Towards Smarter Loot Systems

The typical way that I see loot working in ARPGs is simple randomization of attributes based on item type and a percentage chance. Roll a many-sided die and look up the result in the table, repeat this several times and you have your loot.

I don't think this is the best way to calculate what drops in an ARPG.

What matters is that players have interesting decisions to make with regards to gear--decisions that aren't as simple as seeing that 10% more damage is less than 15% more damage. You can generate interesting decisions here in a much more directed fashion than just dropping fully randomized but scaled-by-level loot.

When designing a loot system, we have to answer two questions:

• How often should you be upgrading your equipment?
• How often should you see a piece of gear that you have to consider as an upgrade?

We can think it through and exert control over it, or we can put some percentage chances in a loot table and hope that everything turns out OK. I'd prefer to design the loot system to guarantee as fun an experience as I can. That means taking more control over the kinds of modifiers that appear on items dropped for each class.

I think that if you have to consider a lot of loot and a high percentage of that loot has no value to you even before you put it in your inventory, you feel like you're wading through crap. The longer you go without interesting drops, the more bored you will become. This produces a feeling of "farming", which I don't think is a positive experience. It has negative connotations because gamers don't like doing it--farming is a reduction of the game to a tedious harvesting task that you could easily hire daylaborers to do and be better off. Tasks like that don't belong in games, they're an artifact of artificial difficulty and/or poorly or underdesigned gameplay.

The game should be aware of what would be an upgrade for you and what wouldn't. Upgrades should be dropped based on what you fight within a certain number of minutes of "challenging" combat. Don't even bother dropping trash. Only drop loot that is a sidegrade or an upgrade, and only drop loot that is equippable. Based on statistical and forum feedback the algorithm can be tweaked.

The game should be able to learn what modifiers people tend to pick on their items, and what people tend to put together. Based on these patterns for each, sidegrades can be generated that suit the kinds of builds that people actually use. In the beginning, such as system would need to be seeded with playtester-approved build information, and some noise would need to be added to the weights in the randomization of items in order to ensure that every character isn't siphoned into one of a few builds.

I think the current set of modifications and the way they work in Diablo III is well-suited towards this kind of system. If the longevity of the game is predicated on farming, as Diablo III's seems to be, my idea can still be effective, but may not be in the developers' best interest. What you really need is an end to the game--a feature that makes roguelikes great and has been lost along the development of ARPGs away from the roguelike foundation. But that's a topic for another post.

The Specialization Trap

A trap that many ARPG designs fall into is overspecialization in the face of relatively permanent character advancement decisions. Path of Exile is a great illustration of the pitfalls of optimal play revolving around specializing your character using permanent decisions over a long span of play time.

PoE has an extremely large and intricate skill tree which allows significant specialization: down to the weapon type level--swords, axes, etc and element (fire, lightning, etc) level. You'll need to look for specific weapons and items that suit your specialization choices.

This is damaging to the ARPG model. ARPGs are a combination of various treadmills that complement one another: loot, character level, ability levels, and perhaps a few more (Din's Curse had "reputation" which would grant you a relatively viable rare weapon upon leveling up). An emphasis on specialization limits the character construction decisions (once you've picked the specialization, you jump pump points into that indefinitely) and loot decisions, cutting off significant branches of the decision tree. The more equipment-related specialization, the fewer pieces of loot a character will find that can possibly be upgrades. A character can easily go from having a 20% chance of finding a relevant piece of loot because he specializes in one-handed weapons, to a less than 5% chance because he has been forced to specialize further, perhaps into one-handed swords, in order to continue getting damage and/or accuracy bonuses from new passive skills.

ARPG players are familiar and fond of systems that involve an extreme amount of character choice permanence. Diablo II's attribute and skill points were non-refundable, and the pattern of severely punishing the uninformed by making character decisions irreversible does not enter the consideration of the majority of ARPG-players who grew up playing Diablo and Diablo II. Titan Quest and Din's Curse made a step forward in this regard by allowing point-by-point respecs at escalating prices. Torchlight, the most casual-friendly ARPG I have played, doesn't have respecs built into the game at all--the only way to respec is to use a console command to spawn a respec potion.

Overspecialization leads to minute-by-minute play being less interesting. If you need to invest a high percentage of your points into a very small number of abilities to make them effective, then you're naturally going to be filtering your ability choices by which abilities you have spent points on. Abilities available are further filtered by what loot you have available to you. In the majority of ARPGs you end up in a situation where you have at most two or three useful abilities--sometimes you'll only have one. When you have no more than two or three tools to work with, it's harder for combat to remain engaging.

Spamming a single ability and watching everything die can only remain fun for a little while unless you are specifically looking for a relaxing experience. Unfortunately, the theorycrafting involved in making an adequate character often is beyond the interests of a relaxed player, so they wouldn't get to the point where they could effectively do one ability spam. The mechanical systems thus lead to patterns of play which are not appealing to the kinds of players that have the capacity to use that style of play.

Permanent point-investment schemes also lead to perverse incentives for building characters. You really shouldn't spend points on skills beyond what you specifically need to get to that highest level skill that you want to specialize in. When optimal play is to not participate in the character advancement and be underpowered for tens of hours so that you can be somewhat above average later, the game clearly suffers.

The reasoning and evidence above would indicate that specialization-focused design is poor design.

So why do players seem to like it so much? A game like Diablo II is a complexly layered system of rewards that vary in intensity and frequency in such a way as to draw us in and addict us. Players have trouble separating the fun and not fun mechanics of a game when they are layered as they are in Diablo II. The rewards systems are strong and interleaved into all other mechanics of the game, so it's hard to separate skill tree manipulation and loot sifting from the enjoyable feeling of character progress. Those activities do contribute to character progress, but their design isn't trivial to separate from that positive feeling.

Good ARPG design is much more than simply causing the player to have the positive feeling of character progress, it's optimizing that feeling to happen in as intense and frequent a way as possible without it being diluted by overexposure. It's a difficult balancing and timing act, and different players have higher engagement at different points along the spectrum between constant rewards and rare rewards, large rewards and small rewards.

In games that feature overspecialization, you'll notice that combat tends to reduce to the repeated use of a couple of skills at most. This trivializes combat and turns it into a chore. When combat is a chore, in order to enjoy the game you must enjoy the minmaxing of character construction, which in ARPGs is done via loot sifting and planning/spending skill and attribute points. So the games' fanbases naturally require their members to enjoy that minmaxing and not mind somewhat boring combat.

