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Last week I took a look at school starting patterns by week based on traffic levels at What MMORPG, which has a significant high school and college aged population. Ultimately, I think we pinned down most schools started the fourth week of August. There is also some evidence to suggest that the beginning of school is either more time consuming or more stressful than a few weeks later. However, the change in traffic isn’t as significant as we see from the first week in August versus the fourth week.
Continuing this idea, I created a similar chart for indexed traffic by day during the same time period as the chart from last week. My apologies go out to those who may have trouble reading the dates. The main date I will call attention to is August 30th, which is a Tuesday. As the the lowest point on the chart and as a day during, which I assumed earlier, is the week by which most schools have started I think this is the actual day most schools start.
Obviously weekends always produce higher traffic than weekdays. Weekends are rest days for everyone and there are few better ways to relax than a nice video game. What is intriguing about the after affect of schools being in session is the disparity between weekends and weekdays. It’s fairly intuitive that gamers are going to get their gaming in and that weekends provide full, free days which allow for that. It’s still a stark contrast between the high point of Sunday, September 18 vs Sunday, August 7 when few to no schools had started.
Certainly some conclusions could be wrong, and if so inclined, I could look up further data to support or disprove my analysis. Still, that doesn’t change how interesting it is to look at some type of a pattern like schools starting classes with something as nontraditional as a video game website’s traffic records. Hope this was worth the read and feel free to comment or contact our support for any other interesting things we can analyze with our traffic.
School is pretty much in full swing now and the reason I know isn’t because I’m stalking starting class schedules across the country. The traffic levels at whatmmorpg.com have continued to rise as a whole, discounting seasonality. However, in August we started to see a decline that has been steadily worsened around the end of August and early September. A drop of 10% isn’t the end of the world, but it’s certainly significant enough to indicate a major shift. Being the end of summer and a reasonable portion of What MMORPG visitors being high school and college students, I think we can surmise school starting is the culprit. With two full weeks in September behind us, I thought it would be interesting to take note of our traffic levels to see just what is going on around schools in the country.
All of these charts on done on an index basis so anything at 1.00 on the chart is the highest volume day or week. Everything else is a relative percentage compared to that max value. With that said, let’s get started. The first chart below is weekly for the past six weeks. You will see a small dip starting with week #2 (Aug 8-14) that dips again slightly at week #3 (Aug 15-21). I’m not aware of any schools that started as early as August 8 so I believe that’s more representative of getting ready for the school year to start, last minute family trips, and a general decrease in summer fun.
The second, and much more significant, drop is at week #4 (Aug 22-28). While some schools did start as early as the week of August 15, this data suggests that most schools started class sometime during the week of August 22. There’s probably some mix of college students arriving on campus starting as early as week #2. I assume that college students arrive roughly the same length of time before school actually starts so the weekly graph should still be telling of what week classes actually begin. With a final drop in week #5 (Aug 29 – Sep 4), I believe most schools have started classes. However, we see a rise in traffic in two consecutive weeks (Sep 5 – 11, Sep 12 – 18) immediately following week #5. As school has finally kicked into gear at this point it’s very possible gamers are looking to squeeze in some more gaming time to counter the drudgery of their educational woes. As such it is possible there were a few schools that started during weeks #6 and #7. I do feel that it’s safe to say the majority of schools in the US (where we receive 80%+ of our traffic) start class the fourth week of August.
Within the next week I will follow up to this post with a look at our daily chart during the same time frame. That should give us a few more areas of interest to poke around. Kids, enjoy your classes!
World of Warcraft is at last joining the free to play crowd. Well…sort of. The game is still pay to play but the World of Warcraft Starter Edition does away with the limited time trial that Blizzard used to offer and replaces it with a new 100% free experience. How does it hold up versus other free to play games?
Overall, it’s an OK experience but unless you are using this as a quick and easy WoW fix it’s going to provide a lot of long term enjoyment. All race and class combinations are available which is a leg up on games like Lord of the Rings Online. So starting out you really won’t notice a difference from pay to play World of Warcraft. There’s no limit to questing and your character is just as powerful as any other noob.
