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I haven’t spent much time on this site lately. I’m planning out two lecture proposals for GDC and hunting for a place to move.

Organizing groups of people is a time-consuming challenge. There are lots of small ways that coordination eats up time. MMOs usually provide players with moderate to strong incentives to group, but most do a poor job of making it *easy* to organize everything from a leveling duo to a guild. That’s something I want to see more of in MMOs.

I’m playing Overlord right now. It’s a humorous, fun game… but I keep running into two chief frustrations: the camera and the save game system.

These problems are ancient, yet they still appear in many new games.

Good cameras are hard to do. They’re a very complex, expensive problem to tackle in any 3D game world. It should be considered throughout the design, including the world & level design. The problem is sufficiently complicated and difficult that I don’t expect games to have great cameras, but they damn well better not have horrible and often unplayable cameras. I run into this a lot in Overlord, and the game gives me almost no control over the camera. Ninja Gaiden II is another horrible offender in this area, but it’s made even worse by the split-second timing in that game. It’s hard to have fun when you can’t see what you’re doing.

Few 3D games have ever done the camera right. So, I’m mildly forgiving about poor cameras… but save systems? Give me a break. Overlord’s like a step back from 16-bit RPG save systems. You have the equivalent of save spots, but all they do is trigger an auto-save, and there’s a clunky option to change which slot you auto-save to. So save spots without the benefit of solid control and with the added ability to screw yourself over if you walk across a hidden save spot. Oh, and sometimes there are lots of enemy spawns on the save spots. And you don’t start with any minions when you load.

There’s no excuse to have a crappy save system in the late 2000’s.

I love competitive games - FPS, RTS, fighting, PvP MUDs, 4x games, turn-based strategy, etc. My roots go back to semi-hardcore PvP MUDs (all gear lootable but no permadeath), where I was a successful anti-PK. I was an anti-PK because I found no joy in killing people who couldn’t fight back. I wanted to face and defeat other fighters. I also felt bad if I killed inexperienced players, but that’s not pertinent for this discussion.

Despite my competitive drive, I’ve yet to enjoy world PvP in an MMORPG. It comes down to one issue: the statistical gap.

I’m fine with having advantages/disadvantages in various PvP scenarios. On MUDs, I tended to have a statistical advantage because I was sufficiently skilled to maintain a full suit of quest gear. Conversely, I had a numerical disadvantage, because I had no allies as an anti-PK but there were plenty of regular PKs who hated me and hunted in packs. Sometimes I was higher level, oftentimes I was lower level. Perfectly even fights were almost non-existent, but there was plenty of breathing room to either win or lose based on individual skill. The variables kept things fresh, because it was rare to have two fights that were identical.

The problem I have with MMOs is that I’ve never seen that kind of world PvP. You’re either level capped or you’re dead. The statistical gap is insurmountable. It’s important to note that MUD PvP commonly allows you to escape if you’re fast enough. In MMOs, the engagement is less likely to leave room to escape. Usually, you can’t even hit your opponent and you’ll die in 1-3 rapid hits. On the off chance that you can take a few hits, they’ll probably move faster than you and have snares/roots/holds to ensure you can’t escape.

Playing in dangerous worlds is fun (although I don’t always want to be in one). It’s cool to know that there’s danger out there, to hunt and be hunted and have a good sense of survival. It can be fun to get pursued by a small group of players or people who are bigger than you when there’s a chance to escape. It’s not fun to get chased by an F-16 when you’re on a bicycle brandishing your fancy new slingshot. That’s one giant barrier to entry.

This is a brief post with a big title. And since I want to do this quick, I’m going to use a data sample of one (me)! Frustration leads to general dissatisfaction, and thus it creates exit points. The point I want to make today is that there’s a direct correlation between the level of frustration, the lure of the exit point and the social ties game. Here’s a quick chart to illustrate my point:

Note that the overall frustration level can be created two ways: a constant source of frustration, and a series of events that creates a frustration spike. If I’m playing a game completely alone, it really doesn’t take much for me to quit. Having players around that you vaguely know or just having a populated game world helps, and then it gets even better when friends are present. Joining an empty game world alone is the worst case scenario. Note that “Friends (cannot group” can be a deceptive category. Although it’d take more frustration to leave this situation, the fact that friends are playing and there are barriers that prevent grouping can create frustration… thereby canceling out the friend benefit.

Everyone knows that it becomes increasingly more expensive to fix a bug as it gets deeper in the process. A similar principle applies to almost all problems: they’re like cracked windshields. Cracks are small and insidious. A simple crack doesn’t pose any serious threat, and it’s easy to ignore. However, if you ignore the crack, it slowly spreads across the windshield. Windshields take constant beatings - thousands of tiny attacks that are readily deflected. Once the windshield is weakened by a crack, the entire thing can shatter.

When small problems are allowed to fester, they compound and become much bigger problems.