Category Archives: Games

Old is the New

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Most things in life happen in cycles. These cycles can be long (ice ages) or short (food cravings). Game patterns have their own ebb and flow. People aren’t clamoring for Pac-Man, though it still sells for nostalgic reasons, but there are some elements that function better with simplicity – for a time.

I like public quests. I really like RIFT’s take on them, what with the instant grouping, chat channels and length. I like GW2s versions for the variety but take issue with the lack of social. Wow has the Timeless isles now which is just a bunch of random bosses every other minute. Cut the BS, gimme the loot. EQ didn’t bother with much of that. Every quest was a group quest and it took a zone to make it work.

I float between the models, depending on mood. There are advantages to each and time is a rather serious factor. EQ takes forever to get going but is much more rewarding. GW2 has oodles of choice but everything is a 1 night stand. Wow, well I don’t rightly know right now. They’ve never done something so organic and it really feels out of place.

It’s good that so many MMOS are around giving the playerbase some choice and developers some baseline. People don’t go back to play BF2 but people go back to play UO. The systems might not have been perfect but new games since then haven’t really moved the bar up – just sideways.

Rate Of Return

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There’s a simple concept that exists in that a person only does something if they have an acceptable rate of return. That is, whatever you’re putting in is proportional to what you get out.

In the real world, this is obvious. You won’t put money into an account without a return of some sort. Sometimes the reward is deferred – where it comes later on. School is like that in where the paper is most often worth more than the class.

Gaming is different since it’s abstracted from the real world. Our values take on different meanings because a) we are anonymous and b) that anonymity allows us to do things differently with minimal consequences.

Games also have a reward structure built over a time element. You need a consistent feeling of reward (progress) to keep moving forward. At some point though, that timer gets either too long or the rewards too poor to keep investing time. At that point people quit.
Some stay, granted, but typically chase another goal – say pet collection or social bonds and proxy rewards. The idea of “making people happy, makes me happy” fits well in this model. But, as most players have found, this player is a rare commodity.

I won’t say this wraps up the analysis of fun/time/challenge/reward but over the last few posts I think I’ve covered a lot of the fundamentals. People will invest time (or money) to do something to get a reward. That something must have value and the reward has to be proportional to the effort or it has no value.

I’m writing this like it was obvious and for most, it is. How to code obvious things is where the challenge lies

Determination vs Deterrence

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Back in the UO and EQ days, you needed to be determined to succeed. Death was extremely painful. You could lose hours of progress or even your entire house! Death was seen as a deterrent for many types of gameplay other than the one prescribed by the developers.

Flash forward to early Wow and the worst part of death was a 20 minute corpse run through STV. Nowdays, any game that puts you more than 20secs away from your corpse is considered hardcore.

GW2 is my current flavor and it treats death lightly. It really isn’t a deterrent in terms of penalty or time. What it does do is kill you all the time for little valid reason.

See, I like to get better. In the majority of games, I tend to float above average. I get meta gaming and theorycrafting. Heck, I write guides for games. GW2 is different.

You can die all the time due to level scaling. You can die to poor spawns, you can die to guys behind rocks, you can die because of aggro radii being inconsistent, you can die because of sparkles that don’t correspond to an attack but do to damage.

My elementalist cannot get better. He has the best gear, all his skills, all the passive traits that I think are of value and enough knowledge of the class to understand skill synergy. But I die a lot. I’d say 1 in 10 fights puts me in rally mode and half of those I die. Most of the time it’s me being victim of poor spawning in an empty zone. And it gets worse the higher in level I get.

It gives the impression than I’m getting weaker as I grow, which is not a fun feeling to have.

More or Less Time

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There’s a concept in gaming called time to kill, or TTK.  This number starts off at a baseline and usually gets smaller the stronger you get.  Makes sense, you swing harder, shoot faster and all that.  Designers increase the challenge by either increasing the number of enemies, changing tactics or simply buffing the enemy hit point pool to no longer be linear.

D&D is the perfect model for this.  Baldur’s Gate kinda pushed this to the limit where you could die to 3 wolves if you were too low a level but get 1-2 levels above them and they didn’t even matter anymore.  4th edition moved away from simply throwing the kitchen sink at you in terms of numbers and instead added challenge with stronger enemies.  Still, a level 20 character is practically a god and that makes it a real challenge for a DM to put an enemy that makes it hard for characters to progress since you need to make your own god.

