Playing a Healing Medic in Global Agenda PvP

I’ve played over 60 hours on my medic in Global Agenda now, almost exclusively PvPing. Here are some tips and tricks for being an effective medic in PvP.

As a healing medic, you should prioritize targets to heal in two ways: heal good players before bad players. Heal other healing medics first, then assaults, robotics, and recons in that order. Don’t heal a bad assault instead of a good recon, though—keep your eyes open for good players and help them turn the tide by keeping them alive as long as possible.

Remember that healing has a multiplicative effect on team ability. The better you heal a good player, the better he’ll play: he can be in battle for a much higher percentage of the match because he doesn’t have to withdraw when low on health or wait to respawn. A better player will be more useful each second he’s alive than a bad player.

Pre-Game

• When you first get into a PvP match, run a /who on each assault and check their star rating. You should stick to the ones that are higher-rated, because they’ve proven that they improve their team’s chances of winning the most. Most of the time, a high-rated player will contribute more—you can push your team over the top by keeping him alive where otherwise he’d be dead.
• Just because you’re a healer doesn’t mean you can’t bring along poison wave or poison aura! A great healer adapts to the situation. If they don’t have many medics, well placed poisons can turn the tide of the battle. Change your offhands during the match, if necessary, to maximize your effectiveness. On Scramble and Payload missions, one poison off-hand can make a huge impact because players will tend to cluster around the objective.

Heal Well

• Use obstacles to block opponents from firing at you as you heal teammates. The less damage you take, the better job you’re doing healing your target. A dead medic can heal no-one. Use terrain to your advantage to avoid enemy fire. Sit lower on a hill than your assault buddy so you aren’t exposed. Heal them from behind a wall. Find a crate that you can crouch behind and heal friendlies without being hit by fire from the other side.
• Use your offhands to pile on burst healing when a friendly (or multiple) takes severe and sudden damage. Last night I was running PvP with a full group of high-skill players—I was using a three-wave offhand build, with frenzy wave, healing wave, and power wave at my disposal. I could pile on 1300 burst healing in a matter of seconds, along with my right-click heal doing 242ish per tick. I’ve saved many teammates by launching all my waves in the middle of a big fight—power wave and frenzy wave can, when coupled, especially lead to a fight shifting into my team’s favor.
• Don’t waste your time healing players who are full on health unless you’re trying to regain health using the biofeedback beam. Keep as many people alive as possible.
• The right-click heal on biofeedback and boost beams does double healing, but it’s much more expensive in power. Use the right-click heal often, but don’t overheal with it. Pay attention to your target’s health and stop healing with right-click as soon as he’s topped off.
• If you begin taking sustained damage, use your jetpack to hop around erratically until your enemy switches targets. Go back to healing your friends once the heat is off.
• Never let a bomb recon’s bombs hit you. Taking their damage can easily kill you. EMP bombs can disable you and lead to your team being pushed off an objective. Dodge bombs and grenades as much as possible—your teammates sometimes cannot do so because they’re busy capturing an objective or finishing off an enemy, but it’s your duty to keep them alive after the bombs go off. You probably won’t stay alive for long if you eat bomb damage.

Fight Back

• Is a recon harassing you, but getting away using his stealth whenever teammates apply pressure? DoT him. Hit him with your agonizer, a poison or powervirus grenade, or a poison wave. While the DoT is in effect, he cannot effectively cloak.
• Use your melee weapon. If you need to deal damage, your melee weapon is your best bet. Not only does swinging away with your poison injector do more damage than most ranged weapons, you also recharge power while you’re doing it. For this reason you may want to prefer melee to ranged combat if you need to fight.
• Take out undefended turrets. Do whatever you need to do to help your team. Is a turret harassing your teammates while another healer is nearby? Get behind the turret and kill it. Preventing damage is as good as healing it.

Short, Replayable Games

Think of chess. A game of chess is relatively short. A casual game lasts no more than an hour, usually. Serious games can take longer—three-hour-game tournaments are common. Notice that when you play a game of chess, you’ve processed a few dozen board positions and seen some tactics you haven’t before encountered. You can’t hope to get the entire experience of playing chess from playing one game. Chess isn’t “over” when you’re done playing one game.

