Game planner’s analysis: Why is Honor of Kings so addictive?

Why do college girls have trouble sleeping every night? Why are “primary school students” appearing everywhere? Why do five big men always come out of the bushes? Why are hundreds of millions of corpses buried deep in the narrow canyon? Why can the master penetrate the enemy group as if he were in an empty space? Was it Bai Qi’s sickle or Zhong Kui’s chain that took away the soul? Is it Luban’s missile or Houyi’s big bird that takes people’s heads from thousands of miles away? Are these strange things a distortion of human nature or a decline in morality? ! Enter the popular MOBA game on mobile devices - Honor of Kings !

Come, let's quietly knock on the pesticides

Countless people in the circle of friends are showing off their pentakills, MVPs, and diamond ranks. Countless people are still addicted to the game when they open it late at night. So the question is:

Why does Honor of Kings make us feel so fun and addicted?

From a process perspective, this problem can be broken down into three questions:

1. Why can Honor of Kings quickly attract new players?

2. Why do players always keep their expectations and not give up?

3. Why does Honor of Kings have such a long life cycle?

Next, I will lead you to analyze these problems one by one.

1. Why can Honor of Kings quickly attract new players?

The retention rate of any product is the most important data that concerns its survival. In the fiercely competitive gaming market, players' patience is extremely scarce. If you don't satisfy me within a few minutes, I will find the next one. In order to retain users, various game products are doing all kinds of things, just to make new players take a closer look at it in the crowd.

Generally speaking, there are three stages in the process from a new player opening the game to deciding to stay:

In order to smoothly transform users from new players to retained players, King of Glory focuses on the following four aspects in game design:

1. Operation - Ease of use

In the PC game market, MOBA has dominated for many years. Now when you enter any Internet cafe, more than half of the screens are still showing LOL or DOTA. But after all, it is difficult to say that they are a popular MOBA game. Why?

Because the threshold is high!

Many of my friends (especially girls) left before the first game was over because they didn’t feel the fun of MOBA at all.

The cleverness of Honor of Kings lies in its positioning as a popular MOBA mobile game , and its extensive simplification based on the MOBA PC game:

① Equipment recommended for purchase

In order to ensure that new players can quickly overcome obstacles such as understanding attributes, equipment, and outfits, Honor of Kings directly recommends players to purchase equipment, thereby ensuring that the player's combat experience in the game will not be significantly affected by not understanding the equipment.

②The number of skills is reduced to 3

In DOTA and League of Legends , each hero has 4 skills, and the four keyboard keys QWER release the skills. But there is an obvious problem - many players are in a mess and it is very difficult to get started with a hero.

As for this problem, the answer of King of Glory is - cut! The number of skills has been reduced to 3, which retains the experience of each hero while greatly reducing the user's operating costs. It is a design that is more in line with the needs of the general public on mobile terminals.

③Automatic aiming

King of Glory has set up a method of combining roulette casting and automatic aiming, which not only ensures that novices will not be frustrated due to operating problems and miss the target, but also leaves a lot of room for prediction and operation.

④ No need to replenish troops

The mechanism in DOTA and League of Legends is that only the player who attacks the minions last can get gold coins, which requires players to always perform the last-hitting operation which does not provide a high-quality experience (i.e. only attack the minions last). However, Honor of Kings has changed it so that as long as the friendly forces are near the monsters, they can get gold coins, which greatly reduces the user's operating cost and makes the game significantly easier to get started.

The extremely simple operation makes it easy for new players to get started, and they will hardly encounter any obstacles in operation, allowing them to quickly enter the stage of feeling the experience.

2. Combat system - triggering flow

Let's check ourselves and see if we encounter the following situations while playing King of Glory:

• Screaming (or panting?)
• Sometimes breathing speeds up
• Hold your breath sometimes
• Occasionally, the muscles of the whole body suddenly tense up

Obviously, when playing Honor of Kings, we are fully committed to it, and in this process we will gain great satisfaction and fulfillment, which is the flow. King of Glory has multiple elements that trigger flow:

① Clear goal: kill the opponent;

② Clear behavioral path: output, positioning, players know what they should do and will not be confused;

③Challenging: It is difficult to kill the opponent, but it is achievable;

④Instant feedback: During the output and positioning process, players are always aware of the effects of their operations

⑤ Sense of control: Players know that every operation they make has a great impact on the outcome, even if it is just a change of one unit length, it may reverse the outcome;

⑥ Concentration: The player's brain needs to process a lot of information in a short period of time, including the movement of both sides, the release of skills, health points, distance of teammates, etc. At the same time, a large number of decisions need to be made, such as when to move and where to move, what skills to use, etc. The player's brain needs to focus on the battle wholeheartedly.

