Tag Archives: Game Design

Try to not just second the market, lead it

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Again on the discussion about the mudflation started here and continued here and specifically on the expansion packs EQ2 is going to release. Maybe soon I’ll also have time to delve on the alternative (better) solution.

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Slyfrog:
So long as they don’t. I think HRose’s point, which I believe is legitimate here, is that the expansion packs become damaging if they are not truly optional.

They cannot possibly become optional. That’s the point. It’s a *loss* of content.

These are multiplayer game, the community must and will agree on what is the “default” path. It can be the new expansion (because it’s overpowered), it can be the old world (because it’s accessible for everyone). Once the battle between these two points is over and the path is chosed and set, it’s HARD to decide to go experiment with the content noone touches. Or you have a guild following your orders and allowing you to invent what you want, or you’ll have to go group and play along with others and along the consolidate path.

Spending six hours LFG because you want to do a quest noone does (because they do not have paid for it or because it has been mudflated out of the game and replaced by a more powerful version) is not fun and won’t happen.

At best these packs, if not completely overpowered, will be use-to-trash content that is considered till it’s new and then forgotten forever.

In an always-enlarging game where the number of zones doubles in less than a year but where the players on a server tend to remain still (or decrease), you move toward a desert with “one player per zone”. This is why the players will automatically start to gather and build paths. So that there will be 10 players in one zone and zero in the other 9 zones that are “lost content”.

The problem goes deeper. This type of dev-work is basically wasted on adding content that has a value only at the precise moment it gets released. Then it goes mudflated and it becomes unused and forgotten. The work of those devs goes directly wasted in the long term.

Now, it isn’t POSSIBLE to have a BETTER model that doesn’t WASTE that precious man work? Yes, but the maket doesn’t seem to go that way. An useful type of development for a mmorpg goes deeper than adding zones and monsters following the exact same model. It’s easy to add this stuff and put a fee on it. It’s basically impossible to really continue to DEVELOP the game on what matters because what matters involves everyone. You cannot add layers of complexity and then restrict the access to them with an expansion.

So, the key of this discussion is that you cannot build and really continue to develop a mmorpg by putting barriers between your players with the release of expansions. Because, since they MUST be optional (as optional expansions), they CANNOT affect the game world in a radical, pervasive way.

This is why I’m all for rising the monthly fee up to 25$ per month but justified by a REAL ongoing development on all fronts. SOE probably surveyed the market and noticed that it isn’t possible to rise the monthly fee, while it is viable to release cheap content patch for 5$.

Now the problem is that while this works from the economic point of view, it damages the design of the game. Basically hindering its potential.

P.S.
The same will happen for Guild Wars. Or they add overpowering content that you must pay for or you are “optionally” out.

Mudflation as a principle

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When I write lengthy articles it’s because I feel the need to “wrap up” an argument that is starting to come on the surface, influencing the scene in many different ways.

The problem of mudflation is a “node”. A source of consequences all related. My attempt to analyze and understand it is a way to go back at the root. So the mudflation is a “warning” for the development of content in World of Warcraft and the upcoming pay-per-use expansions in EverQuest 2 (and a lot more).

One of the reasons why I personally chosed WoW (as written yesterday) is because the possibility of PvP makes it feel more like a cohesive world with breadth instead of an infinite treadmill with no aim (like a ladder bringing you nowhere). I want to play a game, to consolidate my role, affect the world. I don’t want to drift away with just the greed of power in the void. The game should provide an environment, not a blurred, dispersed space. The “content” I’d like to see added is about different layers of complexity, one on top of the other. It’s vertical development, not horizontal “fat/flat” development. I want to see the elements a game already has to become deeper and more complex, I don’t want to see more elements ad infinitum all working exactly in the same way. Interdependence of all the elements, not dispersed content all equal and mudflated, all eroded and dispersed.

These comments go directly to touch the (dangerous) potential of the “Adventure Packs” EQ2 is about to launch. We already discussed that these represent a line of separation between “have and not-have” players. In an online game or everyone has something or noone has/uses it. The players must agree here because it’s a collaborative game and, for it to succeed, agreements need to be done. Consolidated paths need to be set so that the players are able to gather and organize.

The point is that an expansion pack that is not “free for all” is effectively a barrier between the players. Recursively, if you want the expansion to sell well and if you want the majority of players to buy it, have access to it and make it required even for those unconvinced (so that the barrier goes away), you need to build it following the model dictated by the “mudflation”.

The stuff in that expansion will be a boosted up version of the “free” content that everyone has access to. This because, again, to be able to play in these new zones you need to group other players that also accepted to buy them. And if these zones don’t offer a perceivable advantage over the rest of content, noone will buy them and the zones will be just finish forgotten by the majority of the playerbase.

In any case this isn’t content. The opposite. This is an erosion of content, a continue replacement of old stuff with new shiney (for a fee). The players will just choose the optimal path and leave the remaining 90% of the game to rot. If the used 10% is the free content or the pay-per-use content it depends on the quality of mudflation and erosion used.

The more the system is able to forget, the more the system is able to grow.

I’m not against the idea, but against the implementation. I already discussed that I would gladly see the subscribtion fee of a mmorpg to rise consistently even at 25$ or so. But excused by a REAL continued development that doesn’t just glide on the surface without delving in the possibilities of the design. The reason to do so is that you cannot advance and expand the game mechanics and then put a fee that the players need to pay. Because that path forces you to make the advancement as an “option”. A “flat” subscription fee allows, instead, to go right at the core and advance the mechanics for everyone and on all the layers.

