Player Types: Browser-Based MMO Travian

This post addresses a question for my game design and analysis course about real and imagined player-types. We were asked to write about how our play experience of an MMO mapped to the Bartle typology, affordances the game provides for development of identity through gameplay, and how those affordances reflect the assumed demographics.

Travian is a free browser-based MMO which was developed in Germany in 2004. It has been translated into 30 different languages, runs on over 150 servers, and has about 3 million registered players. When a player begins the game they choose a race to play as (Gaul, Roman, or Teuton) and are randomly given a village on one square in an 800×800 grid, starting at the coordinate (0,0) and moving outward toward +/- 400 X and Y coordinates. The game uses graphical representations but is not animated. As shown in the image at right, players spend their time upgrading resource fields outside their village to gain more income, and build and upgrade structures inside their village. In addition, players build military forces to raid other players’ villages for resources, go to war, and protect their own property. Essentially, it is a game about one of two things: dominance or survival.

Travian is played in “real time” and continues even when a player is not actively playing. By real time, I mean to say that actions in the game are given lengthy durations. Building a level 1 crop field takes 2 minutes when you first begin a village, but by level 10 that time shoots up to 9 hours. You can only build one piece of town infrastructure, one resource upgrade, and one type of military unit at any given time. As a browser game, it is generally something that cannot be played for more than a half hour at a time because it’s possible to exhaust all your actions. A “round” of Travian, which is to say the time from when the server starts to one of a few end-game states, is nearly a year. Players expand their empire to include other villages they’ve founded or conquered from other players, form alliances, and wage wars through this minimal interface.

Travian is basically a spreadsheet game. This is a term used to describe games in which success comes down to being able to crunch numbers. A raid (stealing opponent resources is nothing more than a count-down clock which says how long until your units hit their target, a table of result data, and a return-trip clock. Battles are not controlled by players but rather decided by numerical comparisons. Reaching End Game is as much a matter of endurance as skill. Once a player’s final village is captured, their account is deleted and they have to go start a new game on a new server. It’s a pretty serious consequence if you’ve been playing for six months. Unlike the Daedalus observations on EverQuest, death in Travian is the end of the bonding experience.

Why would anyone play this? you might wonder. It sounds time-consuming, boring, and masochistic. Yet, much like a MUD or a 3D MMO game environment, it develops certain types of players who love the game. I never thought I would enjoy a game like this, but I was fortunate enough to be guided by a top 10 player who could explain the intricacies of the game and teach me how to play like a top-100 player in a few short months.

Much like TL Taylor describes, the limitations of the technology and design of Travian create the player types. Players of Travian do not fall into the typical Bartle alignments. There are some similarities, as will be discussed, but Travian is a unique type of game that only allows for certain styles of play. This is a result primarily of its goals, it’s always-on design, and its interface.

The will to survive.
As I mentioned before, Travian is a game that has a real game over. Death doesn’t mean restarting. Death means losing everything with no chance of revival. The consequence of death means all the work the player has put into the game vanishes instantaneously. As I learned from experience, Travian is not a game for someone interested in only casually playing. Because it runs 24-hours, it requires attention throughout the day and players must take care to defend themselves when they can’t be at their computer.

In the first few months of a round, players are more likely to delete their account than get killed by another player. Why does this happen? Because aggressive players spend their time raiding their neighbors to steal their resources. No resources, no building. No building, no playing. And though there are safeguards to help players (you can build something to hide resources in), this time is spent “not losing” rather than progressing.

So how can we describe Travian players? This system I described heavily favors Bartle’s achievers. In fact, there’s very little else to do if you’re not seeking to survive through a round. As I will describe, socialization takes an interesting form and exploration is only a subcategory of achievement.

The player types boil down to achievers, survivors, and losers. Achievers come in all shapes and colors. There’s the ultra-aggressive type prone to starting conflicts (which might be seen as Bartle’s imposition group). The regular aggressive players who raid other villages for resources because it increases their income. The neutral type whose income in derived internally. Different paths of progression/achievement comes through expansion of empire, which involves either settling new villages or capturing them from other players. Regardless, the game is set up such that it’s extremely difficult to work with only one village and players have to expand to survive.

Personal representation.
Travian players have no player-embodied avatar in the traditional sense. They have no “characters.” They have iconic representations of their data tables in the form of villages, which is all the other players can see. One form of representation, then, comes through the naming of these villages. Players with default village names are seen as weak because they’re not choosing the label themselves. Players with numbered villages, on the other hand, are seen as aggressive or seasoned. Labling your first village “.001 Rockland” at the beginning of a game implies that you not only plan on building other villages, but that the numbers are an organizational tool–a form of high strategy.

Seeing the alliance of a player is also a way to understand them. It probably goes without saying, but alliances are groups of players who have chosen to work together. It might just be a scare tactic, to warn possible attackers that there’s the threat of retaliation from other players. It may also say something about a player’s nationality–”CRO”, for example, is an alliance of Croatian players who take the game very seriously.

Players can also keep very limited profiles which tell others their rank on the server, tribe, alliance, number of villages, population, age, gender, and location. One strategy, used by some of the more aggressive players, is to either use misleading information or leave these last three fields empty–you dare not give someone your location because they’ll have a pretty good idea when you sleep and use that as optimal time to attack you. It is not impossible to be social, especially if this information helps you identify others like you who might be good to befriend. It’s difficult to be social for socialization’s sake, but it is beneficial to make friends who can help you.
But with such limited forms of communication and representation, how do people socialize?

Communications channels for socialization.
Communication channels in Travian began quite limited. In the game itself, there were only in-game messages (IGMs), which could be sent to either one player or a group of players in an alliance. They are text only and not in real time. This probably began as a technical limitation, but has persisted as a gameplay convention even though technology has improved. The game runs on PHP and aims to be low bandwidth–both to keep server costs down and to allow players (especially in Europe) to use the website on their mobile devices.

To overcome these in-game limitations, players who wanted to socialize had to seek external resources like forums. The creators of Travian have since implemented discussion forums for players on their website, with topics ranging from feedback and suggestions on game design, strategy, and the usual off-topic discussion like music and politics. However, alliances have private forums to discuss game strategy or other alliance-specific matters. The game of Travian leaves little room for pure socializers as a play type, but makes for a strong community of play. Just because they’re playing the game means they have to be at least as crazy as you.

Socialization, as a strategy, means finding people to help you out. The progression of the game is much like an arms race. Alliances are more about defense than offense. Being a part of a good alliances requires not only playing well but making friends with other strong players. Weak alliances have little communication.

It is important to again note that most Travian players are European, which means there are language and nationality barriers in the game. There are specific servers for different countries (compare travian.co.uk to travian.nl), but players can choose to play anywhere. In my personal experience, when I couldn’t communicate with a player directly because of language differences, game action became our language. A message in Romanian from a weaker player I had been raiding was incomprehensible to me, but their gift of 200 of each resource clearly stated they were hoping for me to back off from my attacks on them.

As an experiment, I would love to see what the game would look like if communication channels were removed. Would it be possible to play the same way? How would strategy change? What sorts of representations would people use to express basic concepts? It would be a remarkable example of how the technology/platform shapes the evolution of play.

(As a side note, I noticed that a new game called “Travians” was launched this past summer, which takes the setting of Travian and lets people play as an actual character inside of a village. I’m going to start playing to see what sorts of niches in MMO play it fills that are absent in the original game.)