UO Blog - Fighting the Lack of New Players - June 26th, 2010

I don't know why I had not covered this issue yet. The lack of new players is one of the most pressing issues of Ultima Online. Without new players, any game is destined to die sooner or later. While UO is a very unique and fantastic game, most players prefer popular games with more eye-candy, even if their content can not even slightly reach the quality of Ultima Online. Most people don't even know about UO. What can be done to solve this?

Content:

• Definition: What Are New Players?
• Status Quo of the Subscription Situation
• Problems Arising From the Current Situation
• How the Problems Could Be Solved
• Conclusion

Definition: What Are New Players?

There are new players who already know about Ultima Online because they have played it in the past. They often return to the game after several years because of nostalgic reasons, or because they tried other MMORPGs and found that they are not the same league as UO. These are not the players I refer to as "new players". They are returning veterans.

The really new players are those who have never played Ultima Online before. Players who somehow have heard about UO, got interested and subscribed. Players who create their character and start in New Haven, and have no experience whatsoever with Ultima Online.

Status Quo of the Subscription Situation

Of course, I don't know any official numbers. But from my observation, experience and consequential comprehension, I think it is safe to assume that the following applies:

• The average overall subscription rate is rather stable, but over the years slightly decreasing.
• Some players leave the game, but the majority of the current customers are rather loyal.
• Veteran players keep returning in waves, e.g. when a new expansion is released.
• The average player age is rather high for an MMORPG.
• Players are less active in general, which sometimes gives the impression of a less populated game world.
• The less player activity, the less motivation to log on -> vicious circle!
• The number of really new players is so low that it is neglegible.

Problems Arising From the Current Situation

Problem 1: The player-base gets older.
This means, the players are less active (due to other responisbilities in life), they often play the game differently (more targeted towards item collecting and relaxing, and less towards risk), and they demand according game features. In general one can say that this is a vicious circle: In order to favor the existing player base, the game has to be developed into a direction that makes it less attractive for new players.

Problem 2: The player-base is dying out.
This may sound grim, but it is the truth. If no new players succeed, the number of players will slowly but steadily decrease. The player base gets older and older. At a certain age, many commitments in life become more important than playing a game: Career, family, spare time. This leads to people playing much less, and people leaving the game. Even the number of returning veterans will decrease over the years.

Problem 3: The game lacks fresh and evolutionary ideas.
Here's a paradigm: Young players are flexible, open for new challenges and they like to take risks. Older players don't like changes too much. With few exceptions, they prefer a less stressful game where they have safety and control. Thus, new challenging and interesting changes are often rejected by the old player-base.

Problem 4: The game will slowly but steadily fade.
Because of above mentioned effects, Ultime Online will slowly fade away. I'm not at all a doomsayer who predicts the downfall of UO. I can imagine that the game will last another 10 years. But since player subscriptions are undeniably dwindling slowly, there will come a day when the numbers will fall below a critical limit. This is the day when even devoted veterans will leave because the game becomes boring due to a lack of community.

How the Problems Could Be Solved

As we have seen after the Stygian Abyss and the High Seas expansion, new features and items cannot really bring back players in the long term. When they have acquired those items and explored the new content they will be even more bored than before. Because UO is not about items, but about an active community. Thus, the crucial task is to make Ultima Online more familiar and attractive for new players.

Complexity

While it is certainly important to listen to the wishes of UO veterans, making the game attractive for newcomers should have a higher priority. As written in a previous column, Ultima Online is a very complex game. If a new player creates a character in Britannia, he will be literally overstrained with all the things he can do and the complexity of the in-game systems. Complexity is a good thing in general, as it encourages individualism, allows very versatile play-styles and makes the game interesting in a long-term. However, it also makes the game more difficult to learn and understand. Learning the effects and quality of armor and weapons alone is something that takes several months. It is important to offer new players two things:
1. Comprehensible guides and tutorials the player can view in his browser, download and print.
2. Step-by-step in-game instructions and quests making the player acquainted with the game content.

