Quote from: RSDancey;426273There's another group that's being seduced by the MMOs: The Character Actors.  These people are getting tremendous value out of the current generation of MMOs.  I've seen people who have filled up every available character slot on every available server with City of Heroes characters, for example.  I know people who have produced (and I kid you not) tens of thousands of message board posts in character, about their character and interacting with others also in character.

These people are getting crack cocaine in the form of a mutable, controllable graphic representation of their character.  For tabletop RPGs the best they could hope for was a hand-drawn "character portrait" and maybe a metal miniature, which might or might not be painted.  In the MMO realm they get a living, breathing, 3-D avatar who moves, dances, emotes, and does all the other things these people can dream of.  And, not to keep hammering this point home, the technology about to come on-line will blow these people's minds.

Speaking as someone who probably would fall in the character actor segment, I have trouble buying that this segment has MMOs beating out RPGs. The best computer interface can not compare to face to face interaction. Yes people who have not tried TRPGs or who do not have a group available can get something out of the computer based interactions. That does not make the MMOs crack cocaine. Just the opposite.

Metal miniatures, character portaits, and even avatars matter a lot less than the chance to inhabit the character and play it as directly as possible. MMOs have not gotten there yet. Give me a virtual reality where I can see everything my character sees and I can interact with the virtual world with a minimal interface and yeah that would tempt me. Watching things on a screen and typing commands does not work for me.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426283What I'd like to know, and I don't recall seeing in the study, is how exactly a person was put into one of the four groups.

That's not how it works.

The result set of the answers to the survey were searched for clusters - that is, places where a substantial number of people all shared the same answers in common.  Once you identify the clusters, then you look at the questions they had in common and you extrapolate a meaningful categorization from those answers.

In other words, we put the segments into the people, not the people into the segments.

Those clusters don't have to have any meta-organization like the two-axis system we showed in the segmentation study.  Ours just happened to have such a meta-organization.

RyanD

Quote from: RSDancey;426264What you see today is not what you will see in the next 3 years.  The MMO field is about to undergo a massive graphic & AI upgrade driven by Moore's law.  The "immersion" of the MMO will soon start to approach Turing Test levels - you'll never be sure if the NPC you're interacting with is a human or an AI.  And the visual experience in terms of lighting, shadows, clothing, physics, skin tones, etc. is all going to become so much better that you'll soon think of the current generation of MMOs the way we think about the old Kings Quest adventure games.  Its going to be that big an evolution.

"It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better."

Quote from: RSDancey;426363That's not how it works.

RyanD

OK. How about this part:

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426283For example, I've seen a very poor study (not the WotC one) where players were basically asked to rate their agreement with the statement "I enjoy a good sense of story". The problem with this approach is that, first, it recapitulates the confusion over "story" which has appeared repeatedly in gaming, especially TRPG. An interest in "story" can mean many things not only in terms of content (it might mean having a beginning/middle/end, it might mean NPCs with real personalities, it might mean non-combat oriented activity), but also in terms of approach to content (it might mean scripted plots, it might mean GM-centric improv, it might mean player-distributed improv with lots of out-of-character input).

What were the questions? Could we see a copy of the questionaire somewhere?

It was late and I was busy with other things, so I completely missed the part of Ryan's post where he describes the cluster analysis used in the study. So that gets one question out of the way.

What I find suspicious, is that the clusters divided so evenly. I would expect there to be identifiable clusters with more variation in relative size. Saying "22% all around" suggests the data may have feen fudged, or the sample may be systematically biased. But that is only a suspicion.

However the point is well-taken that the study presupposed trpg players, so it may fail to capture preferences that differentiate trpgs from other entertainments. E.g. socializing with friends. It's also difficult to see how a study of existing gamers will identify what's needed to attract new gamers. And unless the study asked questions pertinent to interest in other entertainments, it would be hard to say which ones are drawing players away.

 Also, the analysis can only develop clusters based on the questions that were actually asked. If nothing addressed issues of the method of play--such as social combat mechanics, or shared narrative authority--then cluster divisions based on those will be missing.

Quote from: Omnifray;426322And... face-to-face socialising??? - or to be facetious - you've missed the tabletop in tabletop roleplaying...

