WOW players drain from the ghost crab into the big data illusion

Now playing "World of Warcraft" has become less and less people, this is not the author's subjective assumptions. According to Blizzard's first quarter 2013 earnings results show that while still retains 8.3 million paid players, ranking first in the world, but compared with the previous season, has suddenly dropped 1.3 million.

World of Warcraft has a glorious history, and not far away. This super online game was born in 2004 and hit an astonishing record of 13 million paying players in October 2010. Not only that, Asian players and Europe and the United States almost half each player. As a cultural product, "World of Warcraft" has successfully crossed the high walls of Eastern and Western civilizations and created an online entertainment community where young people around the world can enjoy themselves.

I have also been a fanatical creature of World of Warcraft, wrote a long article online "addiction battle: a meaningless fake battle." But in fact, as a former video game editor, I simply do not like online games on the computer, do not even like playing games with a mouse. "World of Warcraft" is the only one that will keep me going, and playing for more than 6 years. However, since the end of last year, I have barely landed on that virtual planet called Azeroth, even though it has often appeared in my memory for the past six months.

Obviously, the author is exactly one of the 1.3 million people who have been reduced, and the game's earnings report also shows that most of the players lost are from Asia. In response, Greg Street, chief designer of World of Warcraft, nicknamed "Ghost Crab," explains: "There's a lot of team culture there." And "China's online games market is growing fast and they release a lot of new games each year. "

World of Warcraft designer ghost crab

But I think it is completely averted. Because, "World of Warcraft" would have been a highly adhesive online community, because a large number of players even if nothing to play will soak in, yo-yo chat, or even been dubbed the "big 3D group chat software." You know, every hour online, players will spend 0.45 yuan, only the real "World of Warcraft" as part of life, to Azeroth mainland as their spiritual hometown, will not care about the money. In my opinion, this habit, and some aunt uncle every night must turn on the TV to listen to "News Network" is the same, once developed hard to change.

But many of them still left. Although the specific reasons vary from one individual to another, the author believes that the overall result is a series of major policy mistakes made by chief designer Ghost Crab, mainly because of his mistake in regard to "big data" The result of the analysis. With the recent "big data" constantly being deified, similar mistakes are staged in numerous businesses.

Schoenberg, author of The Big Data Age, once said with excitement: "The biggest shift in the era of big data is the abandonment of the desire for causation, with a focus on the relationship, that is, knowing what it is and not needing to know it 'Why.' "But I think" ghost crab "precisely because it sticks to the big data itself made by millions of players, but does not think about" why ", only so many fundamental mistakes committed.

2010 World of Warcraft, the second piece of information, "Wrath of the Lich King" operation, in its large background of the players behavior statistics and forum keyword statistics, some of the players will be very concentrated complaints. These complaints include: career balance, difficult team formation, guild management issues, slow equipment upgrades, and more.

The "ghost crab", the new chief designer of the "new official assuming the rank of three fires" at the time, is now using the data as a basis to solve the third piece of information, "Holocaust and Rebirth," one by one. It turns out that these solutions have instead led to bigger and more fundamental problems. For example, to solve the "team difficult" "random team" mode, so that players no longer need to coordinate with the Society, will automatically be able to join a team. But this directly led to a substantial reduction in the exchange between players, severely damaged the social properties of the game. The "crabs" the most rigid "adjustment of occupational balance" proved to be nothing but "by the gourd from the scoop", not only the issue of occupational balance completely resolved, but due to excessive adjustment of the occupational characteristics of homogeneity, a Paladin play Up with a thief almost, which directly affects the player's "role-playing" experience.

Tim Leberecht, chief marketing officer at frog design, wrote in Fortune magazine that big data is not social. He warned, "We often confuse people's feelings with their behavior, and in fact human judgment is far more complex than binary numbers." Obviously, "Ghost Crab" made the mistake and he just wanted to solve it Consumers complain the most, but did not consider whether these emotional complaints will affect the consumer's rational decision.

As a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, the key words of World of Warcraft virtual experience include Western fantasy world view, online community and role play. If these 3 points were destroyed, "Warcraft" product kernel will be gone. Unfortunately, along with the emergence of a large number of Chinese elements in the data piece "The Mystery of the Pandas" in the fourth piece of information, the paradoxical worldview of World of Warcraft is no longer as interesting and friendly as the local " Fantasy Westward Journey, "while role-playing games that lack community attributes are less than casual games and stand-alone video games. Players lose a lot of nature is inevitable.

In recent years, the boom of "big data" has been on the rise, and the failure of World of Warcraft to use big data has reminded us that the more data appears to be complete and comprehensive, the more likely it is to hide the information gap and result in huge analytical errors. Instead, they may not understand the real needs of consumers. Big data is simply a supplement to traditional analytics and must not be a substitute.