Tag Archives: Game Design

Rigged statistics

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People are toying with WoW’s new statistics page.

Lum in particular says (or not, see comments) this is the perfect Mordor’s all-seeing eye that every designer would desire. Instead I’m one of thise who looks at statistics only with a mild interest.

People usually like statistics because they can be seen as something “objective”. But the truth is that they only give the illusion of the objectiveness. Even the statistics can be seen from different perspectives and there’s always something you miss. You can never be sure of your observation and at the end this makes statistics pretty much as arbitrary as any other observation.

Take for example this problem of the Defias. It’s the most evident one if you look at the kill list, and if you browse it you can see that every flavor of Defias is in pretty high position on that list.

So, instead of trusting what that page tells me, instead I consider my own experience. Well, in my own experience the Defias, and all Westfall in general, aren’t all that dangerous. Quite the opposite. In fact the last time I leveled a character (recently), moving to Westfall felt like a liberation because I knew things would have been very smooth and better manageable.

The most (and by a HUGE margin) dangerous zone for me at that level range, alliance side, has always been Loch Modan. I’ve died hundreds of times in Loch Modan and sometime even logged out in frustration. That kind of frustration that makes you want break things. That zone is pure hell and the quests really, really hard if you go solo and don’t outlevel them. There is aggro just everywhere and there’s always a random mob waiting to ambush in the worst moment possible that it feels almost like they have developed an artificial intelligence on their own.

I’ve died to troggs at least ten times more than I died to Defias. In particular if you aren’t a melee class, it’s basically impossible to fight troggs without aggroing the whole zone. Not only the troggs themselves are a great pulling puzzle, but there isn’t any decent safe space because as you move one step you aggro a spider or a bear or a whole other trogg camp with javeling throwing scouts and casters. If something goes wrong the risk of dying is extremely high. That zone is packed with roaming mobs and all the quests send you inside caverns or through narrow places that get increasingly dangerous. The quest given by the gnome who crashed near the lake with his plane is one of the hardest in the whole game for that level range. It sends you recuperating objects that sit deep in troggs camp where you have no possibility to pull one by one and also risk that they respawn right on you if you don’t clean the zone fast enough.

Westfall, instead, is much more open wide, there are safe spots and the encounters are much more spread apart. It has more breadth and it is much more accessible in general.

So. Ubiq says that Defias need nerfing. You know what? My theory is the exact opposite. Westfall and the Defias are the “easiest” part of the WHOLE game. And it’s for that reason that the players prefer it to other zones and play there for most of the time.

The kill list, as well as the number of “soul shards” created are documenting an use. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Defias are high on the list because, yes, they are more dangerous, but more dangerous among content that has the higher usage. This reveals a *preference* more than anything else.

Loch Modan is HELL compared to Westfall, but it isn’t represented in that list. And it isn’t represented not because the zone isn’t deadly, but because the players have learnt to AVOID that zone. As it is dangerous.

Moreover, the choice of (1) the faction and (2) the race, strongly influences those stats. It’s kind of obvious that the monsters who are being fought more often (and that may kill more players) are on the alliance/human side. No surprise there.

My conclusion is that those stats aren’t saying that Westfall is the deadly zone that should be nerfed. Those stats are instead the demonstration that Westfall is the zone preferred by the majority of the players and those zones that should be looked at are the others that the players have learnt to avoid (mudflation, or path of least resistance). Which is something I had understood from my own (arbitrary) observations, and not because a page of statistics was able to reveal all that to me.

And what I wrote here is just the demonstration that the use of statistics is an arbitrary observation as any other. And as valid as any other.

On WoW’s players retention

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It’s a while this topic isn’t discussed and I take the occasion from a discussion on a forum (the GMG thread again) to bring this up again.

We are also close to the anniversary of the great analysis on “levels” that Raph wrote a year ago, and the long discussion that sprang from it. This was also tied to my further analysis (this is how MMORPGs die) that also led to the comments here below.

—

I do believe that Blizzard has focused on retention AND new player influx more then any other company really has, but thats saying a lot because they’ve also designed their game around new players vs. veterans.

At all.

Let’s be honest. WoW has an unexpected player retention but this is due to two main reasons:

1- WoW is “king of the hill”, and that fact alone assures a good retention and constant influx of new players. And this fact won’t change till WoW won’t have a serious competitor (and it won’t happen anytime soon).
2- The good retention the game still has is NOT due to what Blizzard did from release till today, but the great work on the “accessibility” that was done BEFORE release.

For example something that I repeat from *years* is that a soloable game usually ages better in the longer term as it can depend less on the presence of other players at the lower levels.

But despite WoW has a very good retention, it is still a clone of a model that is PREDESTINED to a decline. This is a rule.

A game world based on THAT model can die more or less slowly, but the fact that it WILL die is assured.

—
In particular I want to underline that “point 1” doesn’t depend on WoW’s game design worth, but just on a moment of the market.

