Use-based Skill Gain, Revisited

My post on the character progression has informed my previous analysis on use-based skill gain. Using the tools I provided in that article, I’d like to re-examine use-based skill gain in more detail and draw some distinctions that I missed last week.

Ryzom vs. Darkfall

We are only concerned with systems that grant XP based on the use of specific abilities within a skill-based system. These systems are called “use-based” because the amount of XP you get towards an ability or ability group depends on how much that ability or an ability within that ability group is performed by the character.

Ryzom and Darkfall illustrate two distinct approaches to use-based skill gain. Here’s how their systems answer the three “scope of experience” questions:

• What will grant experience?
• Darkfall: Performing any action to completion.
• Ryzom: Completing a quest or killing an enemy.
• What will an experience point apply to?
• Darkfall: The ability group to which the action belongs that granted it.
• Ryzom: XP is distributed proportionally to ability groups depending on the abilities used to kill a monster. XP is scaled based on the difference between ability group level and enemy level.
• What can an experience point be spent on?
• Darkfall: Only on increasing the level of the skill or skill group to which the experience point applies.
• Ryzom: XP in an ability group goes towards leveling that ability group. Once the group is leveled, XP is converted into points used to buy new abilities and effects.

Runaway Positive Feedback

Notice how narrow and direct Darkfall’s system is. You get XP that is allocated to what you just did. You can’t specialize in any way beyond what you’ve done because of the narrowness of experience’s scope. If you want to perform well (before you’ve capped all your abilities—the lack of cap really kills specialization at growth’s end), you are stuck using the abilities that you’ve used most. So if you are pushing yourself by trying the most challenging content you have a chance at completing, you are stuck using the same set of abilities to the exclusion of almost all else. The positive feedback loop created in this way does not meet its end until you reach the ability cap. Then, and only then, does an optimal build begin bringing its other abilities up.

The pendulum swings between the necessity of complete specialization during character growth to the complete lack of specialization at growth’s end. I see this as the worst of both worlds. To play optimally, you’re trapped into using only what you’ve spent the most time using—until you’ve maxed everything out, at which point it doesn’t matter.

By broadening what XP can be spent on, a system allows specialization beyond exactly what the character is using. Ryzom’s system benefits significantly from letting players choose what their experience will improve within an ability group, instead of forcing the growth to occur in specific points. The positive feedback loop of growth in a certain area spurring further growth does not disappear, but it is significantly moderated.

Exploitation 

A system is more exploitable if the rewarded action is one swing of a sword. If the completed action is broader—like, say, killing an enemy in Ryzom’s system—then the problem largely goes away. Ryzom’s system proportions XP in a use-based fashion, but doesn’t focus all growth only on counting ability use.

The optimal strategy for becoming a master swordsman should not be:

• Find a friend who can debuff attack power and buff defense.
• Have him debuff your attack power.
• Have him buff your defense.
• Find a mob that has a lot of health.
• Debuff the mob’s attack power.
• Buff the mob’s defense.
• Swing at the mob a million time until it dies.

If that is feasibly the most effective way to gain skill levels, the system is broken. It’s trivially easy to level up that skill. In Ryzom’s system, you can’t gain XP beyond some fixed cap for a given monster, regardless of how many times you swing your sword at it. It’s clearly easier to exploit a use-centric use-based system than it is to exploit a system that rewards only broader accomplishments, like killing an enemy.

Limited Reward Potential

Darkfall has such as strict conception of use that characters cannot be rewarded for any activity above the use of an ability. Why should a system be so restrictive? It cuts out much of the benefit in the experience point abstraction. Ryzom reaps the rewards of using an experience point system while still maintaining the customizability and flavor of a skill-based advancement system.