It starts to go downhill when you want to experience the main crux of an MMO: socialization. You can’t mail other players (probably for spam reasons) but worse is that you can’t even form a party! I know World of Warcraft is solo friendly but really that’s pretty lame. You’ll need to find a party leader under level 20 who is willing to invite you if you want to experience WoW’s grouping. Oh and you don’t get access to public chat. You might as well pretend all the other players are NPCs with as much human interaction as you’ll be getting.
In fact it becomes pretty clear just how limited this free to play World of Warcraft really is. Below are some of the most major limitations:
・ A player can only have a maximum of 10 gold.
・ A player cannot trade through the Auction House, mailbox, or player-to-player.
・ A player can’t speak on the public chat channels. The chat is limited to whispers, /say and party chat. (If the player can find a person he can party with.)
・ A player can’t create or join a guild.
・ A player cannot ‘whisper’ other players unless that player is on the friends list.
・ A player can’t form a party but can be invited in to parties from a full WoW player.
・ Voice chat is disabled.
・ Starter edition players will be pushed back in any log-in queues.
Clearly a lot of the above is to prevent spammers from ruining the experience for other players. Yet there are plenty of free to play games that have solved this problem without such harsh measures against it’s free players. While the World of Warcraft starter edition is an improvement over the week long free trial, it’s a barely.
If your goal is to find a good free to play game, look elsewhere. If your goal is to play World of Warcraft just buy the game. The Starter Edition is not going to drive repeated logins.
This is more of an FYI than anything else. Over the next couple weeks we are going to test some new site designs and layouts. Some changes will be bigger than others. Feel free to give us any feedback you would like but we’ll be monitoring how the new layouts get used.
With that said, we currently have the first new layout/theme up and running. Hope it’s well received but if not it will only take a few minutes to revert back to the old site so no worries!
July is such a great month for celebrating independence and burning up in sweltering heat. Sit back, watch some ID4, and lather up that sunblock while you grill. Like any other month there’s some specialty additions that define it. For What MMORPG, we have our own additions that define July.
You may have noticed several new country flags in the top right corner. Up until last week they were all for show, but now we have specialized listings for certain categories for Italy, Australia, France, and Poland. There’s not a ton of international traffic to the site relative to what we see in the US but anything to help make finding games faster is an exciting addition.
Outside of that are just the regular updates with new games, new comics, and new articles. The featured article this month looks into the closing of Star Wars Galaxies and the possible correlation to the launch of The Old Republic. Our most popular recent comic pokes fun at the inventory management systems in MMORPGs. The biggest hit for recently reviewed games is definitely Battle of the Immortals. This is a great Diablo clone with a lot of added depth that can be played for free so check it out!
Not really an addition but I also wanted to point out that we have 100 fans for our Facebook page. We’ve only recently taken an active interest in promoting this further so it’s promising to see we have some early adopting fans. Thanks!
When you run a MMORPG site you are going to get lots of spam about people advertising their various video games. When you run a blog of any kind you are going to get spam about everything. At times, it’s an annoying process to clear out the post queue of the garbage tossed into it. However, it also provides an amusing list of absurd sentences that are pretty fun to analyze and rarely have anything to do with the related topic. Spam is pretty awful in general but when something makes you laugh, it can’t be all bad can it?
Engrish Would be an Improvement
One spammer, in the past 2 weeks, has commented not once, but twice on my very first blog post (from early April). That post is basically an introduction of things to come. Spammer’s response?
“I was probably part contented to rove this web-site.I wanted to thanks in behalf of your date in the exhausted to of this wonderful mean to!! I certainly enjoying every two secs footprints of it and I partake of you bookmarked to into veldt bushy-tailed possessions you blog post.”
