Identifying Illarion's Target audience

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Estralis Seborian
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Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Estralis Seborian »

Dear all,
recently, it was brought up by Merung that the definition of our target audience is merely implicitly stated and that there is no document one can refer to. The Illarion Vision just states:
http://illarion.org/development/us_about_project.php wrote:Illarion is open to all players, regardless of nationality, language and role-playing experience. The main target audience are casual gamers who maintain a distant relationship with their characters, and are thus able to engage in real role play.
This is a start, but not concrete enough. After speaking to a person who knows some practical methods to determine a target audience and not just the usual, theoretical blah blah, I tried to adapt an "inverse approach" to determine our target audience. Since we cannot turn our game upside down, we need to start with what we offer to the market and what the resulting target audience is. As a niche game, we cannot compete with all the other games out there, but need to fill the gap between them for those players who look for a game that is slightly different from the rest. Different does not mean "worse" or "absurd" in this context, by the way. As usual, please give your constructive input on the individual aspects to improve the definition of our target audience. Add your points to each headline and also, think about how to make the definition even more precise. I want this document to become a collaborative venture of the whole team so we can all identify with this target audience definition.

1 The Market
Illarion is a game for a market, generally described as (massive) multi player online roleplaying games. This market is tightly in the hand of a set of AAA titles with extremely high budget. Among those games, not a single one existed when Illarion hatchet from its egg. Illarion is, hence, a living fossile from a time when this market was not as developed as today. The top ten games of this market generate a turnover of around three billion dollars a year and have up to 7 million active members each, see these interesting links:
Clearly, Illarion cannot aim to be a major factor in this overall market. Hence, by defining our target audience clearly, we must aim for a niche without neglecting the rules of the market. Within our niche, we need to become the best, albeit a comparable small niche. A game with few players is not necessarily a game with a small niche but it can also be, bluntly spoken, a crap game. Not taking into account the overshadowing, competing AAA titles can lead to not identifying nor covering any niche.

2 Competition
Illarion's competition consists of major AAA titles for the general market but also of niche games that target a similar audience. Both types cannot be neglected. Obviously, Illarion also competes with "distractions" of different genres, such as offline games, casual games, and girlfriends (not to be treated here). These are the main competitors:
  • Planeshift: A game very similar to Illarion in terms of goals but in 3D
  • Ryxom: An MMORPG present in Debian distribution
  • UO Freeshards RP enforced
  • RP enforced servers of commercial games (e.g. Lord of the Rings Online has four)
  • Your games here
3 Unique selling points
These are the aspects no other game of the market can offer. They are exclusive to Illarion. They give Illarion the edge over other games and make it a unique indie game. They are not necessarily main features of the game.
  • Bilingual Game / Multicultural Game
  • Unique Levelling System
  • Complex and involved alchemy system.
  • Ability to be whatever you want.
4 Standard selling points
Players of our target audience expect a certain baseline of features. These selling points are not unique to Illarion and partially offered by other games as well. Illarion can only stand out by the collection of features, not by single features alone.
  • Real, enforced Roleplay
  • Free to play (and always will be)
  • Play 2 Win (as opposed to Buy 2 Win or Pay 2 Win)
  • Crafting
  • Combat
  • Retro graphics
  • Non flashy graphics
  • An immersive soundtrack
  • Pretty map
  • Three distinct factions
  • Coming Soon: Magic
  • Coming Soon: Housing
5 Additional selling points
In addition to the selling points above, Illarion offers more aspects the target audience could deem interesting. They are not mandatory for a player nor do all players like them. But they still enrich the game.
  • No forced Class System – everyone is able to do anything in the game
6 Lacking points
These are aspects Illarion will and cannot offer. Members of the target audience won't have them among their mandatory features or they won't be part of the target audience.
  • 3D graphics
  • Your points here
7 Motives, problems and desires
Common theories claim that most things we do pursuit goals to e.g. fulfill a desire or overcome a problem. Playing games - especially social games - like Illarion is done because of the following motives, problems, and desires:
  • Escapism
  • Desire to take on a meaningful role such as becoming leader of a guild.
8 Solutions, relief, and support
Illarion can provide solutions for problems or desires, like those listed above. Playing the game can grant the following:
  • Get away from stress from life
9 Technical Requirements
Obviously, our target audience is limited to those who have access to a computer that fulfils the minimum requirements for the client. These are the hard facts:
  • Screen resolution of min. 800x600
  • Windows XP or higher, Linux, MacOS
  • Java 7
  • Graphics card with Open GL 2.0
  • Internet connection
10 Demographic data
Commonly, our target audience shares a couple of demographic data. This does not mean that every member has to fulfill all aspects, but the majority of members fulfill the majority of aspects.
  • The majority of the target audience understands english
  • Your points here
11 Channels to reach the target audience
Consequently, to reach our target audience, we need to be visible to it. These are the channels we need to turn to to reach them all:
  • Steam - the #1 platform for games with an extremely high reach
  • Desura - a major platform for indie games
  • Download portals - for many, the main source for downloading binaries
  • Linux distributions - the game is shipped directly to our players
  • Roleplaying communities
  • Game developer and indie game sites - uniqueness wanted
  • Your points here
12 Consequences from the target audience review
From above definition of the target audience, we can derive some interesting consequences for development. These consequences, mainly derived from the motives, problems and desires in combination with our existing selling points, should govern our actions. We might think that what we do is best and right, but does our target audience think the same? Keep in mind that all of us ARE member of the target audience - as players. So we need to consider what we like - as players!
  • The text display has to be as clear and easy to read as possible due to the massive amount of text a normal Illarion player will write and read
  • Your points here
Last edited by Estralis Seborian on Thu Dec 18, 2014 5:46 pm, edited 11 times in total.
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Jen
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Re: Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Jen »