Use-centric Advancement Systems are Inferior

It’s important that we draw the distinction between use-centric systems, like Darkfall, and other use-based systems. Use-based systems filter XP towards limited ability groups based on what abilities were performed to cause the XP gain. Darkfall’s system represents a pure version of this where use is the center of advancement: all character progress is based directly on use and little else. Systems work better when, like Ryzom’s, use has a more abstract incorporation into how character growth happens.

Mechanic Assessment: Use-based Skill Gain

(I made a more recent post which basically replaces this one while doing a much more thorough analysis. Please read it instead of or in addition to this one.)

From my experience with use-based skill gain systems in Oblivion, Morrowind, and Darkfall, I’ve noticed that such systems are inferior. They should be avoided in favor of other approaches to skill-based advancement (as in Fallen Earth) and class/skill hybrid systems (like the one in Final Fantasy Tactics).

First, three gamist reasons why use-based skill gain is an inferior character advancement system:

The character can only be rewarded for a much narrower set of tasks. And that set of tasks is doing whatever action the player wants to level. It’s not clear how quest (or whatever kind of achievement system you want) rewards can fit into this framework. Use-based skill gain cuts out an important part of the incentive structure. In an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Mousegard, combat isn’t an end, it’s a means towards surviving a precarious scenario. There are other means, such as parley, avoidance, and escape that serve that purpose just as well. With use-based skill gain, it becomes difficult to reward the player character for accomplishing anything except easily quantifiable combat and crafting tasks. This leads to gameplay focusing on direct combat and crafting, which narrows significantly the effective and beneficial conflict resolution methods.

Use-based skill gain leads to runaway positive feedback loops that restrict character growth and ability diversity. I kill using ability A so ability A becomes more powerful so I use ability A to kill stuff. This loop generates a second-order effect on skill growth. If you only have a few abilities that are strong enough to use against mobs that drop worthwhile loot, you’re going to use those abilities frequently leading to them becoming more effective and the farming being more efficient and worthwhile. In this way, characters are stuck using the same abilities because only certain abilities are day-to-day useful. But all the abilities are on a similar scale. The Illusion and Mysticism schools of magic were like this in Oblivion: they had some nifty effects, but they were largely composed of utility spells that you would never justifiably use enough to keep the skill level competitive with your melee skills or destruction magic.

Use-based skill gain encourages and rewards exploitation, macroing, and cheating. Some skills necessarily will be used less than others. By factors of hundreds. This forces designers to balance skill advancement against use. This problem cannot be solved. Designers need to measure skill-use frequencies and balance that frequency against how difficult advancement should be. But if a player wants to level a skill, he’s going to find ways to use it more than is reasonable, throwing these calculations off and leading to imbalance. If the player wants to level his buffing abilities, he is going to cast buff spells on everyone he sees if he’s nice, but more likely he’ll cast a buff on himself, then dispell it, and repeat those two actions until he has the desired skill level. Players will always seek to find safe ways to level skills, trivializing the advancement system—developers will always be behind in preventing this kind of behavior. Exploiting and macroing becomes the only way for an honest player to keep up. Darkfall’s EU server has fallen victim to this problem. Exploitation is always the most effective way of increasing skills and it breaks the balance of skill gain.

And one simulationist reason:

Use-based skill gain doesn’t make sense from an immersion/metaphor perspective either. People do not go out and put their life in direct danger to advance from novice to super-novice at using a sword. They spend years practicing with the weapon for several hours every day. The time spent practicing far outstrips that time spent in actual life-threatening struggle. When you’re engaged in combat where life is in the balance, the amount of skill you have when combat begins determines if you live or die. You’re focused on survival, not on dinging 34 on your sword skill. Certainly you will learn from direct combat, but not even a tenth the amount you learned from training since you were the age of 10.

Use-based skill gain should be avoided for primarily these four reasons. As a mechanic, I thought it was a great idea before I played games that implemented it. Now I don’t see a reason to go with use-based skill gain over a different skill-based advancement system, such as purchasing skill levels with XP or some other broader resource.

