I’m slightly curious about the imminent release of another MMO: Throne & Liberty.

NCsoft almost collapsed, I guess they really need this long-in-development project to turn out well. But there are tons of problems. Some of these are design concepts easy to fix, if the intention exists. But some other are ingrained deep about the type of game. I won’t discuss any of this.

Instead I’ll comment this: https://www.playthroneandliberty.com/en-us/news/articles/autumn-2024-content-roadmap

To begin with, how many times you’ve heard something along the lines of “I absolutely have to play this game, there’s an Halloween event going on” ? I guess never.

Seasonal events are a nice addition to any game because they add some flavor. But they never are the guiding purpose. If a game relies on a seasonal, transitory event to gain value, then it means that the foundation of what the game has to offer is shallow. Unless of course you expect players to come and go in phases, but once again, a seasonal event will never be enough of a motivation to bring players back. If anything it helps engagement of those already there. But okay. I only find quite weird this emphasis and focus, with the launch of a game, for something as TRIVIAL as seasonal events…

In general we can say that seasonal events “follow”: if there’s interest in a game, that interest can be translated to some interest in a seasonal event. But a seasonal event will never magically bring interest BACK to the game itself.

The real problem is that reading this, and without having information about details, I can already say this whole approach is WRONG. The idea of frequent updates rather than wait for a big content drop after months is a better strategy overall for a game that wants to stay alive and active. That part is good. The part that isn’t good is that, as you can read, they put lot of emphasis on the pacing of power, player-progress. Including some hints of a catastrophic approach to deal with this: statistics-based design.

What would even mean “identify the best opportunity” and “active player data and feedback” ?

Best opportunity for WHAT? Obviously, the underlying argument is that the addition of new content has to be …paced. Therefore, as those two points indicate, the western release will withhold some progression systems compared to Korea. They will monitor how the overall community bites onto the game, and measure the rate of progress, in order to keep this overall progression well paced.

Do you understand WHY this whole approach is completely broken without any further examination? I hope so. This is an MMO. It’s, in some way, a world. Yet, the overall game design and game development approach, is to treat this game AS A RACE.

You PAY MONEY to get an headstart, because the sooner you begin this race, THE BETTER CHANCES TO STAY AHEAD.

(note that they gate events even AFTER the early access phase, so that early access servers CONTINUE to be ahead even after the full release)

Itemization is a mix of loot-based systems, crossed with guild-based gating systems (that promote community toxicity and elitism), blended with item level-based progression as a materials and currency sinks. A somewhat “walled” grind, but grind nonetheless, and GATED grind on multiple levels, the minority of which are time based. All the rest is gating by selective systems. Of guild-based rules of circular dependencies of “you need to be already qualified to join.”

It is what is likely to become, very quickly, toxicity: the game.

So, back to the actual problem hinted above, because what I described up to this point was simply cause, not end. This overall strategy worked well for Lineage and similar. It won’t likely work today.

What I mean to write here is not in the way of an “opinion”, but in the way of an analysis. The intention is that what I write doesn’t depend on me, nor it reflects my desires and preferences. It just is (unless I’m wrong, of course).

What “just is”? What is this mountain of a problem?

You are trying to design your game as a race, and then as consequence all your effort is at trying to gather data and feedback so that you get the pacing of that race as good as possible. All good? Yes, if you lacked the perspective. This is exactly the right way of proceeding, as long you embraced the problem as it is. But the scale of the problem is much larger: you are creating a gap between new players and veterans.

To be successful long term (when these days “long term” can be as short as three months), your game needs a constant influx of players. New players. Players who have no idea what they are doing and put effort to learn things from scratch. The game systems, game design, overall structure of the whole thing, need to be constructed as if they EXIST OUTSIDE TIME. No matter if you start playing during an headstart, or six months down the road, or two years from now: THE GAME NEEDS TO BE ACCESSIBLE. It needs to be fun, and it needs to be well paced.

It’s not a fucking race, even if you want it to be a race. Because, no matter what, you have two scenarios. Either you have millions and millions of players on day one, and then are able to keep enough of a fraction to be successful. Or you’ll have players, if the game is good enough to convince players to try it, that maybe join a week later, a month later, six months later. If all your efforts are spent in a well paced race, then you are ERASING the totality of potential player-base joining PAST day one. You are desperately hanging on that momentous splash of day one. Placing all your hopes that the game will bleed players slowly enough to still make sense commercially. And even still, even IF an enormous success, you still run on a countdown.

