Great Pyramids!

Mike Rozak recently announced on MUD-Dev that he’d posted a new article on a new gameplay landscape theory he was throwing around, which he called the Player Pyramid. It got me thinking about things – and getting me to think about something other than football on Superbowl Sunday is no easy feat. Yeah, this article has been brewing for a while, and be warned, this is a long one…

Here’s a tiny snippet from Mike’s original missive:

Categorising players by the population of the virtual world that they need to fulfil their goals and fantasies produces a pyramid. Most people are happy with linear fiction, forming the base of the pyramid. On top are those people whose needs are met by single-player games. Above those are the multiplayer gamers, game-like virtual world players, and world-like virtual world players. Each group’s population is progressively smaller:

				World-like VW players
			Game-like VW players
		Multi-player gamers
	Single-player gamers
Linear fiction readers/watchers

I was intrigued by this model because, well, I’d seen something similar to it before. Will Wright, at a GDC speech, described seeing something similar, but not quite the same, patterns emerge in the Sims community. I searched for this on the web, and found this summary from an old article (art is mine):

Wright: The most interesting things I’ve seen have come from the self-growing structure of the player community. People sort themselves according to both function and theme. It’s almost like two dimensions. There’s a pyramid of players that form almost an ecosystem, with the lowest level being the casual players, then people that are browsing or downloading stuff off the Web, then people running the Websites, then people creating content, and finally people creating tools for the creators of the content. This pyramid gets narrower at every level, and every level is dependent on the levels beneath it. People can pick their functional relationship with this hobby by that level: “I really like running a Website.” Or, “I like making custom objects.” Or, “I like just browsing them and telling stories.” But they can also pick a theme horizontally within a given slice, such as the Websites. Sims is very neutrally themed, which leaves a wide-open field for somebody to do a historical Sims fan site or science fiction or fantasy or whatever. They’re not competing with each other. I think it’s pretty clear to a player coming into this as a hobby – they’re going to spend a lot of time – what slot they want to fall into. They can see this map very quickly. In that sense, the players are self-sorting.

Fascinating, very fascinating. There’s some stark differences between the two theories and approaches. Mike’s concentrates more on the market as a whole, and is somewhat external to the game. In fact, he talks at length about how to build a game based on how the market looks. Will’s is more internal to one community, but to one that is very different than a standard MMO’s community.

I decided to shake and bake the two theories together to see what would come out of it, limiting myself inside one game’s community, and using more standard MMO roles than the esteemed Mr. Wright did. The results are to the right, and they’re interesting. Please note: I use ‘adventurers’ and ‘craftsmen’ in my example because they fit the MMOs we all know and love, and make it easier for us to talk about. Applying this to a non-combat MMO would still work, and in fact it brings into stark contrast the need for different activities for different heirarchy levels (for example, you still need a role for the masses — i.e. what does the guy who only logs on for an hour a night do all day?)

Each layer of the cake is smaller than the one above it, and in general is less ingrained into the community. However, the higher you go in the tree, the more the person in that level of the tree acts as a force multiplier, amplifying effects through the rest of the community. As such, even though only a few people are guild leaders, they have powerful effects that reach the whole of the community. The guys on top need the guys below them to succeed, but the guys below them will have a far better time with the guys on top amplifying the game’s benefits. All of this led to the following observations, which talks about how to bring ‘world’ features into your MMO:

1) Each cake layer has a ‘right size’, and a good game design will nail it. Take craftsmen, for example (by which I mean someone who plays primarily as a craftsman, not someone who makes a horseshoe or two on the side). Craftsmen are good for your community – they effectively help build solid ‘weak’ social links (weak links being those between social circles that normally don’t interact. However, if your game design creates too many craftsmen compared to the levels below them, there won’t be enough business to keep them all satisfied.

There is a ‘right’ number of craftsmen, and designers must remember that these guys are the exception, and not the rule. But they are a crucial exception.

