Tag Archives: Game Design

Level gaps and tiers in Warhammer’s PvP

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Remember my design challenges?

The second in particular was thought to balance the four “tiers” of the level up process, so that the fights between the players could be always fair and balanced and so that all content in the game was always accessible, removing some “barriers”.

This was done by “auto-levelling” an higher character entering a lower level zone. By delevelling that character to the max cap (along the recruit system) it was possible to keep the fights in a zone always balanced, while keeping all the game world accessible and playable all the time. Giving the players an open choice about where they prefer to fight.

So, for example, a tier 4 character could go fight not only in the tier 4 zones corresponding to his level, but also de-rank to 1, 2 or 3 and go fight in those lower-level zones. Permeable barriers, permeable tiers.

The point of the design challenges was to offer some design solutions founded on my ideas and watch if Mythic ones, in the case they differs from mine, were going to be better or worse than what I proposed.

We have already something. From the grab bag:

Q: Will a character of Tier 1 be able to compete at all, even if poorly, against a character of Tier 4? Will multiple Tier 1 characters be able to take on and defeat a Tier 4 character?

A: This is a question with many potential implications, so don’t read any more into this than my exact words. Also, please remember that we are still a long way from launch, and that this may change.

Higher tier players who enter lower tier zones will not be able to attack or be attacked by lower tier players. However, if a lower tier player wants to enter a higher tier zone, all bets are off, and attacking/being attacked can happen.

The specific answer to your question is that Tier 1 players cannot win a one on one fight with a Tier 4 player. A pack of Tier 1 players will be able to cause harm to a Tier 4. We have not yet set an exact level of intended damage (and it will vary hugely depending on the player and the circumstances), so I cannot give you a specific answer.

See the part I underlined. Yeah, lame.

I’m already winning ;)

There’s more. In my first design challenge I analyzed a way to coherently lay down the structure of Warhammer’s PvP based on the parts that they already disclosed: skirmishes, battlefields, scenarios and campaign.

In my proposed structure the skirmishes and battlefield were exactly how Mythic defined them. A persistent zone, with a PvP territory. You enter this territory and you can fight. My proposal was to use the “instanced” scenarios as a cohesive, automated part of the overall structure.

Basically players go normally fight in a battlefield. These are persistent. As there are enough “x” players on a battlefield, an instanced scenario is triggered and spawned automatically and all players in the battlefield ported over. So it’s an automated system that instances itself as there are enough players. The more players, the more instances are spawned. Not enough players and only one persistent zone is active.

This had multiple purposes, but it was also an idea to balance the load and the number of players engaged in PvP.

Here’s instead Mythic’s way:

Jump into a Scenario and you’ll be automatically grouped via our lobby system for a balanced fight. Scenarios are instanced battles against two groups of equal strength.

Yeah, WoW.

You queue for a Scenario (WoW’s Battlegrounds) and an instance is then spawned on demand.

It’s much poorer version than the one I proposed. It feels faked and not consistent with the rest of the PvP structure. While what I proposed was “transparent” and seamless for the players, better integrated, realistic and tied more tightly with the rest of the structure of the PvP (as the instances were triggered to balance the load, not to remove the persistence).

Sad that all that Mythic is doing is copying WoW on every aspect. As I wrote before, they are repeating the exact mistake they made with DAoC ToA (copying EQ, in that case).

Scenarios offer different game play, ranging from Deathmatch to Capture the Flag to Assault.

Heh. It’s so saddening to see PvP treated like that. Why things cannot change? Why we have to deal with this shit?

I just cannot accept it.

Realm vs. Realm (RvR) has come a long way since it was first introduced in Dark Age of Camelot. We’ve had over five years of experience with the system, and we’ve learned both its strengths and its weaknesses. The RvR gameplay being implemented in WAR is truly a next generation implementation of the original system.

So you learnt deatmatches and CTF from playing DAoC?

Be ashamed.

No math in games (reinstated)

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I got an odd question in the mail that I’ll back-up here:

In your “Dream MMO” how much information do you give the players? Do you give them the math behind the numbers? Do you give them all the numbers (leaving the math behind the numbers a simple exercise reverse engineering)? Can you show them NONE of the numbers? What different levels would you define to group the different styles of showing numbers? What’s the benefits & drawback of these levels? Which ones are more viable?

I always intented the “ruleset” of my dream mmorpg as a pen&paper ruleset. So rules that could be managed by human player in a normal play session and simple dice rolls.

All the “logic” of the game is supposed to be “readable”. So full disclosure of the mechanics, but not only. It’s not just about revealing them, but also designing them so that they can be understood and used easily.

That was one of the basic goals behind the “dream mmorpg”.

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Beside many reasons (that I explained partially in a post with a similar title), there’s also the fact of the “genre”. RPG are fun also because rules are fun on their own. It’s fun discussing them, it’s fun learning them. They “belong” to a world as much as the content itself. An RPG is also the tomes you had to read. Reading the rules of a pen&paper game was an integral part of the experience that I want recuperated in a mmorpg.

