This, then, may be another reason to argue for a streaming client. The faster people can get up and running with interesting play mechanics, the easier it is to *not* burn up the attention span.

I don’t know about anyone else, but if I’m trying classes out in a new game, I expect to get a ‘feel’ for them fairly early on. I’ll be curious if their redesign for Cataclysm goes deep enough to rework the level/skill progression.

My guess is for F2P games, the majority of new trials don’t last more than an hour at most. People download the new shiny, load it up, say ooo, and then get bored in about 10 mins and go. But then again, I have a sinking feeling that a lot of people don’t play their full price boxed games for more than an hour or two before getting bored and putting it away either. Not just MMOs, ALL boxed computer games.

It would be really interesting to know.

Such is the trouble with designing a mass market game, perhaps.

So… let advanced players start with a different sort of character? Give players the chance to choose how they enter the world? Some will always want to jump right into the deep end, others will want to wade and simmer for a while. Why make either do what they don’t want to do?

…in short, I’m just not sure why Blizzard would cite level 10 as a relevant cutoff point. They aren’t actually saying anything about retention or conversion there, it’s just a curious gamist statistic. I can’t help but wonder about the business model and what is going on with the real money numbers; that’s way more interesting to me than a level cutoff.

That said, from a game design standpoint, I actually am curious as to why people do quit the game. If I were starting today with a Hunter, delirious “a boy and his dog” visions in my mind, I’d be more than ticked that I don’t even get a pet for ten levels. In fact, when I fired up a Hunter for the first time on a free trial, I almost gave up on him around level 7, when the grind had stepped up but I still didn’t have a pet. I wanted a pet from the outset, not after I’d qualified to play a non-gimped version of the class by playing half the time in melee *which I’d likely never do again once I had a pet*. That’s bad design, teaching a player a totally different playstyle from what they will get to play if they stick with it. (Another complaint about the “game starts at 80″ raiding switch, as it happens.) It very literally felt like a chore, playing a melee Hunter until I could play a “real” Hunter. Bear Form for Druids is similar, I’d guess. (I’m not sure on the other classes. Totems for Shamans?)

Sometimes I wonder if MMOs could benefit from the Metroid Prime design mentality; give the player a lot of toys to start with, hinting at what the future could be, and only then punt the player back a bit and let them work back up to the really interesting stuff. (Though that would make the grind even more psychologically annoying…) Impress them in the first fifteen minutes; a flyby, a couple of conversations and a “kill ten rats” quest don’t do it any more.

Also, is it just me or is the “level 10″ metric a bit odd? That’s not really measuring conversion or retention, just character level, which doesn’t really correlate.

…I just don’t see a lot of reason to get excited about that number since it’s not really measuring what interests me. It’s great for feeling special if I’m over level 10, but that’s just fluffy social feelgood gibberish.

When I started playing WoW, it took a while until I got into the game, because at the beginning it was just like any other Single Player, until I discovered the social aspects.
My main concern at day one was: Why paying monthly, when I can have the same experience with Diablo for free. And I was in a guild from day one, of people I knew and who explained me a lot.

At the start, WoW does not feel different from a Single Player game.

Another thing is the horrible reputation of the game.
We occasionally visit other friends who play WoW, many of them couples. And we all agree, that none of us tells their colleagues, friends and families about WoW, without running into risk of being considered of some sort addicted.

We even have a community meeting every year in another city, and granted none of our members, looks like the typical WoW Victim they present in the media. But when we get asked where we know each other from, we usually change the topic.

I know many, many couples, who usually had the typical discussion about him playing to much video games, and who found their peace in WoW. In contrary to most Shooter or Action games, the game was very pleasant for women, so their wife and girlfriends started playing. Many of them simply left, because they felt “addicted”. Not that they were actually playing more WoW than the average Joe watches TV, but they were afraid of becoming what media showed them.

I have stopped watching reports about WoW, the last one I saw, was about some Blizzard Con in the USA, showing just Fat people and the second one, claimed that WoW players wear diapers during Raids.
Both in national television.

WoW had to hit the roof eventually and I suspect that from now on Blizzard will have to focus more on keeping the subscription numbers steady rather than trying to get more playing. Blizzard might prove me wrong though, no one believed a MMO would get much more than a million subscribers.

About the 3/10 only makes it past thing must be included trial accounts? Who pays for a game then plays for less than the 2-3 hours it takes to get to level 10? If the numbers are high or not also depends if Blizzard are able to weed out the spam-bots or not.

As you I’m probably going to try out SWTOR (try saying that three times fast). But I don’t dare getting my hopes up. I played both LOTRO and WAR for 2-3 months but eventually stopped. Leveling felt like a chore in both of them and I never got that “wow-feeling” when exploring. The people I play with will probably keep me playing WoW as well. LOTRO and WAR just felt lonely.