CNN’s Geek Out blog has a new article out today called “The migratory patterns of MMO gamers”. In the article the author, Nikki Rau-Baker, talks about the pattern of MMO players to leave their game to try another game.
The article speaks on a couple games but LOTRO is a bit more prominent as it is something that the author is familiar with and plays herself.
Nikki speaks with Jim Drewry, VP of digital publishing, and Adam Mersky, director of digital communications, for Warner Bros. Entertainment . Turbine/WB has never shared subscriber numbers for LOTRO and I found the response WB gave to Nikki’s question about this interesting.
“We’ll just say we’re huge, but we don’t really share too much in the way of numbers. We are adding new players every day.”
The reason I find it so interesting is I personally am hearing the opposite. I play on Landroval which is a well populated server and I know there are other servers with a healthy population as well. I know LOTRO to be thriving where I play with new folks jumping on board all the time just as the quote indicates.
However, I hear of other servers not really so crowded. Particularly from players who decided to move to Landroval is who I hear this from and they compare their previous server to Landroval’s population. To those players, they may not see LOTRO’s player base as “huge”.
I also have to bring up a question about how a Free-to-Play MMO measures “subscriber numbers”. Are subscribers anyone with an account (active or not), and account that is actively playing, an account that is purchasing goods in the store or only those paying a monthly fee? You could see how given how it’s defined could make a huge difference on the answer to the “subscriber numbers” question.
Merksy also comments on the trend to share in the social network scene more:
With social media, gamers can interact with each other and reps from their favorite games in ways they never could before, even five years ago. Mersky says gaming companies such as Turbine are “constantly evolving how to communicate with people in ways like Twitter and Facebook. It’s no longer just going to the forums.”
This couldn’t be more true for me, I dislike reading the forums and when I do go there, it’s typically just to look at the dev tracker.
LOTRO conducts contests and announces lotteries on their twitter which is great way to keep players involved with the company and of course if they win something, will keep them interested in the game.
It’s not a perfect system though. There needs to be a final resting place for information. Twitter is a medium to announce and share news, not where the details are parsed out. I suppose you technically could host all the information on a place like Facebook or Google+ but it’s probably better you don’t. Link folks to the full details back on the main site. That just pushes us back into the forums many of us don’t like (or to the beta site).
I will agree with the article that community makes up MMO stickiness. Having fun with friends (real or internet) in game is probably what is going to determine how much you play the game more than the game itself. LOTRO is great but if I found myself wandering alone with a dwindling kinship or community, I could leave LOTRO in favor of doing quests with friends in a different MMO.
I am aware that some prefer to play alone. Treat MMOs like a solo console game of sorts. They solo through levels and purposely do not join kinships. That’s fine. I’m not here to tell you how to enjoy your game and I am known to go off and do my own thing as well.
From my personal experience, when my community falls apart is when I decide to move on. That doesn’t even mean to a new game. I’ve had communities that fell apart and I’ve simply switched servers to try and find a new community in the same game.
To the general point of the article. Yeah. MMO players try new games. This is not new and I don’t think it will ever stop. People will come and go and some return and some don’t. This is true for a lot of things, not just games (*looks at her pile of unused scrapbooking supplies*).
To put it into Hobbit-thinking, just because you really really love chocolate pie, doesn’t mean you won’t try the blueberry pie when it comes out of the oven!
Source: Geek Out!
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January 31, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Mmmmmmm. Pie.
January 31, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Lotro is the only mmo I have ever played, and I started playing due to my love of Tolkien’s writing. I generally play solo or with my wife, so in many respects I guess similar to a console game. I am uneasy playing in fellowships, raids, instances etc with others as I am not confident enough in my own ability as a player, and therefore probably don’t get everything out of an mmo that I should. However, whilst I don’t like playing alongside others, I like playing at the same time as them and interacting with them. I don’t think I would ever move to another mmo even if the numbers shrank (gilrain isn’t huge, but it’s generally a nice bunch). I don’t think another world would grasp my imagination in the same way as middle earth. Well, maybe a sergio leone spaghetti western mmo may
February 1, 2012 at 2:26 am
it was the same for me, i had a bit of “fear” to start doing instances and then raids because i always used to think i don’t play good enough for that. well after i started grouping, i found out i wasn’t the worst at it. not the best either, but somewhere in the middle (i hope). if you do decide to start doing something like that, just remember to ask if you have any concerns regarding strategy and such. people on gilrain usually respond well to that and take the time to explain stuff. well most people anyway.
good luck and enjoy the game, anyway you choose to play it!
February 1, 2012 at 2:57 am
One thing I found is that, if you want to be good at raids and instances, it’s helpful to get tips from people who are good at them. Specifically, people who play your class.
I’ve found that most players will freely give advice, often good advice, if you ask them.
February 3, 2012 at 1:26 pm
This is exactly how my wife and I started to play. When we got one toon to endgame we started another and levelled it, all “solo” (duo). However, the longer we played, the more we started grouping. As confidence built we even took one or two stabs at PUG raids (although we didn’t love doing them and usually only tried once or twice). Then, after playing for a while, we got recruited by a nice kin and can now play all the content with non-judgemental friends.
So we totally sympathise, and hope your experience turns out like our own soon.
