Old players always chase the white moonlight in their hearts
How long does a game last?
In the perception of the vast majority of players, including the author, in the time span of more than ten or twenty years, even if it is interesting and beautifully made, there will be a day when players will get tired of playing. In fact, there are not many products that have been able to maintain vigorous vitality after five or six years of launch, and even more rare products that can operate for more than ten or twenty years.
But contrary to "common sense", whether a game is "really" dead or not is more up to the player. I don't know if my friends have ever met such players, they are generally older, and they are not interested in most of the new games on the market today, but they are very persistent in a certain type of old game.
And the market created by these old players is even more exaggerated, taking classic IP legends as an example. According to the research and analysis of gamma data, as of 2020, the legendary genuine IP licensed products have created a cumulative value of 90 billion yuan, and it is estimated that the turnover of the legendary IP in 2020~2023 will reach 130 billion yuan. In the field of mini games that will explode in 2023, the influence of legendary IP should not be underestimated, according to DataEye Research Institute, the market size of legendary WeChat mini games will be about 1.2 billion in 2023.
Although the legendary IP itself is legendary, the old games that veteran players love are by no means just legendary. It is undeniable that the once young players are getting older, and these "pension games" for "older players" are gradually developing into a behemoth.
Nostalgia is old age
As the game continues to operate, so does the loss of players. Especially for many long-term MMORPG games, the continuous output of content has raised the entry threshold for new players to a certain extent, and it is difficult for the game to attract new players.
Generally speaking, there are two main reasons for manufacturers to launch nostalgic clothes, one is represented by games such as "World of Warcraft" and "Sword Network 3", the operation time of these products is too long, and early users quit the game because of age, work pressure and other reasons, they don't have too much energy to keep up with the continuous update of the official server, and they hope to be able to return to their "youth memory".
The second is "Sword Spirit", "Dragon Nest" and other products, the game itself has a good foundation, and it has also stood at the peak of the category, but there are problems in the follow-up operation links that lead to the loss of players, hoping to make up for the past version through the form of nostalgic clothing and adjust it more in line with the needs of current players, so as to regain the favor of old players and even attract new players.
On January 10, 2014, Huang Lingdong, then deputy general manager of Tencent's game cooperation product department, said at the time that since November 28, 2013, the highest number of simultaneous online users of the game exceeded 1.5 million, setting a new record for MMORPG in China's online game market to reach the highest online 1.5 million.
It is undeniable that when the national server of "Sword and Soul" was launched, the action experience with strong positive feedback was one position ahead of similar products, which also made "Sword and Soul" the "white moonlight" in the hearts of many MMORPG players. Unfortunately, the rapid expansion of the value of "Sword and Soul" from the white and green version and the departure of the core creator Kim Hyung-tae eventually led to the rapid loss of players, and it was difficult to reproduce the glory when it was launched.
The S3 weapon that was extremely supermodel at the time
Therefore, the core idea of the nostalgic service of "Sword and Soul" is to start with the early versions of Yanhuang and Artillery Orchid, which have the largest number of players and the most popular, reconstruct the skill and numerical system, cancel the numerical payment, and pay mainly in the mode of membership, monthly card, battle pass, etc., and take a more people-friendly route.
Compared with the official server, the biggest change and optimization of the "Sword & Soul" nostalgic service is still in terms of equipment and currency. In the past, the equipment of "Sword Spirit" basically only brought a purely numerical increase, while the nostalgic clothing tied the equipment to the martial arts genre, such as the desert earrings given during the main story, which would change the skill effects of the Spirit Sword class Feiyan Sword and Flowing Wind Slash after equipping.
If players want to follow a certain genre that they like or are familiar with, they need to obtain the corresponding equipment, which is actually an equipment-driven way to enhance the player's desire to challenge in PVE gameplay. However, to a certain extent, this also increases the player's liver and limits the player's freedom to match martial arts.
In terms of currency, the most core "gold coins" in the past have been replaced by divine stones, which can be understood as bonds in most games, players can obtain divine stones by recharging, players can buy fashion in the mall, and purchase resources and gold coins through trading houses and Fenghui banks (gold coin transactions) also need divine stones, and players cannot trade privately.
But if it's just like this is the official monopoly of all transactions, so the Blade & Soul Nostalgia also introduces the concept of "redstone", which can be compared to the binding bonds in most games, and can only be used to buy non-static items such as vanity or horns in the store. Divine Stones can be exchanged for redstone on a one-to-one basis, and when the player earns more Divine Stones in in-game transactions than the monthly limit, the Divine Stones received by the seller will be converted into redstones.
