Non-hunters and the new rares

OK, so Blizzard announced a slew of new rare beasts, specifically for hunters to tame, each with their own tricky mechanic to overcome. Gripes about the non-rareness of the skins aside this is a move to applaud.

The forums however have multiple mentions of non-hunters killing the rares.

Naturally, some (or much) of that can be put down to players being bored and deliberately setting out to grief other players (ie. hunters seeking a taming challenge). However, I'm sensing an additional reason: regular PVE players are bored with the simplified solo-friendly content and are seeking a challenge. I know I miss the days when zones would have vicious elites that you'd carefully skirt around and cautiously plan your attack. Now ... elites are wimps.

Except the new rare taming spawns.

Help players tell their stories

Chris Hecker has a fascinating GDC talk up on his site: "Achievements Considered Harmful?". Its long, but totally worth viewing.

In the Q&A section at the end is a notable question, about the 61:40 mark, which is about how sometimes players will take a video of something really cool they did in the game and post it online, sort of like asking for a verbal reward from other players. The question to Chris was then "is there a way to have players decide when it is time for a reward, and what would be the result of that?"

I find this interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly and foremost is that this is an area of game development which, in my opinion, has been largely unexplored.

What support is provided in the game? In some you can take screen-caps, some have built in video capture. I forget which FPS it was, but some even provide instant replay video capture - that is, you don't need to actively and consciously turn on the video capture facility, you can instead say "omg, that was cool, what the hell happened" and press the instant replay button. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a game that lets you do an instant replay and show it from multiple camera angles, not just the one you saw.

Would you cross the street...

Would you cross the street to gain a skill improvement that buffs your key performance metric by 1%?

Would you travel to the other end of the world to gain another 1% improvement?

Would you set off on a journey which would take you several hours of game time to get a 0.1% skill buff?

I'm pondering the design of a skill based mmo set in a massive world, one where there are a small number of common 1% skill buffs, available pretty much everywhere, and then a large number of 0.1% buffs scattered about the world.

A rookie warrior could stay in the one general zone and pick up all the skill training buffs for a total of (say) +50% damage, and then set off into the wide world seeking out 0.1% here, and 0.1% there ... all adding up to another 25% again. It would be like traveling from Paris to Tibet to learn the ancient art of mumble-fu from a secretive clan of Mountain Warrior Monks (0.1% buff to unarmed combat), and then deep into darkest Africa to track down a mysterious Zulu Exiled King to another 0.1% buff to berserker stance combat.

All without teleports or any other fast travel. And even then, the Mountain Warrior Monks want you to prove your dedication and virtue by [killing 10 rats], the Zulu Exiled King generally mistrusts everyone and doesn't give training away for free, and so on.

I would plan the design such that it would take several months to travel the world and gather the full 250 x 0.1% buffs. And all while you're doing this you're not in your home zone contributing to the development of your village/estate/guild/kingdom.

But it wouldn't be necessary to do so. The Big Bads would be balanced around players having only a total of 50% – 51% skill buff. That would be all the common training, plus a dozen or so of the nearest rare skill buffs.

The design intent is that there would be a lonely few insane individuals wandering the dusty roads of the world, perfecting their personal skills; and meanwhile everyone else is putting time and effort into improving the quality of the smithworks, securing high grade ore, and other activities which give players additional bonuses.

Just varying the difficulty adds difficulty

I played against an AI in a game of Reversi/Othello over the weekend. It had three levels of difficulty, and once I'd played for a while I could easily beat each of the three levels of difficulty. There was a distinct difference of difficulty amongst those three levels, by the way: the first level was utterly trivial, and the third mildly challenging.

Then I tried something ... before each game, I would change the difficulty level, either up or down, no particular rhyme or reason. The same three difficulty levels now became a whole lot harder, and I found myself actually sometimes losing on the third level.

Read into that what you will.

Solving the prisoner's dilemma of Tol Barad

The Tol Barad battleground has apparently been a big fail with lots of win trading going on. This was due to the massive honor being awarded for successfully attacking and scant rewards for defending. In some cases win-trading was coordinated or at least discussed and argued for on the forums, but on some servers it just naturally and organically occurred. Why defend this time if instead you could just come back later and attack, and gain (literally) 10 times the rewards.

