Tag Archives: design

Bad Design or Hidden Design

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As you can tell from the majority of my posts, I’m fascinated by game design.  This bleeds over into the real world, where I work in IT architecture.  Both take a systematic approach to a problem and attempt to design an intuitive system that fits into a grand vision.  You won’t be firing spaceships in WoW anytime soon but you might be doing sea battles, as an example.

EA’s design philosophy over the past 5 years has been to milk the crap out of existing IPs and dilute the story elements in favour of mechanical systems.  The systems are core to any multiplayer game, as they need to be balanced.    Dragon Age 1 could never achieve multiplayer balance but sure as heck that’s the goal with DA3.  I’m not a big fan of this plan.  Activision is pretty much in the same boat.

I like the recent indie push, with the lower entrance fee for developers.  This has a side effect of a glut of games coming out, many of them pure garbage. The plus side is that word of mouth on the internets is exponential, so finding a game like FTL (Faster than Light) is easy.  The design philosophy here is simple. The graphics are stylistic choice and the game flow (cohesion) is key.  There’s a solid reason people think Borderlands 2 is up for Game of the Year and Halo 4, COD and BF aren’t on any short list I’ve heard about.  FPS games are shells of what they once were.

Back to the MMO world and to WoW in particular.  In the next content patch (5.1, which has been talked about for a month…who knows when we’ll actually see it) they are releasing a PvE content box called the Brawler’s Guild.  You queue up, get thrown into a ring and have to defeat an enemy, 1v1.  Test realm doesn’t give any tangible rewards, other than achievements.  Still, the concept is really damn cool.  Sort of like Pet Battles but for people instead.  Here’s the catch.  Queues are physical rather than logical.  If there are 25 people in the zone, then there is a 25 person queue.  LFD/LFR/Scenarios don’t care about that part but the Brawler’s do.

So let’s say you design a new PvE box of content.  Nearly everything you’ve designed from that point avoids the queue issue either through instancing, phasing, logical grouping or simply by spreading the content around the world.  How would you avoid queues for this?  Physical queues don’t make sense.  Once you hit a specific number of people around you, then the queues become ridiculous.

Next question.  How do people get access to this content?  Everything is gated right now, either by level, by gear, by exploration or by gold investment (mounts and pets).  Apparently, you put it on the Black Market Auction House so people can bid on entry and you set the limit per day to 10 invites.  This sort of works like a massive gold sink for a server, maybe dropping 1 million gold per day.  Then you have the people who are invited give out 10 invitations each, and those can give 10 as well.  This is called exponential growth.  100 the first day, 1100 the second day, 11100 on the third – assuming everyone uses up their invites.

Combine those two together now.  The first day, you have 100 people lined up, so queues for sure.  The second day, jeebus.  By the third, might as well give up.  Clearly there is missing something in this story.

Monks, Schmunks

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I played a Rogue in WoW for 6 years.  I had alts but the Rogue was it.  When Cataclysm came out, I started playing with a Shaman for kicks.  He had been there since BC and was sitting at level 5 for something like 4 years.  Got him to 85, played some dailies and dungeons.  He was a ton of fun because he gave me not only the option to range DPS but also heal.  After a few weeks of this, it was clear that melee DPS has some serious design issues.  Its sole advantage is the passive DPS you get simply by auto-attacking.  If you’re not in range, you aren’t dealing damage.  Ranged attackers are just a better fit.

Panda-land came out and I played my Shaman.  Well, the ranged limitations are obvious now.  I can get hit and it hurts.  A level later, I decided to try a monk out.  90 levels later, here I am enjoying it.  The mobility gives you some advantages of the ranged attacker while the attacks give the melee damage advantages.   Still, there are some concerns.

