Levitikon
Constructive Influence
Northern Associates.
0
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Posted - 2011.11.09 22:20:00 -
[1] - Quote
Lots of this post is written in all-caps, because it's friggin' important.
Ok. Every mmo on market has a launcher. so, nothing special here (funny fact - I considered EVE launcher-less design to be an next gen solution - no crappy extra app needed to run).
That said.
since you're implementing launcher, MAKE SURE TO LEVERAGE EVE'S ADVANTAGES and DO NOT WRITE CODE THAT WILL BE NEVER USED OR APPRECIATED BY 99,99% OF PLAYERBASE (aka. staging). In other words - PLEASE ADD BUILT-IN MULTI-ACCOUNT SUPPORT and preferably multi-character support.
Why?
Staging is pretty much useless (I know it sounds nice on paper), because there is a very small chance people will spend long enough in character creator to get EVE-proper downloaded and installed in the background. So, in the end, they will be stuck on waiting screen whether you waste precious coding resources or staging, or not. Chances that this feature will actually improve new player retention are pretty damn slim - mostly because waiting for EVE to install is not where churn happens - it's mostly at horrible, Win95 based (CCP words, not mine) user interface that users are subjected to after they log to game proper. So, if you want to improve player retention, this is where you should be focusing all your efforts.
Another obvious problem with staging, is that it will not be used by anyone who already has a character. I can estimate and bet 10B isk to you, that in month time, more than 99,99% player launcher interactions would not use staging.
Instead, focus on strengthening unique points of EVE, and that is:
-extremely widespread multiboxing use (WHICH ALREADY GENERATES CRAZY ARPU, AND CAN BE FURTHER IMPROVED)
-multicharacter use; no other game puts such emphasis on using alts, and alts are gateway drugs to true multiboxing
Instead of staging (another Incarna, coding resource allocation-wise), give us following features:
1. Ability to select account from launcher.
2. Ability to launch/stage multiple accounts at once.
3. Ability to chose which character to log in.
4. Mixture of the above.
4. Tabbed clients, in longer term (not as a brand new, multi-session capable client that will require full EVE rewrite, just as a way to manage multiple EVE client windows, new UI scaling framework you devblogged about recently will nicely into it)
Make it easy to multibox and encourage people to do so. It will make playerbase happy and will make you much more money than some than staging character creation ever could . |