Some points for now... more to come eventually :)


3. Unique Selling Point:

Bilingual Game * Multicultural Game
I strongly believe this should be one of our unique selling points. People often treat it as a downside to Illarion, suddenly having roleplay in a non-native language, but I know a lot of (mostly German) players who improved their English skills immensely through the game – such as myself. There are also a few English players out there who try to use the little German they remember from school, which is just as amiable. It encourages players to learn a language. I think we should make this a unique selling point and state along the line of:
Illarion offers a warm, welcoming and supportive environment to test and improve your language skills.

Unique Levelling System
I assume our MC System is unique? I can’t think on the top of my head of any other game where players level up depending how much time they invest in the game. If this is not unique though, I’d list this on “Additional Selling points”


4. Standard Selling Points:
Real Roleplay
Free to play (and always will be)
Play 2 Win (as opposed to Buy 2 Win)
Crafting
Combat
Coming Soon: Magic
Coming Soon: Housing

5. Additional Selling Points:
No forced Class System – everyone is able to do anything in the game
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Estralis Seborian »

Great, thanks, I added your points!
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Zephyrius
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Re: Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Zephyrius »

3. Unique Selling Points
-Complex and involved alchemy system.
-Ability to be whatever you want.

4. Standard selling points
-Nice crafting system.
-Pretty map.
-Good Roleplay.
-Free.

5. Additional selling points
-Have options in regard to your town.

6. Lacking points.
-Fighting system is quite lackluster.
-Not enough variety with weapons and armor.
-Attributes could use some reworking.
-Current lack of magic.
-High reliance on the forums to participate in the game. It's almost essential, and I don't think this is a good thing. This could be improved by having functional IG message boards, IG mail systems, and other tools of communication. Other games offer this for players, surely we can too. The forums should be instead for technical issues and ooc talk.

7. Motives, problems, desires
-Escapism, get away from stress from life.
-Desire to take on a meaningful role such as becoming leader of a guild.
-There is a problem in that there in the past has been lots of conflict between the people who play for high skills, and the people who play for social standing in the game.

8. Solutions, relief, and support
-I think if we made some skills more fun, the people who usually don't like to skill would be less adverse to doing so. For example, some of the crafting skills I consider highly boring since you need 1000s of material to raise by very little, and you don't learn a lot of new items as you do so. If we had more items and more recipes for the crafts, I think it would be better. Similarly, it seems to me as if there is a "correct" set of attributes, skill, weapon and armor to choose if you want to be competitive as a fighter. A bit of variety is needed.

-I think we need to show more support for player controlled organizations. Things that would help these groups are: ways to get customized items (names or descriptions) without a GM, group storage, maybe a technical faction system as was planned before.
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Estralis Seborian »

Moved to public forum to get some more input.
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Velisai
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Re: Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Velisai »

Since you ask for it, I'll speak my mind even if I've said most of this on other occasions.

Sadly, multiplayer roleplay in general and even more so for a persistent world, is not very well suited for casual gamers. I can tell you from my own experience that it is rather pointless to play this game if you don't have at least 10 hours a week of in game time to spend here. The more, the better. I'm not sure what your idea of casual is though. Maybe 10-20 hours/week is, maybe not. I think of casual players as those who log in for a couple of hours on Sundays and maybe spend the occasional hour in game during the rest of the week. For me, that pattern isn't enough to be satisfying, since I'd miss out on a huge chunk of events relevant to my char.

Other than RP, the main reason why I've enjoyed Illa so much was that sense of everything being possible. Maybe it has only ever been that way inside my head, but I used to feel like my char's actions mattered and could influence the course of in game history (despite her not maxed-out skills and not very effective set of attributes). That has changed around the beginning of VBU development and has only gotten worse since the release, because everything about the in game environment is becoming more and more static.

I can only speak for myself and I'm aware that I'm sort of a freak, but for me, sandboxing and immersion are top priority in an RPG. Illa has been neglecting those two for years and I think, without having solid proof, that this is one of the main reasons for the dropping player count. I understand all the reasons behind the development decisions and agree that many things have improved. It's just that I, as well as much of the player base from 4 years ago, was willing to put up with all the flaws Illa had for some reason. That reason doesn't seem to be there anymore.

I'm still playing because of:
-RP
-the game is still 100% free to play
-habit

There is a lot more to say, though that would totally blow the scope of this thread, so I'll leave it at that. Hope it helps.
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Mephistopheles
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Re: Identifying Illarion's Target audience

Post by Mephistopheles »

In these matters I've always agreed with Velisai, I've been hounding on certain points until they seem dead and thats my problem, so I won't do that here.

Still wanna thank the devs for trying so hard to really make illa better.
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