Accountability System for Dynamic World MMOGs

Let’s think about how society holds people accountable for their actions and why. We’re not going to be able to directly model this in a game, but understanding how morality and social structures maintain themselves in real life can provide us with a basis for the mechanical social structure in a game world.

What (most likely) separates human beings from other animals is that we can calculate consciously the affects our actions will have on others. We can conceive of systems to judge actions on a scale beyond our own self-interest. These conceptions are institutionalized through religion and law. Societies dynamically generate and modify moral codes that their members tacitly understand. When there are enough people in the society, institutions arise to enforce moral codes and perpetuate, beyond the scope of the family, certain moral standards.

Accountability and moral agency are tightly bound. If we can be held accountable for our actions, we have the capacity to make moral decisions and be held to moral standards. We want the morality of actions to make a difference in what a player chooses to do when he interacts with others.

Societies in online games take on much of the morality of the real-world society in which the game is played. The effect of morality is deadened significantly in online games, though, leading to plenty of negative, uncooperative behavior that leads to undue pain and suffering.

Active morality promotes social order and cooperation, which, in general, leads to a much better social experience and a more enjoyable gameplay experience. In order for morality to matter in the game world, though, there needs to be accountability. Actions taken against (or with) other players need to have consequences, positive or negative, in order for the morality of those actions to matter to the player. Consequences cannot be enforced by players without knowledge of the precedent action.

Accountability in MMO dynamic worlds is deadened by several factors. Dynamic world games have to mitigate these factors significantly to make accountability work.

1. There’s no way to teach the morals of the game’s society to newbies without them experiencing it. Newbies are given a character that should have a solid understanding of the moral framework, but it’s impossible for the newbie to have that level of understanding.
2. There’s no ultimate punishment in the game world because death has little meaning. This has far-reaching consequences and cannot be overlooked.
3. The cost of abandoning a character and creating a new one isn’t prohibitive. Griefers only lose time when they are forced to make a new character, and those griefers usually have more free time than those who are being griefed.
4. Players don’t play every waking hour, so decisions that may need to be made have to work around when a player is online. The player’s perceptions and actions are limited by how long they spend online—there’s no analog for this in real life.
5. Survival is not a motivator for belonging to social groups. I-game groups are much more ephemeral and the bonds between players are much looser because there aren’t many pressing needs, and no need is as pressing as survival.
6. Membership churns in social organizations. As a result of weaker bonds between players in social groups, a player can jump from group to group at little penalty.

An accountability framework for a dynamic world needs to have several parts:

1. Event capturing and fact collection. The game engine can provide plenty of information about what characters have done. This information can be factually perfect—which is actually better than the general imperfection of information in real life. Collecting data can be difficult in games that have a lot of ambiguous actions available to players, but if players’ actions are relatively well defined, event capturing can lead to a significant increase in accountability.
2. Player aggregation and contextualization of information. Trusted players should be able to take the bare-bones fact sheets generated by the game engine and write histories around them that can be read by other players within the game.
3. Limited information availability. People don’t immediately know all of one anothers’ deeds and misdeeds. A game shouldn’t model this directly, but some gradual information spread depending on player contact and faction contact is necessary.
4. Account-wide activity memory. Because we cannot assume any degree of roleplaying, the moral actor should not be considered the character, but the player. All characters played on the same account should be connected. Activity histories should appear the same for all characters on one account (though there should be some reorganization of the view to allow the activity of the current character to be at the top or highlighted).
5. Give in-game social groups facilities for communicating at all times within the game. This means much more than guild chat. Social groups should have message boards accessible from within the game. There should be something like a wiki that the group can put up to hold important data about itself that its members need to know for the social order to be maintained. Organizational tools are crucial for the promotion of moral and cooperative behavior.
6. Allow social group membership to have a dramatic effect on how a player plays the game. More than simply giving the player a tag beneath their name and a chat channel, guilds should open up a whole new world of coordinated and uncoordinated group activity. When a player joins a new group, she should notice a difference in the way she plays the game every single time she logs on. In this way, group membership can have significance and membership churn can be reduced. Survival can be replaced with raw utility as a motivator for social behavior.

