Earlier in this week I posted about the new Rift Ascend a Friend program. While I still think this program is by far the best I have seen implemented by a game company, the more I thought about it the more frustrated I got. It feels like all of these recruitment programs are fundamentally flawed.
Why Recruitment Programs Suck
The fundamental flaw in all of these programs is simple. When a game starts to drop in population after its initial release boost, the first tool in the bag of mmo publishers to to break out a recruitment program. Where better to draw in new people than from their loyal player base. If you have friends playing a game, you are more likely to adapt to it yourself. I find no flaw with this logic at all.
Where the breakdown happens is the fact that most “alpha geeks” have already drawn deeply from their friends at the release of the game. I know personally I have been responsible for the sale of at least a dozen copies of rift. At this point, everyone that would make a solid player is either in game, has tried the game and left, or is a wow-loyalist and bordering on ignoring me for my constant pro-rift banter. While recruiting three more people doesn’t seem like much, for someone like me who had already drawn deeply onto the friend pile, it definitely is.
In theory, by creating a recruit a friend program, you are slapping your most loyal players in the face. Those are the folks who have already brought everyone they could into a new game. For example, I sold probably 30 copies of WoW over the years, but it took me 5 years to finally earn one of the recruit a friend mounts. In this scenario however, the mount is the least important part.
It is extremely frustrating that all of these friends who I have brought into the game, can never be linked to my account like any new people I recruit will be. Since some of my closest friends are already playing, I wish there was a way to somehow retroactively tag them as folks I brought in. How handy would it be to be able to join your friends in doing whatever they are doing by teleporting to them?
How to Fix Them
The thing publishers need to understand is that from the day the game launches, their most loyal players are going to be actively recruiting. So even if there are no rewards for it from the beginning, you need to give your players a way of flagging which players they have recruited into the game. This is not something that can really be rolled out a couple of months after the game launches, this is something that needs to be in place prior to release.
Bioware seems to be getting this, at least in a small way. With The Old Republic they have given us the ability to form guilds, recruit players, and create the social structure for the game well before launch. However I think all publishers really need to look at this as the new norm. The key difference between an MMO gamer and your standard console or pc gamer is that they crave the social interaction that these games gives them. As a result it is impossible to divorce the community from the gameplay.
More than likely I will eventually get my pony. However as a beta rift player, that managed to bring a good share of his friends into this game, it is frustrating that I will need to go into hardcore recruiter mode to earn it. While this is not a massive deal, but recruitment programs have been a constant of MMOs for years. Knowing this, I think it is something that publishers have to think of from day one. Capturing this user loyalty from the start, only serves to give your player base the message that they really do matter after all.
I noted this on the guild forums and I’ll mention it here too – Rift is at least implementing this a little. All the people I invited using my code back when you could give away free weekends of Rift are now linked to my account, and don’t need to be invited or linked a second time.
Now, the fact that none of them bought the full game… that’s another problem entirely… but it at least acknowledges previous recruitment efforts in a non-zero fashion.