Now the biggest problem is that SOE already surveyed and analyzed the market. It wouldn’t be concretely viable to set a 25$ monthly fee. Instead it is viable to build content packs and sell them for an accessible price. But what I’m trying to say is that this works for the market but it doesn’t work nor improves the possibilities of the design. The market strangles the quality, the potential.

While, instead, it would be possible (even if hard) to slowly lead the market instead of just seconding it. To educate it to a new product and a new type of offer. The direct gain is that this path is harder but more effective and rewarding because its aimed correctly.

Do not leave a game in the hands of these guys

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I just bumped on two (popular) blogs suggesting ideas for World of Warcraft. Both of those writers are way more near to the possibility to become actual developers than me (the second guy is supposed to work somewhere), so the fact that their ideas suck greatly reassured me a bit :)

The first two ideas come from here. And they are both out of place and not directly relevant for the game (I believe he doesn’t know that WoW runs great in a window or it’s another failure from myself at getting bad sarcasm).

The other two ideas instead at least make sense. Still they are poor. The first is a database hog and again a work on fluff that doesn’t add anything. I still think that an archive where to browse the completed quests would be easier to implement and more useful to have.

The other idea is better even if poor in the proposed implementation. He basically suggests to shift some of the treadmill progress on the equipment. So that the use of a weapon makes it improve and “grow”. This idea is actually the reason why I’m writing. To begin with it’s nothing new. Just the last example (with another awful implementation) is about the artifacts in DAoC, but it’s obvious that the concept has been used many times even if it failed to become a major system (for all I know).

The fact is that this idea is also the origin of one of the systems on which my dream mmorpg is built. It’s between those ideas that I haven’t already fleshed out and written completely but, at least in my head, I have already all the basic elements organized.

A few details are described in the piece where I started to shape the combat system:

Each type of attack is obviously based on a weapon, assuming that even a fist is a weapon. Usually the player will have a different skill for every weapon type, but this isn’t directly true because there will be also a side-skill that will measure the “fondness”. So a character loosing a short sword will have the “fondness” reset to zero even if it will grab and use another very similar short sword. The weapon skill is the skill of the *weapon type* (short swords, long swords, axes, 2h swords, etc..) then the skill is modified by the “fondness” that is instead dependent on that specific weapon/physical entity.

Here you have already the proposed idea fully implemented, with the use of a specific weapon slowly improving, but it’s just the bottom of the system I built. The “fondness” just regulates the behaviour of ALL the weapons. While the advancement system that I have in mind will apply only to magical items, with the possibility to transform a normal item into a magical one.

The idea is that you can start with just a normal weapon and make it not only special but also unique. The first problem I had to face is that the original plan was about transforming a normal item into a magic item through the use. But this means a pure form of grind, so something to dodge. The consideration of this problem brought me the core system that I explained on the link I pasted above. All the progress related to a character (skills, magic, weapons etc..) is *strictly* goal-based (and here I’d be interested to know if Turbine came up with the idea before me because I discovered they “stole” it months after I wrote about it). In general (but not only) the progress is based on quests, never on the repetition. So you can grind the quest system and find the best path but you cannot sit in a place, killing the same mob over and over and expect something to happen (aside rising the “fondness”).

So, moving through special quest lines, you can transform a normal item into a magic one. Now my game detaches itself from the current games. The magic system is one. Every magic item in the game (with the exception of the artifacts, that are lootable in PvP and extremely powerful), dropped, player-made or quest related, is equal in power and possibilities. This means that nothing is directly more powerful in potential than something else. A rusty dagger has the possibility to become the most uber item around (again with the exception of the artifacts).

As per the idea above, the “magic” items aquire and provide new skills. The fact that they are “magic” is simply to define that they have access to a dedicated advancement system. This system is very complex to explain with words but will be straightforward and clear in the use, retaining a lot of depth and producing unique items. The progress is based on “skill trees” similar to the talents in World of Warcraft, but where each step is always directly connected to the next one, if the connection misses you cannot move on that point. The complexity depends on a few factors. The main one is that these “skill trees” are three dimensional. Concretely not only you can move horizontally (in the 2D space of the graph) to unblock more powerful skills, but you can jump also “up” or “down” to parallel skill trees (think like overlapping different sheets). Each overlapped layer will correspond to a school of magic (think like “fire”, “ice”, “shadow” etc..).

Now the movement of the progress along these graphs is, in general, casual. The player will have a limited control in two ways. The first is about fighting (and solving quests) that are linked to a particular sphere (each school of magic corresponds to a skill tree and also to a physical plane that the players can access, as I hinted here). The second is about blocking the way in a direction he wants to avoid but considering that there are always more than two possibilities, so offering only a partial control. Doing so the item will grow and gain power in a semi-random way. At the end the system will be deep enough to create many unique items. Things like graphical effects (items glowing, fire effects, usable skills etc..) will always be the direct consequence of the progress of the item through particular schools of magic.

There’s also a last element that will affect the progress of an item. It’s about an invisible DNA code unique for each item. This code will affect the % of possibilities for an item to move in a direction or the other. It represent a “destiny”. The players will be able to drive the progress with the tools I explained above but at the end the possibilities of movement will always be restricted in the “space of possibility” given by the hidden DNA code. Something that the players will have to discover through the observation and research.

