Seagull Droppings

I have been doing some catchup reading on the CSM minutes. (The Council of Stellar Management is a player elected group which CCP consults on design focus & decisions for EVE Online.) One of the most interesting sections, and the section that has made me the most hopeful for the direction of EVE Online, was the session titled EVE Online - The Next Decade. This section was lead by CCP Unifex and CCP Seagull.

I was extremely impressed with CCP Seagull's comments on how the company is starting to analyze new features for EVE. The biggest contribution seen in the CSM minutes is her additions to the EVE developer lexicon. She identifies 5 major types of players:

• Instigator: Players with ambitions who inspire groups to act.
• Enabler: These players run the logistical side of large groups so that things function smoothly.
• Lurker: Solo players who have little contact with others.
• Group Player: Players that want to engage socially with other though joining activities.
• Small Scale Leader: These players put together activities for others to do. They differ from instigators in not having as large a scale, more an evening's activity verses conquering an empire.

The objective behind defining player types is so that CCP can get into the mind of the players better. In particular, examine the question "What do I do now?" from the players' perspective. EVE is an incredibly open ended game and figuring out what to do when you play is often a more daunting prospect than how to do something.

To me the fact that people in the company are starting to definite types of players and design specifically for those types of players shows that CCP is maturing. This shows a better understanding of their game and more focus in improving EVE. In reading the minutes it is clear that CCP Seagull it talking on a level above the CSM and even most of the other developers in the meetings. This terminology and way of thinking is clearly very new to many people are still adjusting to it.

There is a similar evolution in vocabulary and way of thinking that happened in Magic: the Gathering, most of which was driven by Mark Rosewater. I have blogged a bit about the Psycographic Profiles before. It is interesting to see that both CCP and Magic created terminology to talk about different types of players after about 10 years of existence. This seems to be a natural evolution of game companies as their products age they develop a lexicon to facilitate thinking and discussion of feature.

The last thing worth pointing out is the 5 player types CCP Seagull defines are categorized by what role they play in a group. The Psycographic Profiles of Rosewater are about why people play. These two different systems don't compete with each other as they define different parts of the player. In theory one could use both systems to construct a more detailed profile of a player. Though that is an exercise for another blog post.

Social Games are not designed for Spike

I just read this blog over at Gamasutra and my impression is that the author is a type of Spike. He wants to demonstrate mastery through goals in game and doesn't understand how games like FarmVille can be appealing. Essentially these games are not designed for him but a very different market segment.

The way these social games work is people have their space, in FarmVille a farm, which they can customize & use to produce things. These products can be used for further customization or traded with other players. Also each player's space can be view & discussed by their friends. In truth, this is not much different from having a flower garden in one's yard. It provides a topic of conversation among friends and complementing the garden is a compliment to the gardener. In essence the garden is an expression of the gardener's self, just like the farm in FarmVille. Which is what Johnnies are all about, expressing themselves.

This isn't to say that Spikes and Timmies can't enjoy the game. Timmies love the experience of hanging out with their friends and bonding over a shared interest. Some Spikes will relish mastering the production method in FarmVille to create the most productive farm. Granted once a Spike masters the game and proves that he has mastered it he will probably get bored. But this does not mean social games suffer from poor game design, just very targeted design.

Timmy, Johnny, & Spike play MMOs

I am a big fan of Mark Rosewater's columns. Rosewater is the Lead Designer of Magic: the Gathering and has written a lot about game design, over ten years worth of weekly articles. Most of the articles deal with things specific to Magic design, but sometimes he does more general articles. One of the big tools for design he talks about are the psychographic profiles for Magic players. Essentially he breaks down the player base into reasons why people play. He also has named the three Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. The nice thing about these profiles is they can be easily applied to other games as complex as Magic, like MMOs.