Agreement. "The human dimension of role playing games is a feature, not a bug. It should not be pushed aside, or ignored: it should be embraced, and nurtured. That's one of the fundamentals of role playing games that's being neglected today, I think." (self-quoting from there)

Quote from: RSDancey;426264A Thinker is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers Strategic/Combat Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy min-maxing a character, spending hours out of game to find every conceivable advantage available in the system to deliver maximum damage from behind maximum protection, even if the min-maxing produces results that are seemingly illogical/impossible. This kind of person wants to solve puzzles and can keep track of long chains of facts and clues.

What's the possibility of "Thinker" types just walking away completely from tabletop rpgs, and moving on to something else that isn't gaming related?

The type of individuals I've known over the years who were "Thinker" types when it comes to tabletop rpgs like D&D, were frequently the same type of individuals who would be searching for loopholes and security holes in things like computer systems, video games, reverse engineering/disassembling computer code, cracking passwords, etc ... as well as other offline activities such as:  picking locks, hotwiring car ignition systems, modifying guns, Blackjack card counting, etc ...

Quite a few "Thinker" type D&D players I've gamed with over the years, stopped playing rpg games altogether when significant numbers of DMs started banning many splatbooks (both WotC and 3PP) from 3.5E D&D games.  4E D&D is an edition they have very little to no interest in, when they saw how much harder it was to abuse the rules.

For reference, a number of technical questions about the survey were discussed in this thread from a few years ago: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=2603

In my experience, there is one reason why MMO's are killing tabletop.

When I want to play WoW, I log in and play. I don't have to call my friends, set up a time, get food and drinks, do all the prep work for the adventure, and then find out someone can't make it at the last second.

Quote from: Grymbok;426301I find this incredibly difficult to believe. MMOs have always lagged off-line games in terms of graphic quality - for this to be true we'd have to be seeing the levels of quality you're talking about already in single-player games, and we're not. Sure, things are improving, but I think you're overselling it here.

Modern MMOs take between 5 and 7 years to develop.  In pre-production they can cost anywhere from $1 to $5 million a year (and the closer they get to full production the more that figure ramps up because you can't just hire 150 people all in one day).  They cost about 10-15 million dollars a year once they go into full production which takes about 3 years.  This is a much much higher commitment of time & money than a single-player game will ever get.

MMOs have budgets about 2-3x single player titles.  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for example cost about $50 million to make.  (Starcraft II was rumored to cost $100 million but Blizzard has stated that number is baseless).  A typical AAA MMO will have an all-in release budget around $75 million (plus marketing, and not even talking about post-release expenses).  Some have cost more than that (Tabula Rasa cost over $100 million).

The best developers tend to go where the most funding is (unless they're exceptionally wealthy and in control of their own destinies like John Carmack).  Thus, MMOs have aggregated the cream of the tech crop for the past half-decade.  Because these games take so long to ship, most of their work has yet to be seen outside closed industry demos.

Take a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ccpgames?blend=1&ob=4#p/c/67C46A980E7C1EE0/0/Gf26ZhHz6uM

This was state of the art at the beginning of 2010.  The people who worked on it consider it to be a barely adequate demo of the tech - what they're working on now blow this away.  It is now being deployed into EVE Online as a revamped character generator:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas&feature=fvsr

I'm a bit hamstrung here because a lot of what I know is confidential, but you'll all see it soon enough.  And CCP isn't the only company working at this level.

If you remember what it was like when 3D cards suddenly became standard gear, and games transformed almost overnight from pseudo-3D or 2D+1 to true polygon based 3D, it will feel like that level of change.

Most MMOs are also moving to a shared framework for things like graphics.  That means that investment in one game usually ripples across several.  So the aggregate investment into core graphics & AI tech is massive - probably hundreds of millions of dollars across the whole MMO industry.  People move around in that industry too so there's a fair bit of cross-pollination of best practices and clever solutions.

The industry spent a good part of the last 5 years in the "Uncanny Valley"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

But the hardware and middleware has finally caught up to the graphic designers' needs and huge amounts of forward progress are now being made.

QuoteSo the survey was designed to show what it showed?