What happens to the mechanic of dropped items? Nothing in particular. Dropped items are no different from player-made magic items. The difference is that the dropped magic items are in a “frozen” status (so they have an “history” already set that cannot be changed). This means that a dropped magic item is an item that already had a progression through the skill trees. It could have just started or even be near the end of its path. These items can be “unfrozen” but then they’ll move only “onward”, with their previous skills already set.

I guess it’s all. I just took the occasion to write it down before someone else steals me the idea :)

Mudflation as antibody of a “stain development”

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As an observer in this industry my duty is to analyze what happens from a personal point of view, that is equal to my sensibility and limited knowledge, and underline the tendencies. So that I’m able to anticipate if something is supposed to go in a good or wrong direction. This is the direct reason why I often play to foresee the future and predict how things will go. Peoples usually mock me (rightfully) at this point. In most of the cases what I repeat is glaring obvious as predicting that the sun will rise the next day. Now the point is that I’m still an observer, till the game companies will keep doing obvious mistakes I’ll have to keep predicting the obvious.

The fact that “the servers will crash” isn’t obvious till I won’t see the problems addressed at best. So I’ll keep underline it. How am I supposed to know what is “at best”? It’s simple. In the case of World of Warcraft I preached since August that their choice to divide the servers by timezones would make the overcrowding problems more serious. This problem isn’t trivial as it seems, there are a large number of implications. What was the result? The result was that what I predicted was ignored till Blizzard got swamped in the problem and had to start to suggest the players to log in servers that do not correspond to their timezone and relative peak times, disrupting directly their plan and even a few important design implications, like the 24h clock, GM support and scheduled downtimes. A couple of weeks later they released an emergency patch to remove from the UI the timezones.

Again, it was obvious. Again, it was ignored. Now let’s move on. The game is now released and we hit another prediction I made. Blizzard is not correctly prepared to sustain the scope of this project. They somewhat admitted it and I don’t have the knowledge to judge if what they are doing is the best possible or if they are committing errors in the process. But I can still observe the game and understand what it needs. The direction that will help it to improve and not just decline as all mmorpgs are supposed to with the passing of time.

Maybe, they aren’t committed enough to this game. Maybe they are moving the focus on other projects, leaving only a small, not adequate, team on this one. The reasons and the choices depend on elements that I don’t know and I cannot control so the best I can do is to point out a doubt and the reasons of this doubt. And I move forward of another step.

This another step is about a “direction”. The game needs work. As I often state the release is just the beginning for a mmorpg, the real development and challenge (with yourself, not with the competition) start now. But what is the best direction to move to? What will damage the game? What will improve it? These are the topics of this new step. Peoples everywhere claim for “content” but this path isn’t that obvious. I believe that one of the worst things that may happen to World of Warcraft is a rise of the level cap. If everyone reaches level 60 and starts to whine because they reached an endgame that sounds like a “game over”, the most direct solution is to push forward the finishing line. Let’s move the cap to level 70 or more.

This is a common process that can be assimilated to the concept of “mudflation”. The keypoint here is that the term defines in particular those games that are generally considered “content-intensive”, EverQuest for example. You aren’t supposed to complain about the lack of content in a world like EverQuest but the fact is that, concretely, the lack of content is its main problem. And here I said once again an heresy. The reason comes exactly from the meaning of the world “mudflation”. Its meaning is about an “erosion” of content. The mudflation is an active process *on the content*. It means that the elements in a game are replaced and made obsolete by something new. It’s true that *apparently* there’s load of content, but this content is actively eroded and forgotten.

Why does this process exist? Because it’s a recursive process. You cannot stretch too much the treadmills or you shatter the community. If the whole development is about adding terrain for the treadmill, it will become increasing hard for the new players to join the game and integrate themselves. The space between the first levels and the last increases exponentially representing an unending ladder to climb just so that you are supposed to join your friends and their activities. These treadmills are barriers between the players. They do not work by definition because they break the accessibility and uncover the true, emptied nature of the model. The mudflation is a process that exists to solve this situation. The mudflation is a positive “antibody” developed directly by the game itself to survive. It’s the only way for the game to remain cohesive, to not finish fragmented into too many pieces.

So there are two elements to consider here. The first is that the mudflation is a direct, positive consequence to fight back a process that was started “outside”. It’s an auto-defence of the game. It’s “wrong” only because it is reacting to a damage from the outside. The players still need a communal ground where to meet. Communal goals to achieve. Too much content would actively shatter this. Spreading all the players everywhere without them joining to reach their objectives. This would produce a dispersion, a desert. The mudflation is the consequence of a *problem*. This is the second point to consider. The problem is elsewhere, in a broken model of development. To excuse this development only new goals to achieve are added. These goals, to be considered worthy, need to become bigger rewards. The development model here is the one of a stain. The original release of a game is the center, then the developers keep adding stuff (areas, monsters, items) around it, like a stain that is slowly enlarging.

The mudflation is an antibody to this model. It’s an attempt to keep everything together. The erosion of content is needed to sustain the expansion. An expansion that isn’t mirrored by the expansion of a server. The players become just drifting ships on this stain. The more the time passes the more the ships will crowd the borders of the stain (the end-levels). As new content is released the stain will expand again and the ships blocked on the border will drift once again till the new border. This while the center is exsiccating. Noone looks the center anymore. Even if the center is the game. The center is the heart and, still, it’s ignored because all the ships are on the border, not anymore in the center.

Soon this heart will die but noone can see this because there are still the boys surfing on the borders. Where the game seems still full of life. The mudflation is a desperate attempt to counterattack this unexcused expansion process. To keep its heart alive this growing stain tries to cut away what it can. The less important parts are abandoned so that the life sources can still be focused elsewhere and sustain the unending, pointless and foolish enlargement.

