Various short thoughts on game (re)design

How exactly are new areas not part of the game?

More importantly, what's your point? 'The game' is everything in it and the overall design concept. If the concept is changed, so is the game, regardless of how old or new areas are. Area and skill changes/implementation are simply evidence of the concept pattern, and hence symptomatic of any changes.

Because if prophecies was released today, you would destroy everything in front of you and wouldn't call the game challenging at all.

You would be bashing Protective bond, earth shaker, watch yourselves, eviscerate, gale, minions, soul reaping, obsidian flesh, etc.

Basically you and anyone that understand the game would be yawning because PvE was so dull.

If new areas with new monster only skills, new environment effects, etc, would be released today and last year, players wouldn't be complaining about how easy the game has become, since they would be entertained overcoming the new challenges (although, each new challenge would take ever so less time be conquered).

While there was some change in design, with what we know today, that change wasn't unexpected.

My point is - horizontal expansions can't survive unless AI evolves because there is so much challenge you can milk from a static AI.

Then the only thing to keep it refreshing is an arms race. But vertical expansions introduce that in a way that feels natural, opposed to this consumable/bigger level/unique skills thing, that is basically hammered into the game and breaks what existed before.

And if you, I and everyone else weren't busy mastering the game at the time, you, I and everyone else would have realized that the GW AI is pathetic.

The AI/GW wasn't challenging back then - just everyone was noob.

Improvavel, you have made some bad implicit assumptions:

1) Your hypothetical new content would have to be "harder" than existing content. If it weren't, everyone would roflstomp it using existing techniques.

2) AI improvements that invalidate existing techniques are not plausible. (In practice this is at least largely true - I'll grant that.)

3) Alterations to existing content that invalidate existing techniques are not plausible. This one doesn't fly.

4) Minor alterations that add new content to underutilized areas without requiring game updates are not plausible. (Eg: weapons contest goodies.) Ditto.

There's nothing wrong with the horizontal model, as long as it is properly maintained. The issue is the lack of proper maintenance and the introduction of horrifyingly imba skills.

Lets look at GW history -> FoW/UW/SF ->Urgoz/Deep -> DoA.

What to add after DoA?
Don't exactly no... but I bet it would be harder via frustration rather then challenging.

Maybe Anet doesn't know either, and hence calling a day for GW.

Or would you prefer a collection of places that play much like the same?

The fact is that AI can't learn and can't adapt.

I don't know if AI can be improved or not for the current GW. Anyway, any improvements is another static script. Once the script is learned, you can abuse it.

The best we can have is random foes/areas, etc. Since 3D games became norm, I cant really recall a game that had this.

Even if there are some games that have it, it isn't that common, so probably not easy.

Anyway, Anet doesn't seem to follow that path for GW.


This one can be done. Simply making SF not maintainable would screw UWSC and cause problems for DoA HM.

On the other hand, DoA could really use some changes to make it more enjoyable.

Again, Anet at this moment doesn't seem to have or be inclined to use their resources for this.

Since I'm not inside Game Design, I can't really tell you if this kind of alterations is hard or easy.

While those alterations can increase the lifespan of the game, in the end its more of the same.

You have seen some of the problems of the horizontal model:
- player base split;
- new characters having to play more and more of the same low-mid level quests/missions;
- more professions mixing up the roles of existing ones;
- areas becoming harder much more because of "annoyance" than "challenging your game knowledge";
- repetition - what really distinguishes dungeon x from dungeon y?;
- etc.

Lets look at GW if it was a vertical model.

Prophecies was for up to level 20. After that you couldn't win xp from there (lets say skill points would come from quests).

Armor and weapons would have max prophecies stats, etc.

Then factions would come.

Any character over level 20 would be level 20 when returning to prophecies, its weapons would drop to max prophecies levels, same for armor, attributes, health, etc.

Any weapon from factions could only be used by characters over level 20.

Factions would take players up to lvl 30. New armor and weapons (with new max stats), new professions (lets say faction would have a tutorial area for their new professions only where achieving lvl 20 was quite fast, and would show the players how to play their new chars. You could create one character there of the new profession only if you had finished prophecies. Your factions char could backtrack to prophecies).

Lvling to 30 would be quite fast too. The rest was quite similar to prophecies, except now you have a new game mechanic.

You could choose from 2 factions, and each faction (only cosmetic differences, for example) would have 2-3 paths (the paths would be similar for each faction, for example).

These paths would allow you to replace up to 2 skills on your bar. You would have some skills that were profession bound and maybe some that weren't.

Additionally, using a certain path would make you unable to use certain secondary professions. Using some of those path skills would prevent you from using some other skills, etc.

Then nightfall. Lvls 30-40, blah blah. in this one, all the professions would gain a new attribute tree, for example. Or maybe some other mechanic.

Additionally, every chapter would have a hall, where you would could display the "prestige items/armors" from that chapter, that would become obsolete the moment you would move on the new chapter.

Whatever, I'm not a game designer.

