MOBAs: Newb-Unfriendliness Typified

I can’t talk specifically about what MOBA I’ve been playing, but I have been playing one that Mot really likes and I like a bit as well. The gameplay is engaging and requires constant attention. There are several layers of strategy involved, and inadequacy at one level can cause a loss when playing competently. From what I’ve read and seen, this game is representative of MOBAs in general, so I will comment on the genre instead of the game specifically.

My initial impression of MOBAs was largely skewed because the game forces newbies to play against people with vastly superior skill at random. The matchmaking engine for the MOBA we played, in particular, used an ELO rating system that matches up teams with similar aggregate ELO ratings (exactly how the aggregation happens is unknown to me). Mot is a good player and I’m a brand new newbie, so naturally we are pitted against good players when we choose to play together. This leads to my prompt destruction and eventual frustration as players who know the game inside and out pick me apart for mistakes I didn’t even know I could make.

And when I made mistakes, it cost my whole team the advantage. I basically was forced to throw games in our opponents favor just because I was new, and this was frustrating my unwitting teammates. I expected some backlash, but people were either understanding or silent in most games. There was a minor taunting episode once that didn’t affect me much. Being a burden on others and not having much fun in the process left me unwilling to play the game again.

Why should I play a game where I will cause other people to not have much fun for half-hour increments? A newbie playing a MOBA is a lose-lose deal. The newb gets a dose of harassment and taunting from angry teammates, and those teammates are forced to deal with an ineffective team member and come near wasting a half-hour of their life.

I played a few more games before I wrote this post and they solidified my observations. I played well in two games and enjoyed myself, scoring two wins and contributing to the victories as much as I could. The third game, though, left me wanting to never load the client again. The other team was well-coordinated and played very well throughout the contest. I could hold my own in a lane for the first stage of the game, but the other team got together early and destroyed us repeatedly in small engagements and sometimes in a large blob. I don’t know enough about the game to combat a fluid blobbing strategy, and my teammates were reviling me. I asked them to actually help me instead of making fun of me, and they proceeded to be negative and make the whole experience a miserable one for everyone.

Afterwards, I went to the forums and did some more reading about the game to try to better my play. I’m confronted with advice to learn what every hero can do. There are 28 heroes, five of which you’ll play against in a given game. That means in six matches, ideally, you’d encounter every hero in the game at least once. Some champions are far more popular than others, though, and you only tend to learn an opponent well if you lane against them for a while and see what they can do. This means that it may take 20 to 30 matches to lane against each hero and have a passable level of knowledge about your opponents. At 30 minutes per match, that’s 10 hours of being a newbie—ten hours of dragging your team down as you try to learn the game. Combine that with trying different champions and the tendency for the MOBAs to be extremely unforgiving.

It seems like MOBAs are rigged so negative and frustrating situations have to happen to new players. I doubt there’s a lot of growth potential in the genre with such a miserable newbie experience. It’s a shame, because the game mechanics are unique and fun when you are playing against opponents at your skill level.

Fifty Posts Deep

We have dug a shallow grave so far, though not deep enough to fully accommodate my ego or drown out Motstandet’s inane ramblings. Our grave is more than fifty posts deep, but what have we done besides put thirty thousand words on the uncompromising sieve of uselessness that is the Internet?

Mot and I never came out and said what we’re trying to do here. It doesn’t matter—we could continue writing without a clear direction for the rest of our lives without blinking—but I think it deserves a scant few paragraphs. If I write what I’m trying to do and you read it, that means at least the two of us can understand the meaning of the pit all these words are meant to fill.

I’m trying desperately to find fun games to play. If I can’t find them, I will try to give people the ideas that they need to make them—perhaps I’ll even try to manifest those ideas in code myself. I see the MMO genre as one with amazing potential. So far, that potential has been very poorly shown by even the herculean efforts of companies like Blizzard. If you play one MMO and get burnt out, chances are you’re going to burn out faster on the next one until you just stop playing MMOs. Why is this? Because variety and product differentiation in MMOs is very narrow. I want more MMOs trying different ideas; the way the market is looking currently, there are not enough people speaking up who are like me. And so I speak up.

The spirit of That’s A Terrible Idea is to revisit older ideas that never caught on and give light to new ones. We want to analyze what’s here as a way to see what can come next. We want to change the paradigm to get past the current rut in MMO design. I know we cannot do this by ourselves and there are other blogs out there that are trying as well—we may just be pissing into the wind, but if enough of us are doing it someone downwind of us is bound to get wet and do something about it.

