This means that they can focus all of their development effort on one specific expected player load, and don't have to worry about nursing a small user base through the various stages to become a large user base.

This whole staged growth process has become a lot more apparent to me over the last couple of years:

• When the player base is very small, it attracts a certain class of isolationist explorer player, one that doesn't need much in terms of a help system, documentation, or maps.
  
  
• A bit larger and you start to get power levelers that like to compete with each other for in-game prestige.
  
  
• Larger still and you start to get quasi-social players, players who like to group with others and help out. They don't show up earlier because explorers don't like to group, but with power levelers there's someone to group with and someone to help. This stage is an easy place to stall at, because these quasi-social players do not have the thickest hides and are less competitive than the power levelers; if they are abused by the power levelers, they will simply leave.
  
  Power levelers tend to form small cliques with these quasi-social players, and then drive off all other quasi-social players not in their clique. This appears to happen because the power levelers in one clique, competing against those in another clique, try to get an advantage by driving off the other clique's support staff.
  
  If restrictions, rules, and code are not put in place to protect them, the quasi-social players will never reach critical mass and will cycle out as fast as they cycle in.
  
  
• The next stage brings in true socialites, players that typically gain levels only as a side effect of being in a group that is running experience while they chat.
  
  True socialites are another huge rats nest of problems. They tend to be drama queens or drama magnets, and are as capable of stirring up political *CENSORED*storms as they are of keeping other players interested and happy. There isn't a lot that can be done about this, other than to shutdown flamewars and ensure that rumors about admin 'unfairness' are killed immediately.
  
  True socialites are heavily looked down upon by the explorer and power leveler communities, and they must be given substantial protection from abuse. Unfortunately, socialites can tolerate a lot of abuse - unfortunate because when they take abuse, they dish it back out tenfold in the form of bitching to other players. One sufficiently pissed off socialite that isn't immediately shut down can crater the happiness and opinions of two dozen other players.
  
  
• The last stage that I have familiarity with is the 'true newbie' stage. This is where you get true newbies coming in, and your game has progressed far enough that true newbies are actually able to make some forward progress.
  
  True newbies are a huge problem. From a technical standpoint, they are generally completely ignorant of the game style, and the newbie areas must be very well built to retain even a fraction of them. This category also appears to contain the largest percentage of 'low functioning' individuals - I do not mean that as an insult, rather an observation. Not everyone has the mental capacity to be an explorer or a power leveler.
  
  These new players must be afforded additional protections that even the socialites did not require. I'm still working out the details of a lot of this, but a good chunk of it amounts to protecting these players from themselves.
  
  

These are just the social problems. There are also scaling issues, each of which presents a 'critical mass' hurdle that must be passed. Certain areas may require a minimum number of players to be handled; assembling a group of that many players may be impossible below a certain user load. In the case of Alter Aeon, many of the automatic control systems rely on statistical data to function correctly. With few players, the lag time on getting statistically relevant data may be literally months.

This kind of lag time really hinders the ability of a game to make quick and effective updates to increase retention. If you have a thousand new character creations per day, you can pretty quickly determine if a change is an improvement or not. If you have one new character creation per day, it becomes very difficult to determine if you're doing the right thing. I suspect this is at least part of the reason that MMOs take out funding in order to start big and improve the game quickly.

I think at Alter Aeon, we're past a lot of these initial hurdles, and could probably reboot the game from scratch pretty quickly; once you get the various protections in place, they remain largely functional even though they fall into disrepair at higher userloads.

That said, I know there are bigger, nastier hurdles ahead of us.  I just don't know what they are (yet.)

Future Plans - Clerics

The cleric class has long languished - not because it was useless, but because until recently there wasn't a lot of reason to have a really high cleric level. Prior to the 2010 christmas expansion, there weren't a lot of cleric spells or skills above level 30; and many cleric spells didn't scale in power as you gained levels, like mage and necromancer spells do.

As a result, cleric has been a useful, powerful class - but not something you want to be your primary. Our future update to cleric aims to change that.

The biggest updates to the class aren't likely to be new spells and skills. Rather, we want to fix existing spells and skills that aren't up to snuff with the rest of the class.

Take for example the 'peace' spell. This could be a very powerful, useful spell - if only it worked differently. We're currently imagining room effects, duration effects, and a handful of other options to improve this.

