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阐述积分排行榜的社交功能与植入方式

发布时间:2014-09-02 13:58:51 Tags:,,,

作者:John Griffin

积分排行榜可能是游戏中最古老的社交功能了,它通过多种排名方式增加玩家之间的竞争性,从而创造更多玩法。《太空入侵者》(最初发布于1978年)据称就是首款使用这一功能的游戏,之后大多数游戏开始追随其步伐,现在大多数游戏都采用了这一社交功能。微软要求所有的Xbox Live游戏都要有积分排行榜,90%在所有平台上的手机游戏也都采用了这项功能。

space-invaders(from gamesbrief)

space-invaders(from gamesbrief)

积分排行榜在游戏中为何如此普遍?

它们的设计相对简单,并且易于添加到游戏中。

当积分排行榜于1978年首次引进游戏时,它们还只是一些通常只显示排名前十的玩家积分的简单表格。玩家的身份由最多为3个字母的玩家标签来识别,许多玩家是输入姓名的首字母,还有些玩家使用的是笑脸。我自己的首字母是JPG,但我记得当时的积分排行榜多为TIT和ASS这种首字母。内存是主要的约束条件,由于内存变得更加平价,积分排行榜也越来越好,添加了如级别、回合时间等额外信息,并且还将玩家标签扩展到了完整的玩家名称。

内存不再是个问题后,我们就有了更多发挥空间,但尽管如此,积分排行榜的理念仍然相对简单。从结构上看,积分排行榜通常不过是一个表格,其条目是由例如分数、回合时间或杀敌数等一个或多个域来排名的。积分排行榜的关键变化与它们所包含的条目数量有关,今天的连网游戏意味着积分排行榜可用于管理所有玩家(成百上千万)的排名情况。

虽然它是一个重要的社交元素,玩家通常并不是在玩游戏的过程中接入积分排行榜,而是从主菜单的选项中进入。因此它们并不必然与核心游戏设计相整合。它们可以相当轻松地添加到多数游戏中。多数积分排行榜的创新,从游戏设计角度来看,主要是社交或好友积分排行榜。对于一款拥有大量玩家的游戏来说,一个全球排行榜会失去其效用,因为玩家如果看到自己在游戏中位列第870万6127名,也就没有多大意义了。如此之低的排名只会让玩家受挫,并且让他们觉得自己不可能攀向一个理想的排名。很显然,玩家并不在乎自己在全球的排名,除百他们位于“全球之颠”。游戏设计师现在更普遍植入好友排行榜,这样你就可以看到自己在好友圈中的排名,这对于玩家行为来说具有更大的影响。好友排行榜,如果与Facebook、Twitter等热门社交网络结合使用,可以极其有效地推动玩家获取和留存率,尤其是在使用推送通知告知玩家积分排行榜的显著变化的时候。

关于积分排行榜设计创新还有其他良好的例子。例如,地理积分排行榜,就是根据特定地理区域(如一个城市或城镇)为玩家排名。这与旧式街机排行榜相似,在没有连网的情况下,可以代表在本地街机玩游戏的玩家情况。其他例子还包括允许玩家与排名在自己之上的玩家较量的排行榜,例如Trials Fusion或者围绕公会群组或《Clash of Clans》中的玩家部落而创建的积分排行榜。

它们拥有广泛吸引力

Richard Bartle(艾塞克斯大学教授)是玩家心理研究领域的主要贡献者之一。他创造了一个将玩家行为划分为4种关键类型的模型:

*成就者——关注成功级别的玩家,这种成功可用分数、奖励、实物或其他价值标准来衡量。可以将他们称为“方块”,他们会致力于获得奖励,认可和荣誉等在玩法或进步上并没有什么优势的东西。

*探索家——追求探索的刺激,从任何新颖或未知事物中获得学习的玩家,可以将其称为“黑桃”,因为他们总想深入挖掘东西,在发现很罕见的东西或秘密通道时会觉得特别兴奋。

*社交家——偏爱游戏社交层面而非游戏战略本身的玩家。可将其视为游戏世界的“红心”,因为他们会从与游戏中的其他玩家互动中获得最多乐趣。对他们来说,游戏是一个可让自己同他人互动,并建立有趣关系的社交工具。