MMOs have a disconnect here between the leveling game, the grouping game and the end game (or raiding).  As you level, it can be argued that your power increases and TTK drops drastically.  TTK in WoW is 2 or 3 attacks after level 50.  Expansion packs have to reset that TTK though, since there has to be some challenge for players or why bother.  While at the tail end of Cataclysm you could kill 10 enemies in 10 seconds, Mists turned that into 20 seconds.  Group content is similar where when it’s fresh, you are likely to die.  When you are powerful, I’ve seen tanks simply walk up to the bosses and ignore everything else in the zone.

Now we get to what is considered acceptable TTK.  I think WoW is a bit low for my tastes, at least in the single player game.  There’s no strategy, just 2-3 buttons.  The Secret World is way too high (cue meme) at 30 seconds or so.  Fights become annoyances where there’s just a meat wall with no impact on strategy.  I like the SWTOR model, GW2 to some degree, where you get to use 5 or so skills and get a rhythm going, or at least an understanding of class mechanics.

There’s some comfort in knowing that I have control over TTK and that if that number fluctuates, I can improve my play to address it.  If random buttons have the same impact as smart button presses, then I just zone out.

Linear Progression

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I’m rather fond of GW2’s linear level progression. Each level is more or less as long to complete as the other. Makes for a smooth ride and set expectations. Compared to Rift’s absolute massive timesink from 51-60, it feels great!

The downside is the concept of power progression. You unlock pretty much everything by level 5, then wait until 80 for a few tweaks. It’s better than Wow where you go 10 levels and then have to learn a new playstyle but the forward goal building is intangible.

I’m curious as to how TESO and Wildstar address this core component. Either the stretch the content to fit the timeframe (how many orcs can you kill before your eyes bleed) or they make all content relevant at all levels (ala GW2)

It’s interesting how much that design decisions impacts my playstyle.

Fun is Measured in Time

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There are a few posts going around lately that argue the financial around F2P and the concept of bypassing challenge – or rather quickening your way to reward.

The core concept here is the old addage that time equals money. The modification I would bring is the “fun” variable to time. If I did something I found a lot of fun I would pay extra for it.

If the value is intrinsic, that is the journey is the prize, then either money or time is a justifiable payment.  If the value is extrinsic, that is the prize at the end of said journey and that journey wasn’t fun, I’d be more likely to spend money.

The reason for this in my mind is that I make a lot (if not all) of my money working. I know exactly what an hour of my time is worth. It’s easy for me to figure out if doing something boring is worth 5$ for a month or not. The answer is quite often a no.  For example, the Sparkle Pony back in the day caused some uproar.  This was in the days where you didn’t share mounts and it was a hassle to get new ones.  Not in terms of gold so much as time.  Buying it gave a ground and flying mount for every character, on every server.  In effect, it allowed you to bypass a boring part of the game for a fee.  Hence the millions sold.  Whether you want to argue poor design in the first place to make that bypass worthwhile, is a different matter.

Where it gets complex is in the mix between intrinsic and extrinsic reward structures. You can only kill bosses for so long before they no longer have intrinsic value. If you’re also not socially driven – say a guild or friends – then there’s even less value after a few runs.  Using WoW again, you could run LFR for 2 weeks, see every boss, likely upgrade half your items and be done with it.

It really is a systematic problem with themeparks as a whole.  If you’re only concentrating on the end of the road, rather than the journey, then there’s no way that can keep you coming back.  If you enjoy the ride, then you can have fun so long as that lasts.  If you play the same content for hundreds of hours, it takes amazing design to keep that relatively fresh.

Where F2P shines is in setting up a smooth, repeatable game with items that provide intrinsic worth. The most common example is with consumable customization options – like dyes.  Another example is services for alts.  It’s a very complex balancing act to maintain and few developers do it well.  Too many people are copying successful games without properly understanding why they are successful.

It’s really simple.  Get a fresh player, have them play until they think an hour is up.  If they are below that when they finish, you have a problem.  If they are above it, then you have a damn good game.