On Balance, Part 1: Strategy and Depth

Everyone at all interested in game design should read Sirlin’s series of posts on balance. He brings up just about every important facet of balance relevant to games in general. He uses mainly examples from fighting games to illustrate his points—they work great as examples of the concepts he discusses.

In this post, I’m going to summarize many of concepts Sirlin illustrates (you should definitely read his articles if you have the time). Balance is a critical concept in MMOs and certainly merits a post on this blog.

Strategy

A strategy is a planned set of actions. Every game has a strategy-space that consists of every possible strategy the game permits.

Some strategies are better than others. The best strategies dominate all other strategies. A strategy is dominant if it is always the best strategy to choose regardless of the state of the game—an expert in the game would always choose that strategy regardless of his opponent’s decisions and the expert would always win.

A strictly dominant strategy is always the best to choose. A strictly dominated strategy is never the best to choose.

There are different layers of strategy. In theme-park MMOs, there are character growth strategies specific to each class (the specific talent builds for a feral druid, a prot warrior) as well as in-combat strategies (a DPS rotation for a hunter or an aggro control plan for a tank). The order in which you complete quests is also a strategy. Each of these layers have different goals and optimizing one may necessitate choosing suboptimal strategies in others. MMOs are fun because there are a lot of strategies that allow us to succeed—success is almost guaranteed—so we almost always feel like we’re being smart players by choosing good strategies, even if our strategies are far from optimal.

Darkfall is a unique example of the strategy paradigm of character growth being turned on its head in an MMO. Any character, as of October ‘09, can max out every skill in the game. Every character is expected to be able to effective perform every role as the game is played now. Most MMOs necessitate character growth strategies that are essentially time-independent, because there is usually some limit to the character’s growth that is set by its class or a skill cap—character growth strategies focus on the character optimizing for a desired role when it reaches the limit of its growth. In Darkfall, all growth strategies are rendered moot in the long run. Every character is exactly the same given a several month span of time. The strategies that matter for Darkfall in its current for are those that optimize the instantaneous power of a character at all points in its life. This problem is significantly harder to solve, but it tends to be less interesting than endgame minmaxing. (There probably can only be one optimal growth strategy in Darkfall.)

Depth

Depth is the result of there being enough viable strategies for the number of possible strategic permutations to outstrip the player’s capacity to experiment with many of them in a reasonable amount of time. This results in an evolving metagame where certain combinations become popular.

Depth is, at its root, the result of asking a player to solve variations on a problem that is very difficult to solve. It’s not obvious to the player at any level what strategy will net him the best results, so players will try out many different strategies against many other strategies in search of optimal solutions.

For instance, assessing mid-game positioning in chess can be a monumental task as the number of possible moves grows significantly as the board opens up. Calculating the value of positioning vs material is a monumental task. Usually there is not enough time to come to a definite valuation, if one is possible. Chess has a lot of depth in that you can play it many times without seeing identical mid-game positions, so not only is piece valuation and position valuation a hard problem, it’s rarely the same between games. Different players put different weight on different ways of evaluating board position and material; the metagame of chess has been evolving for at least four hundred years and most players still struggle to gain a grasp on evaluating board positions and possible moves.

MMOs currently lack depth. The problems that a player must face when he sits down to play are severely limited in difficulty. Modern MMOs are mostly built to tickle players with rewards and those rewards are their primary motivation for continued play. If game systems had enough depth to rival the reward addiction, MMOs would be able to get over the Kosterian Curve of rapid adoption followed by devastating desertion.

Darkfall’s Design: Sounds Good, Smells Bad

I’m going to stir the Darfall hornets’ nest. I waited a bit after DFO's launch before putting the contents of this post anywhere because I wanted to see if AV would make progress towards getting through some of these odd decisions... And they have not as far as I can so. So here goes.