Too many videogames are considered “over” and exhausted once you’ve finished your first play-through. Experience-oriented games tend to reach a point where they are clearly “over” and “beaten”. Themepark MMORPGs are unique among experience-oriented games because they do not have a decided end-point, but instead have an open end onto which developers tack more and more content until the game no longer is worth the investment.

Experience-oriented games work better with longer play sessions, because they rely on the player holding information about characters and stories in their heads throughout the playthrough in order for the game to have its full effect. Experience-oriented games are designed almost as interactive movies. Their stories are almost always static—created by game designers and writers and consumed as they are intended to be consumed, in whole and unaltered. Designers paste gameplay into gaps between story exposition. The gameplay does nothing to alter the story, though different pieces of the story may be shown at different times because of gameplay.

I prefer short, replayable games because they tend to be designed in a way that avoids several aspects of many games that I dislike.

• I don’t want to play games that demand so much of my time just to experience a story which will doubtless be less interesting than the stories in the great works of fiction that I could easily sit down and read instead of playing the game.
• I don’t want to play games where playing the game is a small part of the experience. I play games to play games. If a community grows around the game and they help to give it meaning, I enjoy that aspect—but if the game isn’t good as a game, and if, when I play the game as a game, I can’t have fun, I won’t play the game.
• I don’t want to play games that rely heavily on rewarding the player at every turn for the mere investment of time. Games that do this are not good games, they are reward engines that push people to perform actions they’d otherwise find boring. Games should not need to rely on extrinsic rewards to keep their players playing—this reliance is a design flaw. (It may make the game more money, though. I’m not concerned with how much money a game makes; I only care if I have fun playing it.)

I love the rapid replayability of a game like chess. I enjoy building my knowledge and skill over multiple plays of a skill-based game. I want more games like this. Especially games that don’t require great reflexes or great eyesight. Strategy games get to the heart of gaming as an intellectual pursuit—turn-based games cut out the physical skill element. I wish more people would make turn-based strategy games meant to be competitively played. I will try to make them myself in the meantime.

Battlefield: Bad Design 2

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has really nice graphics, but its design has some glaring issues. With all of the cheerleading done by reviewers (not that they cover game design much in their reviews, anyway), I think some criticism is in order. Here are a few aspects of BFBC2 that have annoyed me repeatedly in my first 10 hours of playing the game, mostly in multiplayer.

They hate newbies and want them to fail.

BFBC2 has vertical advancement in its multiplayer. Lots of it. You advance as a player through god-knows-how-many levels and unlock equipment. You also advance in each class—assault, engineer, recon, medic. Your class-specific advancement takes the form of unlockables you earn by doing positive stuff (killing enemies, getting assists, capturing points, etc.) while playing as that class.

These unlockables add significant utility to your character. You cannot use your class-specific utility ability until you’ve unlocked it, which may take many matches. This is hideously awful design. Not only is a newb hampered by a lack of knowledge of the basic game mechanics, he also cannot be useful at a base level as his class would indicate. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare mitigated this issue by giving all characters, regardless of level, a full compliment of weapons and perks—increasing level unlocked a wider variety of weapons to choose from, it didn’t outright add new abilities on top of existing abilities that made your character significantly more powerful than someone of lower level.

It’s noticeably easier to get XP once you’ve unlocked your class abilities, as well—this means that the newbie is put through a slog of slow XP gimpiness and he has no way to avoid it. This is terrible design both as a vertical advancement system and as a mechanic in an FPS that should be entirely skill-based.

Grenade Hell

Taking one grenade’s damage will kill you. Modern Warfare took note of this peculiarity and added a “grenade danger indicator” graphic that lets you know where a nearby grenade has landed. BFBC2 gives you no indication that a grenade has landed nearby—the only way you can tell would be to actually see the grenade thrown. When you’re busy aiming an innacurate gun at your opponent and praying you’ll hit them, it’s difficult to see every little flying detail around you and differentiate between a grenade and, say, a piece of completely superfluous garbage fluttering in the wind.