"Timmy wants to experience something." At the heart of what drives a Timmy is the need for fun. Be it acting out the dream of being a space pirate, letting out one's inner LeeRoy Jenkins, or simply shooting the breeze with friends, Timmies are looking to enjoy the game. Things like efficiency, amount of Gold, or killboard stats are of secondary importance.

EVE online is a mixed bag for Timmies. Some of the most obvious things that Timmy would find fun, like the massive and incredible powerful Titan class ships, are incredibly time and resource intensive. For Titans it takes literally years to train into the ship, the pilot is stuck in the ship as he can't dock, and moving the ship around requires coordination with other players. But Timmies still have a place, even if it not in the most obvious locations. Many are social creatures and just enjoy hanging out with friends, regardless of the activity. Others are looking for the raw adrenaline rush of combat and engage anything that looks fun regardless of if thinks he can win or not. Still others are happy to sit in NPC corps because it lets them fly their space ship in relative safety.

"Johnny wants to express something." Johnnies tend to be the explorers and inventors. They are looking to show a piece of themselves through their actions in game. This expression ranges from off beat constructions, to in game art, to finding a new way to do a mission.

Johnnies have the most to do right after new content is released because there is new things to explore and tinker with. At this point old assumptions can be proven wrong and new ways of specing characters with new synergies emerge. This is not to say that Johnnies have nothing to do in-between patches, there are always things to test or self-imposed challenges to lay down. Often Johnnies are the players that stumble upon a new concept in their constant quest to carve out their niche in the game.

"Spike plays to prove something." Spikes are easily stereotyped as the jerks that just want to win. Though there are many different types of ways to quantify winning and each Spike picks a different one. Some go for raw killboard efficiency. Others use only the optimal way to run missions and accumulate resources. Finally some want to master the politics and control a large empire.

In many ways EVE Online is a game built for Spikes. The entire idea behind the game is ruthless competition in any arena a player wishes, be it combat, politics, or commerce. Often well know players will be Spikes exactly because spikes are out to prove something which goes hand in hand with fame.


This post was meant to be a brief overview of the player types and how they can be adapted to other settings. In the future I hope to go into detail on them more. In particular there is a dimension of leadership, apart from the political dominance, that it is not clear to me how it interacts with they types. The existence of groups and group activities is one of the big differences between MMOs and Magic. The closest analogy for Magic would be player groups testing the meta-game and selecting decks to complement each other.

Technological Change & Consumers

The background for this post is a new patch just came out in EVE Online which tweaked an old system. One of the Largest Alliances in game found a loophole and mass produced some rarer items with it. The details are in the first 3 posts of this thread:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124145&find=unread

I have seen people say that this alliance, called the Goons, created ISK. This is patently false. They actually destroyed ISK by paying it to NPCs to get these items. The Goons did create Value. There are now many more of these formerly expensive items in game for players to use. People should be thanking the Goons for making these items easier to acquire.

Essentially what the Goons discovered was a new way to manufacture some items, akin to discovering a new technology. This makes the items cheaper for everyone to purchase and allows the Goons to make a nice profit underselling people using the old technology. Granted players who used to make a living off these items are harmed, but they can now shift into other endeavors and by the now cheaper items in the market instead of producing them.

Unfortunately, from the consumer's perspective anyway, CCP declared this method of creating items an exploit and have patched away the ability to do this. In essence destroying a more productive technology. While I am sure CCP has some other macro concerns, we should not forget the Noob who can now afford +4 implants because of the ingenuity of the Goons.

Value vs. ISK: The Macroeconomics of Fiat Money

Sorry for the dearth of posts, life got quite busy for me.

This post was motivated by a discussion in an EVE chat channel about how "destroying ships destroys ISK," which is patently false. The problem is people are conflating ISK with value as the statement "destroying ships destroys value" makes perfect sense. The reason people are making this conflation is to the player ISK and value are nearly the same, but to the developer these are vastly different notions.