Another spell that's long been on the todo list is charm. The current version of charm has basically been dented into the ground to prevent charm armies. With this update, we're planning to switch it to a control point system similar to necromancers. This should make charm a lot more useful while at the same time limiting "charmy" problems.

Other things that could use similar kinds of improvement are turn undead, the ward spells, curses, and the monitor skill.

All this said, we do plan to add more spells and skills. So far these hit most of the major groups - character buffs and enhancement, a possible brew skill, some new curses, new damage spells, and a new undead spell.

The schedule for this is some time in august, about a month after the thief updates of the previous post. After this, we still have a ton of things to work on, including elemental channeling for mages, god code, and a couple of new character classes.

Future Plans - Thieves

Now that level 35 is installed and running in the game, I figure it's probably a good idea to let everyone know about the game's direction and where we're headed. Things aren't going to be static; there's a lot of really neat stuff planned out for this year.

The next major update is scheduled for some time around mid to end of July. The focus of this update will be the Thief class, which is currently the least played class in terms of high levels, and the class with the fewest skills.

At a minimum, the thief update will include an entire tree for shadow skills. I'm not a fan of traditional ninja skills though, so don't expect Naruto style effects. The basis for the shadow skills will be a type of channeling/synergy with the shadow plane, which has already made itself known with the Guildmaster Assassin in Jo'Kerin.

Also on the high priority list are a couple of miscellaneous skills ('untanking' in group combat, room analysis out of combat), and updates to lock picking to make it more incremental and less hit or miss.

For medium priority stuff that might get implemented, we have disguise skills, bribe improvements, and haggling (possibly for bulk purchases.) My guess is that at least some of this will get into the final build.

For low priority, we've been mulling over the idea of distraction skills, but the effects are pretty ill defined right now. We also really need to take a look at the way poison damage is done, to try to make poisons function in a reasonable way. It's pretty unlikely that either of these will be done for the update.

That concludes things for the proposed thief update. Again, we hope to have it out prior to August. I think it will address a lot of the shortcomings of the thief class, without necessarily making thief into another fighter class with differently named skills.

Coming up next - clerics get some love too.

Scaling

When we released the necromancer expansion back in November, I expected a pretty large spike of new players. I figured we'd get a bunch of new people from the announcement, but also a lot of high levels would want to try out the new class from scratch to see how it worked.

And new players we got; perhaps four times as many as usual, which again was about what I expected. What I didn't expect was that we would be nearly incapable of handling them in terms of areas and content. There wasn't really any fighting over equipment and quests, but from time to time it seemed newbies literally had to queue up to get their turn at a particular quest item.

This got me thinking about scaling. If we can't effectively handle four times the standard newbie load, we'll be limited to a player base less than four times the size of our current one. And it's not just newbie areas; we have to think about it everywhere, from areas to exp thwacking to the who list to the the size of Ralnoth. We might not have five hundred people logged in right now, but even if we did the game probably couldn't handle them all.

Here are some things I think could help with that:

- Instancing. Instancing allows you to create private copies of areas for players, so that they don't interfere with each other. This is great for quests, in that each player or group can be on their own private copy of the quest, and don't need to worry about someone else getting through it first and taking the quest item. Judicious use of instancing can help eliminate quest bottlenecks, and it makes the world seem a lot bigger than it really is.

- Gold and experience thwacking. Right now, gold and experience are thwacked globally, so that if a mob is run too much the returns on it drop for everyone. This is fundamentally dependent on the number of players; a better way would be to put thwacking on individual players, so that the actions of one player don't break the game for someone else.

- Item maxload. Having limited load on items is another thing that's fundamentally dependent on the number of players. Once the player load rises to a certain level, a maxloaded or rarity-based item will simply never load again. Maxload and rarity effectively need to be removed to fix this.

- The who listings, and other display systems. Having a five hundred person who list would be ridiculous. Beyond a certain point, you pretty much have to switch to a query system instead of a global listing system.


Some of this stuff is already in transit or is being worked on; in particular, instancing was booted in earlier this evening and is being tested as we speak. Maxload for the most part was phased out last week.

It's a decent start. One bottleneck at a time...

Miscellaneous

It's been a long time since I updated here; I'd like to say that I've been busy working on things instead, but while I've been busy it seems little of it relates to Alter Aeon.

