Conversation Between Marketing Drones

I am almost positive this conversation took place at some point over the past two years or so...

Marketing Drone 1: So, did you see the latest numbers from subscriptions?

Marketing Drone 2: I don’t look at anything until at least my 5th cup of coffee. Why? What’d they say?

Marketing Drone 1: New subscribers are fading fast; and some of the old subscriptions are beginning to fall off as well.

Marketing Drone 2: Crud. Well, it was good while it lasted; better submit my resume to the Evil Empire.

Drone 1: Now, now… let’s not be hasty. No need to jump ship quite yet. Anyway, I thought you still had your eye on that one over in Q&A.

Drone 2: You will not refer to the immaculate goddess as ‘that one!’

Drone 1: Yeah… sure… Aaaaanyway… There’s no reason why we can’t keep gainfully employed right here for years to come.

Drone 2: But you just said…

Drone 1: Ah, sit back upon the seat of knowledge Grasshopper, and learn from the Master.

Drone 2: I’m not a grasshopper, I’m a drone. Grasshoppers don’t have drones… at least I don’t think they do… they’re all like independent and non-droney-like.

Drone 1: Focus. Foooocus. Drink your coffee and just listen, capiche?

Drone 2: Sluuuuurp.

Drone 1: Good. Now, we make money off of subscriptions whether they’re new or old. So it doesn’t matter if we have an influx of fresh players or not. We just need to make sure a minimum number of players keep sending their money our way, right?

Drone 2: (Slurp-swallow) Right.

Drone 1: Excellent! So we could try to target new players but that costs a LOT of money in advertising, so we are losing up front with no real guarantee of return. Instead of getting in new players, we should focus on keeping the old ones. It costs less up front and has a better chance of success… provided we target the RIGHT players.

Drone 2: (Adding more sugar to his coffee) Okay, makes sense as far as it goes, but how do we tell which players are the right ones?

Drone 1: Easy, we need the most die-hard, the most easy-to-please, the players who thrive on mindless, repetitive activity and never get bored.

Drone 2: We need drones? Sorry to tell you, but I already get my subscription to the game for free.

Drone 1: No, no, no… We need grinders. We need to come up with a system that naturally attracts grind gamers.

Drone 2: Grinders? Good lord, why?

Drone 1: Because grinders never give up. Something in their mental make up triggers an endorphin surge when they do the same thing… over and over and over again. My cousin is a grinder… he played this one RPG where you could farm one room of monsters in a loop. It was a 10th level part early in the game, but by the time he left it he was 83rd level. He wanted to keep going until he maxed out at 100 but his wife told him she’d break the disk in two if she had to watch him kill the same monsters one more time.

Drone 2: That is seriously twisted. Dude needs to get a life.

Drone 1: No! Dude most certainly does NOT need to get a life… Dude needs to come play OUR game.

Drone 2: Yeah, but other than getting purple recipes or merits, there really aren’t that many grind opportunities in the game.

Drone 1: So we make one! We make some sort of content that will make you able to increase your character’s power but in order to do so you have to get a certain number of invention drops or some such thing.

Drone 2: Make it just for 50th level characters, that way it seems exclusive and will make newer players at least one want to stay with it long enough to get their character to that level and see what all the fuss is about.

Drone 1: Awesome idea!

Drone 2: Yeah, the coffee must finally be kicking in.

Drone 1: You’ll have to grind to get access to the new powers. You’ll have to grind to make them stronger. You’ll have to grind to change them if you decide you want to try a different one of those available.

Drone 2: All this talk of grinding is making me want another cup of coffee. We can come up with missions for them to do so they can earn the items of power.

Drone 1: No… not missions… Trials.

Drone 2: Trials? Why trials? I thought research showed the players don’t like having their options limited to ONLY being on teams. They want a choice of running solo as well.

Drone 1: Don’t you remember one of the cardinal lessons from Business Marketing 101?

Drone 2: I never took Business Marketing 101… I was a theater major.

Drone 1: A theater major? Really? Is that why you and Zwillinger were doing that West Side Story dance fight re-enactment in the break room?

Drone 2: That wasn’t a re-enactment. That’s how theater majors fight. That Prima Donna tried to take the last donut.

Drone 1: I think we’re getting off track here. We don’t want to cater to the solo crowd. One of the things that keeps people coming back to an MMORPG is the feeling of community. They make friends when they team. They feel more like they belong when they team. Solo players are fickle and don’t have that sense of commitment that team players do. You may feel comfortable quitting a game… but you’re a lot less likely to quit a group of people who’ve become friends and companions.

Drone 2: That’s so brilliant it’s almost evil.

Drone 1: That’s marketing.

Drone 2: Okay, so we have a pretty good idea here. How are we going to get the big-wigs to listen to it? We’re only drones after all.

Drone 1: How much extra cash do you have on you?

Drone 2: I dunno, about twenty bucks I guess. Why, are we going to bribe someone?