While “point 2” is surely a WoW’s quality. Today the importance of soloable content is widely accepted everywhere, but it is often misinterpreted on its real meaning. Soloable content IS NOT important because there are players who prefer to play alone and that preference should be respected. That’s irrelevant, the least important aspect that is often seen as the main one.

The importance of soloable content doesn’t depend on a “preference”, but on the side-effects that forced grouping brings. The problem isn’t that some players dislike grouping, the problem is that EVERY player dislikes, for example, to sit LFG for a long period of time because he cannot progress in the game without a group. And maybe he has to sit LFG for a long time WITH a group because they cannot find an healer (and this is an example of a problem of game design that I did try to solve *radically* on this website with concrete ideas). The players don’t refuse force grouping, but they just don’t accept to have some time available only to see it wasted because they depend on other players. What is “punishing” and that was rewarded in soloable games that eliminated it, is the *dependence*.

So, if you could design a game where forced grouping can happen without side-effects, then you can also have a game with forced grouping that is largely successful. Today we have learnt that the solution isn’t forced grouping, but “favored” grouping. Where “favored” doesn’t mean that you put better incentives on grouping (like an exp bonus), but that you give the players better tools so that they can meet and play together more easily, with less burdens. For example by giving players the possibility to summon their friends (that WoW does with a warlock ability), or by giving them better LFG tools (that WoW still lacks today). Or by working on “permeable barriers” + “gated content”.

The key is removing the barriers, instead of building new ones.

And even in all these cases it is still a matter of “accessibility”. That’s the keyword of WoW’s success. That’s the word that defines WoW’s success. It is often mistaken as “polish”, but polish is important only in the measure it makes the game more accessible.

For example an interface is usually considered good when it is intuitive and simple to use. We can assume that a well polished interface IS intuitive and simple to use, but the “polish” is not the relevant trait. Because what really *matters* is the accessibility of that interface.

MMORPGs in general, but also MUDs, had a LONG story of user UNfriendly-ness. That’s the habit that WoW broke and that’s the real major key in WoW’s success.

The rest are a myriad of details, all with their own importance but also all subordinate to the “accessibility”.

P.S.
Also notice that this thing about the “accessibility” isn’t just my own fixation. There are games out there who made the accessibility their MAIN marketing strategy. Think for example to Guild Wars and their major decision to not require a credit card. This is again a case that falls in the field of accessibility.

There are aspects of the accessibility that are external to the game. Like this case about the credit card or the hardware requirements. But there are also aspects internal to the game and that are competence of game design, some of which I considered in the link above about permeable barriers.

On Mythic’s implementation of relics/artifacts

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I promised myself to not comment or criticize DAoC anymore, but since it deals with one of my ideas I want to add something.

Reading the boards I see the players complaining about two main points when the relic system is discussed:

1- Adding another RvR space was stupid. PvP action needs to converge, not being spread even more.
2- The bonuses aren’t appealing enough to remain interesting in the longer term.

The point is that while Mythic copied exactly my idea (you can compare their official description page with my original idea to see that one is the carbon copy of the other) those two points are the only ones who were left out and that represent the ONLY difference between Mythic’s implementation and my original design.

Mythic: These relics provide temporary bonuses, but in order to keep the mino-relic, the wielder must actively participate in RvR.

The wielder (and his group, if not solo) of the mino-relic must participate in RvR combat in order to maintain the mino-relic and its effect. Each mino-relic has a feed rate (the number of enemy kills required over a specific time period); there are different feed rates for different mino-relics.

HRose: In order to keep them on your character, you need to “feed” them by killing the players on the opposite factions and have a role in the conquest, participating actively in the PvP. Exposing yourself. If you are hiding you won’t be able to fulfill the “feed” requirements and you’ll lose the artifact.

Mythic: If the wielder of the mino-relic does not get sufficient kills to sustain the mino-relic’s feed rate timer, the mino-relic “decays” from the player and it is returned to its encounter location in its locked state.

HRose: If the feeding requirement aren’t met, or if the player with the artifact has been logged out for too long, not meeting the active requirements, the artifact is reset to the original PvE instance that will remain sealed for a set amount of time depending on the type of the artifact.

Mythic: Mino-relics cannot be taken out of RvR areas and cannot be stored in keeps.

HRose: They artifacts aren’t usable in PvE, they lose all their properties if they are brought in a PvE instance.

Note: since the relics need to be “fed” the prohibition to take them out of RvR zones that Mythic added is superfluous.

Mythic: The wielder of the mino-relic is visible on the RvR map and the zone map (or dungeon map) via a special icon.

HRose: The other faction will also know that one of the artifacts was summoned and will be able to “divinate” your position in the map. They can track you down. you will be hunted.

Mythic: If a player is carrying a relic upon death, LD, or logging, the relic will drop to the ground. Due to this, mino-relics will constantly change hands while they are active. This complex game of “hot potato” will present a fresh new twist for standard RvR play.