That said, I’d like to link to a few of my posts that I believe lay the groundwork for my MMO design thought. Because, at best, only 10% of anything is worth the effort, I’ll give you the four posts (roughly 10% of my contributions to this blog) that I think are good enough to merit a read for newer readers or a reread for the very few of you who have been around since the beginning.

• From Absurd Gamism to Modest Simulationism - Outlines my general approach to how to improve MMOs in an abstract fashion.


• The MMORPG Revolution: 10 Points - I offer ten concrete ways that I think MMOs should change to revolutionize the genre and lead to much better games.


• The Seven Questions I Ask Myself About An MMORPG - Gives a good idea of what I think about when I play MMOs and where I'm coming from as a player in general.


• Save the World (And Level Up!) - How story and mechanics in MMOs have become separated and why they trivialize one another.

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.

MMO Novelty and Social Networking

We are at a turning point in the MMO genre. It is a point which will bring about either the downfall or the pervasion of the grandest display of video games seen yet. Up to this point, I feel MMOs have survived entirely on the novelty of playing in a large, persistent world. Players were willing to do very un-game-like activities because that's just how it is in an MMO. By the time grinding catches up with them, they are bound to the world with social ties--guilds and friends they've played with over the months.

The novelty is wearing thin, particularly in the combat area. More and more MMOs are appearing to be copies of each other because developers can't get past those poorly designed grinds. Aion, Champions Online, Fallen Earth, SWTOR: all have the same combat system. And guess what? WoW pretty much popped the MMO cherries of any gamer who would begin to try an MMO. Please stop with the "tried and true" single-target, hotbar doldrums. If you stay down this path, then the only way gamers are going to migrate to your new world is if all his social ties move there, and you will lose that battle also.

I'm projecting my feelings for Aion, but I'm willing to bet other players feel the same way. Aion deviates little from the beaten path. The only way I will be paying for Aion is if several of my RL and gaming friends decide to play it.

The only feature I am looking forward to is grouping. Apparently you can kill monsters in groups as a means to get XP, which is reminiscent of EQ, FFXI, and all those aged MMORPGs. What I am afraid of is that this feature gets American-ized out, and the grossly optimal way to level is solo-play. Fewer players willing to group means fewer groups.

So should NCSoft remove my beloved parties, I will be very reluctant to start paying them. I'm not going to torture myself just to chat and play with my friends. If I'm that socially depraved, then I'll start using Facebook more.

And here's the kicker. With all the social networking outlets, with all the social apps and casual games found on all these sites, MMOs will become obsolete. That is, unless they offer something these venues cannot: engaging progression that can't fit inside a Facebook app. If players get the same rehashed game systems over and over, they will learn to stop trying new MMOs. Less players means less revenue, and for a world that requires millions of dollars to create and maintain, that is not a sustainable business model. MMOs will die out.

Discarded Mutants: Design Considerations

On further review, this idea doesn’t work very well as an MMO. The spirit of the game would be compromised by min-maxing competitively against other players and there are significant issues with what happens to player-owned assets when they log off. The game would be far more immersive in a single-player mode with an (perhaps mostly co-op) online multiplayer mode.

Here are some fairly broad design considerations I’ve derived from the concept:

No world map. If you chose an intelligent mutant, you can make a map if you can find the materials to do so—ink and paper may be quite difficult to find, but carving into tree-bark might work. The quality of the cartography depends on how perceptive and intelligent your mutant is.

Combat doesn’t have to be complicated. This game is about survival, not war. There needs to be enough of a combat engine to allow the player to defend himself and hunt for live game if need be. No vertical growth is necessary, though it may be nice to have. Most mutants won’t last very long. This game is more about experimentation than it is about building up an uber character.

A basic social model will be sufficient. The mutant needs to be able to express some simple sentiments. “Go here”, “kill this”, “I don’t have a weapon”, “I’m friendly”, “leave me alone or I’ll throttle you.” The chance of two mutants being capable of spoken communication and actually speaking the same language is infinitesimal, so we don’t have to worry about RPG dialog conventions.

Most gameplay is interaction with the terrain and environmental features—not necessarily NPCs; a dynamic and living world is the focus.

There will be story, but there won’t be exposition. The player, in search of food and water or maybe just to mess around, will stumble upon ruins of lost civilizations. Through ruin exploration, the player can implicitly learn about how the civilization was structured and what led to its downfall.

Interface will be a big challenge. If the interface is poor, all the interactive world systems in the world won’t save the game from floundering in uselessness and unplayability. This point is as important as most of the design points in the game, because without it the game cannot even limp towards success.