Followed shortly thereafter by…
“I was infinitely contented to wallowin this web-site.I wanted to thanks in behalf of your provisions in the palpable estate of this wonderful allot to!! I certainly enjoying every little map of it and I partake of you bookmarked to into visual bushy-tailed possessions you blog post.”
I could understand a mad libs approach to leaving spam comments where you insert adjective A in one spot, noun B in another, etc. In his second spam post this guy/robot just replaces random words from his first post with random dictionary words in his second post. It doesn’t make any less sense though because the first post equally reads like it was written by an illiterate chimpanzee on meth. Way to go!
Misssppelinng
There must be a code among spammers to misspell at least one word in every sentence. I suppose this helps get past spam detectors. It also helps me block the comment. The following have shown up at various points in the blog’s history:
“Thats really srhwed! Good to see the logic set out so well.”
“It’s sopoky how clever some ppl are. Thanks!”
“Real brain power on display. Tahkns for that answer!”
Ironic that none of the people that compliment intelligence have enough of it themselves to spell elementary vocabulary words.
Repetitive Redundancy
This one was very creative:
“I would really like to thank you so much for your job you have made in writing this piece of writing. I am hoping the same most reliable job from you later on as well.”
I hope I don’t fail Mr. Spammer! Lastly, I’m not sure if the one below belongs in the misspelling category or this one. Either way, it’s my favorite:
“That’s not just the best answer. It’s the bestset answer!”
Not only does this spammer invent a word, he/she/it fails to spell it correctly.
Thanks spammers…you’re the bestset.
Posted in Funny
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Tagged Spam
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It’s been an unfortunate while since a blog posting has been written. I feel that some readers may have been let down but really I know as long as the game listings are up and running people will stay happy. I’m going to make it up with a special next week…
June has been pretty interesting when it comes to space and sci fi MMORPGs. Eve Online was attacked by the same group that took down the Playstation Network, resulting in an inoperable login server temporarily. This was one of the first attacks by the group to target something a little closer to gamers’ hearts and forums in various MMO communities were not taking it too well. It’s one thing to go after a corporate entity that seems to hate their customers, but going after an indie gaming company? That brought a bit of a rage – not that I imagine the hackers care too much.
Firefly Universe Online is making a comeback and is now under development again, this time by the indie crew DarkCryo. Hopefully this will live to see a release as there are many die hard Firefly fans. Unfortunately it seems like this will get shut down by legal issues before it gets anywhere, but perhaps will see a product where they can make some money. They do love their money.
Lastly, Star Wars Galaxies will be shutting down before 2011 ends. One can only speculate that Lucas Arts has no desire for this game to compete with Bioware’s upcoming “The Old Republic”. Also, the game has been a shell since a complete revamp outraged the player base. Perhaps this will be a lasting lesson for developers to enhance gaming experiences, not slop together something nobody asked for.
It’s always fun making changes and new additions to the website. Seeing the website grow and evolve is a rewarding experience, and I’m pretty happy with the changes since What MMORPG launched about 1.5 years ago. Over the past couple of days there are a couple new additions to the site. First is the addition of the Facebook ‘like’ button placed above every page. Now that the website is fairly deep with content, I feel that it’s important to start building a community. Facebook and the forums are both great ways to at least get that process rolling. By ‘liking’ the Facebook, users are helping to show their support for the work invested into the site. The Facebook group also serves as a way to highlight top articles and comics on our website. It’s especially useful if you don’t use our RSS feed.
The second addition is more of a tool to help gamers find their new MMOs quickly and easily. It’s called MMO Advisor and it works by offering up several selections by which to sort MMO games. After you hit submit, your query will search through our database of roughly 150 games to see which games best fit your criteria. It’s more or less a beta version and there’s more work to be done, but I don’t feel like plastering beta on something just cause it’s new. I’m accepting comments and opinions on what to improve, and I feel like that’s what’s most important.
PS – Today’s Google doodle is a guitar you can actually play. That’s awesome.
