Monthly Archives: April 2013

Dance the Dance

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After having played the recent Batman series, I have found a new love for the combat dance.  In my younger days, I played a lot of arcade fighters and usually held my own.  There was just one local guy who could really whoop me and I learned the combat dance from him.  The dance is a series of timed moves that work symbiotically with each other, in what can only be perceived as “what I was trying to do in the first place”.  In older games, this was called (and might still be) juggling.  Today, there’s a rhythm to most games that involve combat so that when you watch an elite player, they don’t so much memorize the buttons as they memorize the pattern of the buttons.

As there is a difference in complexity between the Waltz and the Tango, so true is it in combat games.  If memory serves, Paladins in WoW have had a longstanding tradition of horrible dances.  The 2-4-6 combo was a series of 3 attacks that you cycled continuously on end.  Hunters are the same.  Most SWTOR classes also suffer this simplistic formula and Rift often suffers from the 3 button macro effect. Some games, like StarCraft for example, have very complex combat patterns and require not only dexterity to accomplish it in short time frames but also the ability to adapt on the fly.

Back to the MMO world though, and the thought process behind generation and consumption in terms of combat.  Abilities are limited by 3 main things – time, resources and condition.  The first one is usually just a cooldown, preventing you from continuously spamming your most effective abilities.  The second can be a bit more complex.  Perhaps your character has a single energy pool, where abilities need a certain amount in order to activate.  More complex characters have a dual pool, where you need resources from two separate pools to do something – like Rogues, Energy and Combo Points.  The third type is where a set condition is required in order to activate an ability.  Say they need to be poisoned, or you need to be at a certain distance.  All this combines into a complexity ladder for a given character and in turn, the popularity of that character.

Look at WoW and the seemingly immense proliferation of Mages and Hunters.  Both have a single resource, little restrictions in terms of timed abilities and very limited conditional factors.  Both are all over the place.  Then look at Warlocks and Rogues.  They are extremely dependent on time (due to Damage over Time effects), multiple resources and plenty of conditional factors.  And that’s just DPS.  For tanks, with changes in Pandaria to an active mitigation – where you need to press buttons rather than stack stats – this means that the combat dance becomes ever more complex.  There are your buttons for attacking, your buttons for defending and your buttons for “oh my god”, all of which use the same complex resource management system of the base class.  Tanks not only have to understand  dance with a dozen more steps, they also need to pay more attention to the music to even be able to dance without falling down.

There’s certainly a balance to be had between a simple dance and a complex one.  In all honesty, I think all classes should have a basic, smooth dance that allows for a player to add complexities when needed.  Rift does the former but not much of the latter.  WoW doesn’t really do transition between the dances all that well – either it’s dumb easy or carpal tunnel syndrome complex.  I think concept of easy to play, difficult to master should be the baseline.  If the game metrics are showing that people are having a really hard time with a class structure, maybe it’s just time for a complete re-write.

Social Framework – Part 2

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To follow up on the previous post about social frameworks, I want to get back into the gaming space.  When multiplayer games started nearly 20 years ago, the mechanics were such that the people you played with were in the “Friends” group.  You had acquaintances, certainly but rarely did you ever have anyone outside your monkeysphere.  In UO for example, I knew my server’s top PKs and guild leaders and most dungeon runs were with the same set of folk.  It was a community.

A few people are posting about social fabric and the need to “focus on the multiplayer foundation” in order to avoid the 3 month life span most games are seeing today.  First to compare – other than the MMO sphere, no genre has ever lasted more than 3 months in the commons.  If they do, they are super niche.  In fact, today’s general gaming includes many MMO-like services (Diablo 3, SimCity, CoD, etc…)So while we can posit that MMOs are only keeping our attention for a small time span compared to previous, we can perhaps assume that this is due to them becoming more like other games – a convergence of styles if you will.

That being said, if you were to take the thesis to the end, you would have to revisit not only the structure of games of the past but the actual environment they were played in.  If I wanted to play with friends on a Monday night, I had to drive to their place to play.  Other than MUDs, which were highly inaccessible, in the year 2000 we had 3 options for MMOs.  Ultima Online, Everquest and Asheron’s Call.  Not really a whole pile of choice here.  When WoW launched in 2004, the landscape had expanded to a dozen or so choices, still pretty bare ground.  When the Looking for Group (or LFD) tool was launched in WoW in 2010, debatably the death of grouping, the market had grown exponentially.  Today’s market is even more crowded, what with the F2P games that allow zero investment players.