The Brewmaster spec makes sense but plays awkwardly.  Nothing is ever 100% and you always feel like it’s an uphill climb to find balance between keeping all your buffs up.  You practically need a mod to keep track of them so that you can concentrate on the actual battle.  I also have some serious concerns about scaling with gear due to the Stagger mechanic.  Mastery is currently a horrible stat (for all Monks) but especially so for Brewmasters when you aren’t gaining a direct stat, instead the chance to defer a % of damage to another time.  If I dodge 1% of attacks, I’m taking 1% less damage.  If I Stagger 1% more damage, I’m still taking the damage.

The Wind Walker is the DPS spec.  You can play this as a set it and forget it spec and run out of Energy constantly or really get into it and try to pace the fight.  The first is way more fun but about 20% less effective than the latter.  The next patch is addressing some concerns (Tiger Palm stacks for one).  The mastery system here gives you a free cast of one of 2 skills.  The first is crappy (Tiger Palm) but the second is good.  Mastery gives half the bonus though, since your chance is evenly split between both abilities and really, only impacts Energy regeneration.   Haste solves that problem for you, directly.

The Mistweaver is the healer, using a completely different gear setup (INT). Gear is a major problem since you level in different gear and quest rewards are determined by your spec at turn in. Trying to fill in the gaps at 90 is annoying.  You can play this in easy mode, using 2 abilities for 95% of combat.  This is eye-bleedingly boring.  You can’t heal from range as you need Chi, which requires a melee attack.  Very strange for a game that has spent 8 years with ranged healers.  The advanced version of the healer is very complicated.  Traditional healers only look at Hit Point boxes in the UI, barely looking at the combat itself.  Monks need to do this AND avoid all the crap going on in melee range.

I don’t hate the monk but it’s quite clear that they are still in the design phase with some serious tweaks needed to keep them competitive.  Blizz has stated that they wanted to avoid the OP Death Knights from Lich King.  To this, they have succeeded.  While I see many Monks levelling, I see very few at max level due to the system complexities.  Maybe we’re looking at the next Rogue/Warlock.

Now What?

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Over the weekend I had a chance to finally jump into some heroic dungeons.  I had been level 90 for a week but I only qualified for Scenarios due to the level of my gear.  A couple drops and quests in Dread Wastes and I was ok to go.

Firstly, Heroics is not the right name.  These are basic level 90 dungeons.  In fact, if you do the dungeons while levelling, you’re likely to have a harder time.  Each one can last 20 minutes up to 45 minutes, with 3-5 bosses.  Each has some weird mechanic and a few are quite gimmicky.  Hopper in the Brewery is a good example; you get swamped continuously with virmen (sort of rats) and need to use a hammer to keep them airborne.

Interestingly, in the 5 or so heroics I ran, I only met one “go go go” person.  I actually mentioned to the group that I thought they were extinct, to might lols. Everyone so far has been quite friendly.  I had a brand new tank in one group.  That was a lot of fun since it was a low pressure situation.  I’m sure I’ll start scraping the bottom of barrel at some point but this lower point of entry seems to also reduce the stress level of other players.

In all the heroics I’ve run so far (maybe 8), I’ve seen 2 upgrades.  So, statistically, I’ve seen 2 upgrades out of a possible ~35 drops – not the best ratio.  This is compounded by the gear variants. As a monk, I only have 2 types – AGI or INT leather.  A paladin though, they use 3; STR, INT and tanking.   At last count, I see 12 gear variants.  Poor design is when you have one gear variant per class.  Like shamans having not only casting mail but healing mail gear.  That means that on any given boss, I have a 1 in 12 chance of seeing an upgrade (or close to it).  Not so motivating if I only wanted gear – especially if you go a run and no one wants anything that drops.

RIFT took a similar path but with a simpler foundation, there are only 7 types needed and since there aren’t “classes” you don’t see gear that no one wants.  I mean, every Cleric uses tanking gear just like they all use casting gear.