ARPGs can have exciting combat and enjoyable character advancement. Diablo III is proof. I hope to discuss Diablo III's success in a future article.

No Bore Core

I have a very bottom-up approach to game design. I like to think in terms of fundamental, atomic, core mechanics, and build them up in layers to produce a cohesive system.

After making those minigames for my cancelled Facebook MMORPG, I am fairly confident that there are 2 types of "core" mechanics: mathematical and pattern matching. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but after observing players for several months, I believe that pattern matching is a superior mechanic for video gaming. I attribute this to the amazing subconscious pattern matching and recognition facilities in the human brain.

Pattern matching as a mechanic is usually coupled with input device mastery. Two prevalent forms of PM are shooters (click the button when a target lines up with the reticule) and rhythm games (click the buttons in sync with an auditory cue). Both these games involve some sort of prediction, e.g. leading targets, interpolating target location, and maintaining musical beat/rhythm.

To help understand the difference between pattern matching and straight up input device mastery, think of any implementation of Whack-a-mole (any WoW addon for a support role will work). The mole surfaces at random locations (debuffs are placed on random raid members), and the player hits the mole (clicks the grid to decurse the target). There is no prediction, pattern, rhyme or reason to where the moles will appear. The player simply invokes muscle memory to move the mallet to a location and swings her finger.

If we examine the shooter mechanic stack a bit more, the very next layer on top of pattern matching in most shooters is resource management (which is a mathematical mechanic). Ammo, weapon clips, reload time, and health--these are all resources that are managed by the player.

I thought this would be an interesting template for RPG combat, and thus I arrived at "ability clips". The entire system would be mirrored from the standard shooter weapon system: the player primes spells in much the same way that weapons are reloaded; when the player depletes a clip, they must reload using a reservoir of mana; each ability has its own reload time, clip size, mana cost, etc.. Players can only have 1 active ability in the very same way that players only have 1 active weapon. The game becomes a third-person shooter with guns that shoot health buffs and movement snares.

There are already a few games that play with functional abilities on weapons. Global Agenda was one. Many of the devices in GA were some sort of non-damaging spell, e.g. speed boost, restore health, stun buildings, and forcefields. Its combat was great; it could have been an amazing example of what I advocated above if Hi-Rez decided to pursue the shooter side rather than muddy the gameplay with hollow additions like persistence, progression, and gearing.

Team Fortress 2 is also an unlikely example of an ability shooter. The interface for swapping weapons isn't as robust and clean as GA's, but many of the newer items added to the game perform a non-damaging ability. The Demoman has a shield which reduces explosive damage and gives them a Charge ability. The Sniper can equip "jar based karate" (it is a jar of pee), and toss it on enemy players to increase their incoming damage by 35%. It also reveals cloaked Spies and puts out fires. Spies have several items which change their cloaking behavior. Heavies can restore health with Sandvich.

Of course these are PvP games. Could an ability shooter work against dumb computers? Players in GA ran PvE missions for the phat lewtz, so I am not entirely sure that those missions without progression rewards are fun. All the mobs did was shoot (from what I remember). If they had a wider range of abilities, maybe it would be a bit more interesting.

Combat as an ability rotation is dull and a precursor to grindful play. The design goal should be to provide the player with interesting decisions, and those require interesting situations. The game must constantly test the player's knowledge and demand that they react, not simply act.

So what other sorts of pattern matching cores could be used to build a combat system? It does not necessarily have to be real-time, but it should have the potential to place players in interesting situations against AI. Some other constraints to think about involve porting the system to an MMORPG, namely how much volition does the player have if set in an open world (player state can't be reset easily; what happens if the player engages more than 1 target).

And if you are interested in passing some time, you can take a look those prototypes. A game of particular relevance is StrongMan. It does have a superficial score attribute tacked on to give feedback to the player, so it is not a pure example of a pattern matching game, but it is pretty close.

Concrete and Abstract Games

I also arrive at a design philosophy of moderate simulationism in MMOs through an analysis of features that define MMOs as concrete games.

Games can be classified along a continuum from abstract to concrete. The most abstract games, you might call them “pure”, are abstract strategy games. The most concrete game would be life itself. The gamism-simulationism dichotomy that I engage with frequently in my abstract design discussions is parallel to the abstract-concrete continuum. Gamism tends toward abstraction—rules for the game’s sake—and simulationism tends toward the concrete—rules for the metaphor’s sake. MMO design is locked in a struggle between the game and the metaphor; the debate is the center of many design discussions and also the source of many ill-conceived arguments.

Abstract Games

“Abstract” as used in “abstract games” means a lack of reference or relation to the real world—Abstract games’ mechanics do not model or have a significant intended relationship with the real world. Think of an abstract game as conceived and played for its own sake. Any similarities we see between it and the real world are not the sources of design decisions, but simply exist because people relate their world to everything they see (a classic reformulation of “if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).

A good example of this is the abstract strategy game of Go (also known as Weiqi or  Baduk). Legend states that Go was invented some 4000 years ago by an counselor to the then emperor of China. The emperor had a son who was a bit dull. He commissioned the counselor to invent a game that his son could play so that he might pick up some degree of mental acuity. How would you design a game if put in the counselor’s situation? It makes the most sense to try to invent a game with simple rules that requires deep thought to play well. To design the game, we’re starting from the very abstract and working our way to mechanics that can be implemented using a few stones and a board with a grid scratched into it. This is demonstrative of how abstract games are conceived.

Abstract games are games designed for the sake of gaming. They do not seek meaning through association with the real world. They give meaning to themselves and their peers. In this way board games can seem utterly trivial to a mature human being unless they genuinely enjoy games (disregarding the social aspect for the sake of discussion).

The “purest” and most extreme abstract games are abstract strategy games. These games have three crucial features:

• Perfect information is available when the state of the game is fully known by both players. (Note that the state of the metagame does not matter here.)
• No element of chance can be present in the game mechanics. This means that only the strategizing of the players affects the outcomes of individual in-game actions.
• Only two players must play the game together. If more players are added, the game becomes political and no longer is purely strategic based on the game mechanics.

We can discern the abstractness of a game by judging how far away from these three features the game strays.