MMOs should make playing with others as smooth and rewarding as possible. In a game world where players can have significant effects on each others’ gameplay, it’s critical that social groups have the tools to invent and maintain morality frameworks to ease cooperation and promote social stability. Without tools to aid tracking and managing accountability, dynamic worlds will continue to breed a disproportionate number of psychopathic characters—such games will always be alluring but, ultimately, socially unstable, exploitable, and brutish.

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.

Your Job is to Make Tasty Sandwiches!

I walked into a Subway sandwich store for the first time earlier today. After ordering, I was confronted by a lot of options that weren’t presented in an efficient way. There were approximately four steps where I had to make some choice as to what to put on my sandwich—four distinct phases where different ingredients were either added or withheld from the sandwich.

When the sandwich was completed, it has a total of 4 ingredients in it (bread included).

I ordered a sandwich that had a distinctive name that suggested almost every ingredient that would be present. “Sweet onion chicken teriyaki” leads me to expect the sandwich has onions, teriyaki sauce, and chicken on it, probably with lettuce thrown in because that’s how sandwiches are usually made. Instead, after ordering the sandwich, I was confronted with four different decisions, each with more than four options. It was not clear at all what would go on this sandwich or what should. Why is that? Because I am not a professional chef. I don’t go into the store expecting to be saddled with making myself a good sandwich. I went to the store so that I could buy a good sandwich that they had thoughtfully designed and put together.

This is a great metaphor for a significant problem application designers face: giving the user as few decisions as possible while allowing them to effectively and easily use the application to accomplish their goals. Subway failed at this basic design problem by saddling me with far too many choices, almost invalidating its primary reason for existing (to sell me tasty sandwiches as easily and quickly as possible so as to make a profit).

Aion makes an innocent but devastating mistake in an effort to simply make a tasty sandwich. They’ve streamlined their game into a candy-coated, artificially enhanced stream of purpose-built monotony. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition falls into this trap as well.

When you log into Aion, you enter a world that is clearly made so that you can run around and effectively kill monsters. Everything’s arranged nicely for your viewing and killing pleasure. The ducks are lined up and a well-maintained rifle is put in your hand for an enjoyable afternoon of shooting—but the ducks are wooden and the rifle doesn’t shoot anything, a wooden duck flips backwards whenever you fire. The gameplay is directed; it’s so directed that, after 10 hours, it felt completely empty to me. My path through the game was perfectly clear. It was so well lit and nicely paved that I felt that I might try a different, dustier, less-traveled path. But there was no other path.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (4e from here on) streamlined the hell out of the tabletop roleplaying—or, perhaps more aptly, rollplaying—experience. Its predecessor, 3.5e, was asymmetric, arcane, and had a serious case of power creep. Wizards of the Coast apparently had enough of that and decided to finely tune the 4e rules to cut off all those rough edges and remove the arcane and less-trodden paths, to simplify the complex, and to run out of town all the rules but those that governed situations that could be vaguely described as combat. Suddenly the sprawling 3.5e is replaced by a very consistent, smooth 4e that has all the corners neatly rounded and all the danger areas surround in safety fences. 4e is a game system that is very obviously a game—it has clear boundaries that become quite obvious when you try to run a 4e campaign. All those fun utility items that abounded in 3.5e are gone. The unique and flavorful mechanics of each class are replaced by abilities that are minimal variations on a consistent framework. The abilities and, by extension, the classes, feel like repackaged and rebranded copies of the same few ideas.

Streamlining games can solve mechanics problems, but it ultimately rips the soul out of a game. When all of the interesting detail is stripped and all the excitement is paved over, it doesn’t matter if the game is perfectly balanced: it simply will not have enough flavor to be fun. You might leave the game feeling like it was well-balanced and complete, but you won’t find yourself excited.

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.

Harnessing Familiarity to Breed Excitement

I enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online for the three months I played. I didn’t get a character to max level, but I did bring a Captain and a Minstrel to around level 40. I found that once I had chosen a character class and set out into the game world, playing the character was fun and the content was good enough that I had little problem soloing my way through most of the character advancement I saw and engaging in limited group play when it became appropriate. The standard MMO leveling process that LotRO leads its players through is familiar to me, so playing the game was a comfortable fit.