As it’s fun personalizing the avatar, it’s also “fun” having detailed character sheets with many statistics. So, even the rules, are a part of the play. And it’s a good practice to let the players in contact with them. Use them and enjoy them. While also keeping the game design and the maintenance of the code (in particular in large projects) much more viable.

“No math in games” is a general principle that I believe could do wonders. Keeping things simple and intuitive.

Objective-based PvP in WoW

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There’s a part of WoW’s PvP system that I still haven’t commented but that truly interests me.

Right from Cosmik’s comment:

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to joining my team-mates in running past the enemy players in Alterac Valley and totally not killing them just so I can engage in some PvE against the Battleground boss first.

He is obviously sarcastic, but that’s an important theme.

I like goal-based PvP much, much more than “deathmatches” and mindless kills. I hate what DAoC became in the last years. With organized 8vs8 skirmishes and almost zero interest in the keeps and territorial control. I like territorial control. That’s one soul of PvP.

It looks like in this case Blizzard went too far. The objective (and reward) are so appealing that the players have learnt… not to fight.

This is an old discussion, in part already examined.

One of the problem at the core is that the conflict isn’t “real”. So the players learn how the game really works and exploit it. They see past the fiction.

But I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s see the possible solutions.

Well, this is one of the main issues that I tried to solve with my proposed PvP system. The Hotspot idea.

The point is not to find the right balance between the single kill and the objective, the point is to understand better how PvP works. My idea was based around the “convergence”. PvP action needs to converge. An objective should be an excuse to meet in a point and fight for it.

In the Hotspot idea the “points” were still gained mainly by killing other players (and without the stupid diminishing returns), but you gained more points the more you fought close to the Hotspot. The idea was basically to think these objectives as “magnets”. The closer you are the more points you get, so they make the PvP action to converge in that point and have a conflict.

If there’s one Hotspot, then it’s in the interest of both faction to control it. The Hotspot, aside the “magnet” effect on the points, had two functions. The first is to slowly build a bonus, like a multiplier to the points earned by the faction that controls it, so in the interest of the other faction to take the Hotspot back as soon as possible so that the multiplier doesn’t grow. The second was to slowly build up a “bounty” (for every kills scored in the meantime) that would work as another incentive for the other faction to take it back. When the Hotspot is conquered all the players in the area would be rewarded with the points in the bounty pool.

That was a simple solution to have goal-based PvP while still encouraging the players to fight each other, as you would get almost no points by conquering a deserted Hotspot.

The problem was that the system was designed for the world PvP. So how you “fix” the problem in Alterac?

The scenario you *expect* is: meet in the middle and starting to “push” to slowly gain territory till one of the faction is pushed back and the other can score a victory. The original Alterac battles could last many hours in fact and it wasn’t rare than one player logged out before the whole thing was over.

The scenario nowadays is: the two factions rush in opposite directions. Neither of them cares about what the other does. The “defense” is completely discarded and wins who can score a victory faster. Instead of a “collision” you have a parallel competition. Alliance and Horde play at the opposite sides of the map. And a battleground lasts half an hour on average.

Now, the duration of a single match is a design problem, and the “content” in the BG should get tweaked till the results are considered satisfactory. It’s pretty obvious that the right choice should be between the too quick current battles and the first ones that lasted way too much. From my point of view an average of 1/1.5 hours should be the target for the Alterac battleground.

But how to fix the problem at the core (the fact that the two factions don’t really… fight)?

It’s simple. The reason why they don’t fight is because the progression of one is disconnected from the other. I mean, if Alliance wins, the Horde could have been 30 seconds away from scoring a victory itself. The real problem is that disconnection.

Company of Heroes could be an inspiration for a fix. Instead of just graveyards and two different, independent battlefronts you add objectives that must be held so that you can score a victory. In short: you force one battlefront instead of two independent ones (or even: you design a more open-ended battleground when you need to hold multiple spots at the same time to score a victory as in Dawn of War).

Let’s say (A) is the alliance base and (B) is the horde base:

(A) x1 – x2 – x3 – x4 – x5 (B)

As it is now the alliance can fight at x5 while the Horde is fighting at x1. That’s the problem.

The fix: in order for alliance to reach (B), they have to conquer and hold all the “x”, from 1 to 5. Same for the horde in reverse.

This forces the action to “converge” in one point. One battlefront. The territorial control is progressive and linear. And the players would fight each other and try to slowly conquer territory and defend it, instead of avoiding each other.

Revision of the proposed LFG tool

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Referred to the previous mock up.

I was thinking about the “Auto LFG Elite quests” option that automatically flags you for all the elite quests in your quest log.

The problem is that this is unlikely a default behaviour, so the option isn’t all that useful. If you are questing in Redridge you’ll unlikely join a group in Loch Modan. Even if it’s for an elite quest that sat there from a long time and that you want to finish (and in this case it’s more reasonable to flag for it manually).