In this kind of vertical system, you would never be like "yawn here comes a timed mission again" or "fighting against level 20's again".

Additionally, this system would deny the advantage higher level/better gear players have in most MMORPG when going back to earlier areas.

Every area would have new armors/weapons that wouldn't be only cosmetic. Maybe even upgraders, that could imbue ur favourite weapons/armors with new powers (read boost stats to match new campaign).

More, every area would introduce some new mechanic you would need to master and balance it against what you were using before to overcome the newer mobs, designed to face this new mechanics.

Basically it is very similar to the horizontal design, except what is in later expansions will never interfere with the earlier ones. You will also never (at least if it is well implemented) think you are just doing more of the same with a new dress, due to the fact you are mastering the new mechanics, etc.

That's not a corner. Low level cap plus static weapon stats plus poor AI constitutes the corner that the devs put themselves in.

Let me back up to a very general point and work my way down to specifics. In general, video game foes come in two sorts: First, there is the "worthy adversary" sort. This foe is exemplified by Deep Blue or Ryu. The "worthy adversary" plays by the same rules that you do and provides challenge by playing by those rules nearly as skillfully as you do. Second there is the "dime-a-dozen" sort of foe. This foe is exemplified by the enemy spaceships from arcade shoot-em-ups or the hordes of demons in Diablo II. This kind of foe plays by a different set of rules than the player -- usually they are easily defeated, but for one gimmick that they embody. Here the challenge lies in figuring out how to counter the gimmick, and how to counter layered gimmicks presented by multiple foes. (Aside: The section of the DIII preview video where the dev explains how one should jump over the shield-bearing skeletons to attack the frail demon-summoners before they can summon their demons is an excellent example of the "challenge through layered gimmicks" paradigm.)

I think it's oversimplifying to say that GW's devs had a fully thought-through and coherent conception of what they originally wanted the PvE monsters to be. However, I think there was a definite strong tilt towards the "worthy adversary" model. Monsters played (mostly) by the same rules as players and were supposed to provide a bridge to PvP (played against other players, also playing by the same rules). The crystal desert missions, Elona Reach in particular, are often cited as examples of this design intent.

However, as time went on, players became more knowledgeable. We came to understand the mechanics and skill synergy, resulting in better builds. We came to understand and exploit the AI's weaknesses. In order to remain worthy as "worthy adversary" foes, the monsters needed to get smarter. Early on, a-net tried to do that -- remember the great AoE nerf? (They also tried very late on with EotN monster builds.)

Then, with the release of the Ruins of the Tombs of the Primeval Kings, a-net seems to have abandoned the "worthy adversary" model altogether. Loaded with stat-pumped monsters wielding monster-only skills in population-pumped numbers, Tombs was given over to "challenge through layered gimmicks."

Why this happened, no one knows but the devs; and it may not have even been a conscious decision on their part. But I do have a theory: I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact that Factions was underway and it dawned on the devs that they were about to increase the number of skill synergies available to players, without simultaneously improving the monsters. More importantly, they saw that the same thing was going to happen with every expansion -- players were going to get more and more complexity to exploit while monsters stayed static, and sooner or later the monsters were going to become unchallenging as "worthy adversaries." The devs realized that they had to make the monsters "smarter" to handle the increased complexity, or they had to get their challenge in a completely different way. They chose to get their challenge in a different way.

I think there were three reasons behind this decision: First, making monsters able to deal with the increased complexity would have required giving them cross-campaign skillsets, which flew in the face of a-net's "campaigns stand alone" marketing. Second, (games amenable to the standard min-max algorithm aside) programming AI that can complete with a human is just really damned hard. The people who can do it are pretty rare and sometimes almost idiot-savant-like. (I can attest that the one really good AI I've written in my life was the result of some bizarre trance state that I can't reproduce.) I'm not sure a-net even has someone able to write AI like that on staff. Third, the resources for a major AI and monster design overhaul just were not something a-net could afford while they were hard at work on Factions.

From there on out, "challenge through layered gimmicks" was the new model for the PvE game. That's what we saw in Factions, then Nightfall, then DoA, then Hard Mode, then EotN. And that's the state of the game now. The monsters present various gimmicks and you've got to form a party that neutralizes each of them -- insane damage is countered by PS/SY; insane armor is countered by armor-ignoring damage; super-powered healers are countered by BHA; etc. Or, as you put it, countering the gimmicks "force[s] players to play a certain way."

To return to where I started, it's the lack of good AI that put a-net into the design corner they're in now. Even with a low level cap and fixed weapon stats, they could have maintained a "worthy adversary" foes model if they had invested in sharpening the AI; but failing to do so forced them into the "dime-a-dozen" foes model. That's what really put the game on its current path. GW would have been a very different, very unique, and better game if they had chosen differently.

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@Fril: Thank you for another thought-provoking thread. You're the best.

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@Avarre:
I'd pay good money to see that.

