Recent events and devel­op­ments have impressed upon me the need to write about some­thing that isn’t nor­mally talked about when it comes to MMO games. That is, defin­ing some bar­ri­ers to entry in the MMO world.

This is the first in a short series of arti­cles that aims to dis­cuss cer­tain aspects of MMOs that would, unfor­tu­nately, keep peo­ple from being a part of that game they want to be in or make them want to leave after a short while.

The first bar­rier to entry in an MMO must cer­tainly come not from the game itself, but from the means by which one enters the game they wish to play. That is, the account man­age­ment and sub­scrip­tion page, or its equivalent.

Basi­cally, I see two poten­tial bar­ri­ers to entry here: one is when you can’t sign up for or sub­scribe to the game you want to play, and the other is when you have to jump through tech­ni­cal hoops to make the sys­tem work for you in the first place. Essen­tially, when one is unable to cre­ate even a trial account for a game, or is unable to sub­scribe to it, that places undue stress on the per­son who wants to play.

Now, down­times for account reg­is­tra­tion and sub­scrip­tion are not uncom­mon. Even the giant we call World of War­craft must have issues at times. A few weeks back (per­haps to some extent, even now), LotRO also had its own issues with cre­at­ing trial accounts and mak­ing sub­scrip­tions. When the only way to find out, how­ever, is to attempt to cre­ate an account or sub­scribe to the game, then we have an issue that needs rectifying.

First off, a means by which the com­pany in charge of account cre­ation and sub­scrip­tion can test the sys­tem should be imple­mented in order to keep a close watch on it. This is dou­bly impor­tant when you’re offer­ing free tri­als, as you turn away poten­tial rev­enue when some­one who wants to try your game can’t do so.

Sec­ond, mak­ing sure that any issues are vis­i­bly seen by the pub­lic would be much appre­ci­ated. It might annoy some peo­ple, but know­ing that the sys­tem is down and the com­pany is acknowl­edg­ing the issue on the main site rather than in some obscure part of the forums would be use­ful as well because, at the very least, sub­scribers and non-subscribers would imme­di­ately know that the issue is there, it is being addressed, and there is an esti­mated time for a fix. Besides, a good num­ber of MMO web­sites won’t even let non-subscribers post in their forums to ask if the account man­age­ment page is down to begin with.

Now we arrive at what I feel is the more daunt­ing bar­rier to entry when it comes to account man­age­ment and sub­scrip­tion: jump­ing through tech­ni­cal hoops to get the job done.

Allow me to explain: imag­ine that you are an aver­age gamer with the usual knowl­edge of tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion regard­ing brows­ing, gam­ing, and other sorts of eso­teric techie knowl­edge. Now, imag­ine try­ing to get into the game you want to play for the first time, only to be greeted by a screen that prompts you to update your computer’s browser and allow for javascript and cook­ies to be enabled.

We’re not done yet. Imag­ine that you checked those set­tings and already set them to the appro­pri­ate lev­els to allow for the game to ini­ti­ate the account setup process. Yes, this is still the part where you reg­is­ter for an account.

Imag­ine it still doesn’t work, and you con­tact their sup­port cen­ter for assis­tance, and a day and a half after send­ing your email, you get a response from them telling you to update your ser­vice packs as well and basi­cally bring every­thing, includ­ing their spe­cific browser of choice (let’s say Inter­net Explorer for kicks), to the lat­est upgrades.

And it still doesn’t work.

And you have to send them an email again explain­ing the issue in detail once again so that there’s no miscommunication.

Are you annoyed yet?

You prob­a­bly are, and the above-mentioned expe­ri­ence actu­ally hap­pened to me for the beta of an up-and-coming game which I won’t dis­close. Now, see­ing as this expe­ri­ence was from beta, I’m inclined to give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt, but imag­ine if that were a newly-released game, and you still had to go through that, and the sup­port agent who emailed you didn’t explain how to enable cook­ies or javascript or upgrade the sys­tem and you had no idea how to do it your­self. Wouldn’t your patience wear a lit­tle thin by that time?

Mine would.

Unfor­tu­nately, this sec­ond one doesn’t have any clear-cut answers to alle­vi­ate it, other than addi­tional tweak­ing of the most basic of sys­tems to ensure it doesn’t hap­pen to peo­ple. Heck, I’d even rec­om­mend addi­tional fur­ther train­ing of sup­port folk or the cre­ation of spe­cial tech­ni­cal tem­plates so they can explain their answers fully and in detail to help the cus­tomer, but that’s just a sug­ges­tion and not a flat-out solu­tion to the glar­ing issue of con­sumer accessibility.

All in all, these two bar­ri­ers to entry are the most fun­da­men­tal, for they are bar­ri­ers that keep one from even expe­ri­enc­ing the game to begin with. They def­i­nitely need solu­tions, but at the very least, some­one needs to be pay­ing atten­tion to these issues so that they can be reme­died to begin with.

Related posts

• Barriers to MMO Entry: The Community (2)
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• Why LotRO?: Story, Lore and Those Less Fanatic (2)
• Why LotRO: Questing Annoyances! (3)
• What Works and What Doesn’t (6)