The idea is to replace that option with a different one “Auto LFG Elite quests in current zone”.

This other options would automatically flag you LFG only for those Elite quests in the *current* zone. Also adding your name to the “location” tooltip so that other players can see you without even searching through the LFG matchmaking function.

So if you check both those options in the upper right corner of the panel you would be flagged LFG for the current zone and all the elite quests in the current zone. Which is more likely a “default”, useful behaviour for a majority of the players.

Oh, I was forgetting. Blizzard completely disregarded the PvP on their LFG tool (I did as well, but here I am demonstrating that I didn’t). Sometimes the LFG chat channel was used to organize PvP raids.

The idea is adding, for all levels, two generic static options to the “raid” list on the LFG panel: PvE and PVP. So that the players can flag for one of the two and then use the comment field to give more details (Azuregos raid, Crossroads raid or whatever).

And it would also be a good idea, when in the appropriate level range, to add to the “dungeon” list also the Arenas and Battlegrounds, so that you could flag LFG even for PvP.

Dark Messiah released today!

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This is a game I wanted to write about while the site was “suspended”.

Well today Arakne released the 1.02 patch after a looooooooong wait. At release this game was plagued by terrible technical problems and some design issues, with this patch I think everything should be much, much better.

I think I actually contributed with the fixing of the major memory leak that could bring Nvidia 6800 series cards to slow down considerably on reloads with HDR enabled. At one point I was able to got 1 FPS, with sound going in a loop, till the whole thing crashed miserably.

The memory leak appeared after the tutorial chapter and used to affect FPS sometimes mildly, sometimes to an unplayable level. But it was always there crippling performance in a form or another.

I reported this problem in detail on their forums, they asked me to send them a save game by e-mail where the problem was more visible. I did that, providing detailed instruction to reproduce the issue, and a few days later they posted a command line parameter that completely fixed the leak:

For Steam User: In the “My Games” menu, right click “Dark Messiah of Might & Magic Single Player”, select “Properties”, then “Set Launch Options” and add: +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0

For DVD User: Right Click the shortcut to the game and add on the target exe line +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0.
With a default installation you should get:

“C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic\mm.exe” +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0

It proved to fix:
– Crash on Loading
– Crash on Bink
– FPS down to 1 on GeForce 6800 during gameplay
– Increase Loading times a LOT

After that I was able to play the game in high detail with no problems, but I decided to wait the final patch to continue.

– Dark Messiah 1.02 patch (changelog)

I’m still downloading this patch, so I don’t know if it actually “delivers”. But I’m confident it does.

If you are a fan of fantasy melee combat or have at least an interest for it YOU HAVE TO play this game. While it isn’t a masterpiece, it still delivers the very best melee combat ever. Before the primate was of Mount & Blade (that also got updated but that I didn’t like at all). That game still excels in larger battles, ranged and mounted combat, but Dark Messiah is FAR superior when it comes to pure melee.

And it also has some great combat with staffs.

Some comments I wrote taken out of a forum thread:

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This game has probably the best melee combat ever. Competitors could be Mount & Blade and Oblivion, but there are reasons why they are left behind.

Mount & Blade has still better ranged combat and mounted combat, but the melee isn’t as good compared to DM. What MB does better is the parries, that need to be timed perfectly and are more reactive, but DM has something similar that if you don’t read the manual you don’t notice (if you wait the last moment to parry an attack you force the enemy to recoil, so it’s better than keeping the parry stance on the whole time).

It feels better overall compared to MB not just because of the production value (spectacular animations, fatalities, variety of attacks etc..) but also because the combat is faster and the controls more responsive.

The kick/shield bash mechanics are well done, and it’s something that I was suggesting for Mount & Blade on this forum a year ago (since piling up enemies while you backpedal is simply bad). It really gives space for more interesting combat since you get more mobility and can escape better from corners and groups of enemies.

Another thing that this game does perfectly and that is better than any other game to date is the “feel” of the body. The way the camera moves differently depending on your state, the way the arms move… It’s the first thing you notice just by moving the first step in the tutorial. I thought it would induce motion sickness and become annoying, instead it’s great and it has a very important role to make the combat and action in general feel truly visceral. It shows how they dedicated to it a lot of time and fine-tuning.

Jumping in particular is done perfectly and has a great feel. There’s a part during the game where you chase gollum on rooftops, in other games this could be the worst part as jumping levels are always the most hated and dreaded, instead in this case the sequence is actually really good and has a great feel just because the controls are superbly designed.

What makes DM stand out (interaction with the environment) is also one of its weakness. Fire and damage from moving object is out of scale and feels incredibly cheap. In these cases they just pushed them too much and they can ruin the challenge of the combat.