I did trample Prophecies. But there are some key differences: we had the same skills as our opponents. I could 3-man FoW all I wanted, but it wasn't because my team was statistically more powerful. I wasn't immune to damage (SF/SY), for example - it was more to do with mechanical precision. More importantly though, there were a lot of ways to play the areas that were viable. I doubt I would bash most of those skills (well, Prot Bond was a bit much), because they're hardly unfair when used in the same capacity against me - in PvP as well.

Of course, given the same period of time, it's a certainty we'd have been bored of Proph (if we all aren't already). PvE, however, rather than extending in a similar fashion, got dumber. If you combine improving players with shallower content, people are going to be displeased.

The primary complaints against PvE have taken two forms from the majority of experienced players.

1) PvE design is one-dimensionally buffed rather than skillfully designed. This refers to areas such as Urgoz (more mobs = more challenge!) and DoA. This takes out the subtlety of the game and boils it down to mass DPS.

2) In order to balance the 'challenge' of such areas, excessively strong and equally one-dimensional skills were added to compensate. Skills that have to be banned from equal competition for being better than the other thousand in Guild Wars.

One-dimensional makes the implication that it can be hard-countered in a single way - and GW has not only provided huge openings for that, but handed out repeatedly more effective ways to exploit them. This cuts the number of effective viable options, while making the best options too good.

GW has a whole bunch of easy buttons, and the game lacks depth for the wider range of possibilities.

Heh, we are actually on the same page you know. Look at what i replied to from fril's quote and my ending statement for both my posts and you would know i was hitting on the AI all this time. Good points though.

Yes, I think we are.

It all depends on what the developers want us to do - which in ANet's case I'm quite afraid of when they toss such powerful abilities for all of us to use.

In a nutshell, when the developer's make their game shallower and shallower, it's akin to them saying "we don't caaaaaare".

Plus, a true challenge doesn't need self-restrictions.

There still are lots of viable ways to complete those areas.

Unless you define viable as being as fast.

I agree with that.

And I would prefer that kind of challenge. Maybe that is why I generally play PvP in games, but GW PvP (at least the worthy one) is time consuming setup wise and I started GW in Factions, meaning I was a year late. And nowadays, I'm not interested in PvP as my friend has a nasty temper around critics and I don't think competition stress is what she enjoys for fun.

Where we seem to disagree is that I'm not against coining my own challenge, because I don't see PvE as a competition between players, so I really don't care if I take more time to do something because I'm not using consumables, for example.

I'm under the impression, and apologies if I'm mistaken, that you on the other hand would refuse to play a build that is slower, although more challenging, because you would be gimping yourself compared to other players.

That is why I'm less interested if things like XTH or SF kill GW economy and more interested in things like 7 heroes or changes to stupid environmental effects in places like DoA.

Hehe.

Here comes the other "faction" I was talking about - we all can identify the problems, can theorize how to solve them, but we want them solved for slightly different purposes and so the routes we would follow to solve them are somewhat different, sometimes even the opposite, although if we could do all in a single step instead of multiple small steps, the end result would be very similar.

But since, small steps would have to be taken, we can't agree what route to take first

For the most part, that's what PvE balance is - having more than one equally viable option. On one hand, build specialization deserves rewards, but builds centering on imbalanced PvE skills are not specialized for the area so much as getting the most power out of an already broken skill.

More simplification of roles and elimination of player skill is the result, rather than providing options.

While there may be more than one way to complete an area that is viable, there is only one that is efficient.

In any area that players repeatedly complete, players are going to insist on the efficient build. The reason is simple - if I want to farm an area, and you want to bring a suboptimal build that takes longer to complete the area or introduces an additional risk of failure, you are asking me to let you waste my time. Such inefficiency adds up over time, making me poorer as measured in shinies, time or both.

This boils down to: you want me to let you screw me over, but you don't offer to compensate me for doing so. A real world example serves to illustrate the point. Suppose that I, as a consumer, want to get the oil changed in my car. I can take it to repair shop A, which will change the oil in X time for Y dollars. Or I can take it to repair shop B, which will change the oil in X+Z time for Y dollars. Easy choice, right?

You'd never choose to go to repair shop B. So, if you stopped to think about it, why would you ever choose to let an inefficient farming method invade your group?

Returning to GW: once you introduce overpowered PvE skills, it's a given that their use will be demanded by groups of players as a condition of entry into the group. Further, if the skills are sufficiently overpowered, players never have to learn to resolve problems with tactics. They simply abuse the overpowered skills and roflstomp the monsters regardless of the tactics they choose. Those players then get exposed as inadequate and incompetent if you remove the crutch that is the broken skill.

The rush for efficiency is merely an expression of people realizing the time requirements of their goals are way over their head. Usually that's the time to quit, but after a short round of denial, people tend to try anyway; or use a bot. Now you can argue who's to blame for it. The player for using the bot or ArenaNet for making a bot look like a good thing by handing out 1000h grinds.

But ArenaNet is actively fighting that. The Zaishen quests try to mix up your consumption of content by sending you in all directions. The rewards are in place, once they deplete they are easily replaced, people earn a lot of faction points on the side.

