There’s a sale on Back To The Future: The Game until Friday. At 10€, I think I’ll bite. I love BTTF, and at that price… Even if it might only be a couple of hours of fun (I heard the puzzles are easy enough that it’s almost an interactive movie).

If anybody knows the games and can speak for or against them, pray tell.

Do you know the wikipedia feeling? The one where you just want to look up who was king after Queen Victoria, and an hour later, you end up with 40 tabs on topics such as the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the Hagia Sophia, homosexuality in the Batman franchise, and the New Coke disaster?

Actually, I already read the last article, and it got me thinking. If you want to, go ahead and read it, too. If not, I’ll give you a short summary. Keep in mind I am both too young and too not-having-been-born-in-the-USA to have any firsthand experience; all I know about this comes from the wikipedia article, but seeing how it doesn’t seem to have any edit wars, I’ll take my chance and consider it correct information.

During the 70ies and 80ies, Coca-Cola slowly fell behind its main competitor, Pepsi Cola, in market sales. Management decided that it was time for drastic measures, and they changed the famous Coke formula. They did in-depth research and consumer testing, and came up with something that fared much better in tests that both their old formula and Pepsi.  Despite a botched press conference, their “New Coke” sold very well. But then, a very vocal minority, who claimed that Coca-Cola had sold out their identity, entered the stage. This proved disastrous, because they spearheaded a huge backlash against Coca-Cola, the movement gained momentum, and in the end the company had to revert their stance and return to the old formula because they feared they’d lose market share.

What does that have to do with MMOs? We all know that those games live and die by their perception. Many bloggers may have no love for WoW (maybe not any more), but there’s no question that the game is still very popular, and a lot of people still enjoy it, and will say so if asked. On the other hand, negative perception of a game launch can be disastrous and gain such momentum that the game will be doomed forever after. Warhammer Online and Vanguard are two examples of what can go wrong (disregarding for a moment the problems they had even without that at launch), and Gordon at We Fly Spitfire talked about that just recently.

Behold, the Warhammer Online or Vanguard of the early 80ies.

To influence perception and gain momentum, people need a platform for communication. In Coca-Cola’s case, the press was interested to cover the stories, simply because it was a huge company, and the “secret formula” had been (and sometimes still is) such an interesting marketing ploy that abandoning it made for a story in itself. In the case of MMOs, you won’t see TV coverage in the evening news. But you’ll have other channels of communications. Of course, there are blogs. But let’s not overestimate our importance. (Actually, I’m not in any danger overestimating my personal importance, I think. The page hit numbers tell me exactly how insignificant I am!) The reach of blogs will in many cases not be enough to create momentum, just as in Coca-Cola’s case, a couple of news stories in a local Atlanta newspaper wouldn’t have changed anything. But there’s other channels of information: forums.

I’m talking mostly about official game forums that are hosted by the game company, and the huge fansite forums. These are frequented by a lot more people than blogs will ever be. And they add to their huge reach another phenomenon: Happy people are silent. Angry people complain. So you now have a platform just waiting to disseminate angry negative thoughts about a thousand things small and large in your game. If your current customers read this on a regular basis, they will probably eventually start feeling negative about things in your game to. Oh, and you better hope no potential customer tries to check out the state of your game via forums.

The analogy here is that in both cases, you have a very vocal minority. They are still passionate about your product (because disillusioned people just silently walk away), and they will start a crusade about whatever they consider wrong. Coca-Cola drinkers, especially proud Coca-Cola drinkers from the south, considered the formula change shameful. MMO players, especially proud players of class X, or PvPers, or RPers, or some other subgroup, will rage against perceived unfairness, or losing something they consider vital. And unless you take measures, you’ll soon be drowned in thousands of posts full of negativity, and it makes those forums a very unhappy place.

There are several ways for game companies out of this. The first one is to not care. It doesn’t make your forums fun, and leads to exactly the problems I described. The second one is to heavily moderate forums. This can lead to its own kind of backlash if people complain about overshooting moderation, or what they call “censorship”. The third one is to simply not have any forums at all. The risk in that case is that people will congregate somewhere else, where the mood can be just as bad, but you lost all chances to control it at all via moderating. So none of these really work.

What is the bottom line? Forums are bad, stay away from them if you want to stay sane. There’s not much to do about it, either. Finally, there’s the fine print: after Coca-Cola reintroduced the old formula, their sales started to rise again, not only recovering, but surpassing sales numbers for New Coke at its peak. Maybe comparing forum rages with the New Coke disaster is not such a great comparison after all. But I liked it and it just came to my mind and never left after I read the article.

Finally, there are other topics in the MMO domain that seem to have some similarity to the New Coke Disaster. Would SWG have been more successful if SOE had reverted the famous NGE? I can’t say anything about it, I never played the game. It sounds like a cute “what if” topic though. Or: did Blizzard fall into that trap with cataclysm? Most of the old world as we know it is gone, replaced by “New Azeroth, now with less running and faster leveling”. But this post is already long enough; I’ll think about that point and maybe make a post about this at a later point.