Or maybe just understand that you need a time-zero type of design: the game needs to be well structured, out of time. No matter when a player joins.

I know how these games try to wrestle the problem: eventually they’ll implement some catch-up system. Some cuts in the early game so that new players have a faster on-boarding. Destiny 2 is that type of game. It’s also that type of game that shot itself repeatedly in the feet. It just happens that eventually you realize you can’t walk anymore.

You can’t fix this through band-aids. The “speed” is never a point, because being in a constant race is only appealing for a tiny group of players. Within some niches, a tiny group can be well enough to be sustainable, but I suppose at the scale NCsoft wants to operate, it won’t be.

It can all be fixed, just as long you understand the game needs to be designed to be accessible and fun AT ALL TIMES, rather than surfing at the temporary edge, dominated by an elitist group. You want to have meaningful progression? Ok, so the risk is that players get scattered across many power levels, populations dilute below levels that are active enough. It becomes a solvable problem of player distribution, and tiering that encourages players to also continue to populate lower tiers.

The problem is already embedded in the words of that announce. Their efforts are focused about timing the introduction of updates. Meaning that the CONSEQUENCE of this strategy SOLELY affects the players who are active THAT PRECISE MOMENT.

Whoever will join the game later, whoever wasn’t active in that time frame, whoever takes a vacation to do something else… Whoever wasn’t right there in an ever fleeting FOMO, is screwed and cut out of the game.

A game built on an ever shrinking elitist pool, where the focus on timing will be ironically PROPORTIONAL to the pacing of the game’s failure. The more SELECTIVE the player progress, the faster the game will bleed players out.

The more focus they will put on TIMING THE GAME RIGHT, the faster the failure they’ll get. Because every single timing they get PERFECTLY RIGHT, will also cleave the playerbase between who was there, and who is permanently gone.

I have no specific information of what’s contained within the boxes labeled “tier 2” and “rune systems”. Is it well designed, or is it not? You instead are saying: if we release it in September it’s bad, if we release it in January it is good. Then, I can confidently state that YOU ARE WRONG.

If the timing is perfectly right on day 1, it automatically means the timing is WRONG on day +x. Meaning that every player joining past day one will have the game being WRONG, always. One determines the other. Either game systems are good and work at all times, or they are wrong most of the times.

In the presence of everything I wrote here, all accusations and recriminations about P2W that DOMINATE discussions everywhere else ARE IRRELEVANT.

I don’t care if you can PAY TO DELETE FUN out of a game (you are the victim of your own choices), I care that a game has good game design built on rational analysis.

—–
In light of all I wrote above, the first line of that image is obviously completely wrong and quite silly: “The content release cadence is one of the most important (and trickiest) to get just right.”

It’s written as a matter of fact premise, when it instead just pure irrational delirium. The faster and the greater the amount of content, the better. Obviously. Of course considering the quality, that usually is the cause behind delays. Imagine taking that line seriously: “we’ve made a game that is simply too good and too big, our players are not prepared. We’ll destroy our competition, we cannot release it.”

You have a certain amount of limited resources, costs, and you try to make the best work you can. You try to match the speed of making something, with the amount you can spend, and the quality you have as a target. Within this context, you simply try to do it as fast as possible, as much as possible. Of course you don’t add a ton of content at once so that you open onscreen seventy pop-ups at the same time like in Black Desert, but that’s again a matter of gaming direction and designed flow, not of some ideal “content quantity” to guess right. The part that is tricky to get right is to avoid mistakes as much as possible, and focus development on what makes enough of an impact. You want to avoid making predictable mistakes, that then cause more time wasted to overhaul systems already complete.

How many resources you want to reinvest to secure the long term future of a game, and the quality of your game design. That’s all that matters. Everything else is out of your hands.

I’ve just bought a second account of this terrible MMO. It’s just 1 euro right now (or 1 dollar, I suppose). Likely because an “expansion” just released, but it’s usually on sale more often than is not anyway. The reasons why I bought a SECOND account are too long to explain.

But let’s start from here. Why selling a game for 1 euro? It’s just a silly barrier of entry. Just make it free. I have played BDO for a few years very casually, I still have to spend any money on it outside of the initial purchase, that at the time was 5 euros.