*杀手——这些玩家是为游戏的竞争元素而存在。可将其视为“梅花”,因为他们就是喜欢竞争。他们热衷于同其他玩家挑战。

基于这一模型,积分排行榜似乎更受追求成功的成就者以及喜欢打败他人的杀手欢迎。对许多游戏来说,这两者就是其主要的玩家类型。

leadboard(from blogcdn.com)

leadboard(from blogcdn.com)

它们能有效推动留存率和粘性

积分排行榜可通过刺激玩家追求更高的排名来增加玩家对游戏的粘性。它们通过刺激排名下滑的玩家奋力收复自己先前的顶级排名而提升留存率。

Nicholas Lovell曾在关于免费游戏设计的文章中提到“超级粉线游”这一概念,并将其描述为将休闲玩家转变为将游戏视为自身兴趣,并且乐于为之掏钱的游戏。这个目标很难实现,但如果你想让玩家对游戏产生强烈的兴趣,那么你就要尽量实现他们在游戏情境中的真正价值,这可以是像公会、部落、积分排行榜和竞争等类型的社交元素。Lovell在同一篇文章中还引用了Kongregate首席执行官Emily Greer的话,即Kongregate平台所有的成功游戏都有一个共性“极强的社交和竞争性”。

积分排行榜的效力在大量AAA游戏中再次得到证实。多数领先的MMO和PC/主机游戏都推出了一些支持玩家社区的专用网站,积分排行榜无疑是这些网站的一个重要功能。

如何植入积分排行榜?

虽然积分排行榜呈现在玩家面前的方式相对简单,但它们背后的操作却要复杂得多。为了让玩家和平台共享积分排行榜,必须将排行榜写入一个中央服务或服务器。我们可以找到许多现成的解决方案,但它们并不完全相同。开发者最好找一些最适用于自己游戏的解决方案。

以下是游戏开发者在选择解决方案时必须考虑的一些因素:

*规模:对于玩家较少的游戏来说,简单的数据库表格就可以运用于多数积分排行榜。但是,对于拥有相当玩家规模的游戏来说,其内部技术必须能够在成百上千万个新分数更新的同时返回即时排名更新。多数数据库系统都有索引功能,有助于运行排名,但索引会拖慢编写新积分的运行。你要使用同时针对积分更新和排名来优化的解决方案。

*跨平台:受阻的设备或平台越少越好。玩家,尤其是移动用户,很可能在大量设备和平台上玩游戏,并希望自己无论在哪种设备玩游戏都能看到相应的积分排名。此外,好友之间在相互竞争 时,他们也未必是在同一设备上玩游戏。将你的解决方案局限于单个设备或平台会制约社交功能,通常来说,积分排行榜可以让你的游戏得病毒传播效果。

*多属性:积分排行榜应该能够包含多个不同的属性,并允许开发者以多种方式来整合这些属性。整合属性或排名的方式越复杂,其运行表现障碍就越大,这个解决方案不但要能够让你创建基本模式,它还必须优化以确保这些复杂运算的持续运行。

*动态分割:有些游戏拥有更复杂的积分排行榜需求。例如,它们可能有一个全球排行榜,以等级来划分的排行榜,每周都会重置的排行榜或者基于地理位置的排行榜。多个解决方案就要求分别针对每个需求来创造各个积分排行榜,这就需要投入大量的粉力。较好的解决方案可让你动态分割单个排行榜,从而满足这所有的需求。动态分割允许你划分不同的整合参数,并且在玩家活动继续的时候自动更新和持续重新索引。

*信息:通知玩家积分排行榜名次的变化可以是一种有效而重要的返回触发器,有利于令玩家重返游戏并再次尝试收复之前落下的排名或位置。对于围绕社交群体/公会/部落设计的积分排行榜来说,这一点尤其重要。

*基于时间或计划:向排行榜引进时间可以极大提升其效力,因为它允许你使用“本周最高分”,“本周最进步”或者每周/每月表格等设置。这可以根据对玩家的影响力,将常规的积分排行榜转变为每周竞赛挑战。