Drone 1: In a manner of speaking. I have twenty myself. I think that’s enough…

Drone 2: Enough for what? Forty bucks is a rather pitiful bribe.

Drone 1: Enough to take Black Pebble out to lunch. He’ll listen to just about anything if someone else is paying for the grub.

This is great as always Steelclaw. It is also in all prolbilty true.

Lmao

Ha to funny.

Posi: Our campaign to give players what they ask for is going well! What's next on our list? Endgame, right? People keep asking about endgame. "Why is there no endgame", "I just got to 50 so what's the point", and so on.

WW: The endgame is rolling new alts. I thought we'd established this.

Posi: But some people don't like alts.

WW: Well they can replay stuff with the one character. We've even added Flashback to make it easier, remember?

Posi: Yeah, yeah, in theory, but... people keep saying they're bored with the same old levelling game. I thought we could have, you know, something to do with 50s that's different. Not necessarily "the game begins at 50", but maybe "a new game begins at 50".

WW: Okay, what do you have in mind?

Posi: Well, if the players say "endgame", they probably mean what everyone else has - high-level raiding dungeon stuff. So that's what we'll give 'em.

WW: But comics aren't based around a whole bunch of heroes all going to fight one big guy!

Posi: What about those big crossover events? Like, there's an Infinite Crisis on Blackest Worlds, or whatever, and all the heroes and villains have to team up and fight the threat, and there's terrible writing and the Flash dies.

WW: Is the terrible writing necessary?

Posi: YES.

WW: Okay, but where are we going to get terrible writers?

Posi: Oh, that won't be a problem, it's easier to make a good writer write badly than the opposite. I'll just need a couple cases of schnapps, a hefty stick and a very tall wardrobe.

WW: Fine. Well, if you say "threat to all existence that needs the combined strength of all the heroes and villains to push back", there's really one thing that immediately comes to mind from our canon.

Posi: Exactly. EMPEROR MARCUS COLE!

WW: ...who?

Posi: Emperor Cole? Tyrant? Evil goatee universe Statesman?

WW: What, the guy who showed up in a couple Portal Corps arcs all the way back in Issue 1 and has had zero impact on anything since? How is he a threat to all of existence?

Posi: Oh, he can find some source of ancient power or something.

WW: Have you gotten some schnapps and started sampling it already?

Posi: Yep! Okay, so in order to stop him, the heroes and villains will have to make surgical strikes into his war machine in Praetoria! Like, attacking his robot factories, or something. Those will be the actual raids. We could have two or three teams of people all working together at once, it'll be epic!

WW: Why does he have robot factories if he's found an ancient source of power? And why does it take three times as many people to make a surgical pre-emptive strike on a robot factory than it does to stop the entire Rikti army from invading, or anything else that happens in our top-end Task Forces?

Posi: Well it's just an example, it doesn't *have* to be a robot factory. And then we'll have lots of awesome things as rewards, so players will have fun with the new game *and* be rewarded for it! I really don't want it to be like other MMOs where only one person gets something, so, everyone will get... tokens or something that they can save up for whatever they want. Ooh! Or you can have stuff that's crafted from other stuff, like IOs, but some of it is rarer, so you could finish the awesome trial and get a rare drop and be like "double awesome!"

WW: Everyone gets something? what, even the guy who went afk?

Posi: ...well, no. We wouldn't want to give stuff to people who don't help. Uh, I'll figure something out.

WW: And what about people who don't like to team up? We do have a lot of soloers, you know.

Posi: Well they have plenty of things to do already. We're trying to branch out, here. We've given something to the PvPers, we've given something to people who wanted a base for their SG, we've given something to people who wanted to write their own stories, and we've given something to soloers. Now let's give something to people who want an endgame! "Give the players what they want", remember.

WW: None of those groups are especially happy with what they got.

Posi: What, you want to spend time polishing existing features instead of making new ones? But that doesn't make for very exciting patch notes. And then players come back and are like "so what's new since I left" and hear "not much", and how does that encourage them to stay?

WW: So you want to keep adding new stuff, and then once the shiny wears off, moving on to other new stuff.

Posi: No, I'm serious about this. I think I'll focus on this content full-time. Hey, would you take over as Lead Designer if I go into Systems Design?

WW: ...Lead Designer? Do I get your office? And your chair?

Posi: Yeah, sure. So what do you think of my endgame idea?

WW: I think it's a wonderful idea and I think you should start working on it. Right now. Excuse me, I'm off to check out my new chair.

I detect remarkable amounts of both truth and hilarity in this topic.

This thread made me want coffee.

And a new chair.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

Brilliant! Just Brilliant!!

Both in Steelclaw's post, but in Silvers as well.

And dear lord... this is the 100th Steelclaw started post I've subscribed to (Yes, I have a separate sub folder for Steelclaw's stuff...). I'm not if this is a good thing or not.

Thank you for the time...

@Travlr (Main) / @Tymers Realm (Test)

It's true, and it hurts, but it's true, so I laugh, but it hurts, cos it's true, and it...


*sob*

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.