Core System
Sessions & Subscriptions
MMOS is a subscription business wrapped in a simulation. Players come and go across the day, and every renewal is a quiet vote on whether your world is worth paying for. This page covers the loop that turns happy players into revenue, and unhappy ones into churn.
- Clock
- Day & night cycle
- Time control
- Pause · 1× · 2× · 4×
- Revenue
- Subscriptions
The server day
Time runs on a compressed day/night cycle, and your world breathes with it: busy at peak hours, quiet overnight as adventurers turn in. You control the flow: pause to plan your next move, or speed time up to watch days of player behaviour play out in minutes.
Logging in and out
Adventurers come online, play a session, and eventually log off, and how soon they return depends on how good a time they had. A player who's enjoying themselves is back quickly and itching for more; a bored one stays away far longer, if they come back at all. Resting at an inn before logging off leaves them refreshed for next time.
Fun is the whole game
Underneath everything sits the one thing you're really managing: are your players having a good time? Fun comes from the moments your world makes possible:
- Landing the killing blow on a monster.
- Adventuring as part of a group.
- Chatting with other players.
- Resting up in a good town or city.
The more fun a session, the longer a player stays, the likelier they renew, and the sooner they log back in. Everything you build is ultimately in service of that feeling.
Subscriptions & churn
Every adventurer pays to play and renews each cycle for as long as they're enjoying it. Each renewal is a roll against their loyalty: happy players stay and pay, while the bored, broke, or under-served eventually cancel, and a cancelled player is gone for good. Loyalty naturally wears down over time, so you can't coast; you have to keep giving people reasons to stay. Subscribers, retention, and revenue are your scoreboard, and they read straight off how good your world actually is.
Churn is permanent: a lapsed player won't come back. Growth comes from keeping who you have and winning over newcomers.
Server capacity
Only so many players can be online at once before the rest have to wait in a login queue, and nobody likes queuing. Let your world outgrow its capacity and waiting players sour and quit, so part of running a healthy MMO is expanding your infrastructure to keep pace with demand rather than letting popularity choke itself.
This article describes MMOS v0.1 behaviour. The game is in active development, so systems will grow and change. Expect this to be revised as it does.