Concrete Games

Concrete games are metaphors for parts of real life. Concrete games create the illusion that the laws of the real world exist in the game. Extremely concrete games are in-depth simulations that allow the player to interfere on behalf of some element in the simulation. These games cannot be played on boards or with pieces of wood or stone, they need the computational power of computers to allow them to provide a model of some part of the real world that can allow players to suspend disbelief.

Concrete games have many players, very limited information flow, and are perpetuated by chance.

If you took all chance away from a concrete game, it would most likely fall apart as a game and become quite boring.  Each player would be able to precisely forecast the result of each of their actions, so all of the complex mechanics would boil down the number of viable strategies to a mere pittance. All of the highly situation decisions made in real life that necessitate the use of rare capacities and patterns of thought would be removed from the game, because chance models the interactions of the myriad minute details that a game cannot hope to simulate effectively. Quantum physics has shown us that even the most basic fabric of reality is subject to the whims of fortune. So to simulate (and therefore to be concrete) requires chance.

In real life, information flow is choked by the limits of our perception. A game that hopes to simulate real life in any way must model this stunted flow of information that may be incomplete or outright incorrect.

The vibrancy and ever-newness of our world is due to the fact that billions of people inhabit it. We are able to communicate with millions of people every day using technologies that were invented only decades ago. The effects of millions of individual interactions between diverse peoples leads to en endless stream of situations that would be fun to model and toy with in a game. Concrete games take advantage of this reality.

MMOs are Concrete Games

MMOs are virtual worlds—in no way are they abstract games. Every individual indicator in MMOs is in favor of their classification as concrete games. As such, they benefit from designs that allow simulation to happen. In this way a game can harness the natural processes of the real world that lead to endless fun and interesting situations. To choke an MMO with abstractness is to take away the very best and most natural fun that can be had in worlds full of thousands of people, saddled by necessity with limited information, and brimming with opportunities for serendipity and chance to reap havoc.

Reducing and Translating Games

A game, in the abstract, is a set of game bits (like individual actors in the game world) and rules (what those actors can do and what the world does in response). The player uses an interface of some kind to interact with the game. This interface could be any collection of physical or virtual objects: a board and special pieces, cards, a ball, or a computer program and the graphical assets associated with it.

Consider tic-tac-toe. We recognize this game because it consists of a three-by-three grid that is filled with Xs and Os by different players in turn, one per grid slot, until Os or Xs are aligned three-in-a-row. But we can create other games that can be translated directly into tic-tac-toe. Here’s one: we take the numbers between one and nine (inclusive) and take turns picking numbers until one of us has a set of three numbers that sum to 15. The same mechanics underlie these two games—the only difference is the interface.

More complex games cannot be directly translated into other games as easily. They must be broken down into constituents that then are simple enough to be translated.

All this translation shows us that a game’s interface can be separated from its mechanics, but how do we actually describe the mechanics of games? Translating one set of abstractions into another, as we did with tic-tac-toe doesn’t seem to get us anywhere in this endeavor. Mathematics is, in fact, a language in which we can concisely and completely define game mechanics. Mechanics can be torn from the game’s interface and described as an abstract mathematical problem that the player is attempting to solve. I will spare you the exact mathematics here, but any game can be reduced to some composition of mathematical problems.

Math has had several more millennia of exposition than game design, so it can provide our young field with some useful language. Problems in mathematics (more than just “1+x=2”-style problems, but problems like sorting a list of numbers without knowing the exact contents of the list) have varying degrees of complexity. The complexity of a problem is basically its “difficulty” to solve, usually expressed in how the time required to solve the problem grows with respect to the “size” of the problem (the size is, for example, the number of numbers that are in the list we’re trying to sort). Non-trivial games can be reduced into math problems of a complexity class of higher than NP.

(Math nerds please excuse me. This isn’t going to be super-precise because I’m trying to make it understandable without taking 1,000 words.)

NP stands for “Non-deterministic Polynomial”, a polysyllabic train-wreck that alludes to how long it would take an “oracle” machine to guess the solution correctly. A problem of complexity higher than NP (I’m thinking particularly of NP-complete problems here) is intractable for a computer to solve—it would take a computer millions of years to solve even modest varieties of the problem. Computers can only verify that the solution is correct in a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable in the theory of computability is a polynomial relationship between problem size and time. It may take a computer 8 million years to solve a certain NP problem, but the computer would only take 8 seconds to check that a solution is correct.

Great games ask you to solve problems that are NP-complete or harder. It has actually been proven that tetris is an NP-complete problem. You’re doing some very heavy lifting when you play these games—your brain works hard to get as close as possible to solve the problem. The startling part is that this is fun!

Raph Koster talked about complexity theory and games in his AGDC presentation this year. I think it’s a profound truth about games that more game designers should understand and utilize.

The Character-Player Gap

In tabletop games, it’s important to maintain the gap between the player and the player’s character. These games hinge on the players roleplaying—the conflict resolution mechanisms are a big aid in the process. The quality of a game of D&D often depends largely on if the players can maintain a separation between themselves and their characters. When the players roleplay their characters effectively and don’t metagame too heavily, suspension of disbelief can take hold and lead to intense immersion. If the gap closes between the player and character, the game becomes a poor simulation with little soul.

MMO design, though it finds its roots in tabletop RPGs, cannot work off the assumption that there is a gap between the player and character. Social competition and cooperation force the gap shut.

How the Gap Closed

In order to compete most effectively against other players (i.e. take the path of least resistance at every possible point and maximize gain) the character is discarded. Roleplaying is significantly less efficient than playing as yourself, so a player motivated by competition will not bother doing it.

To cooperate most effectively in games, players use tools like voice chat that will erode the sense of talking to the character. The player’s interaction with the game world is no longer tightly bottlnecked through the game, it spreads out onto forums, vent channels, IRC, and IM clients. It becomes significantly more difficult to maintain a character-player gap under this diversity of contact—and most of this contact is necessary to cooperate most effectively.

If there is a not a social contract based around roleplaying, people will not roleplay. One or two people failing to roleplaying consistently leads to exponential numbers of players thinking it’s OK not to roleplay. So games cannot expect roleplay where there are a significant number of new players who are not familiar with the concept.

What Does It Mean?

Design games that don’t rely on their being any separation between player and character. Don’t limit the player’s ability to talk to other players because they are not on a certain character. At its most superficial level, persist guilds and friends lists across an entire account (perhaps on a server-per-server basis).

We can only safely assume that a player is roleplaying when he’s interacting with NPCs. MMOs should have a wider variety of NPC interaction choices. NPCs need to have lives that mean something to players—this alone will lead to a significant change in the meaningfulness of an MMO’s world.

