Tag Archives: Game Design

Do they just rattle around like bingo balls until a slot opens up?

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When a designer invents something retarded the excuse is always the same: the players are confused and the designer is right.

The designer obviously cannot waste his precious time to clarify the doubts and the critics of the players, of course, are all superficial and coming from misinterpretations. After some time everyone will understand the genius. Or not.

The fun part is that this process is purely reputation-driven. Nothing else. You can put the most idiotic idea ever in the mouth of a respected and well-known developer, and the majority of the players will start to drool. In particular if it’s filled with buzz-words and commonplaces. In particular if it’s completely devoid of details and full of positive adjectives. Today we have two different examples (or three if we included WoW’s Honor System) defining two different moments. The phase when the idea is still a blurred, vague concept but still accepted with lots of hype and unmotivated praises and the following phase, when the idea has to become real to collapse in a magnificent trainwreck for all to see. An alternation of unfounded promises and their consequence.

In the first case we have Brad McQuaid explaining a new form of instancing, in the second case we have the Combat Upgrade trainwreck that invested the “headless” SWG. Two parts (moments) of the exact same process.

In this second case, from devs to producers, there has been an insane work to release interviews, dev diaries, apologies and whatever you can fit in the pack. Probably because there was this need to teach again to the poor clueless players how the new system works. Because they are confused:

The first obvious issue that’s impacting our players is that it’s a fundamental change. Players, specifically our hardcore players who’ve been playing for 20 months, have to relearn how to play.

Because it is a new system, especially when you’re a veteran player and you have a whole lot of high-level skills you use in combat, it’s going to take you a while to use the new system.

(hint: “communication” means listening what others are saying, not preaching from a podium)

There’s this diffused arrogance, the players are stupid, they cannot see the magnificent ideas (nor the designers have time to explain them) behind some changes. So they just need tools to keep the herd under control while the shepherds lead it in the proper way. Babysitting the kiddy community. After some time the protests will settle down and everyone will get used to the new game (hint: peoples adapt and get used to just everything. This doesn’t make the result a good result).

This is when the game gets fucked up, under the eyes of the players. The promises full of adjectives do not hold anymore, the facts claim their concreteness and the only resort for the devs is to justify their work by denying the problems, denying alternatives, denying the critics. Well.. denying. And delaying (so that the players will adapt and shut up). They want the community asleep, sweet dreams while the money keep flowing, everyoneishappy and alseep. They chant lullabies and reassurances. Everything will be okay, there’s nothing wrong, all is working as intended.

Some games, instead, live still in the misty land of the hype, where everything is possible. Where every player can paint something in his head the way he likes. All perfect, nothing will go wrong, the premises are all wonderful. This is the first stage where the reputation of the developer becomes the whole depth of his ideas. That’s the value, nothing else. The source is the cause (which is a good principle, after all – till it lasts). And we have Brad McQuaid with the most blurred, indefinite (and derivative) game-concept of the history: “Vanguard – Saga of Heroes”. He has a very good reputation among those catassers that still represent the heart of the genre and his first resource and marketing target. The best he did wasn’t to create EverQuest, but to leave it with a perfect timing, unloading all those responsibilities before suffering their weight (Raph did the same with SWG, even if he didn’t come out really as a winner in the eyes of the players). He left at the peak, he cashed the praises and the glory and dodged all the consequent responibilities to become an “icon” of the nostalgia, a myth on his own, purified and exhalted by the censorship of the passing time. He’s not even anymore human. He’s a god called “Aradune Mithara”, the god that will bring back “the experience” to the players.

In the last days we got some more concrete informations about one of the systems that will appear in the game. As expected the majority of the fanboys loves it, while the minority that criticize those ideas is obviously confused. This system has been defined as “Advanced Encounter System” and is a rehash of some features of the instancing technology. My first comment isn’t that different from the opinion I have formed after reading through the “compiled version”:
“Incredible! They will be able to borrow all the problems of the private instances without any advantage! It’s a design miracle!”