At the end the moral is that this cannot be an optimal process. There must be something better. The games modeled on a stain give only the illusion of content because the truth is that they are kept alive thanks to the mudflation. The truth is that the erosion, so the loss of content, is the reason why they still survive. This rings a bell? How it is possible that an old game can only survive through a loss of content when that content is supposed to be its main strength? How it’s possible that this loss underlines a quality (and probably the only one it has)?

Those are the questions that is useful to answer. If they will remain unanswered the unacceptable and inexplicable destiny of these games will remain the same: die of age.

About factional balance

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(and I swear that I’m done for today)

I save here a discussion before it’s lost. The topic is the factional balance in a PvP game but from the perspective of “why one side is more appealing than the other”.

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Oh, I wrote too much about it on this thread.

My idea is that the players choose deliberately specific archetypes:

I’m saying that the race is not relevant. What is relevant is the alignment.

The alignment is a constant throughout all the different mmorpgs. Here’s a “rule”. A pattern repeating in different contexts at a glance.

If you allow each race in WoW to chose if to be alliance or to be horde you’ll have, at the end, that the alliance outnumbers again the horde. This is the point.

An orc and a troll aren’t choosed not because they are ugly, but because they do not incarnate a ‘good’ alignment. Not a case that the most choosed class (and by far) is the paladin.

And I want to add:
The only way to “fix” this at the origin, as you say, is to build in the game factions that cannot be linked easily to archetypes. And, believe me, you don’t want to go this way.

Archetype means that a “figure” acquired with the time a cultural meaning. This meaning becomes an archetype that goes beyond the boundaries of a single game, it becomes a concept by itself.

So these games are unbalanced because they work on consolidated archetypes. When a player chooses one it doesn’t choose just an image at the log in screen. The choice is about a cultural, shared background.

In general players want to be heros:

The other reason is that human, elves, dwarfs and even gnomes are standard fantasy setting. While undeads and taurens aren’t. Plus the trolls don’t look like trolls and are (arguably) the ugliest race.

In WoW this unbalance is just about the perception and the ‘good’ faction will always be more popular than the ‘bad’ faction.

Calistas then wrote better my concept:

No need to be metaphysical, they are just ‘bad’.
Show pictures of the races/cities to anyone and ask them to pick the baddies and the goodies and is, largely, obvious.

People aren’t going to ponder which one to chose. Many will just chose the goodies out of habit.

ALL this genre has value JUST because it’s archetypical. That’s the only reason why this stuff is “popular”.

This is also why I strongly criticize Raph when he thinks to these games just as formal systems. It’s the culture to permeate and give a meaning to the formal system. The formal system is nothing without the other part.

PvE Vs PvP

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Highlights:

(from Ubiq)
Having these terms is useful to us, as we try to have a dialog with each other and you guys about how to build these things. People who try to diffuse this by saying “There is no spoon” only impede these discussions.

[…]

However – the key point is that if you expand that definition just a touch, every MMO is PvP. And the less freedom the game specfically gives you to gank thy neighbor, the more creative, and thus inherently nastier, the players will be in harming their fellow man.

[…]

You cannot prevent players from being little snits to each other. They will. No matter how much you try to code it out of your game, players will be little bastards to one another. The healthiest way to deal with this is to channel it into forms that can work for your game. Consensual PvP in all its various forms is a key part of this. Players want to fight each other? Fine, here’s how. And make damn sure that there’s enough checks and balances so that it’s always an opt-in mechanism on both sides. Mercantile PvP, which was the whole thesis of this post, is another key part of this. Economic warfare is inherently deeper than almost any other game system you can come up with, if only because it encapsulates neatly so much of our base motivation for doing things.

Related:

Calandryll:
As people consider designs from different angles, allowing words to shift in meaning is very important if we want to continue to grow the genre.

[…]

For example, the EQ2 devs recognized spawn camping (or rather, kill stealing) as a form of PvP. So because they wanted to lessen the amount of PvP in the game, they introduced the locking system to remove the ability for players to use kill stealing as a form of PvP.

I’m sure this will be useful for the future.

In a gold rush the only ones that really make the money are those that make shovels

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It’s always rather hard for me to understand Jeff Freeman’s point of view. I can understand what he writes but I find hard to decide if he’s being sarcastic or if he actually thinks what he writes. In the case of The top-five MMOs of all time he was sarcastic, or better, he believed in what he wrote but he didn’t actually like it.

Now the blogosphere thingie started again because of Dave Rickey. But it was already in the air. One of those arguments that keeps returning to haunt your nightmares, at least till you decide to solve it completely and exorcize it. Now, maybe, I’ll try to tackle this argument to at least define my point of view so that I can have a more solid stance in the future, when the issue will be brought up again.

Reading what Jeff wrote I believe the focus is at the start and the end:

The US Army is fighting back against payday loans, by offering payday loans.

[..]

Performing the services of delivering items, information and secure transactions to players (without damaging gameplay) is only something the developers – not third party operations – can do.

These services need to be integrated into the total package. These services need to be part of the service that we’re operating, if we want to deliver the entire service that the players are demanding.

So I believe there are two basic concepts (and again, if I explain in broken english what others wrote in a clearer way is just to help *myself* to focus the arguments, not to teach to others). The first is that it’s ridiculous to fight fire with fire, the second is that (if something needs to be done) it’s the direct responsibility of the game company to find a solution, without encouraging or supporting a third-party effort.

