Tidbits about the WoW backend

This discussion with Joe Rumsey, a software engineer for World of Warcraft at Blizzard, took place in 2013, but I'm only posting about it now.

• Their database has 50% read and 50% write. There used to be more writes because the durability of player's equipment used to decrease often in combat. They have a proxy in front of the DB. The proxy flushes to DB periodically. Around 20 shards per DB. Transactions: inventory, trade, zone change, but not combat/monsters state.
• 800-meter zones. Sort of dynamic zone borders. Would rather have one big zone on one server than two zones with a lot of exchange between them on different servers. Objects are mirrored on adjacent zones. If a zone falls, the entire server falls. To move an entity between two servers, server 1 flushes the entity to DB then server 2 retrieves it from DB; the two servers never exchange the player data.
• The game server ticks at 2.5 times per second.
• The clients connect to a proxy.
• JSON vs binary messages: JSON's performance is fine 95% of the time.

WoW subscribers and Blizzard's strategy

I found this graph of WoW subscribers from launch until end of 2013, but could not track any of its sources. So here's my version of the graph, with the sources below.

The most interesting part of the graph is that Mists of Pandaria (MoP) is the first reported expansion to suffer from churn a few months before release. Blizzard's CEO says that have become much better and much faster at consuming content, and so they would leave when they're done. Have players changed, or has the game changed? Probably both.

The game has fundamentally changed, and this is a result of Blizzard's design approach of depth first and accessibility later. But as the game becomes more accessible, new content is consumed faster. Veteran players agree.

Have players changed? Probably. When WoW launched in 2004, mobile and social games did not exist. Blizzard has always targeted PC gamers. That segment was growing in the early 2000s, but has probably started shrinking in the last 3-4 years. Free-to-play PC games have also bloomed since the late 2000s, and lots of PC gamers would rather play for free than for $15 per month. WoW remains subscription-based because, according to Blizzard's CEO, it was not designed as a free to play game and would not transition to F2P. Keeping WoW subscription-based is a very conservative and obstinate stance, but Blizzard probably lost faith in F2P after the Diablo 3 real-money auction house failure.

Blizzard is conservatively milking its existing games. But I don't see the pay-to-play PC-gamer segment increasing. So Blizzard will have to adapt their game design or die.

date	millions of subscribers
23-Nov-04	0 (launch)
17-Mar-05	1.5
14-Jun-05	2
21-Jul-05	3.5
9-Nov-05	4.5
19-Dec-05	5
1-Mar-06	6
11-Jan-07	8
24-Jul-07	9
22-Jan-08	10
31-Jul-08	10.9
28-Oct-08	11
23-Dec-08	11.5
11-Feb-09	11.5
7-Jul-09	6
10-Feb-10	11.5
5-Aug-10	11.5
1-Oct-10	12
4-Nov-10	12
31-Mar-11	11.4
1-Sep-11	11.1
8-Nov-11	10.3
9-Feb-12	10.2
31-Mar-12	10.2
4-Oct-12	10
31-Dec-12	9.6
31-Dec-12	9.6
31-Mar-13	8.3
30-Jun-13	7.7
30-Sep-13	7.6

Blizzard's Hadoop platform

Talk given by Brian Griffith and Amanda Gerdes at the OC Hadoop user group meeting in October 2013.

Blizzard uses the same Hadoop platform for Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, WoW, and Hearthstone. This platform went live in March 2013. Before this platform, game developers would log game events in log files, and use custom scripts to ETL these log files into relational databases for analysis. Problem: cumbersome, hard to maintain, low performance.

Solution: game developers, on their own, decide what to track in their game, and send that data to the platform. Instead of a log file, the game developers send protobuf objects. The 20 nodes in the Hadoop cluster receive and deserialize around a billion objects per day. The message's headers determine where to store each protobuf object within Hadoop. Blizzard also uses Hadoop as an operational data store. The cluster runs map-reduce jobs to filter and aggregate the stored protobuf objects. Currently, the 20 nodes store 60TB, but now that Blizzard realizes what they can do with Hadoop, they plan a 100-node cluster storing 1PB. Current bottleneck: CPU for deserialization. They rarely hit the disk for data so no IO waiting bottleneck.

For the messaging, they use a federation of machines running RabbitMQ. 50 producers worldwide (China, Europe, US, etc.) and 8 consumers (most likely in the Blizzard headquarters in California). When an Internet cable got cut with China, some messages were queued for 40 hours.

The analysts were using Greenplum for processing game data in parallel and ETL. Now that Hadoop is in place, they could start using Pig for ETL. But sales and customer data still come from relational databases, and the Greenplum is great at ETL. So there is no reason to force analysts into Hadoop. Solution: ETL jobs pull data from Hadoop and store it into Greenplum for warehousing. Greenplum is still in charge of its own ETL jobs.

Some data (such as a character's level or class in WoW) stay interesting across patches, but others (such as transmogrification usage) are only interesting when the feature launches. So the platform allows to build KPIs daily (e.g. activity aggregated per character level) and dive deep on demand.

Use case: WoW economy. Every gold transaction is sent to Hadoop. Reduce step aggregates by NPC id, item id, or player id. Makes it possible to:

• Check if the gold sinks follow designers' expectations.
Detect networks of gold farmers.
• Keep an eye on auction house prices.
• More ...

Gold buying patterns

Picks from a paper I wrote about gold buying patterns for FDG 2012. The data comes from an online questionnaire completed from March to May 2010 by 2800+ WoW players from around the world. Unless mentioned, all results are significant with a p-value below 0.01.