There are changes incoming, but they sound like simple tweaks of the numbers and not a change to the underlying system.

The problem is that, apart from the rewards of the battle itself, there is no difference between successfully attacking and successfully defending. Win-trading is still an optimal path to rewards, whether planned and coordinated or simply by herd instinct.

Consider though if successfully defending multiple times in a row gave some additional benefit, and continuing to successfully defend increased those benefits further. One successful defense might give (say) a +2% buff, two successful defenses (in a row) might give a +4%, and so on, and on. Now, the defenders have a reason not to engage in win-trading because the longer they can hold Tol Barad, the greater the rewards. (Whether it's +2% cumulative or +5% cumulative, has diminishing returns, is capped etc are parameters that can be tweaked. Lets just use +2% for sake of example.)

Tricky thing though is that you can't make this buff apply to PvP, otherwise you've got a positive feedback loop that will eventually make it nigh on impossible for the attackers to succeed. Especially since fewer and fewer potential attackers would even bother queuing.

Thankfully, Tol Barad includes a raid dungeon which only unlocks for the faction that won the last battle. If the defender's buff were to apply to that PvE content then you don't have a positive feedback loop but you do have a motivation for defending, a motivation that grows and grows.

Problem solved? No. A strong defender faction has greater motivation to successfully defend, which in itself demotivates the attackers. They failed in their last attack, and they know the defenders have even more reason to defend for your next attack. We still need some reason for attackers to get in the game, and this is even without the defender's buff further motivating the defenders because, by definition, they are the weaker faction.

A PvP buff needs to be provided to the attackers, one that is also cumulative with successive failures. For simplicity sake say it's a cumulative +2% to all attackers for damage, healing, health, movement, and so on.

This way a generally weaker faction will be buffed and buffed to the point where they can actually win the battle and control the island. The buff to movement could be really interesting: eventually the attackers could chase down lone defenders with ease, zerg from point to point faster than the defenders, and easily escape getting overwhelmed by a numerically superior pack of defenders.

As additional incentive, a successful attack could result in the attackers receiving the full PvE buff the defenders had for one round, before it resets back to the initial +2% for a successful defense. If the defenders have dominated Tol Barad for six successful defenses then the attackers know they would be receiving a +12% buff to raiding if they win. Plenty of motivation to show up and try harder.

Note though that if the recently defeated defender's were to rally the next round and successfully attack they wouldn't regain that +12% buff. They'd start over at no buff, otherwise the buff will only rise and rise and rise, just changing hands every now and then, and that would be untenable. Mechanically, call the cumulative PVE buff for successively defending the Defender's Buff and the transferred PvE buff for successfully attacking the Victory Buff, and the rule then becomes easy to express: successful defenses grant a cumulative +2% raiding Defender's Buff, successful attacks grant a Victory Buff equivalent to the losing defender's Defender's Buff, but the Victory Buff only lasts one round (ie. gets replaced with the cumulative Defender's Buff).

Would this work? In what nasty underhanded ways can you imagine this design could be exploited and abused? Would the forums asplode in flame?

Designing systems, vs designing levels

There's a fascinating post over at Lost Gardens, one which gets me thinking whether that approach could also be applied to MMOs. If it could, then it could well be the trick to overcoming the 900 lb gorilla in the room.

For contrast, there's this over at Hardcore Casual.

... what are your thoughts?

WoW's AH online app - benefits for the rest of us?

Since it's a web-service based online app, it would be interesting to know if there are any major limits on simply querys of the auction house.

I know there are limits on how many auctions you can post, but are there limits on how many queries you can make?

If there isn't, and if Blizzard don't get touchy at other websites using the web-services API (like they currently don't frown at Armoury scanning websites), then this would mean someone else could set up a website which does frequent and complete periodic scans of all AHs on all servers, and make that information available to anyone, even if they don't have the AH app at all.

Sure would save me logging in at all hours of the night just to run an AH scan.

I'm referring to sites like WOWecon.com here.

