GA Follow-up with Todd Harris

Yesterday, I was extremely dissatisfied with IGN's interview with Todd Harris. I criticized Cydoc and then rhetorically posed a bunch of questions from the top of my head that I, a passionate player, had about Global Agenda.

Hours later, some of my questions were indirectly addressed in a newsletter--particularly random PvP queuing and an extension to the Conquest free trial.

Several hours after that (while I was playing GA), Mr. Harris personally answered my questions. I want to thank him and Hi-Rez for taking the time and for caring about their game as much as I do.

First, thanks for the attention to Global Agenda. There are a lot of MMOs out there and we appreciate your interest in our title. Clearly you guys are investing a lot of time with the game as you form your opinions and publish them. I may not agree with them all but I can respect informed opinions. I wish all game journalists would be as well informed before they post. :)

I saw your most recent blog earlier today. And so, without further ado, are some quick written responses to the questions you guys were most interested in.

• The servers are down or restarted almost daily. Are player numbers and activity surpassing your technical expectations?
  
  Global Agenda player activity has indeed been very strong - slightly ahead of our projections to the extent that we've added more capacity in Europe and are working on new servers closer to our Oceanic community. In the first days after launch we certainly had a set of restarts for tuning and application of server patches. That said, I would invite anyone to compare our 'uptime in the 2 weeks since launch' against any other MMO launch and I think we compare very favorably. In the first ten days we were perhaps overly-aggressive in bringing down the server to apply dev patches. We have moved to an approach where maintenance patches are applied during a pre-scheduled off-peak time unless it is truly a critical issue. This maintenance schedule should make things more manageable for players and still let us continue to improve the game as is our commitment.

• Why are VOIP channels so shaky? Should we be complaining to you or to Vivox?
  
  Mainly us. We work closely with Vivox. So, in terms of the exceptional sound quality of our built-in voice, we'll both take some of the credit. :) Likewise, we work jointly to address any issues. We have had zero issues with the core technology Vivox delivers. And we worked hard to ensure that any voice issue would not affect the core game. However, a small set of users have definitely experienced VoIP channel stability issues within Global Agenda and we are delivering a patch later this month that we believe will address those reported issues.

• What qualifies Global Agenda as an "MMO" while League of Legends is not?
  
  Each game needs to choose its own path in terms of qualifying itself. And even then we know that players bring their own expectations to the table. We've tried to be VERY candid about what Global Agenda provides and what it does not since some players assume MMO means World of Warcraft with different art. As you guys know, our website states that "Global Agenda is NOT a typical MMO in many respects and does not include: a large, seamless world to explore; quest givers; open world PvP or PvE; elves. If you consider any of these items to be must-haves within your MMO, we may not be the game for you.
  
  We categorize Global Agenda as an MMO because, although instance based, our game allows thousands or tens of thousands of players to all find one another, interact, and compete online within a single-shard universe. There is no segmenting of the population based on named server as you find in the typical MMO or typical online shooter. We also feel that Global Agenda's AvA gameplay delivers more persistence and consequence than the typical MMO but each player needs to make that determination for himself.
  
  Personally, I'm encouraged by the many hybrid games now emerging that allow thousands of players to interact online in non traditional ways. These games each trigger lots of debate about terminology but I think the innovation is exciting to see.

• Follow-up: What makes Dome City more than a glorified lobby?
  
  I think Dome City hosts functionality beyond what most people would expect in a lobby. Specifically - locations for player mail, an auction house, and player crafting, in addition to the expected set of vendors. That said, Dome City could certainly be called a graphical lobby and I wouldn't debate you on it. Its primary purpose is to support our mission-focused gameplay and accessible character progression. I do think we have lots of room to add social elements and immersion elements to our city spaces over time but our priority was to deliver fun combat first.

• Players have expressed dissatisfaction with the random PvP mission type. Why hasn't a preference system been implemented?
  
  A preference system for PvP will be live before the end of this month.
  