BDO is a game that is outside of rational plausibility. It’s something of this world that is not explainable. That’s why I’m writing this. The whole situation of the MMO space has always been a mess, and only got worse in recent years. Making a decent MMO is extremely hard, now exceedingly rare. And make it survive the market even more so. BDO is this absurd anomaly because it has the concrete potential of DESTROYING the competition. I’m not joking, I’ve been observing this space for a too long time, I’m not exaggerating. It’s a game that realizes things we were dreaming about in the early 2000s, when the genre was starting to flourish. It does stuff that no other game even attempts, and it does it in a way that seems effortless.

Yet, it’s all a fucking disaster. A COMPLETE, UTTER disaster of the game. Flawed beyond anything you can imagine. What’s infuriating for me, it’s how easy it would be to repair. And what a marvel it would be when simply restored to its ideal shape. The shape that you can SEE, if you have eyes to see. The shape that is already there, waiting to become. DEMANDING to be delivered. A work of art that waits. If even someone out there was just willing to spend some time… and listen. Fucking LISTEN.

Because if on one side the game already realizes wild dreams no one thought even possible, on the other it completely fails on everything. Base game design, structure, every single little thing, accumulating to a trainwreck of galactic proportions. And it’s not even that, not even just game design. The game engine is at the same time a marvel and a continuous list of small problems. The UI is a disaster, and so on. Again all solvable if anyone simply cared to stop, observe and do something. Just a casual mention of one of the smallest problems: while you can move some UI elements, what you can or cannot move is arbitrary. So for example you can move your stamina bar, but you cannot move the gathering/processing bar. If you happen to move some of these widgets you will keep getting problems because they will overlap with other unmovable widgets, especially when they share a similar function. The example about stamina and gathering is meaningful because you consume stamina when running or fighting, meaning that there’s no contextual overlap between using stamina and a gathering process (you’re forced to be still). So why not use the same widget? Why have two, and why, IN PARTICULAR, you make stamina movable but gathering bar not, so that if I move the stamina to avoid some overlaps then I get the gathering bar in the way no matter what? Again, just a MINUSCULE example for something unambiguously bad, that has no rational reason to exist. You can only move 50% of the things, forcing the things that can actually be moved still be moved around and in the context of what cannot. A way to give customization only to take it away.

And I’m writing this to start from ONE thing. We’ll get to it.

Let’s say the game has an opening cinematic scene, done in-engine, already showing a bunch of problems right from the start, with plenty of graphical glitches, hair sticking out of clothes, and the usual “jank.” BDO is all jank, everywhere. A complete lack of polish. But okay, that’s not the point here.

The game starts through some quick forced dialogues and then gives you some control of the character. Already HERE it’s a mess. Because you can spend 20 minutes just figuring out a tons of crazy attacks and combos you’re given. Some of these are shown through the UI, but many you can discover by experimenting with controls. There’s enough complexity here to overwhelm even an experienced player. It’s nice to show what the combat system is capable of, but it’s really messy and confusing to present to a new player. But this is also beside the point. The trick used here is that the game gives you a full powered character, only to strip away those powers a minute later. A classic, but not quite so because even when stripped down you still have way, WAY more than you can handle as a new player.

But all of this is again beside the point.

After this initial few scenes where you got through some cryptic dialogue that sets up the “mystery” of the black spirits, you finally get ported to the actual MMO world. You get a quest and everything. Same as many MMOs, BDO even more than any other game, evolved through an accumulation of systems that got progressively patched in. So you get multiple layers of quests, and a near infinite aggression of on-screen messages and alerts not even remotely related to your character. I’m not even delving about all this. Because again, it is beside the point. Just know that any of these IMPLIED sidetracks could take multiple pages of text to analyze, to explain everything that is wrong, and how with minimal tweaks they could all be resolved by marking a clear path through all this mess…

So let’s get to the point. If you happen to hit the special key that evokes the Black Spirit, something that you’ll do a whole lot through the game, you get pushed into a quest that isn’t the starting quest. It’s something new that was added about a year ago.

A quest to help new players, on top of all other introduction quests that are supposed to help new players (a reminder of the accumulation of layers I mentioned, you can’t even imagine how many layers of “new-player-help” have been added, all overlapping, creating one of the messier new player experience in history that is infinitely worse than one of the worst games doing this so badly: Destiny 2. The race to the bottom is always crowded.).

You accept this quest to obtain an item, that lands right in your inventory.

