I played most of WoW Vanilla and the start of TBC before taking a break.  I clearly remember coming back and being so far behind the attunement curve, that raiding in WoW was pretty much done for me (at least until LFR gave me easy mode).  Sure, each expansion had the allure of a new set of raids (or recycled ones like in LK) but after being OUT of it, there was little motivation to get back into it.  RIFT was pretty similar, where a summer vacation for a few weeks broke the raiding guild into two pieces that never recovered.  Since that point, my will to raid has been pretty darn low.

The exception to this rule is FF14.  Raids (that have no trash I should add) are part of the leveling process and 8 to 16 players in size.  Sure, it’s LFR, but the challenge is there for all of them, unless you greatly outgear it.  I know I’ve wiped more on those raids than in all the dungeons combined.  Once I hit level 70, I’d queue up for the various daily roulette options, including the raids.  I enjoyed it a lot, made friends and joined a guild.

Ok, quick aside for a minute.  One of my favorite all-time games is Shadow of the Colossus.  I remember reading about it well before it was released and people were clamoring that an “all boss” game couldn’t work.  Well… suck eggs, it worked wonders.  The game was structured without loot drops (aside from bosses) so if it did have trash, it would be meaningless aside from time padding.  FF14’s raid structure is pretty darn close to the same – have engaging bosses, get rid of the rest.  Food for thought.

Back on topic.  FF14’s raids are accessible.  WoW’s were not, but then there weren’t exactly 100 games to choose from before LK came out.  Wildstar’s were not at launch (or ESO’s version but only due to veteran levels).  There’s a solid difference between making something accessible, and then making something engaging.

Diablo 3’s seasons are a pretty darn good example.  The Story Mode was required for each new season, up until Season 4.  Story Mode is fine and dandy, but it has half the loot of adventure mode and takes 5x as long.  Plus, after having done it a bajillion times, you’ve kind of proven capable no?  This gets into the whole character/player debate, where having to unlock more stuff on a separate character is mostly padding.

I get it, battle scars and all that jazz.  But the accessibility door for end-game content is measured in two distinct elements, which are related but not equal – time and stats.  Time is padding.  You need it, otherwise the game takes 4 hours to complete.  It’s not a measure of skill, it’s a measure of patience.  Daily quests, rep grinds and attunements on trivial content are all time-based.  Stats are just plain gear checks.  With enough skill/experience, you can often speed up the gear check process.

The first time through, people are willing to suck up the time portion and lack of experience makes the stat portion take a while.  The second time through the time portion is annoying, and the stat portion can be overcome more quickly.  I’m certainly not expecting an alt to be as powerful as a main without any investment but at the same token, the time padding needs to be drastically reduced.  WoW tried to address this in MoP with the rep tokens, that nearly doubled the reputation gained for all characters after you had maxed out one.  SWTOR’s legacy system provides similar perks for alts.  FF14 bypasses it altogether since you only have 1 character.

This is a long stretch analogy but let’s say you’re a manager at a sales company.  15 years of experience, lots of contacts and a solid knowledge of the business.  Layoffs come around and you need to find a new job (assuming jobs are to be found).  You’re not expected to be doing entry level work, having to put in another 15 years to get back to where you were.  There’s a learning curve for sure, but that should be relatively quick compared to what you went through before.

The more people have access to do, the more they will end up trying those piles of things.  Putting in artificial gates, especially ones that impede 80-90% of the playstyles (since every extra class is a playstyle) just seems like a weird position to me.  An alt-friendly game is quite clearly a long-term game.  It’s evidently the future…just depends on who decides to get on the train before getting hit by it.

For an MMO to survive, it needs stickiness – at least if they plan on getting people to continue to pay on a monthly (or just use the cash stop).  Destiny, D3, CoD aren’t really MMOs due to the lack of the word massive, but more so because their financial model is box-based.  FPS types in particular, launch a new version every year or two.  MMOs, the more generic kind, last for years.