HRose: If you die in a PvP battle, your artifact will be dropped on the ground and one of the players in the opposite faction can loot it and use it, acquiring the powers that were yours.

So. I’m paranoid, egocentric, or maybe my “feelings” are a bit justified?

Let’s see these differences concretely.

1- Adding another RvR space. Even if my idea wasn’t traced upon DAoC, it still avoided that mistake. While in Mythic’s implementation these relics are taken from PvE encounters in another, huge, RvR space (the labyrinth). In my idea the relics/artifacts were taken from an instanced PvE-only space. The players could “race” toward a relic. When a relic was captured, all the instances would be sealed.

This effectively removed the mistake of adding another RvR space while providing a perfect environment for truly challenging encounters. Getting an artifact, in my idea, was really the “hardcore” part (to then be brought back to the rest of the community via the full-loot system and feed reqs). The harder PvE experience in any game. Something that happens rarely, not every day. Plus it was also planned to be tied to an innovative, different placement of “PvE raids” (more about the new form of raids).

2- Mythic’s relics aren’t all that desirable. They are relatively small bonuses to skills, nothing that created directly new forms of gameplay and that the players carve. It’s just about adding yet another kind of items to loot and toy with. Completely forgivable after the novelty wears off, as they don’t really have a “place” in the gameplay. They are a transitory “cool” system. A gimmick. Instead in my idea the role of relic/artifacts was more significant. I often described them as the “heroes” in Warcraft 3. It was something planned with a strong impact and, instead of small bonuses to skills, each relic/artifact was supposed to infuse and channel new powers. Not just significant for their impact in a battle, but also graphically spectacular.

One interesting part of my ideas is that a relic/artifact would mutate graphically the aspect of the player. And this idea of “mutation” and “corruption” was taken directly from my own source of inspiration, Michael Moorcock’s Elric.

This second point is particularly important because it’s not the first time that Mythic wastes good ideas with a poor or inadequate implementation.

The ideas were valid, and not because they were my own. The idea of the “hunt”, of the mutation and the collaborative, “epic” effort to take down a player demi-god, with a spectacular graphic impact on the battlefield. Those were seeds and they needed water, not sand.

Conclusion: while there are parts of my idea that would have required more work than what Mythic has allocated to it, from the other side the “divergencies” between Mythic’s implementation and my idea are what the players are complaining about. Some of them required more work, but some of them are blatant design flaws that I had avoided.

Moreover I also proposed Mythic in another context to add another RvR zone. So was I stupid too? No, because I proposed a special zone that wasn’t “always on”, but that would open only on special occasions. When the new zone was open all the players were supposed to converge there and leave the classic frontiers deserted, this zone would remain open for one, two or three days and after the event was complete the zone would be sealed till the next “event”, that could trigger one week or more later (for example you could set it open for 36 hours and triggering every 10 days). With the purpose to not overlap with the standard RvR activity while offering a different kind of gameplay (physics system in that case) and also giving the feel of “epic” and “uniqueness”. Something that the players could “wait for” with anticipation.

And also something that has never been seen before.

The other perspective (after “Revelations”)

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So the “Revelations” patch for Eve-Online, or at least its first part, was deployed.

I don’t know if the servers came back up in time because the account management page didn’t work yesterday and I couldn’t manage to reactivate my account.

Today everything seems working ok and it’s quite an achievement. During previous patches the week after release was pure hell, with servers having problems and frequent reboots. So, as far as stability is concerned, this is one of their best patches to date.

From the perspective of a noob character not much seems changed.

The new map system is nice and, as CCP would say, “classy”, but it isn’t more useful than how it was. I find annoying some decisions with the UI, for example the constant pop-up as you move the mouse around, sometimes when you are just trying to pan the view and instead the mouse pointer loses focus to one of those menus. An option to turn off the mouseover actions and just trigger them on a mouse button click could have helped a lot (and something I suggested long ago).

There is now also a ring of stars/dots in the background representing the whole universe and that is part of the new “seamless” transition between normal view and the starmap.

On the other side the rings around planets now flicker as the textures on the Amarr stations. They talk about Vista and DirectX 10 and they still have massive texture flickering. Heh.

The other two things you notice right away are the wrecks instead of the loot cans and the contract system.

The wrecks need work because as they are implemented right now are just an added annoyance. Before you would blow up a ship, go loot it, and the loot can would disappear. With the new system the wrecks sit around in space and it’s really hard to know what you looted and what you didn’t. You know, the kind of problem that in WoW was solved with the sparkles ;)

The contract system is what I expected. Right now most of the offers I saw were scamming attempts (courier missions where the “collateral” cost was hundreds time larger than the reward, hoping to get rich quickly in the case someone gets the mission and then forgets about it), and some legit auctions. All the other types of contracts aren’t possible if not for your corporation or alliance, so not open for the public.