Good Out-of-game Guides

The guides on the UO website should be enhanced a lot. It lacks of pictures and screenshots, and there is no geographical guide whatsoever. There should be descriptions of at least the dungeons of Britannia, there should be big downloadable maps (like these), there should be information about cities and shops. It is a great help for a player if he has some geographical information about Sosoria printed on paper lying beside his keyboard. The importance of this kind of service should not be underestimated!

New Player Quests

There are a couple of New Haven quests that are quite nice and help new players to get acquainted with some of the game mechanics. However, after they have finished those quests players are pretty much left alone, although they know only about 5% of what UO really offers. The new player quest system needs to be enhanced immensely. New Haven would be a good location for such quests, kindof like a home base for new players where they always return to. There should be quests that make players acquainted with more game content and game mechanics. For example:

• There should be quests making players acquainted with basic and important game mechanics, like item insurance, repairing items, moongates, using commodity deeds, using pack animals etc. Players need to be sent on adventures where they have to use those features and experiment with them.
   
• Geographic quests that send people on assignments where they have to visit different towns and shops, utilizing moongates and classical methods of traveling. Traveling spells should be prohibited during such a quest. The quests should add temporary waypoints to the Enhanced Client map to show the player where he has to go. This way, players can learn about the cities, their features and their character.
   
• Crafting quests that step by step introduce the complex armor and weapon attributes to new players. A reward could be a soulstone that allows the player to transfer the skill acquired during those quests to a crafting character. Crafting quests should teach new players how to find and use different kinds of material, different crafting tools, imbuing ingredients etc. A simple example would be:
  The player gets a new quest from the Tailor in New Haven. The goal is to craft armor for Dragon protection. His first task is to find 300 horned or barbed hides, because those are needed for better armor quality. The player is sent to the appropriate dungeons to achieve this. The second task is to craft armor with high physical and fire resist, because Dragons deal that kind of damage. The task is finished when the player has made a suit with at least 65% physical and 65% fire resist. Once this suit is finished, the player will receive a Dragon slayer weapon and get his third assignment: Go to Destard and slay five Dragons. This way the player will learn the meaning of different resists.
   
• There should be quests that explain in detail some of the most important magic attributes on armor, weapons and jewelry. Those quests should teach the player how important the effects of such attributes are, how items can be combined and enhanced, and which items can be used for imbuing.
   
• Adventuring quests that introduce some of the less dangerous dungeons to new players. The player should receive some information about a dungeon, i.e. what kinds of monster there are, how many levels it has, and where it can be found. Then he will be sent into this dungeon where he has to find certain artifacts hidden in different dungeon levels. This way the player will have to explore all levels of the dungeon and learn about dealing with more dangerous monsters.
  Also, quests should send new players to different landmarks in Britannia to complete a task, but the player is not allowed to use traveling spells during the quest. He has to go on foot or mount, thus getting acquainted with Britannian geography. Some of the ideas described in a previous column can be used to make the journey more interesting for the player.
   
• The available sandbox games in UO should be introduced by quests, for example plant growing. First, the player will receive information about how it works, and some ingredients (poison and cure potions, fertile dirt, water pitcher etc.). He will also receive a special fertilizer so he can grow a plant within 3 days and doesn't have to wait that long. He will learn how to gather seeds and whatever else the plant yields. Then he will be taught how to create dyes from that plant by using alchemy or cooking. This should be done in a easily comprehensible step-by-step quest.
   
• There should be multi-stage quests making players acquainted with all kinds of non-fighting and non-crafting complex skills, like animal taming, musicianship, herding, fishing, cartography, stealth etc. In these quests the player should learn how to train the skill, how to use the skill, and what actually can be done with that skill.
   