The closing of the character-player gap doesn’t necessitate gutting systems of all immersion and stripping them down to their most addictive mechanics. The player character primarily needs more means of effecting the world that are affected by the character and not the player. We simply cannot rely on the player to roleplay in any form. We must fashion gameplay around this fact, not, as WoW and its descendants have done, in spite of it.

(When I present the design for the MMO I’d like to make, you’ll see more clearly how I intend to do what I say here.)

The Abstraction of Character

Perhaps my post about the abstraction of character progress was a bit premature. I defined the progress of characters without defining characters. This post will fill that gap. I aim to present vocabulary and set of patterns of defining and analyzing character abstractions as they exist in RPGs. (This may also be applicable to other genres, as well.)

A pragmatic view of a character in a game world would consist of two facets:

• State: A physical manifestation of the character in the game world, this implies a description of the character.
• Behaviors: A set of abilities that the character uses to interact with the game world.

More simply stated: a character’s meaning consists of what it is and what it can do. Characters allow interesting gameplay because their state affects what they can do and what they can do can affect their state.

State

What is the character?

Typically we describe a character (in terms of game mechanics) using a set of attributes. Attributes are the “ability scores” that are ubiquitous in modern RPGs: strength, dexterity, agility, constitution, intelligence, leadership, wisdom, charsima, etc.. Attributes only exist because they effect the abilities of a character; they represent the capacities of the physical being of the character.

Attributes are either intrinsic or derived. Intrinsic attributes belong to the character’s very being—you can’t break down their capacities further than intrinsic attributes. Intrinsic attributes are the individual variables in the various equations that dictate the effectiveness of abilities. Derived attributes are constructed through the mathematical combination of intrinsic attributes.

Although it doesn’t matter in most MMORPGs, attributes can be used in either their base or modified form. The base form is simply the attribute’s value when no novel effects apply to the character. The modified form arises when some effect happens to the character that changes the attribute. Permanent attribute damage or permanent attribute growth, as happens when a character levels can alter the base attribute value.

Behaviors and Effects

What can the character do?

Usually characters are quite limited in their actions. They can move about the world at varying speeds, but can only touch the world through killing creatures or combining ingredients to make items. On a smaller scale, characters are limited to a certain set of relevant abilities in each kind of activity they can undertake. In crafting, this is usually restricted to each type of item they can craft—an ability is to execute a recipe. In combat, a character has a number of abilities that center on changing the attributes of itself or other characters involved in the combat. The effectiveness of all of these abilities is dictated by individual abilities’ mechanics and the attributes of the character executing the ability.

A Schematic for Describing RPG Character Systems

Here’s my attempt to define a generic way to describe any RPG system. This is not set in stone: it may be incomplete, so please let me know if you can think of systems that this does not cover or anything else I’ve omitted. I will edit this schematic based on input from comments.

Define a set of attributes. Each attribute has

• A name.
• If the attribute has mutually exclusive values (like eye color).
• If the attribute can have multiple values simultaneously (like heritage).
• If the attribute is to be represented as a number:
• Its resolution. (The smallest increment possible that the attribute will recognize or allow.)
• (Optional) Its range. (The smallest and highest numbers possible.)

Define a set of abilities such that each ability has

• A name.
• A list of effects, such that each effect has
• (Optional) a name.
• A magnitude, either as a flat number or as an equation in n-dimensions that may refer to any set of attributes or external conditions. (The amount of damage dealt, hp healed, strength regained, etc. may rely on character level, strength, the color of the character’s hair, the phase of the moon, etc.)
• Either:
• An attribute effected.
• Something created that has its own unique state, which may consist of a different attribute system entirely and different abilities that should be defined on their own terms.
• A duration. (Instantaneous, permanent, or expressed in some unit of time.)
• A set of targeting rules. What will this effect affect?
• A set of triggering conditions. The effect could happen immediately or be reliant on some other condition, such as a certain amount of an attribute, the character’s knowledge of non-euclidian geometry, etc..
• A set of keywords that describe the effect. (A fireball would have the “fire” and “area of effect” keywords, for instance. These exist to allow effects to be modified by one another.
• A list of costs, such that each cost has:
• A duration. (If an effect needs to be sustained and the cost isn’t paid up front or if, for instance, the character debuffs itself in exchange for some other benefit.)
• A magnitude, either as a flat number or as an equation in n-dimensions that may refer to any set of attributes or external conditions.
• An attribute or object in which the cost is paid.
• A list of triggers that could cause the cost to be paid, modified, or diminished.

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.

Moral Choice Beyond Good and Evil

While browsing through the Alganon website for publicly available data on the game, I was angered by the insistence on using the horrible good-evil dichotomy that has become the standard system of moral choice in games.

There are two factions in the game: The Asharr and the Kujix. Guess what they represent? Just pick the easiest possible dichotomy that has been used the most in videogames: Good vs. Evil. Alganon doesn’t stop there, though! It folds all of of the positive “good-aligned” traits—light, nature, heart, mind, order, obedience, and protection—into Asharr and similarly it folds the opposites into Kujix. They went all-in on this cliché. This kind of design laziness borders on the obscene. Reading about Alganon’s weak backstory brought memories of a certain AGDC session flooding back into my thoughts.

Mot and I attended a group session at AGDC ‘09 entitled “The Jesus-Hitler Problem” where we had a series of small-group discussions about how to make moral choice in games less banal and ludicrous. Everyone agreed that the good-evil dichotomy is weak, overplayed, and should be relegated to the trash heap, but few people had much to say about how to replace it. Some suggested avoiding the question all together and divorcing moral choice from game mechanics. Some suggesting having some kind of faction system in games to represent a players alignment with the wants of different important groups in the story.

It’s definitely time we ditch the good vs. evil dichotomy in games.  Both sides are stupid. No one actually ever fits into either of the sides accurately. They’re caricatures that have been dulled by overuse. (And I find it ridiculous that people don’t have a problem how MMOs imply that the moral caliber of one’s being has to do with one’s race.) We should keep moral choice as a mechanic, though, because leaving it out doesn’t encourage players to try different paths. The stakes become very low if moral choice doesn’t actually have an effect on the game world—we almost shouldn’t bother with moral choice at all in that case. Faction systems are a better idea, but don’t fit a wide range of genres.