The first reason for this post is the mapper. I've built new area maps for the web pages! You can find these at the standard Alter Aeon Maps location. These maps include the level of areas, as well as a number of new areas that have been added in the last six months.

Speaking of new areas, we've had an awful lot of stuff come online in the last six months. It would probably have been more if I'd get off my can and worked on the west continent and the demon city of Qoorik.

Lastly, the necromancer class and skillset continues to make its slow and steady progress. I've got the spell and skill trees set up in what I think will make a good, solid class. Honestly, it's far better laid out than any of the other classes are; all the skill trees make sense (to me at least), the level spreads look good, and it's largely new techniques and behaviour. There's a lot of use of charmies and mob armies.

I'm stealing a handful of spells and skills from other classes though. Cleric will lose demon lore and probably undead lore as well as durhams, preservation, and animate corpse. Mage on the other hand, will lose fear and possession. Not huge losses, but enough that I'll have to do some grandfathering.

One thing that does concern me is the upcoming druid class split, scheduled for after necromancer. My current vision of druid has sky/water/earth skill trees, which may serve to simply gut cleric in regard to offensive capability. I'll probably have to rework these simultaneously, and it won't be pretty. It may be possible for me to steal more stuff from mage to compensate. I don't know yet.

Farther down the line is paladin, which I'd intended to be a specialized cross between warrior and cleric; basically a fanatic nutjob fighter with a direct line to his god. I'm not sure I can come up with enough stuff to make this a sane, standalone class.

My final goal is 8 classes, but there simply may not be enough variation in the game world to support it.

Leading by Leading

If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that public debate about radical new game features is seldom a good thing. It's not the players don't have good ideas; it's that vocal minority groups serve to deadlock and kill otherwise good ideas.

This reminds me of the Knesset in Israel. They have so many fanatic fringe groups that it's virtually impossible to get anything done.

On March 16, I globally removed and disabled permanent player killing. I didn't post about it, I didn't request for comments; I simply did it, and waited for the fallout.

There wasn't any. Or rather, the people who would have made a big deal of it were unable to do so - there was no way to invoke righteous indignation from the population by blowing things out of proportion. Propaganda doesn't work when people can try it for themselves and say, "no, that's not true".

The next day, I changed the way magic resistance works for players. I've been wanting to do this for over a decade, but never felt like it would be appropriate. Fallout level? Again, very little. Again, largely because the bullshit espoused by the vocal minority was quickly killed by players simply trying things for themselves.

I like this idea of leading by leading instead of leading by consensus. Decide what to do, make it happen, just be prepared to clean up the mess afterward. It's not that I'll never mess up, but it's definitely easier to apologize and fix it than to debate it up front.

Weeds, heading off into them

I've been on a big DClient kick the last few days, with intent to get a new 0.983 release out probably by this weekend, and a 1.0 'official' release by January. I'd managed to pare down the feature list and clean up a number of niggling bugs.

This morning when I woke up, I knew I wanted to do DClient work. But I couldn't quite recall what I was supposed to work on, and before I could look it up my brain spotted a nice looking patch of weeds and headed into them, full steam ahead.

Instead of working on the newbie 'demo mode' of the client, I somehow ended up working on audio. I've been avoiding sound and audio for months now, yet for some reason I decided today was a good day to do it. It took me about four hours, but I've got audio working on my Linux dev machine, and I implemented a full mixing stack as well to allow an arbitrary number of sounds to play simultaneously.

The only problem is, now that I can play audio, what do I do with it? The initial implementation pretty much only does one thing: it plays a short algorithmically generated 'click' whenever a command is sent to the server. While great for testing, it doesn't really add to the gameplay experience.

Now I have to find both ambient background music as well as triggered audio samples for various events. I'll also have to get the audio layer working on Windows, which could take anywhere from a couple of hours to several days.

Class updates

As part of the groundwork for getting additional classes into the game, Locane and I have been digging through the code and trying to condense common routines and eliminate dependencies. He's been working largely on uncontroversial skill changes, to merge together the skill handling routines and make it easier to add skills in the future. I've been working on player regen and healing. This is a bit more controversial.

Quite a bit more controversial, as it turns out.

