Friday, July 10, 2009

Vertical Progression: the Proliferation of Big Numbers

One thing is guaranteed when you play MMOs: You’ll start by seeing small numbers and end by seeing big ones. This is “growth” and “progress” for your character. We can grasp progress easily when it’s presented in the vocabulary of gradually increasing numbers. Ten damage is worse than 10,000. No one can contest that.

What is important to the game, though, is not that the numbers grow, but that there is a seeming disparity in power levels between characters (hence the term “level”). This disparity has to be significant between characters of different explicit levels to encourage people to continue playing so that they too can become so powerful.

How easily we forget that power is relative in MMORPGs. It’s not how many levels you have under your belt, but how well you can take advantage of those levels to make your character more powerful than the other ones of your level. You care about this because you are best rewarded for fighting battles where you are of lower or equal level with your opponent. This is especially the case in the ever-rapidly-approaching endgames of theme-park MMOs where level becomes irrelevant when you reach the meat of the game, the endgame.

My enjoyment is not sourced at seeing a character level up. I’ve seen that happen thousands of times in my life. I’ve built Dungeons and Dragons characters from scratch and planned their progression before. I’ve played characters that have gone from tavern brawler to god. The little carrot presented by leveling has lost its meaning. Now all I see are the mechanics before me: what abilities I need to unlock and what gear I’ll need to obtain so that I can execute whatever plan I have for my character.

In a game where there is no real story to go along with the long vertical climb of character progression, I lose interest as soon as the mechanics relevant to my class wear thin. There’s little to substantiate the long grinds I’ll have to endure in order to hit max level. The treadmill-like nature of this action becomes starkly apparent when I notice that the relative challenge of the game never really increases. The stakes never get higher. The rewards don’t get more meaningful. I’m running in place. That discourages me and gets me into a funk that leads to hitting the cancel button.

Players don’t need to waste their time running in place for 50 levels before hitting the real meat of the game. The players that MMOs make the most money off of spend much more time at max level than they do leveling. In World of Warcraft, leveling to max level doesn’t take more than a couple of months (or less) of serious play. I’ve known people who have played the game for five years. They’ve spent maybe three months leveling and at least twelve-fold more time in the endgame with their main.

After all this vitriol, you may be surprised that I do not wish to turn character advancement from a pyramid into a broad, flat plane lying orthogonal to the axis of power. There needs to be some vertical difference between characters with different specializations in order to allow players to mix and match abilities. If we have an on-off switch for each kind of ability in the game that indicates if the player is able to do that kind of ability, but there is only one “level” of each ability, there is no middle-ground where characters can have back-up abilities that they use if their mainstays aren’t useful. It doesn’t make sense to have abilities be “best” or “non-existent”. There needs to be some vertical, though it should not dwarf the horizontal.

I suggest between three and five tiers of power for important abilities. This limits vertical advancement enough that it is not a terrible grind, while allowing some differentiation between characters that want to do similar things but specialize in different places. To make this vertical advancement less grindy, I suggest severely reducing the maximum level attainable or removing levels from the game and allowing players to allocate XP to buy individual skills they want their character to have. Skills would naturally be in some kind of tree structure, but ability gain would only be gated by experience gained, not by level and some other limited resource (like talent points in WoW).

Naturally, in a less vertical system you will need to have caps on total experience points allowed for a character to have spent at one time. There are ways to make experience points above this cap meaningful. For example, once a character achieves max XP and spent it all on abilities, further XP could unlock below-cap XP to be respecced at will (preferably only out of combat). Let’s say the cap is 10,000 XP. Once a character reaches 10,000 XP, he starts gaining XP in a “respec pool”. The player can deallocate XP from abilities up to his respec pool amount and reassign them as he likes. As the character continues to accrue XP, each point of XP may no longer increase the respec pool by one point. Diminishing returns or a cap on respec pool gain can stop players from constantly shifting their characters to different FOTM builds. Or, if you want, you can allow all characters who have advanced this far to respec whenever they want. This would certainly make Mot happy.

11 comments:

Bhagpuss said...