My suggestion is that we keep moral choice, but change its gamut radically. Moral choice shouldn’t run from perfect good to perfect evil separated by a vanilla neutrality of uselessness. For moral choice to be effecting and memorable, players have to be forced to choose between two equally appealing (or equally disastrous) options. There should be a solid case for either choice being good or evil. 

Here are some dichotomies that arise in moral dilemmas; one’s beliefs on a dichotomy need not be either one or the other, there can be some degree of dithering:

• Idealism vs. Pragmatism (Hope vs. Reason)
• Material vs. Spiritual
• Mercy vs. Justice
• Need vs. Deserve
• Impulse vs. Reason (Heart vs. Mind)
• The Many vs. The Few
• Authority vs. Equality
• Self vs. Others
• Present vs. Future
• Certainty vs. Opportunity (Fate vs. Free Will)
• Intent vs. Consequence
• Unity vs. Diversity

If we profile NPCs through using their positions on these dichotomies, we can construct almost lifelike belief systems. Once we have belief systems, we can present the player with options that will either appeal to or disgust NPC groups that with which the player interacts. The tests of morality can occur relatively frequently, probing at the player’s conceptions of each of these dichotomies. Different factions react in different ways depending on how the player has behaved earlier in the game.

Through expanding the moral quandaries and removing the pretense of good vs. evil, we can create arresting moral decisions, and then have those decisions have deep-rooted effects on the way the game progresses. Such a system will be significantly more engaging, replayable, and thought provoking.

On Balance, Part 2: Ten Key Tips for Balancing

On Monday, I wrote about the fundamentals of balance. Here’s the second and final part of that discussion.

Here are ten important take-aways from Sirlin’s series on balance, but with an MMO bent. These tips cover a wide range, from ways to find imbalance to ways to quantify and fix those imbalances. I added specific MMO-related applications of some of Sirlin’s points about balancing fighting games.

Finding Imbalance through Tier Lists

• Ask players to organize classes, character types, and abilities within each class into five tiers based on their power or usefulness in different scenarios. The highest tier should be “God”-level—these are dominant strategies—and the lowest tier should be trash-level—these are strictly dominated strategies. You want to clear out those two extremes and ensure that the other tiers are as close together as possible.
• Tier lists can be applied to classes or abilities in MMOs, but with a caveat. Characters in typical fighting games are mutually exclusive in the context of play—a player can not be more than one character at once. But in an MMO, a character can have multiple abilities at once and those abilities can be at multiple power levels.
• In a class-based game, it’s easy to apply the tiering system: for each role, tier the classes in their effectiveness. It’s not a disaster if a class is God-tier in one role, as long as it isn’t God-tier in too many, making it basically a dominant strategy to play that class (ala Channellers in Shadowbane). You can use tiering to roughly balance the utility of each class in different situations. It’s a good idea to make the design intentions of classes available to the player so that they don’t make a terrible decision when they choose a class that gimps them at doing what they love.

Avoid Imbalance through Preventative Design

• Imbalances are avoided by the use of counters. Sometimes these counters are passive: Elemental damage is countered by elemental resistance; physical damage is countered by dodging, blocking, and armor. Sometimes these counters are active, like using a shield bash to interrupt a healer casting a life-saving heal spell.
• Design counters and counters to counters. But don’t turn your game into rock-paper-scissors.  Iterative deletion of dominated strategies can be used to determine where bedrock is hit. Sometimes counters can be generally weak, but they can exist just to counterbalance a possibly exploitable mechanic.
• Don’t become fixated on balancing at a micro-level. In a class-based game, you’re balancing class against class, not ability A against ability B. Keep this in mind—sometimes combos of a class’ abilities can make it overpowered and you’d miss that if you were focusing on micro-level ability balance.

Balance Towards Fun

• Abilities have to be powerful. Balancing games isn’t about lining numbers up so that they sum to zero, it’s about making the game as fun as possible for as long as possible.
• Maximize the time where both sides have a fighting chance. Always give each side a reason to fight further—there should always be something to lose worth protecting and something to gain worth taking. Be careful of runaway negative and positive feedback loops.
• Always pull the bottom up to meet the top. This can be difficult in MMOs, but you should work very hard to avoid nerfing classes or abilities. It’s better to have a gap filled a little too much than to leave a void.
• There should be gamist reasons why every mechanic is present in the game. There should be simulationist reasons why mechanics work as they do. The challenge is to pick the mechanics that are balanced for simulationist reasons—actually real-world systems that balance one another aren’t easy to find.

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.

Design Goal: Kill the Boring

When you’re playing a character in a huge 3D world, you want to go to wherever the interesting stuff is happening so that you can have fun. Yes, it’s a trivially true statement, but it lies at the center of many debates in MMO design.

The obvious design decision is to make players walk or ride or float on clouds or fly with their wings (sometimes) through every foot of the world. They have to do this manually, because if they aren’t logged in and staring blankly at their computer screens, bad things must happen.

Bad things must happen, right? Obviously this is the case because no MMORPG allows you to AFK travel. Hell, few MMORPGs allow you to do much aside from various guises of waiting around  (watching progress bars, walking on a safe road, riding on a gryphon, watching your character auto-attack an enemy to death). But what bad things would happen if you let your players skip the boring parts of their character’s lives?

If we’re going to follow the industry-wide pattern of streamlining MMO gameplay, we should take the obvious but oft-overlooked step of allowing the players to be offline or AFK during as many boring or trivial tasks as possible.

EVE Online lets you queue up manufacturing tasks and log off or do something else while they complete. This is an important step towards automation, but a small one. EVE’s mechanics are based around largely non-interactive fundamental activities: combat involves a lot of waiting and gathering is almost entirely non-interactive. In most combat and gathering activities, less than one-third of the player’s time is spent interacting with the game—and those interactions may not actually involve making interesting decisions.

MMOs will be more fun to play if as many boring parts as possible are stream-lined out of gameplay. Keep travel time appropriate so the world can be big, keep production time appropriate so items can have meaning, but don’t make the player pay for this by making them stare at the screen needlessly.

When you’re addicted to an activity, the most intense moments are usually when you desperately want to fulfill the addiction, not when you’re sating your urge. By that logic, it superficially seems that having a lot of dead time your MMO is justifiable. But if we extend the logic further, we have no answer to the question “why must players be logged at all while their character does mundane and boring tasks?” The more time a player spends bored or disinterested in a game, the more boring the game appears. But if being bored in-game is optional (and actually sub-optimal), players won’t stay in your game to be bored—they’ll stick around to do what’s fun and they’ll only remember that your game is fun.