  Earlier today I posted the following to the GA community:
  
  For initial release we consolidated gametypes within a single PvP queue. With no guarantee around number of players we would have, our top priority was to ensure the players got into matches quickly and to make sure our matchmaking system had a sufficiently large population to balance out sides. That said, we've heard how much players want to specify, or eliminate, certain match types. And we do have the population to support this request. So, we will be implementing player selections per PvP gametype so you can exclude or include each type as you wish.

• Do you plan on extending your matchmaking system to include character talent specialization?
  
  No current plans for that. We'll continue to monitor matchmaking and improve it but so far it is doing a very good job.
  
  
• Are players of high TrueSkill matched with similarly skilled players, or does the system try to even out the teams by dropping in low-skill teammates?
  
  Matchmaking's first priority is to ensure that the average skill-level is equal between the two sides – in addition to considering other factors like keeping classes balanced and character levels balanced. Matchmaking prefers to also keep the standard deviation low within a match so similarly skilled players are together. However we balance all of that against minimizing the time players are waiting for a match. Bottom line: if the population online is fairly low you could have some lower or higher skilled teammates as long as the average skill-level is the same between the two sides.

• Why is Conquest free until March 3rd rather than for the first 30 days of box purchase, like every other MMO?
  
  The MMOs that include 30 days with box purchase also shut down your access to the game entirely when you stop paying subscription. We let you play the core game in perpetuity and I think the real question is why every other MMO doesn't offer that! As an aside, we have recently extended our Conquest free offer until the end of March. The extension will allow allow more players to sample Conquest and allow us to demonstrate our commitment to delivering new content frequently.

GA Failview

Over at IGN, Cydoc interviewed Todd Harris, the Executive Producer for Global Agenda. Or rather: pandered. Not surprising that another game journalist asked questions which could be answered by browsing the Global Agenda website. GA players are going to get nothing out that information session.

Here is a game which is getting bad to no press coverage, and instead of conducting an actual interview, Cydoc turns it into a fact-fest. It's not even a hype-erview.

PR at HiRez might be thinking that it'll generate some buzz, but there is nothing buzz-worthy in the entire thing! There is some drivel about the origins of "No Elves" and Recon sleep darts; I almost rolled my eyes out of my head. I doubt this will sway anyone considering purchasing the game. So who exactly is this interview for?

These are the questions that Cydoc should have asked:

• The servers are down or restarted almost daily. Are player numbers and activity surpassing your technical expectations?
• Why are VOIP channels so shaky? Should we be complaining to you or to Vivox?
• What qualifies Global Agenda as an "MMO" while League of Legends is not?
• Follow-up: What makes Dome City more than a glorified lobby?
• Players have expressed dissatisfaction with the random PvP mission type. Why hasn't a preference system been implemented?
• Do you plan on extending your matchmaking system to include character talent specialization?
• Are players of high TrueSkill matched with similarily skilled players, or does the system try to even out the teams by dropping in low-skill teammates?
• Why is Conquest free until March 3rd rather than for the first 30 days of box purchase, like every other MMO?

Fun and Learning

We don’t have a good way to derive what will be fun for different people aside from attempting to replicate what we find fun. Fun as a concept is transient, temporal, experiential, slippery, subjective, and fickle.

If I were to pick a starting point for a discussion of fun, I would start with the importance of learning. I agree with Raph Koster’s assessment that fun is a matter of learning. But when some players hear this, they pull back from the idea with shock and dismay, curious as to what education has to do with gaming.

Schools have turned learning into dreary work, though we frequently learn and enjoy the process—games are one such case of self-directed learning.