Every game needs some sort of starting area. Sometimes there are several to choose from, but in the end, there needs to be a spawn point that the game drops your newly created character into. There are a few sensible constraints that come to mind:

• It is generally not a good idea to have newbies start in the middle of your biggest city hub. That can easily be overwhelming. Someone who logs in for the first time will have enough other things to figure out, such as the UI. They don’t need the additional complexity of 100 people bustling about.
• Following up on this point, starter areas are generally designed exclusively for this function. They don’t have many things that would entice anybody to come back regularly.
• Often enough, they’re sheltered away by means of a mountain range, a dense wood, or any other thing that can function in the context of the world as an impassable barrier (the ocean!). Again, this probably helps to reduce sensory overload in the very beginning, and it will give a sense of the immenseness of the world once they leave the area for the first time and have access to all areas, at least in theory.
• Finally, most games, for practical reasons, will have the starter area still reasonably close to a main hub, or at least easily reachable. This is helpful for alts of experienced players that want to skip the introduction (or maybe even only run another mule-alt to the city, where they can fill their bank slots).

One of the more popular ways to house your starter experience is on an island, the “starter isle”. I originally noticed the fact that there were a lot of such islands in games, but then I realized a second factor that was much more important. Let me make the distinction between those two kinds of islands:

1. The geological island. This is a piece of land surrounded by water, with the sole purpose to create a starter and leveling experience for the first couple of hours. Once the characters are done, they’ll leave for the big wide world.
2. The functional island goes a step further. This might not be a geological island at all, but it is separated from the rest of the world by other means. Often, this “island” will be so separated that once you leave, you can never return. In contrast to the geological island, this means higher-level characters will never be able to interfere with the low-level experience.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. I don’t claim to have a very broad knowledge of different MMOs, but I’ll give whatever I know:

• EQ2 had two starter isles, one for good and one for evil factions. They were geological islands as well as functional ones. You sailed off, and could never return. They did away with them at some point in favor of starter zones. Interestingly, Halas still has the “starter isle within an island zone” thing, but it’s not a functional division.
• Vanguard released without a starter isle, instead had distinct starting zones that were no functional isles. You still can opt to start there. The starter isle though is one in the geological and functional sense.
• DDO added a geological isle (Korthos) in a later patch. It is a kind of functional isle, in that you can return to it later on, but will be in a different layer/phase than the starters. You can choose to skip the newbie experience altogether though.
• LotRO has no geological isles. Which islands in Middle-Earth, anyway? However, for the first couple of levels, you are instanced in story-mode. This serves as a kind of functional isle.
• WoW never really had starter isles. Until Cataclysm, interestingly. Both “completely new” starter zones for Goblins and Worgen work as functional isles that you can never return to once you leave them (the Goblin one is also a geological isle). The DK starting area was also a functional isle. But it wasn’t a starter isle, because you couldn’t roll a DK until you had another high-level character, hence there was no genuine new player experience involved.
• EVE: Of course not. I don’t want to try to define what a geological island means in space, but there is no instancing/layering/phasing. You’re a newbie, you better learn early on what it means to be griefed! (Ok, this last point was maybe a bit unfair. But you have to admit there’s a grain of truth in it.)

So, after this very lengthy introduction, the main question I want to ask is: why? Why are islands that popular, especially of type 2? None of the original four reasons for a starter area requires a functional division between starter area and the rest of the world. In fact, the only reason I can come up with is that you want to make sure higher levels cannot interfere (neither positively by helping, nor negatively by griefing) with the starter experience. Why would that be a good idea?

Rummaging a bit through my Bartle, I can come up with the community idea. Let’s consider a new player that has just joined.  Since an MMO is a social thing, you (as a designer) want him to form bonds with other players. Forming bonds is easiest if you have common goals. Joe and Joan Newbie would share the common goal of finding out what this game is about. They would easily meet each other because they start in the same area. There would be as little anxiousness as possible, because they can both assume that the other is also new and at about the same level of ignorance. Their common goal is to figure out the basics, and to progress. Immediately, there is a community of interest and, if all goes well, after a short time, a community of practice.

There’s a couple of problems with that idea, though. First of all, Joe Newbie can’t be sure that Joan Newbie is actually new to the game. She might be an alt. So the anxiousness barrier isn’t necessarily lower. Similarly, the common goal of figuring out the basics is also gone. However, they still share the common goal of progressing. That’s good, right?

Not exactly. First, they don’t necessarily share the means of reaching that goal. An alt-player will often try to progress quickly through the content he has seen a dozen times, while the newbie will want time to check out stuff. In addition, there is no incentive to group anyway, because today’s MMOs are designed for a solo experience while leveling. In fact, there’s little communication even at high levels in some games (WoW dungeon finder *cough*). If there is no incentive to group and communicate, there is no real reason to give newbies a sheltered experience. Unless there is another reason here that I can’t figure out.

I’m a bit at a loss here. Is the idea of a separate starter zone a relic of days when MMOs were group-based games before the level cap? Is it one of these things that just gets done “because X did it”? If you have any ideas, please let me know! I’m really curious.