Back on topic.  I’m reaching the point I normally come to when playing an MMO, lack of appreciable progress.  Going the dungeon route just leads to the raiding route, an end point I’m not a fan of.  Dailies could be their own topic.  How many times do I have to heal those baby serpents before you clue in that I’m a good guy?  Farming is what you think it is, except for the moving part.  There could have been massive progress towards player housing here.  Scenarios are a run for achievements type of event.  Challenge modes do not interest me.  Pet battles are an interesting side project though.  I think I can stretch this out a couple weeks until Storm Legion comes out.

The Challenge is in Stopping

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Thank goodness we gained an hour over the weekend.  I don’t think I would have woken up today without it.  There’s an old saying that goes something like “you only get good at something once you stop”.  The guys got together to make tourtieres (a french variant on meat pies) for the day and what originally seemed like disaster turned out really well in the last hour.

Games sort of follow this path don’t they?  The last boss is typically such a crazy challenge that you would not have been able to win had you had to face them in the first 5 minutes.  When a game hits that plateau of skill challenge and then drags on the rest of the game at that level can cause burnout.  I’m not talking about the NES days of Contra or Ninja Gaiden either.  They were difficult for other reasons.  Dark Souls is great because the challenge is continuous.  As soon as you clear one obstacle, another presents itself.

MMOs have this built in too – which is one reason PvP tends to make a game last longer.  The challenge is continuous when you are against another person. PvE content is different though.  I like playing a Monk in WoW because there’s a new challenge in learning the class and the new game mechanics.  I hate playing my Rogue in WoW because he’s been the exact same thing since Lich King.  Raids certainly present some challenges but they are often statistical rather than operational.  You either have the DPS/Healing or you do not.  Once they release a raid where your hit points mean nothing and you simply have to wait out the clock on a death ride, then I’ll give it a shot.  Until then, there’s not a whole lot of difference between hitting a post with a pattern than hitting a boss with a pattern.

It’s certainly a conundrum for any MMO today.  How do you add challenge to a genre that has been based on challenges for years?  What’s left in the bag that can make players say “one more time and I got this?”

Dinosaurs on the Dancefloor

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Dancing Dinosaurs

A must-read if I do say so, Wired interviews Peter Moore.

When you take an industry vet and put them in the task of predicting the future, you’re never sure what you’re going to get.  Moore is an interesting gent though, seemingly always on the cusp of pushing something new forward.  He’s the primary reason for EA opting out of Steam and setting up Origin (a profit generator, if not the most efficient path) and has quite the interesting view of the market as whole.  Of note.

It’s going to be a while before we can say, alright, here’s a 15-gig client for free. Although we’re getting there with Star Wars, which is the first change, although that’s an MMO world in which we can micro-transact.
I still think we still have 18 million people who are very willing to buy our FIFA game each iteration, and then I don’t even know what the pass through rate of that game is from used game sales. Ultimately, we don’t get to play in any of that revenue. But I could ultimately put my hand out and say 25 million people right now have experienced FIFA 12. Without a shadow of a doubt.

No disrespect to Zynga, but you don’t want to be so focused on Facebook that you don’t see mobile coming. All of a sudden you’re one platform, you’re so reliant on one company.

“I just didn’t want to pay $15 a month. I felt kind of locked in. I love the game, but I’m locked in,” and for a lot of people 15 bucks a month is a lot of money. So when we looked at the data that was streaming out of it…. It was very clear to us that if we could knock down that initial barrier to entry that is price, that we could blow out the funnel and instead of dealing with several hundred thousand people on a regular basis we could get into millions.

If I said to you for $15 a month you have access to most of that which EA has created over its history and everything that’s new coming in, like a Netflix model coming in, I believe a lot of people would pay for that for 15 bucks.

Quite a few nuggets in that interview.  F2P isn’t a simple switch.  TOR folks left because they didn’t think it was worth 15$ a month (not that 15$ was too much, but that it didn’t justify the cost), an EA streaming service is an option and of course, taking a massive dig at Zynga’s inability to play the big game.