Players resist thinking of games as learning experiences because when society institutionalizes a concept like learning, we associate the institution with the concept that birthed it and draw a confused distinction in our minds between the institutional workings and the actual concepts. Through their experience the American public education system, most Americans have been traumatized into thinking that they want to learn as little as possible. Combine that trauma with a general aura of anti-intellectualism in the United States, and you can easily see how  learning would be frowned upon by working people. Learning is a weapon wielded by the intellectual elites (who they consider to be liberal blow-hards who have never worked an honest, real job). In an idealistic meritocratic society, hard work means more than smarts. Smart people are crafty, manipulative, and cannot be trusted; hard-workers are honest, feel with their hearts, battle-worn, and sympathetic. We, of course, side with the hard-working factory worker instead the lazy banker (not that the banker is necessarily smart or the factory worker is necessarily dumb). Values among Americans are changing with regards to smarts because of the prevalence of computers and their usefulness in the modern world, but there is still this palpable dislike for anyone who wants to make you think—and that dislike extends doubly to people who would have you think for yourself.

The joy of games is that they allow you to think—they make you think without you being aware of it! They are distractions. Distractions make you think about something aside from your normal concerns. Fun games establish self-contained thought patterns that please us because they are outside of our everyday experience. Games let us engage in an exotic kind of thought unlike our everyday drab thinking.

This thinking is simply learning for a different cause.

When you learn, you internalize patterns so that you can recreate them or recognize them later. Pattern matching is the basic operation of the human mind. Everything we mentally do is pattern matching. Our senses provide us with data; our brain processes them and, through recognition, understands the world. From this understanding, we make decisions and change our environment or ourselves. This view is so abstract and big-picture that we do not think of it in our everyday lives. Pattern matching is the frame through which we see the world—it’s easy to see how we wouldn’t notice that frame when we’re so busy looking past it.

Games present us with new patterns, or new variations on old patterns that we like, and we find learning these patterns fun.

Global Agenda’s Design Failure: DPS Medics

EDIT: Please note that this post was written before Global Agenda 1.3 was released. This was before solo PvE was possible. The open world did not exist when this post was written. Please keep that in mind. (In other words, this post may be irrelevant.)

In Global Agenda, Medic is the only class that can be a dedicated healer. Robotics can plant medicrates that heal nearby allies for a fixed amount every second or two, and they can buff allies’ damage through planting sensors or defense through planting forcefields between allies and enemies. Medics can buff as well as robotics, if not better, and they can heal other characters anywhere on the map.

Every class in Global Agenda has three talent trees. All classes have a “balance” tree that provides general improvements like a bigger power pool, faster power recharge, and extra defense. The other two trees are specific to each class. The medic has a healing tree and a poison tree.

The poison tree is a design failure for three reasons.

Reason #1: Poison Medics throw off Team Balance

In Global Agenda, you always play with a team. You play 4-man instances if you’re doing PvE, and 10v10 matches if you’re doing PvP or AvA (Agency vs. Agency; conquest).

Global Agenda balances teams based on class composition. Each team will have roughly the same number of medics (there may be one more on either team). If each team has three medics, but one side has two poison medics and one healer while the other has three healers, you’ll notice that, if skill is even between the teams, the team with the healers will always win.

Keeping allies alive in Global Agenda is paramount—an ally waiting 10 seconds to respawn and running back to the fight location is not helping his team for as much as thirty seconds per death. Perhaps the medic-spec imbalance would not be an issue if poison spec medics could do significant damage, but poison medics are easily foiled because they are reliant on poisons and debuffs that any heal-specced medic can dispell with the press of a button once per minute.

Poison medics act to spoil team balance. Especially when all PvP is through pick-up groups (you can only have a 4-man group when queuing for PvP, but teamsize is 10), a DPS medic takes away a surprising amount of utility from his team because others cannot adjust to fill the roles needed—only medics can fill the role of dedicated healer.

Reason #2: Poison Medics are Redundant

Other classes have DoTs. Other classes are better at doing damage. Why let a support class spec so that it can do comparable damage to classes that are meant to do damage primarily? Other classes do what poison medics do—everything except healing on demand.