The system is rather odd. Odd because it doesn’t make sense, it’s unjustified. It has already been defined as “private instancing, just in public” or “instances with spectators”. The basic idea is that the various groups entering a dungeon will follow different questlines and paths, as they choose. These paths will be based on different triggers, both common (kill “x” mobs, reach this place, pull the lever etc..) and uncommon (the actual AES, aka “spawn on demand”). In the design plan this means that these dungeons are always public. Vanguard will completely avoid the instancing technology so the world will always be shared and unique. In a dungeon you’ll find other groups already involved with various path/storylines. The schema will work like a theme park with different attractions, every group will follow its own itinerary and the choke points will be avoided by introducing this new form of “public instancing”.

At some point of the progress through a path, a mob will drop a special object that, if used, will spawn “privately” the special encounter. In order to prevent other groups to disrupt it:

A very limited subset of NPCs involved in an encounter route will be â

Communism in mmorpgs

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Ahaha, I got the best idea ever.

If I’m going to experiment with new forms of economic systems, why not communism? So, maybe, this will become the base of my dream mmorpg and the chimera I’m building with Chris. And there are also very good premises for it to work, in the non-reality.

The actual implementation isn’t really so alienated from the few forms we have already in the game. There’s already planned a guild system under a bigger structure with three hardcoded factions. So the players will keep fighting for their realm, expanding it, its resources, conquering new territories, spawing NPCs, guards and so on. It’s part of my general purpose of pulling out the purpose of the game from the single character power treadmill to the “outside”, the environment, the role of the player in a bigger structure, with a more direct commitment and responsibility. Not anymore faked in a fixed, artificial arena.

The crafting will have odd quirks, the crafters will never be the players (there are exceptions I won’t discuss here). Instead the players will be able to spawn both crafters and resource gatherer NPCs and plot simple schedules structures for them (player-controlled robots). The player won’t have to press a key and stare a progression bar, all the work will be automated through NPCs. The economy (and currency) will exist on a bigger level, all that the players will need to control will be at an higher level, dependent to the guild (the guilds will be able to claim and manage the RTS level of the game) and, then, the realm. Private propriety? No thanks. Everything related to the gameplay and the single player (loot, magic items) won’t enter the economy. What is part of the economic level will exist at the “upper” level, so the creation and management of the resources already (by design) “shared” between all the players under that faction – already built to be part of that shared/trade level without disrupting and damaging the “game”.

Most of the game comes from that layer. The players are brought together because they share goals and means. They aren’t anymore within artficial structures excusing their actions.

They ARE the structure. They ARE the state.

Now tell IGE to try to enter this system to broke it, they would be required to actually… play the game. This model not only is impermeable to the Real Money Trade, but it also preserves all the fun elements unique to this sub-genre.

Quoting an old comment from Raph:

Hmm, I think that one thing that people who want to just axe economies are missing is that economies can and DO provide gameplay. There’s strategic gameplay, large-scale cooperation gameplay, PvP gameplay, and other types of gameplay that kill-the-foozle doesn’t offer.

We may quibble all we want about whether harvesting is currently as fun as it should be (it isn’t), the act of crafting is as fun as it should be (it isn’t), or the juggling of inventory is as fun as it should be (it isn’t). But it’d be dumb to say that running a business in a game can’t be a fun endeavor or add gameplay–there’s entire single-player genres of game based on it, and they are some of the most popular games in the world–Rollercoaster Tycoon, anyone?

The reason to have game economies that have complexity to them is the same reason why you have PvE combat with complexity to it–to have it meet the minimum threshold bar of fun. Worrying about wwhether dupes unbalance your economy is the same as worrying about whether buffs are overpowered, frankly. It’s just another axis of gameplay.

Does your game NEED it? No. But given that it is one of the axes of gameplay that makes use of persistence, and persistence is one of the key things these games offer that other games cannot , well, leaving it out may be considered to be at least underutilizing the genre. Not a bad thing if you have a specific other area of focus, but not the One True Way either.

Raph comments SOE sellout

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For sellout I mean this. He commented on a thread on Grimwell.

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Raph:
For that matter, I made my feelings known about it back when I was on UO.

