Category Archives: Games

Interjection – SWTOR

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Ok, a quickie here.  Rise of the Hutt Cartel is $19.99 if you buy it outright as a non-subscriber.  As a subscriber, at $14 a month, you get it for free.  Plus a stupid amount of perks.  If you cancel, then you still keep the expansion.

Oh, and if you were a subscriber and bought it before August 11th, you get a title.  So $10 for early access I guess.

$5 isn’t a lot of money but it’s 25% of the purchase price.  On the aggregate, BioWare is either hoping people are incapable of doing math or are really hoping people subscribe and stay subscribed for some odd reason.

It’s things like this where you scratch your head and wonder what exactly the developer is trying to accomplish.  Maybe that explains the new expansion (or massive patch) process.

Social Economies – Part 2

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In the previous post, I covered the definition of social economies in terms of gaming and hopefully provided some framing to the concept.  This post is going to cover the history of social economies to provide some better context as to how we got to where we are.

Believe it or not but humans require social interaction.  100 years ago, your social framework was the village.  50 years ago it was what you could phone and maybe drive to within a few hours.  20 years ago it was what you could fly to.  The Internet really only took off 15 years ago and that was through dial-up.  Broadband internet is still not common for everyone.  The ability to contact other people, over extreme distances, is really only standard for people under the age of 1.  Anyone older than that, you will have spent the majority of your social time in face to face or phone conversations.

Today, nearly everyone has easy access to some form of internet, a smart phone and free web services to keep in contact with others.  Just 7 years ago, that wasn’t the case.

I want to stress the following fact that many people seem to forget.  Facebook, arguably the largest single impact on social economies, launched to the public in 2006.  It turned a profit in 2009.  We are pretty much only 5 years into the “social media” phase.  Anything before this time was considered niche and geeky.  I consider this the watershed moment for social economies.

So back to basics.  Before MMOs we had D&D and tabletop games (like Warhammer).  These were competitive games certainly, but operated with a set of rules rather than a pre-defined path.  There was no “one right way” to run an Orc army.  This meant that strategies and discussion occurred between the players and that the actually gameplay was secondary to the social interactions.  I didn’t play D&D with strangers just to get a D&D fix.  I played with friends.

MUDs came about and for the most part were based on D&D structure, minus the grouping aspect.  They were glorified chatrooms really – like IRC in the day.  Ultima Online was the first (not really, Meridian 59 was there before) game to provide a fully interactive game with social elements.  Launched in 1997, these were the dial-up days.  A lot stunk about the game but there was freedom, lots of freedom.  Social boundaries were established quickly – PvP clans, villages, mentors, dungeon runs.  You could play alone but again since there was not destined path, people naturally got together to try new things.

Remember ICQ, MSN & AIM?  That was the Facebook of the day.  Ventrilo, Mumble and Skype all came later.  General chat channels didn’t exist until EQ.  PHPBB was making thousands on guild websites.  If you wanted to talk to someone, you did it on the web, not in-game.  This also meant that the social bonds you made were available in other games and at times where you were not playing at all.  You didn’t need to play EQ to keep in touch with your UO friends.

If you look back before 2006, contact with people not in physical proximity was technically challenging: you needed hard to find quality internet, a desktop application (or website forum), non-game related contact information and good typing skills.  This “barrier to entry” meant that those who were in the game, wanted to be in the game and had a vested interest.  They wanted to participate in the social economy of the day and made the non-negligible effort to get there.  Up until 2006, there was common ground to build on.

Social Economies

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Oh boy, what a simple title for what would fill books in content! First a definition. Social economies are those that are based on intrinsic values, i.e. of no physical value. A hug, a smile, but not a sword or a house.  They can however be composed of extrinsic items, in part, such as a village.

MMOS succeed or die on social economies. Otherwise, they are just large group single player games. Like Diablo3. A true MMO rewards you for making relationships and sustaining them. It’s the reason you log in, more than the shiny object on the corpse.

Outside of MMOS this is how social circles work. You are a part of a greater whole. You give time/affection for the promise of some in return at a later date. What else explains helping to move a friend in the pooring rain?

Take a step back to Ultima Online. Arguably designed with little foresight into the masses, it provided a basic toolset for social economies. Extrinsic value was so sparse, essentially only the house was a stable investment, that people used the tools to build more than the sum of parts. Entire villages sprung up with dedicated causes. There was one that had hundreds of books written by other players. Another was a rune set for practically every screen in the game.

EQ1 kept that up with an artificial group requirement wall. If you wanted to progress you needed a social group. I spent a lot of time in Guk with no experience gain to help guildies. Horizons (remember that one?) was all about this and had next to nothing to do otherwise. Sort of an odd Second Life I guess.

Wow changed this model drastically and more and more so every patch. Today you can do evertying in the game with no social investment (save minor parts). When you’ve had your fill of the trough, there’s no need to log in, making for empty guilds and empty servers. They tried to fix it but guild levels, achievements and transmog suits are a poor replacement for friends.