Stickiness is important because it keeps people playing, it keeps the world alive.  It’s more than just a user base. As most MMOs have a leveling phase, even a high amount of players that played sporadically and left would cause a serious issue since there’d be less and less people as you leveled up.  Players need to play, and then keep playing for extended periods of time.  It’s been noted in quite a few places that people are what keep other people logging in.  If it wasn’t for guilds in WoW, it would be fair to say that a significant chunk of their users would have left a long time ago.  People need something to do when they log in, and someone to do it with.

A couple years ago (pretty much to the day) I wrote a series of posts about social economies (1, 2, 3 & 4).  In terms of timing, this was during FF14’s relaunch, a year after SWTOR’s conversion and during the “hype” phase of Wildstar and ESO.  Looking back at it, it’s almost a wish list for what I was expecting in both of those games and truth be told, I was generally disappointed.

Say what you will about the leveling portion of a game, the truth of the matter is that the mechanics either work or do not work.  Most people get a darn good feeling for a game in the first hour.  From that point until the “end game”, it’s the social aspect that keeps people playing.  Sure, there’s always the solo-minded player, but even they need to see other people playing the game around them.  But group-based activities have a massive impact on retention.  During the leveling portion it gets quite complicated mind you – travel time and level disparity the 2 main issues.  Mentoring/level sync is a key solution to address this, though only a few games support it.  Group teleports are also quite useful, though to avoid abuse they typically need long cooldowns.  While simple in concept, the mentoring portion can be quite complex to implement, still… it pays off exponentially later on.  FF14 learned this lesson well in v1, and made massive strides in progress with ARR.  There is group content everywhere while leveling, level syncs are included and group teleports are simple.

Once you reach end-game, then the real challenge of long-term gaming takes place.  Progress moves from “do anything and you get experience” to “do this small subset of activities to get gear”.  Both have the same result, more numbers, but one is a heck of a lot more complicated to balance.  The content needs to be accessible and engaging.  For every hurdle that’s put in front of content, a game loses players.  This isn’t a bad thing, as that hurdle is certainly a motivator ion terms of challenge to the player base.  It’s just balancing how many hurdles you put in to see the players using the content drop in line.

For example, ESO at launch had veteran levels.  You reached the max for your faction, then needed to do both of the other faction’s quest lines to reach the true end game.  It was pure padding and a massive hurdle for the player base.  People just abandoned the game completely at that point, since it opened up the same issues mentioned above about the leveling portion of the game – level disparity and travel time.  ESO didn’t have guilds as seen in other games either, it was simply a chat channel.  So the sticky glue keeping people together was pretty weak.

Wildstar at launch had veteran dungeons, adventures and raids for max level players.  Each was a solid content piece on its own.  Unfortunately, in order to move from one tier to the next, the attunement hurdle was present – requiring gold medals.  One small mistake and the gold medal was gone, and so was the group.  I personally ran dungeons with the guild and it was fun if you weren’t chasing a medal.  Sadly, if the guild wasn’t around, random groups were next to impossible to complete.  Without the ability to be social outside the guild, people left in droves.  It took a while but the devs updates the content to provide more solo/group options at 50, but also to drastically reduce the attunement requirements, making random groups much more viable.  Before the F2P conversion though, there were simply not enough people playing to get into a random group, making populations stagnant/decline.  It had a pretty solid guild structure, but without accessible content, people just didn’t have anything to do but chat.  And without “roots” in the game, people moved on.

WoW’s recent expansion went full-out on making content accessible, with the tiniest of hurdles.  I ran a test with my Druid and was able to level from 91 to 100, and complete LFR without leaving my garrison (aside to collect more building plans).  There was no incentive to be social and with the fast-food mentality of content, it was far from engaging.  Losing half the subscribers(!!) is a pretty solid sign in itself that the social glue keeping that game going has almost dried up.