The discussion is rather complex. There are many elements included, for example this point of view can (and should) be extended to things like Cosmos (the UI mod for WoW) and Thottbot. Both are examples of third-party involvement that goes to satisfy a large “demand” coming from the players. I can develop this line of thoughs saying that WoW *already* improved the game by including in its design what was previously confined to external sites. So while you *have* to use a spoiler site to get a quest done in DAoC, in WoW (in general) you have more informations to understand what the task requires you to do. Not only, in general you also know what will be the reward, the difficulty of the task and a rather precise approximation of where you have to go to accomplish it. And beware, these are basic design elements that made WoW largely successful, they aren’t tiny or irrelevant.

Now, because I already named Dave Rickey, I’ll also say that this is *exactly* what he stated not long ago in a discussion about Thottbot:

Frankly, examining it makes me wonder why we didn’t have that level of data-gathering. Like most “benign” third-party tools, it points out a design shortcoming.

What he says backups the point I explained above. These third party tools identify a demand coming from the players and they “anticipate” the design implications that will follow. This because the actual development always lags behind. There aren’t many developers that know exactly what is going on in their games and they fail too often to see basic design mistakes, possibility spaces about improvements and all the rest. Till it doesn’t become GLARING. See all the recent thievery of basic ideas and Ubiq’s excuse about it:

Why did it take so long to do it? I posit that most revolutionary ideas seem easy and straightforward in retrospect. Before WoW, most people didn’t see quests as being all that important because… well, in the games in the past, they’re not. It took the revolutionary (and obvious in retrospect) idea that the quests needed to be front and center, rather than an afterthought.

Now, without derailing too much, it’s obvious that there are many “fronts” to consider about this problem. There’s a legitimate demand from the players, there are the design implications as a consequence and then there are all the problems about third-party operations that capitalize the need by taking advantage of a weak point of these games. Now what Dave says is that the industry should stop to fight against this latter point:

At the bottom of this is the fact that the “secondary market” exists, and it isn’t going to go away. And it’s not going to ruin the games, although it does create some very real problems when farmers and players are competing for the same stuff. Like I’ve been saying for years, we’re going to have to find a way to make peace with the item, gold and account trading.

But you CANNOT. And all the reasons are already there in what he states: “it does create some very real problems when farmers and players are competing for the same stuff”. The competition in general is what makes these games “multiplayer”. It’s all about competition and I want to underline for the billionth time that the proper etymology of “competition” is: “Going together toward something”. It’s not directly “me vs you”, it can be also a collaboration. Now all the non-single player games are about a competition and you cannot trivialize this concept. Foton was already over this point when he demanded his paycheck (follow the link because he goes straight to the point). The “equality”, the BASIC principle on which these games are *founded*, goes in the cesspit.

Let’s say that Mythic decides to sell directly the epic armors for an accessible price, like 10$ or so. What will happen? I don’t know how many guilds will accept to help a player with that horrible and upsetting line of quests. “Just pay the 10$ for god’s sake. No, we aren’t going to help you and loose all that time just for that.” If you directly plug in the game mechanics the real money you break the engine. Who will organize and join a raid on the bugged Molten Core to try desperately to kill and loot Onyxia when you can obtain the same result with a few bucks while sparing a lot of time? Once the money becomes gameplay it cannot exit again. How many players will be left to play the game “properly”? They will become quickly a minority, the gameplay not only will marginalize their presence, making them quit because they cannot find anymore peoples to group with, but it will also ruin directly the experience of those that gladly pay to not play. At the end they’ll cheat themselves out of the fun and the game will look just empty. Or, better, emptied.

About a year ago I was on the same position of Dave about this argument but Lum explained me (in a lost PM) that the “equality” *is* a basic element. Once you are in the game we are supposed to be all equal. WoW is largely successful (as already explained) because it is accessible. When you introduce pay-per-use gameplay elements (or when you tolerate them by not enforcing your policies) the players are not anymore equal, the difference becomes how rich you are in real life. You can afford to participate in the competition only if you have the money. The competition itself, the gameplay itself, become about who can afford to pay more. It’s not a case if already in the past another hot topic is about casual vs time intensive crowds. Because even the “time” is considered borderline as “interesting gameplay” (and, again, accessibility). And if we want to be completely honest about what Dave says:

We sell characters, we sell “special services” like character transfers that cost us nothing, we sell access to our betas, we would sell you the trash from our bathrooms if we thought anyone would buy it.

This is already true. “Expansions” for mmorpgs are already a line breaking the “equality”. If you want again to participate you have to shed out another 29$. Want this new shiney? 29$ or you’re out. Even the high system requirements for EQ2 are another line to cross that disrupts the accessibility and the “equality”. Even in the FPS genre the equality is broken when the gameplay relies too much on how many frames per second your hardware is able to grind. Again the direct reason why the first Counterstrike is still super-popular. If you play “chess” it doesn’t matter if the pieces are made of precious ivory or paper. The competition HAS a value. The competition is ALL. If we remove it we have nothing. Even a world like WoW that so much negates the importance of a strong community still relies completely on a competition and even Diablo was again about a competition.

It’s not a case if one of the examples brought by Dave *underlines* this point. The “bonus items” that are often tied to the collector editions of games are ALWAYS non-competitive tools. It’s graphic fluff exactly to avoid to affect and invade the other mechanic where the real money becomes a gameplay factor. This cannot happen. Going back to what Foton says, it’s obvious that another approach cannot work. What if I’m trying to organize a big raid with my guild so that I’m able to win that powerful item? Nothing? What if three days later my guildies find out that the powerful item is being sold for real money on eBay?