Where LotRO failed: Never did I fully grasp the capabilities and intended roles of each class. It seemed to me that the classes had a diversity of abilities to fill different roles to varying—mostly quite small—degrees. Every class can solo effectively and every class has some usefulness in a group scenario—probably more so than in WoW—but I did not find myself getting excited about potentially playing any other class. Never did I look at their abilities and think that such a class would be able to fill the role I’d like to fill in a group while being fun to play solo.

Why did I feel this way? Because the classes in LotRO do not feel familiar to me. If they do not feel familiar, my expectations don’t match up with reality. The Minstrel class is an instructive case of this. Minstrels (or Bards) in Dungeons and Dragons and in most RPGs are utility characters that use their song to buff friends and use their guile to manipulate NPCs. Bards have a small cadre of arcane magic they can use, but those incantations are usually tricks to help them with their previously stated roles. In LotRO, Minstrels are basically clerics. This dissonance forced me to throw out my knowledge about the roles and goals that a Bard or Minstrel should have—I cannot be excited about the potentiality of playing a class of which I have no ground-level understanding. Excitement occurs only when you can project an interesting and vital future for the decisions you make—if you can’t perform this projection, the dissonance that results saps excitement and, in my case, my motivation to roll a different character. I find myself in a similar situation with every class in LotRO.

I should be able to answer this question: “What is this class designed to do well and how will it do that?” If I can’t, my motivation to play the game suffers significantly. If I can’t answer that question even after playing the game for two months, there must be a problem there.

It doesn’t matter how well-designed and balanced a game’s classes are: if I can’t get excited about starting a new character, I will not care.

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.

TF2 and the Meaning of 'RPG'

Valve is promoting their next update for TF2. They are calling it a "classless" update because typically they will focus their efforts around a single (or pair as in Sniper vs. Spy) class. We are getting a new Arena map, Offblast, which I can't understand given that Arenas (one death Deathmatch) seem to be the least popular map types, and even competitive leagues will use standard capture-point maps, payload, or capture-the-flag maps. King of the Hill is also being added.

Instead of making witty and stereotypical remarks regarding the character of whatever class they are updating, Valve has decided to focus their attention on Hats. TF2 has a very crude item system which was originally designed to allow players to make strategic decisions. Weapons would have sidegrades which could be swapped in and out. The best (and possibly only good) example is the Medigun sidegrade: the Kritzkrieg. The standard Medigun slowly builds ÜberCharge which can be used at 100% to make the Medic and his target invincible for 8 seconds. The Kritzkrieg version instead gives the Medic and his target guaranteed critical hits for 8 seconds.

Hats are vanity items which players acquire at random times and are extremely rare (I don't have a single one). They can be swapped like weapons, changing your headwear. Because they are so rare, and often hilarious, players want hats and will comment whenever someone is wearing one. Valve is, of course, playing on that social dynamic:

Throughout history, men have worn hats as a way of showing how much better they are than other men. “I buy hats,” a behatted man seems to say. “I am better than you.”

I don't know who is writing all this, but I find it to be quite entertaining. Here are a few gems someone (Blargh) in my TF2 community posted:

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/populace/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/hats/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/war/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/geographic_lumps/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/advertisement/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/barbary/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/enigmatical/

My favorite being the one about hats:

SMELLY UNFORTUNATE: 'Please, sir.... May I have a hat?'

GENTLE MANNE of LEISURE: 'A-ha-ha! You are as PRESUMPTUOUS as your are POOR and IRISH. Tarnish notte the majesty of my TOWER of HATS.'

His COMPANIONE: 'I have maney hats also but did not bringe them.'

I'll bring up the question which has been talked about ad nauseum: how many items does it take to get to the center of an RPG? TF2 has: role-based, tactic combat; items and inventory. Do we need stats other than HP? Weapon ammo can be considered Mana. Are achievements and weapon sidegrades character progression? I would say 'no' considering they are designed to be situational or support different playstyles.