To a player it is very easy to change back and forth between ISK and the assets which allows him to play the game. The thing is ISK is not actually used to accomplish playing EVE. In theory, players could simply barter for what they want and some alternate currency would probably develop. This happened in Diablo II with the Stone of Jordan as Gold is too common in the game. In this sense removing ISK from EVE would not remove any value from the game. (Slight caveot: ISK's value to EVE is smoothing transaction costs. But having one ISK more or one ISK less circulating doesn't hurt at the margin.)

Taking a more Macro perspective, it is clear that when a ship gets blown up no ISK is removed from the game. The player probably purchased the ship with ISK and definitely lost a valuable asset with its destruction, but the ISK he spent is still in game, in the hands of the player who sold the ship. It is this perspective that CCP must take as they are essentially the monetary authority of EVE and need to worry about inflation. This is a serious problem in MMOs as once ISK enters a player's hands, the only way to make it leave the system is through players conducting transactions with NPCs.

Note that the destruction of ships actually places strong inflationary pressures on the game. First a valuable asset is destroyed without a corresponding drop in money supply. Hence the ISK is chasing fewer goods. Second, when a player loses a ship, he then needs a new one to fly. This means that as more ships are blown up ISK is changing hands faster which increases its velocity. So ship destruction both decreases the total real value of assets in the game and increases velocity, which is worrying for the state of the economy if CCP keeps pushing PvP.

For the uninitiated ISK stands for Icelandic Króna InterStellar Kredits, the unit of currency in EVE Online.

WOW Promotions: Manifestations of the DBZ effect

An Anonymous recently posted a comment in The Dragon Ball Z effect. What follows is the comment:

Ok, so I wanted to know what people thought of the following thing.
So its obvious that the number of people playing WoW has dropped considerably in the last year or so, and blizzard has made a wide variety of attempts to improve the number of people playing. These attempts include playing for free up to level 20, commercials starring Chuck Norris, getting a free copy of Diablo 3 with a one year subscription to WoW. These are at least the ones that I've seen, and come to mind when I think about an aggressive advertising campaign to improve subscribers. But now there is a new one that I think is worth mentioning.
So the next "upgrade/promotion" I've seen is something called the scroll of resurrection which is when a player gets a super pimped out mount, in return for getting an inactive player (not a new player, but a player who has been inactive since march 4th). The returning player gets the following stuff
7 days of free game time, a optional free character move (to another server), a FREE upgrade to cataclysm (the most recent massive game update), and in my opinion the most interesting thing of all, is a free upgrade to boost a single character to level 80!
I'm curious to know what people think about this, having a character instantly moved to level 80. That seems...pretty crazy.

This is interesting. I had seen the free to 20 promotion. And it is true that WOW has lost a significant portion of its player base recently. The last promotion indicates that Blizzard thinks ex-players is a significant enough market to directly target it. I like the structure of the promotion as odds are good that some current player knows the person, either a real life friend or guildmate. Though I agree that a free level 80 character is very interesting. I think that it signals there is a barrier to entry of some sort. Whether it is new players getting discouraged and quitting or old players not wanting to grind up to max level with an older character or new class they want to try.

In any case this seems like the WOW monolith is starting to collapse under the weight of years of new content and playtime. I wonder if there will be another MMO that becomes such a market force? I doubt that one will given current MMO designs. In particular any game like WOW will suffer a similar fate. As I have indicated before, I think something new is needed for there to be a really enduring MMO.

Standard Conventions: Mouse Wheel Zooming

I was using Google maps today and kept having problems with the zoom functions. It became clear to me that EVE Online uses the exact opposite convention. For Google maps, forward is in and backward is out. EVE is the reverse. It is very disconcerting going from one to the other. Especially after having played EVE a bit too much and trained myself for the other convention. In looking at the timeline, EVE predates Google Maps, but is no where near as popular. So while I wish EVE would move to the industry standard, it is highly unlikely due to hysteresis. Yeah for learning the same thing two different ways.