Designing stickiness is hard work.  Looking at one item alone isn’t enough; it’s the sum of all the parts.  A game could have great dungeons but no group-finder.  It could have superb guild tools but nothing for the guild to actually do.  Beta testing, heat maps, analytics…those all indicate what is working and what isn’t.  It takes a really good dev team to plan that ahead of time and an even better team to make the changes after the game has launched.  It’s good that both ESO and Wildstar have made some large strides to address their core issues from launch.  Fingers crossed that the next MMO out the game applies all these lessons before launching, and saves themselves a ton of headaches.

My wife plays ball hockey, I play ice hockey.  She plays in a rec league, I play in men’s competitive and one group for pickup.  She’s adamant that the nicest man on the planet turns into an ape once you put a hockey stick in their hands.  I am not one to disagree.

The concept of competiveness for me is deeply associated with scope.  Rec/pickup is meant to just have fun and socialize.  At the end of the game, you’re going to see the opponents and have a beer with them.  It doesn’t make sense to take a whack at their knees.  Sometimes the blood boils, I get it, but it still strikes me as odd.  I know personally I tend to laugh the entire game, though there are certainly bouts of open frustration when you hit a string of bad luck.

Competitive though, that’s a different ball game.  You don’t usually have a beer with the opponents, so there’s certainly some bad blood that brews between both sides, usually just a couple players though.  The expectations are different as well.  It’s not so much about winning, because you can’t win them all.  It is however about trying.

I play on 3 teams, one of which has a much lower skill average than the others.  Well, to a degree I suppose.  The team itself is in a division of equally skilled players, so at the end it often turns into a meetup of mistakes.  Players who put effort, regardless of their skill set, build some level of confidence and improve – those that coast are really just spectators in the game.  That part really grinds my gears something fierce.

Skill is an interesting topic, if I can take a small tangent.  I remember a study where chess masters were presented a board for a few seconds and then it was hidden.  They then were able to replicate the board, piece for piece, without fail.  They did this because these were boards of actual games, where strategies were applied.  They tried again with boards that were setup by kids who didn’t know any of the rules, and few of the masters were able to copy the boards.  The lack of skill/understanding removed all patterns from the game.   Sports are a lot like this.  There is a certain pattern to a well-played game, and you can see this in most professional sports.  No look passes are a great example.  People just know where to be.  When you remove skill from that equation…the patterns go away.  It makes for rough going sometimes.

Greater Rifts

Following a bit on the theme of patterns, at higher GR levels, there are specific movement & skill patterns that need to be applied.  You can just go Rambo at the lower levels and bulldoze your way through but on the higher tiers, you’re going to suck floor.

The WD has an interesting pattern in GRs compared to Monks.  Depending on the gear set, you have more or less control of what’s going on.  Getting large packs together is harder, as your movement skills are a fair bit limited.  Using mimics (Grin Reaper) further complicates this, as they randomly cast their spells.  I understand the basic elements but the complex movements are still a learning process.  When to use the Wall, when and where to use Bears, when to use Haunt.  It’s all a neat little dance.  When it works out, you feel rewarded.  When it doesn’t, you feel cheated or pretty dumb.

The Monk on the other hand…you just flit around the screen massing up big piles of enemies.  You snapshot a decent EP, then learn to spread it in the group.  There’s more circling involved, a lot of quick jabs to keep the buffs up, but the actual skill use is simple.  Press SSS and things blow up.  I mean it sounds simple, and on paper it is, but in practice you need to get the timing down.

I like the challenge greater rifts apply here.  There’s more granular control on the difficulty than simply jumping up Torment levels and a much higher skill cap.  I think GR82 is the current record for group play, which would put it somewhere near uh, T 15 I guess?  I know that at GR60 a regular enemy has over triple the health of a guardian in a TX rift.  So finding the pattern of the class you’re playing is as important, if not more than the actual stats on your gear.  It’s a neat balancing act.

Wildstar

Still a huge queue, though I was able to log into my housing plot for 5 minutes before bed.  UI is the same as before, with a small (very small) item shop button.  Need to play through some more, fingers crossed it works tonight!