In a battle that lasts only a few seconds, our adrenaline will surge and our brains will be over the top, which is why we are so addicted to the battles in Honor of Kings.

3. Game rhythm - multiple progressive climaxes

We can summarize the number of participants in a game's core battle:

Through the ingenious design of the terrain, Honor of Kings makes the disadvantaged side's defensive terrain better as the game progresses, which forces the advantaged side to start a team fight as much as possible in the later stages. Therefore, the core battle in a game will involve more and more people as the game progresses.

This means that as the game progresses, the battles will become more intense and longer, and the information that all players need to process and the decisions they need to make in each battle will increase, making the rhythm of the entire game fluctuate, as shown below:

As the number of combatants increases, the battle situation becomes more and more complex, the pace of the game gradually speeds up, and the player's flow intensity will become stronger and stronger. The next battle will bring more pleasure than this one, so you will always remain looking forward to it.

4. Career Design - Creating Experience Expectations

If we play enough games, we will find that some games are very strange. When we play them, we will think: Wow! interesting. But after playing with it for a while, I deleted it without hesitation. This phenomenon often occurs in some small games. Why?

In fact, this is what we usually call the lack of game depth. After playing for a while, the player felt that there was nothing worth looking forward to in this game. The only reason any new player is willing to stay is because they expect the game to bring them more interesting experiences.

However, Honor of Kings follows the MOBA approach, creating experience expectations for new players through differentiated hero designs.

In Honor of Kings, heroes are divided into six professions: warrior, tank, mage, assassin, support, and shooter. Among them, there are types such as consumption, charge, group control, and harvesting. It can be said that the experience of each hero is completely different.

If we change the heroes we use, from shooters to tanks, assassins, etc., we will find that the gaming experience will change drastically, which is basically equivalent to changing a different game. So, are 67 heroes equivalent to getting the experience of 67 games? New players will naturally have an endless desire to explore, acquire new heroes, and try new experiences. How can I leave when I haven’t played enough heroes? !

PS: Of course, if you are a typical female user who pursues beauty, then you just need to remember: appearance is justice! After all, this world is all about appearance!

2. Why do players always maintain their expectations and not give up?

Finally, under the careful planning of the game planners, new players were transformed into retained players.

But another problem arises - how to make these players become more and more dedicated and not quit?

The most important thing is that you need to ensure that players will not feel bored or painful for a long time. Therefore, the design of King of Glory for this problem mainly focuses on two parts:

1. Combat: a diverse experience

We know that any experience will feel fresh at the beginning, but after trying many almost identical experiences in a short period of time, you will feel bored. The MOBA format perfectly avoids this problem. The combat experience of Honor of Kings will be affected by the following factors:

① Hero types: When considering only 1v1 situations, there are 67 heroes in King of Glory. There are 67*67=4489 situations in 1v1 duels, not to mention 5v5.

② Number of participants: The number of participants in a battle will greatly affect the battle situation, with 1V1~5V5=25 situations;

③Lineup: What is the lineup of the players participating in the battle? Shooter + support? Mage + Assassin? Or whatever, the matching situations are extremely diverse;

④ Map conditions: There are different ways to play in places very close to the tower, very close to teammates, and at the mouth of the high ground. There are countless battle situations;

⑤ Players: There are 1000 Hamlets in the hearts of 1000 people. In King of Glory, 1000 people playing the same hero will have completely different ways of playing. The last Luban you met and the next Luban you met will not be the same as the Luban you meet now.

⑥ Development status: What is your equipment in the game? What about teammates and opponents?

