I often hear that players are stupid. It even comes from the players themselves as often as not, typically referring to another segment of the population. They do stupid things, make stupid mistakes. That previous sentence is true, but it also contributes to a horrible misconception.
Players are only as stupid as any random group of people. Any group is going to have stupid people, average people and smart people. Even if you argue that people in general are stupid, there are still going to be smart ones in the group… especially if you consider the sample size. On an individual level, there are stupid players. As an audience, players are not stupid. Even the most intelligent people do stupid things, fail to read instructions and generally bungle simple tasks. However, doing stupid things is a far cry from being stupid.
The problem with saying that players are stupid is that it can become a justification to do things wrong. And when that happens, players figure it out and suddenly you’re wrong instead of them.
- If you lie to them, they’ll figure it out.
- If you hide something from them, they’ll find it.
- If you leave something out, they’ll know it’s missing.
- If you try to keep them from doing something by only making it seem impossible, they’ll find a way to make it possible.
- If you try to keep them from beating your game too fast, they’ll still tear through it in no time.
- If you try to patronize them, they’ll see through it.
- If you try to ignore an issue, they’ll know it’s a hot button.
- If you try to fudge the math, they’ll find where the formula breaks.
Players are smart. Treat them like they’re smart, and then you’ll see that they’re industrious too. Give them a problem and the opportunity and they’ll solve it. Keep them loyal and they’ll build things you never had the time to create.
It’s the wisdom of crowds. In any multiplayer environment your player base is going to be in frequent, if not constant, communication with each other. If any single member of the player base knows something, the probability of that information spreading is very high. The more people who know, the faster the information spreads.
Players aren’t particularly smart, they just have more free time, and the greatest communication tool the world has ever seen. Welcome to the cognitive surplus.
Wisdom of the crowds is probably a simpler way to say that players as an audience are smart.
Welcome to two things:
One: The statement of the realization of the importance of ‘organic distributed processing’ as a game designer. It was a big step and I’ve watched your company take it with anticipation over the last few years.
Two: The reason that I support your company financially as to the best of my ability. The simple inclusion of the tool set you allow players access to on the PTS is evidence that the era of DvP (developer vs player) is hopefully coming to an end at least in your collective corner of the world.
Allowing us access to not only your bug management database but the tools we need (communication and The Bugfinder NPC) to neurotically track them down and identify them as subscribers to your service and putting in man hours doing so that even an over-staffed team could never dream of fulfilling.
Welcome to the world of “Equilibrium Points in N-person Games” (assuming perfect play there is a limit to benefit of strategies that can only be surpassed with collusion). Some of us have been waiting years for you to get here. Glad you found us. It was rather lonely here.
–mcl
No, some players are smart. Once one smart player figures it out all the dumb players follow suit. At least if following means they get to attack someone. But I agree with the premise. Act like players are smart. And hey, if you make games assuming players are smart, maybe you can weed out the stupid ones :p
This was also an issue with balancing the Invulnerability power set in City of Heroes (and probably the reason for the relative weakness of the invulnerability power set in COL).
Some smart cookies did some things with Invulnerability that defiled the game with its power/risk free play.
Invulnerability was nerfed in COH to stop the smart cookies. Invulnerability then became very difficult to play unless you used a smart cookie build.
Balancing the power set became a see saw dance between top user defilement of combat and community outrage. Community outrage was still in the lead the last time I looked and defilement still very possible as a smart cookie.
Balancing for the top bracket is a double-edged sword. It’s where the problems are most visible and where things tend to fall apart, but it’s also a smaller part of your audience.
Broken high-end elements are like bright red, frequently misleading targets. The easiest fixes commonly break things for players who aren’t taking advantage of the perfect combination.
It’s rare to see balance changes made with sufficient finesse to eliminate the broken element without impacting the average player.
/agreed. Trying to shut down the 2%’ers really hurt the 98%’ers and they wound up giving in. Hopefully a good lesson learned about reacting too fast and too finally. Hindsight 20/20 and all that.
