Building an Online Game Community - The Right Way

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

Categories: Online Communities

This is a follow-up to the last article where Fury was used as an example of a game where it’s trying to build an online game community, but ends up doing a poor job. You’ll find that the game I’m about to describe and Fury had a lot of the same initial attributes. Instead of adding to its list of shortcomings, which makes people reluctant to join your community (and the reluctance spreads like wild fire), Guild Wars did as much as it could to stimulate new community members to begin following and discussing the game. They did more then enough to compensate for the fact that they were a “new” startup and had a publisher unfamiliar to most in the United States.

Let’s go ahead and follow the same format as the Building an Online Game Community - The Wrong Way article.

What They Can’t Change

Here’s a general list of what Guild Wars has had to deal with.

Game Developer and Publisher not well-known - ArenaNet, the developers behind Guild Wars had some key Blizzard ex-employees in it, but ArenaNet was far from a gamer’s household name. NCSoft, although a popular publisher in Asia because of its Lineage series, also didn’t have the popularity in the United States. Although Guild Wars did have edge over Fury in this department, Guild Wars did end up doing quite a bit to offset this possible drawback.
Basic Game Concept - Guild Wars is a hybrid player versus player (PvP) and player versus environment (PvE) game. Although you may assume that targeting two different demographics is a strategic move, it also meant an attempt at being a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. The game risked disappointing either player type.
Natural Appeal to the RPG Player - Like Fury, Guild Wars has role-playing element. Role-playing often encourages long-term play. Like I mention in the Fury article, player types don’t just change overnight and the players you’re bound to attract to your community are ones that already play RPG’s.

How Online Communities Work

I talked about this in the older article, but as a short recap:

Word of mouth spreads good information and bad information like wildfire
Word of mouth is what gets you a community
An online community needs to be listened to and nursed

What Guild Wars Did Right

Lower then Average Required Specifications (at the time) - It’s amazing how simple this is and how much this can affect everything. It’s great if I just bought a computer, I can run any game on the market I want, but if 2 out of 3 of my gamer friends can’t run it, it’s definitely a negative point that’s brought up when deciding on what game to buy as a group to play together.
Great Beta Experiences - Guild Wars put out great betas and spread them out so they weren’t repetitive and kept people interested. They OPTIMIZED their game from the start so that lots of people can play. Although they didn’t have the max amount of content, the content they did have was fairly complete. And since the betas were kept to weekend events, it wasn’t often people would finish everything and get the illusion Guild Wars would be boring. Also, since the betas were monthly, there was always fresh content at each event.
No Monthly Fees - Guild Wars made it their goal to pimp out the fact that there would never be a monthly fee. By using an optional campaign system (which recently announced was difficult to work with, but that’s aside the point), they were able to get enough revenue to offset the server costs. This works great, not everyone has parents willing to give their kids a credit card number. It’s also much harder to get a group of friends to all get their parents to participate.

Conclusion

There you have it, Guild Wars went out of their way and did three relatively simple things. Although ArenaNet never confirmed this, I’m fairly sure that those factors contributed highly to the fact that they have over three million copies sold. These factors kept people interested in the game and kept people’s friends interested in the game and speaking positive about it. Although there are many comments on how ArenaNet mistreats their community now and doesn’t listen to them, this article was about building an online game community, not maintaining one.

Cheers.