There are also influencing factors such as inscriptions and summoner skills. It can be said that a single 10-second battle in Honor of Kings can have at least trillions of situations. It can be said that if you keep fighting, you will never be able to finish all the experiences contained in Pesticides in your lifetime. The next battle will always be a new experience that will bring you a sense of freshness and arouse your curiosity. Therefore, players will always be looking forward to it and throw themselves into the next battle without hesitation.

2. Game difficulty is always balanced

Let’s think about it, which type of players in Honor of Kings are most likely to quit?

Players who are often crushed in the game!

So let us think about a question at this time: Why do we not give up even though we have lost so many times and faced so many disadvantageous situations? ? ?

It's simple, even if we were crushed, we still got a good enough experience!

In a game, judging from the way the battle starts, the battle style of the advantaged side will change significantly:

For the party with the advantage, the difficulty of killing the enemy is gradually increasing. If we can kill the opponent head-on, why should we, as the party with the advantage, ambush and lure?

Due to the existence of the in-game development system, the advantaged side will gradually become more economically superior to the disadvantaged side. Therefore, in terms of combat power, it will become easier and easier for the advantaged side to win if they keep fighting head-on. If this situation continues, the player's combat experience will be as shown in the figure:

To maintain flow, it is necessary to ensure a balance between ability and difficulty. If the ability is much higher than the difficulty, the player will feel bored. If the difficulty is much higher than the ability, the player will feel anxious.

Looking at the development within the game alone, the ability of the advantaged party improves much faster than the difficulty increases, so the advantaged party will feel more and more bored, and the disadvantaged party will quickly fall into a failure trap with almost no chance of a comeback, and will be surrounded by anxiety and despair. Naturally, both sides will have no experience at all.

But from the map design, we will find that the towers further back are easier to defend! This means that the attributes of the advantaged side become stronger, and the disadvantaged side can rely on the strategy of shrinking towers to balance the difficulty! Ultimately, the game difficulty curve changes in the following way:

At the same time, since the combat value is a division formula, we can find that the marginal benefit of any attribute is decreasing. It is extremely difficult for the advantaged party to achieve a complete attribute crushing. Instead, it is easy for the disadvantaged party to close the distance and even make a comeback! (Due to the arrangement of the numbers, the probability of a comeback in the later stages is still quite high)

Therefore, no matter the advantaged or disadvantaged side, both sides will always be in the flow channel and can feel a stable flow experience throughout the game.

PS: Of course, the design to prevent users from abandoning the game also includes the matching mechanism of Honor of Kings, which relies on multiple dimensions such as rank, record, hero proficiency, hidden points, etc. to match, ensuring that the two matched teams are basically balanced from the perspective of combat power, and there will be no exaggerated crushing situation. However, the specific logic has not been announced, so I will not speculate here.

3. Why does Honor of Kings have such a long life cycle?

When we play any excellent game, such as classic games like Contra and Super Mario, playing for two or three months is already a big deal. Even though Honor of Kings can give us countless experiences, people are ultimately tired of the old and love the new. If there is no change, they will eventually feel bored.

However, players of Honor of Kings basically play for half a year, a year or even longer, which makes the life cycle of Honor of Kings far longer than other mobile games. why is that?

Let's sort out the player's entire game experience process. Players can be roughly divided into four stages:

1. Playing heroes: When players first come into contact with Honor of Kings, they are quickly attracted by the thrill of operating heroes and thus set playing heroes as their goal.

2. Gameplay: After players have played a certain number of heroes, the speed of obtaining heroes begins to slow down, so they begin to pay attention to game modes such as Abyss Brawl, Changping Attack and Defense, and activity modes. Players will become curious about various new game modes and try them out.

3. Playing in ranks: After players have played various modes and have acquired several heroes, the system sets a higher goal for players - ranks. Ranks are a symbol of strength and have become a new goal for users.

4. Play with inscriptions: When users are stuck in a certain rank, they will notice the inscription system that can enhance attributes, and improve attributes in order to improve their rank, making the development of inscriptions a direct goal.

A system that is both attractive and playable needs to ensure that users are given enough stimulation in the early stages to grab their attention. As players become more and more serious, the difficulty of the game is gradually increased to maintain the balance of the entire game ecosystem. Generally speaking, the experience will follow the following curve, and the above four systems of heroes, gameplay, ranks, and inscriptions fully comply with it:

1. Play Hero

Thanks to systems such as exclusive rewards for novices, luxurious login gifts for novices, and growth history, players can very quickly obtain 2 heroes and multiple hero experience cards in the first 7 days after entering the game. Combined with limited free games, new players can quickly try out more than a dozen heroes within seven days.