You CANNOT make peace with this secondary market because the playerbase is already borderline. The companies that are directly against this like Mythic, SOE, Blizzard and Squaresoft already have serious issues because the players demand a reaction, not just words. Again it’s not a case that reports of hacks produce loud fights in the message boards when the players don’t see STRONG reactions from the game companies to prevent them. Guess what? It’s again because there IS a competition. It’s someone running faster in a PvP environment as much as someone discovering a “god mode” switch in PvE (and it’s not a case if so many players legitimate attack Mythic because of their support to the buffbots). If one of those companies will now say “ok, we will stop taking actions against who uses exploits or hacks” or “ok, wo do not support the secondary market but we won’t pursue it” you’ll get a REVOLT.

So another path isn’t possible? The answer is “yes”. For the same reason of what I wrote here above about the expansions. Why they are tolerated by the players if they effectively are bags of improvements with a real money labels? Because they aren’t just that. Those bag of improvements that you pay for aren’t just that. They are attached to the gameplay. They are creative systems, there’s a game that you play. There’s an experience. If we broaden this point of view we will be able to include realities like “Second Life”. This game works because the real money is always tied to an act of creativity. It’s not competition based on false laws, it’s creative competition before everything else.

Now I’m tired and I want to conclude. There’s a definite line between these games and real life elements. You cannot allow the secondary market to cross it, nor you can integrate that secondary market in your game without creating something *specifically* aimed to that, like Second Life. This is why Blizzard tried to address the problem in the best way that, for now, is a compromise. Trading is limited, not all is translated into a shareable value. Quest rewards cannot be traded and this allow the main structure of the game to remain unaffected. The accessibility of the game isn’t hindered even if the problem isn’t completely solved.

My point of view is still near of what I wrote in a comment to what Lum wrote (linked above):

I still believe that most of what is being sold (money, phat leet) isn’t fun to play. The game should focus to offer something more involving that leet power, greed and narcissism (as mechanics).

I believe there are better solution to solve gradually the problem strictly from the design point of view. For example you cannot buy the cooperation of peoples and you cannot buy reputation in a community. Again this should be the focus of these games in a similar way to what Ubiq always repeat. We play along with others, we need the world to gain new depths and better mechanics that aren’t again just a threadmill of power or personal achievement. These games need, again, *cooperation*. Healthy competition. Large scale PvP scenarios with more tactics and, maybe, more immediate and intuitive gameplay but not just time-intensive or money-intensive power-ups.

The solution is about thinking out of the box. Discover that these games can be much more without chasing desperately overused mistakes. Without seconding them. There’s a lot to do in the game design to minimize the relevance of the problem of the secondary market.

“They say that in a gold rush the only ones that really make the money are those that make shovels”

Yes, “they” made shovels exploiting holes and deficiencies in the design. The design shouldn’t now second that wrong tendence. It should learn about it and correct its behaviour. Addressing the problems and advancing.

Edit: Ubiq also commented and even shifted the focus to what really matters and is only drowned in the sea of words I wrote.

War between titans – WoW vs EQ2, again

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This entry is the result of a line of thoughts that spans various message boards and most of what I wrote on this site in the last days and also what I’m going to write for the next.

Again this is a (dry) analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both games from an objective point of view (so without personal comments of preference). With the aim of looking forward though. Observing and learning what happens has no use if you don’t draw concretely useful conclusions for the future. And this is my goal.

In regards to the title of this article it’s rather obvious the link to what is written below. World of Warcraft already won the first round and probably also the followings. Smedley already congratulated Blizzard for the success, hiding the hostility and exhibiting a big smile. In a similar way Kerry did the day after he lost the elections against Bush.

What is dangerous, as I explain at the end, is the desire of emulation.

—
This links directly to the discussion about WoW endgame because all the guidelines and the things I wrote on that thread reflect directly here:

Feltrak:
Nagafen will not speak to anyone that does not know the draconic language, so his giant buddy sends you on a quest to learn the language. The quest involves traveling throughout the entire world and finding 26 clickable items sitting around every zone. From city zones to level 20 experience zones to level 45 experience zones. Our guild spent about 2-3 weeks running all over the world, running our mouse over every thing that looked like a book, scroll, or bag on the ground. Some of the runes were placed in such insane places like on top of a tent in the Feerrott.

This is another demonstration of SOE focusing on Fun(®) gameplay. How can they claim that their aim is to deliver a fun experience when they blatantly use unfun, frustrating tricks?

Raph Koster:
We go into every game with the goal of avoiding grinds. :) Really, it surprises me how many people think developers are willfully ignoring everyone–it’s really not that so much as how easy it is to lose sight of what you’re trying to do.

This comes from a completely different discussion but it plugs here. They *know* that what they are going to offer is crap but they do nothing at all to avoid these elements.

This is, again, deliberate. No excuses.

Feltrak:
Guilds: The guild system is awesome. My guild is on their way to achieve magic carpets as a ride through Norrath via the leveling system. Leveling up your guild allows you to get items from status merchants, and lowered cost on other things. Also, there’s nothing better walking around through town and having every Guard salute you, or bow to you. Sony did this well, as it allows the end game to not only be raiding, but achieving guild status and prestige as well.

I underlined this “merit” on my website. It’s a direct advantage that EQ2 has over WoW where the guild layer can be directly ignored like any other form of community involvement.