This is a hurdle next to no game has been able to overcome, en-masse. And that’ll be the topic of the next post.

A Turtle, a Hydra and a Bird Walk Into a Bar

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I think I might have found the most unique post heading ever.

The thought process behind raid bosses intrigues me. Do you design the encounter around the boss or the boss around the encounter? Is it “hey, let’s make them dance! Maybe the boss will be a transforming radio!” (p.s. Please do this).

Maybe it’s more like a D&D game where a dice is rolled and they look up their ability table. This one gets an AE cleave, a shield, a chain attack, and what the heck, random invulnerable minions.

How do you make memorable bosses with recycles mechanics? SWTOR’s recent raid has a boss that has a future/past mode which sounds cool. It’s better than the previous round’s mash of DPS races. I like bosses and challenges. Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls are solid examples of tough yet rewarding experiences. I can do 6-10 of those bosses. Wow, if my math is right, has about 400 bosses. I’m talking Stockade, C’thun, Lurker, Mimiron and the like. Just the variables to make that seem somewhat unique are impressive.

I do like Neverwinter (and apparently Wildstar) approach to bosses, what with a more action-oriented approach. There are still bosses in Wow today where you never have to move an inch. I think the concept of “more than just numbers” is going to be the way forward. Think the challenge through. Brute force can work too but the smarter move should be the better one.

Less Is Better

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While LOTRO has been off my playlist for a while, I still like to keep an eye on their game. I mean, the $50 hobby horse fiasco was super entertaining, while at the same time mind boggling in its stupidity.

The next major patch/expansion (is there a difference in F2P?) is planning to re-write a lot of the skills and provide a new “alternate path” of advancement, with what looks like a semi-talent tree. The latter I get, in that it slots you to a role within a class. There’s about 500 games that do this. The re-write of skills though, that’s ballsy.

There’s a Dev diary that covers the reasons. They are very good reasons and one that pretty much every MMO has to deal with at some point in the lifecycle. There’s a saying of “addition through attrition” which means you actually gain from removing something. An MMO that just adds more and more skills but never cleans up the existing stuff has a bloat problem. SWTOR, for some odd reason, launched with skill bloat. Hunters in Wow and Warlocks before MoP are good examples too.

I like Neverwinter’s approach to this. GW2’s a bit less But it serves a similar purpose. Basically, you have a limited amount of active abilities at any given time. If you want to heal, then you drop another skill. As a developer you can still increase skill quantity but your players apply attrition for you. It becomes extremely clear, extremely quickly where you have balance issues.

If MMOs launching tomorrow put in skill caps, I think that would be a step in the right direction. Maybe have role slots with pre-configured skills to make the UI a bit easier. NW is action-based, so a low limit works. Something more typical of themepark-wow should have 8 for active. Stuff that wasn’t active (mounts, professions, pets, etc…) could be handled elsewhere.

Less options means a simpler interface for new players yet at the same time, more creative management for the elite players.

Do What I Think, Not What I Say

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I was in a meeting today and someone said “they are only doing what we told them to do, not what we wanted them to do” and I thought that was a great summary of computers and games as a whole.  I remember in my early programming days getting frustrated with some section of code that just wouldn’t work.  I’d pour through the lines, trying to find the problem.  It was never a problem with the code but a problem with the coder.  The system only ever did what I explicitly told it to do, not what I wanted it to do.  For every keystroke the user put in, I had to put in error handling to prevent a whole bunch of other things from happening too.  QA and bug control is a pain.

Today’s games are more and more complex, with hundreds of options for a player at any given time.  Gone are the EQ days of rigid code and sever limitations on playstyle.  If you were creative, you were called an exploiter.  Today, you can do pretty much anything you want in a game (exemplified by GTA) but with that freedom comes unexpected results.  Burning Crusade in WoW is a good example.  Everyone who raided needed to be a leatherworker for drums.  Guilds stacked shamans for bloodlust/heroism.   Content was tuned for this crowd since anything lower was something around a 15% power gap.  Lich King had to completely redesign the buff system to accommodate and “homogenized” the classes to avoid stacking.  Now it’s about individual player skill less so than actual class mechanics.  In that I mean that a great rogue is going to outshine a poor shaman, where in BC this was rarely the case.

This is more of a problem in themeparks, where the rides have expected outcomes.  In sandboxes, where emergent gameplay is encouraged, balance is less of an issue since the variables are so many.  I mean, you can’t rightfully balance group encounters in EvE so that both sides have an even chance.  You can however be explicit in how the given tools will function in a given circumstance.

In my gaming history I was often called an exploiter because I liked to try different things.  My favorite game was “The Incredible Machine”, which pushed for out of the box thinking.  In EQ, my necro soloed effectively in all sorts of places due to poor pathing.  In UO, I had a tree in my house.  In WoW I corpse-jumped through locked doors and climbed to the airport in Ironforge well before Cataclysm.  BioShock Infinite had quite a few places where I’d set up death traps for large groups and not take a scratch.   The entire concept of “what if I do it this way?” is the reason I still play games today.  I do feel bad for QA though.

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.