In Global Agenda, grenades can’t kill you in one hit. There’s no grenade indicator graphic, but there is an audible “CLICK” sound when the grenade hits the ground. Grenades are also huge glowing balls of death, easily visible. Global Agenda’s third-person perspective allows a wide-enough field of view that you can usually see where grenades are coming from and react reasonably. Grenades are balanced in this fashion.

Grenades in BFBC2 are instant and near unavoidable death because there are no audio or visual cues unless you’re staring right at the person throwing the grenade. This is not balanced and it is not fun.

Big Maps Mean Marathons

My pinky hurts from holding down the shift key half the time so that I can get between parts of the map at a reasonable pace in the standard case of not being near any vehicles. The Conquest multiplayer mode will wear out your shift key in this fashion.

Big maps are great for vehicles—piloting a tank doesn’t make much sense in a small map. But the maps in BFBC2 are annoying large if you don’t have a vehicle. You usually won’t have a vehicle. The maps are large, but you still will regularly find that it makes no sense to drive a tank through much more than three or four clearly delineated pathways through the map. This makes vehicular combat usually pretty boring and predictable, because mobility is limited to a large enough extent for strategic maneuvering to be minimal.

Big maps cause gun balancing issues. Suddenly, the range of a weapon is critical information for the player to have, because he will regularly encounter situations where he can see enemies who are beyond his weapon’s effective range. Outranging your opponent can win you a battle in such an environment. Most weapons, unfortunately, aren’t particularly accurate at any but short-to-medium range—unfortunately there’s no indication of weapons’ effective ranges. Obviously snipers will dominate in such an environment.

Ever try drawing battle lines among 32 players who can spawn just about anywhere on a big map? So seldom is it clear who is attacking from where that the little pinhole first-person perspective through which I see the game is even more inadequate than usual to the task of giving me reasonable sensory data on my surroundings.

Other Assorted Annoyances

• You need a shocking amount of XP earned before you gain access to the red dot sight. As I said in my post about CoD4, using iron sights is almost strictly inferior to using red dot sights. This is yet another example of how vertical advancement in an FPS can be surprisingly frustrating.
• There’s no clear indication of the effective range of different weapons in BFBC2. This game has huge maps—you need to have a good feel for how far the gun will fire if you’re to gauge combat situations appropriately.
• No clear sound when you hit an opponent. When firing a relatively inaccurate weapon at range, the little symbol that appears to indicate you’ve hit an opponent does not provide enough feedback for you to gauge the amount of damage you’ve dealt.
• BFBC2 punishes you for being near an explosion by distorting your sound for several seconds. The game’s sound is already suspect—occasionally an appropriate echo or some such dazzle will be cool, but the sound isn’t as useful to me as the sound was in CoD4—punishing players who are already besieged by explosive-wielding enemies by stripping them of one perceptual input is unnecessary. If I don’t have my headphones on while playing, tanks can sneak up behind me without me noticing the audio cue.
• There is so much bloom, random particles in the air, and camouflage that I find it very hard to see enemy combatants at range unless they’re moving. My eyes aren’t particularly good, but I notice that in this game, particularly, I have lots of trouble seeing enemy combatants.
• Every vehicle and combatant icon on the radar (which could be quite nice otherwise) has a bloom effect on it that makes reading the radar completely impossible if there are more than a few players or vehicles in the same place. This is terrible primarily because you rely on the radar to choose where you want to deploy, and deploying in the right place consistently is a huge contributor towards capping points in conquest and winning games.
• You can be a part of a squad of up to four players. Anyone can spawn on top of a squadmate anywhere they are on the map as long as they're alive. This means that where one enemy is, 3 more can instantly appear. This renders strategic movement moot to some extent, because a dead enemy will just be magically respawned with full health and ammo where his one remaining squadmate is camping right near where you just whooped his ass a minute ago.

Overall Impression So Far

I would give BFBC2 a mediocre review. It does nothing particularly well, but could be reliably enjoyable if I could see well enough to be effective in combat. 2.5/5.

Innovation and the Gaming Habit

People don’t buy games because solely because they are innovative, they buy games because they think the games will be fun to play. People do not try to reference some objective and authoritative “fun” when they decide if they will buy a game. They see the game in relation to their interests and what they’ve played in the past—based on this, they’ll decide if they want to try the game out. Perhaps they’ll have read a review before hand, but, most likely, players are buying games almost blindly. People who enjoy games will do more research before they purchase, but there still is thought of objective “fun.”