EDIT: And other classes can use off-hands and certain weapons that do the same kinds of debuffs that poisons allow. If anything, the Recon class should use poisons. Otherwise, giving medics the ability to counter medics is poor design, considering other classes can just shoot the medic who is healing and kill it before moving on to the teammate he was earlier healing.

Reason #3: There is No Soloing

Why do you need a DPS tree in the medic class if there is no reason the medic should be using it? Damage trees became popular among support and healing classes in other MMOs because healers needed some way to solo so they would be casual-friendly—but you never solo in Global Agenda!

The Third Tree Should be “Buffs”

HiRez should remove the poison tree and replace it with a buff-centered tree that gives  bonuses to different buffs’ durations and magnitudes. A buff-centric medic supports other characters and will be able to heal effectively at any time.

I’m not against medics having a few offensive off-hands—but allowing the medic to essentially substitute his or her entire healing capacity in favor of dealing damage has too many downsides and almost no upside.

[EDIT: I'm arguing that medics shouldn't be encouraged to DPS through dedicating an entire tree to it. I am NOT saying that medics should be unable to defend themselves. Medics should be able to do reasonable damage to foes, but they should not be encouraged to eschew the point of their existence, healing, in order to do a little more damage.]

Meaning, not Immersion

In MMO games, the concept of immersion is overplayed.

Perhaps it’s a leftover from the era when 3D graphics first arrived and people gaped at how they could be truly within, “immersed” in, a game world for the first time. This would be genuine immersion—just as a you are immersed in water when you jump into a pool, you’re immersed in a 3D world when you play Mario 64. This far immersion makes sense.

But gamers want to take the concept of immersion farther. Now immersive games have to be games where the world is more real. This doesn’t mean that the world has to be more superficially like ours (though that’s what many developers seem to want it to mean)—it means a world that has a similar level of detail to our world, at least as far as the player would naturally examine the world. Players think immersion requires that the game include small details of the real world that have no mechanical reason to be in-game. From many player’s descriptions of immersion, it seems to be no more than an artificial glomming-on of graphical assets and sounds to add detail to the game world, even if that detail has no significance in playing the game.

People who talk about immersion as being of critical importance are picking out nice details and artistic flourishes in a wall mural of a morbidly obese leper vomiting, then claiming that those details are why people enjoy looking at the grotesque mural.

Immersion is bunk because you can’t apply its concepts consistently to an MMO without becoming a gibbering maniac. Wolfshead claims that World of Warcraft is (or was) immersive, in part, because of the little critters that roam about uselessly in the game world. Seeing a cow or chicken wandering Azeroth doesn’t mean much to anyone. It’s cute, sure—but immersive? If immersion only requires a vague similarity to the real world in a superficial Potemkin Village-like way, immersion doesn’t mean much aside from a proliferation of graphics, 3D models, and sounds.

If you try to find immersion in the major mechanics of the game, you will fail. Characters grow vaguely like people do in real life, but do people suddenly become much stronger every time they’ve accumulated a certain amount of experience? Mobs in the game world respawn fully-grown and in a set pattern—this alone should make an immersion-interested gamer turn and flee. Quest-givers give everyone who stops by the same quests to do the same things; what!? This is the least immersive genre ever. Everywhere you look for immersion you’ll fail to find it—unless you’re happy with pretty lights and sounds.

The best definition I can think of for immersion in gaming: the player’s impression that the they're in a real world. This may capture an extremely superficial understanding of why games interest and addict players, but it misses the point. We don’t care about games because they resemble a real world, we care about them because they have meaning to us both derived from the gameplay or bestowed on the game by the outside world via, for instance, communities and social organizations.

Players only care that what they’re doing in the game has meaning to them, whether it comes from the game itself, other players playing the game with them, or from the player herself. Without meaning, a game will fail regardless of its immersive qualities. People don’t want an immersive game, they want a fun game.  Let’s think about meaning as a positive quality in games instead of immersion, because wherever immersion fails, it is a really a failure of meaning, and wherever immersion succeeds, it is because of meaning.

