We had an interesting discussion about new player retention on <bat> channel
yesterday. Too bad I had to hit the bed right in the middle of it while I had
still a lot of things on my mind to add to that conversation. So I'm doing it
now.

A few hc batmudders might deny it, but lets face it, we all wish we had more
players. It just isn't as much fun to play a multiplayer game with only five
or ten players as it is to play a game with one hundred players. Larger games
can afford better resources (although I think it is mainly in form of
graphics) and they have more "political power" among online games communities
as a whole. There isn't much negative to say about having a lot of players.

I've administered a couple of smaller (now defunct) muds as a "side dish" to
BatMUD. A MU* admin trying to create his own genuine playerbase can consider
himself lucky to have twenty people online. BatMUD, being much more
influential, still has many more than those twenty. But I seriously doubt we
are going to be happy with the current number in the long run.

But we are not willing to host a commercial mega-operation and lie to people
in order to keep our mud strong. We do not see ourselves as 'salesmen' and we
aren't about to put our players on paid subscriptions to be able to play. Face
it, BatMUD isn't about money so much as it is enjoying doing things a
particular way.

But we look down the street and the local Guild Wars community having
thousands of players and the admins of the game are probably driving corvettes
and wearing 5 kilo-euros in jewelry.

Come on. It has to bother you. It just doesn't seem fair.

We resent these commercial operations for being so large and successful. We
would love their success but not if we have to "sell out" and turn our coats
to run a flowermud of Darth OMGs and Luke L0llerz that's a complete joke.

And that's the problem. We probably believe that the playerbase is diminishing
because our game is so hard and the modern youth doesn't simply have the
resilience to become good in a game during a time period when McDonalds is the
king.

But that's wrong. Just because the game is hard doesn't mean our playerbase
has to be small. I'm pretty sure that - for example - to learn how to play Eve
Online *well* is as equally hard as mastering BatMUD. So there are games out
there that are every bit as hard to master as ours.

So why is BatMUD shifting it's mode of operation from "thriving" towards
"surviving"? I (delusionally ) think I have the answer, and I think I can
explain a bit about the steps we can take to increase the number of players.
No, I'm not going to tell we have to sell toilet paper door to door, or do
anything else than we would as a mud community be ashamed of doing.


Rate of Retention: Tracking our performance

The main reason that players leave a game after trying it out one time, for a
week, a month, for less than a year is not beacuse the game is too hard. They
leave because of the behaviour of players and admins.

You (I'm always using "you" as a passive form, so its not *you*) may not
realize it, but if you are anything what I used to be as an admin in my side
projects, you are already a master of driving people away. Let's run an
experiment. Let's carefully keep count of the number of new players who play
the game even once. Now, let's also keep track of how many new players have to
walk through our character creation for us to get a new player that stays at
least a year? This is our annual rate of retention.

Rate of retention is a business term. If we check how many new players come
through our door for us to get someone to stay a year, I bet we will find that
90% of the new players who try our game leave within, lets say, 11 months. In
fact, I would be willing to bet the number is more like 95%. We're lucky if we
keep 1/10 of the new players for 12 months.

You know, a 10% retention rate is terrible.

Let's think about our typical newbie. If they find their way to BatMUD, and
leave us to go play WoW, Eve etc. it means their experience with us was so bad
that they are willing to pay someone else more for a more decent gaming
experience. That says a lot. Text-based gaming aside it says we aren't
appealing to very many people.

If we could change that number even from 1/10 to 1/8, with 30 new players a
year we would increase BatMUD's playerbase by 9 people instead of 3 every year
- and the community would start to grow. What I'm saying is that we don't have
to be perfect - just push then needle a little further on the dial and change
things a little bit for the better. Doing that, I'm pretty confident we'll see
our player count start to increase.

Maybe you aren't convinced that we are the problem. Most of us think the
reason for such a low rate of retention is that our traditional way of gaming
is much more strenuous that today's weak and lazy people are willing to do.

There is absolutely no data to support that conclusion. It's an assumption,
nothing more, pure guesswork. In fact it's a rationalization - an excuse that
distracts us from considering the harsh truth: It's us. We are the reason. We
drive people away.

So how can we reduce the percentage of people who are driven away from us
before we can get through them with our message and provide them a year of
enjoyable gameplay? It isn't easy, and it will require some self-examination
and no small measure of painful honesty with our community. I won't ask anyone
to sacrifice our principles though.

My hard won opinion / advice comes in two parts. The first lesson is how to
drive new players away. If you (again, this is a passive form) can understand
the things we do which causes us to lose new players, it might be easier to
understand why I give the recommendations in a later post. So, let's get
going.


Lesson #1: How to drive new players away


We already know how to instinctively drive people away. Let's review some of
our magical skills which we make new players disappear.

* Treat new players as they are indentured servants, employees, military
conscripts, or child students in school (self-service).
* Use only one communication style ("rm!") with all different types of
players.
* Become a source of negativity, derision, embarrassment and criticism
* Explain everything in terms how you see the BatMUD ("Ohh no, you can't
thrive as a mage, you have to make a tank - oh, you created a mage now? Well
you can reincarnate to a tank later.")
* Fail to build social connections with new players (party with them!)
* Act like the leader of a cult and make others uncomfortable with odd,
exclusive behaviour (just like I do)
* Ignore developmental levels (You actually can't get a good start with a
level 1 mage - if so, a new player shouldn't be able to create a mage in the
first place)

Good grief! Are we doing all that? Probably not all, but I am willing to bet
that we are doing the most of it and even in the areas where we think we do
pretty good we are probably completely oblivious how bad things really are.
Such is the curse of leadership. The yes-men survive, the nay-sayers are cut,
and bad behaviours of ours are rewarded and only get worse while no one tells
us a thing about it unless something huge, dramatic and unpleasant happens.

After we're done with the above list, there should be about two new players
left now. They are the best of the best, because we have chased off the weak
and helpless masses who infested our game with their pathetic attempts to
learn it. When these remaining players - after many years of gameplaying -
start to taper off in what they can still achieve in the game, let's go into
denial about it.

That should have chased off every new player we have. Luckily for folks like
me, it didn't. Usually even the most unprofessional idiot on Earth (me) can
manage to scrape together 10 or 20 players to put up with this crap if he has
even a bit of talent.

I wonder how many readers I chased off.

Finally, there's this guy named Rob Redmond - originating from completely
different types of communities but which however share many of the same
problems - to whom I owe undeniable credit for many of these thoughts.