Short-form:

– the fact that people want to pay real money for virtual stuff is a massive validation of the emotional power that online world can possess.
– the level playing field is a myth, and these generally aren’t competitive games anyway.
– your achievement is not diminished because someone else took a shortcut. I know this hurts deep in the gut somewhere, but it’s still true.
– any design approaches to removing RMT tend to involve ridiculous design compromises. Removing all forms of trade? No thanks.
– these are worlds anyway, not games. They embed games. You can eliminate RMT on an embedded game on a case by case basis, but trying to remove it from a world is pointless.
– look to Korea and their current biggest business model (hint: it isn’t subs). They are the harbingers, and they got over this already.

I tend to agree but about the third point I’d say that the achievement is conditioned by what others do. If everything is solo-accessible, okay. But if the achievement requires multiplayer (or PvP), what other players do affects my experience as well. There’s no need to discuss the specifics of the virtual economy, just try to build a group to do a mudflated quest: it won’t be possible. The virtual-real economy is a direct mudflation process and it has an effect for everyone living in the same environment.

And about the fourth point I agree that it’s pathetic to try to fix the consequence of the problem when it is already obvious. But, for sure, it’s not pathetic to fix the origin.

He goes on but I won’t criticize since I have different ideas and our directions become different aims, not directly comparable (for example I believe that trading can and should be removed to be rebuilt in other ways and yes, you can get rid of scarcity.)

I don’t think the issue is capitalism.

What is the difference between outfitting a guildmate, and RMT?
What is the difference between twinking, and RMT?
What is the difference between gifting a newb with some goods, and RMT?
What is the difference between handing over phat lewt to a pretty female avatar who promises to have hot netsex with you, and RMT?

You’re going to say “money.” But I’m going to say “there isn’t one.”

Because if the gripe is the alteration of the game world, then it’s already been altered. Trading opened the door to all of this. There was no level playing field in the first place. Any demeaning of your achievement already happened.

If the concern is farming specifically, then yes, I agree. But farming occurs quite independently of real money. It exists because there is scarcity in the game world and demand for the scarce good. Do you want to get rid of scarcity? I didn’t think so.

The question really needs to be “what part of a game world is being altered here?” I haven’t gotten any good answers yet.

My answer to the last question:
“The game is at loss.”

(but he knows already that one)

Artifacts – How to keep something rare and special while making it accessible and fun for everyone

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This is a comment I posted on Chris blog about the role of artifacts in MMOs:
“How can developers reconcile the rarity (or uniqueness) of an artifact with the desire of players to own it?”

My answer starts in the specifics but then opens up to criticize the current solutions in other game and explain some more my idea behind the “dream mmorpg” that I keep shaping up from time to time. It’s another recurring topic in mmorpg design and another of those with the most awful answers till now. So worth looking at to see if there’s a space to improve and bring something new to the table.

I guess I should rewrite it to pull a better and more complete and readable analysis, examining all the different cases to see where they worked and where they didn’t to conclude with general considerations about the viable, better paths that could be available. But that would require time and commitment. But right now I find harder and harder to even put two lines of text together and even if I managed to do that I’ll just finish a comment too long that noone will be interested to read. So the comment will remain a rough shape of the same ideas.

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Is this coming from our discussion or you are just gathering ideas freely?

Of course this interests me since it’s one of the systems I was tinkering with. The design questions you made at the origin are the same, but I found different answers in order to adhere better to the rest of my plan.

Some of your ideas sound rather interesting even if I see some problems here and there that won’t be that easy to solve. For example it would be rather hard to even code the pathing in the right way in order for the guardian spirit to chase the players along all the world and with his minions. Considering all the problems WoW is having right now with the train of mobs (like Lord Kazzak invading Stormwind) I also fear that the whole mechanic could become more fun as a creative exploit than for the actual use of the item. And, of course, this doesn’t look nice.

I personally don’t love too much the idea of countdowns and “at loss” situations. This directly aims for the pure catassers that will have the guild support to gain and keep up the artifacts and its “requirements/side effects”. And this isn’t really appealing as it should be.

So what I don’t like is the actual mechanic of the guardian chasing the player and the negative, progressive side effects. But you also suggested me new elements that could be fun to develop and expand.

My own idea remains connected the “design” purpose of an artifact (not the “lore”, just the design pattern):
– A rare, special item to offer a substantial (unbalanced) power up that shouldn’t become a direct requirement.