Glad to see you are also from POTBS. Very nice game and, imho very good devs. It was a lengthy stop on my itinerant gamer trail.
Like Jl said, I see it more as a smart cow issue. Players are dumb, but information flows quickly and its easy to copy most things. But it amazes me sometimes how thoroughly the community will probe for advantages, exploits, and tactics. That’s why I’m convinced in the long run the only design formula that works is 1) clear vision of where you want the game to go and what the major parts will be, 2) a willingness to tinker and adjust WHEN things go awry, and 3) listening to the community critically and more importantly keep them informed by explaining why you are doing what you do. Even if people don’t agree with your decisions completely, if you will state your goal and explain what you are changing to get there complaints plummet.
My opinion on balancing for the top 2% has changed over time. When I played guild wars, I thought the only thing that mattered was how things worked at the top because bad players could simply get better and their balance issues would go away (and without needing a code fix). That made guild wars an outstanding game for people at the very top, but it made people at the bottom very unhappy as they lost all the time with no reason to keep trying, and the pvp community got smaller by the month.
Instead, I now think its better to view your audience as two parts — the top 2% and the larger mass of causal gamers. Both groups have different goals and needs — the 2% will only be happy if the game is balanced, complex, and rewards skill while the masses are more interested in fun and competition without taking it to such an extreme. If you ignore the hardcores, the game will get a bad rep on gaming forums and will lose the drivers and organizers of the community. If you ignore the casuals, soon you will have a community of increasingly more hardcore asshats driving everyone else out of the game. The “hook” for each group accordingly needs to be different — for the 2%, they need a well-thought out skill balance from time to time, but mainly they just want the gross imbalances fixed and then let them bash it out against the other top players. The masses on the other hand need fixes to make play interesting, fresh, and above all rewarding for them to keep playing, even if the top 2% crush them over and over.
I think Aion did a pretty good job at this — the abyss/pvp reward structure gave a lot of incentive for casual players to pvp or pve in pvp zones without forcing it on them. The rewards were very easy to get at first, even if you lost a lot. There was also no area smacktalk and no scoreboard telling you you were 3-17 or something, both of which discourage people. But at the same time, as you got better at pvp there were more ladders, forts for the top teams to hold, and more exclusive ranks for the top 2% to battle for. It was a good blend to satisfy both groups, imo.
P.S. Congrats on your new job, Taelorn. Hope it works out for ya, and I have my eye on it. I think you did an excellent job at FLS.
The communication and knowledge issues are why I mentioned players being smart as an audience. I thought about expanding on it, but decided to keep it short.
Thanks.
Posted a discussion topic about the sorc changes in COL today.
Of course opening up a topic for discussion is inviting the chorus of L2P posts but /shrug, sometimes I feel the game is more important than my dignity.
Your smart player issue is alive and well in COL with the Sorc changes. Something that was meant as a stand alone defense was found to be FOTM when stacked with a kitchen sink’s worth of other defenses and made some big fights trivial.
I won’t miss the way the power used to be. But this guy in the lower percentile sure will. Reminds me of the COH Invuln issue of past years.
“I ran a sorcerer solo, now I can’t. I don’t have enough power to heal myself and fight the mobs. I’m not designed to tank. The only thing that USUALLY kept me alive was CoPD, now I die alot. This game is not setup to take one or two at a time, it’s setup for 3-4 and easily agg the next group. Some people in this game have taken advantage of the main asset a sorcerer has and now sorcery is not a valid class to run solo. That’s a shame. Instead of killing sorcerers why not fix CoPD so it’s dependent on our main stats? why not make it useless to people who are taking advantage of the system? Why do I have to relearn to play this toon or retcon her into something else? Being able to choose from any skills is great, but usually the skills you choose scale with your talents, why not do that here?” — Dismaye, Champions Online Forum