• Overall, 14% of people have ever bought gold.
• Men are twice more likely to buy gold than women (17% vs 8%), but there is no difference between Asians and Westerners.
• Achievement increases the likelihood to buy gold, while immersion decreases it. The effect of achievement is stronger on men.

• 12% of people who only play with people they know IRL have bought gold. This ratio increases to 15% for people who play with both RL relatives and friends made IG, and to 21% for people who play only with friends they made IG.
• Overall, people who have taken longer breaks from the game are more likely to buy gold.

• But really, it's a big mess to know which variables influence gold buying: in the correlation graph below, vertices represent variables, and edges bearing positive/negative values indicate positive/negative correlations between two variables. Values closer to 1 in absolute value indicate higher correlations.

• That's where GLM come in handy: they account for interactions between variables in regressions from multiple variables.
• Controlling for all other variables, the odds of buying gold increase when playing on a private server, being a man, having frozen one's subscription, having made friends IG, playing for achievement, and having played the game for a long time. On the other hand, the odds
• Controlling for all other variables, the odds of buying gold decrease when having had a college education, playing for immersion or socializing, and playing with cousins, siblings, or spouse.

The life of the Chinese gold farmer

Notes from a June 2007 New York Times article about gold farming by Dibbell.

Julian Dibbell, June 2007, The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer, 

• 100k Chinese workers are involved in RMT. RMT market = $1.8 billion worldwide
• 80 MMOs and 30M players worldwide. WoW brings $1bn/year to Blizzard.
• The Gross Domestic Product of the MMO player population is between $7bn and $12bn.
• The gold farming wang ba given as an example has 10 employees and generate $80k/year. 12-hour day/night shifts. Dormitories are in the second floor of the wang ba.
• Farmers collect 25 gold/hour. For 100 golds, the farmer receives $1.25 by his boss, and the boss receives $3+ by the gold selling website which sells those 100 gold for up to $20.
• After Blizzard banned 50k gold farmers, the exchange rate went from 6c/gold in Spring 2006 to 35c/gold in January 2007.
• Differences between power levellers and gold farmers: bigger teams (25 per 12-hour shift), less sweat-shop-like, have a company tee-shirt/polo, team spirit, less ban (because they use the customer's account and act nearly like actual players). Some leave gold farming to power levelling to have more room to play for themselves. They like the game/work because playing WoW = learning. Some even buy gold because they don't have time to grind.
• Raids have drops bound when picked. Therefore, gold farming/power levelling for high-end content is hard. Solution: make a guild, invite the customer in it, raid with him, and have him pick the loots when a boss is downed. Problem: too few customers buy it => cancelled.
• Gold farmers too want to play.

[Literature] Retention in WoW

Thomas Debeauvais et al. 2011. If you build it, they might stay: Retention systems in World of Warcraft. In FDG2011.

I looked at what keeps people playing WoW and which mechanisms retain most effectively which kind of players. Here are my picks from the paper I wrote and sent to FDG2011.

Around 2800 WoW players from Europe, North-America and Asia completed an online questionnaire. Player commitment (and therefore retention) was measured by three metrics: weekly play time, ratio of respondents who have ever stopped playing, and number of years spent playing WoW. All the results mentioned in this article are significant with a p-value below 0.01.

• 96% of respondents have been playing WoW for more than a year, 70% for more than three years.
• 23% of respondents have stopped playing for more than 6 months and have never canceled their subscription - they keep paying even if they do not play!
• On average, people play 23h/week. Asians play more than Westerners. No noticeable difference between men and women.
• Achievement and social actions are motivations that increase the weekly play time. Immersion does not influence the weekly play time.

• Asians are more immersion-oriented than Westerners.
• A higher guild rank (officer or GM > basic member > non-guilded) increases retention.
• Women play with people from real-life more than men.
• People who play with their partner play less than single players, but more than players not playing with their partner. They also stop playing less often.
• 13% of players have found a real-life boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse in WoW.
• There are more players over 45 than players who play more than 40 hours per week (another sample may contain a different ratio, though)

Map updates and nostalgia

Nostalgia of the good old times spent in an old version of an MMORPG may have many origins. Back in the days, there were

• more friendly and well-mannered players,
• more original monsters,
• more believable NPCs,
• a less frivolous virtual economy,
• less competitive guilds,
• balanced equipment,
• authentic choices in avatar appearances/classes/races that have now been updated,
• ...

But in my opinion, updates are most strikingly received by players through the new maps. Characters of a new race start in new maps. New monsters and NPCs are found on new maps. New (unbalanced?) items are dropped in new maps. Many players go to the new maps at the same time, hence one can measure the new gaming atmosphere there. So ... everything is linked to the new maps! Let us look at RO, EQ and WoW map updates.

RO

Payon

A new version of the Payon city was added on kRO Sakray (the Korean test server) in September 2004 with Episode 6.9.

// --- Ep6.9 - New Payon ---
// Requires kRO Sakray 09-03
(from eA svn)

The city previously counted 5 or 6 visitable houses and was very small compared to other cities of the world. A big castle and several houses were added to the city with the update. Nothing else but a larger city was added at that time (no new monsters, NPCs, items or classes). But many players have complained about the new Payon map: God how I miss the old Payon so much...the map was so much easier to navigate through and to memorize... and others have expressed nostalgy about it: Really missed the old payon. So many old memories with firends there. /sob Some players from private servers have asked for the old Payon town to be added in addition to the existing new Payon.