Addendum

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Time is short and work is crazy busy making for nights that end quickly.  A few more detailed posts are being worked on but in the meantime I wanted to add a bit to the previous posts.

First though, I wanted to dwell a bit on D3 itemization.  That horse isn’t dead yet!

Diablo ItemizationThe above shows a fairly good roll against a fairly bad roll.  Look at the estimated DPS loss (character runs at 102K DPS) from a weapon.  That’s a 96% difference in damage from one item.  Take that horse!

 

Second item is the defense of subscription.  Gaffney posted some stuff defending WildStar’s decision while Jack Emmert will talk about the opposite in a few weeks.  These are both people with significant experience in the field.  Both have seen F2P on their games (Gaffney was with Turbine and NCSoft) and have seen subscriptions as well.

Perhaps we’re at a point in the hype cycle that subscriptions can become niche again and that the MMO tourist avoids it due to the massive F2P options out there but WildStar doesn’t seem to be aiming for niche.  TESO certainly isn’t.

In regards to the PLEX variant WildStar is aiming for, that only works in a closed and extremely well developed economic system.  It works in EvE because everything is player created, everything required sweat equity and everything is relevant, even at max level.  Taking a cue from any themepark, even the recent GW2, economies from start to max level-1 are completely irrelevant 1 month after launch.  I “beat” WoW’s auction house, making a few million along the way – PLEX would have failed hard in that market. This isn’t apples and oranges.  This is apples and nuclear missiles.

 

In Defense of Subscriptions

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I like Gamasutra, there are some solid articles about the business side of the industry. Ramin and Isaac are on my reading list not so much because I agree with them but because they expose a side that we rarely see.

Ramin is more of an internal systems designer with strength in economic systems – auction house, crafting and so on. I am guessing he’s working on one of the two Big MMOS coming around the bend.  Isaac is a service guy, looking more to the economic systems outside the game – support models, client interactions and whatnot.  Both of their fields intertwine but I consider the above their specialties.

Isaac’s latest post attempts to support the subscription model along 3 main issues. First, subscriptions push people to get value for money by rushing content. Second, development of said content needs to follow and be of quality. Third, companies cannot price discriminate as everyone has the same fee.

While conceptually I think he has some strong arguments I think there are some flaws and realities that are unaccounted. Let’s say his baseline is accurate for playerbase – 30 to 40, kids, working, no huge time available. Yes they sink less time but they are hyper-aware of dollar per smile economics. Subscriptions drop when similar services are available for less cost, that’s why F2P works.  The math is simple enough.  I have X dollars to spend per month, where can I get value for that money?

Two, content delivery must meet player expectations in terms of volume and quality. Iceberg Blizzard has paid massively for their schedule. SWTOR’s 4th pillar destroyed their ability to quickly iterate and expand (voice acting).  This bleeds a bit into the first topic.  2 months after launch, the content that was there was consumed at a rate far exceeding expectations and what was left lacked value for money.

Three, price discrimination is a red herring. All games have internal metrics to see what is consumed and for how long. WoW saw that their moneysink – raids – were only hitting 1% of the userbase in Cataclysm. That brought us LFR, and now Flex Raids. DDO only offers what sells, same with NeverWinter. Companies know exactly how to nickle and dime. There is no other reason for lockboxes.

Are subscriptions bad? No, they provide a baseline income that investors can see and development can project. They are however, an easily accounted for expense for players to compare to other games. The argument simply becomes “can I spend 15$ or less in another game for the same or more fun?”. The answer, today, is a yes and that bodes extremely poorly for Wildstar and TESO.  They must “out content” all other MMOs (not really seeing this as possible), provide an iterative schedule faster than what is offered by competition (everyone is better than WoW, few are better than Rift) and somehow target their material/pricing to bring in the most dollars/effort possible – without existing metrics.  One heck of a tough road.

Holy Bangarade

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10 weeks on parental leave and back to work now for 2. It’s annoying when you delegate work and nothing at all got done. Now I have 10 weeks of work to do in a few days. Quality!

Suffice it to say I need a mental breather some nights. Lack of time means minimal investment though, so I’ve been giving F2P games a hit.  No RIFT, GW2, WoW, or any game that I can’t simply drop within 2 minutes.