However, in the later stages, the upper limit of gold coins obtained from weekly battles is 3,500. Assuming that all gold coins can be obtained from daily tasks, activities, etc., about 7,000 gold coins can be obtained in a week. Most heroes are priced at 13,888 gold coins, and one hero can be obtained approximately every two weeks.

An ordinary player can earn about 4,000 gold coins a week, and it takes an average of four weeks to obtain a hero. At the same time, a new hero is released every month, and each new hero strives to provide a different experience. As long as players are still interested in the hero, they will never give up.

2. How to play

The various gameplay experiences of Honor of Kings are somewhat different from ordinary gameplay, and each has a different positioning and user segmentation. This ensures that players can experience a lot of new experiences during the gameplay stage and can find a game mode they like better.

Abyss Brawl: A single-line full-time team battle mode that focuses more on real-time teamwork;

Changping Offensive and Defense: A single-line tower-pushing mode that reduces the complexity of teamwork;

Mohist Mechanism: 1V1, pure solo without coordination;

Fog mode: Increase field of view settings, improve game complexity and depth, and classic MOBA gameplay;

Clone Wars: Standard mode with reduced coordination difficulty;

Battle of Flame Mountain: Increase the importance of positioning and coordination, and a full-fledged battle mode without tower pushing

…

3. Playing Ranks

The ranking system is a classic design for MOBA games. The latest version of Honor of Kings is divided into Stubborn Bronze, Order Silver, Glory Gold, Noble Platinum, Eternal Diamond, Supreme Black, and Strongest King/Glory King. The basic rule is that if you win, you will get a star increase, and if you lose, you will get a star decrease.

The rules seem simple on the surface, but the rules behind improving user experience are actually extremely complex. The rank is a reflection of the player's strength. It can clearly show the user's gaming level and can also greatly promote the accuracy of the player matching mechanism.

In the process of upgrading the rank, most players will be able to rely on winning streaks to quickly climb up in the early stages and gain a great sense of improvement. However, the closer the rank is to their own level, the slower the star upgrade will be, which will require players to slowly think about how to improve their level to upgrade the rank.

Of course, most people will never be able to reach the King level in their lifetime, which ensures that if the user still pursues a certain level, he can play the game for the rest of his life in the ups and downs of gambling/Cruel Smile.

4. Play with inscriptions

As users start to get stuck in their rankings during the game, they begin to pay attention to the inscription system that can improve attribute enhancement capabilities. Inscriptions are mainly obtained through inscription lotteries.

We will find that it is extremely easy to obtain low-level inscriptions. Low-level inscriptions can be obtained at low cost through lottery, purchase, and adventure mode. Therefore, it is easy to obtain attribute upgrades in the early stage of playing the inscription stage and successfully capture the user's attention. However, due to the limitation of inscription positions, the effect of low-level inscriptions becomes smaller and smaller in the later stages, while high-level inscriptions are difficult to obtain. Therefore, the pace of obtaining inscriptions will become slower and slower, ensuring the playability of the system.

At the same time, different heroes must have different demands for improving attributes. Some need magic power, some need physical attack, some need critical strike, some need armor, etc. Matching the right inscriptions for each hero is a complete development pit. It is easy to get started but difficult to master, and it is easy to extend the life cycle of the game.

PS: It can be said that social interaction runs through the entire Honor of Kings. Now Honor of Kings is not just a game, but also a social tool . The role of social interaction is obvious, so I will not analyze it in detail.

IV. Conclusion

The nationwide craze for Honor of Kings has brought about a very obvious change in the market, that is - the number of mobile game players is expanding rapidly.

It can be said that Honor of Kings has made many users who have never played mobile games start to try or even become addicted to mobile games. So will the mobile game market experience a big leap forward as a result? What opportunities will arise?

After all, Honor of Kings cannot dominate the market forever. As player demand changes and the long-tail effect takes effect, which games will stand out from the red ocean and take the lead?

As a person who loves games, this is the best time!

The author of this article @ 36kr was compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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