The AI is easily exploitable. It was never intended to be truly challenging, but in many situations you can climb out of reach and kill everyone with zero risk. There was a part where I was up a ladder and just waited and kept kicking down guards one by one. It was fun, but also stupid. It’s also interesting to notice that they decided to unbalance the game all toward the player, instead of trying to make the fights more “fair”. Fire does almost no damage to you, while it’s an instant kill on monsters. Spikes and physics object deal also zero damage to the character, and enemies never pick up objects to throw at you.

This is a precise design choice, and also the reason why it’s not suitable for multiplayer. Ever if it was technically possible, the combat system was designed to be completely asymmetric.

About the graphic I have mixed feelings. Some of the art is awesome but there are highs and lows, as if not all the game was equally polished and detailed. I hate some too dark rooms, in particular those where you have to fight. I would have appreciated environments with dim lights, but at least more uniform. Models and animations aren’t on part with the level design, but they do their work. I’m still not far into the game, but I would have liked a bit more variety in the encounters, instead of seeing just one type of enemy through a whole level. Mixing monster types together would be definitely more fun than fighting one enemy type changing for each level.

As a rollercoaster it tries to go close to what Valve is doing with HL2, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of polish and attention to the detail. Some sequences are fun, but the constant loading continuously breaks the flow and it gets rather annoying (the sequence on the rooftops I mentioned could have been fun if it didn’t have a loading screen every two jumps).

I’m playing on “hard”. The game is fairly challenging if you avoid the blatant exploits. The combat is well balanced despite its flaws and sometimes I went to replay some parts just for fun.

In fact I almost think that this could have been a better game if you removed the story entirely and transformed it into a pure hack&slash with endless combat. Like a first person version of Diablo.

An “arena mode” like the one in “Sin” could be insanely fun. I mean, if it’s a sandbox on rails, why not add a mode that removes the rails and keeps just the sandbox. It’s something that could hugely increase the replayability instead of having to go through the storyline (and long, constant loading) again.

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One thing in particular that I noticed. The jumping has an absolutely GREAT feel. There’s something that makes it feel better compared to every other FPS I played. As I wrote above this is an aspect where Dark Messiah absolutely excels: the feel of a real body. You don’t feel like a floating camera that slides around. You feel the body, you feel the corporeality, physicalness. You feel the arms you see in first person as part of the rest of the body, and not just floating mid-air. And this is all done through a great, precise use of the camera movements. That’s a part of really wonderful game design.

Well, one thing I noticed and that I believe is responsible of the great feel of the jumping is that while in other FPS jumping just moves the camera up and down, but always “parallel” to the terrain, in Dark Messiah the camera also TILTS slightly downwards. Try to do just a simple jump and you’ll notice that as you land, the camera rotates slightly downward, giving the feel of actually landing on your feet. It’s actually hard to explain in words, but in the game it’s much more evident.

Oh, and the game also has a flavor of “twitch” magic system that is incredibly interesting to see in action (no “lock-on” spells).

I design a competent LFG tool

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This is a mock-up for a LFG system that WORKS. Based on the previous rants (rant 1 – rant 2).

There should be also a new icon that looks like an eye of a demon (and maybe even animated, for the cool factor). Eye open = LFG on. Eye closed = LFG off. It’s a simple toggle that you enable/disable with a mouse click on the icon.

The design idea is: If you make the LFG tool a predominant element of the interface instead of hiding it somewhere, then people more likely will use it.

In my design this icon/eye should be placed near the character portrait or at the upper right of the screen, between the zone name and the icon showing the time of the day. You click on this eye and a radial menu will open with just two icons/options (if you use Trinity bars you have an idea of how this radial menu could look). One will toggle the LFG flag on and off, the other will bring up the LFG panel shown above, where you set all the options and can perform the searches.

The LFG options you set from the panel are SAVED with your character. This means that your preferences will be carried over from session to session and you could log in the game and just toggle the LFG flag. Without the need to reconfigure the whole thing.

Trick: Another idea I got is that if you mouse over the zone name, just above the mini-map, you would get a tooltip that shows on the fly all the players who are LFG in the same zone.

Some more explanations:

– If you check the “Global LFG” option then all the fields below will be checked automatically and you’ll always appear in every search that another player performs if he is in the same level range.

– If you check one of the main fields (Zone, Dungeon, Quest and Raid) then all the fields below will be checked as well. Instead if you go check one of the single options while the main field isn’t checked then the main field will be checked as well, but not all the other options for that field.

– “Auto LFG in current zone”, if checked this option greys out the “Zone” field. If active it means that the game automatically flags you LFG only for the zone you are in. This means that when you move from zone to zone the LFG flag will be updated automatically to your “current” zone. Just remember that even if this option is active, you still have to toggle the “LFG” on (via eye icon) to be actually flagged.

– “Auto LFG Elite quests”, if checked this greys out the “Quest” field. It means that you are LFG for all Elite quests in your quest log and when you take a new elite quest it will join the list and get flagged automatically. Same as above, you still need to toggle the LFG on for this option to be in use.