What would you prefer? Four hours spent in-game where only one is spent having fun, or two hours spent in-game where one is spent having fun? MMOs these days lean towards the 1-in-4 ratio.

So why don’t we ditch the boring stuff?

This suggestion is not one that can be implemented with little change to the theme-park model. It requires a rethinking of how MMORPGs engage players. But if the average player is going to put in 1,000 hours of play time, I’d rather have those hours in concentrated bursts of fun lasting around one hour, not in five-hour slogs.

Defining Moderate Simulationism

Simulationism does not mean blind reproduction of real-world processes in a game. I have a more nuanced and objective definition of simulationism. Using this conception, we can better understand what I mean by moderate simulationism.

My approach to moderate simulationism is based on a managerial technique employed to some success among Japanese automakers and subsequently many businesses worldwide: The Five Whys.

Take a look at the high-level mechanics in a game and ask “why”—“why does this work?” or “why did this happen?” After drilling down through consecutive “why”s, you reach a point where you have no other answer but “because the devs say so.” This is the point at which there is no further game-level reasoning: you must step out of the rules themselves to answer this “why.” I call this jump to metagame reasoning a “bottom”. It’s the end of whys that are useful to the player when they’re playing the game. Each time you have a successful answer to a “why” question in a chain, the why-level for the mechanic increases by one.

Gamist systems tend towards metagame reasons taking control almost instantly. The rules in a pure gamist system exist primarily because of metagame reasons—all of the rules do, high and low abstraction layers alike. The perfect simulationist game would allow this chain of whys to proceed all the way until you reach the point you would say “well… I don’t know!” in real life.

In virtual world design (which is the primary concern of just about every single MMO) pure gamist systems fail because the game rules become too arbitrary for the players to suspend disbelief and become immersed in the world. The immersion loss is too great to justify the marginal balance improvements a pure gamist system ensures. Pure gamist virtual worlds do exist, though, in the form modern MMORPGs. There are no pure simulationist MMOs because pure simulationist systems are impossible to implement. Limitations on computing power doom pure simulation. Even if the computing power limitations disappeared, thorough simulations routinely become too complex to program and too complex to play. We don’t even have the means to interact with a computer accurately enough for a simulation of such depth to be feasibly usable.

What, then, is moderate simulationism?

Start with a living virtual world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate simulation of some subset of the real world, but it should be a virtual world that sustains its own operation but changes as different agents interact with it. These agents should be AIs to start. Once you have a self-altering world, you define a set of interaction points at which the player can touch the game world—these interaction points manifest in the player character and its capabilities in RPGs. The way that the player character can interact with the world depends on the parameters of the simulation and the natural conditions that arose as the world evolved under the influence of AI agents. The why-levels of most of the key aspects of the game world will now be significantly deeper than they are in modern theme-park (and even further, sandbox) MMOs, but there is still a bedrock of world design principles that are safely below the why-level of the real world.

(Props go to Tales of the Rampant Coyote’s article on making magic less mundane which helped me to better understand the core of simulationism.)

Make the path of least resistance more fun.

If you let players design their content, they will not design it to be the most fun. They will design the content so that they can accomplish their goals as easily as possible. This dooms open PvP games set entirely in traditional purely persistent shared worlds.

My philosophy of design is to make the path of least resistance into the path of most fun. There doesn’t always need to be an easy way out of every situation that yields positive results for the player, but if the player is optimizing for the easy way out, which players usually do, they should find their optimization leading them towards engaging with game systems in intended ways designed to be fun.

In a typical open PvP MMO, players can pick and choose their engagements so that they very rarely have to fight a superior enemy. This means that players hunting alone are going to get ganked by roving bands of players who risk nothing in the engagement. Rarely will there be a scenario where players on each side of an engagement assess the situation as being even enough that unpredictability of the outcome leads to a willingness to take the risk on an even-strength enemy. The result of this kind of behavior: most engagements are routine for one side and frustrating for the other.

Discontent stirs regarding PvP as pageantry, as well. Players who seek alternate worlds where consequences can be devastating and rewards significant abhor scenarios and “battlegrounds” preened and molded particularly for the delight of theme-park goers.

There must be some middle-ground between meaningless risk-reward scenarios and largely uneventful, often-frustrating open world PvP.

The most obvious solution is to restrict the actions that players can take in the game world. This doesn’t mean adding even more hyper-gamist rules to an already rule-riddled mess. It means limiting the parts of the world in which the game allows direct player interaction so that each interactive simulation can be very good, very fun, and very convincing. Only interactively simulate the fun stuff—allow the player to only participate in the simulation of what players want to do in their character’s shoes. The game world and AI can handle the mundane stuff. If the player needs to control the mundane stuff, let her give the AI goals and then go and do something fun with another character or *gasp* let the player play another game instead of getting burnt out from playing your game too much.

My primary issue with modern MMOs is that they encourage players to put four hours or more into the game per day, and out of those four hours less than one hour is spent doing what’s fun. It’d be better for both players and devs if games were made that can be lots of fun for 30 minutes a night out of 45 minutes played. If I’m going to get 1,000 hours of total game time out of your target audience, I’d prefer to get those 1,000 hours at one hour per day instead of five hours per day—especially when that one hour will not lag behind the five-hour session in terms of time spent having fun.

(In a later post I’ll get into the specifics of how to do what I suggest here. This is a basic precept on which I’m designing my own MMO. I intend to make the design completely public—I don’t care if someone steals my ideas. I don’t have the time and resources to make the MMO I’d want to. I’d rather play the game of my dreams than have it sit in a word doc on my desktop.)

Meta-PvP: A Strength of Victory System

I’ve been toying with the idea of a PvP MMO game that doesn’t involve players fighting one another directly.

The game would consist missions that players can undertake to combat other player factions or NPC factions. Missions could be initiated by players who run factions or NPCs. Each mission would involve a scenario or a set of scenarios where a player (and perhaps a few NPCs under his control to some extent) or group of players fights a group of NPCs of the opposing faction while trying to accomplish various objectives. There would be multiple scenario types including “deathmatch”, escort, protect the item, obtain the item, etc. Certain numbers of each type of scenario would need to be completed within a certain time-frame to complete a faction-wide mission—for example, to take a city/town/hamlet/farm. As the sides complete scenarios, they are awarded points based on their performance in the scenarios. The side that obtains the highest score accomplishes their goal, be it defending or attacking.