This is why, in the other thread, I wrote:
“The point of an online game is to live in an alternative world to build something there. To have a sense, an impact. Maintain a presence. All these things happen (even if still weakly) in all the major mmorpgs.

But WoW isn’t a world in the hands of a community. It’s a single-player world with cooperative experiences. The type of impact is often just a form of griefing and communal goals are very loose concepts.”

Point taken for EQ2.

Raiding: Raids in Eq2 are very very well done. Some of the encounters that we’ve come across are amazing. The MOBS are flexible enough that multiple different strategies can work for them, but you have to perform that strategy flawlessly to succeed. With a 24 person limit to raids, you can’t just send in 50 people to slaughter a mob and hope you can do enough damage before it kills everyone (zerging.) Alot of strategy comes down to group setup and key classes, as most all of the traditional eq1 group buffs can not be distributed to other groups.

This plugs in the discussion about the difficulty. Again this underlines basic differences in the design approach of the two games.

In WoW everything is trivialized to be *accessible*. There are no group restrictions, powerlevelling is tolerated and encouraged to an extent, the monsters always drop their loot no matter of the gaps in levels, no restrictions in the access to the instances.

All these steps are founded on other basic elements, for example the “tagging” system allow higher level players to assist and babysit lower level players so that they can get their full reward even bypassing completely the difficulty of the encounter as it was planned.

In general there are no rules in WoW to prevent the players to bypass the difficulty of a goal. On the contrary, the powerlevelling behaviour is often encouraged and is probably the main purpose of a “guild”.

EQ2 is directly opposed to these concepts. I believe that this is *evident*. A few levels and a trivial mob doesn’t give you anymore experience nor loot. In a group the difference in levels directly affects the difficulty of the encounter and the relative reward. Encounters are locked and you cannot get assisted. Grouping between similar level players is strongly encouraged by the system, grouping players in a wider gap is penalized. The instances are strictly controlled about who can enter and how they are experienced. And so on.

Now can you see that they follow two, diametrically opposite, patterns?

WoW has its main keyword in the accessibility. Everything is possible, never impossible. The difficulty can be easily bypassed if you so choose, always. You have control over the rules. You have a direct control over the difficulty of the game. Everyone is allowed in.

EQ2 has its main keyword in the challenge. The experience is always aimed. The developers set standards and rules and the players need to go through a set condition and “win” it. It’s all about beating a difficulty, so it’s always about a challenge and a reward. The gameplay is the opposite of “accessiblity”. Why? Because EQ2 operates a selection. You can continue to play only if you learnt the lesson.

In WoW you can bypass a lesson at any time. Just call your buddy level 60. (again accessibility). In EQ2 you bump into “walls”. If you want to proceed you need to endure it and win the situation as it was set by the developers. This becomes often boring or frustrating because:
1- The lesson isn’t really interesting
2- The lesson is too hard

In WoW you can choose what is interesting, what is too hard (so you “cheat”), what you should repeat, what you want to jump etc…

In EQ2 the fun isn’t in the hands of the players and strictly depends on the Vision(â„¢) and the talent of the devs. If the content sucks you’ll directly hate the game because you have no control over it to adjust it to your likings.

With all this I just want to underline again that the two games are founded on completely different patterns and goals. One isn’t directly better than the other “by design”. As the development continues, they both have different paths to follow to become better games. What is *dangerous* is to not understand the nature and the scope of these game. Dangerous and harmful is when I hear that EQ2 is starting to move to “feel more like WoW”.

The biggest mistake is on this superficial point of view that will only damage directly the game when the aim should be about *consolidating the differences* to offer a different product, at the same time addressing those strongly UNFUN and broken parts of the game that every player continues to point out, like the one at the beginning of this message.

Spaces can be considered narrative units?

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I’ll have to archive a few discussion that I’m tackling on two message boards. Even if the topics are different, often there are points of contact and everything converge on a general point of view that should be considered all at once, without too much fragmentation.

In this part I want to link the discussion to something I already introduced. There are strong ties between words like “virtuality”, “virtuous”, “contingence”, “identity”, “narration”, “story”, “history” and more.

The original dichotomy is:
Contingence -> possibility -> virtual -> potential
against
History -> identity -> virtuous

An identity is something that NEVER changes. It cannot change. It’s a fixed point, an unavoidable reality. An history already written. It’s something with a personality, something to tell because there’s a story to hear. It’s hand-crafted content with a precise, fixed use. It needs rules because it must be experienced in a precise way and with a precise direction. It becomes a narration with a sense. With an order and so, again, rules. Borders. A precise message, a precise “lesson” to learn.

The contingence, instead, is open-ended. It’s generic because it adapts itself. It changes, it’s virtual, potential. It’s here now but it can be somewhere else then. It’s dynamic, it follows variable rules, interconnections, mediations, compromises. If the possibility isn’t “held” we obtain an high degree of chaos. From the game design perspective the chaos is the origin of the creativity but it’s also hard to manage and impossible to digest for the players. It’s not fun because it’s hard to discern patters, it’s hard to develop content within it because there aren’t fixed rules. A world without a compass.

If you want interaction, complexity and depth you choose the second approach. If you want to tell a story you choose the first approach. Similar choices are done wether you want effective PvP or effective PvE. This transcends the game design because the premises are deep-rooted into real-world concepts and even games (for real peoples) needs to go back at these roots if they want to be effective. We can communicate because we have something in common, if MMORPGs are “large-scale” communication (or art) they still need to consider what we have in common as human beings.

