Metrics and MMOs in The Escapist
Jun 26, 10:55 AM
I wrote an article for this week’s The Escapist magazine about my experiences catching gold farmers using gameplay metrics. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
An MMOG is an amazingly complex entity. You might believe a gold farmer could easily hide among the millions of other characters on a server, like a needle in a haystack. But farmers behave fundamentally differently than a normal player. The farmer isn’t trying to have fun. In fact, if you look at the act of farming, it’s probably the most boring thing you can imagine. But it’s efficient, and efficiency is what the farmers are optimizing for. That efficient boredom sticks out like a sore thumb. We can see this stuff happen. So it’s like finding a needle in a haystack where the needle is colored bright orange and we happen to know the density of each cubic centimeter of the haystack.
The whole issue is MMO-themed and all the articles are well worth a look. In particular, I liked Dana Massey’s look at MMO subscription numbers, and Allen Varney’s article about how Asian MMOs are an extremely tough sell in the Western market.