Morocc

As for Morocc, a new version of the city replaced the old one in September 2007 with Episode 12.

// --- Episode 12: Satan Morroc & Schwaltzvalt Seige ---
// -- 2007-09-19sdata_k.gpf
(from eA svn)

Unlike Payon, the Morocc update brought an entire new content set: a remake of the city map, new fields, new monsters, new drops and a new dungeon with a 2-phased 20-million-HP final boss ending a quest (bosses are usually less than 10M HP and quests are rare in RO). I did not see as much complain as for Payon, maybe because there was not only an old map update, but also a lot of new high-level content added.

WoW

WoW started in late 2004 with 2 continents: Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. This pre-BC period has been called Vanilla. Then BC brought the Outland (and 2 new beginning maps) and WotLK Northrend. In the latest update, Cataclysm, Blizzard has decided to add new zones and modify existing maps.

However, some players have started a petition for Blizzard to launch Vanilla servers. Others like the Madcow studio have cleverly identified how Ragnaros - Vanilla-dungeon MC's final boss - would feel after the BC update. In the Molten Chorus, Ragnaros and Executus sing on the Yesterday tune of the Beatles Yesterday, we were everybody's favorite raid and Suddenly, everybody's level 70, we have a shorter life expectancy. Although Ragnaros will be back for Cataclysm, no wonder how clothing such a the "I Heart MC" nearby could appear.

EverQuest

The vanilla period of EQ is called EQ Classic. It lasted between 1999 (when the game started) and 2000 (when the first expansion, Kunark, was implemented). EQ Classic had 77 maps. Since then, around 330 maps have been added (around 400 total).

As for the WoW Vanilla petition, there is a Classic EQ petition.

A few teams have tried to develop a server-side version (also called emulator) of Classic EQ. Eqclassic have not finished their development yet, but Project 1999 was launched in October 2009. A poll of 799 players of Project 1999 revealed 57% started playing EQ in its Classic period and 2% played EQ for the first time on this emulator. Although there are around 500 players online, the team is aware of the legal issues raised by their emulator.

Edit (September 7th): my point is: whatever the update size, there will always be nostalgic players.

[Conf] Game design = learning design = game design

On June 19th, James Gee gave the opening keynote at FDG2010. You can find the abstract page xix. Here are some notes I took during the talk.

Games convey learning better than schools do.

A concentrated sample is a basic language sample for a 1-year-old kid learning language. But people do not speak simply enough, they do not send basic samples only. Nature's solution is: kids filter and simplify what they receive, they can only process simple sentences. Kids are built to be limited. What could be a boss battle in language? For games, the problem is: how to be sure players get only the bits of information they need to progress. Games are guided experience on concentrated sample for future learning. Each level is a preparation for the following level, each level is learning. A boss is here only to test if the player is prepared to learn more. A better player is a better learner.

Experts only know one thing, they overvalue it and undervalue their other knowledge. WoW is distributed experts who also understand other classes' expertise. With the Damage Meter add-on, DPS free-riders are spotted.

Learning is helped by the emotional impact found in games. Why would I save people in the game? Why would I play? The story is here to kick-in emotions and motivate players. Stories are the only way to do it.

There is always performance before competence. The problem is trainees need to trust their trainers, otherwise they fear to perform. In games, there is performance: it is players looking at other players or NPC. Bonus: the intelligence is distributed. The community helps learning. This works particularly well with modding.

A game is fair when players admit I can win if I get better.

For Baby Boomers, intelligence meant speed and efficiency. For today kids, it is adaptation.

[Literature] Who owns the mods?

Who owns the mod? was written by Yong Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi in May 2010. They conducted 15 interviews with WoW modders (ie those who make WoW add-ons) after Blizzard had decided to forbid modders to make money with or advertise in their mods. Currently, more than 4.000 mods have been coded by modders.

Blizzard's new policies

QuestHelper has 23.000 lines of codes and has been the most downloaded mod with 38 million downloads (and counting). QuestHelper, nUI and Carbonite were popular enough to support their owners full time with in-game player donations or for-pay versions with additional features.

But in March 2009, Blizzard posted in their add-on forum section a new set of add-on-related policies. Modders were particularly furious at 2 policies: Policy 1 — Add–ons must be free of charge and Policy 5 — Add–ons may not solicit donations. Only a few modders managed to live with the revenues generated from their add-on, and most modders did it for fun and for free. However, the whole WoW modding community felt betrayed and considered the new policies were a violation of modders’ trust. Modders started to see Blizzard as a company with intimidating lawyers rather than with friendly developers.

Modders reacted on the WoW forums. Cogwheel was a forum MVP and the author or useful mod tutorials and guides. His vehement reaction against the new policies only made Blizzard remove all his posts (ie stickies and normal posts) from the forum. Modders felt that they deserved a response from Blizzard. But apart from reprimanding Cogwheel and deleting the posts of critical modders, Blizzard chose silence.

The modding community

Modders respect each other's work. The ownership arrangement was not legally enforceable, but was upheld by the community’s own mechanics: websites such as curse.com or wowInterface, two key download sites supported by plentiful advertising, were able to remove non–conforming mods from their download sites. WoWMatrix, a download site that did not recognize the community rules, was shunned by modders. After the new policies, Blizzard stood quiet and did not debate with modders. Hence, the solution came from download websites. The requests for donation were relocated from inside the game to the download page of the mod on both WowInterface and curse.com. But mods are downloaded less often than they are used in the game, so this post-policies solution was still less profitable for modders.