The fundamental problem with regen and healing is that the algorithm was put together over a decade ago, and hasn't been fundamentally altered since. In its simplest form, caster levels are pitted against fighter levels, and regen is heavily tilted in favor of the winner; higher casting level means greater mana regen and less hitpoint regen, while higher fighter level is the reverse.

This balancing act was a zero-sum game. Gaining a single level in a class could force you to trade hitpoints for mana; and at higher levels, a caster for example has no choice but to gain levels in fighter classes. The only thing that made this balancing act of a system usable is cast level equipment, which allowed players to push around the balance point.

Unfortunately, adding new classes isn't really compatible with this. We have also received a number of complaints over the years about unusual side effects and problems with the system. I finally made the decision to try something radical, rather than continuing to tweak the existing code.

The last couple of days, while hectic, appear to be quite an improvement. The level/balance dependency is gone, and I've even managed to keep cast level somewhat usable. Most players have increased net regen, which is probably bad in the long term, but in the short term allows work to progress.

Something unusual is that the value of mana regen varies wildly based on the player and their playing style. I have a couple of fighter primaries totally geared out like casters; these players complained loudly about being dented. This type of player would gladly trade hitpoint regen into mana at a 4:1 ratio, double the standard 2:1 typically found with heal spells. Most other players are happy with 2:1, as they burn through mana and hitpoints almost equally as they play.

The plus side is that this work has eliminated yet another choke point for pushing through additional classes. Unfortunately, there remain quite a few equally controversial areas that will need to be updated.

Where do we go?

I've been doing some serious thinking about the game, the market, and the business model I'm trying to work with. I still think the business model is sound; I've been able to pay most expenses and use the remainder for (admittedly ineffective) advertising for years. This year will be different, as I'm dumping some of my personal money into it, but even so the numbers have risen and will compensate somewhat for that increased outflow.

The biggest problem I see with regard to expansion right now is, unfortunately, market based. If you go out to any gaming news site, it's not just that there's a handful of games being advertised - it's that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of games being advertised. It's reached the point where you're lucky if you can even find a WoW ad amidst the piles of other crap.

The gaming market right now is, as near as I can tell, in the middle of a huge investment bubble. Hundreds of companies have come on line with venture or public funding to be the next 'WoW killer'. These startup companies are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising for a limited number of players; several new cookie-cutter MMOs come out every week.

On the plus side, most of these will fail. As with all bubbles, this one will collapse, and most games will go under. There's simply not enough players right now, and once you've seen one cookie cutter game, you've seen them all. In some ways, being a text based game protects us, as we have a limited niche that isn't facing ridiculous competition.

So what do we do about it? In the immediate short term, scale back plans of massive growth, and wait for the bubble to pop. But we can't just rest on our laurels either; we should be doing something. What best to do?

Make the game the best game it can be, that's what. Most of the games that will fail, will fail precisely because they -are- cookie cutter games. Do you not think that the players on WoW would pay $5 more for a game that was $5 better than WoW? The reason that they don't is because there aren't any games $5 better than WoW.

I currently have two projects in various stages to this end. The first is the ongoing upgrade to the client, which is coming along slowly but steadily; I probably won't have a new release this weekend, but should have one soon. I think with that release I'll start looking for a graphic designer or other artistic input to make the interface pretty.

The other project is only in the planning stages: add more classes to the game. I get a lot of comments from newer players that the limited class selection looks strange and seems thin compared to other games. It also has issues (which some players call features), such as limited room for long term expansion, high level characters all being the same or very similar, a small number of high-end playing styles, and what I would consider bogus skill groupings.

I think I have a rough model of how to do class expansions now, but it will probably be several weeks before we have enough detail fleshed out to really start implementing it.

Skills, spells, and classes

Today, a long-pending project finally got turned on for general use in the game: monster lore, and a few specialized versions for particular mob types. The current specialized skills are demon lore, elemental creature lore, undead lore, animal lore, and dragon lore.

In coming up with appropriate class distributions for these, I once again ran into the shortcomings of only having the four basic classes. There's really just a few things that don't fit nicely into combinations of those four buckets.

So I've been thinking really hard about just how much effort it would be to add other classes to the game. The first most obvious one would be a ranger class, which already has a handful of skills and could probably appropriate a bunch of stuff from cleric and mage.