I still don’t see what is so much better than WoW’s system. Yes, it’s more powerful. For example instead of selling one item or a stack (as in WoW) you can bundle all kind of stuff together in a custom package. And there are more “freeform” contracts only available to your corporation or alliance (by the way, is it possible to create logistic groups within the same corp and open a contract only to that group instead of the whole corp?). It will become more interesting when, with the Factional Warfare late in 2007, NPC corps will open contracts and all sort of missions for the players.

For now it’s one of those features that sound “cool” but that I doubt will be used all that much. Outside of the standard auctions and scam attempts.

Finally, one of the smallest but most important changes that affects radically the gameplay is that now all the insta-jumps are gone and you can “warp to 0” everywhere by default. This means that travel times in general should be reduced significantly and that some PvPers will complain. The change was inevitable, though, and it’s actually bad that CCP waited this long to take a definitive decision.

Or you institutionalize a feature (like they decided to do), or you remove it altogether. You don’t leave in the game a semi-exploit whose use is limited just by the fact that it is tedious.

I wanted to check the new character creation, but to do so I have to delete one of my old characters and I discovered that the process takes ten hours. It doesn’t make much sense to me.

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The “other perspective” is to underline the contrast with the typical playerbase of Eve. You can go in one of the forums where there are some Eve players and, in all cases, you find very hardcore players discussing concept that are nearly immpossible to grasp. You can be as experienced as you want with games and MMO in general, but Eve is another beast, and what I noticed is that there doesn’t seem to be ONE player who isn’t deep in the game to the hardcore level.

My idea is that there’s nothing in between. This is one major weak point in the game. Or you fall in the hardcore category and go deep in what the game offers, or you bounce back. There is no middle ground.

Some say that this is due to the steep learning curve, but I’m one of those who fall in the category that “bounces back” and yet I know very well how the game actually works. I joined when the game entered beta 2, at the beginning of September 2002. I was there till the release (May 03) but I subscribed for the first time only in December of the same year in occasion of the first expansion. From there I occasionally returned to check new things and it’s the same I did yesterday for this new patch.

I log in, give a look to those new things, warp to an asteroid belt, blow up two pirates and after an hour I feel already like logging out without much desire to log in back later.

From my point of view Eve lacks an “hook”. something that motivates you to go look past the next corner (figuratively speaking, as we are in space). Something that can give you the desire to go back in the game because you have something left to do. Instead I feel detached from the game. The major goal seems to be wealth, but money matters only when it is an “enabler”. Money as a goal just sucks.

With every patch CCP devs legitimately develop content that is targeted at their hardcore players. Whether it is about player-owned stations, high level crafting/ships, jump clones, death rays, COSMOS systems and all the rest. Again the problem is that there’s not much in between.

Everyone says that till you don’t join a corporation and don’t get involved into that higher level layer you don’t really know where the worth of the game is. And I agree. But this is also one major flaw. In other cases we would talk about “obligatory grouping”, but in Eve grouping isn’t really obligatory, even if it’s actually a lie produced by a wrong perspective.

The point is: I’m forced to find friends to enjoy the game. When the opposite should happen. You play the game and by playing the game you get to know people, from there you build and enter a community. The game and the fun bring you there. And then you get to the other players.

While in Eve this is reverted. Get to the other players comes AHEAD of the fun. Getting to other players is a prerequisite to arrive at the meat of the game. While the opposite should happen. Your hook to the game should bring you to the other players. Firstly you develop an interest for the game world. You are hooked, having fun. You slowly get immersed, addicted. THEN you slowly get to know other players.

For example. Let’s say I enjoy comics. Okay. I read comics on my own. I have fun reading comics. I’m not part of a community, but the fact that I like comics can bring me to other readers and from there build a community. But it’s not like I had to join the community so that I could enjoy reading comics.

In the same way, using WoW as an example as it does this perfectly, it’s when you are already hooked to the game that you are slowly “brought” to other players. It begins with an occasional meeting in a cave where the other player has your same objective and it continues later on when you are brought to your first instance. The key for the success is that all those steps are connected. While in Eve there’s not enough in between (you got the pattern).

Lack of interesting content is one of the flaws. The missions are usually quite boring and not just because of the travel, but also because the combat encounters aren’t exactly designed to provide an ESCALATION of challenge, or stuff to discover or figure out. It’s also true that it’s hard to develop interesting and involving content in Eve, as the player getting a mission can have all sort of different ships and loadout. If you cannot predict the player’s potential, then you cannot plan an encounter that is fun and challenging without being or boringly easy, or frustratingly hard. Actually NPC agents check the ship of the player before picking a random mission, so there is surely room for improvements.

In a game like WoW the “hooks” aren’t just the new skills and loot or the classic “ding”, all of those simulated to en extent even in Eve, but the consistence of what there is outside. I got a sort of illumination while fiddling with a starmap. So big… but still so empty. What do I *care* about in all those thousands of systems? Not much, because the large majority of them are redundant. That’s the typical generated content: nothing to see.

