Finding People in that Mushy Middle

 Okay, I’m going to say something that ought to be patently obvious: visible activity by other players in an MMO is critical to an MMO’s success.

It’s a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number of games that struggle with that simple notion.

"Hello??!! Anybody here??!!"

I remember when I first started playing WoW, there were people running to and fro in Eversong Forest; not that many, mind you, but enough to get the feeling that there were others inhabiting the world. Then I was taken/escorted to Orgrimmar and… Holy crap was it crowded.* 

But as I leveled, outside of a few critical places that were busy, such as Hillsbrad or Stranglethorn, the number of other players I encountered dwindled until I barely saw another soul in Outland or large sections of Northrend. At the same time, I began to see “Dalaran” more and more as the location of people I encountered and put on my friends list. It wasn’t until I reached where Dalaran floated above the Crystalsong Forest in Northrend that I truly understood just how many people played WoW on my server. 

And, more importantly, where they all were.

After that revelatory moment, I began to keep a closer eye on how MMOs handled the “multiplayer” aspect of their games. 

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It’s a rather common problem that over an MMO’s lifetime people will gather at watering holes where the current content is located. The problem is that is not where the new players are, so to a new player it certainly seems like nobody –or nearly nobody—is playing the game. 

If you don’t want people around, that’s fine; I’ll be honest in that I kind of prefer the isolation to an extent. However, if you want to do any form of group content, well… Good luck with that.** It’s just that you need people out there and visible in the world to give you the impression that the game is viable.

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By all indicators, WoW Classic Era doesn’t have a large population. The server selection screen identifies the East Coast Cluster as having a low population, and if you look at the raiding population it’s not exactly overwhelming.

However, if you enter the two capital cities in Classic Era, you’re going to find a decently sized group of people just hanging around, even at 1 AM server time. Given that you periodically return to a class trainer to train, you’re always returning to a major city while leveling. Additionally, the leveling process itself funnels you into the capital cities early on, acquainting you with the fact that this is where people go no matter their level.

The impression it leaves on a new player is that the game is active even at the beginning.

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Lord of the Rings Online does something similar in that your intro zone and first leveling zone –for clarification purposes they are distinct zones based on your race— may be active, but they all funnel you toward Bree. Bree becomes a major hub within LOTRO itself that is always active, no matter the expansion. While the leveling zones have fewer and fewer players in them, Bree is always omnipresent as a watering hole. Sure, the central location of whatever the current expansion is gets the lions’ share of players at max level, Bree is probably one of every player’s top three hangout locations. Bree shows a new player that yes, people do play the game, and some of them are even at max level out there. LOTRO may not have the activity of even WoW Classic Era, but it is active in its own way.

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When you get to Retail WoW, however, a lot of the systems put in place back in the Classic game are no longer present or no longer needed. 

Blizzard quickly discovered that people at max level congregated at a central location in the current expac zones, abandoning other areas. Shattrath City and Dalaran was where the people went, and the major cities became ghost towns. History repeated itself in both TBC and Wrath Classic, only more so, as there were very few new players out leveling in the world. Blizzard's solution was to put the focus back on the capital cities in Cataclysm, but it didn't exactly work as intended. Automated systems, declining subscriptions, and server transfers all meant that while some servers had active players where Blizzard wanted them, others did not. And to make matters worse, servers marked "New Players" were frequently those with the lowest population in the WoW ecosystem.

Instead of server merges, Mists of Pandaria introduced connected realms, clustering servers with low population together so that the world would feel like an active world. Blizzard abandoned the idea of returning max level players to the capital cities where low level players could see them, and as time went on more systems were created to get people to max level as quickly as possible. If you were new and wanted to feel like part of a living world, you had to skip over all of the "old" content to get to the new stuff.

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When J1mmy put out this video:

There was a particular sentence that resonated with my experience in many MMOs since 2009: 

"...but sure enough the second I hit 60 right on cue my pager's going off and I'm getting contacted from people in Stormwind begging me and pleading me to return and start the Dragon Chronicles and so I went back to Stormwind, I got to the dragon place, I think I leveled up like once or twice and then I logged out cause I realized that through that entire experience [of leveling through Battle for Azeroth to Dragonflight] I had yet to talk to a single other human even once."

It's kind of ironic in that for many MMOs the most active you see players out in the world are in the starter areas and the main hubs in a current expansion. 

The starter areas are where new players inevitably begin play***, and the hubs at the current expansion are where all of the max level toons go. But it's once you leave that starter area where things get mushy, and if you don't see anybody around the promise of seeing other people at Endgame can seem like so much vaporware. 

To combat that emptiness you need good gameplay, good systems, and a story that remains valid throughout the leveling experience. And all three demand one thing that a lot of game companies don't want to utilize: a development team's time. It costs too much time and money to make sure the mid-game is taken care of, despite it being a critical part of keeping a player playing your game. It costs far less money --and is more profitable-- to simply put new items in the cash shop rather than plan for the long term.

*And more than a little intimidating. Ironically enough, as soon as I arrived, I was accosted by someone looking for guild signatures. Having someone come up to me out of the blue kind of froze me in my tracks. I have since gotten over my fright of that sort of behavior, but it did take quite a while to do so.

**And the overall lack of players available to perform group content at level is one of the reasons why automatic group finders are a thing.

***Unless you pay to skip those areas.

#Blaugust2024