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DESIGNER DIARY > Survey No. 1 Results
PUBLISHED: Aug 31, 2005
AUTHOR: Daron
Stinnett I figured that leaving the survey open
for a week would be adequate. As it turns out, a few days would have
been plenty. The survey received over 1500 responses in its first two
days - more than enough samples to get a sense of our community. I want
thank everyone who participated and doubly thank everyone for refraining
from discussing the survey's contents on the forums. This survey was
modest in its goals. Future surveys will get into more weighty issues
which will certainly put forum restraint to the test.
This first survey was a test to see how the survey software worked and
to see what kind of response we would get - and of course to get some
valuable information about our community. The results were fantastic. We
used SurveyMonkey, which turned out to have some very powerful tools.
For example, this survey directed MMO players and non-MMO players to
separate follow-up questions. And having the ability to chain together
many questions and correlate answers to a single responder gives us a
lot of information that you cannot get using individual single-question
polls. We can dissect the results to understand the answers by age
group, gender, or even sliced by favorite Star Trek series. For example,
we could determine which MMOs are preferred by Enterprise fans.
So what did we learn? Well, besides testing out the mechanism of
fielding an informal poll, I wanted to start by getting a better
understanding of MMO experience within the community. Understanding how
many community members have played MMOs and which MMOs contribute to
perceptions about STO is really valuable from our perspective. And for
people who have yet to spend any significant time playing an MMO, we
were eager to learn more about what factors had kept them away from the
genre. In the end, we learned some interesting things about those two
questions. I've also sliced the data in a few different ways for other
interesting results. You can view the survey summary here.
When it comes to MMO experience, 85% of responders have played at least
one MMO. That number drops to 82% when considering just those who have
played any MMO for two or more months. That is still a surprisingly high
figure in my view. I knew there were a lot of MMO players on the forums,
but I had figured there was a higher proportion of ST fans who were
considering an MMO for the first time. Having a community to work with
this early in development is a real asset and it is comforting to know
that most community members have MMO experience when it comes to
evaluating our plans. At the same time, there is a significant
proportion of members without MMO experience who can represent the
expectations from that point of view.
Of those who have played MMOs for two or more months, 90% have played
one or more of the mainstream MMOs. I'm assuming that the remaining 10%
have played MMOs not listed such as Dark Space, Eve Online, Anarchy
Online, etc. In retrospect, I should have included those MMOs in the
survey.
The top reported MMOs are Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, City of
Heroes, and Everquest II - in that order. Interestingly, but perhaps not
so surprisingly, the relative popularity of MMOs among people interested
in STO differs from that of the general MMO playing population. I
believe the subscriber base numbers rank the top MMOs in this order: WoW,
EQII, SWG, CoH. With WoW in the lead by a wide margin. For the record,
the STO team has played (and is influenced by) the following MMOs
(listed in order of popularity): WoW, SWG, COH, GW, EQ1, DAoC, EQ2, UO,
FFXI.
Star Trek is a well known and friendly environment, and we expect it to
attract players who are new to the MMO genre. So we are interested in
learning more about what has kept those in the STO community from
playing an MMO previously. Here are the reasons reported; listed in
order:
55% Too expensive
32% Too time intensive
31% Haven't gotten around to it
23% Not interested in subject matter
16% Other (please specify)
11% Not interested in gameplay
7% Not interested in social aspects
Of course, our favorite responses are "Haven't gotten around to it" and
"Not interested in subject matter". In other words, we're hoping that
the idea of a Star Trek MMO is subject matter that will prompt many to
finally get around to it. The fact that "too expensive" topped the list
is a little troubling given that STO will require a monthly subscription
fee to cover the cost of maintenance, recuperate development costs, and
fund ongoing improvements. Even when I filter our younger respondents
who may have not been in a position to afford an the subscription fees,
too expensive is still the top reason with 44%. Given the fact that the
survey allowed people to vote for any reason that applied, I suspect
that many checked that box by default. After all, who doesn't think MMOs
are too expensive? If I'd designed the survey to ask respondents to
select only their top reason, these results might have been a little
more informative.
I'm hoping that we'll meet expectations for STO to be less time
intensive. My view is that an aversion to the time investment is driven
by two factors: compelling content (or lack thereof) and social
pressures. Many people have warned us to avoid the 'grind' in the
forums. I haven't played much of SWG, but I understand that the grind is
especially ugly there. Providing lots of compelling missions and a
variety of interesting activities is one way to address the grind. I
certainly hope we can avoid the mistakes that others have made and I
know we have a budget to build plenty of content. But no matter how
compelling the content, I believe that the need to keep up with friends
can be a big turn-off for some. No matter how fun the missions/quests
are, trying to catch up with my buddies (who often have more free time
than me) makes them less compelling. Star Trek certainly offers great
opportunities to address this issue given the emphasis in the shows on
mixing high and low ranks. It's a paradigm in which we intend to take
full advantage.
Comparing males and females produced some surprising findings. For
starters - where are they?? Only 4% of respondents report being female.
I have data that suggests the male/female split among ST enthusiasts is
close to 50/50. And I've seen data showing that female MMO players
account for as much as 30%. So I'd say it is a good bet that Star Trek
has the potential to push the female MMO demographic even higher. In
fact, some have argued that the casual ST fan demographic is weighted in
favor of females. So is it the nature of the forums? Surveys? Or is it
that males are just more likely to get interested in a game long before
it launches? Whatever the reason, it will be interesting to track female
interest throughout development.
Even though it was a relatively small sample, there were enough female
responses to draw some conclusions about the differences. There's a
chart showing MMO experience sliced by gender:
The chart shows a few obvious differences: first,
females rated World of Warcraft as most played, versus SWG for males.
Also, female responders, on average, have more MMO experience than the
males. Another slice of the data indicates that though female
responders are looking forward to STO at about the same level as
males, the idea of a Star Trek MMO has almost no impact on their
interest in playing an MMO in the future. Whereas in the ST improves
these same odds for males by 15%. I suppose this might make sense in
considering that a higher percentage of the female responders are
already fans of the MMO genre. And females tend to rate fantasy MMOs
higher, so it makes sense that STO is just one of the MMOs that on
average, females are looking forward to.
When it comes to favorite shows and the sexes, I didn't see any big
surprises. Voyager is an obvious difference. Interestingly, females
report watching fewer of all the series with the exception of TOS.
And just for fun, I ran a cross-tab to see how each
show scored for the various age groups. No big surprises here. Oh, and
I apologize to the 45-54 crowd. I accidentally left that choice out.
Unfortunately, SurveyMonkey doesn'tallow changes to be made once the
survey is running so I had to live with the error.
There are dozens of other ways to analyze the data
and I hope I've covered a few of the high points. We're looking
forward to hearing further thoughts on the results from the community.
As a test this survey was a huge success. In fact, I'm more than a
little surprised at the number of responses - well over 3000!
Oh, and the MMO is preferred by Enterprise fans? Everquest I. With
Ultima Online a close second. Go figure...
- Daron
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