Mods such as SellFish, Threat Meter or Group Calendar have been integrated into the official game by Blizzard. Blizzard does not infringe any copyright owned by modders on their work, they simply take the ideas seen in the most popular add-ons. Ideas are not protected by copyrights but by patents, and filling a patent is too administratively complex for a mod developer. Hence what Blizzard has been doing is perfectly legal. And modders never complained about it. Rather, it was a sign of their work done right. Modders were also recognized in their community if their mods had a high download count.

Conflicting interests

Players sometimes complained about bugged mods, or harassed modders for additional features with little respect to their efforts. In fact, many players considered they owned the right to use a decent mod with no ads or donation requests because they had paid for the game. Obviously, this kind of players was not very supportive to the add-on developers. As seen in the figure below, different conflicting interests aroused between players, Blizzard and modders.

In late March 2009, the GroupCalendar mod was removed from distribution. Its author protested against the change in Blizzard's policies. Players came to the authors website and asked for a come back of the mod on curse.com. The mod came back.

API = (developer) community management

Decursive was a mod that automatized many actions into a single click. Blizzard found it simplified the game too much, and the modder rewrote it. Moreover, it seems modders accept updates in the API very easily - after all, code is law. Instead of the highly unfriendly “You have 60 days to comply!” software platform changes are described in neutral, impersonal programming terms. Hence, a lot of the modder community management could happen through the API. [However, I think it requires a very complex mod platform/environment that Blizzard does not have yet].

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 3/3

This post is the last of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. The first part deals with the methodology, I put the data in the second part and this last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

Discussion

Most of the time, the two marketers have strongly different strategies. But it happens that they agree on particular domains such as niche markets or lay offs. Their opinions also often differ about general topics such as respect or misunderstanding.

Image and communication

(Data)
Unlike Godin the RL marketer, Gevlon the VW marketer does not rely on his image to sell his products. This is particularly obvious when looking at the "Celebrity", "Offering Gifts" or "Donations" quotes, and when observing how they have decided to manage their increasing number of blog followers. At a certain point, managing their community has started to consume them a lot of (their precious) time. On the one hand, Seth Godin, careful with his image, disabled the comments on his blog so that he does not have to moderate or answer them. On the other hand, Gevlon stated he would stay quite involved in the moderation of his blog comments (I delete troll comments) and skim through his followers' mails (I'll have a very effective and anti-social mail policy [...] I know that I'll lose some readers because of that. But my own time is more important than reader count (especially when readers are in pretty large supply).). While Seth Godin keeps thanking his readers, Gevlon admitted that Most of my readers are not idiots and lot of them don't like me at all, they come here to bitterly argue and troll.

Moreover, while Godin promotes respect, tolerance and sharing knowledge, Gevlon pretends that business tricks are kept secret and he does not care about treating someone an idiot (see the "Sharing strategies" and "Respect" quotes). But actually, Gevlon shares if not all at least some of his strategies with his readers. So I think that both Gevlon and Godin have the same goal (keeping the blog followers), but they achieve it through different communication strategies (inspirational, pleasant and agreeable versus selfish, meritocrat and cynical).

Anonymous strategies

(Data)
Back to marketer strategies, a successful WoW marketer does not own a loyal customer base. When they need a particular item, Auction House buyers take the cheapest and do not really care for the vendor's name. This particularity echoes the unique rules in WoW economy mentioned by Gevlon: WoW has no second-hand economy mostly because of soulbound items, and no cartels are dictating prices because avatars' needs are not matter of actual life and death. Consequently, I could only find basic "anonymous" economic strategies shared between the two marketers.

First, niches are considered as successful economic strategies for both RL and VW marketers. Niches are small by definition, but small is larger than tiny, and potentially pays more. Both marketers agree that even though they pay less than mainstream marketing, niches are free from competition and easier markets because the customer base relies on the (most of the time) single vendor's products.

Second, choosing to sell in markets where the supply does not meet the demand is another strategy shared between the two. Gevlon explains it very simply at the end of a post. Let us say one vendor has a monopoly and sells overpriced items. The possible reasons for monopolies detailed by the two marketers are very similar. The main difference between RL and VW concerning monopolies is that in VW, monopolists can be pushed out of market. In WoW, a smart marketer simply enters a market in flooding it with lower-than-monopolist's but still high-priced items. This flood forces the former monopolist to buy all his/her concurrent's items to keep the monopoly. This means, the newcomer is selling to the former monopolist, hereby making profit! Seth Godin explains that for "nice" RL items or services (eg luxury hotels), customers are ready to pay the intrinsic "extra" for the "nice", but vendors can still make huge benefits. This does not seem to apply in WoW: any marketer can jump in the gap between the median/normal price and the current higher price and make profit, ruining other marketers profits. This strategy and undercutting make it usually rare for marketers to gain on mainstream "nice" virtual goods (eg glyphs).

Third, both marketers recognize that the customer is king. It is useless to try to sell unappropriate products to your customers. It is even more difficult to sell to people who do not want to buy your products, more particularly in VW where drinking water is not a matter of life and death...