As a result we see far more lenient puggin on the Zaishen Quests combined with a very pleasant stream of rewards trickling in. If we take that small step as the direction of what's to come, then the period of excessive grinding might coming to an end. I suppose SF will stay around until the next PvE centric update will give users better things to do than to farm the same mob over and over.

It's also not a crime to buy Wipeout Fury

There is no reason in the world to settle for inefficiency when efficiency is possible. Irrespective of the goal, anything that can be done faster without incurring other costs should be done faster. Your alloted lifespan is a finite quantity. Why let other people choose how to spend that time for you by wasting it?

The Zaishen Quests are nothing more than a magician's trick. "Look over here where I want you to look!" They're a nice fringe benefit for players that were going to complete those tasks anyway, and they provide a focal point for daily play that brings a fragmented casual player base to specific locations, but they don't actually alter the fundamentals of player behavior in any meaningful way.

Sure, if you wanted to complete a Zaishen quest by pugging players you'd settle for players with inferior builds, because you'd have no other alternative. Of course, the sensible resolution is to develop an available network of more capable players that will abuse the imbalanced skills and get the job done faster.

Some players are going to farm the same mob over and over because it's the efficient solution to accomplishing the player's goal. This may not be your cup of tea, but some people have higher tolerances for boredom or repetition than others. The only resolution is to make all prospective farms equally (in)efficient, which is hard to do as a designer.

Martin Alvito: the zquests are IMHO an incentive, and one that works to a certain extent. You do find groups, although you have to be quick on the day of the zquest. It's just sad that the grouping is so "punctual", but I (someone who has only completed 1/10th of HM missions, it'd be a totally different story for an experienced player) appreciate it very much, it sounds like good design. Even if I'm still 1/5th of the way to the biggest bag, I'm enjoying the experience very much, and getting titles along the way.

But your comment, and others, can steer the discussion in a new and interesting direction: did Anet at one point forgot the coop dimension of GW? Or did they simply notice it late and attempted to rectify some mistakes? We talk about OP, consumables and PvE skills, but what about heroe buildsets like Sabway, Cryway, Discordway, aren't they rducing the coop dimension of GW the same way that OP/consum/PvE skills remove some of the difficulty of the game?

Chthon: very interesting theory, which sounds quite solid. Somewhere after NF was released, the designers realise the skill system is out of control and they can't do a U-turn, so they decide to offer a new dimension to the game mechanics with monster teams growing in numbers (number of monsters and skill impact) while giving new specific tools to beat them, including the OP ones that they fixed afterwards.

I would extend this comment to titles: did they drive the game, and the playerbase, in the wrong direction? They seem to be one of the two main reasons why farming pollutes the game so much (the other one being "rare/exclusive/shiny stuff"). Are the skill explosion plus the title madness problems the expression of a global state of GW where Anet lost control of the overall design?

Or, more controversial on Guru but IMHO very relevant, did fansites lost track of who the average player is? I wonder whether 4thVariety is right and player will see consumables and PvE skills advantage, maybe simply by experiencing less game difficulty and DP? Has Guru become, via the layering of discussions and forumers, a theoretical discussion that has nothing to do with the reality? This question is for people like Ensign, Avarre, Bryant Again, TO NAME ONLY A FEW (I don't want to introduce more layering or make it explicit, this would defeat my purpose of making the community better): if we look at your goal to put diversity back in the game, it only makes sense if you make sense of the game, so isn't your viewpoint flawed because it is limited to a tiny fraction of the population? (strange question to ask you if you're no longer playing the game)

Another food for thought: since Regina became CM, there's a more "formalised" relationship between fansites and Anet, including the building and consolidation of the official wiki. I know and believe Regina when she said she relayed the concerns expressed here, but I have to raise 2 difficult questions: how is this "concern" described, perceived and taken into account by Anet designers? how do they keep track of the history and diversity of viewpoints?

I'll symbolically rez my idea of a "council of players", which is to say that the dimension of the community wasn't explicit in the game design. Guilds have even become tools for unexpected abuses (pay 100k to get into a gold cape guild then 10k a week, pay 50k to get in the guild that hold Cavalon since Factions, etc.).

It's not that ANet forgot the co-op dimension of GW. The fundamental problem is that developing and maintaining a network of players that is both active and not full of fail takes more time than most casual players are willing to commit.

Enter heroes, which make it easier for the go-it-alone types to accomplish tasks, are available when you don't quite have enough people for a full group and are vastly superior to henchmen, and which provide some degree of control over the inadequacies of the AI.

Few actions are without unintended consequences, however. While the Guild Wars AI is terrible at a great many things, it turns out that it is much better than a human player at certain categories of tasks. It cheats at interrupting, is quite good at dividing its attention between huge numbers of tasks, has perfect recall, and is privy to data that players don't get.