*基于地理位置:尤其是对手机游戏来说,它正成为一个更为受欢迎的功能。应该让玩家能够根据地理位置对积分排行榜进行分类,并且通过玩家之间的地理相似性将他们连接起来。

并非所有积分排行榜解决方案都有这样丰富的功能,开发者应该根据自己当前和未来需求来考虑选择哪种解决方案。在发布游戏之后再更改方案就没有那么容易了,因为得转移现存数据以避免丢失当前分数和排名等信息。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Leaderboards: the original social feature

By John Griffin

Leaderboards are probably the oldest social feature used in games and are used to increase the level of competition amongst players by ranking them in a variety of ways with the aim of generating more game play.  Space Invaders, which was first released in 1978, is reputed to be the first game to use them and since then the majority of games have followed suit with leaderboards being, by far, the most commonly deployed social feature in games today.  Microsoft mandates that all Xbox Live games have leaderboards and 90% of mobile games across all platforms reportedly use them.

Why are leaderboards so common in games?

They are relatively simple to design and add into a game

When leaderboards were initially introduced back in 1978, they were simple tables often showing only the scores of the top 10 ranked players.  Players were identified by gamer tags of up to 3 letters, which many used to input their initials and others used to put a smile on our faces.  While my own initials were ‘JPG’ the leaderboards I remember back then were filled with TITs and ASSs.  Memory was the main constraint and as this became cheaper, leaderboards got better, adding additional information such as level or lap time and expanding allowable gamer tags to full names.

Memory is no longer an issue – we have lots of it at our disposal – but, despite this, the leaderboard concept has remained relatively simple.  Structurally, a leaderboard is usually no more than a table in which the entries are ranked by one or more fields such as score, lap time or number of kills etc.  The key change in leaderboards relates to the number of entries they contain as today’s connected games mean that leaderboards are used to manage the ranking of the entire player base of a game and, as we know, that can get into the hundred’s of millions.

Although an important social component, leaderboards are generally accessed when not playing the game and often from an option on the main menu.  They do not, therefore, have to be incorporated into the core game design.  They can be pretty easily added on to most games.  Most of the innovation in leaderboards, from a game design perspective, is around social or friends leaderboards.  For a game with a very high number of players, a global leaderboard (one which ranks the entire player base) loses its effectiveness as players can be disenfranchised when told they are in position 8,706,127 in the game.  Being so far down a leaderboard can overwhelm a player and gives the impression of an impossible task to climb to a respectable position.  Arguably, players don’t care about global ranks until they have ‘Best in the World’ in their sites.  Game designers are now designing for this and more commonly implementing friends leaderboards where you see where you rank with respect to your pool of friends which is far more impactful on the behavior of the player.   Friends leaderboards, when used in conjunction with popular social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, can be incredibly effective at driving player acquisition and retention particularly when notifications are used to inform participants of significant leaderboard changes.

There are other good examples of leaderboard design innovation.  Geo-leaderboards, for example, ranks those players within a certain geographic area … a city or a country perhaps.  This ties back to the old arcade leaderboards which, by virtue of being not connected, represented the pool of players who played in your local arcade. Other examples include allowing players to play against the ghosts of players above them in the leaderboard as Trials Fusion does or building the leaderboards around groups or clans of players as in Clash of Clans.

gamesparks leaderboards social game features trials fusion

They have broad appeal

When looking at player behavior, Richard Bartle, who was a professor at the University of Essex, is one of the key contributors to the study of player psychology.  He constructed a model whereby player behaviors could be divided into 4 key types:

Achievers – are players who focus on obtaining a level of success, measured by points, prizes, material possessions, or other valuation criteria. Known as the “Diamonds,” they will strive to gain rewards, recognition and prestige, with little or no advantage in gameplay or advancement.

Explorers – players who seek out the thrill of discovery, learning about anything that is new or unknown. Referred to as the “Spades” because they tend to dig down and uncover things, explorers feel a rush of excitement when they discover a rare artifact or a secret pathway.

Socializers – these are individuals who are attracted to the social aspects of a game, rather than the game strategy itself. They are the “Hearts” of the game world, because they gain the most enjoyment from interacting with the other players in the game. For them the game is the social vehicle that allows they to engage others and build interesting relationships.

Killers – these players live for the competitive elements of the game. They are referred to as the “Clubs” because they like to “take it to” their competition. They love the opportunity to compete (and beat) the other players.