Nowhere in this system are players required to lose a battle they participate in. The system actually works perfectly fine if both sides win every single encounter in which players take part. As long as the NPC AIs are good—and they might not have to be much better than Darkfall NPC AI with some added behaviorlets—players can enjoy playing through challenging content and succeeding without being teabagged by 12-year-olds while accomplishing broader, world-changing objectives.

Can a system like this allow people to have their dynamic world cake and eat it too without it being a newb-repelling niche experience? Could such a system bring dynamic world, sandbox PvP to the masses?

Grinds I Don’t Mind: Dynasty Warriors 6

This game and the others in the Dynasty Warriors series have immense replayability for me. I grew to love the Romance of the Three Kingdoms through playing this game and its predecessors.

The defining oddity in Dynasty Warriors titles: the core gameplay is really repetitive and “grindy”, yet I find myself playing through the same battles many times without getting bored. Individual enemies are seldom challenging to beat and, when they are challenging, they are usually “turbo-charged” officers who have the same mediocre-at-best AI but have ridiculously beefy stats. Once you get past the visceral coolness of wading through massive numbers of enemies, slashing as you go, the game seems to be quite a grind.

If the game were only a button-mashing beat-em-up, I would not enjoy it. Dynasty Warriors games have an added dynamic of choosing what path you take through each individual open-ended battle—even though you can be fairly certain of victory, the way that you can accomplish victory can vary significantly depending on which character you’re playing. If you play the same battle from the same side, but choose a different character, you may have a completely unique experience while still affecting the whole battlefield. Your impact on the battlefield is in evidence. It’s addictive and enjoyable.

Within a battle, there are numerous events that are triggered if certain conditions are met. This is a fun system not because it is particularly adaptive, but because it affords the battles more uniqueness and it invites you to “hack” it by doing actions in odd orders. It’s fun to learn the dynamics of a battle and then play it again and take advantage of your knowledge. The CPU doesn’t react reasonably as much as I’d like, but sabotaging an enemy force is surprisingly fun.

Why don’t I mind the grind in Dynasty Warriors 6?

• Battle events are varied depending on my success or failure at certain objectives leading to a somewhat dynamic battlefield.
• The visceral thrill of combat is sufficient—the graphics and presentation are good enough to keep the grind mildly pleasant.
• The grind is punctuated with accomplishing objectives. This is a “killing with purpose”-style grind similar to early WoW and Aion.
• Deciding where to go and what to do next within an open-ended battle at the strategic game layer involves enough in the way of interesting decisions to prevent the grind from becoming monotonous.
• Whatever I do will have noticeable affects on the course of the battle.
• I genuinely enjoy the Romance of the Three Kingdoms settings. Seeing the characters brought to life in the game world is worth more to me than it would be if I was not connected to the story.

MMOs Evolve in an Elaborative Way

MMO evolution is in a stage of elaboration. The game mechanics in RPGs have reached a stage of development where we generally know what works, though the specific applications of single-player and tabletop RPG mechancs to the MMO vein are still a work in progress. Elaboration shows in the fact that each successful game offers players more to do than the last. The standard activities in MMOs are each being built with increasing intricacy. This intricacy is aimed at producing the highest probability of the players having fun and getting what they want. Camping mobs was supplanted by quests, static quests were gradually replaced by instances and, perhaps, will later be replaced by Guild Wars 2’s “Events” system.

Elaboration is a process that relies on familiarity, because without a simpler form from which to build,  creation results. A raw creation is an unproven attempt which has a significant chance of outright failure because the outcomes of implementing a creation are significantly less predictable than the outcomes of implementing an idea that has been tested and elaborated upon for several generations of games.

Think of the evolution of certain apes several millions of years ago. Did the evolutionary process yield survivable, successful creatures by flailing about and coming up with radical new ways to solve problems that were already somewhat solved? You can clearly see the similarities between chimpanzees and gorillas, the differences between the species aren’t vast swaths of new features on a similar basic vertebrate structure, the differences are elaborative changes that built on past partial successes and honed the features of the individual apes for survival in specific environments.

There are two ways to utilize familiarity to effectively elaborate game mechanics:

1. Use unfamiliar methods to achieve familiar goals.
2. Achieve unfamiliar goals by using familiar methods.

There are two other permutations of goal and method familiarity that I did not list above. Neither of them afford a designer noticeable advantages in a scenario where elaboration is the guiding evolutionary pattern. Using familiar methods to achieve familiar goals is better described as “cloning” a preceding game. Using unfamiliar methods to achieve unfamiliar goals is almost assuredly creation and not elaboration.

The goals in MMOs are quite standardized. The metaphor is of living in another world as a being with extraordinary abilities. This means that the goals players will have, in their most abstract forms, will be very similar between games. The game designer exercises their abilities in designing the necessary sub-goals that can lead to the achievement of abstract, standard goals.

The methods of achieving goals in MMORPGs are the game mechanics that the designers implement to mediate the interaction of the player characters with the game world. The tools designers to interact with the game world are very limited in the popular style of MMORPG, so elaboration can easily lead to gameplay that is significantly more fun. We’ve seen MMOs get more fun over the past ten years, and that trend should continue. Designers need to mind the gap between cloning and elaboration.

After getting through all this abstract talk of elaboration, the question becomes what exactly is familiar to players.

What cases can you think of where good familiarity factors have aided elaboration to create great mechanics? World of Warcraft is the first to pop to my mind—that explains its wild success. What about the rest of the market, though: which games do you think elaborate and which simply clone?

I’d love to hear cases where unfamiliar goals combined with unfamiliar methods have led to success, as well.

Information Availability: An Underused Asset

MMOs are confronting a unique challenge in the gaming world: detailed information is available about any MMO—and is expected to be available—that can potentially compromise the fun of the game.

This problem is critical in MMOs but inconsequential in single-player games. It’s easy to control information flow in single-player games. You reveal information to the player as you see fit. You do not need to design with the expectation that your players will enter the game world knowing how the game works and exactly what they’re going to do to get as powerful as possible. Players can gain more information than they should simply by playing the game multiple times (or by going online and reading FAQs and guides)—this is an unavoidable situation but it’s not usually a problem. In a single-player game, there can be some illusion of fairness: some illusion that a player will not try to completely compromise the game by finding game-breaking exploits and repeatedly performing them. Such an illusion is reasonable because if the player exploits a game to death, the only person they’re harming by performing the exploit is themself. They’re robbing themself of the full experience of playing through the game as it was intended to be played.

