Wipes: How Sisyphean Games Keep Players Engaged

Sisyphus’s Punishment

In Ancient Greek Mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra and a man who seeked to cheat death. After cheating death twice, Hades punished him by making him roll a boulder up a hill. The catch was that whenever the boulder reached the top of the hill, it would roll all the way down, undoing all of his progress and trapping him for eternity.

Games that use wipes are similar in that regard: they remove all (or most) of a player’s progress every so often, making it so that the player has to redo all of their work. However, unlike Sisyphus, players seem to enjoy this cycle, keeping them engaged with a game.

The Problem with Endless Games

Most games can be categorized into completable, repeatable and endless games (or some mix of the three).

Completable games are straightforward: You start the game, you play through it, and eventually you reach the end. Once you reach the end you have basically completed your interactions with the game. Of course you can replay it, but the main experience was that playthrough. Examples of this are most RPGs and campaign-based games.

Repeatable games are similar in that there is a start and an end, however they are generally scaled down so that the playthrough cycle can be repeated over and over again. The goal of these games is to keep a user playing the same core game many times. Examples of this are most competitive games, rogue-likes and party games.

Then there are endless games. Games with a start but no clear end. The player will scale and grow through a playthrough, but there is no defined end-point, instead there are generally milestone points players label, such as labelling early-game, end-game and post-end-game. Even if there is a campaign or objectives, the gameplay typically continues beyond them. Examples of this are sandbox games. Specifically, we will look at Escape from Tarkov, Rust, World of Warcraft, and Ark: Survival Evolved as examples of endless games.

While completable games don’t seek to keep players around indefinitely and repeatable games keep players around by their repeatable nature, endless games have a pitfall: player engagement falls off as the playthrough continues. This is typically because a player hits a level cap or completes all their objectives or has explored all the content available. Once these are done, the player has little reason to continue engaging with the game. There are a few ways to deal with this though.

Content Drops

The general way for repeatable and endless games to keep players engaged is by simply adding more content. Live service games like League of Legends and Fortnite will do this frequently to keep players engaged with the game. This content can be in the way of balance updates, new cosmetics, new gameplay, etc, but the general idea is that there is something new for the player to engage with.

World of Warcraft Player Counts from Mid-2018 to Mid-2023 (via mmo-population.com)

World of Warcraft’s three most recent expansions are: Battle for Azeroth (14 August 2018), Shadowlands (23 November 2020) and Dragonflight (28 November, 2022). Looking at the player population chart, we can see that there were large spikes in players right around the release of these expansions that dropped off as players completed the new content.

From this we can see that new content will get players to come back to a game but only for a bit. This also comes with the reality that making new content is expensive for the development team and possibly infeasible for some developers. There is however, another way to keep players engaged.

Wipes

The idea behind wipes is that (at some frequency) player’s progress will be reset to 0, forcing them to play the game from the start. While this may seem like a deterrent for players, it actually keeps them engaged as the time limit places a bit of pressure to progress as much as possible before the wipe and allows new/returning players an entry point to the game where they are on equal footing.

As a comparison on the efficacy of wipes, lets look at two similar games: Rust and Ark. Both are sandbox (mostly PvP) games where you collect resources, craft items and build bases with a general progression system based on what you can make and find. Rust uses wipes while Ark does not.

Ark: Survival Evolved Player Counts (via Steam Charts)

Rust servers wipe once a month with some community servers wiping weekly instead. As can be seen in the player counts, there is a large spike in players every month on the wipe, followed by a gradual decent until the next monthly wipe, with weekly wipes providing smaller bumps in player count. This cycle keeps the player count relatively level long-term.

Compare this with Ark, which doesn’t wipe. We do see spikes in players, however these are all for the weekend and immediately fall off when the week starts again. This cycles are much less gradual than the ones for Rust and do not maintain the player count long-term as well, which can be seen in the actual player count numbers for both games. Despite both games having roughly 245k peak players, (as of April 2023) Rust currently has a 30-day average of about 82k players while Ark has a 30-day average of about 44k players. This shows the power of wipes in keeping players playing long term.

Another game that does wipes is Escape from Tarkov. I couldn’t find the historical player numbers for Tarkov, so we will instead go by twitch viewership, which is an ancillary indicator of player engagement.

Escape from Tarkov Twitch Viewership (via Twitch Tracker)

Tarkov wipes about every 6 months, and as can clearly be seen in the Twitch viewership, there is a massive spike every wipe which rapidly drops off a bit after the wipe ends. However, these peaks continually keep increasing, indicating that the actual interest in the game is actually increasing. Of course, since these are viewership numbers and not player counts, they aren’t perfectly representative, but considering that (based on data from mmostats.com in April 2023) the peak daily player count of Tarkov is 233k, it’s likely that there are actually more players than viewers.

Caveats

Although the benefits of wiping was shown here, it is important to note that not every game can implement them. Both of the games with wipes that were mentioned (Rust and Tarkov) are PvP/PvE games with a lot of content to progress through. While mostly PvE games, the long progression is still true in other games with wipes such as Diablo’s ladder and Path of Exile’s league. So one thing to note is that a lack of actual progression and content will not be fixed by wipes, instead wipes should be used to reengage players with the existing content.