(I mean, you could argue that the description is misleading, there are no “Edan adventures”, that the green line has the most emphasis, yet it’s just a quote, and the important message that indicates the actual FUNCTION only arrives at the bottom, in a gold color, but that is much easier to miss. It’s a small example but indicates well the attention fatigue you get, because BDO drowns you in worthless information that is extremely hard to parse, and will continue to be hard to parse even after 100 hours in…)

“Press RBM” to open a UI thing, is the only function of this object. So important that a new quest was added, as one of the first things you see as a new player. What is it in practice? A browser window, thankfully done in-game, with basically a portal to a bunch of introductory guides. It’s actually useful and I often use it even if I’ve played for quite a while: BDO is a mess of systems, you’ll constantly look up stuff on the internet.

…Especially because of a near-infinite clutter of items and descriptions to figure out. Beyond your wildest dreams or nightmares. Which is odd. Usually a large itemization pool means lots of stuff you can and want to collect. But BDO is a game of near-linear progression. You have a thing that you upgrade, but you don’t find loot and randomized equipment that drives most games to their fun and addictive progression systems. No, you only get a large number of materials and tricky sub-systems to simply upgrade a thing and tickle some gambling addiction. But again, this is all beside the point. The progression system is a large, high level concept and problem. And we’re only dealing with minutiae here.

The problem at this small scale and the first main issue to solve for all players, both new and veterans, is the limited inventory. The game will drown you under piles of items, all fighting for limited space (and one of the things you can buy, with real money, is inventory space). The real mastery is telling what is useful from what is not, but that again is a thing that plagues most “gachas”, and BDO is often more a gacha than a typical MMO.

But again, this is the issue that made me wrote all this: you get a starting quest, dumping a book in your inventory. If you click on this item, you get a browser page with some guides.

Ok. See here? Among a million of other options (by the way, yes, there’s a million of stuff, but the game cares for you, so you cannot customize the UI until level 10, but you can of course have your screen full with end-game options and pop-ups and alerts that IN NO WAY relate to your character at least for the next 50 hours). Among all those options there’s that button. And what does it? It opens the same UI widget that you access from right-clicking on the book in your inventory. It’s always been there, the book is only a shortcut to the same thing. A “shortcut” taking inventory space, for something accessible from the main menu.

(lets say you miss it, it’s still plastered all over the place. The “hotkey help”, which appears as a giant button always present on screen for new players, brings up another screen. pressing “F2” is yet ANOTHER shortcut to the same screen. But if you press F1, it’s THE SAME. It brings up the same browser, but pointed to a different tab. Still has all the other pages, you just need to click. But more! see the bottom of that screen, there’s ANOTHER button “Adventurer’s Guide” that again does the same of the F1 shortcut… There are no less than FIVE things to get to the same place: book in inventory, main menu button, F1, F2, button inside hotkey help UI)

Nothing else is explained.

If you are a new player, you will be extremely wary of throwing items out that may have some uses later on. Tons of stuff that BDO throws at you FROM DAY ONE, is important stuff that you should store safely. But it’s lost in a near-infinite ocean of pointless clutter. Something in there is stuff that is important later, and that no matter the length of its tooltip, you will have NO IDEA how to use, when to use, or even if. Everything you do in BDO has a good chance of crippling your character, by wasting some important item. And there is no sane way around. But again, all this is beside the point and a much larger problem.

The problem is that, in this specific case, this book is worthless. But because nothing in the game tells you it is worthless, there’s a high chance you will worry it may be useful, and keep it in your inventory, or dumped and forgotten inside some city storage, taking away precious inventory space…

Beside the vague point that this might be done deliberately, since the game sells inventory space, it’s still bad design. And it would be easily fixed. If anyone cared.

This has been added slightly over a year ago, for a game that existed since 2015. BDO updates once a week regularly, with massive, systemic updates delivered at an absurd pace. It’s unprecedented in the genre. And yet, it’s all clumsy. It’s all knee-jerk, back and forth, doing and undoing. All going to waste and rot. It does 500% more of what it needs, but delivers nothing. Because it has no direction.

So here’s the solution:
this is a quest that is shoved on your face, you can’t miss it. So let’s REMOVE the option from the main menu first. Place the book in the inventory as it happens already. During the first three minutes the inventory is thankfully still clean, so the book is easy to notice. You right click on it, and make it so the book IS CONSUMED. Rather than opening the UI browser, you give a pop up that points the player to a NEW option appearing in the main menu. You follow the instructions to find out the book unlocked this new menu button, and using it brings up the browser with the guides. The option is always there in your main menu, and the book delivered by the quest had only the function to trigger it and guide the player to be aware of its existence.