This is a phenomenon very close to Oblivion’s rubberbanding. If the world “moves with me”, why moving at all? Simply put, there’s a lack of exploration, but this is a limited perspective, because what misses here is an “interest”. Why should I care for the world outside? What is there to learn, be part of?

Players are here to be entertained but Eve just empowers them so that they entertain themselves. But, obviously, this doesn’t work for everyone. That level often is either invisible (what should I do next? where’s the fun?) or unreachable. Again, there’s nothing in between.

And maybe it’s time to connect those two parts. Maybe with what they call “Factional Warfare”, if they don’t make it hardcore-only content too, and if they can finish it before the majority of the staff is moved on the new World of Darkness MMO.

On Bioware and the story thing

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I was checking other things and noticed something I wrote a while ago. Look at it from the current perspective of all the talk about Bioware and their desire to focus on the story:

Recently we touched so many fundamental points. About the limits and accessibility problems of a sandbox, about the linearity and staticity of a narrative, about the unexcused, negative transition from the levels being a way to progress in the story (classic pen&paper RPG) to the story being a way to progress through the levels (classic DikuMUD progression). We have lost the story. Some also said that we lost the possibility to affect and change the world, like branching quests that open up different possibilities.

I wrote my own opinion about all these points and suggested many solutions. But it’s always hard to make a synthesis of all that. It’s hard to have a “one size fits all” answer that is truly satisfactory without those “deficiencies”. I wrote that some of the problems, goals and solutions are antithetic. You cannot find a solution for everything because one will be opposed to the other. I gave up here. I’m not good enough to think something that works so smoothly. A story, to be a very good story, needs identity and authorship. Control. It has a start and an end. It’s more or less linear, even if you can segment it and let the player follow a personal order. But all the pieces would still be there.

At the basic level: a good story has an awful replayability.

After you have spoiled it, part of the fun of the exploration and discovery will go away. Yes, we could chase the myth of of the branching possibilities. So that you can repeat a story and find out different possibilities. But this makes the development time increase exponentially and these games have budgets, and these budgets depend on time. This would also not remove the artificiality of a falsely persistent world where you can go back and repeat something to see it going in a different way. It’s a paradox, a false solution.

On “reset buttons” and “progressive” territorial control

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-Part 1-
This spawns from a blog post where Ubiq talks a bit about Mythic’s Warhammer (at least what he reads about the game).

Now I already followed and discussed things in the past, so I could better portray how Warhammer PvP and territorial control should work. *IF* what I understood is correct and there haven’t been significant changes in the meantime (I give them the benefit of the doubt).

You can see one of my previous analysis here (or check its category).

In short you may think to Dark Messiah multiplayer and have a good idea about how this system (here I’m focusing on the territorial control) should work.

At the “endgame” Warhammer should have five zones for each of the three “war fronts”. One war front for orcs/goblins vs dwarves, one for Chaos vs Empire and one for Dark Elves vs High Elves.

Of these five zones two should be the rival “capital cities” raid zones that Ubiq talks about. The ultimate siege that may trigger the definitive victory and the supposed “reset button”.

Now, as in Dark Messiah, each of those zones should be closed and instanced “scenarios”. If your faction achieves particular objectives and “wins” that scenario, there’s a “map switch” that moves ideally closer to the losing faction capital city.

So these capital cities aren’t player-populated “hubs”, but only combat scenarios that are “unlocked” through a campaign mode that implies the victory on previous maps/scenarios.

You start from the neutral map -> win it -> move to the one closer to the enemy capital city -> win that too -> and finally the “capital city” scenario is unlocked -> win it -> (supposed) system reset

If Mythic is smart, only one of the five endgame maps is going to be active at the same time (outlining the campaign progression), so a player should have a choice between three maps where he can go PvP (one for each warfront). Helping a lot to focus the PvP action instead of dispersing it among too many zones as it currently happens in DAoC.

On the other side, if there are too many players packed into one zone, the instance system triggers and creates more balanced “mirrors” of the same scenario.

So this should address effectively the two main issues, the convergence required for the PvP and the overcrowding.

-Part 2-

Ubiq: That being said, the question I’m most interested in is how a side that has been utterly decimated to the point that the capital is in ruins can hope to come back to turn the tide. While I genuinely love city conquest scenarios (I feel they capture the ‘massive’ part of what MMOs are supposed to be), most territorial control games are progressive – a game design term meaning that the winners tend to keep winning, as they gain more and more spoils of war, and more and more players on the losing side feel the desire to join up and/or play. This problem was a very tough issue for both Shadowbane and Dark Age of Camelot to deal with.

Long ago I had proposed an idea for DAoC that I think would work well (if not, I’m still wondering why).

Basically each keep can be upgraded to level 10 and levels make guards stronger, among other things.

Currently all keeps can be upgraded to level 10 with no limits (if not limits of time).

My simple idea was add a fixed cap for each realm.

For example you have five keeps for each realm, 15 in total for all three realms and you give each realm a cap of 50 points.

