Web-based MMOs on Facebook versus standalone websites: chief ohai Susan Wu analyzes the tradeoffs

Our first MMO, City of Eternals, can be played within Facebook, and on its main site, CityofEternals. The game experience is significantly different, depending on the platform you play, but they both have advantages for the developer. On her personal blog, chief ohai Susan has very interesting player data on this point. For example:

When people play embedded through Facebook, their usage pattern looks something like this: 5-6 minute sessions about 8-10 times a day. So they are round tripping in and out of the game world many times a day. When people play directly at the City of Eternals site, they’ll play for 20+ minute sessions 2-3 times a day.

So people playing City of Eternals on Facebook play the game more often but in shorter periods, while players hitting the City of Eternals site play for longer periods, but in less total daily sessions. Notably, the average daily play length comes out roughly the same: 40-60 minutes on Facebook, or 40-60 minutes on CityofEternals.com. However, the time spread is significantly different, and that suggests very different tradeoffs to both platforms. For the standalone site, Susan notes, “you have more control over the user experience” — but because it’s not embedded within a social network users are accustomed to visited many times a day, “you have to deal with a conversion rate hit of the first ‘try’.”

Much more here, including thoughts on turning users from “tourists” into “citizens”. That is, “Someone who is invested in the health, stability and future of the service they’re using.”

What does it mean to be in an open beta, anyways? (or “how do you build MMOs as a web service?”)

Last week our first MMO went into open Beta, and maybe you’re wondering what means.

Most traditional games, even online ones, have discrete development cycles and ‘formal launches.’ These development cycles are usually marked by a fixed point in time when the game is “live” and “launched.” We’re not like that.

We’re building our MMOs as you would a web service. We’re always evolving them based on actual player behaviors (we’re paying attention!) and what we think you might enjoy. As with all of your favorite web services, our MMOs are constantly evolving. We’re testing new areas, new features, new levels, new user interface elements on an ongoing basis.

We look at it this way: You wouldn’t want to read a news site that wasn’t updating its headlines constantly or use a wiki that people weren’t contributing to or participate in a social network that didn’t have real time feeds and ever changing content based on your social context — why should the online games you play be any different?

We’re building organic, live web services. Every time you come to City of Eternals, we hope you notice new content, new improvements to the user experience, and new fixes to issues players have been reporting. We’re changing the game every day, every week.

If you’re expecting an old school MMO where you have to periodically download a giant patch, or go to the store to buy another expansion, that’s not us.

With ohai’s handcrafted MMOs, we want you to experience additions and improvements as fast as hitting your browser’s Refresh button. We’re able to do this because we built a significant amount of technology & tools that allows us to iterate at web speed. As our writer Wagner James Au puts it “I love how we can add missions to our MMO about as quickly as adding a blog post in Wordpress.”

It’s this same technology that enabled us to get our first MMO (yes, there are more coming!), City of Eternals, to an alpha launch in 9 months with 3 core engineers.

So what open beta means for us is that the game is now stable enough to allow new users to begin to enter our game world. We’re not nearly done making huge improvements to the user experience and to the gameplay, but we’ve made significant strides since our private alpha.

The open beta period will be accompanied by constant improvements. The game in 30 days will be dramatically better than the game you see today. At some point in the near future, we’ll be ‘fully live and launched’ but all that means is that the game is pretty stable and performing well, and our core set of initial features has been completed.

Even after we’re fully launched & live, we’ll be making ongoing edits and improvements every week. But that’s a blog post for another time.

Hope you guys are having fun out there,
Susan

p.s. Btw, here’s a photo of my sweet, sweet pad in City of Eternals.
Have you ever wondered to yourself, “What would I do with my own vampire lair?” Well, wonder no more! Click on this awesome link to begin customizing your own. (no, I don’t know why I have a Cryo Tank in my kitchen. Do you?)

Games.com Interviews Chief ohai Susan!

Games.com has an extensive interview with Susan, our chief ohai, who covers many topics pertaining to our new Vampire MMO, City of Eternals, and around the ohai philosophy of MMOs. Here’s a sample:
Read more…

ohai — Announcing City of Eternals, Our Modern Vampire MMO!