No waste of one (precious) inventory slot. Less clutter. No worries about whether this item can be safely deleted or not. And overall better guidance to navigate the mess that is the main menu.

This is just one thing. One minuscule example of bad design. There’s no ambiguity about it, it’s just bad, and easy to fix. In a sea of other problems, just as tiny, all the way to mountains. But all within reach, I assure you.

If simply someone cared.

Someone who does listen. Someone who can see.

But no, of course. BDO is just another MMO in decline. Something that won’t even be remembered that fondly, after all. And yet, this is potentially, concretely… not just one of the best MMO out there. It could be one of the greatest games, of all times. A masterpiece. Not after a massive overhaul, but by fixing what is easy, simple and quick. Cleaning the junk, and polish what’s underneath so it shines. If simply someone cared. If someone had eyes to see.

BDO is not a game to save or that will be saved. You just observe in dismay what it could have been. It’s nostalgia of another world.

For something just silly, for once…

This is unedited. It’s a screenshot of a contiguous list of posts exactly as they appeared on my screen. Under a post by SpaceX.

…What is even the point? Are these bots? Is it some kind of AI test? Is it used to boost visibility by creating a layer of fake engagement? Or maybe it’s just random people who enjoy the copy/paste?

I don’t have an answer. It just looks silly to me, but if it works for you, okay then?

Not much to comment when what’s written here is so eloquent by itself.

The second is a literal call for war in the name of supremacist ideology (under the usual coat of victimism). Not specifically white supremacy, here, but if you’ve seen the overall context you can deduce the answer on your own.

This stops being political propaganda “for Trump.” This is unhinged. Completely lost contact with reality. At this point this doesn’t need any external intervention, Elon Musk will drive himself into a wall, unassisted. Just need to be patient and observe, I guess.

I said it before, but now it’s plain: Elon Musk is waging war on reality itself.

He’s like a toddler with a giant gun. You can imagine the consequences.

Sources:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1830390502836854925
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1829180803722686904

Edit: by the way, let me add a little layer. Posting this crap is easy as a way to criticize the guy. I don’t write down the complexities that go on behind, but then I realize by doing this I just participate in the same broken game. So, beside pointing an accusing finger to the bad guy, there’s a more interesting part here… Why has he posted that first thing?

There’s always this layer. It’s easy and effective to just point the finger to something so plainly WRONG. And that’s quite enough. But if you care about understanding, rather than judging, then there’s more. At least a little bit more. So WHY has he posted something so obviously unhinged? Something that not even Trump would have endorsed?

You could say that Elon is THAT crazy, just shitposting on his own network without giving a single fuck. That kind of ruthlessness and rash sincerity that people seem to love.

But this is, from my point of view, a little bit more and a little bit less. He currently has a beef with Robert Reich, who wrote an article for The Guardian. Openly body shaming isn’t even that surprising.

He likely didn’t intend to “share” the sexist ideology in that image. His mind simply clamped on the positive response triggered by the mocking of Reich’s masculinity. He felt giddy and playful. His brain “folded” there, around his current primary obsession: to hate the guy and see him humiliated. Enough to completely ignore the WARNING flashing sign, of giving way to such blatant misogynistic ideology. His focus blindsided him from the whole context, enough for him to become the butt of the joke.

Just another simple mind.
(Btw, it’s neuroAtypical, neuro-atypical. A-neurotypical must be some creative invention by someone who’s clearly very neurotypical and lobotomized by that same consensus filter they believe being immune from. You’ve swallowed propaganda whole, high T man with a deep throat. Autistic, you are not. Plain fucking dumb and maybe in serious need of help, yes.)

Edit 2:
… there’s, huh, a darker turn about this first message. I can’t find the original, that message is spammed multiple times within 4chan (and the image is at least a few years old). But there are higher resolution versions of the image, enough to be able to see clearly that part of that tiny subtitle says: “He is worse than a Yew.” I’m unaware of the context of the image. It’s funny in a darker kind of way that a simple image from 4chan triggers this sort of Qanon conspiracy derail, but. In the light of this simple coincidence (?), the line “also known as the REICH effect” seems to assume a different meaning. The words were already quite fascist on their own. Mind, this is the sort of pattern matching that powers the greatest delusions. I definitely don’t believe there was actual intent with this ominous hidden meaning…