In a PvE environment this type of tool could be a “key” to solve a particular puzzle (like the special magic item that can slay a particular mob), but it’s in PvP that the design comes to the surface as an unbalanced power. As I commented in our discussion I think that the unbalance is an interesting mechanic, in particular in PvP (another of my heresies). This is why it should be used instead of feared and this is also why my answers to your questions pivot around the PvP.

Artifacts are unique -> they can be gained through instanced PvE but they have no effect till they are pulled out to the persistent world (where PvP happens). Once this passage is complete only “x” number of artifacts can exist. In the persistent world they become persistent items. Let’s say that they “solidify”. They are unique or rare based on the type.

Note: The artifacts cannot be used to access other instanced PvE content since the artifacts banish the player from the access of portals. So they are exclusively PvP tools and this because of another design reason. In PvE an overpowering tool just begs to become an exploit tool and will be used directly to bypass the difficulty that the devs have planned for a specific encounter. I believe that overpowering tools in PvE do not offer anything that is fun or interesting, they just become pattern-breaking tool, hence they should be put aside.

Artifacts are powerful -> They are. They are directly planned to transform a player (along with bonuses for allies) as a “raid encounter” himself. Veguely reminding the old ideas of players playing as mobs. In a 3D graphical game the wielder of an artifact will become a demon, graphically. The size will increase, it will use different powers, attributes and so on. The player with an artifact becomes “content” for the players of the opposite faction. A goal. A target. (I explain later the actual “reward” the encounter represents)

Since the artifacts cannot be traded or dropped and since they banish the player from accessing the PvE instances, the player won’t be able to get another artifact. So the problem of stacking these tools is solved at the root without developing specific systems.

The important point, though, is nested in your first question: “artifacts need to have a mechanism to regularly leave the characterâ

Instancing Vs Persistence – Again on the two paths

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I save a comment spawned around the release of Guild Wars. It’s tied to other comments I wrote in the past and in particular to the two-parts article about the death of the genre (one, two):

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We are back at discussing the Original Conflict.

From the “game design” point of view the use of the instancing technology is the very best way to deliver good-quality PvE. Instancing means control and control means that the devs have more tools to balance the type of “pattern” they are going to offer.

It’s obvious that the fun of PvE comes from a balanced challenge.

Now the conflict is between THIS model, that Guild Wars achieved perfectly, and the “original mmorpg myth”.

This second model isn’t game-y design but more near to a “simulator”. So the persistence becomes the actual pattern to reproduce. The “verisimilitude”.

That’s the basic conflict between two different models. Old time mmorpg players usually expect to find the second, so they feel upset or dissatisfied.

My DAoC – Fancy ideas for a “better” game

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Posted on the boards in the impossible hope to receive some feedback and archiving here.

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This is what DAoC should become, how it should move and develop and what, as “Just Another Player”, I’d like to see. It’s actually a draft of something more detailed but I decided to see if I’m able to receive some feedback before considering if to put more work into it. I’d like to read some critics in order to discover what’s wrong in these ideas, someone pointing to me where they fail or where they aren’t as good as they seem to me.

A follow up focusing on different details here.

And forgive my crappy english, it is still my second language.. ;p

PvE

– Move the quest/content team to reconsider, realm by realm all the quests in the classic game -> Updating the quest mechanics where needed, reducing pointless, endless fetch patterns, isolating and reinforcing the fun mechanics, removing what is unneeded, adjusting the rewards to be valuable and interesting with the rest of the game (and for low-level PvP). Reconsider the distribution of the monsters. Study EACH zone with a design approach aimed to give a specific purpose and an actual, concrete use to each “Point of Interest” on each zone. Erase the idea of mudflation and obsolete content and reconsider all these parts (in progressive stages, like from leve 1 to 5 of each realm, then from 6 to 10 and so on, till everything is consequentially covered) in order to give back a sense and use to *all* the parts of the game. Each zone should have 4-5 “PoI”s with a specific, unique purpose in the overall structure of the game.

– In particular: Redesign all the quests for the epic armors. Redesign the kits so that they have bonuses up to date with the rest of the content. Add to each full set new bonuses *unique* for these armors and that no other item in the game will provide.