This week I’m proud to announce City of Eternals, the first full-featured online game (often called an MMO) set in a world with modern vampires. Request a private alpha invitation here, we’re giving them out as quickly as we can.

We’ve been building out the core technology for about a year now. City of Eternals went into production about 9 months ago, incorporating a few design elements from our early social games from 2007, and from our even earlier work developing the world’s very first MMOs back in the 1990s. I’m proud to say that ohai team members were leading innovators and developers of text-based MUDs and large scale game franchises such as Everquest, Everquest 2, PlanetSide, Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Second Life and Free Realms. I’m honored to be working with this fantastic team.

With City of Eternals, we’re taking social games and MMOs to their next stage of evolution: An action-filled, web-based experience with 3D graphics playable not just within Facebook, but anywhere on the web, starting with CityofEternals.com, and soon, anywhere you can host the game’s Flash client, such as blogs and social network pages.

In New Valencia, your vampire will battle powerful monsters, uncover mysteries and secrets, and earn a place among many rival vampire Houses fighting to control this secret society of Immortals. But that’s just the start: Fall in love with a fellow Vampire, lead your own personal coven (which we call your “House”), customize your home and avatar look, and much more. Choose the way you want to play a Vampire! Over the next few months, we’ll continue adding features and new content, so our world can better reflect the big diverse culture of the bloodthirsty undead.

Our game is still growing and improving, and we’d love your feedback to make it better. Meantime, look for me in New Valencia — my avatar is also named Susan, a Vampire dressed in hot red boots (I wish I had these in real life!) If you spot me, please say hello.

This is just ohai’s first MMO, by the way, with many more of all varieties to come. Meanwhile, see you in the City of Eternals!

- Susan, chief ohai

Behind the Scenes of the New Gravedigger Mission!

We just added a new mission to City of Eternals called “Grave Digger”, full of zombies, gory mystery, and (we hope) scares. It was created by ohai designer Philip. “I wanted some kind of interaction with the zombies in a way people encounter them in movies and games,” he says. “A little bit of surprise goes a long way, especially when it’s a person’s first time experiencing a zombie attack.” After all, he observes, “What could be better than being ambushed by zombies running at you from the depths of the forest?”

Think you’re brave enough to accomplish this mission? Look for “Grave Digger” in the Ominous Grove, in the Northern-most section of Mt. Seraphina State Park. Just get ready to start digging quickly! If you already have a Bite Club invite, click here to log in and play!

MMOs as a force for good!

I’m an avid yoga practitioner. I love it; I learn a little bit about myself each day through the daily practice of feeling peace and clearing my mind. I’ve often thought about the daily ‘practice’ of playing an MMO — if an MMO could help you feel heroic and accomplished, a little bit each day, how would that translate over time into a new kind of muscle memory? What could you be in your everyday life if you felt heroic rather than defeated and hopeless? And if you felt heroic and acted as such, how would that then spread to your friends? (There’s a great NYTimes article about how such things as happiness and outlook are contagious amongst friends.)

A quote from Ogyen Trinley Dorje –the only senior Buddhist leader recognized by China, Tibet, and India:

Well, I view video games as something of an emotional therapy, a mundane level of emotional therapy for me. We all have emotions whether we’re Buddhist practitioners or not, all of us have emotions, happy emotions, sad emotions, displeased emotions and we need to figure out a way to deal with them when they arise.

So, for me sometimes it can be a relief, a kind of decompression to just play some video games. If I’m having some negative thoughts or negative feelings, video games are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel better afterwards.

The aggression that comes out in the video game satiates whatever desire I might have to express that feeling. For me, that’s very skilful because when I do that I don’t have to go and hit anyone over the head.

Thanks to @daveofdoom for the link.

ohai… What’s An “MMO” Anyway (And What Makes City of Eternals One)?

