Summary

MMO Strategy games are very popular because of the depth of the user experience and the ability to work with other gamers for the general good.
MMO is actually short for MMORPG which stands for Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game.
MMO’s are really economic games even though most do have a war element also. SimCity Build or even Farmville are examples of MMO’s without a war element. They are economic games in the sense that they allow the player to build and allocate resources to acheive specific goals. For instance, a player may need to produce a lot of food to level-up a building so they would divert resources from something like wood production to food production in the short term. The player has to manage resources and growth based on their objectives.

Well designed games all use the same method for getting the gamer invested in the game and can be illustrated by this curve.

levels <- 1:15
resources <- c(200, 2000, 3000, 4900, 9700, 
               26400, 60100, 106700, 190400, 322900, 
               481800, 608300, 957700, 1239800, 1522500)

plot(levels, resources)

Explaining the Curve

A game designer wants to move a gamer from not-invested in their app to fully-invested as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is how they do it…

Gamer not emotionally invested in game at all

The gamer finds a new MMO on their app store and decides to give it a try.
The first time they open the game they start at the most basic level, maybe a small castle and a plot of farming and forest land. They quickly discover that they can produce more food by leveling up the farm. Once they produce enough food and wood they can level up their castle.
The early levels are mostly instructional to get the gamer used to the gameplay and familiar with all of the buildings and resources at their disposal. These early levels can also be progressed through quickly, as indicated by the first ~5 levels in the chart.
Psychologically the gamer now realizes that they have catapulted themselves ahead of all the gamers that tried the game and gave up shortly thereafter.
Good games also put the gamer with others at the same level so that they can grow together.

Gamer partially invested in game

At this stage the gamer is still determining whether the overall quality and gameplay is good enough to keep them interested for the long-term. They understand the basics and are still discovering new things.

In levels ~6-10 the time and amount of resources needed to upgrade starts growing exponentially. It was actually going up exponentially before but the numbers were so small that they were virtually insignificant. Levelling up from level 2 to 3 may have taken 5 minutes of build time, but levelling up from 9 to 10 may take 4 or 5 hours.

Since there is a significant time-investment in each upgrade the gamer has to be more strategic with how they want to progress. Do they want to build a big army, or focus on developing resources?

This is the stage where the gamer starts checking in multiple times per day to ensure that continuous building is going on with a minimal of unused resource time.

Gamer fully invested in game

The gamer has now advanced to a fairly high level within the game compared to other players.
They have mastered all of the levers of production and the gameplay has slowed down to where any major upgrade takes days of preparation to grow or plunder the resources and then maybe several moe days to build the upgrade.

They have switched from karate (quick strikes to acheive objectives) to jiu-jitsu (minor adjustments to acheive objectives).

The gamer could get by with just checking in once a day and still advance at a predictable pace.

Other factors

All of these games offer the ability to speed up production by spending real money. Usually the first offer is for what would be considered a lot of resources for someone in the partially-invested stage for 99 cents. It’s a bargain. It’s also a slippery-slope.

Once the gamer has made the first small purchase they have psychologically registered that this is an option if they get into a crunch in the future. Then they start seeing offers for $4.99 or $19.99 and it becomes much easier to make those purchasing decisions.

It is a fairly virtuous business-model. Gamers that don’t want to spend money don’t have to and they are not unduly punished for it. They will just have to spend more time developing there kingdom. Gamers that want to be top-ranked can spend an unlimited amount and quickly level-up to elite status. Game developers have to make money to build their games and this model of “free with in-app purchase options” is a fair way to grow a user base and open up a revenue stream to pay for future development.

Origin of source data for plot

I was playing Guns of Glory recently and my castle was at level 11 and I wanted to upgrade it to level 12. The time to build the upgrade was 21 hours and I still needed to grow a lot of food and harvest a lot of wood before I had the resources to start the build.

I realized that I had seen this pattern before. Fast-growth at the start that gets progressively slower but not in a linear fashion.

Unfortunately, once you pass a level you can’t look back and see how many resources or build time it took so I relied on a single set of data points to illustrate the curve used in every aspect of this game.

In Guns of Glory there is a Kingdom map which shows your estate along with other estates around you. There are also “beasts” that you can use your army to defeat and get resources. Each of the beasts is given a level and each level has a corresponding “Recommended Troop Power” to defeat them.

Luckily on my map there are still beasts of every level from 1 to 15, even though my castle is level 11. I noted the “Recommended Troop Power” for each level and plotted the points which clearly displays an exponential curve. Note that the level 12 point is not quite in line with the others leading me to believe that they were manually decided on instead of generating them through an algorithm.

The Clash of Clans Curve: How modern MMO Strategy Games get you Hooked

Kier O’Neil

6/7/2018