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.)

More Clienty Goodness

Since I've posted last, I've released two versions of the Alter Aeon client, with a host of improvements and new functionality. A lot of this has been layout and theme changes, but there's also a more substantial newbie mode and other feature updates. I even managed to get a primitive mouseover compass working in the automap!

Here's a screenshot of what the new interface can do and looks like:



(Note - this is the X/FVWM/GTK version of the client, so the window decorations around the outside will look a bit different from the Windows version.)

We've got a lot of other improvements coming in later versions, but now it's time to get back to work on game mechanics.

DClient 0.982 Released!

After a lot of hard work, intermediate releases, bug reports and beta testing, the latest version of the Alter Aeon game client is now available! It's only been about a month since the last release, but the number of updates and new features is pretty impressive. Here's some of the major things that have been updated:

• Grouping status bars added.


• A new version of 'left hand layout' is now available.


• Added basic support for color themes and backgrounds.


• Side buttons now use the same color scheme and format as popup and function key buttons.


• (For builders) 'connect' command allows connecting to arbitrary ports.


• Redraw flicker reduced in popup windows.


• Add support for GMUD color scheme.


• Smoother scrolling for the automap.

In addition, there's been a pile of minor bug fixes, as well as a lot of work to clean up and improve the interface. You might also notice things like removal of scrollbars and word wrap on popup windows that don't need them, fewer buttons to be confusing for newbies, and improvements in the input text bar. Here are some examples of a couple of possible configurations:





The basic theme support and the overall interface cleanup should help us a lot with new players. The first 30 seconds of pretty buys you the next 30 seconds, etc. It seems to take forever, but incremental improvements do really add up over time.

Again, the download is at http://www.dentinmud.org/AlterAeon.exe. Snag a copy and check it out!

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.

Web pages

I've just completed the first pass of an all-CSS layout for the official Alter Aeon MUD site. To retheme the site, it should be as simple as picking new colors, and generating two header images for the image banner across the top. At least that's the hope.

One of the reasons for doing this is the possibility that the dark, ominous colors are driving people off. I've heard more than a few comments to the effect that the current color scheme is 'off-putting' and/or looks evil. (It does after have demon horns in it.)

I've certainly noticed this in RL in terms of dress. When wearing my usual fare of all black, people are much, much less likely to approach me than if I'm wearing blue jeans and a light shirt. If web page viewers are even remotely similar, a difference of 2:1 wouldn't be impossible.

With all this in mind, I'm perfectly willing to try some lighter color schemes and see if it helps. Perhaps a nice light blue ice theme to begin with.

I should probably think a little harder about the image backgrounds. It should be possible to do image under- and overlays to perhaps pretty things up a bit.

FYI, this is all hand-written CSS, with the pages generated using GNU M4. Take a look at the source time time if you're bored.

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.

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.)

More PR

Over time, you tend to run out of things to say on blogs, and I think I'm hitting that wall. It's not so much that you run out of stuff entirely, it's that you tend to repeat the same things over and over.

I'm rapidly finding out that running the game as a business very much falls into this category. You're never done with PR, web page improvements, enhancements to the newbie experience, game additions, etc, but there's only so many ways you can say "I worked on the web pages today." I suppose such is the drudgery associated with a business.

This pretty well explains what I've got to look forward for the next few weeks. I've found some new avenues to pursue regarding getting traffic to the site, and as usual there are articles to post and other PR work to be done. This is all slowly paying off, but it's definitely slow - I suppose like guitar, if everyone could learn it in two weeks, it wouldn't be impressive. The PR:4 thing is a real boost however, in that it shows that it's actually possible to improve things. I hope to hit PR:5 by the end of the year, but I suspect we're a long way away from that.

I just got more advertising set up for Alter Aeon on Top Mud Sites, though I suspect it will drive the same type of people as the Mud Connector. This market for players is really limited, but in the short term it's going to have to be our bread and butter.

(Another neat web site I stumbled across is Mud Stats, which collects periodic statistics from games and sorts them. Stats collection appears to be every few hours, so it's pretty up to date.)

