Author: NGA-Rinakawa ♀ Akira ( ♀
Marik Yetter, the chief gameplay designer for League of Legends, joined the League of Legends MMO team in April of this year as game director. MMO is undoubtedly the focus of Fist Game development, but it is also a very risky project that requires a lot of resources. Mark hasn't tweeted new content in a while, and toward the end of 2021, he finally talked about what he was working on and what he thought about the game.
Mark says engagement is one of the hardest metrics to identify for game development. Depending on the method used, you may get completely different results. The intention of these methods is generally good, and if the player plays the game, they will definitely be able to reap the joy of it. But there's also a design trap where pursuing short-term engagement has a lot of appeal, but in the long run, this approach can lead to players losing their enthusiasm for the game.
Designs that force players to spend a lot of time will pay off in the short term, but in the long run, they will cause players to lose trust in the game and even divert interest. Therefore, Mark believes that the better goal is to pursue long-term player engagement trends, judging player engagement over a longer period of time, such as "Are there more players this year compared to last year?" "In the long run, player satisfaction with the game will be a more important indicator."
But Mark acknowledges that it's not easy, as it's important to continuously collect player feedback and data to continuously evaluate the current state of the game and improve the game's development efforts. If the game has released an update, it is definitely not a good idea to wait a year to see how this version is doing. However, Mark is more focused on long-term goals than short-term goals, but he will quickly detect updated anomalous content.
In the final analysis, long-term satisfaction of players is the criterion for the success of game development. Mark made two points, the first is whether players' current engagement is getting higher or lower, and the second is the long-term perception of players, who can ask them through questionnaires whether they think the game is improving or feel that they need to spend more time in the game. Mark also came up with another idea that, if used properly, short-term engagement can also have a positive impact.
For example, setting up a double experience on a weekend, or expanding the map, is an exciting time for hardcore players. But if this content is too ordinary, or becomes a regular content that is continuous, the game will consume all the player's time. Although Mark did not propose the actual design of the League of Legends MMO, short-term engagement and long-term satisfaction can be said to be the core basis of any online game, especially the time-killing attribute of MMO games is very obvious.
MMO games do not account for a high proportion of today's game market, on the one hand, players do not have so much time to play, on the other hand, many tasks and activities can not take care of short-term players. Fist games have realized this from the infinite fire mode, which needs to provide short-term stimulation and maintain long-term enthusiasm. But since the League of Legends MMO is still a long way off, we'll have to wait until the 2022 developer blog to know the system design of this game.