Limitations

This study examined only two marketers. Even though each of them was supposed to be a somewhat representative sample of his respective marketer population, the samples' very small size raise obvious external validity issues. However, given the short time allocated to this study, I could only do with these small samples. I recognize that some WoW marketers disagreed with some of Gevlon's strategies, and Gevlon adressed some of them. While Gevlon does not hide his fight against "socials", Markco, a rival WoW marketer of Gevlon, claims his social side loud and clear: Don't Be Anti-Social says the left-wing panel of his blog. But at the same time, Markco wrote a book about how to make gold in WoW, and he certainly wants people to buy it. Yet another marketing blog used to effectively get customers ...

Still about external validity threats, I do not think this study relied on "perishable" materials (ie quotes that are not valid anymore). A few quotes from Seth Godin date from several years ago (2005) but I do not think that RL marketers change their opinion so quickly about efficient marketing strategies. As for VW marketer strategies, it is very possible that they change very often: one can use patches to make profit (buying in mass when cheap and selling after a patch when it becomes more interesting) and above all, one has to permanently come up with new strategies (because A single guy being aware of the trick can ruin it for you). However, all Gevlon's quotes but one are dated 2009 or 2010, so I think the collected quotes are still relevant today.

On his blog, Seth Godin has been talking about marketing for years, but he has also been effectively marketing (if not his company's products, at least his image). Gevlon has rejected advertising on his blog several times because he presumably simply wants to spread the goblinish widsom: Spreading goblinish ideas is a very selfish move: I convince people not to waste gold and time to M&S in the game. [...] "I want my hard-earned money to be mine. I don't want to support complete strangers just because they are poor." If enough people will say that, the world will be a much better place. As seen in the mapping framework, the motivations of the observed samples matter a lot. Indeed, keeping in mind throughout this study that the two marketers had somewhat different motivations helped me be particularly cautious when picking quotes, especially when dealing with the image and communication strategies.

The line was sometimes blurred between marketer strategies (the study interest), effectively marketing (eg "get my new book!") and blog followers management (eg "morons of the week"). This is a relatively small threat to reliability as I have been following these two blogs for over 6 months, and I have learned to detect when each of them looks for what. For instance, I realized that 2002 articles from Godin contain more links to/comments about external sources than nowadays's articles, and Gevlon's September 2008 articles had a less cynical tone and nearly each of them contained WoW everyday life screenshots. Even some of Gevlon's rants about bad groups were softer (well OK, World of Retardcraft was a particularly harsh post...). I guess people tend to speak more about themselves when they multiply by 100 their number of readers.

One can argue that me picking up myself particular post quotes to make my point introduces a severe bias. I think it was not: if we take a blog as a long and recurrent interview about various topics, quoting particular article lines was no different from selecting excerpts from traditional interviews. At the first glance, I found analyzing blog articles was a methodology that gave even more freedom to the analyzed individuals than unstructured interviews. Indeed, these bloggers have been writing spontaneously about what they want. I was definitely not obtrusive and there was no possible Hawthorne effect. However, there was no control of the data materials.

Finally, I have only considered the anonymous and somewhat basic Auction House trade chanel as it was the only one mentioned by Gevlon. I did not look at other possible trade chanels (friends, guild ...). I might be wrong, but I do not think that VW marketers can massively use other chanels than the one specifically designed for trading by the game designers, ie the Auction House for WoW. I agree that for Second Life, where people sell goods they created themselves to each other, one should not only take into account the B2C trade chanels, but also the C2C ones.

Conclusion

I have tried to keep in mind the mapping principle framework suggested by Williams throughout the study. Although the methodology of this short comparison of RL and WoW marketer strategies could largely be improved, I have found interesting mapping and non-mapping results in the direcionality VW to RL. Cutomer relationships do not exist in WoW because the current trade system was designed so that consumers can buy the cheapest item from any one at any time, independently of their previous purchase. However, some WoW strategies mentioned by Gevlon such as niches marketing seem to map to the RL strategies mentioned by Godin.

I do not pretend having done any top-research-quality work with this short study. Although I have tried not to spend too much time on this post, I have also tried to be as critical as possible, particularly concerning the methodology. Collecting quotes from blog posts was much more difficult than collecting data from interviews. Google Search mastery and Google Reader sometimes helped finding relevant posts, but this study took very VERY much time and did not bring that many satisfying results.

In the end, I think the mapping framework helped keeping in mind particular issues (eg motivations), but I do not think it should be taken as an article template to follow blindly.

Edit: Tobold, a WoW player, found in January 2010 that current posts from Gevlon contradict the ones Gevlon posted a year ago.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 2/3

This post is the second of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. The first part deals with the methodology, I put the data in this post, and the last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

I have found for each topic one quote from each of the observed marketers. These topics can be considered as my dependent variables, my independent variable being RL versus VW. I have divided topics into two broader areas: "Image and Communication" and "Anonymous strategies". I will refer to these areas later in the discussion section.