If you were to take a solid look at these games and found the core players, I would bet a year’s worth of salary that the total amount across all MMOs would exceed WoW’s peak numbers.  You have the same amount of players with deep investment, they are just spread out across more games.  I know a lot of my friends from the EverQuest days went to EQ2 while only a small handful went to WoW.  The Syndicate, the largest online guild in the world, has presence in dozens of MMOs, all with deep roots in the game.  The flipside to this is that a larger percentage of players are just tourists, trying out a game to see if they like it then moving on.  If only 20% of your base is invested, and you need to supply for 100%, you’re going to have trouble.   EvE succeeds because nearly everyone is invested.  WoW does it through sheer subscription numbers.  SWTOR couldn’t do it without turning the game into a casino.

To sum, it’s simplistic to state that MMOs have to focus on multiplayer.  Of course they do.  It is better to state that they need to focus on getting players invested in the long term through meaningful, non-punitive multiplayer foundations in order to covert as many tourists as possible into core players.

Social Frameworks

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I want to talk a bit about social investment in terms of relationships.  There’s an old adage that says a marriage is like a bank account, you have to put something in to get something out.  All healthy relationships are like that.  There is a term called Dunbar’s Number (or perhaps more commonly as monkeysphere) that posits that any person can only maintain a stable social relationship with a set number of people – around 150.  Outside of this number, you ability to empathize/socialize is practically null.  This post will be about how both of those intersect.

My hypothesis on social structure is that an individual is only capable of a certain amount of social investment at any given time.  Their choices determine where that investment is made.  Below is a representation of social classification, in terms of relationship and their proximity to the individual.

Circle of Confidence

 

If you were to assign a 100% value to the entire set of groups, the heaviest weighting should be from left to right.  You should put more investment in yourself than in your Closest Ally and a whole lot more than in any acquaintances you might have.  In this I mean that all things being equal, given the choice between yourself and someone else, you should pick yourself (altruism aside).  This part really isn’t up for debate, as it’s a social construct that humanity has employed for a very long time.

What is up for debate is the quantity of people in each group, the investment in a given group and the ratio across the spectrum.  If you have 20 people in the Closest Ally group, you are unlikely to have any energy left for the remainder.  Ideally your immediate family is part of your Closest Ally group (spouse/gf/bf included).  You likely have a few friends in there as well.  Your extended family comes next, then a social group of friends you see on a regular basis.  Finally the Acquaintances bucket.  This is where people you know but don’t have any vested interest in are located.   There are people outside of this bucket but as the monkeysphere theory indicates, it’s unlikely that you have the need or want to acknowledge their state.

If you find yourself hopping from group to group and never really finding the time for quality social interactions, odds are you have too many people in your Friends group.  If you only have 3 people you consider friends, then likely you have invested too deeply in the Closest Ally group.  If your cell phone has hundred of contacts, odds are you have too many people in your Acquaintance group.

The flip side to this is that if you identify yourself as being heavily invested into a certain group, then you have a social profile.  Heavy on the left side and you’re likely introverted, focused and invested – maybe even smothering.  Heavy to the right and you’re likely an extrovert, unfocused and shallow.  It’s hard to have quality relationships if you’re at either extreme as you’re likely to have a distorted social framework to rely upon.  Either your sample size is too small and therefore unable to cope with change or it’s too big and you don’t have enough time to invest.

When most people leave school, they are on the right side of the structure.  A few will be on the left but next to no one leaves in a balanced state.  It takes years (sometimes it never happens) of conscious effort to find the proper balance and keep it balanced.  Sometimes your Closest Ally in school moves to be an Acquaintance, sometimes the other way around. Likely, you will find yourself with less people you call friends and more people you call acquaintances.  No matter what happens, embrace the fact that you’re going to change and that change is a good thing.