It’s a rare thing to get an honest interview from EA about anything.  Moore somehow manages to hold the corporate line while giving a solid opinion.

Damned If You Do

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Are you considering changing the reputation system?  So many dailies are burning us down from the game.  Tabards back?

When we tried limits, folks said we were playing nanny.  When we tried nothing, folks said they didn’t have anything to do.

Blizzard has an interesting problem at hand.  This quote from Ghostcrawler, has a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” mentality to it and I can empathize to some degree.  When you have nearly 10 million clients, you can’t keep them all happy.  When you integrate disparate systems, you’re going to upset some people.

Excluding Lich King, most of WoW’s trajectory has been aligned with the more hardcore activity crowd.  Tangible goals and rewards.  This makes sense in terms of accomplishment and sense of place – makes a bit less sense from a financial perspective if you want to keep 10 million people playing.  The casuals clearly are the majority in games (even 80% of EvE players have never touched NullSec) and therefore subsidize the activities of the hardcore.  Blizzard’s challenge over the past few years was expanding on that casual market – which is has in terms of player ratios.  Keeping them around is a challenge though, especially when you have quality competition on the market (F2P for one).

So for years the hardcore have had the upper hand in terms of game direction.  This expansion is clearly not aimed at their efforts.  Kung-Fu panda and pets does not scream hardcore.  Yet in order to keep that group occupied, they integrated hardcore activities into casual content.  The best raiders have a “need” – real or artificial – to complete casual content in order to progress on the hardcore front.  A true shoe-on-the-other-foot issue if I’ve ever seen one.

Who do you please?  The casual market who is bringing in the dollars?  The hardcore market which consumes the most and gives you the highest visibility?  I mean, does anyone in their right mind care that the Will of the Emperor is a raid boss MORE than the fact that there are hundreds of pets to collect in-game?  The battlefront seems to have changed and you’re never going to please the masses.

The Failings of /Ignore

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This post brought to you by the musings of Azuriel.

Back in the day, you had 1, maybe 2 characters in an online game.  Worlds were relatively small.  You couldn’t name change at will.  There were process barriers that limited your ability to be a dink online.  If you had a bad rep in EQ, you never grouped again.  If you had a bad rep in UO, you were camped.

Today’s PvE (and some PvP) games have an /ignore ability that essentially blocks all communication between your character and another.  Rarely does this list work at the account level (I can’t think of one off the top of my head).  Really though, if a person is a dink with one mask, they will be a dink with another.

What are the limitations of ignore?

  • only works per character, not account
  • only stops chat
  • it’s personal, no social reprocussions
  • most systems allow name changes, invalidating the ignore

What can be done about it?

  • make ignore block the account.
  • make it so that after X amounts of ignore, you get put in a penalty box.  Limit the chat ability, trade ability, grouping ability
  • make it meta.  LoL has a tribunal for serial trolls.  This system should exist everywhere.
  • ignored players cannot group with you, unless manually done (no LFD, LFR, PvP stuff)

All of this is for the negative side.  We could put in some benefits to being nice in game.

  • You have enough distinct +1 scores, you get a higher rating in the queue (up to a certain cap).
  • At a certain rating, you get mailed costumes for social events.
  • Players at a certain rating can run in-game events with in-game resources (weddings, races, etc…)

The social aspect of gaming has had so many barriers broken down that society can’t manage itself.  While it’s great that I can group with a friend from server X (having only 1 server is another story) is great the problem is the butt-heads from that server are also around.

It’s 2012.  We can do better.  We should do better.

When Wrong Enough is Good Enough

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Storm Legion comes out soon (2 weeks!) and a common question that I see is how Trion is able to balance all the souls.  The answer is simple, they don’t.  Rift has quite a few quirky mechanics that beg to be balanced but aren’t.  It won’t ever be an e-sport or try to (*cough*WoW*cough*).  It won’t have heroic raids.  It doesn’t put an arbitrary line in the sand and say “only the best of the best can do this”.