Note: there will be a new option on the quest log that allows you to send a specific quest to the LFG panel. By default only the “elite” quests will be listed on the LFG panel, but you can use the quest log to “send” there even normal quests, and ask for help.

Note 2: When you flag an elite quest you are also flagged automatically for the corresponding zone. This allows you to “see” those players who are flagged LFG for the zone where the elite quest is, even if they don’t share your precise quest. This to make easier to ask for help and maybe trade favors (I help you with this if then you help me with mine). For example making visible two players who are LFG for two different elite quests in the the same zone.

Similarly, players LFG in a zone will see also all those players who are flagged for an elite quest in the zone, so that they can offer to help them.

– “Looking For More”. This tab is greyed out till you are “solo”. As you join another player in a group this tab becomes usable, while the options above the tab will be reset. All the options you set while in the group are “volatile” and won’t be saved, and as you disband your default options on the LFG panel will be restored. The purpose of this is to allow simple, aimed searches when you are in a group and going for a specific objective. So without overwriting the default options that you use normally while looking for a group.

For example lets say that you are with three other players going in the Blackfathom Deeps dungeon. Your group needs an healer. So you select Blackfathom in the dungeon tab, then check “1”, “Priest” and “Druid” under the LFM tab. This corresponds to the classic “LF1M healer”. When you’ll perform a search you’ll see all priests and druids who are also looking for a group for that dungeon. And all the priests and druids looking for a group in that dungeon will see your group set LFM.

The two major goals of this system are:

1- Allow for multiple choices, giving as much customization and “reach” as you want
2- Provide complete matchmaking results by performing ONE search

In particular I underline the second point. In the current system used in WoW you have to perform one search for each option available. Instead in my system you get ALL the results, sorted by group (first groups, then solo players), number of matches and then alphabetical order.

So you’ll get a list of names of all the players whose LFG options match at least one of yours. By mouse-hovering on a name you can see what is the result, or results that were matched.

Summary of the overall UI scheme:

  • eye icon (eye open = LFG on, eye closed = LFG off)

    • (radial menu)

    • LFG toggle
      • (on/off)
    • LFG panel (two tabs)
      • LFG Options (this opens by default if LFG toggle is “off”)
      • Search (this opens by default if LFG toggle is “on”)

This system has one apparent imperfection compared to Blizzard’s one. To be able to perform a search and get “matched” you are forced to set yourself LFG (as the search function will look automatically for all the fields you checked). While in Blizzard’s current LFG tool you can search LFG players even if you aren’t set LFG. This is a desired effect. As I want the players to flag themselves when they are searching, instead of using the tool passively.

It will encourage more players to turn the LFG flag on and get better used to the system.

EDIT: I revised some smaller parts.

WoW’s PvP still fundamentally flawed

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I won’t really go deep into this because I’ve already analyzed WoW’s PvP from multiple perspectives and all I said is still valid today. There are tenths of links if you want to dig.

I didn’t play WoW’s “endgame” recently but I heard that a lot changed. Or at least there are “bigger carrots” who are making people crazy. I’m reading this on Tobold’s blog:

And I started wondering how exactly the honor points are calculated. Because there are some rather weird things going on around the way you acquire honor points.

Yeah, this is actually one of the biggest flaws of WoW’s system since PVP was implemented. Surely NOT a today’s problem.

Still today the mechanics that regulate the PvP are mysterious. The exact opposite of something intuitive. And also something that for this reason is different from all the rest of WoW’s design, that is usually quite linear and easy to grasp.

Today things improved because they decided to finally cut the part where honor points were calculated weekly based on a ranking system and a very complicated and counterintuitive progress system that no one ever completely understood. It’s like black magic. Magic formulas only known to a secret cult. But those latest changes were only a partial achievement as I read that those stupid diminished returns are STILL in the game and that honor points you see right away are only a rough “estimate” on what you’ll get the day after.

At the same time the arena system inherited the suck of the honor system: good luck figuring out how the ranking will work. But I won’t comment that, for now.

Maybe it’s not a case that still today the same designer (Kalgan/Evocare) is working on the system. “The fox can lose his fur but not his cunning.”

As Cosmik said:

where r u, DAoC Realm Points?

Really. The biggest problem is that Blizzard continues to use an obscure system that seems completely unexcused. There just is absolutely no reason, in particular after the most recent changes, that justifies that obscurity.

We moved for a very, very stupidly designed system that OBLIGATED players to play as much as possible in order to get more points and climb the ranks, to one that was asked MONTHS before the Honor system was actually implemented. All those HUGE, GLARING flaws were EVIDENT since the first day the system was announced. And today, one year and half later, they finally admitted that the Honor system was pure shit and replaced it with one where honor points can be used as currency. Exactly as EVERYONE ELSE was suggesting and has suggested for all this time.