It took people a good long while to figure this out. I seriously doubt that ANet anticipated players breezing through HM with heroes and henchmen. This is simply another example of how time and iterations undermine challenge.

There's not a lot you can do about the situation as a designer. Players have come to rely upon heroes, and will be upset if you gimp them. You marketed Nightfall to players as providing this new system, so you cannot very well take the feature away once you determine it is producing results that you do not prefer. All you can do is nerf the mechanics that the players are abusing and let it go at that.

If you want to be nitpicky, Regina's title is "community coordinator". But I doubt any member of community has ever been coordinated. A coordinator is a leader, not merely an interface; which boils down to describing Regina's job better: interface. The question is whether there ever was a goal to which we are being coordinated towards. Total fandom? Ravenous viral marketing? Flashmobs? It ain't happening. She does stuff and then Linsey does stuff... ...I don't know beyond that. I just know she's always friendly and I'm told she does a lot of work and I congratulate her on a safe job for that, but the impact on the single user is not that large. The forum freaks might know her, but there is no way to communicate with the user on the streets of Lion's Arch. Games will change in that regard, you do reach more players with an ingame paper than with another overhyped proprietary communication thingy such as twitter.

Looking around in the industry we can identify two companies being ahead in that department: Nintendo and Blizzard. Both have carefully hedged communities with a strong positive bias towards ANY of the products the company is releasing. Sure, you ask why an ArenaNet community guy is supposed to pimp a NC game, but that is beside the point. They have always been a 100% subsidiary. The reality of marketing today is that almost every WoW player is made into buying D3 or SC2. Hence the unified Blizz achievement system that crosses between games. That is the step they are ahead. While GW players see the drought ahead, the Blizz player is happy about D3 and SC2. He is not complaining about the lack of Wow2, or another expansion, he wants the next game from that company.

NC never made an aggressive attempt to capture GW players. Not with Dungeon Runners, not with Tabula Rasa, not with Aion. Those games often have a worse standing with the GW community than with random people. Which would never happen to Blizzard or Nintendo, no matter what they release.

So of course the GW fansites take a hit once the river runs dry. The sites are overspecialized towards one game and even the community revolts if you merely mention another NC game. GW sites were for the most time some sort of html based "social mod", or an extention to trade. But development there is also at a halt. So all the sites can do is wait for GW2 and then start programming again. Standalone map software, real guides, build creators, character calculators, trading platform, social connectivity, character show off pages.... Personally, those are the areas of coordination that we are looking into for GW2.

Fan sites as a whole don't have a collective view of the average player, that is dictated personally from poster to poster.

That aside, the people who know most about the game are always going to be put in the tiniest minority. That doesn't mean you can shit on depth, though. The average and casual player does need to be catered for, but so does the high-end player. That's what separates the good games from the bad: appeasing both ends of the spectrum. This is where Guild Wars doesn't really succeed, since the high-end player will have a very easy time "mastering PvE" and also with little variety.

Hard Mode should have been about better AI, or failing that simply better mixes of classes within mobs.

I want to see mobs with healers, hex/condition removal, strong direct damage, anti-melee, party heals and shut-down. Not only would that provide more of a challenge, it would discourage gimmicky builds that steamroll through some parts of the game, and it would actually be better preparation for PvP.

or just make mob spawns in explorable areas random. skill sets for classes would be variable (but include some type of untargeted/nonspell enchant removal).

How about 8-person mobs? HM can lose its difficulty when you, with your 7 heroes and hench, take on FOUR monsters at a time. ('cept for those darn gravebanes...)
It's the full-size mobs that might pose more problems.

Back to Fril's latest question: Did A-Net lose control somehow? Probably, but isn't there a basic law of physics that suggests that all complex systems tend towards deterioration? The more complex something is, the faster it will degenerate towards chaos?

Chthon's very long explicates much of the problem: that fundamental visions on A-Net's part interfered with certain possibilities we discuss.

Now, to this: Posted by Fril:
I would extend this comment to titles: did they drive the game, and the playerbase, in the wrong direction? They seem to be one of the two main reasons why farming pollutes the game so much (the other one being "rare/exclusive/shiny stuff"). Are the skill explosion plus the title madness problems the expression of a global state of GW where Anet lost control of the overall design?

Feedback loop. Look at the posts about efficiency:
A-Net introduced titles and skills tied to those titles. There.s plenty of shiny loot out there. A Max title becomes desireable BY ITSELF as an indicator of "skill'" and ALSO because it provides additional power in game. People wanted to max this TITLE and SKILL as fast as possible (put a carrot out, and people WILL chase it). The tiers of the title, however, require many more points toward the top end. So, we see a push toward efficiency there: You must come to the table with a high enough title to help others and yourself efficiently attain the higher ranks of the title. You need to use skill X to increase the strength of skill X (*lookin' at you, ursan farms).
Couple this with the Shinies: A-net gave us nice weapons as a sign of wealth, skill, luck, and time in game. People want the shinies, and the fastest way to get them is via groups using title skills. So: grind your title to improve your title to improve your chances of getting in a group to improve your title and maybe get shiny drops. Once you have, or bought, nice toys, you now need to join groups to show off your new toy, but the way into groups is through the title you grinded to get your toy...