On a somewhat depressing note, I shut off the Google ads completely and the overall newbie load does not appear to have changed by any noticeable amount. It's only been a few days so far and the stats may yet be bogus, but if it's really that hard to pull in true newbies the future of the game could be very questionable. I need to look at this a lot harder I suspect.

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.

Google Page Rank

As I posted a while back, the AA website's page rank recently went up; since the site went from 2 to 3, there's been a factor of 1.5 increase in overall traffic to the site. Newbie logins, and Google Analytics stats all seem to reflect this general increase.

However, I'm not sure I buy it. When I look at the competitive analysis trend lines in Analytics, I see a pretty regular pattern leading up into December, then things start to look a little different. Going into January, it appears that the global amount of traffic in all categories has increased by the exact same factor of 1.5 I'm seeing on AA. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. I've seen January increases before, but I never paid much attention to it. I always figured it was people waiting to go back to school, bored and without much to do.

One possibility is that the competetive analysis numbers I'm seeing are related to reclassification of the web site. When a page/site changes page rank, does Google reclassify the site to compare it to the new group? It's possible that the wierdness I'm seeing is simply the new competition in the new page rank category. It would be nice to have more information on this.

Whatever the reason, this influx of newbies is really refreshing. I can only hope that it's not a temporary blip, and that it continues going forward. For too many months did I work on the web site to see no gain whatsoever.

In other news, I found out the reason for the massive drop in players around the October time frame: competition. A rather large group of dedicated blind mudders for all intents and purposes got bored and left to go to another (very large) mud. I've learned several things from finding this out:

1) I need to pay more attention
2) My mortals are bored
3) It's possible to do what I want to do. The target mud has on the order of a thousand players on it. That's the short term goal for AA.
4) I'm slacking. This is my fault. See #1 above.

So I suppose I have a belated new-years resolution: I will pay more attention to the competition and what they are doing.

Client updates

A whole bunch more client changes went in today, including getting the buttons on the right side working and making the view menu functional. Mouse click events in the main window also work right, and you can change the font at runtime. As usual, the client can be found at:

http://dentinmud.org/TinyAeon.exe

The next set of changes will hopefully involve turning the rather plain direction buttons into a compass that dynamically displays the exits from the 'autoexit' command. I also have a pretty decent bug list that needs to be taken care of, but not much in the way of showstoppers for release.

In other news, I found a handful more places to submit AA for promotion. It's funny how you can think you've tapped the market out and come back later to find loads of things you've missed. I really should try harder to stay on top of the propaganda campaign.

This makes no sense

I finally got up enough incentive to put in time on the client, and as a result I got a fresh dose of why I avoid working on it: this toolkit makes no sense.

Or rather, it does make sense, it's just not documented. You pretty much have to figure out the internal state of the system from examples and experiments; this is very different from the QT tookit, which while a pain in the ass, at least was comprehensive.

So for my time tonight, I have a dialog box for logoff/disconnect/cancel that looks correct in the Linux build. I don't have any of the buttons hooked up, but that's a bit more straight forward. There's a handful of these dialogs that I need to build, so getting even one of them figured out and working properly is a huge step forward.

My current plan is to get the dialogs and history save working, then try to get it working with the screen reader on the laptop under windows. I hope I can get it working at least as well as other clients, so I can offer a preconfigured, functional client for the blind as well as one for sighted people.

One final note: I thought I had the dialogs and sizers figured out, and went to move the dialog out of the main window and into a subwindow. Shows what I know! Doing so broke the entire layout in weird ways I've never seen before. Clearly I don't understand what's going on yet.

Newbie newbie newbie

Today, I spent a couple of hours play a newbie up to level 10. I went through nearly all of the Sloe quest area, including taking out the vampire and going through uffspigot. I did end up modifying a handful of things along the way, and there's still some stuff that's not the way it should be, but in general it was a pretty fun experience.

I also, for the first time in quite a while, got that weird 'this is actually fun' feeling when I was going through the first part of a new quest Morpheus has been adding. I never really thought that side quests would add a lot to it, but they really improve the feel of the game, and give it a real feeling of depth. I'm going to have to add some more stuff in here along these lines, it's just a matter of coming up with ideas.

(Regarding ideas, this is a reminder to myself to put Varjojen Vir, the Winter Wolf, up in the 16400 rack of northern Ash Mountains.)