But in multiplayer games, it’s expected that the players know the game systems well—if a player doesn’t start without enough skill, he is stigmatized. When failures affect other people, failing has a multiplicative effect and can cascade, causing disproportionately large penalties. When a game is conceived without a single-player mode, the learning ground must be built into the multiplayer experience. RPGs are naturally attuned to this learning stage because character growth is usually slower than player skill acquisition (provided that the player actually tries and isn’t babied through the content). MOBAs, as I discussed in an earlier post, do a poor job of this.

Information availability is a double-edged sword.

The first edge helps players: new players can more easily master the core concepts and mechanics of the game using the information available to them as an aid. This can cut down the trial-and-error needed to succeed in-game significantly. The community is doing the interface designers’ and documentation writers’ jobs by documenting the mechanics of the game: pointing out pertinent, critical information about the mechanics and how to use them in a reasonable way.

The second edge hurts game designers: no longer can static information be used as a critical point of gameplay—this means that typical means of storytelling in single-player games will not work as intended because they’ll be spoiler instantly and disregarded. When more than fifty thousand (or another arbitrarily large number) human beings are going to experience your content and solve the exact same problems, there is a sufficient market for the solution of those problems that the information will be made readily available. Gamefaqs and thottbot are the two websites that embody this principle, though one generally covers single-player games and the other only one massive multiplayer game. Players are incentivized to find thottbot when they play WoW. They’re incentivized to use addons like QuestHelper to help them streamline their play sessions—this is not because they want to compromise the content (as they regularly will do and blithely remove the fun from the game, then complain about it) but because they have no reason to avoid the good information that makes playing the game easier and significantly lubricates the otherwise daunting expanses of character advancement. As a designer, you must assume that story and fun will always be compromised by success in a social setting.

There are two take-aways I want to emphasize from this analysis:

1. Designers in the MMO space do not need to be afraid of creating deep, complex, and difficult games composed of mechanics that take time to learn and master. As long as character advancement reveals abilities and mechanics at a sufficiently slow pace without boring seasoned gamers, complexity and depth can be assets without presenting players with a wall of unmitigated and impassible difficulty. Information availability should be emphasized in-game to allow players to learn faster and become versed in the fundamental mechanics as soon as possible.


2. Storytelling needs to be rethought. Static stories will no longer be effective for a large enough percentage of the playerbase (and for the louder part of the playerbase). Even more flexible conversational systems (like Star Wars: The Old Republic’s system) are fodder for expanding informational awareness. New ways of storytelling need to be invented that allow for dynamic worlds that aren’t as dull as procedurally generated content tends to be.

The One Character Fallacy

Many of the character advancement problems that we encounter in modern MMOs are caused by the one-character philosophy. Single-player RPGs adhere to this philosophy for good reason and originated it as a metaphor. As with the blind adoption of many of the other tropes of single-player RPGs, MMOs have taken this one blindly and not done adequate work to adapt it to fit the realities of massively multiplayer gaming.

The one-character philosophy exists and has persisted because of these design decisions:

1. Player characters do not age.
2. Player characters cannot actually die.
3. There can only be a limited number of PCs per player.
4. Character advancement is very time-consuming.
5. Character advancement is almost entirely vertical.

The one-character philosophy doesn’t need to be a static emplacement in MMORPG design. There are several well-documented issues with expecting the players to stick with one character throughout their journeys:

1. Grinds are necessary to keep players playing if they are meant to stick to one character. Developers want to milk as much play time from characters as humanly possible.
2. Vertical character progression has to be long. This means that level barriers lie between you and having fun doing what you want in the game world.
3. The wild swings of the nerfbat turn your favorite max level character into a useless sideshow in your favorite style of play. You’ve put 150 days of playtime into your character, but now it’s all rendered moot because the balance has tipped out of your favor.
4. Making an alt means repeating the whole grind again!
5. Lots of vertical progression means lots of content strewn across the game world that is only accessible to narrow groups of players at a time. 90% of the game world is useful to less than 10% of the players at a given time. Making good content is difficult and uneconomical considering the low number of total hours players will spend with that content.
6. Max level boredom is the result of grinding your way to max level, then looking out over the desolate landscapes of useless locales and wondering “now that I’ve climbed the mountain, what do I do next?” This is less a problem is World of Warcraft, because the game is very top-heavy, but in other games this is brutal. (Warhammer)
7. Death has to be meaningless or half of the players will run around naked, sit in town and macro all day, or become exploiters due to inhuman risk aversion.
8. Permanent decisions are anathema because characters have to live with what might be cripplingly bad decisions for the rest of eternity unless the player wants to throw away the time spent on that character.

MMOs refuse to stick to this metaphor wholesale (aside from Darkfall and other games that force you to only play as one character on one world) when they allow alts. This allowance is the first down the road to mortal characters in MMORPGs.
Problems with perma-death:

1. Discourages character investment.
2. May overly reward excessive play-time.
3. Character progression may be overly repetitive.
4. Managing too many characters at once.

Design responses (off the top of my head):

1. Focus on horizontal character progression.
2. Ensure there are important activities that a character can only do when the player is offline. Characters may have to sleep for a certain amount of their lives to not face penalties. Such penalties make it optimal to play multiple characters while not necessarily making every one of them uber.
3. Reduce vertical progression to the side-effect of good and skillful play. A 10% cap on vertical ability gain would be reasonable. Ensure that vertical progression is no longer the focus—speccing well and having a strategy for your character should be more important.
4. You don’t need to be logged in as particular characters to perform certain actions. Perhaps web-based or otherwise out-of-game interfaces would be more effective for managing the auction house, trade goods production, and other repetitive activities that can be more effectively managed from a dedicated interface outside of the game engine.

Discarding the one-character philosophy has its own problems, but it’s impossible to fully grasp the potential of a multi-character system until it’s actually implemented, and I don’t see any games giving it an honest go yet. One-character thinking has reached its natural conclusion; we need to move on. MMOs have proven their marketability, it's time to make game mechanics that leverage the nature of an online game instead of shoe-horning single-player mechanics into multi-player games where they do not belong. I believe the one-character philosophy is one design stumbling block past which we will find much better MMOs.