• At the New Haven port, quests should be offered to introduce players to sailing and fishing. Those quests should send players out into the ocean, teach them how to use the enhanced Client map utility, how to use sextants and sea charts. They should send players (again, with traveling spells disabled) to certain islands where they can dig out artifacts and take them back to New Haven to receive a valuable reward.

The possibilities are endless. The important thing is that those quests should yield useful rewards that allow new players to explore medium level game content, and not only blessed but quite useless rewards. The higher level quests could yield 105 power scrolls or +5 stat scrolls, so the player learns that he can raise his skills beyond grandmaster level. Also, rewards should be useful pieces of equipment, for example items that allow a player to get a suit with all resists at 65%. The rewards should have the quality of minor artifacts.

Freedom and no more Safe Candy Land

The invention of the Trammel facet (no non-consensual PvP) took away the freedom from the players. Since most players will choose the safe zone if it is offered to them, non-consensual PvP practically died out. But taking away this freedom also killed the UO community, because unneglegible good and evil is what triggers strong emotions and builds the foundations of our socitey. Also, the Trammel rules prohibit a lot of things that a typical MMORPG player would expect to work. Why can I not attack a guard or an NPC in town? The consequence may be death, but just making them non-attackable seems absurd. Same for not being able to cast area effect spells in town, or the way area effects work in guild wars. Also, why can a player not poison food properly to poison anyone who eats it? There are many examples that show that the safety of Trammel has been exaggerated to an extreme extent, so players cannot even hurt themselves anymore. People retreated into their safe zone where they will bore themselves to death. Taking away the last bit of responsibility and freedom from the players will turn them into dumb item-hunters, and it will kill the spirit of any MMORPG. But at the same time, especially new players need to be somehow protected from massive griefing.

I have written extensively about the problems I see with the current Trammel system in another column. You may ask what all this has to do with new players. I am convinced that what draws new players to an MMORPG is a certain kind of freedom, but also adventure and risk. All this is currently non-existant in Trammel. The consequence is that players seeking for adventure (which are the players UO needs the most) will eventually find UO boring and leave again. Only people who like to play safe simulation games will find UO interesting, which is a vicious circle leading to UO becoming more and more like SIMS.

Advertisement

When all the above steps have been taken, it is important that players who have never heard of UO will become interested in this game. There are many cost-effective ways to advertise such a game and demonstrate to all the unaware people out there what UO really has to offer. Currently, people see in UO an out-dated old game with unattractive graphics. Nobody has the slightest clue about what UO has to offer. A simple well-done 3-minute high-resolution YouTube video could most efficiently demonstrate the quality of this game at almost no cost.

It is a pity to see that the whole marketing potential of the internet, which is available even if you have no or very little budget, is not utilized at all. It is shocking to see that nobody from EA is able to make a deal with the big gaming magazines and give them an in-depth demonstration of what UO really is.

Another interesting method would be to let people play UO for free. They should be able to create one character and access most of the game content, but without being able to abuse the system. Free players should be limited to the landmass of Britannia, they should have a limited bank box, should not be allowed to gather more than 300 of each resource, should not be able to hold or use commodity deeds, should not be allowed to build a house or own a boat, should not be allowed to own more than 200,000 gold pieces, should not be allowed to hold or use books and mark runes. Their skills should be limited to 80 skill points. The game client should have a feature to mute all free players, so spamming the screen during events can be prevented. This way, UO would open their gates to people who want to get thoroughly acquainted with UO, who want to test most of the skills and explore what the gaming world has to offer. This is the only way to get a good impression of UO. Free accounts should only expire after 1 month of inactivity.

Conclusion

I think I have demonstrated quite well that:
- currently, UO is not very new-player-friendly
- it would not be too difficult to make UO attractive for players who never have played UO before.

If nothing is done to attract new players to UO, the game will sooner or later die out, no matter how many great expansions and new features are introduced. The number of fans and veterans are inevitably dwindling. It would be a pity if a fantastic game like UO would fade away, just because we missed a great opportunity to change the course.

[ Back to the main page ]