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot

This one is in open beta and a lot like Dungeon Master and Diablo in that you can set a castle full of traps and run other people’s castles. It has upgrades with timer (where the F2P stuff comes in) which is fine I guess. The gameplay is horribly balanced though where the tanky class can run through anything without batting an eye, even 6-7 levels above them. The other classes have no chance. But it’s beta and the concept is solid. Maybe in a later patch.  The file size is rather small.

Infinite Crisis

I got into the beta, which is beta.  You’re comparing LoL to a game with an admittedly limited character roster.  You might have 4 flavors of Batman but it’s still Batman.  There are technical bugs, some serious balancing issues but overall the game is pretty solid.  Community management is going to be the real kicker here.  Current playerbase is nice enough, since it’s test.  But once you get the crud coming in, there needs to be a way to filter that out.  The learning curve is extremely high but that’s expected in beta.  Oh, and it needs way more maps.

Dragon’s Crown

I don’t play a lot of console games, only when I’m on the bike.  This one is pretty solid, with a link back to the arcade D&D games.  Is it worth 60$ though?  No.  Maybe once it hits 30$.

Marvel Heroes

A new patch (1.2) fixed the defensive skills, added a ton of itemization and huge balance changes. This is what the game should have launched with. It even has 3 difficulties making the trek from 25 to 60 different than running the same zone for 20 hours. The itemization and skills are the polar opposite of Diablo3, which is good.

Diablo3

Just a few days in, tried a new Monk build. Cost me about 25 million in gear to make it work due to the way itemization works in game. And this isn’t even for hard stuff, just regular Inferno. What’s the point of upgrading gear if you need to swap nearly all of it to change builds? Maybe 1-2 pieces but not 10.

And of course the AH is going away in 6 months – likely the launch date for the expansion. It annoys me that Loot 2.0, which is what the consoles got, has been getting great reviews but the gamer base has to wait so damn long for it. Anyways, the AH simply focused on Jay Wilson’s poor direction for multiple systems. A loot system that dropped inferior gear even at high difficulty, itemization that drove stats to absurd levels to even compete, the requirement for “perfect” rolls for the item to have any possible value and a difficulty setting that made no sense. All of those systems by the way, have been or will be removed.  The game today is wildly different than launch and the console version is yet another massive leap forward.

Listen, the AH was a good concept to avoid gold farming and scamming. If I knew I could get upgrades while playing (I have never once with my monk past 60), then the AH would just be a slight nudge. When I can see that a single item on the AH can raise my damage by 10% and costs 20 minutes of gold farming time, there is a massive problem in the loot system.  Shutting down the AH is one thing, shutting down the RMAH is another, as that thing certainly brought in a sizeable amount of income.  It takes some pretty large brass to through that away – baby and bathwater.

Summer Is Here

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Summer is here and that means sun and fun.  I’m lucky enough to have the summer off, of sorts.  Actually, it’s parental leave with 2 young kids.  Depending on the day, it can be seen as better or worse than vacation.  Topics today are my break, XBOX and GOG.

Me

Last week was at the cottage and for my birthday, my eldest daughter and I went fishing.  Lucky me, I caught a 40 inch pike.  As big as my 3 year old.

I’ve mentioned in the past that a true MMO has fishing and until then they are just pretending. I caught this bugger turning a corner, about 200 feet from the dock.  Took 10 minutes to haul in and the net I had was a tad too small.  Took pictures and sent it back on its way.  Won’t ever forget that day.

XBOX

Back in town now and back to the news.  Don Mattrick has left XBOX and moved to Zynga. Love or hate the guy, he built the XBOX to what it is today.  Hard-ass to the end, it seems the only ones with success in the big industry are like that.  Enough that when news hit that he had moved, Zynga shares suddenly became a “BUY”.  I don’t see how anyone will be able to properly replace him now.  That has a lot to say about the 180 Microsoft has had to pull lately, and now two top execs are gone because of “always on”.

GOG

Good Ol’ Games is having their summer sale.  This is the start of the end for me as I love their selection.  STEAM has more recent titles but jeebers if you can’t find excellent quality on GOG.  No DRM and for $60, you can get 20 absolutely amazing games that will give you thousands of hours of play.  Steam is going to break me in a few weeks, I know…