You misunderstood.  I said we released it to demonstrate that all TRPG players were not vested in metaplot nor was it a monolithic audience. It was an answer to people like Mike Stackpoole who questioned the design direction of the 3rd Edition of D&D in a quantitative way rather than a qualitative way.  I think the results speak for themselves.

QuoteOne of these things is not like the others... I wonder how the "active gamers" were selected for this survey, considering you've come back with a bias towards people who are buying new products.

First, there's no mention of price in the criterion.  Add on sets and new versions does not require a commercial transaction.  DM created content in the form of new magic items, monsters and scenarios absolutely qualifies.

Second, gamers were selected in a multi-step process which you can read about in the overall survey results here:

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/WotCMarketResearchSummary.html

(We also busted our asses making sure that the survey would clearly distinguish between "computer RPGs" and "tabletop RPGs" as well).

Quote from: Omnifray;426322And... face-to-face socialising??? - or to be facetious - you've missed the tabletop in tabletop roleplaying...

This was without question one of the most surprising results of the survey.  It doesn't segment.  And it's not central to the experience.  People talk about it until they're blue in the face, but what actually happened is that when a virtual game experience came along where most people play alone and can't see (and often can't hear) their companions, well, they had no problem whatsoever embracing it.

The physical aspects of gaming are vastly over-rated.  In fact, my pet theory is that they're actually a band-aid on how challenging the hobby is to engage with.  Many people who might have given it up in frustration or disappointment kept playing because they just liked hanging out with their friends.  But when a better format came along, they switched, and found other ways to socialize.  Anyone who thinks that social contact is a unique value proposition of tabletop games has to question why people's actual behavior doesn't seem to back that up.

In fact, the MMO network is actually much more focused on community than the TRPG audience.  TRPG networks rarely extend to more than a dozen people or so (but there are many links to other networks).  MMO networks rarely have less than a hundred.  In EVE, there are multi-thousand person organizations.  This sense of larger community is actually more social and more likely to produce off-line friendships than the tighter knit, smaller TRPG network.  Its extremely attractive to people with poor social skills but who crave social contact.  Plus, it's where the girls are.

BTW:  TRPG theorists are not the only ones to make this mistake.  The Poker community never thought on-line play would ever become significant; there's no way to use body language skills to deduce strategy, its easy to cheat, collusion is rampant, and "people like to see who they're playing with", etc.  Turns out, not so much - on-line play offers people a play-anywhere, play any time, easily trackable, anonymous, "don't have to go to a scary casino full of scary poker pros" experience that was a better fit for many people than live casino games ever were.

Quote from: RSDancey;426398Second, gamers were selected in a multi-step process which you can read about in the overall survey results here:

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/WotCMarketResearchSummary.html

Ryan, just making sure I'm right about this:

Out of the people that replied to the first mail-shot, 1,000 were sent the 100 question survey.

And "The particular individuals chosen to participate in this expanded
survey represent the population, as determined by the screener."

In the screener, 6.00% or so or so of the population had played TRPGs.

So of the 1,000 people surveyed, 60 had played TRPGS? And the data on TRPGs is therefore based on the views of 60 players? Is this right?

Thanks for the detailed answer. The first video was deep in the uncanny valley, as you say. The character creator is very impressive though.

The other challenge for MMOs, of course, is moving lots of PCs around at once, which makes all this stuff a lot harder to do at high-quality than in single player titles.

Will certainly be interesting to see how things shape up if this happens as you predict. In the past few years launching an MMO has seemed like nothing more than a good way to lose a lot of money, with only WoW and your own EVE being successful launches in years now. I'll probably just be an observer rather than a player though - I spent several years playing EQ and am not in a position to give any MMO the commitment levels they demand anymore.

Quote from: RSDancey;426398First, there's no mention of price in the criterion.  Add on sets and new versions does not require a commercial transaction.  DM created content in the form of new magic items, monsters and scenarios absolutely qualifies.

Gotcha, makes sense, misunderstood your phrasing.

Quote from: Glazer;426405Out of the people that replied to the first mail-shot, 1,000 were sent the 100 question survey.

The 1000 surveys were sent to people who self-identified as people who played games (not just TRPGs).

RyanD

Now this is thread worth reading. Glad I was pointed towards it.

I may not agree with what's said in it. But it's still interesting even so.