Since you begin with five keeps, you can upgrade all five of them to level 10, using up all your 50 points.

But then, as you conquer keeps from other realms the situation changes and you need to spread those points. You’ll likely try to upgrade your new keep so that it is well defended, but doing so would mean removing levels from your other keeps to upgrade the new one.

The other side of the medal is that the realm losing one keep gets back those 10 points that it used there. And the idea was that you could “overload” the level of your keep above ten, but where every point above ten would cost (x-10)+1 (so to go from a level 10 keep to a level 11 you would need to use two points, to go to 12, use 3, then four and so on).

The result would be that the more a realm expands, the more it becomes also harder to defend, because it exposes more weak spots as the points need to be spread between more keeps, while the realm who is losing can concentrate the strength on a stronghold and make it really hard to capture.

This means that the realm who is losing isn’t left staring passively, but it is given the possibility to counterattack effectively through smaller strike teams aiming at the weak points.

The overall idea is the one of the rubber banding. The more you force a situation, the harder it is to maintain it.

(that was the problem back then. Today players don’t even care about keeps and it’s all reduced to 8vs8 ganking groups)

Jason Booth: Territory is tricky, but I think it can be done in a satisfying way. I think the trick is really in convincing people that the inevitable loss of territory is part of the fun. It’s hard to convince people of this, so it must be some fundamental part of your reward system instead. Push the boulder up the hill, get distracted by shinny cookie, let the bounder roll back down again – but you get to keep your cookie.

Instead I think it can be done through gameplay. My idea is that being on the losing side with the possibility to turn the tide can be even more satisfying and fun than being on the winning one.

The problem is to provide gameplay alternatives, ways to effectively counterattack so that the losing side has something to do.

If what is left to do is get steamrolled by a zerg for the next two hours, the player logs out frustrated. The point is to offer gameplay alternatives.

The point is to foresee these situations, and design solutions so that the game offers things to do in those cases.

About the “reset button” or the boulder pushed up hill, Mythic model in DAoC is already stronger.

The donut is represented by the relics. Not only you get to keep the donut/relic, but the donut also becomes a “ransom” that the other realm will eventually want to get back.

So a victory doesn’t also lead to a reset (after a relic is captured things slowly fall back in normality) but also as the starting point for what’s next.

On fizzles

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Archiving something I wrote about EQ2’s fizzle mechanic that is going to be removed (while I controversially think it should have been changed and left in), mostly because one of the ideas I proposed was used for the interrupts:

This is the new behavior of interrupts, they now automatically restart the cast up to 3 times.

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There was a long discussion a few months about WoW’s release about the Warrior class which led to an in-game protest and a long post from the lead designer. Here’s the interesting bit:

Now, regarding your opinions. Obviously it’s perfectly valid to hold the opinion that we should have designed a lower failure rate in general (miss/dodge/parry/etc) and compensated for that in other areas. In fact, if we were to do it all over again, it’s reasonable to say I might be in favor of doing something to that effect. That being said, it wouldn’t be as easy as changing all mob HP’s. Not only would it also require changing player HP’s, but compensating through HP changes also has ripple effects on the effectiveness of spells, non-physical-damage procs, etc.

I see miss rates not differently from fizzles. They are negative odds. Never directly “fun”.

As Kalgan says, the less you have of them, the less frustration. But they are also part of the *fabric* of the game.

Some games that didn’t understand that concept failed horribly. Think to Morrowind combat. If you had a low attack skill you would hit ONCE every ten or more “swings”. This is absurdly retarded.

So, as Kalgan said, here the right recipe isn’t about removing the odds, but finding the sweet spot where they add flavor without becoming frustrating.

Fizzles are essentially the same thing. They are negative odds, exactly like missing with a weapon (I don’t know how misses are calculated in-game but I guess they are related to the skill level as well, dodges with skill level compared to defence of target and so on). They are *excused* within the game because they are consistent:

– You learn a new spell and need to practice so that you can improve using it.

That’s a consistent, familiar mechanic that I wouldn’t remove lightheartedly and that’s why I commented it.

Now the problems of the fizzles:

Fizzles provide a need to hammer the same key while getting increasingly pissed off, and feelings of frustration/incompetence as their cost of failures.

– First problem. How frequently fizzles happen. This is obviously related to the skill level and should remain so, imho. To make the mechanic more satisfying you could link more directly the skill-up with a fizzle, so that if players fizzle often, they also skill-up faster. You fail (fizzle) but you are rewarded with a skill-up. Secondly, it’s essential that they are odds in combat, but not the norm. I admit to only have experience of the very early game, but fizzles seemed rare enough. If they are still perceived as annoying their chance could be made more steep depending on the skill level (so that you reduce the chance of fizzle at an high skill level, and then readjust the progression).