– Instance ToA’s ML content to be doable with a single group (everything, from step one to the last) -> Tune *UP* the difficulty so that it will be HARD to complete each level with that group. As an example the ML1 part1, consisting on a 1vs1 encounter in an arena underwater, should be redesigned from zero to become an 8vs8 arena, with no possible intervention from outside. Remove the constitution loss on death if the death happens during a ML trial. Add a /release point *within* the instance (maybe as a small dungeon to clean to find your way back to the actual ML missions) porting there the players automatically and without needing them to actually bind there.

– Redesign the scrolls to activate the artifacts of the game so that they become rewards from *direct quests* -> Each of the three scrolls to activate an artifact should come from a quest that will point the player to rediscover a part of the *classic* world (new named monsters could be added to the classic game for this purpose). All these quests *must be soloable* but requiring 5-6 steps each (no farming). Some of these steps should require the use of player crafted components.

– Redesign the artifacts’ bonuses so that *each level* offers a new skill, or a power-up to a previous one.

– Allow the artifacts to gain experience without specific requirements (PvP and PvE equally balanced over average time spent). Boost the experience up if the player is in a full group.

– Add a quest to restore the use of an artifact after it loses all its durability (example: kill Legion in DF). Apply the same mechanic for every quest item in the game.

RvR

– Reconsider (reduce by a very good margin) the damage of siege engines in all the Battlegrounds.

– Fix the Tower Razing mechanic to disable also its *function* (the tower cannot be conquered and remains “neutral” till the repairing process is over) while the tower is repairing.

– Continue to monitor, consider and potentiate the RvR missions in order to add dynamism, purpose and spread the players uniformly around the zones. Add competitive missions (one goal – three different groups coming each from each realm to fight over it) to work as “matchmaking” services for single players and groups.

– Address directly the population unbalance (this point is too long to explain, my idea is to cap the total upgrades to the keeps to a fixed pool. Each realm will have to decide if to upgrade one keep only to the maximum, or many but all at low levels and so on). This in order to open up possibilities to smaller realms so that they will be able to compete with hit&run tactics. Taking advantage of the weaknesses of the bigger realms (chatoic zergs, confusion, lack of organization, visibility).

– Redesign completely how interrupts, stuns and immunity timers work -> The interrupts shouldn’t break an action but just put it “on hold”. So without requiring the player to keep spamming a key. The spell should trigger as (if) there’s a right moment to cast it. The spell should remain in the queue till the spell is successfully casted or the player interrupts it directly. Stuns should never last longer than 5 seconds, mezz should never last longer than 15, immunity timers should last a fixed amount of time (like 15 sec) without a variation or special cases. When an immunity timer is active it should show a specific blinking icon.

– Redesign the healer classes on *all the three realms* as follows ->
* Adjust the specialization factor from 1.0 to 1.5 (in order to grant them the access to different roles instead of becoming buff or heal bots).
* Redesign the buffs mechanic, the caster will be able to mantain only a maximum of 2 buffs on each player. Adjust the concentration values accordingly (sensibly reducing the pool).
* Redesign the three resist spells as just one spell working in an Area of Effect without timer (as long as the caster is on range the protection will be active).
* Two same-type casters cannot buff the same player (to not dodge the 2 buffs cap).

– Reduce/reconsider/adjust and rebalance the damage in PvP. Do not touch the hitpoints, just scale up the defenses and the damage down all over the table and with a regular scheme to uniformly affect each class without differences (so that the system won’t need a redesign from zero).

– Remove the red “names” above the heads of stealthed enemies.

– Disable /face /stick /follow on enemy targets (mobs and enemy players).

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This is also what I consider broken in the game right now and what I believe should be high-priority. I believe a new server with a new ruleset is just a “cheap” solution to simply continue to ignore the problems while throwing a cookie to the players. It won’t help the game as it didn’t help to add /level 20, the free levels, and the bonuses to the smaller realms.

PvP honor system – Enjoy

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It’s nearly a full year that I rant against this system and now everyone else finally finishes right into it, gladly or not. Again, as for SOE selling out, there isn’t anything “new” for me. I already commented extensively my point of view and I just regret to have put too much confidence in Blizzard’s designers. I decided to wait till the very last minute to see if they were able to understand and solve the basic problems. Pulling an ace from their sleeves. Well, it seems I’m still not jaded enough.