Now all this reasoning starts when it was asked why World of Warcraft (and other games) has zones closed between impassable walls, with a defined space that doesn’t seem near to the geography of the reality:

DeepT:
What is a “bowl” world? Well each ‘zone’, is like a bowl. Player’s play in the middle, and all around the sides are impassible barriers with a few exits ‘cut’ into the sides of the bowl.

Why I consider WoW in the specific? Because different games organize their space in different ways. The rules aren’t fixed when what you want to deliver is different. But at the same time there are basic rules that regulate your choices. If you want an open-ended game you aim at something precise and you’ll follow rules that wouldn’t work in a story-driven world where you want the players to remain on the path and follow it, without making them feel too much constraint.

So how the space is organized on WoW? Could it be considered a “narrative”? There are rules that the game follows? On which elements these rules are based?

Those are the answers I searched and I believe that my conclusions finish to tie with other important elements that I may discuss in the near future. In the “seamless or not” debate there are design elements that aren’t just technical and depend on the type of experience you want to deliver. The roots are above, where I put “virtuality” against “identity”. There are basically opposite ways to see the genre, opposite types of games. In a similar way as PvE is opposite to PvP.

—
(discussing the concept of the “closed spaces” in WoW)

DeepT:
2) It is unrealstic. The natural world is not built like this.

Games aren’t supposed to be realistic, they are supposed to take those elements from reality that are interesting to plug in a system, wiping those that create problems and are unfun. There’s always a selective process.

Even in the real world you need guides or roads to not get lost in a place you don’t know. If you get lost, in general, it isn’t fun.

DeepT:
3) It is monotonous. It limits exploration.

It leads the exploration. It is limited not as a side-effect but as a decision to lead the player along. It’s OBVIOUS that WoW isn’t an *open ended* game. We can argue whether we can build better, open ended games but WoW is far, far away from this and both its strength and its weaknesses are here: in the FOCUS.

DeepT:
Also I didn’t say all zones should be all open. Most zones should not be cupped in impassable barriers, however. Only rare zones, such as the grand canyon zone might be surrounded by impassible barriers with just a few access points.

This is what happens already, but on a different scale. There are corridor-shaped zones, there are vast plains, there are valleys, there are peaks. All that you describe already happen WITHIN each zone, just not often between different zones.

Why? Because you are, again, following a narrative. A narrative can be a line of words on a page, but can also be a linear sequence of places you visit. This linear sequence exists and is experienced by: Every. Single. Player.

It isn’t exactly linear, but it is segmented. This means that the players are able to displace the segments (quests) but, in general, the gameplay is about visiting different places in an order. Moving from the spot where the troggs are to the spot where the slimes are, to a crypt, to a cave and so on. This is a narrative. WoW is fun because it is pulverized into an infinite amount of goals, all accessible. Always offering a variation (as opposite to a grind and repetition).

The “walls”, even the concept of a “zone”, are to mantain an “order” or a linearity. This means that it’s easier to move within a zone, it’s easier to receive feedback when you are stepping outside the path. “Borders”, as a concept, lead to a control. This is a BASIC concept of WoW because the whole and only keyword on which the game is founded is: accessibility.

So if WoW is considered as a semi-linear story, it can also be considered as a book. The pages in a book are organized with a sense. There are precise reasons why page 13 should be read after page 12. You cannot have the pretence of taking this book, tear off every page and then reorganize them with a random order. In the same way you cannot have the pretence of wiping off basic rules on which WoW is built.

—

Silverlight:
Yes, DeepT, there are reasons to have walls. Yes, HRose, there are reasons not to have walls. The presence of them is a design decision that could go either way.

Oh for God’s sake.

I’m saying the EXACT same thing. I’m not against open ended games but here we were discussing WoW. For THIS game there are reasons why an open ended approach wreck its premises and its strengths.

You may build a good game that is open ended, you may also build a good game that isn’t, like WoW demonstrated. But you cannot take WoW and negate directly all its rules and pretend to make it better.

The reason why SWG, as an example, has no borders, is EXACTLY because it misses a narrative. There isn’t a place where the troggs live opposite to a place where slimes lurk. Every single spot in the game world MUST be virtual because it may “host” an house or an elephant or a strange bird or a rebel hideout and so on.

The world NEEDS to be virtual because it is open ended. But being open ended means that it isn’t virtuous, so it CANNOT tell a story because a story needs an history. Something that happened THERE, not somewhere else. In SWG all the elements can be displaced at any time.

You wonder why it feels “generic”?

—

DeepT:
Ok Hrose, lets just forget about WoW. In ‘general’ why do most MMOGs go with bowl world and what are some good reasons to keep designing them like this? And please to not bring up “It will ruin the narrative” because you have totally failed to convince me that would happen.

For the same reasons but depending on the cases. Since it’s about a control, it helps to predict and lead the players along “paths”.

Open spaces, by definition, are unpredictable. PvE, by definition, is about telling a story in a fixed environment. Games focusing strongly on PvE, in general, need predictable spaces, so controlled, closed spaces. It’s how you maximize their fun (in fact now everyone does the instances to have a complete control over the players).

Open ended games or games focusing on PvP can use better open spaces (but close in the scope, so no infinite land everywhere). At least without considering battle dynamics. For example DAoC “went bowl” with the new frontiers to create choke points and allow the players to fight, adding some strategy.

For similar reasons even in PvE you want the players to move along semi-fixed paths so that they can meet each other.