I wouldn't just want to add one more class; if you're going to change the infrastructure enough to allow easy addition of classes, you might as well make a handful of them and get some really solid groupings going. I'd feel better about it if I had more than just ranger to work with; I think a lot of other skill sets can simply be specializations of existing classes, and don't justify a separate class.

Good examples of these would be necromancers (cleric), elemental casters (mage), and barbarians (warrior). I don't think any of these so much need a separate class as just appropriate spell and skill trees.

There's also a question of how many classes are ideal. Keeping with the exponential leveling scheme, a level 30 character should have levels of approximately 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5, with levels in six classes. I'd actually expect there to be more people in the upper ranges similar to Boa, with something more akin to 33, 32, 31, 27, 22, 17, 12, 7, and 2, for a total of 9 classes. This indicates to me that even the most hardcore players would have difficulty bringing up to the top more than ten or so classes.

As far as code modification, there's a handful of specps and some other places where the code would definitely need work, but I'd like to think that once the fifth class is added, a sixth and more would be much, much simpler.

The final issue is: does this improve the game enough to justify the effort? It certainly adds some concept of end-game and more opportunities to advance high level characters, so perhaps the answer is yes. Then again, perhaps not. What do you think?

Trading

I've been out for almost a week, so when I came back it was time to pull forward code from Locane and get some other minor things out of the way. As it turns out, he's been working on secure trading between players, and while I was away I read some articles on that same subject.

There seems to be quite a hubbub going on in the MMO world regarding trading, in particular gold farming. The general consensus seems to be that gold farming is something that should be utterly squashed wherever it crops up; further, anyone caught selling gold (or other in-game currencies) for real life cash, outside of the game environment, should be penalized as harshly as possible. Most games delete not only the accounts of the farmers, but the accounts of the purchasers as well, and occasionally the accounts of anyone they trade with.

This seems ridiculously harsh to me.

When I first started the game, I didn't really have an opinion on this topic. I originally didn't think trade would be big enough for it to really be a problem. Over the years, players began to donate to the game simply because they liked it; we (I and the other admin at the time) decided to give minor perks to those contributors as a way to say thanks. Many years later, we now offer a wide host of things for purchase from the game store.

While we were setting all this up, I got a lot of very good advice from some very bright people. The overwhelming majority of them were very clear on one point: thou shalt not sell things that unbalance the game. This includes characters, equipment, gold and a number of other nasties I have seen for sale on (less than successful) games in the past.

Players don't like the idea that someone without skill can buy their way to the top. If you take a look at our list of purchasables, you'll notice that everything on that list is either convenience, customization, or a minor boon. This policy has worked rather well for us over the years.

But back to the issue at hand, which is trading. I don't see any reasonable way that it can be completely prevented, and from my standpoint anything that's traded had to be obtained by someone somewhere. If they're going to be doing it anyway, I'd much rather put in some sort of secure mechanism for it, so people can't be ripped off.

Locane's code starts this off by handling in-game currency only. Once that's stable and working well, I'm going to add the ability for people to trade dollars, but only ones that have already been donated. Once dollars are donated to the game, you can buy donation things with them or trade them to other people. Eventually, I'll probably set up business accounts that let people withdraw those dollars from the game.

It will be interesting to see if this model works for any other MMOs. So far, I'm not aware of any that have tried it.

One major concern I have is regarding duping and generation bugs. If someone finds a way to exploit gold or certain items into existence, it may quickly become very difficult to clean up.

Customization

After a week of forcing myself slowly, piece by piece through this code, I finally managed to boot in player customization on character create. I don't know if it's just me being in a coding funk for a week or not, but it seemed abnormally hard to get this done and installed.

The upshot is that we now have basic character customization for new players. They get to pick a handful of obvious traits, from which a generic long description is created. This will hopefully solve two problems:

1) The long description problem, which is that most players seem utterly incapable of generating proper long descriptions. Those who are capable don't want to take the time. Everyone now has a sane long by default.

2) Far more important is the issue of player investment. Specifically, new players are insufficiently invested in their character to return after their initial playing session. The hope is that customization will pay off in the long run, as the people who do take the time to customize will be more likely to return. I should be able to verify this over the next few months by tracking stats.