– Consecutive fizzles. From your comment it looks like this is the most frustrating pattern. The solution is to make the system “aware” of fizzles and increase the chance to cast a spell after one or more fizzles happen. This could transform into a *positive* mechanic: for example by affecting more than just the next spell and even by rising the chance to crit (like an invisible buff). You fail the spell but when this happen you can count on a “compensation” on your next spells.

– Spamming keys. If the problem is about having to re-issue a command (this is even for me), you could automate this. On a fizzle the character would automatically recast the spell as soon as possible without requiring the player to press the hotkey again.

In short:

– Reduce the chance to get a fizzle at the proper skill level and rise the chance to skill up after a fizzle.

– Compensate a fizzle by improving the chance to crit and succesfully cast spells on the next few spells.

– Make recasting automatic if a spell fizzles.

The idea is to transform negative feedback into positive one. So that instead of triggering frustration, you trigger revenge: “Okay, this spell failed. But the next one will tear you apart” translated into higher chance to cast the spell successully and higher chance to obtain a critical hit.

Realistic loot (and inventories)

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I read what Raph wrote about WYSIWYG loot and I cannot avoid to criticize some parts.

The point is that, again, Raph keeps doing really smart and interesting considerations from the point of view of the SYSTEM and of the DEVELOPER. But never from the point of view of the PLAYER.

The problem with WYSIWYG loot is noise level, just that. Not (only) database noise level, but “info to player” noise level.

Think to the fun in a game as a “signal to noise” ratio. Noise isn’t affordable.

Think if when you killed a boar you would be prompted with tenths of different items that you could get and that are part of the daily mmorpg experience. Eyes, livers, meat, skins, teeth, bones and whatnot. This is why often in WoW quest objectives drop only after you are quest-enabled for that item. You only see what is relevant for you. With minimal noise. Without the quest those items would be invisible.

So what’s the point of this kind of loot system? From my perspective only the desire for realism and immersion. This is why in my “dream mmorpg” notes I write about realsitic loot and inventories. I had planned a system where bags aren’t abstract entities, but need to be located precisely, have weight and *volumes* and the same for every “manipulable” object. It’s part of a whole different layer with its own purpose in the design. I believe it contemplates all that is interesting and valuable in a WYSIWYG loot system while removing the useless noise that has no purpose.

Realistic loot means that a boar doesn’t drop swords or gold coins. But it also doesn’t mean that one goblin drops a leather jackets, coins, shoes, bags, a dagger, a slingshot, stones, teeth, nails, eyes, hair, a tongue, pieces of skins and tenths of other potential objects. Because this is just “noise” that is not relevant for a player.

Raph imagines a cloth system to randomly generate groups of mobs with trousers of different colors and “wear” and “decay” to justify a WYSIWYG loot system. Why?

It’s a game, all the elements that are superfluous and don’t add to the fun… are CUT. Without even a hint of regret.

Why adding annoying and frustrating mechanics like wear and decay only to support a loot system that seems to not have any other worthwhile purpose? Is this design because there’s a NEED for it, or it’s just bloat for the sake of it?

Any time spent on making kobolds customizable NPCs with attach points and morphs and whatnot is time that could have gone into making different monsters altogether. On the flip side, if you spend a lot of time with the kobolds, it’s extremely apparent that they are cookie cutter. A little algorithmic variation would go a long way towards making the process of killing 45 of them less tedious.

You can develop a complex cloth system that randomly generates each kobold and makes it look different. But what’s the point? The gameplay needs to be tuned, it needs designers that plans fun encounters, give paths and patrols to guards, put certain mob types in certain locations. Bundle casters with melee fighters to create interesting encounters. How they are dressed matters in THAT context. In the combat. In the different patterns that it creates.

You cannot spawn fifty kobolds, randomly generate how they look through a clothing system, add two tents and call it a kobold camp. It sucks. It has no depth. No crafting.

A Cloth system on kobolds is superfluous? BEEEP! Wrong.

Cloth system, yes, it is superfluous. Different kind of kobolds aren’t. Not from this perspective of the loot. But because you want equipment to bring to varied gameplay. Kobolds that attack you in melee, kobolds with more or less armor protection, kobolds that attack you from range, shaman kobolds and so on.

The “algorithmic variation” is needed to create varied gameplay. Different kinds of kobolds that don’t just look slightly different, but that also have different behaviors that go to intersect with the gameplay and that require the players to adapt and react in different ways.

The former case can easily be illustrated by the ways in which these things worked out in UO and SWG. The famous green cloth that Janey always pursued in UO was the result of one of these random customization spawns: a particular NPC happened to randomly get a shade of green dye that wasn’t necessarily easily available. People chased after NPCs with particular colors of clothing in SWG because they wanted it for their own customization (in fact, there’s an additional side effect there, of people “killing for sneakers” so to speak). Both of these are examples of further detail in the simulation creating value for the players in what might have been useless throwaway loot. (Obviously, the majority of what is generated is still useless to most people, and has little market value).