The first curious thing is that you don’t get your honor points immediately. Instead you get an “estimate”, which tends to be far too low, and then get your real honor points the next day. Imagine experience points worked that way! “We estimate you have gained experience for two more levels today, but come back tomorrow for the exact value and the actual reward.” I wondered, if honor points are given out on an absolute scale now, why would it take one day to calculate the honor points? It’s better than the previous once-a-week calculation, but still not very logical.

Yeah. That question is gold. That’s exactly what I was wondering a week ago on Q23, we are on the same line. No one could really understand this and the best guess is that it’s all STILL because of those FUCKING diminished returns. My god, sometimes Blizzard is so absolutely stupid that isn’t believable.

This can really make sense only in Kalgan’s mind, because for the rest of the world this is blatantly flawed. And at this point isn’t anymore just flawed, but also completely unexcused.

NO ONE STILL HAS A CLUE ABOUT HOW THIS SYSTEM WORKS.

And, at this point, I guess not even Kalgan knows anymore what he designs.

So I did a bit of research, and my fears were confirmed by a “blue name” on the official World of Warcraft forums: “Honor is given at different amounts depending on the opponent you defeat. Doing those calculations on the fly would be extremely taxing on the realms if they attempted to calculate everyone being killed and how everyone involved got parsed out honor and in what amounts. If we are ever able to get to the point where the calculations are able to be done live we would certainly do so.”

While that explains why it takes a day to calculate honor, and confirms that honor points gained per honorable kill are still depending on your opponents rank, this confirmation opens up a whole new can of worms: How can you have a PvP reward system in which the points depend on the PvP rank of your opponent, but there is no more way of earning or losing rank? Somebody who only started PvP after the patch and now plays PvP all the time will soon be as skilled and well equipped as somebody who did his PvP before the patch. But he will be worth very little honor points to his opponents, because his rank will never go up from 0. The longer this system is in place, the more illogical it gets. If this continues, in a year on the battlegrounds players will actively hunt down the few remaining characters with a PvP rank, because they are the only ones being worth decent points. We are playing PvP in a league in which all the ranks are frozen, but rewards are still given out according to that rank. Totally crazy!

I think Tobold goes too wild here, but it is certain that this system just cannot work. It’s just not tolerable to design a system that is so messed up and unreadable like this one. ESPECIALLY in a game like WoW.

What the fuck is this system calculating that it cannot be done on the fly? It really is above me. There isn’t any fucking justification.

If we are ever able to get to the point where the calculations are able to be done live we would certainly do so

I’ll tell you what you should do: you should demote that designer who is responsible for all this and replace him with someone who has at least half a clue. I do not want Kalgan fired. But I DO want him REPLACED. At least. Take his own responsibility for all this shit.

But, even more important, why the fuck PvP has to always receive this treatment? I mean in general, why the fuck PvP has always to be the afterthought? Why it always has to have the worst, careless design?

The LFG system really DOES suck

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Thanks to Lum and D-One to have pointed to this. LFG systems are one of my pet peeves (and, incidentally, something that Blizzard doesn’t get, like the PvP system). I already commented all this, but I guess there’s more.

From Lum:

The players of World of Warcraft discover the eternal dilemma of LFG systems: until a critical mass of people use them, no one uses them.

It becomes useful only if enough players use it. SURE. But, hey, the opposite is true as well and actually comes first (in particular from the design perspective): More people will use the tool when the tool will be actually useful.

Who’s born before? The egg or the hen?

This isn’t a fucking problem for game design because you first build the tools so that they are useful, then the players WILL use them. Because they are useful. If they aren’t useful then they aren’t used.

Especially: if they suck, then they won’t be used.

I ideally imagine a LFG system like a “punch card” used on those old mainframe computers. You go around in the game searching for someone else who has a card where at least one hole is in the same position of one of yours. When you find one hole that matches, you are set. You are a winner.

Now. It’s OBVIOUS that if you can have just three holes on your card and there are is a total of 1000 possible positions for those holes, then it will be really, really, really hard that you can find easily someone with a punch card with one hole that matches yours. Statistically your possibility to “succeed” are scarce. And things get even much worse if you add the fact that you have to repeat a specific search for EACH of those thousands of possibilities.

There’s no cumulative “look for anything that matches”. You have to go check MANUALLY one by one.

Now let’s make an hypothesis. Let’s say that every time you get an “elite” quest you are automatically flagged LFG for it, of course offering the possibility for the players to turn off this option if they so choose.

Right now it’s IMPOSSIBLE to find someone currently using the LFG tool and going to flag for that *precise* elite quest that you are also flagged for. If it happens it would be like one of those coincidences that only happen once. You DEFINITELY don’t build a LFG system that works on the premise of “RARE COINCIDENCE”.

There’s a label on this tool. It reads: “WORKING PROPERLY ONLY UNDER RARE CIRCUMSTANCES“. Yeah, I suppose it is going to be really useful. Expect many people to use such a wonderful tool.