February 4, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Pesky – your post could have been written by me verbatim. I’m not a pure ‘gamer’ at heart. Therefore because of Tolkien, LotRO is also my first and only MMO. The lore is the reason I’m here and I don’t forsee any other game distracting my interest, not even SWTOR. As good as the SW universe is, it’s still not the lore of Tolkien, and besides, I don’t have as much time as I would like to play LotRO, much less another game. So here I will stay. After about 14 months of playing I’m still learning the ropes of the different classes and how to play them effectively in different settings. I tend to gravitate more toward a solo playstyle but would like to group more, however getting into a fellowship to do the group content I want always seems a cumbersome process at best. I have not tried the istance finder yet, mostly because I don’t want to waste my precious game time running anything other than the group content I want, not something from a slot machine. Anyway, just thought I’d mention you are not alone in your gaming situation…well maybe the spaghetti western MMO thing.
January 31, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Oh, I intend to eat a lot of blueberry pie. And by blueberry pie, I mean Guild Wars 2.
January 31, 2012 at 5:01 pm
I think one thing that helps is great fan sites, too. You guys are doing an awesome job.
Beyond that… I never know what to think with the “my server isn’t busy!” stuff. With Turbine not giving any numbers, all we have are people’s random frames of reference. People are not good at self reporting and many of those frames of reference are skewed or have highly variable factors affecting them.
I suppose the last thing that matters to anyone is their own personal experience, regardless of actual numbers.
The only “good” way of adding players up that I’ve ever found is using the Looking for Fellowship tool and then filtering it by level and area. It only displays 100 entries at a time, so it’s helpfulness is limited lol
January 31, 2012 at 5:08 pm
And then there’s those players that are Anonymous and will not show up in the LFF window.
The way I see it, servers cost money. If a server isn’t self-sufficient, it would make more sense for that server to go away, its characters transferred to another server that will pull its weight.
That has yet to happen in LOTRO. Not that it’s inconceivable that it couldn’t happen eventually. But I think the fact that they added more servers speaks volumes in and of itself.
January 31, 2012 at 5:31 pm
LOTRO has been the main MMO for me. It helps that the Landroval server, which I play on, is well populated and has the best community. I have to agree with Bry though, im going to fill up on a lot of GW2 pie.
January 31, 2012 at 5:50 pm
The companies that *do* give out numbers tend to play a bit loose… the usual is to give ‘registered users’ and imply ‘subscribers’ instead. Blizzard was one of the few who actually reported numbers using a reasonable definition, not that they’ve been releasing any subscriber numbers for a while now.
On a different subject, do you have a link to the dev tracker? Or some hints on where I could find it…
January 31, 2012 at 5:53 pm
There is a link to the dev tracker on the top of the forums page. Right under the forums tab.
January 31, 2012 at 6:40 pm
http://forums.lotro.com/turbine_tracker.php?tracker=dev
February 1, 2012 at 1:39 am
One word: Layering.
Plenty of times I’ve been standing, alone in a hub and I can see that little icon. I know that others are there I just can’t see them..
February 1, 2012 at 6:25 am
Well you heard right GS, server population elsewhere is sort of dwindling. On the Riddermark for instance, from my observation, we’ve lost 50% of our players. My kinship alone has been reduced to the size of a fishbowl and I’m pretty sure the majority of players that are left are the server veterans. Also, the questions you presented about the amount of player account figures in f2p is spot on. They just can’t measure these things accurately. But in the end, I somewhat really want to see them do well for the next expansion and hopefully bring our players back!
February 1, 2012 at 7:30 am
I think a lot of games have been poached by SWTOR, which is an anomaly in terms of new MMOs coming out. I know of several people who left their previous MMO for the galaxy far, far away, but have since gone back. Their reasons vary, from their friends not playing to not liking the class quests to gameplay issues (the SWTOR GUI, for example, is horrible and allows for virtually no customization).
Since the “official” launch, the first month has past, which means some peoples’ intial play period has ended, and the first of the multiple-month subscriptions are set to expire in about a month and a half, so it will be interesting to see how the MMO game populations stabilise. I suspect that some people will go back to their previous games as they start hitting the level cap and they run out of new content.
I have heard multiple complaints about the community not being as cohesive as LOTRO’s, and I have also heard a lot of people complain that the game’s players are all ex-pats from WoW (in the negative connotation). My experience, however, is that there are good people and jerks on every server, and that the community is there to enjoy, it just might take a while to find it.
Personally, I would be very interested to see a big stack of LOTRO census and server population data, broken down by player region, subscription, play time, etc. to see who’s playing LOTRO, but that’s probably asking for too much.
February 1, 2012 at 8:32 am
I resemble that analysis. I’ve barely logged into LOTRO since SWTOR came out, except to earn the new yule horse on a few characters. The game has been tired to me for a while, and the new currency changes killed my will to grind out the Draigoch armor on any other characters. I’d like to try the new instances sometime, but the new armor stats aren’t that great. SWTOR is fresh and new and I don’t see myself wanting to do much in this game until update 6 comes out. So it goes.
February 1, 2012 at 11:34 am
Me too.
I’ve only logged into LoTRO to pay maintenance on my personal and kin houses. All my other time has been on SWTOR. I ripped through the last LoTRO expansion so quickly that I don’t think I got the most out of it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but, I’ve decided to take a break for a while so that when I return, I can rediscover what I love about LoTRO.
LoTRO was also my first MMO and I’ve got a founder account so, I’m not really wasting money or anything.
I consider myself on holiday exploring galaxies far, far away (and yes the SWTOR GUI sucks but I love the story lines).