The Colony: RP Haven

My computer experienced some hardware failure a few days ago. Waiting for parts to arrive, I've been spending the time in front of the TV more than I usually do. I've watched all episodes released of the Discovery Channel's The Colony. It's a reality show about a group of people in a mock post-apocalyptic world set in downtown LA. It's an interesting idea, but I think the producers severely underestimated the resourcefulness of the participants in the "experiment." The people were herded into a very large machine yard. I'm calling it the modern version of Gilligan's Island--the "volunteers" have made showers, laundry machines, flame throwers, and tasers. They even have solar panels powering all their lighting and welding needs.

Some of the situations feel contrived, and it's not as if the people don't see the cameramen everywhere or know they are mic'd. The post-apocalyptic experiment is pretty much defunct, since survival needs were taken care of by the second episode, but watching these people react to certain stimuli is very fascinating. It has become a very alluring, televised role-playing game (one guy even uses a bow and arrow as his weapon of choice).

Those running the show send in raiders or other actors to steal or to stake claims on resources. The producers react to how the volunteers have handled themselves thus far. For example, the participants spent time building comfort luxuries (like that shower and laundry machine), so the experimenters exploited their weak security and defences and sent in raiders over unfortified walls. A trader showed up in one episode. He was transplanted right out of nomadic Arabia; he had a truck, but all his wears were in brown sacks. It was very out of place, almost fantastical.

They are in the process of fixing an old truck to leave for greener pastures. With a water filtration system, steel walls and doors, and a renewable power grid, I'm not sure why one would want to leave, but that's their priority. It's as if they beat this dungeon and want to see the next one.

I can't recommend the show for the post-apocalyptic "experiment" (a "cross section" of society includes no burger flippers, oddly), or even the drama (everyone is a generally level-headed and educated), but if you look at it through a fuzzy lens, you can see the RP elements shining through. Maybe survival MMORPGs will have a market.

Call of Duty 4: Punishing Newbies Sells Boxes (Once)

When I first started playing CoD4 multiplayer, I absolutely loved it. I loved the advancement options and the persistent rewards that made me feel like I was accomplishing something by doing the same kind of standard FPS play over and over. It’s nice to see your name rise on the scoreboard, and it’s certainly fun to gain skill at a game, but to know that a new weapon is just around the corner makes me load up one more round of the game instead of calling it a night. The game becomes intensely addictive as you level up. Gaining skill and gaining abilities was a delight the first time around. I had the best multiplayer FPS experiences I’ve had in my entire life, and I didn’t need to be an elite player to enjoy the game.

I loaded CoD4 onto the gaming rig that I built a couple of months ago. I started a new profile for online play.

I was rusty, yes. My knowledge of the game had dissipated from disuse. But I was so disheartened by being stuck with a level 1 account again that I almost gave up the game entirely. I had a max level account that I played a significant amount within a few months of release—without the options granted by higher levels available to me, the game become artificially difficult and extremely frustrating. I’m stuck with iron sights, for instance. Iron sights are terrible and seriously hinder aiming. I have to suffer through many awkward matches to get to the point where I can use the red dot sight, which is the only sight for assault rifles that I find tolerable.

The game is punishing me for being new. Why is it doing this? At first blush, I thought it did this to limit the options new players have so that they will not get overwhelmed. Then I realized that it doesn’t matter if I have twice the options if those options actually let me have significantly more fun with the game. Why don’t they give me all the sights for the starting weapons? Why do I have to use crap sights for fifty or more kills just to get a sight that is a direct improvement? This is a skill-focused game, not an MMORPG. I’m motivated to play so I can get better sights, but that motivation is counteracted by the frustration I’m experiencing now.

Call of Duty 4 makes it more difficult for new players to have success. This is a bad design decision. You are forced to play uncomfortably for a while before you are permitted to enjoy the full fun of the game. I don’t understand this approach—vertical progression in an FPS betrays the purpose of FPS games. FPSes succeed based solely on player skill growth and challenge being motivating factors; reducing challenge while skill grows is counterproductive! This kind of positive feedback mechanic is damaging to the spirit of the game when you examine it with some objectivity.

So why, then, is Call of Duty 4 so wildly successful? Because the game mechanics are great. They nailed the FPS. There are a number of varied and useful weapons and there are rewards for using them well. Gluing multiplayer matches together with a progression system is a great idea, an idea so good that it pushed aside the counterproductive tendency of the system with its sheer innovativeness and the polish that made that innovation a pleasure to play (the first time through).

One game has had great success by punishing newbies. I sincerely hope that this does not become a trend. I see people asking for unlockables in the fascinating District 8 (which is now in open beta—I suggest checking it out) and I cringe internally at the possibility of having to bludgeon my way through crippled weapons and suboptimal choices until I prove to a skill-based game that I can be a warm body in enough matches to brute force 150 kills.