Botched Newbie GA Experience

I am back after a long and busy few months, and I want to talk about Global Agenda. Evizaer posted some facts of the game, and I'm going to share my perspective of the PvP missions.

I played a melee-focused Recon until 25 and a launcher Assault until level 18 in pre-order beta. Starting back at level 5 in release reinforces my notion that this is a very skill-centric game. Even at level 7, I topped damage, kill, and objective charts. However, I am going to attribute my dominance to a design oversight.

There are 5 PvP mission types, each with a handful of maps. I don't know the exact number, but it's in the ballpark of 15. When a player queues for a PvP mission, they cannot select a mission type preference. All enqueued players are pooled together, and when the matchmaking system finds appropriate players, spins up a random type and map, and puts all the players into the game.

That is terrible newbie game design. A game should shepherd newbies into the game, teaching them new systems once the players are familiar with the previous lesson. They should spend a few sessions with one map type, learning the strategies involved. Then the new types should open up, allowing the player to queue if they feel compelled. This is--in fact--exactly how queuing worked in the pre-release beta and some of the earlier closed betas. HiRez decided to change it to a single pool in order to "lower queue times". I never had a queue longer than 2 minutes with the former system. (Not to mention that I hate the spamfest that is GA Payload.)

Newbies who are trying to make heads or tails of combat, class abilities, team dynamics, etc. are forced to learn new map mechanics every 10 minutes. They have to learn where objectives, corridors, and hotspots are on every new map. So rather than focusing on the intricacies of fighting, they have to figure out basic map layout. This lack of consistancy and familiarity delays gaining player skill, and as a result I don't get healed by medics.

And I'll make a little comment about GiantBomb's 33 minute "quicklook": the reviewer ran around with his secondary weapon the entire time. Enough said.

Global Agenda: An Overview

In this post I’m only discussing the gameplay outside of Conquest, a mode that costs you a monthly fee but adds impact PvP to the game.

When you log into Global Agenda and pick a character, your character appears in “Dome City”, which is essentially a 3D lobby for setting up PvE missions, PvP matches, and Conquest. The game is in 3rd person, but in a dead-on camera orientation instead of an over-the-shoulder orientation.

The Player Character

• Health. The standard measure of life. The game tells you how much life you have and lets you know how much damage you’re taking per shot by scrolling numbers above your head. Damage and healing numbers relevant to you scroll above the appropriate character.
• Power. You don’t reload in this game and there are no ammo limits. You have a pool of “power” that you expend to fire different weapons and burn your jetpack. When you’re out of power, you can no longer fire the weapon or use your jetpack. Power regenerates when you’re not draining it.
• Melee Weapon. There is no choice of melee weapon—at least from what I’ve seen. You always have one available to you, though.
• Ranged Weapon. Different classes get different kinds of basic weapons. For example, medics can either use a standard assault rifle or a shorter-ranged poisoning gun; Recons can use SMGs or assault rifles; etc.
• Specialty Weapon. Each class gets a unique selection of specialty weapons. Recons get sniper rifles, medics get their healing guns, assaults get rocket launchers and miniguns, among other weapons and gadgets.
• Off-hand Abilities. You can equip three off-hand abilities. You can trigger each of them roughly once a minute. They offer class-unique effects, deployables, and area effects on friends and foes.
• Jetpack. Everyone has access to a jetpack at all times.
• Boost Ability. Each class has a boost ability that they can use after sustained excellent play. The effects of the boost are different for each class, but usually it’s a big help to your teammates and can alter the tide of battle.

The game features four character classes: assault, medic, robotics, and recon. The classes are vaguely similar in concept to Team Fortress 2 classes. Each class has three skill trees that you put points into as you level up the character. Characters do grow vertically in this game—though it’s a game of skill.