The illusion of "doing it better"

Imagine there's a game publisher with a design doc for some truly innovative advances to the MMO field. They've done their homework, they know how to build it right, they've done the numbers, they know how much it will cost. This stuff will knock your socks off. We'll refer to these people Game A.

Now, imagine there's some game publisher with a Triple A game which dominates the market. Game B.

The Game A people have done the math, they figure it will take about $M to implement this innovation to the full extent they have in mind. This means they need to attract some N thousands of players to their game to satisfy this budget expense.

Game B, seeing all the attention and interest that Game A is garnering from their early press releases and dev interviews and such, and seeing that some number of players are considering defecting to Game A for this feature, decide to also implement something similar.

Does Game B need to spend the same $M on this feature to remain competitive? (Assume that every $M that Game B spends produces the same value as what Game A has, assume no special advantage or brilliance).

Surprisingly, the answer is No.

See, if they spend (say) 0.6 x $M, then they will retain some portion of potential defectors. Those defectors are not available as new subscribers to Game A, and thus impact the revenues available to spend by Game A. Without Game B in the picture they figure they would have sufficient revenue to afford to spend $M, but with Game B making similar promises (remember, neither have working code to demo at this point) they no longer have $M available, they only have 0.4 $M available.

Game B doesn't need to develop 100% of the original idea at all. They can do a half-assed job, split the market, and forcing Game A to compromise on their design doc vision.

Now, if Game B was an equal player in the market and not a monopolistic behometh, the innovation would be still be pretty good. We, the players, would get at least 50% of the original concept to play with.

However, since Game B is a massive presence in the industry (leveraging network effects, market inertia etc), they know they don't even need to implement 50% of the innovation to split the market and retain potential defectors. Game B only need to implement (say) 10% of the idea, and Game A would be left in the position of only affording to implement about 9% of their original idea.

If Game A doesn't get sufficient traction, then they shut down and we never see the other 90% of the original innovation.

Things are now looking bad for us, the players, and the industry in general.

The galling thing is that commentators will be saying "Game B took the idea, polished it, and did it better than Game A". Sorry, but although 10% is “better” than 9%, that 10% is still much less than the original 100%.

Doubly galling because Game B only needs to spend 10% of the original budget to achieve this, yet retain 100% of their profits. Which suits them just fine.

The duration of dynamic events?

GW2's Dynamic Events Content is starting to sound pretty cool.

There's something I've not seen explicitly stated yet though, and that is how long these dynamic events take to play out. Reading between the lines it sounds like there are two activities affecting timescales involved:

1. active participation resulting in a state change (success or fail mechanics)
2. nothing happening until the conditions are just right, resulting in a state change (trigger mechanics)
   

The former is equivalent to what we know questing activity being today. Kill ten rats, collect 100 ogre ears, that sort of thing. Timescale: minutes to tens of minutes.

The latter would depend on either other events cascading, or players performing some specific action like activating a McGuffin device. Timescale: days, weeks, months, possibly more.

Personally, I'd like to see some long-scale events added to the mix too. Huge community based events that stretch over hours, days, or weeks of activity by dozens or hundreds of players to finally tip the balance and effect a state change. Consider the resource gathering efforts to open the AQ gates, or the unlocking of the Isle of Quel'Danas as extreme examples.

The point being, it would be good to log on over multiple days, and see measurable progress on change being effected in the world. This, vs. not knowing what state the world will be in when you log in, just to do the equivalent of some random daily quests and log out again.

My theory is that this form of longitudinal game play would have an effect on the social dynamics of the players, strengthening and shaping the community for the better.

Is healing boring because of interface design?

Playing DPS is generally more fun that playing a healer - that's the accepted wisdom.

This is often explained due to hurting being more fun that helping, and also due to hurting being essential to accomplishing the game goals (and that you can't "heal a mob to death").

I've previously written about making more quests for non-killing activities, particularly healing, but could it also be due to the interface design? With DPS, you are given continual appraisal and reinforcement of your progress towards your goal: the enemy target's health bar is diminished, gradually or in leaps, until it's all gone. Healers on the other hand see a full health bar when they start, and if they are doing their job properly they see .. a full health bar. Where's the encouraging feedback in that interface design? (The same goes with dispelling debuffs by the way.)