WoW’s largest flaw is also its largest pull – the generic homogenization of everything.  The outliers who specialize, Rogues and Warlocks namely, are massively shunned by the gaming populace.  I remember reading a population breakdown and with 10 classes, both combined were under 5%.  The generic classes (Druids and Paladins) took over the largest chunk by far.  WoW took the design decision to balance everything and so doing, made everything taste like Vanilla.  WoW gives you two talent sets because that’s enough.  I could give you 6 others, they’d be the same as the first two.

Rift is like the Harry Potter Jelly Beans.  You really don’t know exactly what you’re going to get.  Might be great, might be earwax.  It’s the reason they give you 6 talent builds and a very easy way to swap between them.  I’ve played a Bard with pets.  I’ve done a ranged tank warrior.  I’ve done melee mage (and will formally in the expansion).  I’ve DPS healed (before Monks made it cool).

I love Lego.  So does my daughter.  You can pick and choose what you want to use to build what you want.  Rift almost gets that but being a themepark, comes as close as possible.  It’s the possibility of failure, of spectacular and gut wrenching mistakes that makes the success so much more tasty.  When you can’t fail, you can’t really succeed.

Payment Models

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There’s a lot of talk about payment models lately.  Syncaine clearly has a disdain for the model.  Tobold is taking a development perspective. Rohan sees a systematic divide.  Syp just wants to play without paying.

At the fundamental level, it takes money to run a service.  The actual cost of that is dependent on the technology, people and process and therefore varies greatly from game to game.  We can assume that it costs less to run Rift than it does EvE – for various reasons.  When a game company offers a “free” service, they still have to charge people for something.

Rohan’s breakdown of payment methods strikes a cord with me.  Not all F2P (or sub games) are set up the same way.  Each has a different gating model and revenue generating possibilities.  While WoW is a sub model, the sparkle-pony sale generated somewhere in the region of 30 million dollars.  In such a fashion, you can break down the service offerings for each game.

The debate is less about the payment models and more about the perceived cost/benefit of spending money.  Is 15$ spent on WoW worth more than 15$ spent on Rift?  What would 15$ get me in F2P-TOR?  As I’ve mentioned a few times now, TOR is offering KOTOR3 for free.  Anything to do with the MMO portion is set up behind a pay wall.  This makes sense as the economy is at risk if all of a sudden the barrier to entry is nil.  Someone mentioned that Slicing is a net positive in cash flow.  Imagine setting up 100 accounts to bot slicing.  It would cost you the PC power (minimal) and you’d have a cash generating machine with nothing to stop it.  D3 has this problem, in another sort, but the devs actually take a cut of the cash sales, so they secretly endorse it.

Let’s add a bit of contrast here.  I spend 15$ after a hockey game with the guys having a beer.  I play hockey 2-3 times a week.  I get a cup of coffee every day, well over 15$ a month.  There are plenty of activities that I do that cost way more than 15$ per month and in actual fact, other than my internet access fee, I don’t have a better deal available to me.

From a business perspective, piecing out content makes sense.  You can easily point out where the best bang for the buck is.  People buy a lot of monocles?  Build more.  No one is buying dungeons?  Build less.  What should be free and what should cost money?

From a dev perspective, this segregation of systems adds overall complexity.  You can longer integrate systems as you can’t assume that the player has access.  The XBOX360 launched with an optional hard drive, meaning devs couldn’t assume players could save content.  You need to have a solid understanding of your foundation material.  Anything built on that cannot be dependent on another built component.

From a player perspective, we’re in an age of options.  Being able to pay for the options you want and not for the others is simply the way things will work from now on.  This adds complexities, depending on the division.  What if your friends don’t have the same content you do?  What if the content is packaged in such a way that it isn’t attractive (pay per use model, gambling model)?

This is far from a simple issue, as most bloggers can attest to.  As long as the dev is making money to sustain operations and make some profit for improvements and the players are content, then you can have success.  In the end though, it’s the player’s money and they get to decide where to put it.