In a more recent post I was expressing the worry about the shady part of the Honor System, specifically the ranking (because, you know, the reward is the whole point as much “fun” is, or should be, the core of a game). Blizzard never revealed the actual mechanic about how the ranks are achieved or lost. So I waited them to actually announce the rules. I waited and waited, now the system is active and I’m still here waiting them to explain how the fuck it works.

How the fuck it works? Who knows.

They are keeping what matters hidden. But it happened the same with the “meeting stones”, I discussed them a lot before their release, for example on QT3 and all the players attacked me saying (and inventing) how they would have worked. What happened? It happened that there was NOTHING behind and those “meeting stones” were effectively *retarded* design.

So what about this honor system?

See? I saw that coming as well. We have a reward system but we do not know how it works. Speculations and nothing else. Wrong impressions. We know it’s “Catass For the Win” but we don’t know to which degree. Everything coming from Kalgan seems completely naive and approximate. I’d say again that they are hiding something, but it’s rather obvious now, even for someone tremendously gullible like me, that there’s nothing. It’s really that retarded.

A rather interesting thread popped up on the official forums:

We realize that the Honor system has been a very hot topic as of late, and that many of you are concerned with the effect it will have on your overall game play experience. As a result, the Community Team has requested a meeting with our lead designer Kalgan, who is responsible for heading up the Honor system. Below are a few of the questions we plan to ask. Answers to these questions should be provided before the week’s end.

Very good questions, go check them. They aren’t comprehensive of *all* the problems and holes in the system, but they are a good start. I’m really curious about how this Kalgan guy is going to answer because this time those questions are direct and not easy to dodge with some superficiality and empty propaganda based on thin air as the last time. I’m curious because here I really do not know what to expect. Is he going to admit that the system doesn’t work and they’ll need to rethink it? Is he going to dismiss the arguments saying that they are working on the problems the best they can? Is he going to say that it so absolutely wonderful so go spread the love? What I know is that this time we do not have some sort of promise of answers to explain and solve everything somewhere in a distant feature. There’s a term, on Friday evening we will probably receive them (if they do not pull an excuse like “due to the sheer amount of the questions we decided to posticipate the Q&A”), it will be interesting to check back, see how it goes and draw the conclusions.

On Q23 I defended my position saying:

If there is, somewhere, a designer that doesn’t care to dissect and analyze a system *before* delivering it to the players, he should be fired ASAP.

I’ll laugh my ass off if Kalgan will answer those questions with: “Hey, we just threw a bone to see what will come out.”

But, concretely, my early warnings were correct. What I described is now absolutely evident. Maybe the only objective consideration that everyone agrees with. The opinion is whether it is good or not, mine is that “it’s not”. The reason is that I liked what I was playing. I loved the PvP servers and I know that, now, what I loved is simply gone. Wiped. It was already something just hinted, a timid beginning of an interesting design idea and fun gameplay. Not so easy to spot and recognize as good. Now it’s all gone, havocked. There’s nothing left. Soon noone will ever remember that there was the profile of something new and different. The game just fell in pointless zergfest, or “fantasy Quake” as other have defined it. For some players this is a wonderful twist.

Should I start again preaching for PvP systems rewarding goals, building deeper structures and purposes, related goals, interaction with the environment? No, it’s pointless. I already tried to explain all that in the best way possible and the result is simply zero. There’s a Fantasy Quake and the players love it. There’s always the good excuse ready: “Hey, it’s the PvP server. What you were expecting?” Me? I agree, I’m gullible. I was hoping for something else but what I know?

The rest is a repetition of my comments on the forums:

The system instead is retareded for a bunch of basic design reasons that I won’t repeat. The basic point is that they should reward a goddamn *goal*, not the free ganking. They weren’t able to grasp this concept and decided to go after DAoC model without following it in its fundamental elements (the frontiers). It’s retarded and it makes no sense to “test it”. If they have designers they need them to work. Not demonstrate how clueless they are. This system is NAIVE. As naive was Blizzard approach on many other parts that they screwed. Meeting stones? Raid mechanics? Server balance? Population balance? 24h clock? Local server?