Based on his model, it is likely that leaderboards appeal to both achievers looking to track their success and killers looking to beat everyone else.  For many games, these two groups represent the majority of their player segments.

They are effective at driving retention and engagement

Leaderboards help increase a player’s level of engagement with a game by motivating them to achieve a higher rank and climb the leaderboard.  They improve retention by motivating players who are slipping down the ranks to re-assert their position at the top.

In the Pyramid of Free-to-Play Game Design, Nicholas Lovell talks about The Superfan Game and describes it as being a game whose players have transitioned beyond being casual players into being hobbyists where the game is their hobby and they are comfortable spending money on it.  It’s hard to achieve but if you want to install fierce passion in your players then you need to try and cater for what they truly value in the context of the game be-it social elements such as guilds and clans or leaderboards and competition.  In the same piece, Lovell quotes Kongregate CEO Emily Greer who said that all successful games on Kongregate had one thing in common: “a strongly social and competitive end-game”.

The effectiveness of leaderboards is further evidenced by the number of triple-A titles that use them.  Notably, many, if not most, of the leading MMOs and PC / Console titles have dedicated websites to support the communities of their players and leaderboards inevitably make up an important feature of those sites.

How are they implemented?

Although leaderboards are relatively simple in how they are presented to the player, behind the scenes they can be much more complicated.  In order for leaderboards to be shared across players and platforms they need to be written to a central service or server.  There are many off-the-shelf solutions but not all of them are the same.  Developers are better off looking for solutions that are specifically optimized for the often heavy-duty requirements of their games.  This is often not the case with the more generic cloud data solutions.

Here are some of the factors a game developer needs to think about when choosing a solution:

Scale: For a game with a small player-base, a simple database table could be used for most leaderboards.  However, when a game has a sizeable player base, the underlying technology must be capable of returning real time ranking updates at the same time as millions of new scores are being updated.  Most database systems have indexing which can help with the ranking performance but indexes slow down the performance of writing new scores.  Its important you use a solution that is optimized for both the score updates AND the ranking.

Cross platform: The less the device or platform gets in the way the better.  Players, particularly on mobile, are likely to play the game across a number of devices and platforms and expect their leaderboard position to follow them regardless of which device they are using.  Furthermore, when groups of friends are competing they are not always going to be on the same device.  Limiting your solution to a single device or platform limits the impact social features, in general, and leaderboards, more specifically, can have on your game.  Walled gardens impede virality.

Multi-Attribute: A leaderboard should be capable of containing many different attributes and give the developer the ability to aggregate these in a variety of ways including the use of complex macros.  The more complicated the aggregation or ranking the bigger the performance hit so, not only does the solution need to enable you to build formula; it must be optimized to ensure ongoing performance of those complex calculations.

Dynamic Partitions:  Some games have more complex leaderboard requirements.  For example, they may have global leaderboards, leaderboards by level, leaderboards that get reset from week to week or leaderboards by geo or location.  Many solutions require you to setup individual leaderboards for each of these requirements, which is a lot of work.  Better solutions enable you to dynamically partition a single leaderboard to meet all of these requirements.  Dynamic partitions allow you to specify different aggregation parameters at set up and automatically update and re-index on an ongoing basis as player activity continues.

Messaging: Notifying players of changes to their leaderboard position can be an effective and important return trigger to get them to go back into the game and once again try and re-claim that lost ranking or position.  This is particularly important for leaderboards based around social groups or guilds / clans.

Time-based or Scheduled: Introducing the concept of time to a leaderboard can dramatically improve its effectiveness by allowing you to implement use cases such as ‘high score this week’, ‘most improved this week’ or just weekly or monthly tables.  This can turn a standard leaderboard into a weekly tournament in terms of its impact on players.

Geo-location: Geo-location, particularly for mobile games, is becoming a much more popular feature.  You should be able to sort your leaderboards by location and be able to link players by their geographical proximity to each other.

Not all leaderboard solutions have this rich set of capabilities and developers need to consider both their current and future requirements when selecting a solution.  Changing solutions post-launch is not that straight forward as the existing data will need to be migrated to avoid losing all of the existing scores and ranking.(source:gamesbrief


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