The game play was really pretty balanced up to level 10 once I lowered the level of a couple of mobs. The waypoints even seem placed at reasonable locations. One thing I really did notice though is that having to go back to camp to level and learn skills was really quite problematic, because at these levels you might be able to gain five levels in the time it takes to complete a quest (the vampire quest, for example.)

One possible solution to this that I'm kicking around right now is to allow people to level up to ten or so without a trainer. This would make gameplay less interrupted by the need to return to camp and fight your way back to wherever you were. The skills are less important than the levels in my mind.

Either way, this is coming along nicely, and seems more playable every time I go through it. It really needs a few solid 8 hour days dedicated to it to get it ready for prime time; perhaps I'll start doing some of that on Sunday.

In other news, the new client has been on hold for a few days while I take care of other things. This morning, I used the 'upx' executable file compressor on the existing AA client, and managed to shrink it down from 8 meg to just over 2; this should make the downloads much more reasonable for people. I'll watch the client download stats from this point forward. It should be interesting to see if changing the download size actually results in more downloads.

Also on Sunday, I hope to boot in the new intro screen code, warts and all. It should be easy enough to revert if there's a problem, and the best way to find bugs is to open something to the public.

Newbies and login screens

Today, I was overcome by the urge to do newbie cleanup. Perhaps I've been spending too much time looking at the dropout statistics from the character creation process. Maybe it was my gods bugging me to get to things that I should have done last week. Maybe it was the coffee I got in the afternoon; that always seems to give me incentive, though it's bad for sleeping.

I ran up a newbie thief character, and got no farther than the cave system before I had my first major thing to fix: movement regen. Movement regen sucks, in that you run out and you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time to be able to go anywhere, even if you only want to walk one room to a safe area so you can sleep. Some brainstorming with myself and an hour later, we now have continuous movement regen. I'm going to boot the code in tomorrow morning.

I originally planned to halt movement regen completely if the character was lagged or melee fighting, but after fighting a bit and running out of movement, it occurred to me that I would -never- get back any movement and might not even be able to flee. Now movement regen is just cut in half while fighting. Regen from equipment or spells isn't affected by this though, in that you always get full regen from effects-based regen.

The other set of changes I made was some relatively minor reorganization of the intro screens. I created an 'Obsolete Options' menu under the 'Advanced' menu, and moved the old login points as well as different ltype selection there.

I plan to make some real changes tomorrow, in that I'm going to move the name selection process to much later on, put email address and some other things in the main menu, and start character creation immediately on connect. The final process will probably be along the lines of:

Create a new character?
Are you blind?
Pick your class
Pick your sex
Existing player/how did you find us
Name selection
Password
Login menu

This should remove at least one screen from the process (the email screen), and hopefully will get people involved in creating the character before they get to the high-dropout phase: name selection. I suspect this will raise the retention rate for new players by probably around a factor of two. Hopefully the stats will bear me out on this.

One other thing I may do is put more character creation options on the main menu, or even prior to name selection. I should probably have Locane come up with an automatic description system as well, so people can pick eye color and the like to get an autogenerated long description.

Logins and players and statistics, oh my!

I just pulled some stats for the last few days and did some crunching on them. I need to do this more often so I keep in mind where the easy gains are to be had, and how to be more productive with my limited time.

These numbers are with a pretty pessimistic stripping to eliminate existing players, and to try to only take into account totally new players.

182 + 19 = 201 total newbies

19 (9.5%) of incoming connections resulted in a saved newbie. Of the unsaved players:

182 unsaved players
29 (16%) made it to entering a name
24 (13%) made it to login

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People using the dclient did a bit better:

36 + 12 = 48 newbies using the dclient

12 (25%) of incoming dclient connections resulted in a saved newbie, instead of 9.5% from other clients. Of the unsaved players:

36 unsaved players using the dclient
13 (36%) made it to entering a name
13 (36%) made it to login


It doesn't take a rocket scientist to gather from the above that improving the login screens and mechanisms could easily double the number of new players in the game. I've been meaning to rip up the intro screens anyway and reorganize things, and now I have a bit more incentive.

Samon's idea of getting the client improved and more widely distributed is also a good one.