Fun is relative and subjective. So is novelty. We call novel game ideas “innovative”. We do this on a wide scale, taking into account all the games we can remember playing and some we’ve only read about or watched others play. There is no objective novelty to which we refer when we tag some mechanic or game as “innovative.” Our perception depends solely on our past experience. I may perceive a game as innovative, but you would be right to note that, for instance, three obscure games made by a Finnish game developer in 2001 already did that before, therefore the game isn’t innovative. All that matters, though, is that I find the game new, fun, and fresh. Discussions about true objective innovation are academic affairs.

Or maybe I’m looking for a game that will be more of the same in a genre I love, in which case I want to be comfortable and not jarred by unwanted novelty, unnecessary innovation.

If you follow how people spend their money, you’ll notice that they may claim to want something novel, but they most often buy more of the same. Note the painfully slow progress of the FPS genre, in particular.

Gamers clamor for innovation when they grow bored with kinds of games that they used to love and want to play more. Different people perceive the patterns in games at different levels of abstraction. The higher-level the patterns, the more games you’ll get bored of and the more you’ll clamor for innovation. When patterns become familiar and gameplay in those patterns is no longer fun, players will want innovation. This happens one player at a time—the community will not collectively make this leap, because each individual player needs to see the patterns and grow bored with them separately and on their own terms. When others point out the patterns the process may speed up, but boredom must develop from actually playing the games.

Over the past several years, gaming has grown in leaps and bounds. So many new players are seeing these hackneyed patterns for the first time that innovation seems unnecessary to industry participants. Game developers can borrow heavily from the past, sometimes outright cloning old games, and the new generation of gamers will pick up the rehash and experience it as if they were playing a brand new game. No need to innovate in an environment such as this—and this pattern of rehashing games to capitalize on new players shows no sign of reaching its end.

To most players, innovation would just be a nuisance. They’re busy playing games that were conceived thirty years ago and enjoying them just as their parents did in those days when the gaming industry was barely an industry. Players take a while to catch up to the modern days of gaming—many never do. But anyone who enjoys games and plays enough of them to develop a discerning taste will find that innovation and fun are noticeably correlated.

Innovation will never be chosen because it brings popularity. As the number of jaded gamers grows, though, innovative games will service niches that can comfortably host many profitable ventures.

Defining Massivity

I am so sick of people calling various online games "virtual worlds", or worse yet, "massively multiplayer online (games)". I hope to make a few distinctions, namely the difference between a virtual world and a virtual environment, and when a multiplayer online game actually qualifies as massive.

Damion Schubert noted the selling point of MMOGs compared to regular online games. That difference is "massivity", the potential for hundreds of users to interact in a virtual environment. Since Schubert's comment was in passing during his presentation, he doesn't seem to provide a formal definition of massivity, and I don't know him personally, so I cannot ask him for one.

Ultimately what an MMOG design hopes to achieve is a feeling of massivity. This is an aesthetic experience which cannot be easily quantified nor defined, but I will attempt to do so. Massivity is the feeling that the user is part of a large world which changes without her being there. It is the potential for hundreds of players to interact in some virtual space, all perhaps with different goals.

We can have games without massivity. But we cannot have massivity without a virtual environment, specifically a virtual world.

I like to use a layered definition when talking about MMOGs: virtual world + game = MMOG. Most people can identify a game or at least hazily understand that there are game systems at work when they experience them. But everyone from bloggers to journalists to game designers seem to forget what a virtual world is.

I define a virtual world to be a globally-accessible simulated, persistent environment in which users interact through an avatar proxy. A virtual world is a virtual environment with the following constraints:

• The environment must contain the concept of location. It must be able to relate entities in the environment to the user with positional information. A chat room is not a virtual world.
• The environment must persist between play sessions. It must convey the notion of a "living world" which advances while the user is not engaged with it. Any instanced encounter with an end is not a virtual world.
• The environment must be globally-accessible and consistent, meaning all agents in the environment could potentially congregate at a location. This is technically impossible, but the impossibility must be transparent to the user. Any user understands that as long as he is a part of the virtual world, he can meet (intentionally or by happenstance) any other user in the world.