I don’t understand the logic behind a lot of the design decisions in Darkfall. I’m not talking about business logic, either—I’m talking about the feasibility of the mechanics that AV put in place from the beginning and continue to work on today.

Consider the following blurbs that are on the Darkfall site and what they are actually saying about the design of the game:

“A Huge… Fantasy World.”

Oh no. A huge fantasy world? In a heavily PvP-focused game? This isn’t good. You don’t want a huge world, because in a PvE-minimal game, it’ll be an empty world. The more space you have, the more emptiness. This is doubly the case for such a niche game where you know you’re not going to have huge server populations to fill the world. It gets worse as the game matures and alliances solidify power. If you thought there was enough travel time to get from hamlet to hamlet, try going five hamlets over so you can get out of the alliance safe zone.

In a game focused on player conflict, you have to have a relatively high-friction environment. This means that content should err on the side of being just slightly uncomfortable in its proximity. You want players fighting over what is valuable, not walking 20 kilometers, killing some AFK harvesters, then having their game crash due to a memory leak exacerbated by loading the 15 zones the player had to traverse.

“In Darkfall, there’s much more to character development than, say, raising your riding or mining skill by mindlessly killing rats all day. Instead, you'll need to practice your skills if you want to get better at them.”

Oh. So I’m going to have to participate ad infinitum in really boring actions like mining and fishing—actions that have just about zero intelligent choice involved in their prosecution? That doesn’t sound as promising as I think they intended for it to sound. A lot of other MMOs have this problem too. I don’t think that forcing your players to perform such an unremittingly mindless activity while they’re at their keyboard is good design.

What’s worse about this promise, though, is the invitation to exploitation. If people have to repeatedly do dead simple activities in order to level those skills, they’re going to macro! It’s not even hard to imagine this being the case, yet Darkfall had huge macroing and exploitation issues at launch and still does.
So really, this blurb should read “In Darkfall, there’s much less to character development than, say, completing quests and earning levels all day. Instead, you’ll need to find a macro program or keyboard and shoot at a wall or AFK mine if you want to advance quickly at them.

“You will never have to re-roll your character again. With Darkfall’s flexible character development system, your character simply adapts to the choices you make for him.”

What does that mean?

It’s basically saying that character advancement is meaningless. You can always go back and change everything—or, even worse, you can be good at everything. Currently, the latter is the case. There doesn’t seem to be any late-progression mechanics in place. This is a fundamental lapse in attentiveness that doesn’t bode well for the game’s future.

Why even have character advancement in the game (especially the vertical variety). This is supposed to be a game that focuses on player skill, right? And there’s nothing more carebear than having some kid who has grinded for a week longer than you beating you 1v1 because he had 10 more points in his Sword skill.

Conclusion

There are some serious issues with the mechanics of Darkfall and you don’t need to dig deep to find them. Sandbox games live and die by their core mechanics. Darkfall may not have much of a future if there aren’t some serious adjustments and outright changes and reinventions soon. As much as I like player-focused, sand box world games, Darkfall can not even earn a try from me given the issues I’ve outlined here.

Fostering Community Growth

The last two MMORPGs I have tried were Darkfall and (currently) EVE Online. I was on the roller coasters for quite a few years and wanted to see what the other side of the genre was like.

I've made observations about sandbox games, particularly in the newbie areas since I haven't played either game for more than a few weeks. I will say that as complicated as EVE is, it does a much better job than Darkfall at weening the rookie off the training wheels and getting players doing at least something. Maybe it's because EVE has been around for 6 times as long as Darkfall. Or maybe not.

But there is a major fault in both these games that I want to address--namely how the player goes about becoming part of a community. Finding a joining a guild in a sandbox is very much a chore and takes initiative on the players' part (like all things in a sandbox). There are in-game and out-of-game recruitment channels, but there are no accidental recruitment channels. In theme-park MMOs, you put together a questing or experience party, you are meeting potential members for your guild. You think "hey, this guy is fun and knows how to play; I'll invite him to my guild." Done. Easy for the recruitment officers. Easy for the potential members.

