The Daily Grind: How would you convince someone to jump ship to your MMO?

It is not so much a matter of convincing someone to switch to a new MMO as it's just advertising or baiting them to take a look at it. If it is a great MMO, as you believe it is, then your friends, presumably with similar tastes, will like it too and start to play it.

I have gotten friends to switch/start playing a new game in just this fashion. I found a new game that I really liked. I went back to the old game that I was still playing and told my friends, "you really should check this one out!" and since my friends all have gaming tastes like mine, most of them were in the new game and playing within a week.

It's nothing really special to figure it out. Great games speak for themselves and whisper their own sedutive lure. Usually it only takes one good look to get hooked into playing.

If the game is worth it it will sell itself. Just point them in the direction of some vidyas.

Im not in advertising and its not my job. If the game can't sell itself to someone, I'm probably not going to do a better job.

It's really all about manipulation.

#1 Trash talk the current MMO he's playing. If your friend isn't defending it, it means he's not a hardcore fan and should be open to a switch.

#2 Keep on bashing, not all at once, then open up with something like "Btw, have you heard about XXX"

#3 Now spray the merits thick on this new MMO and of course they'll want to try it.

Won't really work if you can't get them a free trial or something. I tried to switch many friends who really love PVP to Guild Wars, but because I can't give them a PVP trial, they don't wanna buy it in case they don't like it.

I guess you can have them try it out on your account if you really trust them.

I've tried this several times. I usually start by drawing out a pro/con list or some kind of weighted grading system where I compare the current game to the one I want to switch to. Then, I compose a multi-point essay explaining things in detail. After that, I send the google docs to my friend and see how they take it. ;)

What's interesting to me is just how partisan a person can get about an MMORPG. I'm very fluid - I will pick up or drop your game in a heartbeat. My friends tend to be a little more entrenched.

I've learned that you cannot drag most MMO players into a new MMO. MOst have "home" games established and won't budge. I'd say the average player plays maybe a dozen games or so over the last 10 years.

Still, the best way to show someone is through videos. Or, with a good deal. A great free game can go a lot further than a great game that asks for 50 bucks before playing. Tap into that impulse buy!

Beau

This is as much user-dependent as it is MMO-dependent. If you have a good product and you know it, you ought to get confident enough to give users a free taste to lure them in. This obviously makes the recruiting player's job easy too. "Hey man, try this stuff out, it's free to try!"

I think RIFT did a brilliant job of this by having so many beta events. Let's face it... the game was extremely polished a couple of beta versions before launch, the rest of the events were just to get people to try it. I got my WoW RP/leveling partner to try it this way, and now we're both playing it (he actually pre-ordered the game before I did).

I can be a loyal consumer, and a good developer will almost always be able to retain my business so long as they can keep me playing a few hours a week. But if they don't (I'm looking at you, WoW), and someone else does, then I'll happily take my business elsewhere.

When you get right down to it, the difference between a new MMO account a years-old one (for the more casual MMO's anyway) is a few achievements, a couple of titles, and maybe some pieces of armor you only wear a few times a year to show off. It's not as big a loss as they'd like you to think, so I see no reason to be too loyal to a MMO that's not delivering on its prime objective: entertainment. I tell most of my friends this, and that generally gets them to at least consider the alternatives.

My reasons for trying to move players to the game I'm playing include a little less altruistic component: since I don't group often with strangers, I really like when I have a real life friend playing the same game.

As for trying to draw them in, I start by gauging their receptivity in conversations. If I feel like they might join, I reinforce my willingness to answer their questions and (although the TOS would usually prevent this) offer them a test-drive of the game both at the starting level by letting them create a character on my account, and at a higher level by letting they play with one of my high level characters.

As for successes, I had a couple for WoW during the vanilla days (after the expansions, players were as often than not unwilling to put up with the added cost of buying the expansions in order to either have the restricted races, classes or professions from the start, or to buy the expansions in the first couple months to avoid hitting the level barrier), and now I'm working at getting a couple friends away from WoW and into DCUO (with partial success, they stopped playing WoW, but are not sure whether to start DCUO or move to another game).

Free candy and porn.

MMOs convince people to cancel all on their own.

Threats of violence.

I try to be as short as possible when describing the positives of the game. I embarrassed myself a couple of times when i was too zealous about it (trying to convince people that WAR was better than WoW, sigh), so i decided to go the other way, if describing the best stuff about a game in short isn't enough to make someone interested, i take it they simply aren't open to any discussion about it at all.

I also think its bad when you can't describe a game in a single sentence.

I don't, if an MMO is appealing and engaging enough, it'll do the job for me. Either way I don't want to feel like I'm forcibly dragging someone with me. Sure it's nice to hang with my friends but if they wanna stay with their current game of choice that's fine, there's always facebook to keep in touch.

I am ridiculous about future MMOs, so when any sort of info or video is released I have to show all of my friends.

However to convince them to buy it and play with me a more indirect method is required. I have to manipulate them and through appealing to each friends specific interests I can make them feel as though there the ones wanting to check out this upcoming "wowkiller". Then I pray the game really will be a "wowkiller"at least for my friends and I. (I'm looking at you GW2)

I convinced my brother to play WoW originally, then his wife started, and she got addicted and played non-stop as a guild leader, and their marriage fell apart leading to a bitter divorce etc. etc. I no longer want the karma of convincing someone to go spend huge hours of their life doing anything addicting. I just try to convey the facts.

If you find a way, let me know: my real life friends have horrifically awful taste in MMOs.

No point, they either like it or they don't.

The last thing I want is to convince someone to 'jump ship' and find out they got on the wrong boat and end up whining endlessly to me in tells and whispers over how this sucked or that doesn't work and make my nice happy life in MMOland hell until they decide to quit and go back to what works for them. F-ing drama.

If I do think someone might like it, I'll mention I'm playing it, maybe show a few screenshots, videos, blog or comment about it, offer a free trial if available. Mostly it's just to open their eyes to the fact that the game exists, since they're not as avidly keeping updated on gamer news as I am. Once they try it out though, I don't push any further, the game stands or falls on its own merits, they can make up their own mind and continue or not as they want.