Channeling is a solution to a technical problem which diminishes the feeling of massivity because the game replicates the same environment, breaking the consistency of the world, and no longer are the technical limitations of the environment transparent to the user. I am not saying that channeled zones are not virtual worlds; they simply break "immersion". As an aside, has anyone ever experienced a channeling system which wasn't annoying or confusing?

Studios are releasing many online games which are breaking molds. They call it a "hybridization"; I call it exploitation of the buzz surrounding MMORPGs. Facebook labels games like Farmville and Restaurant City as virtual worlds. Debates ensue on whether or not anything with character persistence (e.g. TF2) is enough to qualify the game as an MMOG. I find this talk very dangerous because it dilutes the definition of virtual worlds and MMORPGs.

Is Diablo 2 an MMORPG? By Farmville or Global Agenda standards, it would appear to qualify. It has privately instanced virtual environments, character persistence, and public chat rooms serving as lobbies. But there is no global environment where any one user could accidentally interact with someone else. The world does not evolve and move without the user present. Sure items are traded and bands of players do quests together, but is there really a persistent world anywhere?

Any of the recent shooters with character and item persistence, whether or not trading is implemented, still reside in game spaces, not virtual worlds. Games are played on maps which have a beginning and end. They are highly structured games with limited participants. There is no central gathering place where players can interact and put their mark on the world by simply standing around. Character persistence is not world persistence.

MAG or even a hypothetical game with more than 128 v 128 battles are no more an MMOFPS than TF2, i.e. they are not MMOFPSs. If a player logs off in the middle of a battle, his team may lose the match. But the buck stops there. There are no repercussions in the larger game world, because there is no larger game world! His guild doesn't lose land, his skeleton isn't a terrain decal for the next week; the players lick their wounds or bask in victory, and they start a new game. Once again, character persistence is not world persistence.

Using today's weak definition, we could classify any online multiplayer game as an MMOG. That would defeat the point of creating genres at all, and we would be back where we started: what is the difference between Everquest and Dungeon Siege? Massivity.

Experience-oriented vs. Competition-oriented Design

When analyzing game design, I note that some games aim to give as many players as possible a certain set of experiences and go no further than that, while other games aim to provide ways for players to compare themselves against other players. These two styles of design can be intermingled in a single game, but often the game will clearly point towards one of the two styles.

We can draw a distinction between two different kinds of design: the experience-oriented and the competition-oriented.

Experience-oriented Design

Most games are experience-oriented. They present you with a set of challenges that they expect you to overcome and areas that you’re supposed to explore. After you’ve explored and completed the challenges, you have experienced the game. You understand what’s going on—the mechanics are usually simple and act as a goad to keep a baseline of interest—you don’t have much need to play it again. Usually these games have a linear (or multi-linear) storyline that you would play through once; maybe you’d play through a second time if you really liked the game.

These games need to focus on immersing the player in an interesting environment. These games should be relatively easy. Or they can provide facilities for changing the difficulty setting to suit any skill-level.

Experience-oriented games may have sections of gameplay where skill matters, but usually these sections will be tests of efficiency where being better at the game grants you a minor advantage—experience-oriented games shouldn’t have skill tests that provide high barriers to content, because experiencing the game’s content is the focus of an experience-oriented game.

Experience-oriented games include the vast majority of JRPGs and single-player RPGs, and single-player games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid. Themepark MMORPGs and some sandboxes fall primarily into this category of design.

Competition-oriented Design

A competition-oriented game discriminates among players based on their skill. Experience-oriented games generally do not—they ask for no more than a time investment and a base level of ability.

Gaming itself started with competitive games where friends would play against one another at games of strategy like chess and go, as well as various card games and sports. Videogaming started with competitive games—but in these games players generally competed against the environment for high scores, only indirectly competing against one another through comparing scores. Arcade games were naturally competitive games based on sufficiency skill tests, because arcade games that let players play for a long time on each credit make less money and will be removed in favor of more profitable machines. From arcade gaming grew consoles and PC games as we know them today. As gaming became more popular, there was more financial incentive for games to be open to more people. Designers lowered skill barriers and games focused on the player’s experience instead of challenge.

