The Newbie Flow

Imagine that your virtual world is a bucket, and players are water. There are holes in the bucket through which the water escapes. If you don’t add water regularly, eventually it will all leak away. There may be a pool at the very bottom that isn’t high enough to reach the lowest hole—that’s you and your die-hard players. Eventually, even this will evaporate away, though.

All virtual worlds need a flow of newbies if they are to survive. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your world is or how dedicated your players are: If you don’t have newbies, you’re in big trouble.

The flow does not have to be constant, just regular. As long as your bucket is big enough to accommodate a sudden wave of newbies should one arrive (for example, because school is out, or because of TV coverage), it’s enough that the average inflow does not fall below the average outflow.

So far, so faucet/drain.

Designers don’t get to control where newbies come from directly, although by designing an appealing virtual world they can do so indirectly (as players tell their real-life friends how great it is ¹). Newbies can sometimes show up on their own, having been looking for a virtual world that suits them and deciding to give this one a try. For small-scale virtual worlds, these two sources are often sufficient to keep everything ticking over nicely. Otherwise, if you want newbies, then you have to use marketing to entice them through your door.

Well, that’s not absolutely true: There is another possibility that I alluded to in Chapter 1—the newbie hose ². This is where someone else has control of a flow of newbies and points it in your direction. The classic example is when a virtual world has links with a large portal that isn’t ashamed of it, as with those on AOL in the mid-1990s. This is not the only way a newbie hose can arise, though. The buzz among the first players of EverQuest was so great that normal word-of-mouth became effectively a newbie hose; Star Wars Galaxies got one by virtue of its license.

The advantage of a newbie hose is that it doesn’t matter how full of holes your bucket is, there’s so much water going into it that it’s always full. Hey, you can even add more buckets if you want. The disadvantage of the newbie hose is that sooner or later it either empties the tank or gets pointed elsewhere. When that happens, someone has to answer the very real question of where the newbies are going to come from instead.

The rate at which people leave a virtual community is called churn. It’s expressed as a percentage of the user base that leaves over a set time period (a month is implied, but other periods are possible). Thus, if you have 100,000 players in your virtual world and every month 5,000 of them fail to renew their subscription, the churn is 5%. This would mean that on average players would last 20 months before quitting. In general, the aim is to keep the churn as low as possible ³.

Companies don’t publish their churn rates, because the figures can affect share prices adversely. AOL, for example, used to run at around 3% churn, but when it was unable to reduce this it stopped releasing the data and emphasized absolute subscriber numbers instead; later, it advocated using the total time that users spent online as a measure of its increasing success ⁴.

Established virtual worlds have churn rates under 5% ⁵, which is considered excellent for this kind of product. A newbie hose masks churn, though. If a virtual world is growing by 3,000 players a month, everything looks rosy. However, that’s a net increase. If 3,000 people signed up and none left, it’s good; if 103,000 signed up and 100,000 left, it’s not so good. An August 2002 article ⁶ quoting SOE stated that EverQuest players stayed with the game for eight months ⁷. That means an average of one-eighth of EQ players quit every month—around 54,000 of them, in other words. Given that EQ was experiencing a net growth of around 2,300 players a month at the time ⁸, this suggests that they were signing up 56,300 new subscriptions. Attracting 56,300 new subscribers a month is very impressive; losing 54,000 is also very impressive, but for different reasons. A churn of 12.5% for a user base the size of EverQuest’s makes them very reliant on a newbie hose, which perhaps explains SOE’s decision to expand into the Korean market in 2003.

The importance of the newbie flow is so great that designers should put as little in the way of it as possible. It might be argued that those designers benefiting from the luxury of a newbie hose can concentrate on retention (that is, keeping people who have lasted a few sessions in the virtual world) rather than attraction; for the majority of virtual worlds, though, newbie-friendliness should always come before oldbie-friendliness. Most of the time, the two can exist in harmony anyway, with those problems that do arise only doing so because the designers forget one or the other. Sometimes, though, what interests oldbies can put off newbies entirely. Chapter 5 discusses an important example of this (the trickle-down effect) in more detail.

Player types can help with the newbie flow. They’re no use for absolute newbies, who are often so confused or shy that they simply don’t know what to do (therefore the first concern of designers is to persuade them to do anything at all!). However, once a player has found their feet, player styles apply. Many newbies will first want to ascertain the established norms of behavior (which can involve killer-style behavior), whereupon they will spend a period exploring the virtual world and their abilities within it. Having gained the necessary skills and knowledge, they can start to play “properly” as an achiever. Months later, when they have reached the top, they retire into the life of socializer. This is the killer to explorer to achiever to socializer path I mentioned earlier. Not all players follow this “main sequence,” of course, and not all of them follow it at the same speed. Someone who is at heart a socializer will soon decide that exploring and achieving is not for them, and will reach the final stage early; someone who is basically a gamer will achieve everything they can do, then find there’s little to do but chat or leave (so they’ll leave).

Coming back to newbie streams, then, the things that designers should concentrate most on for inexperienced players are enabling them to find the world’s behavioral boundaries quickly and providing plenty of interesting things to see and do that will help them develop their playing skills ⁹. Support from customer service greeters can make some of this run more smoothly in practice, but that doesn’t mean designers should shirk their responsibilities.

At this early stage, there’s a possibility that designers can affect the future playing styles of impressionable or open-minded newbies. A player who is an achiever in other virtual worlds may discover the joys of being an explorer in yours, if you let them see what they’re missing. If you want more of one player type than another, then making it appealing to newbies is a way to achieve your goal. This is not to say that players should be given the hard sell: It’s about presenting opportunities, not arm-twisting. EverQuest 2 has a particularly impressive scheme for bedding in newbies (even though what they’re bedded into isn’t a whole lot different from EverQuest 1).

A balance of player types among newbies isn’t important. After they jump off the main sequence and start to play in the style that best suits them, that’s when they join the majority for which standard type dynamics apply. An overall balance among non-newbies is important, because balance leads to retention. Meanwhile, the next batch of newbies is beginning the process, and the wheel turns once more.

We’ll be looking at the concept of “main sequence” in some detail later on in this chapter. It gets a Whole Lot More Complicated.