 

Buying a New Set of Wheels

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With 2 squirts making a family of 4, our little Toyota Echo is getting cramped.  Pretty sure I won’t be able to fit a set of golf clubs in there anymore.  With the better half on maternity leave, this leaves us at an economic disadvantage.  To sum, we need something bigger and we need to pay very close attention to the price.

Given that we both enjoy the outdoors and that our eldest seems to feel the same way, we’re more or less road warriors.  That means cargo space + fuel efficiency.  I have a dislike for mini-vans, in that 90% of the time you’re in one, it’s just wasted space and therefore wasted fuel – even with a variable engine.  There’s certainly a stigma attached to it, and if memory serves, actual mini-van sales are on a crazy decline.  SUVs, in general, are giant pieces of crap.  They are often put on car frames, let you load up on passenger space but provide less cargo space than a box of donuts.  Plus their fuel efficiency is horrible, they drive poorly (due to the perceived notion that farther from the ground = better) and they are priced way above value.  All that to say we boiled it down to two main options – Subaru Outback or Golf/Jetta Wagon.

Being Canadian, our pricing structure is special like a snowflake.  Market value is based on suggested retail value (MSRP) and no one knows the invoice price (unless you pay for it, like CarCost).  This means you’re negotiating at an artificially inflated price with all the power in the salesperson’s hands.  The US market by contrast, provides invoice pricing to the public, giving them more negotiating power.  This also means that they are more options (trim if you will) when it comes to a given car.  In Canada, there are 5 variants of the Outback.  The US has at least 10 that I’ve found.  In the end, we found out that there’s essentially a 20% markup in Canada.  When you’re looking at a $30K+ vehicle, this isn’t chump change.  Another nice thing to consider is that the warranty coverage is usually the same in both countries.

One final caveat.  If a car is manufactured is not manufactured in Canada or the US, then you pay a 6.1% tariff on cross-border purchases.  The Golf/Jetta is not made here or there, so I’d have to pay.  The Outback is made in Indiana.  That’s ~$2000.

Now we get into the math and my love of spreadsheets.

If I buy the Outback here, the MSRP is about $34,000.  If I buy it in the states, the invoice price is $27,000.  I’ll be charged 200$ at the border to transfer the vehicle.  I won’t pay the state tax due to not being a resident but I will be charged the HST once I come back home.  I would pay HST here too.  Subaru is currently offering a 1.9% interest rate for 4 years.  Buying in the US means cash only and the bank is looking at giving me ~5%.  The Canadian dollar is at par (or better) lately, so that comes out more or less a wash.  Tabulate all that together and we get.

Total cost of the car in Canada: $39,000.  With interest: $40,500.

Total cost of the car from the US: $30,900.  With interest: $34,100

I save $8000 if I pay cash for both or I save $6400 if I wait 4 years.  Even if I had looked more at the Golf/Jetta, I would have saved ~$5000.  Hello!  Why would anyone buy a car on this side of the border with that type of saving?

Here are a few resources to help you out:

RIV – the Canadian government site

Monsieur Maggots – a step by step view of the process

Clickity Clique

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A clique is a group of insular people with not much concern with the outside.  A stereotypical clique is one that shuns anything outside of that group.  Everyone has either been in one or seen one in their life.  School is made up of cliques.  This is based on a primal need to belong and the instinct to fear something different.  I didn’t enjoy high school all that much.  Cliques were certainly a part of it but they were a bigger problem for me in primary school.  Our high school had a dress code, which gave a fair bit less power to the cliques – but there was certainly one particular group who rose to the top.  From what I’ve read about those members since then, none have actually gotten anywhere in life.  “4 touchdowns in a single game” syndrome I guess

When I was a teen, working in a grocery store, we had our own little clique or sorts.  We had a lot of fun and I’m sure people looked at us with a “what a weird bunch of folk”.  Insular I would say but not so much shunning of outsiders as to be honest, we were a bunch of outsiders ourselves.  You don’t work and associated yourself with co-workers in a grocery store if you’re cool right?  It was good times. It was social growth.