We're so used to seeing progress bars in our games, steady measurable visible progress. Enemy health bars go down, XP bars go up, reputation bars go up, cast bars fill up, channeling bars go down, item crafting feedback bars slide across the screen, etc.

There are no progress bars for healing though.

So, is healing boring because of interface design?

Shaping community behaviour via NPC interactions

There have been multiple games where a quest-giving NPC is interacted with via a dialog tree. It would be a safe bet that virtually all of them presented fully immersive RP dialog options. If only the devs put in a dialog option for what the player is really thinking ("Yo! Quest .. gimme now! And skip the life story twaddle!") ... of course many players would choose it, especially if it did skip an interaction step or two.

Let them do that a few times, and then have the NPC offer only measly rewards to quests, or give false information, or send you on a quest which is much more dangerous than apparent .. that is, have the NPC learn from these interactions and treat these jerks as, well, jerks.

If the player wants better quests and better rewards they'd soon enough learn that the jerk-option is non-optimal. When you come down to it, the actual dialog in the options is as irrelevant to the NPC as it is to the player - the player is simply choosing option J over option A, B, or C.

Now ... what might be the knock-on effect in the rest of the game, especially with the player's interactions with other players? Will they take out their frustrated meanness and jerkwadness by being jerks to other players, or will the "be nice = optimum route to loot" lesson be unconsciously ingrained and applied onto other players? Will players, when confronted with jerk behaviour, model their response on how the game treats such behaviour (ie. disdainfully unforgiving) - if NPCs punish players for being jerks, is this not permission for players to punish jerks too?

Theory by Flatfingers

Go read Theory by Flatfingers, I am.

I'll fish out my favourite posts and link from here later.

More kill 10 wolves please?

I'm levelling an alt, and thus am revisiting many zones.

In my travels I wandered into the Warsong Labour Camp in Ashenvale and saw no quests here at all. Lots of orcs, busily labouring away, but not a single quest.

Fair enough that creating interesting quests with rich backstory and characters and polish and quality checks and all that is a lot of work, but c'mon .. not even a simple request to go kill some wolves because their howling keeps them up at night, or they'd like some warm furs? Heck, a simple fedex quest back to the Mor'shan Rampart would be better than nothing. Even if the quest was grey and I could happily ignore it, it would add a bit of life to this camp.

Which gets me thinking - would adding more trivial and banal quests into a world make the epic quests stand out more? What if the trivial quests were added as daily quests, to further differentiate them?

persistence

I've noticed there's some confusion about what "persistence" means in MMOs (ably addressed by Raph and others).

Still, for my 2 bits, I like to reference Newton's Laws of Motion to explain what persistence means. Stuff is what it is until something happens.

You don't get much for 2 bits these days =(

Moderating player generated content?

It's been noted that if you let players design content, they'll design set pieces which provide maximum reward for minimum effort. The reward might be in the form of achievements, xp, or loot. It would be impossible to get devs or trusted CMs to pre-emptively moderate player content, there would simply be too much of it.

What you could do though is deem that all un-moderated content will have zero rewards. No XP, no achievements, no loot. Players would have to play the content for the love of it, and if those players rate it highly then it's likely to be interesting content. "Interesting", as defined by devs. This highly rated content could then be slated for dev oversight and moderation, and rewards activated for that content.

Another idea is to have, at least, loot being dynamically determined. If endless gangs of adventurers are able to tramp on in and kill all the monsters, it's only reasonable to assume that their treasure chest will likely be bare. If on the other hand the monsters are snacking on a growing pile of adventurer corpses it would be reasonable to expect the mobs to have accumulated more treasure.

guild math?

The math behind mechanics can be interesting.

Imagine if you could invite anyone into a guild, and the larger the guild the bigger a bonus to the power of the members. A mage in a smallish guild for example might do 1% more damage, while a mage in a larger guild might do 3% more damage.

A simple bit of math. Net result would be a game which encourages larger guilds, even your basic zerg guilds.