So yeah, I'd say somewhere along the line, A-Net lost "control." By this, I mean that the playerbase--large, large populations--unconsciously or consciously altered or misconstrued the functions and rewards of the titles. Were they not supposed to be a reward, to demonstrate your love for the game? A reward that would transmit to GW2? However, they soon became a way of separating, somehow, people.

And again, if we look at Strain's speech about complexity creep: Titles and their skills SIMPLIFY the game. Players don't need to synthesize, or consider alternate heroes, or experiment with 2ndary professions on heores or themselves: just add a title skill. Grinding and farming also are ways to simplify the game: exploring dungeons, forming parties, and talking with other people are all way more complex tasks than redundantly zoning and pressing the same buttons in the same order.
:

It's not that players make an error by playing in a degenerate fashion. They haven't misconstrued the game. All that's happened is that the player recognizes that it's the best way to accomplish the mission.

People like visible signals of accomplishment. It's why they buy McMansions, Porsches and Rolexes. In the game, these signals send a message about you to other players, and they act as a constant reminder to oneself of having "climbed the mountain."

If you introduce titles and rare shinies, these act just like the Porsche. People want them, because they say something about what you've accomplished. The scarcer the shiny, the more attractive it becomes, because it sends a louder and stronger message.

Now, if you want a REALLY rare shiny, you're competing against thousands of people to get your grubby little paws on it. To acquire the shiny, you have to outbid tons of other people, which makes it a competitive process.

How do you get more money than these other players? (Let's leave aside RMT for the moment.) Well, you're converting your time to in-game cash; so is everyone else. If you're going to win the race, you need to invest substantial time and maximize the amount of in-game cash generated per unit of time invested. The amount of time other players will invest is an unknown, but you can surmise that at least some people will invest an extremely large amount of time.

If you aren't efficient, you're going to lose the race to players that aren't efficient but have more time than you. It's a certainty that some kid or college student out there has twelve or more hours a day to spend in Kamadan, so if you want to outrace that player you're going to have to make money a LOT faster during what time you have. The good news is that he's got all that time, and that time is therefore not as precious to him. So you can probably beat him on a per unit basis because he hasn't got the pressure to innovate that you've got.

The implication is that if you set the goal to get the rare shiny, and you're serious about attaining it, the only way to do it is to be FAST.

Giving the titles functions that confers advantage only exacerbates the problem. Players are going to self-separate into people willing to invest the effort into having the PvE skills available and those that are not, because the PvE skills confer advantage and wasting time is foolish. I hardly play PvE any more, because I'm not willing to toss the hundred hours needed to pump up needed title tracks on various farming characters. That time is a huge barrier to entry that restricts the endgame content from most players.

This can't be good for player retention.

Well spoken, and largely what I was trying (and probably failing) to articulate. Let me rephrase my statement about "misconstruing" titles: In many cases, titles are no longer a reward in and of themselves. They are signifiers of wealth, of time spent doing something, of certain "affiliations" in-game, and are signifiers that a player is now "allowed" to join certain groups to do certain things. (GLF R8 Cryer!) Is this what the developers wanted? Probably not. So we're seeing sort of the law of unintended consequences at work here: that the community has largely accepted these signifiers and altered (in places, in ways, I generalize, I know...) their (likely) intended meaning.

Titles themselves are shiny, too: rewards that, like nice weapons and porsches, people can display. I have no problem with that...and inherently, no problem with people seeking such rewards.

So here's are two questions... CAN'T this be good for player retention? I'm with you; the game and the pve skills and their requisite grind narrow my personal choices in chasing the shinies. I don't have the hours to innovate my solo farms.

and...

Is the evolution of the game unintended? are game developers resisting certain changes that are happening organically, and fostering other changes (organic or not)?

And last...why does this thread seem to invite so many long posts?

Your analysis might be right, but I think you are forgetting that not every player is like that. Or to quote the cover of my favorite game of 2008:

FUN SHALL OVERCOME

In other words: if you only develop content aimed at giving players the chance to wave their virtual genitalia around, then soon that will be your only players and guess what the only thing they'll do will be.

In the "long term fun" department, GW only has two things really. Competitive PvP and competitive title/item grinding. While that might be two things that are relatively uncomplicated to implement, I say there is potential for a lot more things. If I may play Nostradamus, then I'd say that the weirdest thing about today's MMOs in 20 years will be that they were so heavily focused on portraying only one genre of game. Give it a few sequels and you'll see Rollerbeetle being closer to a real racing game, item trade being similar to trade simulations and Polymock being closer to a real fighting game. A much broader representation of gaming as a whole. You see Freerealms trying that, we had Spore go in that direction, even some WoW April Fools joke poked at Rock Band.