As an adult, I am certainly subject to cliques.  I have a group of friends, all extremely bright, and that intimidates most people trying to fit in.  If you have an ounce of self-doubt, I can assure you that you will feel it grow exponentially.  My wife loves to remind me of the first time she met the group as a whole during a party.  It was getting a bit late, we had a few drinks and we decided to play a drinking game, but a quiz-type based on numbers.  Most games would be something like “name 7 colors” or “name 5 sports with balls”.  Not this game.  The first question out of the gate was “name 7 countries that assisted in the invasion of Iraq”.  The odd thing was that there wasn’t much drinking done during that game.  We haven’t played it since.

The round-about point I’m trying to make here is that at a very basic level, cliques serve a useful social purpose.  They breed familiarity and comfort, allow like-minded people a place to share ideas and provide a foundational support structure for social endeavors.  It’s like an extended family if you will.  There is a tipping point however, where familiarity leads to isolation and near xenophobia.  Different is shunned rather than explored.  A lack of trust with the outside world starts to permeate every discussion, seeming to create conspiracy theories everywhere.

It’s easy to point out that type of clique from the outside but near impossible to do so from the inside.  From that perspective, everything seems like an attack and a relatively low sense of self-worth, combined with a need for acceptance can make even the most cheerful of people aggressive.  That’s the key if you think about it – people within the clique need a better sense of internal self-worth.  If they need someone else to tell them they are good and that’s the only positive stimulus, why in the world would they drop it?  Maybe Stuart Smalley had it right all along.

The Journey of Distance

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Warning – Introspection ahead.

As a father of two young children, girls in fact, I find it difficult to separate the real world from the one they live in.  There is a psychological “shelter” factor that comes into play, more instinctive than I would have thought previous to parenthood, that wants to keep these packages safe from harm.  I do realize that this is a temporary state as one day they will fly from the nest and it’s my responsibility (well my wife and I) to ensure they are properly equipped to survive.  This isn’t a new thought as I had pondered this exact statement for nearly the entire term for my first child and holding her within seconds of her birth.  What has set the idea home however is my second child.

There is a piece of a child that lives in a world of wonder.  That piece is akin to a flower and it requires all the love and attention you can provide it.  I will not lie and say this is easy, it isn’t.  As the child grows, it becomes more self-aware and by its very nature, more likely to self-harm with experimentation.  My eldest daughter knows of no fear and while I cringe at the things she does, I also have to sit back and be amazed at her freedom.  She has had scraped and bruises since before she could walk and each tumble was followed with a smile – as if you say “Did you see that?!  That was awesome”.  I have difficulty understanding how I can keep that sense of eternal awe within her – but I can relate to her.

My second child is still quite young but has since birth smiled for what seems every minute of every day.  She is much more emotional than her sister and leaves it out to bear.  If her sister is upset or loud, she starts to cry.  She needs a shoulder to snuggle upon.  It’s like watching a piece of tissue paper float in the wind and always, always with a smile.  I could have the worst day and to come home to that just makes me forget everything.  Now, my wife and I smile a fair amount.  It’s infectious really.  But I don’t think I can properly related to the concept of always smiling.  It almost makes you feel petty in that you can’t always find something to smile about.

To sum, as a Dad, I find it the most difficult to be at the right distance from my children.  I want them to grow up to be productive members of society, with a core set of values, as do most parents.  I also want them to learn about independence and self-worth and I that is not something you can teach, it must be experienced.  Finding that balance of hand holding and letting go is by far the most difficult journeys I have ever undertaken.  But I’m ready for the trip.

SWTOR Expansion

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Back to the gaming discussion.  This week, Star Wars launched it’s new mini-expansion.  5 levels, 1 planet, a new raid and 2 new gear levels.  Every day this week, they had a blog post covering the class changes that the expansion brought.  Given that I had 3 of the 4 archetypes (I don’t like warriors for some reason), I was curious as to the whole of the changes.

At the time the game came out, I wrote a guide for the Sith Inquisitor – since taken over by another author.  I also spent a lot of time building combat models for both that class and the Bounty Hunter – specifically the Powertech tank.  I’ve always been fascinated with numbers and this was simply a decent outlet.  Something new and mathy.