This plan is actually to solve one of the core pain points of "Sword and Soul" at the beginning - the studio brushing gold. In the past, the core currency of "Sword & Soul" was gold, and players needed to spend a lot of gold coins to buy equipment from the trading house, and the price of gold coins in third-party channels was much lower than that of official channels, so there would be a situation where players spent a lot of money to buy gold coins from the studio.
After the introduction of the Shenshi solution, it is difficult for the studio to monetize through gold farming, and the overall price in the game has also stabilized, which is more biased towards the direction of players producing benefits for players. Taking the level 36 Yanhuang version of the Spirit Sword Quick Draw Flow as an example, it only costs about 10 yuan to buy a set of equipment copies that meet the standard equipment.
On the whole, the core gameplay experience of the "Sword and Soul" nostalgic server is not very different from the official server, and the original main side quests constitute the core experience in the early stage of the game, giving players a full sense of immersion. After the full level, it is still dominated by PVE dungeons, PVP large map dogfights, arenas and other gameplay, which optimizes the player's paid experience and game income while ensuring the "originality" of the game. So far, the changes in the Sword Spirit Nostalgia Suit have achieved quite good results.
It's not the manufacturer that defines memories, it's the players
Unlike "Sword and Spirit Nostalgia Suit" and the frontal hard studio, "Dragon Nest Memories Suit" has chosen a more conservative approach - social content is one-size-fits-all, directly turning dozens of hours in the early game into a single-player PVE experience. At the same time, in order to cater to this difference, "Dragon Nest Memories Suit" has a very obvious hardcore trend in combat, which sets the tone for the core experience of the game.
There are three main changes to the hardcore: the first is to greatly reduce the performance of the character, cancel the setting of skill hegemony value (any attack of the mob can cause stiffness to the character), and at the same time reduce the number of skills of the class, emphasizing skill management; The second is to enhance the boss's behavior tree moves, and greatly increase the amount of HP to increase the boss's tricky feeling; The third is to change the original skill cycle as the core combat experience to "attack to reduce the boss to break the defense bar→ boss to break the defense, release the skill to break the explosion, and then return to the attack to reduce the boss to break the defense bar".
At the same time, drastic changes have also been made to the cultivation part, first of all, the change in the way players level up, changing the experience upgrade obtained by playing dungeons in the past to completing achievement tasks to gain experience points, making the challenge more difficult. And added the setting of random entries to the equipment development to give the game equipment-driven attributes.
This set of radical changes also makes many players wonder about the words "Memory Suit", because in version 40, the player's "Memory" is not a weak character and a powerful boss design that deliberately increases the difficulty, nor is it a pure single-player upgrade experience that cannot be traded or teamed, and it does not rely on completing super difficult challenges to achieve level improvement. Even the choice of class needs to be unlocked through character shards, and players may not be able to choose their favorite class at first.
In the end, "Dragon Nest Memories Suit" did not meet the "memories" demands of most players, but brought players into another strange territory that seemed to be separated from the original.
Judging from the performance of "Sword Spirit Nostalgia Suit" and "Dragon Nest Memories Suit", it is not difficult to find the basic appeal of old players for such nostalgic products, that is, to pursue the original taste in the core experience, and to lower the play threshold (including growth paths, implementation conditions, etc.) as much as possible, so that all old players can get started painlessly; The second is that the stronger experience feedback than the original can also meet the experience needs of old players, for example, the equipment in "Sword and Spirit Nostalgia Suit" can provide skill effects, and players can get equipment more directly.
The black shadow that devours the player's retirement market
The old players who can get a good death are undoubtedly happy, but it is difficult for more old players to reunite with the white moonlight in their hearts. But where there is demand, there is a market, and as long as the profit is high enough, someone will do it, even if the market is illegal.
As a result, ready-made clients will inevitably be noticed by people with "ulterior motives". In the era of terminal games, those well-known imported games are the hardest hit areas, especially the irregularities in the shutdown process of overseas terminals, resulting in the leakage of clients. With the progress of cracking technology and the improvement of the industrial chain, not only old games, but also many new games cannot escape its claws, and the black industry of private servers has gradually appeared in everyone's field of vision.
I believe that many players' first reaction when they hear the private server must be resistant, but for many old players, they just want to reminisce about a certain version of a certain game, and under the premise that the official server is difficult to achieve and there is no favorite alternative product, they can only pin their hopes on these private servers. Are they really willing to play private servers? It's just that the white moonlight that used to have nowhere to place it has become restless.
In this case, veteran players are not picky, and whoever can satisfy these players in the game will choose whom. At this time, the only advantage of the official server may be the stable operation, after all, there are not a few people who run away in the private server for a month or two, but in the face of a tenfold and hundredfold recharge return, many old players will choose to take risks and choose the private server to cool up for a while.