It doesn't matter that not all players are like that. The fact that some are inevitably creates the disconnect where the players that are like that have no use for those that are not. Since goals to be pursued (limited PvE goodies or PvP glory) are competitive processes, you're inevitably going to have a separation between those that feel the game is srs bsns and those that do not.

Why does the focus end up being on limited objectives? Well, the problem is that those two objectives are the only open-ended objectives available in games today. Eventually you're going to own the AI, so the only reason to continue to own the AI once you've figured out how is to get more shinies than other people. Alternately, you can move to PvP where players constantly come up with new builds and tactics...but GW's game design ensures that players do not innovate unless new content is released or skill functionality is altered. Observer mode and the need for interchangeable parts in teams ensures this.

@ englitdaudelin - I doubt that the end outcome is intentional. The problem is that the designer only has so many hours to pump into the product, and the designer derives no revenue directly by adding small quantities of content. The cheapest means to provide endgame content is to create open-ended objectives, and by its incredibly low cost it crowds out all alternative design strategies.

I'd like to throw in user created content as another open ended objective. It has popped up time and again over the last 20 years and where it did, the potential to extend the product's life was definitely there.

Neverwinter Nights and Little Big Planet are two of the more recent examples. Even though only a fraction of players ends up creating content, all the players profit from that, giving them a chance to do something other than extreme grinds.

City of Heroes introduced user content, other future MMOs have announced they want to include it, so the revolution against the hardcore grinder might not be that far away.

If we face the truth, then the open-end grinder is a player thriving on the competitive. His style of play is geared towards excluding others eventually, thus hurting the interest of the company to retain players. If games are interested in entertaining players that are different from the Grind-Core, other means of open ended objectives have to be created.

Spore failed big time with it because it delivered several games in one package and each of them lacked depth, length and fun value.

This is what you get for trying to glue pieces of different games together. Some parts will simply limp. And if MMO achiever gets blocked from achieving by need to play 'good' fighting game, all devs would manage is to piss of loud player AND waste resources. Generally, content like polymock did not get much of applause but rather more like distaste and pissedness.

And if company can develop several good games, last thing they want to do is to package them together and sell as one unit.

Minigames are gonna be just minigames ... small & simple distractions from grinding.

I liked Polymock. Thought it was a little simplistic and easy, but I liked it. It had all the right elements.. I wished they'd have player versus player polymock, but .. oh well?

No argument here about how those games lacked depth from the perspective of players who are exploring such genres in depth.

But from the perspective of a normal Joe, who is the holy sales-bringer after all, it did not matter that the games lacked depth. For him that is what made Spore accessible. For persons who play in their after hours for FUN and RECREATION, it is frustrating to have to learn layer after layer after layer of small intricacies. Don't turn games into school!

It is stupid to develop 1000h of content and structure it in such a way that the player will not see most of it because he either can't meet the time requirements to advance, or lacks the gaming strength to unlock the next experience. Spore learned the hard way that you cannot expect people to play Diablo for five more hours when they hate Diablo and are mentally already in the Civ stage. If you deny him the ability to skip each mini-game they hate, they will quit and hate on Spore even more.

The "normal" player enjoys a variety of genres and is pretty bad at each of them. This is what Spore went after successfully in terms of sales and that is why big boxes of game collections are selling well. We are simply not there yet, in terms of 3D-engines being able to handle all genres, development tools suited to create content across all genres and development teams experienced enough to pull that off. But we are getting there. Many games try to include at least one genre on the side. Racing, Platforming, Shooting, those are the big three that are merging for a few years now. Other genres will follow. They might not be as good as a highly specialized genre implementation, but 95% of players won't be good enough to know that difference anyway.

*laughs* Interesting idea that the open-ended objective player creates an externality that screws over everyone else. It's definitely true that the existence of truly open-ended 24/7 grind content drives unhealthy behaviors, because if you raise your level of effort, I have to raise mine to stay ahead. Your effort imposes a negative externality on me. The implication is that Grind Wars is not socially efficient, and I don't think you'd get any arguments from anyone on that score.

You could internalize the externality with the old school model of a per hour usage charge, but reshape the curve such that players pay a minimal amount at low levels of usage that scales up rapidly as the user passes through an "acceptable" level of usage. So you might say that an average of an hour or two a day is fine, and charge a low tiered price up to that point, and then jack the per hour price up after that.

Of course, if you proposed this in a development meeting, the marketing people would promptly stab you in the eye. The proper level of implementation for something like this is at the level of a tax, and that just isn't going to happen.

As for enabling user-created content, that just isn't going to happen with this business model. You've got to be deriving revenue from continued usage for it to be sane to permit its introduction into an MMO. Otherwise you're just driving bandwidth usage without collecting revenue to cover the cost.

One could invert the skill power curve and keep the prestige skin curve the way it is. More time results in better pixels, while increased usage of grind based PvE skills depletes the attribute powering them. You start at Ursan strength 10, but after 6h it will be worn out to level 1. Then the attribute regenerates over time, but those who play too much will be forced to play even better using non depleting skills, or change their build more often. People with less time will get more power, people with too much time get more of a challenge and do not exploit their power AND their time to increase the loot gap too quickly. Everybody wins.