We say ohai makes “handcrafted MMOs for everyone”, which we talked about in yesterday’s MMO development philosophy post, but just in case you’re not as geeky as us, here’s a quick explanation of what MMO means, and a very brief history of the genre:

Way back in olden times (like, the 1980s!), when the Internet was mostly just a thing for college campuses, some programmers started creating games that depicted whole fantasy worlds with text and primitive graphics, and used the network to let many people (say, a few hundred) connect into that world at the same time, and play around in it together as alter egos, called “avatars”. As the Internet grew, these worlds got larger, and by the 1990s, many got large enough for thousands of avatars to be online at the same time. That’s about when people started calling these games MMORPGs, for “Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games“, which is quite a mouthful to say. In recent years, networking power has improved enough for millions of people to play these games, and as they became more popular, the acronym was often shortened to MMO, for “Massively Multiplayer Online [World]“. That way, the term could describe anything from casual virtual worlds on the web, to big budget online roleplaying games with 3D graphics. (Also, we think people just got tired of saying “MMORPG” over and over again.) So everything from Habbo, Gaia, and RuneScape on the web, to Aion, Second Life, and World of Warcraft in 3D, can accurately be called an MMO.

But what makes City of Eternals, our first game, an MMO? Well, the City itself is a mini-world, with numerous neighborhoods and districts to explore, and mysteries to uncover. Every player has an avatar they control, and each avatar has character stats, resources, and equipment they can invest in over time. Above all, to us, MMOs are immersive environments that foster synchronous, real time interaction — something we’re striving for in CoE.

Our goal, as we discussed in a previous post, is to make an MMO enjoyable for both hardcore gamers and people who only just discovered online games via a social network like Facebook. And because City of Eternals is a modern day vampire MMO (the first of its kind, we’re fairly sure), we also want it to be an MMO to the many fans of the genre in all its many variations, be that Buffy, Twilight, Anne Rice novels, True Blood, and more.

So whatever kind of player you are… ohai, welcome to our massively multiplayer online [vampire] world!

ohai… I’m taking MMOs to the next level!

Welcome to our new site. I’m Don Neufeld, chief technical ohai. Before cofounding this company, I helped ship several top MMORPGs, including EverQuest II, PlanetSide, and Star Wars Galaxies. At ohai, however, we’re making a very different kind of game. Basically, we’re making frictionless, lightweight, MMOs that create joy and connection between people in their everyday lives.

But what’s that mean?

Look at the gaming landscape: Very few companies can develop new massively multiplayer online games nowadays, because they cost so much money. A typical MMO has a production schedule that is budgeted for three years, but often ends up taking five. Most of these games are also built as walled gardens, with very little interaction between the game world and where people normally live and socialize online.  That isn’t to say they aren’t fun, but they aren’t built to appeal to a broader audience.

That’s one reason we’re building MMOs to live on the web. That speeds up the development time, a lot.  And rather than assume we know what players want, we iterate immediately based on what they’re actually doing in the game. (Another advantage of deploying on the web.)

Being on the web and within social networks also means our games can reach out to players in interesting ways. We want to make it so that you don’t have to be logged into our games, to know what’s happening in them. These aren’t walled gardens. Characters from our game will send you instant messages, even Tweets. We want to tell an unfolding story in real time, with and for our players.  (More on this in future posts!)

Gamers used to playing MMORPGs with high-end graphics may read this and wonder, So what’s in this for me? To be sure, we’re not going to compete on 3D graphics — we build games that run efficiently in Flash.  But we don’t think 3D graphics is where MMO innovation needs to be.  Instead, we’re trying to provide more compelling social, multiplayer play and take that to the next level. Think short play sessions and episodic fun, games played in bite-sized chunks, not whole novel lengths. But, there’s still enough complexity here that you can easily immerse yourself for hours in our rich worlds.

Essentially, the kind of gaming that people are already enjoying on Facebook, but we’re taking it to the next level.   Translation: an MMO you can play at the office during your lunch break or from the school library between classes. Of course, we’re free to play, and we’ll be monetizing through microtransactions.  We believe in providing a service that is so engaging and compelling that people will want to pay for parts of it.

So there’s the general idea. In future posts, I’ll talk about the code behind our games: the server architecture and the game coding my team has been working on, to make our MMOs a unique and innovative experience. Until then, get some hands-on experience with our gaming philosophy, by giving our first MMO a try: Play our flash game City of Eternals now.