Condensed pharagraph: for every chunk of content randomly generated, 98%+ of it is usually garbage. So why we need to save it? Remove the superfluous (again). A game is a distillation of reality with a hint of magic. You take in only the best. The available space is limited and should never be wasted with something that isn’t the Very Best.

Then he also throws in the mix other complicated elements like economy and customization, and looking at them from a perspective I consider surpassed (that kind of overcomplication is something that I would definitely cut LIGHTHEARTEDLY).

Fear my PvP

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I was searching my old design notes about my “dream mmorpg” for something else but I found a part that caught my attention.

Today there are many players who complain about PvP because of bland death penalties. Because there’s no permdeath, there’s no full looting, no harsh exp losses, corpse camping is often considered griefing and so on. They don’t want these possibilities to exist, they want them even encouraged by the rules.

Well, I’ve always been strongly against those positions because I always thought that PvP should be accessible and fun for everyone. Never punishing or elitist. But I found these notes where PvP is quite harsh, harsher than what you’ve seen till today, and yet without getting in the way of the gameplay.

It was part of a bigger scheme to make the combat more visceral and cinematic. The idea was about letting players chop off heads and limbs from corpses to create totems with which “decorate” a battleground. “Trophies”. That is something with a strong effect but that doesn’t remove character progress. It has a strong emotional impact that doesn’t leave you indifferent, but at the same time it doesn’t cripple the gameplay.

I had divided PvP vibes into two groups. The first was “personal” (corpse looting, permdeath, corpse camping all fall in this category). While the other was “communal” (conquest modes, domination and everything that is usually goal-based). And I decided that the second group was always ok, while the first should be used to “punish” the loser, but without depriving him of his progress or his possibility to play the game. So the idea to go with the emotional impact, on the “roleplay” level.

Think to the extreme scenario where you could kill a character and then rape the body. This would be *more than enough* to drive away from the game in shock and disgust half of your players and create so much noise that the “Hot Coffee” case would be nothing compared. But it is just to say that you CAN make death harsher and have more of an impact without crippling the gameplay or impairing the characters.

It’s part of what you may call “taunting”. It doesn’t have any weight on the rules themselves, but it adds a lot of “spice” and I’m sure it offers something that even the hardcore PvPers would appreciate. Adding the personal satisfaction through totems and similar mechanics (I had planned even a hostage system), while the persistence and purpose through goal-based systems (the conquest mode, housing, city building and so on). Actually I even added notes to give these totems some effects, with enough totems in an area the other faction could suffer a “morale loss” that could work like a slight penalty while fighting in the area. Giving for example the possibility to “decorate” your city walls with these totems as a deterrent for an assault (I didn’t decide if the morale penalty would apply only to NPC guards and patrols or also to the players).

In my design notes these totems were also tied to the crafting system, requiring materials to be made, with the purpose to limit their number somehow. The totems would also decay over time, becoming unrecognizable and turning into skulls.

Below these notes about totems there were other ideas for visceral combat. One in particular was about the use of “finishing moves” or “fatalities”, with choreographic, dramatic animations and everything.

You could think that the implementation could be problematic because of the netcode, but the way I described them seems doable. Basically I had considered them like normal attack skills to be used only as finishing moves. They could be dodged or parried (I actually described these as the “grabs” in Tekken). The server resolves the action before the whole animation is triggered. If the attack misses, is parried or dodged, the cost of the move (like “rage” or whatever) is paid and lost. Instead if it hits and it deals enough damage to kill the enemy the finishing move animation is triggered and can run freely for a few seconds. During the finishing animation the attacker is invulnerable, so the animation can run uninterrupted without problems, in all its spectacular effect (if you think about it God of War does pretty much the same, making your character invulnerable as long the animation runs).

This gave the possibility to add spectacular, cinematic animations and special fatalities for all classes, maybe in various combinations triggered randomly. A warrior could throw his victim on the ground, block him down with a foot on his chest and then push down his sword on the body. A mage could burn to ashes his victims or freeze them with a cone of cold to send them to pieces shortly after. The more gore-ish, violent and cinematic was the animation, the better.

In particular these animations could be completely in synch, without technical problems thanks to the way they are triggered (after an enemy is “already dead”), offering a strong sense of “touch” between two fighters that is completely missing in today mmorpg’s combat. And you could also have a lot of freedom, not only adding 1vs1 animations, but also 1vs many if it’s the case.

Thinking about it, it isn’t so unreasonable to think these special synched attacks not just as finishing moves when a fighter is already dead, but also to use them mid-combat. You may think that taking out the control from the player to play a synched animation could be frustrating and unfun as a “stun”. But a stun locks one player while the other continues to hit, while a synched animation is one attack only. It would become more like a “matrix” mode, a “pause” or a “slowdown”, a temporary suspension (of disbelief) in the combat that actually gives you a couple of seconds to plan your next move.

And, of course, the monsters could be enabled to have something similar and very special, cinematic attacks.

It would deserve at least some prototyping to see how far you could go (and no, your middleware won’t allow you that).