Image and communication

Topic	Godin says	Goblin says
Offering Gifts	The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. [...] Plus, giving a gift feels good. in The hidden power of a gift	In best case, giving gifts is just as good for the group as not giving. In the average case it produces some waste. In worst case: wastes all value. in Presents!
Donations	I want to send you a copy of Linchpin (at my expense) three weeks before anyone else can buy one. [...] The first 3,000 people who make a donation to the Acumen Fund (at least $30) get one in Get a review copy of my new book	all of the guys giving him [Kungen, a famous WoW guild leader,] gold are not premiere raiders wanted to get some tips [...] They were morons. in Celebrity
Celebrity	Most marketers are opening acts. [...] Some marketers are rock stars. [...] I just went to see Keller Williams in concert. Without a doubt, he's a genius and a rock star. [...] If he was selling something, I'd buy it. in Opening acts and rockstars	The celebrity followers are a masterpieces of stupidity. What does a goblin do if he sees a stupid? Takes his money! [...] The celebrity industry is a great indicator of human stupidity. in Celebrity
Sharing strategies	Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you. from How to get traffic for your blog	no one will teach you the recent business tricks, partly because you would use it against them, and also because they are usually immoral from Surgeons and goblins
Respect	it doesn't matter who's "right". What matters is that giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them with respect is not only more fun, it works better too. from You can always be mean later (respect works)	I have no problem telling someone that "you are a useless dead weight and I want you out of my instance, idiot" from Women and hearts
Customer service	Call your customers. Or write to them. [...] You'll end up doing a lot for your customers. Which is a wonderful privilege. Even for those that don't reciprocate. in Easiest cheap way to dramatically increase sales	Standard M&S letter with the standard answer by Nicciter of Smolderthorn-US. Someone could make an addon to answer this automatically from Morons of the week
Misunderstanding	It's almost impossible to communicate something clearly and succinctly to everyone, all the time. So misunderstandings occur. [...] If we're engaged with a stranger or someone we don't trust, we assume the worst. The challenge, then, is to earn the benefit of the doubt. in Benefit of the doubt	he [another WoW marketer] offered a shady virus-ad [about WoW gold techniques], and when I declined that, he claimed that he's just been "misunderstood" [...] While this trick seems lame, I guarantee that it's not. Social people find it very hard to look someone's eyes and say: "you are lying!". They usually accept that "misunderstanding" happened. in No means no

Anonymous strategies

Topic	Godin says	Goblin says
Choosing a niche	The reason you can make money in the niche pocket is that it costs far less to compete here. First, because there's less competition and the competition is less fierce, and second because it's cheaper and easier to reach your target market because they're choosing to pay attention. from The long tail and the dip	The best things about niche markets is that no one cares for them. You mostly run without any competition. So you can list lot of items at once without fear for undercutting. [...] If you find a niche, go for it. It's all yours. from Niche markets
Niche size	It's entirely possible that you will choose a niche that's too small. It's much more likely you'll shoot for something too big and become overwhelmed. When in doubt, overwhelm a small niche. from Make the world smaller	If you need a better item, you may find a niche producer who sells a high-end product. Unfortunately they are extremely expensive, exactly because they have to make profit from a smaller customer base. from Premium products for valued customers
Monopolies	There are three things that led to the monopolies we now enjoy: 1. The FCC limited the number of TV and radio stations in every market [...] 2. Copyright ensures that we can charge a lot [...] 3. The limited number of physical distribution outlets [...] guarantees that distributors with clout get more shelf space. from Monopolies seven years later	There are some cases when the monopoly works. * [...] If you are the only one on the server who have the recipe [...] * The market is about to shift, usually because of a patch. This case the "monopolist price" is actually the "new market price". [...] * Market of the fools: you can be a monopolist if your buyers are plain idiots. from Monopoly
Unanswered demand	if all I want, the only extra, is for someone to be nice to me when I visit your business, how much extra does that cost? [...] I think there's a huge gap between what people are willing to pay for nice (a lot) and what it would cost businesses to deliver it (almost nothing). Smells like an opportunity. from How much extra for nice?	most of my profit comes from "top-scanning": seeking items that are mostly overpriced. If the auctions of item X are listed between 150% and 999%, then it's an item with increased demand. I find a way to supply to this increased demand. I find a way to craft the item in need and sell it in this boosting market. from Invisible Hand
Forcing consumers	People don't adapt to what you make, they adopt it. They can't be forced to adapt, so they won't. from Five common cliches (done wrong)	We must keep in mind that we are not needed. So we can't dictate prices. Our items may be wanted by players, but they can live without it. from Unique rules in WoW economy

You can read the discussion, limitations and conclusion here.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 1/3

This post is the first of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. This first part deals with the methodology, the second part contains the data, and the last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

Methodology

Following my last post about the Mapping principle, I tried to use, throughout this entire post (and the next one), the framework suggested by Williams to map marketers' behaviors. A few obvious questions came to my mind very quickly. Could a successful RL marketer be also successful in VW? What about the opposite? If there is no direct mapping, are there similarities between the two? These questions are too wide to be magically answered in one blog article. In fact, trying to answer these big broad questions require a minimum of expert RL economists, VW social scientists, VW economists and a few years of journal publications. I do not pretend being able to play all these roles, particularly for a single blog post. So I decided to simply look at what RL and VW marketers say about their business. No better place than blogs!

Crawling all possible blogs from RL and VW marketers to collect data would have taken really much time. Also, I planed to write a post and not a whole 10-page research paper, so I have looked for one representative marketer of each kind. I have chosen to follow Seth Godin's blog for the RL marketer, and Greedy Goblin for the VW marketer. I have been following both of these blogs for at least six months. Both are intense bloggers - they post every day - which means they provide a lot of data to analyze.

To be more explicit about the directionality of this study, I tried to detect if VW marketer strategies map RL ones. That is to say, if the real impacts the virtual (direction is offline to online). To my mind, it is very unlikely that VW economic strategies have been mapped to RL strategies. However, there might be a very interesting bi-directional connection between some RL and VW consumer behaviors (eg impulse purchase or conspicuous consumption), but this might be the topic of another post!