The hiccup here was that even in beta, the developers didn’t have a solid understanding of numeric balance, or perhaps they didn’t have time.  There were a few basic stats.  Power (increased base damage), critical chance, surge (critical damage), alacrity (speed) and accuracy.  Typically in any RPG game, each stat has a value in relation to the others, depending on your class.  In a well-balanced game, every stat has value, but it might have diminishing.  In a less-balanced game, stats will have caps, where points above that give nothing.  In very poorly balanced games, some stats are completely worthless and others are the only thing you should ever seek.

TOR had this latter problem.  Alacrity caused you to attack faster but it didn’t increase resource generation.  In PvP it had minimal value but in PvE it was actually a penalty.  Accuracy also had issues, where after a small amount, like the amount on a single piece of gear, you were capped.  This left power, crit and surge.  At the time, you couldn’t get any item with those combinations.  Some classes were stuck with a single stat.  The worst part was that this was flagged on the forums in the beta and during live, with tangible solutions.

Well, I left after 2 months so I didn’t get to see some of the changes that came along.  What I did read this week though was the fix for alacrity and accuracy.  They now work in a logical fashion and no longer cap or cause a penalty.  I have to wonder why it took nearly 18 months for this fix but it’s there now.  At the same time I do understand that their focus has not been on end-game balance as there really isn’t a need for it.  Maybe the next set of large changes will address that part of the game.  It seems that the game finally has a solid RPG foundation in terms of numbers.

Moral Development

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As a father to two young children, and having a personal passion for social psychology, I find the concept of morality (or social integration) fascinating.  Parallel to this, I find that the vocational schools live nearly entirely on this aspect.  Teachers, doctors, lawyers, religion – they all provide a particular value or input into society’s definition of morality.

There’s a simple test to show that morality, for a very long time, is defined by outside sources and not from the inside.  Ask a child if it’s OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed a hungry family and the majority will say no.  Same question to teenagers will have a split answer.  Young adults tend to say OK.  Older adults are going to be all over the place because their moral development may or may not have progressed.  The answer itself isn’t important so must as the justification.  Your personal experience and knowledge will directly impact that answer.

According to Kohlber’s stages of moral development, there are 6 stages that people may pass through.  The first two are focused on the individual and can be seen as being selfish.  We would typically associate this behavior with a child or youth trying to find their place in society. I do know a lot of adults that remain here.  This typically reflects the inability to show respect or compassion for others – a typical narcissistic behavior.

The next two are where conformity to the masses enters the picture and found in teens and many adults.  Society has expectations of performance and people measure themselves to it.  This is the main reason reality TV is so popular, since it gives people the feeling of moral superiority.  This is where politics and laws operate as they work at a fundamental level for society.  If effect, society is telling you what is or is not acceptable.  The majority of adults live in this space.

The final two are based on individual principles and the capability of finding individuality in society.  Rules change based on evolving needs – the core principle of democracy.  The highest form is more akin to empathy/compassion in understanding the other’s position.  Preventative measures, rehabilitation are key concepts where the previous tier focuses more on punishment.  I know of very few people that are at this level and by definition, it should be a small amount.

It’s an interesting challenge for a parent to guide a child along this path, especially if they never really exceeds the self-interest level.  I know I had to look outside my home to find progress.  I realize that I only have so much time with my kids and that the two groups of people my children will see more – their friends and their teachers – will need to be aligned with our goals.  The former I have some control over currently and hopefully we can provide enough guidance that when they get older, they pick “quality” friends.  The teacher portion though, that’s out of my control unless I change schools.  It does mean however, that I need to have a social contract with each teacher, so that we can all work jointly to provide not only an academic learning experience but also a social and moral one as well.

Social Core

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There’s an old saying that goes something like this.  If I have an apple and you have an apple and I give you my apple, you have two and I have none.  If I have an idea and you have an idea and I give you my idea, we both have two.  For a long time this basically was a separation between the tangible and not but in today’s world, I have a bank full of intangible swords and there is an infinite supply (or near enough) of digital books.  In that train of thought, what you really are exchanging are concepts or frameworks.

This translates well into games so that two people who play the exact same game, the exact same way come out with different results.  You might come out of Tomb Raider antsy from the fighting or wondering about the next step.  What you are given is not necessarily what you actually receive, or interpret to receive.