There's still a lot of work that needs to be done here, including ways (other than long descs) to see your features, and ways to change them. Changing them is actually going to be more interesting than I expected - as was pointed out to me, age is technically quested for via the fountain of youth, why not quest for most of the other attributes as well?

Things like changing hair length or style are clearly easy to do (got some scissors?), but other things might be interesting for players. Changing skin color for example, could be a pretty involved process.

Now that this is done, there's a whole raft of low level changes on my todo list. Lack of player investment is only one part of the problem; the remainder is that the game just isn't as fun as it should be for low levels. I have several more quests to add, as well as a couple more shopkeepers and more utility items. There are also some structural additions to be made, but those can wait for a while.

MishMash

A quick note - I built up a Muds and Mudding lens over at Squidoo. Squidoo is one of those new things which I don't entirely understand, like I don't understand Facebook or Myspace. But other people do, so perhaps it's not such a bad idea. The url is:

http://www.squidoo.com/mudding

I've been thinking about and doing a bit of work on the client recently. One of the newer changes was the addition of an enemy hitpoint bar; the current release client has this bar between the automap and the buttons. I moved it to be in the regular prompt bar, and this serves to make the screen a lot less 'busy'.

All this has got me thinking about what to do next. I really should allow for an unhooked/floating automap, so users can position it wherever they want. I've also been thinking about having a sort of 'list window' where people can perform actions on list items, such as looking in containers, getting things from containers, etc.

Until recently, the mechanics of how to do this in the code have been somewhat questionable. As usual, talking to my girlfriend about it generated a solution: uuid strings for objects and characters, that you can always use to get an exact command reference to that object or character.

I started on the first stage of this process last night, with infrastructure. The game has had a really, really bad PRNG for years; I threw something together with basically no experience about ten years ago and we've been using it ever since. Looking at the code, I'm actually somewhat surprised it didn't cause a lot of visible trouble over the years.

We now have a brand new, 10-register lagged fibbonacci PRNG driving the game. Not only is it faster, but it actually produces reasonably high quality random numbers to drive the game mechanics. Using this, im now generating proper UUIDs that I can have some amount of confidence in.

The list window however I'm less sure about. I suspect this needs a proper design.

Setting Priorities in a Business

Something I need to constantly remind myself about is prioritization. There's only one of me, and there's way more things that need to be done than I have time for. One has to prioritize. You're not choosing between things that are right and things that are wrong; you're optimizing to get the most out of your time.

Here's what I'd consider a rough priority list, not necessarily in any order:

- Improve the Mud Connector banner ad to drive more traffic
- Improve the main AA pages - add a couple of images, some player quotes
- Release another client version with true non-mudder additions
- Improve level 5-29 experience, especially in groups

Some of these are easier than others, but of all four of these, I note that none of them are on my board. Not that the things on my board aren't important, but somehow, these irritating bottlenecks have managed to avoid being written there.

How exactly do the four most important bottlenecks not get placed on the todo list? There are multiple reasons; first and foremost, these bottlenecks are continuous, persistent things. They almost always require improvement, and focusing on them exclusively would mean nothing else gets done.

It could also be that they are too obvious - of course that needs to be done! Or it could simply be that I lack the incentive to work on them. I find incentive to be in short supply these days.

With the influx of newbies from the Mud Connector and other sites, things appear to be going reasonably well. But as I've told others, the Mud Connector is a limited market that will saturate in just a few short years, if not sooner. We have to work on other things as well.

Improving Google PageRank

In a totally unexpected twist of fate, the main Alter Aeon web pages breached PR:4 over the weekend. I was actually not expecting this at all; it's only been 3 months since we went from 2 to 3, and I figured we were well below the required popularity for this jump. If this increase is anything like the last one, our traffic and the quality of our web hits should increase substantially. In fact I only noticed it because the web hits were abnormally high today.

This leaves the very open question of how to get to PR:5 though. I haven't submitted links or done link propaganda in a while, mostly because I was running low on quality sites to hook up to. I'm pretty sure getting PR:5 is going to be a lot harder than 4.

Also related to this, I've been setting up ad campaigns at a few other sites. These should be coming on-line in the next few days.

All this advertising is actually paying off (though in a limited, short term kind of way. More on that later.) The rate of verified, saved unique newbies has doubled since November; the actual number of logins has tripled. Pretty much all of the stats agree on the relative increases, so I know that I'm seeing something legitimate. How long it will take for that to push up the average userload is an open question however.