Competition-oriented games are built to be played repeatedly. Players play the game through multiple unique times to learn how the game mechanics work and evolve progressively more effective strategies through trial and error. In order for a game to be competitive, its core gameplay must measure player skill in some way. The easiest way to do that is to pit two players against one another with even, usually symmetrical, starting conditions and similar mechanics.

Games like chess, go, stratego, othello, poker, backgammon, Counterstrike, Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, the Halo games, bullet-hell games, and competitive RTS games like Starcraft, Company of Heroes, and Command and Conquer 3 are among competition-oriented games.

The Tension

MMORPGs, because they rely on massive populations, naturally orient towards experience design. When people start playing MMORPGs, though, they aren’t sensitive to the fact that they are playing an experience-oriented game. The tickling they receive for spending time in the game seems like the tickling they’d receive for being of high skill and succeeding at a skill-oriented game. The distinction between a timesink-based game and a skill growth-based game is not readily visible to the everyday player, so they’ll continue playing the game under the impression that they are a good player because they’re continually rewarded as if they were one. The player will eventually thirst for a real skill test—they’ll want to show off their skill at this game they’ve invested so much time into. In this way a tension develops between experience-oriented and competition-oriented gameplay and design.

Competition-oriented design must discriminate among players—players are measured against one another and players can view that measurement. Good competition-oriented games make this measurement easy to read, though it may only be on a discrete “I won” vs. “I lost” scale. A game can’t discriminate and fail to discriminate at the same time. For this reason, a mechanic cannot be both designed in an experience-oriented fashion and a competition-oriented fashion.

Mechanics of the experience-oriented and competition-oriented varieties can be mixed within the same game, though, and often are. Themepark MMORPGs (and some sandboxes, as well) don’t discriminate until the very top of the time investment reward chain has been reached. This is how such games resolve the experience and competition tension inherent in an experience-oriented game design.

A themepark MMORPG based on skill doesn’t make sense. A game based on content exploration and letting all players have access to as much content as possible cannot be a game based on skill discrimination that uses content as a board and pieces are used in chess. This does not preclude themepark MMORPGs from having competitive elements. On the other side of the same coin, we can say that competition-oriented games will only be weakened by adding experience-oriented design ideas—if  a game is to be based on competition, clouding that competition with timesinks can only weaken the core of the game.

“Maximizing Fun”

All game design should intuitively should rely on the following maxim: Games should maximize fun.

But where? and how? What is more fun and for whom? Who do you care about? When given a decision between making something fun for one kind of player or another, which kind do you choose?

One of the first questions asked when trying to design a game: why are we making a game? Or, more precisely, why will we make design decisions?

You can’t always make design decisions that appeal to the largest number of people because you don’t know what the largest number of people actually want. Game designers probably do not think of why they’re making design decisions in a broader sense—they might say “because this will be fun” or “because this will make money” but they won’t be able to answer much further if pressed. Game design is guided very much by intuition. Designers primarily refit concepts they’ve seen in other games into the context of their game—genres are in this way perpetuated by endless clones with slight variations. Without a more objective criteria for design decisions, “that which I think will be most popular” or “that which I’ve seen and liked before” are the main justifications for design on a broader level—as long as those justifications rule, clones are the order of the day.

When I approach analyzing a game’s design and judging the quality of certain design decisions, I open myself up to the patterns the game reveals to me. How do I play the game? Where are the developers trying to focus my attention? I start from a holistic view of how the game is put together and then look at more specific aspects to see if rough edges show themselves. I try to see what design decisions fit and do not fit with the patterns I noticed when looking at the game as a whole.

From here I can derive the “consistency” of the game design. A consistent design directs the player naturally towards what the game does best and doesn’t distract her with divergent quirks and mechanical dead-ends. Generally, games that have consistent designs are better games. Judging the consistency of a game is one way to get a feel for design quality while avoiding the multifaceted and ever-changing subjective nature of fun that gets in the while of “maximizing fun”. Consistency is still very subjective, but it is at least one step away from blind traditionalism and appeals to popularity to which so much game design seems to fall victim.