In VW, and more particularly in WoW, a marketer (also called gold maker in WoW) has to react to other marketers' actions and price fluctuations at the Auction House (a server-wide Wall Street). Consequently, even though he/she has to care for other players, a VW marketer is the only one who chooses which strategy to follow. Hence I consider VW marketers can be treated as individual entities. As for the RL side, I have only taken into account the RL marketer's opinion as an individual, not as a company spokesperson or a member of a group of RL marketers. However, I think it could be very interesting to compare RL marketer teams to VW cartels.

I should also explain how I compared topics between the two marketers. From their blogs, I have randomly read articles of the past 6 months - this was done easily in Google Reader. When I found a relevant article on one of them, I searched the other blog for an article about the same topic. I also thought about traditional economic principles such as monopoly or niche markets.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a New-York marketer. He is considered as a celebrity/guru and as of February 22nd, 2010, his website is the 127th most influential according to Technocrati and has the first ranking of the top English-language marketing blogs in the world (as of February 22nd, 2010, and out of 1092). Roughly 15k people visit his website every day. Many other famous marketers, if they do not agree with Seth Godin, at least they talk about him and his marketing strategies. After the publication in January 2010 of his last book, Linchpin, Godin talked with dozens of marketers and economists. Godin has been regularly mentioning other marketers in his posts. Hence, even though I am certainly not an expert marketer, I found Seth Godin's blog to be quite representative of RL marketers.

In a January 2010 article entitled The 2.0 media tour, he wrote:

You know by now that I haven't gone to any traditional media for the launch of my new book - no pitches to newspapers, magazines, or television. Instead, I went directly to my readers and the many intelligent voices online. I sent review copies by request to my readers - who were generous and creative in their reviews, and now we'll hear from the bloggers and other online denizens.
-- Seth Godin, January 2010

Seth Godin has not only been using his blog to talk about marketing, but also as an effectively marketing place. His target population is his readers. This seems like the first reliability issue. Even though in Death of the personal blog? (2008), he explains that a blog's point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking, he has disabled the comments on his blog since 2006, so they will not be taken into account in this study. Intriguingly, even though comments are impossible on his blog, a large number of people keep following it anyway.

Gevlon the Greedy Goblin

Gevlon is the pseudonym of a Hungarian WoW player born in 1977 - he uses freemail.hu and mentioned Hungary a few times. His blog about making gold and soloing instances in WoW, and bashing altruists and other idiots, has reached more than 4k readers in February 2010. In the last 7 months, he has doubled his number of readers. Interestingly, this particularly misanthropic character stands as one of the most recognized WoW marketers: many other WoW marketers or players keep mentioning him. His prowess as a skilled player were even mentioned at wow.com. Being well-connected in the WoW marketing blogosphere, Gevlon's blog list suggests he follows many other WoW player/VW marketer blogs. I guess if Gevlon was a charlatan, he would not be so followed and cited in the WoW blogosphere.

Like Seth Godin's, Gevlon's articles mix personal opinions and business strategies: making gold, soloing instances and bashing altruists and other idiots is the motto written on his blog banner as of February 2010. As his blog has been growing older, Gevlon has been talking more and more about RL economic issues such as National Debt Crisis or Underwater loans, or about more trivial issues such as how stupid he found a recent comment on his blog. Same threat to validity as Godin's articles.

But unlike Godin, Gevlon's motivation is to share his ideas to have them improved by his readers' comments. That is maybe why he sometimes answer comments.

Data

You can read the data here.

[Literature] Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in WoW

Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris, 2006. Qualitative work (semi-structured interviews and field observations). play is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations. Indeed, the classes asymmetrical strengths and weaknesses encourage collaboration during battle as well as in brief encounters.

The fun of collaborating with strangers

Buffs are the simplest way of engagement between players. Buffs happen in a cohesive group but also from a player to another he/she does not even know. In the latter case, authors explain that on a volontary basis, players commit small acts of kindness to maintain a mutually beneficial atmosphere. On the other hand, ganking consists of players waiting for killing other players weakened by fights with monsters. Not all interactions are beneficial for everyone.

The authors explain that with the freer atmosphere of online communities, players do IG things they would never do IRL, such as dancing naked in a fountain, following a conga-line or flirt.

Guilds, knots and friends - social structures in WoW

The authors argue that having different possible ways to collaborate in the game provides a versatile, robust environnement for play and learning. Indeed, playing in a guild requires much more involvement than taking part in a "pick-up" battleground party. To my mind, the underlying game design suggestion is: include as many and various ways for players to interact with one another as possible.

Learning

Moreover, the article mentions 2 key game activities: having fun and learning the game. It depends on what is meant by "fun", but I am not sure if these are the only interesting activities possible in the game. Anyway, Nardi explains that the social structures in WoW provide an environement for learning. The zone of proximal development (see figure nearby) introduced by Vygotsky consists of the knowledge or skills a child can learn at the moment, that is to say the difference between what the learner can perform alone and perform helped by a teacher (ie "collective performance"). Ang and Zaphiris in Social learning in MMOG: an activity theoretical perspective have argued that WoW players learn new skills or information if this knowledge belongs to their ZPD.