I think it boils down to persistence. DotA and other MOBAs have everything listed above aside from explicit character progression persistence. When the game ends, you start over. If you didn't start over, but played these games with heroes at max level, then would it be an RPG?

What about a story? Do we need a creative team to dream up some world and its history? Single-player RPGs would be incredibly lackluster without a story (would you play FF7 for just the battles?). But is player-generated history enough to support the story requirement?

RPG seems to be one of those really ambiguous terms, like "fun". We know what it is when we see it, but can't describe its components.

The Role of Chance

“Cutting down the role of chance” is one of the more overlooked of my 10 Points for the MMORPG Revolution, so I will tackle it first.

The first step towards cutting down the role of chance is to understand the role of chance. Randomness is a root preconception that players have in MMORPGs, and, to seasoned RPG players, it seems absolutely necessary. In actuality, this assumption need not hold. In this post, I will review the roles of chance and why we want to reduce its role in upcoming MMORPGs. In a later post I will offer suggestions as to how to cut down the role of chance in specific instances of each of these roles.

(As a thought experiment, I encourage you to think about how you’d design an MMORPG that does not use a random number generator. We’ll see if our ideas match up when I get to the second part of this discussion later on.)

Here are the three roles chance plays in MMORPGs. (If you can think of more, please comment! I want to make this article as complete as possible without getting overly concrete and nitpicky.)

Random Numbers Simulate Character Ability

In role playing games of all kinds, random numbers are used to determine the outcome of events because they can resolve actions independently of player skill. If a character needs to roll a 15 or more on a 20-sided die to successfully perform an action, that character has less skill than the character who can roll a 10 or more and succeed. No level of player planning can overcome his characters limitations without some luck—this is appropriate, because ability gating and character growth are important, fundamental parts of RPGs.

Random Numbers Model Unforeseen Factors

Random numbers model the effects of actions that are outside of our scope of observation. In real life, we notice events that seem to occur randomly, but this is just a symptom of our subjective viewpoint. Because we don’t see the causes of certain events, we assume that they’re random. Under further analysis, we find that human-level events have complex cause-and-effect relationships that, if followed prior to the “random” event, make the event an obvious effect. As individuals, we can perceive so few of these strands of cause-and-effect that it is impossible to get our heads around most of the complex activities that we are subject to in a given day. Hence, the idea of "randomness" or "chance" in human-level interactions and one of the roles that chance plays in RPG systems.

Random Numbers Provide Variety

Random Numbers are used in generating loot and monster spawns and can be used for determining the behavior of enemies (if there are multiple equally viable AI strategies). This randomness provides variety in the game world and is partially responsible for how addictive loot-heavy games are, Diablo II especially.

Entire dungeons can be generated on the fly using random numbers. Diablo II did this, but there are more interesting procedurally generated maps in roguelike games. Much replayability in roguelikes is due to the ever-different dungeons and maps that present the play with a seemingly endless number of interesting tactical situations and fiendishly difficult dungeon levels.

There’s a lot of work done in procedurally generated content, as well. Most of this stuff is rather technical, but goes to show that there are a lot of people working on effective ways to use random numbers to generate content in games.

Motivation For Reducing the Role of Chance

Why do we want to get rid of as many random number-determined actions as possible? With few exceptions this mechanic has been the core of RPGs for as long as RPGs have existed.

If we want to give the player the ability to change the world and affect other characters in meaningful ways, we need to make decision-making the central process. We need to allow decision-making to determine the outcome of events, not chance. If we provide the player with appropriate information about the decision they are going to make, there’s no reason to build into the game a chance of that decision failing outright due to a bad die roll (something that’s completely out of any player’s hands). I’m not suggesting that we remove failure from MMOs, but instead that we remove unavoidable failure from individual player’s actions.

In a system that allows player success to the best decision-makers, players can easily see what they have done wrong and accept their losses as lessons for the future. If the dice screw you, you’re going to be upset at the game—nothing is learned. If you plan poorly or make a bad decision, you can identify that without the obscuring power of dice rolls and make intelligent decisions using that input in the future, leading to player skill and player learning being the most important facets of the game, not time invested and luck.