It’s true that the zergfest will settle down, and by a good margin, I believe. But this will mean that the players will start to spread around more and form smaller gank groups instead of concentrating on just a few chosen spots.

This will happen as the players will understand that these zergfest bring no points. Since this awful system doesn’t give ANY feedback it will take some time before the players will figure out how to grind it at best.

What you see *right now* is the result of players being clueless about what matters and what doesn’t. They only see honorable kills in the UI and the feastest way to pile up them is to zerg. As they understand the actual *value* of those points, they’ll also learn how to optimize the process. The zergs will disperse and the “professional ganking” and “stealth wars” will begin.

Let’s just say that what is happening NOW is the result of an awful UI giving wrong feedback. When this problem will be overcome by the players you’ll actually see the scope of the clusterfuck of a retarded PvP system.

The very basic point that not many have noticed is that the insane amount of zerging we have right now is produced by the lack of feedback. The players have absolutely no clue about how this rank system will work. I do not mean the abstract level of the design, I mean the concrete, personal level. The patterns that each player will follow while playing it. What they can see right now is a simple panel on their character window with the number of “Honorable kills”. That’s all they concretely have. It’s all the feedback that the game is offering.

The result is that the players are chasing that specific pattern. They check the honorable kills and want that number to rise, following exactly the pattern of well-known treadmills. The “zerg” is simply the most optimal pattern to pile up honorable kills. At the end of the day you’ll have the impression to have achieved something, but is this real? Is this going to change when the players will realize that it’s not working?

We know that these kills are just an illusion, the actual points will come from different mechanics but, again, the players cannot and won’t be able to receive proper feedback about what matters. The system is already broken at this level. With the time it may happen that the players will start to behave differently, realizing that in a zerg they are losing time instead of optimizing their gain.

But will this be easy to understand? The system won’t provide any feedback. without any kind of feedback it’s simply impossible to optimize a pattern and learn how to play. Another basic design rule. At some point the ranks will be distributed but the players won’t know “how” or “why”. They won’t know the specifics. It’s like a miracle. Peoples will get promoted while others will fall behind and feel frustrated because they didn’t expect that. It’s a blind game, you know you just have to grind it as much is possible and nothing else. No feedback, no gameplay. Just grind and time-to-sink.

The result could be actually good. The players could simply stop to tolerate such pointless system and reject it as something too alienated, distant, not comprehensible. They could just chose to ignore it and go back to play the other parts of the game where they can receive a proper and “readable” feedback.

Previous blatherings:

– (fears about) Emergent behaviours in WoW’s PvP (to vanish) – About the old PvP servers and their (now) lost qualities
– PvP honor system – In the toilet – About the worst nightmares being confirmed
– PvP honor system – Catass SUPREMACY – About the Kill On Sight becoming the trend of a pointless system
– PvP honor system – The rank system – About the “goodnight” to the casual players and the retarded rank system
– PvP honor system – An idea about dishonor – My suggestion for a dishonor system
– PvP honor system – How it SHOULD work – My ideas about how the whole system should be put together
– PvP honor system – Rated honor – More guesses about how the rank system will work
– PvP honor system – Latest critiques – About the inconsistencies in the Honor/Rank system

Flakey design (Tower Razing in DAoC)

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About two weeks passed from when I praised the last group of additions/fixes to DAoC. Yesterday the patch was moved from the test server to live. It didn’t take too much research on the forum to find comments about “things gone wrong”, because, as always, Mythic is able to do the most obvious mistakes.

Now I won’t touch the class issues because it’s an old argument that matters more in the relationship between the developers and the players than the actual game mechanics. The new mistake is instead the Tower Razing mechanic that I was expecting as a major improvement. Some players are strongly criticizing it as a letdown and when I delved into it some more to understand why, I discovered that the model I imagined in my head (since I’m not playing the game anymore) was actually different from the one implemented.