WoW has, in my opinion, too few craftsmen — the auction house, while marvelous in many ways, doesn’t encourage repeat business from blacksmiths, and so those craftsmen aren’t really social. Enchanting is the only real exception. By contrast, SWG when I was playing it had too MANY craftsmen — too many attempting to get business with too few combatants to support them all. SWG’s current refocus on improving their combat will go a long way towards bringing this back into balance.

2) Features higher up the pyramid are worth coding, even if a smaller audience sees them. It’s a challenge, at times, to convince producers that you need to provide guild leaders with great tools, because ‘only a few people will ever see all this work’. The important thing is that, since people higher in the tree offer added value to everyone below them, they deserve extra attention to be kept happy, since they will spread their goodwill to those layers below them. Imagine, if you will, if the top levels narrowed – the bottom levels would likely quickly atrophy without the top ones adding their value to the community.

3) It’s possible to put too much effort into features that have a small audience. If 80% of your population are adventurers and 15% of your population are craftsmen, be sure your dev time is spent appropriately.

4) You should focus on making features for the higher level ‘cake’ layers trickle down to the masses. Good features to implement for craftsmen and leaders should be features that impact and are visible to those lower than them. In standard MMOs, most crafting skills should benefit the adventurers. Most guild leadership features you add should result in tangible benefits that all guild members end up enjoying (even if that benefit is simply a more efficiently run guild).

In Mike’s pyramid, he suggests the opposite (which may be true for his model, but for mine, would be the result of a failed design):

Players of lower tiers usually see players and their activities from upper tiers as superfluous or annoying…
For example: If a player wishes to play in a game-like virtual world, then having to deal with player inn-keepers is quaint, but doesn’t particularly add to the game. Nor does having to deal with someone that is “king” of the surrounding countryside and who demands taxes or other nonsense.

I would argue that good design for higher-cake-level characters results in those higher ups enriching the world for the casual player. Bad design makes it so those higher up in the pyramid can detract from the experience of the casual player. This is the danger line that many ‘world’-based MMOs must tread carefully. But the important thing is that it highlights that ‘world’ features are necessary to satisfy your core gamers. This suggests that the debate is not ‘game vs world‘, but ‘How much ‘World’ do we need to add to keep the top of the cake happy, without alienating the ‘Game’-rs that make up the base?

5) Each layer of the pyramid requires people beneath them to make their role relevant. This is something that Mike talks about with his pyramid, and it’s also true here (although the craftsmen/guild thing seems like two seperate tracks).This ties into observation #1: if there’s too many chiefs and not enough indians, you just end up with a whole bunch of bored chiefs.

6) That being said, the higher in the pyramid you are, the more important it is that we retain you. Craftsmen and guild leaders are social hubs for the game. If these people are happy and satisfied, they will help to keep the rest of your community solvent. So while thinking of features for #3 and #4, be sure to keep in mind means in which to give these players carrots which keep them happy.

This should be self-evident, and is a clear undertone of the dynamics that Will is talking about in his pyramid. However, it’s interestingly the place of clearest dissonance with Mike’s theories. Mike proposes that we give away the game for free to everyone we can, and charge players money if they’re interested in ‘world’ features, such as guild tools and crafting. The problems with this are pretty self-apparent:

• Given that most of your players are in the lower levels of the cake, you lose a lot of revenue, which can only be made up by quadrupling the price of your elder gameplay.
• Those who play your elder gameplay are the glue that keeps your community intact.
• Your elder players are savvy enough to compare your higher price tag to the flat $10-15 rate of the next MMO over. =)

Personally, I’d want to bribe the active community hubs to stick around and do what they do so well and love to do, not punish them with a higher price tag. They are VIPs of your community, and they make your world a richer place. Take care of them.

The true benefit of the pyramid is that it helps visualize the relative importance of these people and the World features they crave. Once you have that, then we can finally move on to making a ‘world’ game that finally has enough customers to keep the ‘world’ players happy, without being so un-fun that the ‘game’ fans can’t find the way to the fun.

Note: Edited to clean up a bit, and expound a bit on point #4.  Original comments here.