In fact, the final outcome of the vast majority of players who have experienced the private server is not good, whether it is the intensification of the private server after the player takes the bait, and the unrestrained pressure of the private server, or the player just recharges the money and runs away from the private server, these potential unstable factors seem to be a "sword of Damocles" hanging over the hearts and wallets of players who are experiencing the private server.
With the in-depth excavation, although only the tip of the iceberg is seen, the scale of this black industry chain is far beyond the author's imagination.
Starting with a compromised client, they send some of the leaked client to a technician who will fix or update the client. When the client can run, it will bid the highest private server operator, and when the private server operator has built the server, it will publish the private server to the "private server release network" for guidance and introduce players. When players pour into the private server and start the experience, there will also be a supporting plug-in team to settle in.
Of course, for private servers, the above process is only the first life cycle stage, and after a game is reduced to a private server, there are usually three life cycles. In the first stage, the price of "first-hand goods" is certainly higher, but it is also due to the fact that private servers have not yet flooded on a large scale, and the number of players is large and easy to harvest and monetize. And in the second stage, private servers began to flood in large quantities, and in order to play self-differentiation, there is no shortage of perverted fast food clothes that have been magically changed, as well as fine operation servers that restore the official ones. And in the last stage, it is reduced to a stand-alone buyout version on Taobao.
Among them, what makes the author feel terrible is that for those private servers with refined operations, there is already a considerable standardization (such as: daily activities, festival activities, bubble points, first-pass rewards, etc.), and the daily weekly content design of some private servers is not even inferior to official uniforms. What's even more exaggerated is that some private servers can even update the latest version of the content at the same time as the official uniform, further squeezing the living space of the official uniform.
What's even more surprising to the author is that some Tencent game private servers even use Tencent cloud servers. And because it is a black industry, the commercial competition in it is more bloody, in addition to DOS attacks, card models to increase the load on the server, pulling players from other private servers to other private servers, and even the client injection virus backdoor, paid interception are also routine operations.
But no matter how much they make a fuss, it is this group of veteran players who are struggling to find Bai Yueguang who pay in the end.
Warcraft, Sword Network 3, who can become the next solution to the nostalgic suit
In the face of the crazy black market and sad old players, is there really no real cure?
In this regard, the benchmark product of the MMO industry, "World of Warcraft", has put forward a solution of "multi-version nostalgic clothing". "World of Warcraft" has been in operation for nearly 20 years, and there are countless players who come and go, and players who have entered the pit at different times have different memories of the times.
At present, "World of Warcraft" has launched four different types of nostalgic clothes: nostalgic costumes, permanent 60 costumes, nostalgic costumes PLUS (exploration servers, based on permanent 60 version of the magic change) and nostalgic costumes hardcore mode (one life setting). Of course, World of Warcraft is able to do this, essentially because the game itself has enough high-quality content and a huge user base, not every game can learn, but it is indeed a key case worth referring to by manufacturers.
Some well-known IP games hope to continue the vitality of IP through sequels and other means, but most sequels pay more attention to the innovation of gameplay rather than the experience of restoring IP games, and the core goal is to attract new players with the influence of IP, which is often difficult to attract old players to retain for a long time, and sometimes even lose the most prominent features of the game.
Generally speaking, the better the experience and services that the official can provide, and the more social the experience, the smaller the living space of the private server. It is difficult for players like "Sword Network 3" to get in touch with the black industry chain such as private servers, essentially because the core gameplay of "Sword Network 3" is almost always based on large-scale dungeons and team battles.
Its nostalgic costume "Sword Network 3 Origin" also starts from the core experience of old players, removing the ACT elements that have been controversial in the game in order to "fight" against the launch of "Sword and Soul". To a certain extent, this also captures the core group of "Sword Network 3" - nurse professional players, so that these players can get a better experience in the competitive gameplay of "Sword Network 3 Origin".
It can be seen that in the case of new products in the MMORPG market, the "Sword Network 3" series still maintains stable growth, which is enough to prove its long-term operation strength and accurate control of the needs of old players.
Yu Yuxian, the executive producer of Sword Network 3, also announced the project proposal of "Sword Network 3" on Weibo two days ago, and bluntly said: "The target users of Sword Network 3 Unbounded are returning MMO players who are like-minded with the fair payment system and dress-up gamers who pursue good looks." It can be seen that Xishanju attaches great importance to the return of old players. Under the competition in the stock market, it is also a solution to change the track to win more old players.
What is "pension"? The first is to be as original as possible, the experience is stable, and the price is affordable (low threshold), just like "hometown".
Bold innovation is poison for it, and old pedantry may be more "stable", and players just want to have their own place on the noisy Internet, and put the heart of the player who has lost his passion and curiosity.
So, which one is the white moonlight in your mind, you are also welcome to leave a message in the comment area.