I see more and more MOBA (multi player battle arena) games keep failing or keep losing users. IT is not because they are badly done or not paid attention to but they missed the most basic point. *friends*.
All of these games expect us to have
- 3-5 friends
- these friends are gamers
- these 3-5 friends like the same game as you like
- these 3-5 friends are in the same time zone as you are
- these 3-5 friends are available to play around the same time as you are
- these 3-5 friends all can speak the same language as you do
So all these games are concentrating on people who meet all these above 6 conditions. most of the users are do not meet 4/6 of these conditions if not any. Most of them play with randoms so most of them do not stay together during the match, those who stay together during the match they all win. Imagine a football or a soccer or a basketball or a cricket team world cup where the host country hosting the cup has a team but every other country gets to choose its player by random. Most of the people are gamers because they dont have a social life, they dont have friends, they dont like to mingle with people and even if they did how can you get 3-5 friends who meet all the above conditions?! Even the most social people cannot find people who meet all the above 6 conditions. What ends up happening is, there will be some professional (those who play to make money via streaming, sponsorships etc., but not necessarily to enjoy or play the game) 1% of the users who join up with other professionals who arent friends but business partners pretending to be friends online, they gang up and bully other 99% of the users, which makes the users leave the platform. The games should be developed focussing on 99%, not the 1%. The games are now targetting professional players who set records or whose highest priority is to earn and their earning is a deciding factor whether they play or not. Either encourage users with incentives to stay together during the match by 1 of many ideas as suggested below
- each character will have a boosting ability, when you are with that character, one of your effectiveness is boosted. ex: character A boosts the fire rate of other team mates near him. character B boosts the DPS of other team mates near him. Character C increases the cool down rate of other team members near him.
- optional abilities gets activated depending on which character you have teamed up with
- you score more per team member that you have been with
All bans should be temporary and should be based on their hardware ID like MAC address, GPU/CPU ID. Many users buy disposable IDs in bulk, cheat and when get banned, they just switch to another ID. Almost all studios know this and yet they let it happen because it brings in more traffic. It seems people who cheat are bringing in more traffic or money than those who arent cheating. Otherwise they would be banning people not based on disposable user IDs but based on hardware IDs.
