So I’ve been reading some stuff and talking to people about Star Trek Online. It’s appealing to me in concept.

Eric Burns wrote a nice lengthy article about what Cryptic needs to do to retain the very impressive million players it gained upon release. These thoughts are in no small part based on reading his article, and on my own five years of experience with World of Warcraft, supplemented by several months in City of Heroes and EVE Online.

It’s no coincidence that I play Blizzard games: they release every title simultaenously for Mac OS X and Windows. And they do it with a fully-developed native client.

It’s also no coincidence that I have tried out EVE Online and City of Heroes: they also released Mac clients. They took the cheap and easy way out, building Cider ports, and it shows — performance is not as good, although it is very good in City of Heroes, and the look and feel is a little bit off. But at least they made the effort.

Why should Cryptic at least put the bare minimum effort in to make a Mac version of the client? Let’s put it this way: you know that very impressive one million subscribers Star Trek Online has started with? Recent estimates put World of Warcraft at two million Mac Users alone. Yes, that’s right: the fraction of WoW users who play on a Mac, which is assumed by many gamers to be insignificant (it’s actually around 20%), is by itself twice as big as STO’s total subscriber base.

And those users have very few other options. If you make a game for them, you stand to capture a pretty large number of them. EVE and COH are both doing quite well with their Mac releases.

Now, there is an “unofficial port” of STO for the Mac, using some compatability wrappers. And apparently some of the devs are actively encouraging it and trying to help out. But I’m not really interested in paying Cryptic to do this wrong. The best thing that can come of the project is Cryptic realizing what a no-brainer it is to do a Cider port.

I don’t really expect them to rush. The game’s infrastructure is already overwhelmed with the subscribers it has. But that will change, and when they find themselves with more capacity than subscribers, a Mac release could give them a pretty significant injection of subscriptions. And there’s no question that I’d be one of them, at least for the length of a trial (at which point, it’s up to the game to suck me in and keep me there).

Eric argues in favor of expanding what in WoW I would call the leveling game: giving people more stories to follow as they level new characters.

This is a good thing to do. There are quite a few leveling paths you can take in WoW these days (this wasn’t always true). You can level one character, and then level the next without touching a fair number of the areas you leveled through on the first. Variety while leveling is important; it encourages people to play different types of characters. And if that variety is shaped by the type of character and ship you create (say, a science vessel follows different storylines than a warship), so much the better.

However, I firmly believe that one of the reasons WoW has something in the neighborhood of 10-12 million subscribers is because it has a strong endgame. You’re encouraged to level new characters, yes, but you’re also encouraged to play your existing characters, literally for years after hitting the level cap.

This is appealing because we grow attached to our characters. Not all of them, of course; some will be leveled, part of the way or all of the way to the level cap, and then gracefully retired. But some characters get under our skin, and we don’t want their stories to end.

A good endgame makes certain their stories never end. The character hits level cap, but continues to improve in other ways indefinitely. Partly this is achieved by good replayable content; partly by providing methods of improving your character that serve as a carrot to entice you to replay the content. And because no content can be replayed endlessly, it requires the constant addition of new level-cap content.

What keeps me playing WoW is my first character, Lhivera. Ultimately, while I have many alternate characters that I spend time on, she is my first priority. Given the opportunity to achieve something new with her, I will pretty much always drop what I’m doing with any other character and strike out for new accomplishments with my main character. It could be as simple as trying to get hold of a particular mount, or as challenging as working with my guild to try to bring down a new boss. Without this kind of emotional attachment to a character, I just don’t see an MMO as a good long-term prospect for me.

The quality of both the leveling content and level cap content is essential. One of the things that drove me away from City of Heroes, despite its superior character creation and customization system, was that the leveling content seemed basically phoned in. Instances were simply map templates filled with mobs that, apart from their skins, were essentially indistinguishable from one another. It was the same thing over and over again, which stands in sharp contrast to the individually handcrafted instance maps in WoW.

So, in short, if STO does release a Mac client, what it needs to do to keep me playing is first, provide an entertaining and varied leveling process, and then when I have reached the last episode of the final season…start giving me motion pictures. Because even if I do decide I want to start over with a new ship and a new crew, I guarantee that if I don’t also want to go back to my first ship and crew and have new adventures with them, I’m going to lose interest.

Lest you think I believe WoW has the only formula for success, I don’t. EVE Online has a completely different model. It doesn’t really have leveling. It doesn’t really have an endgame. Interestingly, despite the absences of those things, it does have an eternal progression path for characters; they never stop improving. But it is an example of how a model entirely unlike WoW’s can work.

But I don’t think STO is very similar to EVE, based on what I’ve been reading. I think it has a stronger resemblance to WoW’s model of development and progression. And I strongly suspect that it will ultimately need an endgame that bears at least a passing resemblance to WoW’s if it is going to aspire to longevity and a large player community.