Instead an automated system that flags you automatically for ALL the elite quests in your quest log right as you log in the game could lead to exact opposite results. It could work wonderfully. You could get quickly a list of all players on the server who share your quest and you could send them messages to ask if they are available for it.

You don’t get the possibility to flag, purposely, for THAT precise quest, in that precise moment. You get the possibility to, eventually, turn it off. That’s a subtle difference.

This would be as useful at level 60 as it is as you level up. My level 22 mage has elite quests that I will probably cancel or do only when I outlevel them just because I couldn’t find other players in scarcely populated zones such as Loch Modan. My level 60 has unfinished level 60 quests that sit in my quest log since more than a year. I have that last step for the Scholo key that wants me to go kill an ugly guy in the middle of the plaguelands but I was NEVER able to put together a group to go kill it. If there was a system that let me see all the others players on the server sharing that quest I’m more than sure than in two-three days I could manage to find someone and go kill that shit.

Hoping to do the same thing with the CURRENT LFG system that Blizzard built is just plain naive.

So don’t bitch because the LFG system isn’t used. The LFG system isn’t used because it sucks. That’s different. So bitch because it sucks. Bitch because we have waited two fucking years for a LFG system that is still inferior to some of those used in other games (even if I admit that the overall quality of LFG systems is crap).

From the “blue”:

First off, it diminishes the use of the new tool and makes it harder for us to refine it in a way that makes it more useful for players.

I’m sorry. You got your chances. Firstly with those fucking meeting stones, then with the server-wide channel, now with this. You cannot fucking get this right. I really cannot understand how Blizzard can be so completely clueless about something as simple but fundamental as this.

If you didn’t get it already then there isn’t any fucking possibility that you can “refine” it in the right way. It is just above you.

I have a feeling we’ll see a slightly different result in the use of the LFG interface once the expansion launches, but that will largely have to do with the players deciding to use it and doing so.

Yeah, the gates to level 70 will open up and the quest logs of every players will get SWARMED with a number of quests and new possibilities. And you’ll have to get along with THREE LFG fields that are supposed to cover all that? Yeah.

The release of the Burning Crusade will only make more obvious how inadequate is the LFG tool. Nothing else.

It’s a good tool.

No, it sucks. This WITHOUT A DOUBT. There really nothing at all to argue about. Objectively.

On loot systems

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It’s not the first time I read Shild at F13 repeating how absolutely great is the loot system in Diablo (2), in particular compared to those used in mmorpgs. I was going to ask him to explain in detail the reasons, but he did it further in the thread, so here it is:

There are 6 things that make Diablo loot what it is.

1. The distribution system: Some things have higher drop rates on better items, but no one is chasing after that one shiny – this is where WoW fails, everyone knows what everyone wants.

2. .The randomization of attached attributes: This is something WoW could fix, sure everyone wants the…whatever, but that whatever could have different stats from your friends. Wouldn’t fix problem #1 though.

3. Can’t exist in a game that isn’t replayable. Something that needs to be paired with this loot bit is randomization of actual levels and bosses and such – there’s a reason all of this is being pimped so hard with Hellgate: London (SAVE ME FLAGSHIP), and there’s a reason why PSU fails so bad, and there’s a reason WoW will never have a loot system better than say… EQ.

4. There needs to be many tiers and sister types to the tiers – the set system was a good start, but I imagine Blizzard or Flagship will expand on this for the appropriate titles.

5. Class, level, and stat specific loot. Level specific loot is so… passe. We need, Thief Only, Dex 100 required on this shit. This is the ultimate carrot. Sure, you may be in a dungeon and kill something that drops a kickass sword – but you can’t use it yet. What do you do? You grind to the point of using it of course. And then you grind some more because you just found a kickass pair of boots but you dumped all your points into dex when you leveled and you need more points in strength. Just one more time through Travincal, just one more time.

6. Most importantly? Tangible differences between every item. This is key. When I equip a short sword, I expect to see a shortsword – when I requip an icy short sword, I expect to see some sort of particle effect or different color blade. The most recent game that comes to mind that nails this is Summon Night 1 & 2 for the GBA from Atlus/Flight Plan.

Anyway, yea. There aren’t any MMOGs out with this done right. They’re all missing one or more of the things above. Most fuck up on #6, which is just goddamn unacceptable.

Shild is a much more experienced and all around “gamer” than me so I’m interested in his point of view.

Let’s see. I absolutely agree with the last point. This is something I always considered fundamental, in particular when I was younger. This is just about the visual cues, nothing really about game design, but it’s a part extremely important. I think the fantasy genre is more dependent on the “visuals” than it is on the “plot”. Even in a fantasy book like Lord of the Rings the visuals are extremely important, even if only evoked through just words.

Today we know how it is important the “avatar” for a player, and also how important is the customization and personalization, so this point isn’t arguable.