In EVE and Darkfall, there is no native trial-run environment. Although there were a few spontaneous parties created around the goblin camps in Darkfall, everyone in the party was still seen as a potential enemy, not a potential comrade.

The solution is pretty simple: create co-operative environments where both guildless and guilded players can come to let their guards down long enough to get to know other players. Where players see others as potential friends and companions rather than potential backstabbers.

I know this sounds very artificial and against the open-world, anything-goes mentality of sandboxes. But with a subgenre so heavily focused on communities and relying on those communities to generate the fun ships for the players, you'd think that it would be less of a chore to get into one of these guilds.

Changing the Fundamental Game Layers

Modern video games have layers. Raph Koster spoke of this at Penny Arcade in a guest article about a year and a half ago.

Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn't deserving of the name. In an MMO, we nest games pretty deep, because some games are short-term and some are long-term. In something like WoW, the smallest games are things like “hit Heal on time.” Then you get ‘kill the foozle,” and above that “kill a hell of a lot of foozles” and above that “make yourself stronger by picking the right gear” and in some cases “make your guild stronger” and so on.

The top layers are typically the most complex, building on games in lower levels. At the bottom, we have the purest and simplest games around. This is very evident in MMOs, but it also applies to other games as well.

Take Team Fortress 2 for example. At the top, there are longer-term games such as: win the round.

• How do we win rounds? Complete the map objectives.
• How do we complete the objectives? Stand at the capture points.
• How do we get to the capture points? Construct an attack plan.
• What is this attack plan? Use a certain route.
• Why choose this route? There are no Sentry Guns.
• Who is accompanying us on the route? Player X, Y, and Z.
• I am player X, how do I help? Shoot, heal, bombard, etc.
• How do I shoot/heal/bombard? Whack-a-mole.

In a FPS, aiming is a very fundamental mechanic. The muscle reflexes needed to click the target quickly and precisely are a player skill. But the choices of whom to shoot and when to shoot are the game. What are the trade offs if I shoot the Heavy instead of the Medic? If I spend 4 out of 4 rockets just suppressing the enemy, what are my choices when a Scout flanks me?

MMORPG mechanics and games are starting to wear thin. Either fundamental mechanics need to change or the layers on top of these mechanics need to change. Darkfall attempted to change the mechanics, borrowing a very well known idea: FPS aiming. Unfortunately, I'm not too sure it worked out. The restrictive field of view severely stifles play. If you notice, FPS are usually confined to corridors, narrow passages, or linear progression areas. The player always knows which way is "forward". In MMORPGs and Darkfall in particular, the world is open. There is no "forward". For the relatively short time I played the game, I would always find myself strafe-walking, making sure to cover a wider angle than the 90 degrees given by the first-person perspective. This didn't create a "thrilling" atmosphere; it was a nuisance.

I'm not saying that the sandbox MMORPG is flawed or that Darkfall is a bad game. I simply don't think the FPS mechanic works in an open-world MMORPG. Had they used an over-the-shoulder mechanic or a further back 3rd person camera like in Spellborn, then I think the low level gameplay in Darkfall would be more enjoyable.

I want to start changing these bottom layers in MMORPGs and questioning the layers MMORPG players take for granted. What are other ways we can declare targets? Why is it that we need to declare a target at all (aiming with a cross hair is still saying: I want to target something)? What are ways other than levels and skill numbers where we can progress? How else can we differentiate players?

After the core is defined, then the upper levels can begin to take shape. It's important to build a singular design where each layer synergizes with all the other layers. A Find-and-Replace isn't going to cut it. If you swap the top levels, you end up with WoW clones. If you swap the bottom levels, you end up with uncomfortable Darkfall-esque play sessions.

No longer will I accept mediocre games, distracted by the lure of a persistent community and cooperative play.