As taught in HCI classes, the interviewed players reported they learned mostly through trial and error: people eventually read the manual after they have tried (and failed). In collaborative activities, players acquire new information not only by themselves, but also by other players. Unless reading forums or databases, a Mage player can not know that a Paladin is particularly efficient against undead monsters until he/she has played with a Paladin. In the end, players can choose among various learning resources (asking other players, consulting websites or trying solo) the one(s) that best suit(s) them. IG, both the game design and the (relatively) friendly social environnement help players learn. But outside of the game, a new player may read websites or forums to increase his/her knowledge, while an expert player will find the appropriate add-on on curse.com. A "social" player may post his/her questions on forums while a solo player may read but not particularly post on forums and if he/she can not find the answer, he/she may try by himself/herself until he/she finds what he/she wants. Giving so many kinds of players the information they want the way they want may be one of the reasons why WoW has become so popular.

Friends

Weak-tie

According to Rapoport, if B and C are linked to A (cf figure nearby), there is a high probability that B and C are linked together. A weak tie is the link between B and C. A weak tie is the social network link between two acquaintances, whereas the link between two close friends or members of the same family is a strong tie. According to Granovetter, only a weak tie can connect two strong-tied social networks. I am taking an exampleFor instance, the Jones have seen on TV a commercial for a detergent. Their neighbors, the Smiths have no TV and therefore are supposedly not reachable by the detergent marketing. However, word-of-mouth marketing relies on this weak tie (neighborhood) between the Jones and the Smith, to make the no-TV family hear about the detergent.

Nardi et al. suggest that "friends" in WoW are not weak ties because in the game, friends do not help connecting strong social networks together and friendship remains a one-to-one relation. In WoW, the friends of a player appear in the friends list. The player can not organize conversations between a group of friends without being in the same party. So, except for guilds of friends, the usual interaction between friends is whispering, a typical one-to-one relation. Maybe players want to have this one-to-one exclusive chanel functionality with their actual friends, and use a more collective broadcast-like chanel for their guildmates who might not all be friends. In the end, I wonder if an "interconnected friends" functionality in the friends list in WoW could not make the one-to-one friend relations evolve into solid clusters of friends.

Guilds

This paper gives a very interesting (and inspirational) definition of guilds: named groups of players that socialize and play together. This definition seems to put in parallel play and socialize. However, I think the reason why people socialize in a guild is because they have chosen to play together. Were they no guild activities, there would not be any socialization. In other words, socialization in WoW is a consequence of the game design.

Illustrating their argument with the small tightknit European villages of the 19th century where everyone knew one another and everyone shared the same history and tradition, the authors explain that guilds look like Gemeinschaft communities. However, guilds are not as isolated as 19th century villages: their members can easily group with strangers and find new people to talk to. While playing in a guild sometimes require an overhead of collaborating, playing solo may look like a break from the guild: assembling 25 players for a raid means waiting for the latecomers and forbearing the clumsy players, but exploring new places and accomplishing new quests alone or with players met on the way has a taste of freedom. PvP is another way to play solo.

Knots

According to the authors, knots are unique groups that form to complete a task of realtively short duration, like an airline crew or international research workshops. The concept of knots has been first described by Engeström et al.. Examples of knots in WoW are "pick-up" teams, trade partners, duelists or strangers dancing together.

To my mind, knots are the transitional phase between perfect strangers and in-game acquaintances and friends (see table below). A player who feels he/she truly belongs to a human-size community such as a guild (but not such as a 11-million-player game community) has a reason to stay in the game. I think game designers know very well how playing is not exactly what keeps players in a MMOG. As an example, between the solo-player and the guild master, who do you think is going to stay in the game longer? Hence a good MMOG game design should encourage players to participate in knot-like situations so that they later can get involved in guilds.

strangers	->	knots	->	acquaintances	->	friends
solo players, auction house interactions		parties, raids, duels, trades, global chanels of discussion		guild membership, social events, private chanels of discussion		guild creation/management, chitchat, oral chanels of discussion

A very interesting idea given by the authors is to tailor MMOG to fit elderly people's interests. Through knots of such an MMOG, elderly people could meet new players with whom they could share topics of mutual interest and participate in activities that provide mental stimulation. Hospitalized people could also benefit from MMOG knots. I recently read about the Compuserve story of Joan and Alex on Yann Leroux's blog: in the 1980's Joan has had a severe car accident leaving her disfigured and in a rolling chair. She decides to participate in the Compuserve forums and shortly becomes a model for her pugnacity. However, behind Joan was actually Alex, a prominent Jewish New York psychiatrist in his early fifties according to meatballwiki.org. This story makes me think that MMOG for specific "weak" populations (elderly fighting dementia or hospitalized children) can lead to many identity deception cases, and maybe cause particularly big trouble among these "weak" populations.

Playing WoW: escaping or increasing offline relations

The authors argue that sometimes players enjoy the virtual world because they want to escape the real one. A player acknowledges that playing WoW has made [him] less social in real life. Another explains that she uses the game as a break from real life: Her in-game friends were refreshingly casual and she sometimes likes to go and play alone.

On the other hand, the authors suggest that sometimes, playing WoW increases offline relations. They give examples of people of the same family playing together. One mother was thrilled to play with her son who lives in another state. For another mother, playing WoW with her children was just another shared activity. A third mother uses WoW to teach her children typing and mathematics. A brother explained that playing WoW with his much older brother made them share a common discussion topic.

The very last sentence of the paper suggests that WoW joins a long tradition of card and board games in which family and friends of different ages and genders may play together. Is WoW the new Monopoly? Ironically, according to an interview she gave to the Department of Informatics of UCI, Monopoly is the last game Nardi played before trying WoW.