One unfortunate aspect is that these logins are fairly expensive. I'm not tremendously over budget with ads, but I'm not breaking even either. I need the userload (and associated purchases) to increase between 50 and 100% in the next few months for things to work out.

Now, the short term aspect of things: nearly all of the new advertising is on mud lists and other mudding related sites. This is a problem, as the total pool of mudders is small, and the pool size is shrinking. I saw a statistic somewhere that the total number of mudders is only on the order of a hundred thousand; if things go well this advertising market will saturate quickly.

The only real answer to this that I've been able to come up with is to focus more on the custom AA client. To get a million accounts, I'll need to pull from the global pool of ordinary, non-mudding gamers. In order to do that, I need to get away from text-only interfaces and complex clients.

There's enough web work to keep me busy for a while, and I have to get the game's taxes done this week, so I won't be improving the client for a while. But it's becoming clear that the client is very, very high priority.

Clients and Newbies

I recently released a new client update for Alter Aeon, one that includes (but is not limited to) the following cool changes:

- vastly upgraded automap
- vote menu
- 'last command select'
- various settings now save
- function key alias mapping

This really is a big step forward in the evolution of the client, and I've received a lot of compliments on it. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this client release, and it all goes back to the problem of newbie retention. But before we go into that, here's some background on the current state of newbies on the game.

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There appears to be three primary types of new player right now:

1) Sighted players from mudlists, who generally already have a client. These players usually don't download the custom client, and if they did they probably would go back to their own client anyway.

2) Blind players who use blind clients. They generally don't use the AA client, as it has crap for blind player support.

3) True new players who probably have never mudded before. These people are the long-term future, as the number of mudlist players is shrinking and blind players will eventually get their eyes fixed. This is also by far the largest market to tap. You don't compete with World of Warcraft unless you're hitting up ordinary sighted people.

The mudlist players will pretty much do their own thing. There's a limit to how much you can do with them, as they have their own opinions already. Many are unrecoverable, as they have been damaged by some other mud.

Blind players we seem to be doing reasonably well with. I have no complaints here, other than making the AA client work really well with readers would probably help a good amount.

The third category, by far the biggest market, is the problem. Since they have no prior mudding experience, odds are very good they downloaded the client, which shows up easily in my stats. I can also track logins based on web page hits. If this class of player is sticking around, I'll see it by looking for newbie players using the client.

This is exactly what I don't see. I see the expected players log in with the client, just as they should. There's a large initial dropout rate, but a good percentage of them level and play for a while. After that they all disappear. We're not keeping people entertained.

I suspect what's going on is they play for a while, run out of stuff to do or don't see the point, and bail. That pretty much describes my first mudding experiences; I got a low level character and basically just wandered around looking at stuff. None of the text meant anything in particular to me, and I would wander ridiculous places because I didn't know where to go or what to do. I didn't even know what the point of the game was.

I clearly need to add a lot more statistics tracking and try to see where the dropoffs are occuring - what level ranges, number of logins, etc. With this information in hand we can improve the introductory areas; but so far, my initial numbers indicate that the dropoffs happen for the newbie areas that are well tested and considered in good shape. So what is really going on?

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The final piece of the puzzle revolves around the massively improved automap function in the new client. I tried really hard to play with the mouse for a while, and it worked as well as could be expected. Unfortunately, when using and concentrating on exploring using the map, the entire text window (which contains everything that's important) disappears. Not from the client, but from your mind. It simply isn't as important as the automap. Looking back at it takes effort.

So say you're exploring with the map. You see unexplored spots on the map, you know you can go that way, and you click the button to go there. Nothing happens. You click the button again - you just want to go explore that part of the map - and nothing happens again. How irritating.

Nothing happens because you're fighting. But unless you take your eyes off the map and look back to the main window, you don't notice it. You just get irritated that you didn't move when you clicked the button. And all the scrolling crap in the main window, highlighted and all, really doesn't mean anything to you.

I've got a few things in the works to combat this, including audio sounds for fighting, changing the buttons in combat, and changing the area description to list various positions such as "Combat!", sleeping, resting, etc. That will have to wait until next week though, as I've got a lot of web work to get caught up on as well.

It's definitely a good problem to chew on.