In a simple way: this new mechanic was SEVERELY needed because, before, the sieges were the most awfully boring thing you can conceive. The siege game was some sort of “tennis simulation” with two zergs of players shooting each other for hours and no concrete consequence aside slowly milking realm points from repeated kills. It was STATIC. The towers didn’t provide enough feedback and impact on the battlefield to create a variety of situations. They moved from being undefended towers that still required an high amount of time to conquer (so: long and boring PvE sessions by fighting NPC guards and beating a door) to endless sieges at well-protected towers. Sieges that only produced actual consequences when one of the side simply chosed to give up and do something slightly less repetitive than staring an uneventful tennis match. Exhausting victories.

This is why I welcomed the Tower Razing idea as a good change in a critical zone of the gameplay. If those damn towers can CRUMBLE, they can finally provide that dynamism that was severely lacking. A crumbling tower is a type of interaction with the environment that forces a change. You CANNOT stay in the same place and play tennis for hours because at some point the tower will crumble. Or the players inside (the defenders) start to do some serious action to keep it up and DEFEND, and COUNTERATTACK, or the tower will crumble under their feet. At that point the attacker will rush in because it’s not anymore possible to defend the door with AoE spells. The proposed system plugs in the game that dynamism and variety of situations that was strongly needed. An erosion of the bad habits in the actions of the players that were strongly supported by a badly designed gameplay. So, finally, an actual impact of a siege WITH CONSEQUENCES.

What went wrong? The absurd. They simply overdid the schema. They moved from a static model to one so dynamic that it basically doesn’t matter anymore. So is the “error” a matter of a careful balancing process that requires an accurate testing phase? NO. The error, as I said at the beginning, is at THE BASIC LEVEL. The error isn’t in the “dose” of the change, but in its FORM. In its coherence. This is why it’s a DESIGN mistake and not a balance mistake. The result is unbalanced but the cause is at the source.

So again, what went wrong? They implemented, as they often do, an half-idea. Without completeing it in its essence and bringing it to the game as a compromise. A compromise that now is correctly criticized by the players. The error is that these towers have effectively lost their defenses (so they crumble, finally), they have effectively brought dynamism to the battlefield but they ALSO RETAINED all their roles IN the logic of the game. Basically they crumble and they are destroyed but EVEN THEN they retain their role in the battlefield. I won’t go on now explaining how DAoC’s PvP works, how the towers are connected to the keeps and so on but it should be enough to know that those towers have roles and they aren’t simply hotspots where to have some fun. There’s a meta-game and some sort of conquest system in the game and this layer is directly connected to the role of the towers.

Now, by design, we have towers that finally can be destroyed, breaking that immobility that was a serious problem in the game BUT at the same time, while the tower crumbles – so becomes weak and easy to conquer, it RETAINS its full role and function on the meta-game. THIS IS THE ERROR. The tower is reduced to pebbles and rubbish but you still have a lord and four guards standing proudly in the middle. The role of the tower is there. The structure crumbles but the ESSENCE DOESN’T.

What this means? That when a tower is destroyed it becomes an easy prey. Impossible to defend. Yes, you can go and conquer it easily because there’s zero protection, but at the same time another realm can repeat that pattern. What happens is that instead of introducing DYNAMISM into the system, they introduce INSTABILITY. These towers keep switching owner in a matter of minutes till this whole meta-layer simply doesn’t matter anymore. It’s so rapidly changing that it’s impossible for the players to care about it. It’s impossible to effectively defend a tower. The persistence of the game vanishes completely in an unstable situation. This is why they (apparently) OVERDID the change and why (apparently) it looks like a balance problem.

But it isn’t balance. The design mistake is to have those towers RETAIN THEIR ROLE. How to fix this? You fix this point and COMPLETE the original idea. If the STRUCTURE crumbles, also the role of the tower MUST GO. The destroyed tower cannot become a “no man’s land” that everyone can temporarily use. If something breaks you cannot use it. It’s the FUNCTION the heart, what is supposed TO NOT WORK. That’s the principle. Once a tower is LOST, and destroyed it must LOSE its role and its function. Temporarily. This time-gap is already there because the tower will slowly repair on its own. What the design is missing is to link this repair time to a restoration of the function, not just of the “edges” and walls.

That’s why I said I was imagining the idea implemented in a different way. I was giving for granted (because, you know, it makes sense) that a crumbled tower would lose its role.

Currently reading

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Not Really Organized.

Books:

Links:

Yes, I know nothing.

(thanks Chris…)