Would You Play a DotA MMO?

What would a DotA MMO even mean? DotA (Defense of the Ancients) is a custom map (Blizzard's version of modding) for WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne. Because it is custom content, Blizzard does not officially support the game, but I'm willing to bet that all the WC3 box sales in the past 3 years have been because of DotA. There are in-depth articles, tournaments, even songs about the game. One interesting feature is that it is constantly being updated and expanded by its makers, The DotA Allstars (TDA), specifically IceFrog. Items and heroes constantly get balanced, retooled, or added. The game boasts of over 95 heroes and over 100 items.

There are tons of mechanics which make DotA extremely fun and rewarding. The trend games have taken during the past decade has been to integrate elements of RPG games. This includes everything from item and cash acquisition in Counter-Strike to character stats in Dawn of War 2. Seeing your guns get progressively better or your units do more damage between missions is explicit progression. Not only are the players' skills and knowledge of the game increasing, but also the attributes of the mechanics themselves are becoming better. When done correctly, this is layer of depth which compounds the entire experience for the player.

DotA has what I like to call Local-scope character progression. The game starts, you progress a character, the game ends, and all explicit progression gained on that hero is lost; it goes out of scope. The next time you start the game, the hero is level 1, you have the standard amount of gold and no items. Everyone starts this way. An unfortunate side-effect of WC3 modding, but a brilliant mechanic. Not only must the player understand the low level game mechanics, but he also needs to know how to effectively progress his hero. Given his team composition and the enemy heroes, what are the best ability choices, and what items will be the most effective? I know not of any other game with this same strategic layer as deep as the one in DotA.

Another really important layer is that of team play. DotA is five versus five. You need to push towers, coordinate enemy hero kills, and complement each other's hero builds. The team that works together will almost always be the team to win (some game modes like All Random might give the team a bad composition; here you are at the mercy of the random-number generator). Heroes have implicit roles: some are pushers, gankers (killers), early-game nukers, late-game behemoths, etc. A well balanced team is paramount to success. Game modes like All Pick or any -Draft game bring team composition to the forefront at the start of every game. Don't pick 5 intellect nukers if the other team has 3 gankers. You will be waiting to respawn more often than playing.

But don't let this team play talk fool you: you personally are still responsible for the power of your individual hero. If one player is dying a lot, he is often termed a "feeder" because he is giving large amounts gold and experience points to the other team. When is it OK to be by yourself? Where is it OK to be by yourself? There are 2 enemy heroes unaccounted for--should you be pushing that tower? In team battles, you have to know when and where to engage (terrain matters), when to use abilities, whom to attack first, and when to retreat. Mind games, lures, and straight up fog-of-war trickery are common place. Here is another layer of depth.

All in all, I view DotA as a Strategy Mini-MMORPG. Obviously the team-centricity and individual responsible layers carry over (with some work) into the full-fledged MMORPG genre, but I'm curious about Local-scope progression. MMORPGs usually have global scope progression. Meaning that every time you log in, the character has retained all explicit progression from the last session. Players who level alts or different jobs/classes can make the explicit progression into a challenge--see how fast they can get to the level cap--but there is no real game layer which all players need to learn and master. Sure MMORPGs have talents and specializations, but you are pretty much locked in to your choices for the length of your character's career. There is never a time in your character's career when you need to actively think: I should first get Rank 1 of a stun spell before max'ing passive damage increase because I am against a very aggressive player with an early game hero, and the stun will allow me to escape if I need to.

There is no game encompassing ability progression in most MMORPGs. This is largely because the leveling aspect of character progression is usually against stupid AI-controlled enemies. Obviously a DotA MMORPG needs to be played primarily against other players.

Would it be possible to zone into Alterac Valley, have your character at level 1 with minimal gold and no gear? You have to kill other players and any monsters roaming around to get experience and gold. After you kill the General and win the match, you would be back at level 1. Would this work? Would local-scope be something players would pay monthly for? Or is everyone too much attached to global scope progression where time = gain and their shinies indicate their characters worth in the world?