 

WoW and Rift Targets, Over Time

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Using the Casual Hardcore argument, let’s take a look at two PvE MMOs:  WoW and Rift.  They are in direct competition with each other as they are both fantasy, themepark, PvE-primary MMOs.  WoW certainly has the massive lead with close to 10x the population levels but also 6+ years of a head start.

WoW Rift Compare

WoW Vanilla was built with old EQ gamers in mind.  They wanted the hardcore activities with a bit of the casual stuff thrown in.  Raids and PvP (other than world PvP) weren’t even in the launch client.  It was ambitious but at the time, they provided the only casual friendly fantasy themepark.  I don’t think we’d call it casual by today’s standards mind you, but back then it was certainly true.  Anyone who remembers the consumables-dance and resist gear-shuffle can attest to this.  Vanilla saw the largest player growth in terms of percentages.

WoW TBC focused heavily on the hardcore playstyle and activity set.  The gating system, factions, lots of raids, outdoor and inside along with a steep learning curve made it that if you wanted any level of success, you needed to play the game their way.  It provided some casual aspects of dungeon running for rep and rewards but even that gate was fairly difficult to traverse.  TBC saw decent player growth.

WoW LK flipped that around.  There were certainly raids but they removed the gating system, added tabards, hundreds of faction items, daily quest explosions and most glaringly, the LFD tool.  Every hardcore item, except for PvE raids (which added a heroic difficulty) was given a casual system.  Even the stat system was simplified.  LK saw the final player growth and cap at 12 million subs.  The sub drop was massive when Blizzard took a year between the final patch and the next expansion though.

WoW Cataclysm again flipped the target.  There were some casual aspects in the levelling game (which prevented you from grouping most often) but once you hit level cap, there was near nothing to do.  Only a couple factions actually had reasonable dailies and casual rewards (Ram’haken for one).  The focus was on the hardcore crowd up until patch 4.3 and the LFR tool.  Before that tool launched, less than 1% of the playerbase had completed a heroic raid, less than 20% had completed an at-level raid.  Subs peaked on launch but dropped continually until MoP.  The last numbers had the game at a 25% loss from their peak in LK – even with the year sub option for D3.  Which starts expiring this week.

WoW Pandaria is a casual approach, once more – plenty of dailies, a very good levelling system, a low gate of entry for dungeons, factions all over and the pet battle system.  The hardcore players have to navigate through this casual playground to get to their stuff though, making for some mad hardcore players.  Let’s see how that turns out.  I personally predict another 2-3 million player drop from now until March (when the D3 offer expired).

Clearly, WoW has been all over the map.  From a centrist idea to the outsides and back in either says that the market has changed drastically every 2 years or Blizzard’s strategic direction team doesn’t look farther than 2 years down the road.

RIFT now.  Rift launched with a mixed approach to casual and hardcore players.  Plenty of dailies, lots of rewards (pets and collections), factions, rifts, LFD and zone quests helped the casual folks.  A consistent approach to raiding and dungeons that required attention helped the hardcore crowd, though noticeably less than the casuals.  We’re 11 patches in though, which is where WoW was at the end of Lich King.  Many casual options have been sent out now; fishing, instant adventures, personal raids, LFGuild tool, mentoring, free character transfers, wardrobes, pre-built characters.  Hardcores have a new PvP setup, a new raid every other patch with quality content.

The Storm Legion expansion pack is certainly aimed at the most casual crowd though with player housing, triple land mass, new towns, new collectables.  Hardcore players will get more raids and a stat increase but no real new systems.

Though Rift only has one expansion pack on the graph, the 11 content patches all fit into the same general quadrant.  This shows consistent strategic direction, though certainly this is over a smaller time frame.  Rift has fit nearly 5 year’s worth of WoW content into 18 months.  We’ll see how the game does in a few more months.