Add a twist - make the mage bonus be dependent on the number of mages in the guild. Now it's likely that there would be some tendency towards specialist guilds, but not that much. Consider: a guild with just 20 mages would have the same bonus as a guild with 20 mages and 20 priests, while the latter would have priests on hand to help out with healing.

One more twist then - divide the bonus by the total number of guild members, mage or not. Now, a guild of just 20 mages might have a 2% bonus, while a guild with 20 mages and 1 priest would get a 1.9% bonus, and a guild with 20 mages and 20 priests would only get a 1% bonus.

With this arrangement there is an active discincentive to forming zerg guilds, and active incentive to forming specialist guilds.

The same math might be available on other factors too - perhaps a guild of mixed classes might instead specialise in one particular form of crafting, and another guild specialises along racial lines.

So .. what ramifications does this have on the game world, what are the subtle ways this might change the way the game is played?

in-game journalism?

A passing thought - instead of recruiting community management personnel to patrol the forums, hire some budding journalists to hang out in your game writing up daily dispatches. Get several in game, put them on various beats, and make their reports available in-game as well as out.

Beats could include various raid dungeons, being embedded with an attack force assaulting Wintergrasp, a suitable bimbo reporting on the AH shenanigans, some wheezy old geezer hanging about the starting zone, and so on. You probably couldn't afford to have people permanently posted everywhere, some would have to be roving reporters.

If the in-game element had a decent UI then this could become quite popular. The UI should include capability for decently sized graphics like screen-shots. They could be supported in-game by criers walking about shouting the headlines and directing those interested to the nearest inn at an appointed time.

This is a more proactive design to community management, and with a deft hand at the editorial tiller could be used steer the community in preferred directions (rather than frantically reacting to flamewars).

Achievements overheads

A few patches back Blizzard removed some of the statistics tracking from their new achievements system: the way it worked is that (e.g.) every time you do damage or take damage it looks to update the max damage statistic. That's a tiny overhead on every attack you ever do, and the tiny bit of cpu distraction really begins to add up, especially in a 25-man raid where you can afford it the least.

Why not just log everything, and then process it during downtime, such as resting in an inn? The character could even be notified in their system/chat log of updates, or possibly even some kind of emote visible to others.

You could even stage out the processing a little bit, so instead of it being a spam attack of statistics it trickles in over about five minutes or so .. just enough to have it prompt social discourse and the occasional /flex.

Optimal builds/spec/gear

Melf_himself writes about how different aspects of gameplay are basically side-stepped by just looking up what is the build of the week, what the best-in-slot gear to grind for is, etc.

All that depends on theory-crafting being universally applicable. Which in a game like WoW is pretty much the case. Take any level-cap character, strip them of all their talents and gear, and they would have the same base template as any other character of the same race and class.

Change this somehow though, such that there is variation in base abilities, and while your talent spec may well be ideal for you but wouldn't be perfect for me. My hunter might have more base agility than yours, while yours has more stamina or intelligence.

Revisiting quest encounters for fun

In WoW there are many cases of mobs that only appear as part of a quest. Once you've done that quest, you can never fight that mob again.

Now, for some mobs that's fair enough, that's the way the story works. For some mobs though I'd like to come back and do it again. I'm especially thinking of the various gladiator ring mobs, such as in Nagrand, Grizzly Hills, and Zul'drak. There's also a really fun quest in Storm Peaks, where you jump from flying dragon to flying dragon. Again, you only get to do this once.

Why would I want to fight them again, especially if there's no further quest xp or loot to be gained? Well, these mobs are usually extra tough with an interesting gimmick, and usually need a group to take down ... which makes them great for testing my solo skills later. (This I know because there were a few group quest mobs I didn't get done back at the appropriate level because I couldn't find a group.)

So, two basic reasons then: (1) gauging my increased skill/gear against a known constant, and (2) fun (remember that?)

Why then are these encounters designed to be once only? (I suspect the reason is more that they haven't been designed to be revisited, rather than being deliberately restricted). If the xp and the loot drops from them are kept low (the quests being the main reward) they wouldn't be farmed or exploited.

What might be the downsides to making these encounters able to be revisited?