" My enjoyment is not sourced at seeing a character level up. I’ve seen that happen thousands of times in my life".

Mine is, though. I've been doing it in one form or another since 1983 and the pleasure has yet to pale.

"Players don’t need to waste their time running in place for 50 levels before hitting the real meat of the game. The players that MMOs make the most money off of spend much more time at max level than they do leveling."

But it isn't "running in place". It's living in the world. It's why I log in. Once my characters reach max level they are usually done, pretty much. I've never used the "end game" in any MMO. Once a character cannot level any more, his or her role usually becomes that of mentor and helpmate to my other characters who haven't yet reached the level cap.

What I personally enjoy is a structure where each class has a set list of abilities that are acquired at a set level. I enjoy levelling the character to acquire these. I like them to be sufficiently different abilities, not just upgrades to previous ones, to make them desirable. I don't like having to spend points or make choices.

I also strongly dislike any options to "respec". I don't mind being able to acquire new abilities on top of old ones, but chopping and changing destroys the integrity of the character for me. I rarely use respecs, even if free and even if I have made bad choices and am disadvantaged by them.

"In World of Warcraft, leveling to max level doesn’t take more than a couple of months (or less) of serious play. I’ve known people who have played the game for five years. They’ve spent maybe three months leveling and at least twelve-fold more time in the endgame with their main."

I think 2 months to level a character is a long time, not a short time. I've just started WoW. I already know I'd like to play about 80% of the races and more than half the classes. The idea of just playing one race/class combination, levelling it and then "being" that character indefinitely thereafter just seems a ridiculously limiting choice.

I've played EQ1 for nearly ten years and EQ2 since launch and I still don't have a max level character in EQ1 (2 levels to go). My 80th Necro in EQ2 is possibly my most "finished" character, but I probably spend no more than 20% of my time there playing her.

I don't know if these statistics have changed, but I know that only two or three years ago, in the games I was playing then, mostly SoE games, it was stated that majority of players never even reached the level cap. Yes there's a bubble at the top of players who top-out and carry on playing, but a lot more players are lost before they ever get that far because things go too slowly, not too fast.

I know that in my personal experience, over years of playing, I have lost far, far more players from my active friends list as they dropped out before they even got close to maximum level on one character than I have lost friends who stopped playing because they were maxed and had no more goals to achieve.

motstandet said...

"I know that in my personal experience, over years of playing, I have lost far, far more players from my active friends list as they dropped out before they even got close to maximum level on one character than I have lost friends who stopped playing because they were maxed and had no more goals to achieve."

Do you attribute this to associating with players who are attracted to the leveling game and never want to get to level cap, or to the long and boring traditional MMORPG leveling game?

motstandet said...

I like having the option to respec only in the circumstances where I will be investing a great deal of resources into a character. The reason is that even if I spend hours researching a game and learning what mechanics and abilities are there, it's very probable that I have misconceptions about how all these things will play together.

The choices you present to me in character advancement better not be mutually exclusive. And if they are, please allow me to reverse them once I figure out how things work.

evizaer said...

Bhagpuss:

Why do your friends stop playing before they "finish" levelling their characters?

In my case, I usually get bored of the game mechanics before I hit max level.

"I don't like to spend points or make choices."

Then I guess you're screwed these days. Almost every game requires you to spend points and make choices in one way or another.

You're the ultimate fan of theme-park MMOs. I'm the opposite. It's mostly a matter of opinion, taste, and experience, I think. I think that we can make better games if we ditch a lot of the theme-park tropes--and I don't think that's not an unreasoned opinion.

Tesh said...

"Living in the world" is no excuse for gating content and mechanics behind a grind. People can "live in the world" just fine when they have all their character's tools at their disposal.

Similarly, calling the grind a "learning period" is a gross misstatement, as most people can understand their character quickly. (And yes, some people *never* get it; no amount of grind will help there.) The leveling grind is an extremely poor teaching tool, considering the wide range of competencies and adaption levels.

