The Trouble with Turf

The Trouble with Turf
Ahh, Turf Zone. For those of you still locked in the proverbial SubSpace closet, a couple months ago Virgin introduced a new zone called Turf. It was a flag-type game modeled after Risk; instead of having just 8 or 16 flags to pick up, instead there were dozens of flags scattered around the map that couldn't be moved. Instead, they would change color and be owned by the team who last 'touched' it. Teams were 20 people, and every ten or fifteen minutes all members of the team would get a bonus depending on how many flags they owned.

By all accounts, this was the most popular zone ever created for SubSpace. Turf quickly gained hundreds of fans and soon its players outnumbered those of any other zone, include War. However, not long after its release vie unceremoniously took it down, forcing all Turf players to relocate elsewhere. Why on Earth would they do such a thing?

Here is the official explanation, from JeffP himself:

...We learned our lesson all too well on player volume issues when we put up more zones than our player base could handle. The net effect was that is split our player base among so many different places that the game lost some of it's dynamic and all zones suffered. This is the primary reason we have temporarily gotten rid of the Turf zone...

Although logical in and of itself, it doesn't explain why Turf was picked to be the sacrificial cow. After all, vie could just as well have chosen Chaos or War to axe if the thinning of the player base was such a concern. Why did they choose Turf?

The reason is that Turf was just too bland. Bland, unexciting, and ill-conceived were the adjectives heard most often from the mouths of many good War, Chaos, and Running Zone players, and after a few days spent in Turf, I began to agree completely. First of all, the bonus for flag territory was simply pitiful. The ratio of points scored by flags over points scored by kills was simply too small, and miniscule compared to what teams were getting War and Running. This problem was exacerbated by the ridiculous profusion of green in the middle of the zone, making it so that greening up to 100 took perhaps 30 seconds with a 20-man team.

This led to the phenomenon where the majority of the players in Turf were there not to flag but simply to goof off. On any given evening you'd see three or four 10-man turrets careening through the zone blasting anything in their path, and dozens of people just doing nothing but shooting at anything in sight, dying, then coming back to do the same with a full ship a half a minute later. Turf completely lacked the focus provided by hotly contested flag games in the War and Running Zones, where huge points were at stake and many highly-talented players were competing against each other. It was laughably easy to get a banner since the points requirement was so low, and thus they signified nothing. In Turf, people just didn't care. You didn't care about the flag game, since the prize was so small. You didn't even care about your ship, in stark contrast to Chaos, since it was so easy to green. Instead, people used it as a place to socialize.

"Alright Rincewind," a Turf fan might say. "I'll grant you that. But no matter its shortcomings, Turf was still the most popular zone by far. On an economic basis alone, Virgin had no justification for dumping Turf." Au contraire, my friend. Yes, it was popular, but remember that SubSpace is currently a free beta. There are certain categories of people playing SubSpace now who will gladly fork over the $15 a month after it goes pay, and other categories who will not or cannot. The key to attracting paying customers is addiction. Think about what makes a game addictive - on one hand it's the excitement, the competition, the drive to get to the top. Complementing this is the social aspect of the game, the friendships, the teams you form, the squads you join. However, in a game such as SubSpace you can't separate the latter from the former and still be left with a dedicated player base. The friendships and the squads are forged in the fires of competition, which is either encouraged or discouraged by the design of the game itself. Without that, you'd merely have IRC - and who pays for IRC? This is exactly what Turf lacked. Turf was basically just IRC with a starry background, and that is why it is now gone.

[4/5/97]