Which ties back to the idea of which interest is in charge. Do we want the best game that can be made, or do we want the most marketable game that can be made. My money is on the best game, since we already got enough overhyped games that are quickly forgotten. If someone step me in the eye for this, I'll go pirate on him.


Many MMO Publishers and Platform operators have to publish quarterly reports. So far none of them was driven to extinction due to bandwidth or server costs. Not even Flagship. It's always the staff that drags you under. At NC 50% are paycheck costs, operating costs of servers and bandwidth are merely a footnote. And again, once you got a community creating levels, you can nickel and dime the hell out of them with assets. Which is ok, if you ask me. That's honest business.

That was part of the point with anti-farm code, right? Increasing time investment nets continually inferior drops, such that the bots can't grind the rest of the player base into the ground.

The problem is that the guy with lots of time still wins. This just blunts the advantage, which ironically causes the guy with lots of time to invest EVEN MORE time to accomplish the same objective. It also makes botting that much more attractive. You've effectively blunted the ability of the individual to produce, which inadvertently turbocharges the relative power of the player with multiple accounts and computers that do the work for him.

I don't know if ANet ever realized that their original anti-botting code was made of fail or not, but all it ever did was incentivize the botters. This would do the same, unless you make it impossible for the bot farmer to ever acquire anything of value.

You could do that, of course. You could create code which only permits nice stuff to drop for you if you have been playing minimally and are playing an incredibly difficult area that requires teamwork and varied tactics to complete. This seems to be more the present model in GW coding. I've personally observed and heard too many "noob always gets the drops" stories to write them off as pure human psychology. Regardless of the drop rate, the odds that I pull a BDS on run #6 as the group's only noob but my friend that does hundreds of runs never pulls one are pretty bad...and that's not an isolated incident across various farms involving chest drops.

Sure, you can wave the conspiracy theory flag here and argue that I'm cherrypicking incidents out of thousands of observations, but when the odds of those incidents occurring are in the millions, the likelihood that I'll ever observe multiple instances starts to get pretty ugly.

Well, as a game publisher you typically want to sell as many copies as possible without breaking the bank on development costs. There are also a lot of phenomenal games out there that never sold well. For every Baldur's Gate there's more than one Planescape:Torment. If you're trying to make money in the business, it's a bad idea to ignore the marketing people. You never want them running the show any more than you want the bean counters running it, but if they tell you that people will hate something as fundamental as your pricing strategy, you would be wise to listen.

Keep in mind that it's always the revenue side that drives you under. You fail as an MMO if you produce something that people, for whatever reason, don't buy and continue to use. It's hard to spend yourself to death on continuing operations, but it is much easier to leverage yourself to death during development to the point that continuing operations can't pay the creditors.

I agree that it's a personnel heavy model. You've forgotten the power consumption and cooling bills for those servers that get buried in facilities expenses, though. There's no realistic way to separate out which segment of those bills is directly attributable to the servers. You could make some assumptions if you wanted to in order to get at that, but my sense is that the external auditers wouldn't be thrilled with you.

The iPhone App model looks fairly attractive as a way to deal with increased server loads (and debugging/security challenges; you KNOW you'd want to stick a back door or exploit in that code). License the user-created content, agree to some revenue sharing with the creator and let the market decide what's good.

Last bit: the tiered promotion system with escalating payoffs that exists in today's companies ensures that management will be penny wise and pound foolish. Exceed your numbers for a couple of years, and you're into a new seat with hugely better compensation before the bill for your skimping comes due. Why did the Japanese think long term? The pay gap between foot soldier and Fearless Leader was orders of magnitude tighter, reducing the incentive for aspiring managers to engage in behaviors that rewarded oneself at the expense of the company.

This is the only solution I've come up with that explains why the servers for every successful MMO invariably end up stinking, no matter how good they are when they start out. The guys responsible for managing server expenses bleed them to advance their own careers, and since projections are always based on last year's numbers, the successor would commit career suicide by going on a spending spree to fix the problem. Iterate over a few years and you get lousy, depreciated servers.

Design-wise I had further thoughts recently and came with this new idea, which complements what has already been said here:

What if Anet, at some point (recently, i.e. 1-2 years ago?), chose to design game elements which would have several feature, each appealing to different kinds of players? A sort of multi-objective design?

For example:
- the Zaishen chest has: a title; rare skins golds (which I personally like a lot); new shinnies (EL); title-related items (sweet, booze).
- Zquests: Guardian title; lots of stuff via zoins (tomes, sweets, etc.); new shinnies (bags -> not needed but convenient); Pvers going to PvP, more PUGing
- Nicholas: fun/sightseeing/lore; title-related items; new shinnies (EL, minis)

IIRC that's also what happened with the Dec'08 reorg of the titles, where vanquish would give you points towards Faction titles.

Thoughts?