Graphical automap

After a long hiatus, I got a new version of the Alter Aeon Mudding Client built and released for Windows. This version fixes a lot of bugs, but is still subject to the quirks and peculiarities of whatever version of Windows it runs on. This is really irritating, as the URL linking is black (and hence invisible) on some versions of windows, but not on others.

The big update is the graphical automapper, which renders squarish blocks based on terrain and some flags. Auto-generated tiles are what I'm using right now, and all things considered it's not terrible, though it's also not great. Here is a link to a screenshot of the Linux/X version of the client, to give you a rough idea. The Windows version looks similar, with slightly different font sizes and different borders/edges.

As usual, with a new release comes new bugs: the control keys appear to no longer work, the 'vanishing url' problem is still present, diagonal exits don't work (this requires a server and protocol change), and a number of more minor bugs have been reported. It's also lacking blind/visually impaired support, though the default support is already much better than for the old client.

All this (except for blind support, which may be impossible) needs to be fixed before it's suitable to take over the place of the old client. It's getting a lot closer though.

One thing I'm grudgingly coming to terms with is the player desire for triggers and variables in the client. Normal mudders aren't going to use it until it has reasonable features for scripting. I really don't want to encourage scripting, but it may be a necessary evil to getting people to use it.

My hope with this project is that low quality graphics and a visual display are better than no display whatsoever. The game is complex, well balanced, and solid - people who play it tend to stick around and find it entertaining for long periods of time. Getting people into it seems the hardest part.

A possible vote in favor of a bad client being better than no client comes from friends of existing players. I can't even remember how many times I've been told some version of the following:

"I tried to get my friend into it, but he/she just couldn't understand how a game that's only words could possibly work."

Even if it's just a cheesy icon indicating where you are, it at least gives non-mudders a reference: everyone's played old school tile-based games. I hope.

Another major concern I have is that I'm now officially encroaching on what I'd call the territory of other, vastly better funded games. This marks the first real foray into adding graphics to the system; right now that consists of low quality, autogenerated graphics, using a mapping system which doesn't even work reliably (due to area linearity and such.) What I have is crude, primitive, and unartistic.

People can get low quality graphics anywhere; and attempting to compete with modern high-quality rendered 3D games is a non-starter, unless you have a reasonably large budget. Further, the game as it stands is fundamentally not designed to be 3D rendered. It would take a major rework to add support for that, and likely result in the destruction of most of the interesting game content.

So the big question becomes: what is the next step for the client, after it's stable and usable by the default population?

Right now, the only big hitter I have on my list is another type of automap, one that uses the generated area maps from the Alter Aeon World Maps page. The server would send approximate X/Y coordinate pairs, and the client could map them to the appropriate position on the generated maps. This would give people an idea of which areas they were near, and approximately where they were at.

Beyond that, I really don't know. I'm sure something will present itself.

Where do we go from here?

There's been a lot of development and other Alter Aeon activity over the last couple of weeks, but the bigger question is, to what end? While making ad-hoc changes can improve things, it's not necessarily the best way to get to a particular destination.

There is a method to the madness here, and a specific end goal. In February, I'll be approximately tripling the advertising budget, and if I'm going to be spending that kind of money we damn well better be ready for it. I have no intention of getting traffic to the site only to fail the new arrivals in other ways.

This still leaves a lot of things to be done:

- Getting proper ad and propaganda materials ready.

- Level 33 should be in and available. Happy high level players advancing to a new goal will help new players feel like there's something interesting going on.

- A proper new version of the dClient should be available, hopefully with a prettier automap and better blind support.

On the plus side, the statistics collection on new players is rapidly improving, and we have a much better idea of where people drop out and where problem spots are. The 'saved character' rate is actually quite high now that false negatives have been properly weeded out; of the new connections that begin the character creation process, approximately half of them get to level 1 and save. This is excluding multis - it's a pretty close measure of brand new people who have never seen the game before.

The 50% 'player save' value is also consistent against the dClient numbers, which I had not expected. I would have thought that the dClient numbers would be higher, and they are after a fashion - but not nearly as high as they should be. The dClient clearly needs more work and polish.

In addition to this, I'm in the process of collecting statistics for the islands to see where new players drop out. This is a longer term collection, which will hopefully tell us how to streamline and improve areas on the islands.