But from the point of view of Diablo I don’t think the game did a so great work. Most of the art assets were reused over multiple items. Not really much (visual) personalization overall. Since we are comparing Diablo loot system to those in the current mmorpgs I really don’t see how WoW can perform worse on this point.

You can like or dislike the art style, but WoW’s loot variety (still from the perspective of the visual appearance) is exceptional. Both because the items are different one from the other and always visible on the character model, and because the single item has usually an unique style that really stands out. Not much in this game looks “generic” or bland, often the problem is the opposite, when tings are too exaggerates, over the top and not really consistent with the genre (in fact I like much more Warhammer’s current style).

Point 5. Something similar happened to me in WoW when I got an epic two-handed sword while my warrior used a two handed axe. I couldn’t equip it right away because I had to train for two handed swords, and then I had to go out and grind to skill up so that I could use it. Not a really fun mechanic from this perspective, but I agree that Diablo is different.

I think this point alone isn’t worth much, but it becomes valuable if you tie it with the level system. In Diablo you continue to grow constantly, so a requirement on a item that depends on a statistic like Dexterity is a “soft cap”. It works as an incentive as Shild describes because it “tells” you to play some more. It works as a “bait”, gets you hooked to the game. But it’s hard to bring this to a mmorpg because of all the problems with the levels.

It could work in a skill-based game though.

Point 4. Well, not much to comment. More variety, more mixes. This point is strictly tied with the other three above.

Jump to point 1. I didn’t understand this one initially and in fact I see it depending on the other two points. “Everyone knows what everyone wants” because of the static drops. But the static drops depend on the fact that content isn’t randomly generated (point 3) and the items don’t have random variables (point 2).

I don’t see how you can have that first point without also having the other two. WoW is actually a definite improvement. If every mob had a small chance of dropping whatever, and if every raid encounter could drop anything, then the players would just find the most efficient path and grind that one. If instead every big encounter has its own static loot list, as WoW currently works, then you have a guarantee that all the content in the game is equally used, because you are going to need all those different steps. All those different steps have a precise “function” in the loot system, so you avoid mudflation from a certain point of view.

In Diablo things were different because the content was linear and soloable. So you would move along naturally without really feeling the need to repeat the same part. The min-maxing wasn’t really needed as a better item could always be past the *next* corner, not the previous. This is what worked in Diablo.

Predictability is also not always a bad element when you can expect the kind of loot you are going to see. You’ll less likely get pissed off. It gives a better sense of persistence, a better sense of progression and achievement. I actually like the quest system where the reward is certain, so you complete the quest and get your reward. Most of the loot you are going to use in WoW as you level up comes either from questing or drops in instances, so there’s a very little use of the random drops. But at the same time the “carrot” didn’t vanish, it only got replaced. In Diablo it was the item past the next corner, in WoW it’s the quest system that gives you objectives and “segments” your playsession.

There isn’t a system significantly better. Diablo was well designed and worked well because all the parts fit together. The random itemization going along with the generated content and the level progression. I think WoW is also well designed from this perspective. You could easily experiment, for example building just one instance where instead of static loot lists you have randomly generated items. You could observe how players react to this but I don’t see this as something revolutionary or so much better than how the game currently works.

What I mean is that or you take all the structure on which Diablo was built, with all its nuances, pretty much what Flagship is supposed to do with Hellgate, or those ideas aren’t really usable on their own.

Instead it is surely possible to isolate the actual problems and find better solutions for each. Personalization, customization, character progress. These aren’t subordinate to the loot system, they are basic structures that have much deeper purposes and dependencies. It’s the loot system that is subordinate to those. It’s a lot of time that I advocate for a skill-based system that makes levels obsolete. That’s an important first step that will strongly influence all the rest.

I also had described on this website, for the “dream mmorpg”, a magic item system where the player “levels” and specializes an item unlocking new skills, powers and bonuses, making every item unique and personalized (and with a generated “DNA” code that will silently affect the efficiency and propensity of each item). There are just many different possibilities.

I think the important point is that the design of a loot system depends strictly on the structure of the game. Form there you really have an infinite number of possibilities and the way Diablo worked is just one, probably not even one of the best possible.

Diablo was at its core an hack&slash game with very little depth if you exclude the combat system. So the repeatable/random content, infinite level progression and random itemization fit the purpose of a “full combat” game.

From Shild again:

Anyway, it’s pretty much a guarantee that if I know what the best armor and weapon in a game is, I’ll never play that game. And that’s just a tiny fraction of why MMOGs suck and could be favorably altered by the inclusion of the Diablo style loot system.

So the predictability. But I wrote above as the predictability isn’t always bad. What is that doesn’t really work here? What is missing?

The point isn’t really the predictability of the loot system, but the fact that you know where you’ll be. So:

1- The experience is spoiled, you can see far away. There’s no surprise nor sense of wonder.
2- The game fails to give you the unique feel. You are going to be an exact copy of everyone else in that game.

I think both of those points are interesting to consider OUTSIDE of the loot system.