I'm sympathetic to some verticality in ability and tactical progression, but it's only in the interest of not confusing players with too much at the beginning. They should be able to take on new options at their own pace, rather than at the standard dev-defined (business model dictated?) "grind" pace. If someone wants to jump in the deep end at the outset, let them. (Say, with an instant level 80 in WoW or a instant level 20 in GW. Notably, the Death Knights are a step in that direction in WoW, and have been well received.)

Short story long, I don't want to slog through a grindy treadmill experience to somehow "earn" the right to actually play the game, especially when I'm paying for the privilege of being slowed down. (I picked up a friend's DK and was up and optimized in less than a half hour. MMO gaming isn't brain surgery.) I'm much more inclined to "live" in a game world if I'm having fun in it, and grindy treadmills aren't fun.

Tesh said...

Oh, and yes, respecs are a must with mutually exclusive choices. I understand that some won't use them, even if they are available, but the reverse doesn't work; if I want to respec but there's no option, I can't do much about it.

Dblade said...

Problem though is what is the point of raiding if not more virtual progression, only slower? I don't know why you think levelling is so bad when it often is the fastest, easiest aspect of the MMO. Raiding and endgame simply is levelling slowed down drastically.

evizaer said...

Dblade:

"Problem though is what is the point of raiding if not more virtual progression, only slower?"

Raiding builds up gear. That wouldn't be effected by less vertical character progression. The most hardcore players will do a lot of work for a 1% advantag, so I don't see how the people who enjoy raiding would have a problem with this suggestion. Limited vertical progression might actually be beneficial to people who like raiding because if they are good at the game, they can be useful to raid groups much ealier. No need to grind for 2 months before hand.

"I don't know why you think levelling is so bad when it often is the fastest, easiest aspect of the MMO. Raiding and endgame simply is levelling slowed down drastically."

The "fastest" aspect of an MMO takes three months to complete? It might be a relatively easy process, but it still takes three freaking months. That just means you'll be bored longer if you get tired of levelling. If you limit vertical character progression, there is not enough levelling for the players to really get tired of it--you'd probably hit the XP cap after a month of the game. Then it is all about getting the right gear and finding the right spec, as well as increasing your skill as a player.

Brian 'Psychochild' Green said...

Generally this is put in terms of a "shallower power curve" by developers. A level 50 character doesn't need to be 100x more powerful than a level 1 character. I think it's more useful to talk in terms of power curve than tiers.

That said, I'm not sure I agree that we need to cling to vertical progression at all. A common thought a little while ago was "more options, not more power" as a character advances. Perhaps at the start I have a weapon skill, then I get shields, then some healing, etc. I build my character by choosing what abilities I want. The abilities could be tied to a class, even, but if I take healing I know that I can heal others and that someone else won't come along and be able to heal many times better than I can.

Dblade said...

Evizaer, I don't get your point. If you get tired of leveling, and go straight to raiding, it's not good.

I did dynamis in FFXI. No one does dynamis because they like dynamis, they do it for the gear. Why do they do it for the gear, despite it taking sometimes years for one piece to drop? Because they leveling trip created an attachment to their characters so they wanted to keep powering them.

The vertical progression hooks people in so they they forgive the repetition of the later content. You remove the progression, yeah you get to endgame easier, but there's no point to it, because endgame is vertical progression just made insanely slow and boring.

As to brian, I don't think that works. I think it's been shown that players will use options for optimal effect and not personal effect. You can want to be a spear wielding ice mage all you like, but if you soon find out that ice is much weaker than fire or thunder, you will reroll or quit. I have yet to see a game balanced enough to enable all options to be equal in community. Usually you are gimp or not.

evizaer said...

Dblade: You're assuming that a designer would just cut and paste the endgame out of WoW. That's entirely missing the point of the exercise. If you're going to change the way advancement works, of course you wouldn't keep the old endgame intact because that endgame is based on the rest of the game being around it.

You also don't need vertical progression to be cover a scale that is hundreds-fold in power gain. You can make it a 10% improvement over the next guy in line and people would still go for it. The point is to facilitate skillful, intelligent play and not throwing thousands of hours at doing trivial tasks. This kind of game is not for everyone, but I think it would address a lot of the concerns of the MMO-players who are currently disaffected.