Funcom has finally announced that their most visceral MMO, Age of Conan, will be converted to a freemium model this summer. It’s also going unrated, whatever that means. I find it amusing that at the end of their PR announcement they glorify Age of Conan as a smashing success by shipping over 1.4 million copies around the world. Despite such a “smashing success”, we are seeing forum posts like this one that depict Age of Conan as a ghost town 3 years after it’s release. Freemium has worked for other higher profile releases such as Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons Online, and it will work out for Age of Conan. The only question is why did it take Funcom so long to switch the game over?
There is certainly an element of fear for gaming companies to give away their subscription based product for free. For one it’s possible to make less money as players who used to subscribe can now technically play for free. Secondly, there’s a perception that free games are poor quality and by going to a free model Funcom may feel that they are saying that Age of Conan is not a high quality game. In reality the freemium model gives underpopulated games the feature they most need: players.
Age of Conan offers players a world with a combat system that is different than a typical MMORPG. The depth of content pales in comparison to games like World of Warcraft however. Different isn’t enough to keep an MMORPG running long term, but compared to many other free MMORPGs, Age of Conan will be a breath of fresh air. This should have been done around winter 2010 when lack of population started to be more noticeable. By the time this free version goes live, games like TERA and Guild Wars 2 will be hot on it’s tracks and perhaps not give people enough time to get drawn into Age of Conan. Nonetheless, it’s better late than never but I think MMO game publishers have a lot to learn in how to best market their products. MMORPGs are living entities and the pricing structures should be no different.
The MMORPG genre is one of the fastest changing genres that feels like one of the slowest changing genres. When Ultima Online launched we had a full open world where everyone was catered to, but that meant carefree crafting and monster hunter folk had to interact with dangerous player killers. Then EverQuest came along and provided an outlet for greater questing and PvE challenges. Eve Online offered the open world (well..universe) experience that Ultima Onlne offered but provided a safe place for players who absolutely hated PvP. They also offered a leveling experience that never required players to be online to advance their characters.
Later on, World of Warcraft would provide an experience that anyone could get in to. They combined usability with a near perfect element of hanging carrots on a stick, in terms of character advancement, in front of their players. Then Guild Wars proved you could provide an AAA MMO (albeit one heavily instanced) that provided content on par with subscription based MMOs. Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) launched popular IPs into the MMO space and provided almost no meaningful PvP content but were strong on PvE. LOTRO also offered an in depth and ongoing story for players. DDO gave us an action oriented combat system with a game that was entirely instanced. LOTRO and DDO would shake things up again by merging a reduced content version of their games for free players with the regular content available for paying players.
In about 15 years we have seen everything the MMORPG genre could offer us. Other games, in addition to the above, such as Planetside and Darkfall added something unique on their release. However, at this point developers are never going to revolutionize the genre. What developers, and probably more importantly publishers, need to realize is the power of the niche. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead mix and match features in an effort to garner 200k subscribers. Developers already know how to do a feature well because it’s already been done. There are so many of these key features that can be combined to attract players that developers have thousands of different product possibilities. Eastern MMO developers with smaller budgets have already realized this. Games like Allods and Aika are nothing substantially new. Even compared to each other the big difference is Aika’s large scale nation war vs. Allods effort to clone World of Warcraft’s gameplay. Yet that is enough to separate and create two different playerbases.
If big budget publishers and developers got behind reusing and combining already perfected features then THAT would be MMO revolution. MMOs would have less total features but the ones pushed out together would be the only ones that the target audience would care about. Players would have hundreds of significantly unique worlds to choose from without any degradation in quality. Publishers would have more commercially successful ventures.
Remember, 200k in sales for a non-MMO is considered a success for pretty much anything outside of major IPs such as Halo, Mario, Zelda, and Call of Duty or games by Blizzard and Bioware. Why should 200k subscriptions or a revenue stream from a F2P cash shop that equals 200k subscriptions be any different? In fact, it’s worth more because of the ongoing revenue. Target niches and see a higher ROI. The blueprints for success have already been laid.
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