• Assaults have high attack and defense. They use grenade launchers, miniguns, and rocket launchers to deal lots of damage. They have shields that allow them to become temporarily invulnerable to different kinds of damage.
• Medics heal friends or use DoTs and debuffs to aid their allies in dispatching foes. They can either use their off-hands for improved healing and buffing, or they can gain access to poison auras and grenades to debuff and sap their enemies’ health.
• Recons use stealth, sniper-rifles, mines, and bombs to sabotage enemies’ defensive positions and reap havoc on any lone player they can pick off.
• Robotics kill and heal through the use of drones, turrets, forcefields and "medicrates”. Robotics are a utility class that offers tremendous strategic potential.

Player vs. Player

Without paying for a subscription, you can play five PvP modes and five difficulties of PvE missions. To play these modes, you queue up in Dome City much like you would for a battleground in World of Warcraft. The game then attempts to fit you with a relatively balanced team. Usually it does a good job. Occasionally the queue is just too unbalanced for the automatching system to deal with and you get lopsided teams—I’ve been happy with automatch so far, though.

The PvP modes are

• Control. Teams vie for control over three points on the map. The team who controls the majority of the points gets victory points. The first team to a set number of victory points wins.
• Demolition. Mot calls this “reverse CTF”. Each team has a “robot” that a player can man. The first side to get their robot to the other team’s base three times wins the match.
• Breach. One team attacks and one defends. The defenders attempt to prevent the attacking side from capturing three critical points—one at a time. If the attackers can’t claim the next critical point within ten minutes, the defenders win.
• Scramble. A critical point appears on the map at “random”. Teams fight for control of the point. When the point is captured, a new critical point appears a few seconds later and the process repeats. The first team to capture four of these points wins the game.
• Payload. Two teams struggle for control of a cart on rails. The attacking team tries to move the cart to the defending team’s side of the map. There are two checkpoints along the way past which the defenders can’t push the cart once they’re reached by the attackers with the cart. If the defenders prevent the attackers from pushing the cart to the next checkpoint in 10ish minutes, the defenders win.

Player vs. Environment

[I initially wrote "enemy" instead of "environment" absent-mindedly. Thanks to Randy for pointing it out to me.]

PvE missions consist of four-man instances. I haven’t played enough of these to have a good idea for what variations occur. Generally you and your team fight your way through an mob-populated locale and face off against a random boss at the very end.

Players gain loot through PvE that can be used to craft. I’m not sure exactly how crafting fits into the game, because crafting didn’t seem to be doable outside of Conquest in the beta. I’ll report back on crafting at some later time.

Experience point gain seems to be balanced between PvE and PvP missions. Because you have a signfiicantly higher chance of success in PvE, the XP rewards are noticeably less.

Unique Issues and Features

• You don’t jetpack around and shoot people at the same time. You need to switch to the jetpack in order to use it, so you can’t fly and fight at the same time. This creates an interesting mobility dynamic and gives a lot of room for player skill to show.
• No reloading and no ammo! Power is tied to using any equipped item (aside from boosts and off-hands). This creates some unique trade-offs: do I jetpack away with my remaining power or try to kill my opponent? If I try to kill him I won’t have any juice left to jetpack away easily. This kind of opportunity cost built into the game adds a unique tactical dynamic.
• A variety of off-hands leads to several unique and viable character builds. Every class has at least two viable builds.
• You can change your build within a match. You aren’t locked into your character build when you enter a PvP match for the entire match; if you’re in an equipment zone, (basically, your “dropship” where you spawn by default) you can freely alter your character build.
• Cooperative and competitive game modes keep gameplay interesting and diverse. Tired of PvP? Get together with your friends and take on the challenge of a PvE mission. If you’re tired of facing dumb bots, queue for a PvP match and enjoy a challenging match within a few minutes.

I will post more commentary on the game as the mood strikes me. It seems like not many of the bloggers I follow and that seem to follow this blog have been covering Global Agenda, so this overview post can act as an introduction to an otherwise unfamiliar game. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in a comment.