If we move back a few years in the MMO space, when the time and social requirements were much more stringent the game didn’t provide you content as much as the people consuming the content provided it.  In my UO days, you could spend hours just sitting in the guild castle, talking with friends, working on some skills, maybe bring in a dragon to fight.  In contrast, today’s game is a wham-bam thank you ma’am affair of instant everything.

We’ve been down this road before but gaming is a reflection of the times and as the average “core gamer” age (~30) increases, it is extremely evident that they have less and less time to play.  Today’s younger gamers have thousands of venues to compete for their attention – Twitter, Facebook, all the Internet, Netflix, smartphones, tablets.  When I was younger, I had to leave the house to see friends. As a quick aside, Keen mentioned recently that he’s finishing up grad school this week (congrats!).  That would make him 22-24ish.  His experience in UO would have made him around 6-8 years of age.  It’s safe to say that UO had a different impact at that age than when I was playing (16-18) – especially from a social perspective.

For example, my largest gripe with SWTOR wasn’t that the game had bad ideas, just that they were poorly implemented from a social/time perspective   You were rarely able to find the social aspect while leveling (due to having a companion, very heavy instancing, low difficulty and no tools) and it stuck out like a sore thumb at max level when you 100% needed a social framework.  The time aspect was inversely proportionate to the fun factor.  You spent more time waiting around (again, with no social) for the fun to start – or even to get to the fun.  Sadly, the necessary game updates came 6+ months after launch and 90% of the playerbase had left by that point (they went from 211 servers to 23 in 6 months, now 20).  I firmly believe that the single most important reason Rift is not yet F2P is because of the social/time aspect being a core concept of game design.

Now TESO and Wildstar are both coming in with some new concepts to a genre that was originally founded on the social aspect.  I’ve heard aspects from Wildstar as to how the social portion is going to be important, in a non-combat way, but next to nothing from TESO.  I have my fingers crossed that both can maintain that core concept, with a little tweaking, in order to make either successful in the long term.  I mean, I don’t log in to kill the big bad guy for the 30th time, I log in to talk to my friends for the 300th time.

Fun Tax

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Would you pay 10$ to skip 10 hours of repetitive content?  Would you pay 5$ to acquire enough skill points to use that amazing sword?  Free to Play games are betting you value their items more than your time.  It’s the basis of the market and at a simplistic level, it’s quite accurate.  The problem is that we long-time gamers don’t play game so much for the reward as much as the journey.  I didn’t beat BioShock to see the last bad guy (there isn’t one), I played it to be engrossed in the story.

Games today don’t always follow that mentality.  Some are designed for instant (or partially delayed) gratification.  A harsh slog, through horribly produced content in order to see the really good stuff.  Any game that says “get through the first couple hours and then it’s great” is a poorly designed game.  The intro to FF13 or Kingdom Hearts 2 spring to mind.  EQ2 when it launched was like this.  Games that provide random drops in order to progress (most F2P city builders, like FarmVille) are built around the concept of the result and not the journey.  Rightly so, people will buy their way to the fun part.

Then you might get a game like SWTOR, where the good stuff is actually the journey and not the end result.  Perhaps the journey gets long in the tooth on the 3rd or 4th attempt and then the company can make money.  That could be convenience items or costumes.  Some might sell new journeys.

While I disagree with Jacob’s assessment of the F2P market going through some sort of apocalypse in 3-5 years time (I’m more inline with Wilhelm on this one), I do see some rather drastic changes to the core concepts.  The idea of a “fun tax” seems to be the current model, where you need to pay to have fun.  Game following this model are likely to be doomed (or closed as Playfish) as you can get more fun, for less money on a mobile platform.  The concept of a “fun bonus” is more likely to succeed.  Think of it as a trial of an awesome game, like demos of old.  “Oh, I get 20 hours of great gameplay for 20$?  And you want an extra 5$ for 5 more hours?  That’s reasonable.”  The kicker here is that the content has to be of the same quality or better.  WoW expansions sell on this.  Skyrim was 50/50.

There is certainly a lot of money to be made in the F2P model (or the buy to play model).  You just have to figure out how to make people want to give you money rather than need to give you money.  That is, if you want long-term success.  I mean, there’s a reason the 3 card monte guy isn’t sitting at the same street corner for more than a hour.