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I’m going to share two very simple stories. Neither story is exceptional, and I’ve experienced/witnessed these repeatedly across many different games with slight variations in the details. Both stories involve being vulnerable to PvP while not particularly wanting to PvP (due to PvE quests that flag you PvP, PvP zones or world PvP zones).

Story 1: Near the end of a tough escort quest, I’m doing a tough escort quest when I end up in a fight before I’m fully healed. Then I get an add, then the escort triggers an ambush. It’s tough, but I’m going to live… until I get killed in one hit by someone higher level who sees me PvP flagged, wounded and outnumbered.

Story 2: I do something that requires a PvP flag, then forget to turn it off. I fight a boss that’s a stretch of my abilities, and a higher level player shows up who can kill me. Instead, he helps me just enough to ensure the boss doesn’t kill me and lets me go.

We don’t spend enough time designing social interactions. Story #1 sucked, while Story #2 was awesome. The second is a positive interaction that makes me amicable towards the game. The first makes me frustrated at the game, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be the game’s fault.

Sidestepping the whole PvP issue, it’s our job to take all the necessary steps to deliver a good experience. It’d be amiss to ignore social interactions as a part of the game that needs design attention to ensure the best experience we can provide. We can’t completely control player behavior, but we can funnel it in the direction we want it to go.

I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of an MMO in the vein of Disgaea, a PS2 strategy RPG. There are two key points interest me as Disgaea pertains to MMOs: exploits and advancement scaling. For now, I’m just going to touch on the issue of exploits.

Exploits

MMOs are very structured and try to keep players playing fair. How many times have you heard, “We can’t do X, because players will do abuse Y.” I’ve certainly said it a few times. At that point, you either need to solve Y or scrap X. If you’re on a strict schedule or find Y live, then the fix may involve duct tape. Solve Y that way too many times and you get a mess.

Disgaea is all about mastering the game mechanics in crazy and abusive ways. Things that are typically “exploits” are more like hidden nuggets in Disgaea that you’re encouraged to discover and abuse. Even once you figured out a way to take advantage of the mechanics, there was still a challenge in pulling it off.

It’s interesting because it was like a built-in layer of exploits in the game mechanics. For example, it was perfectly reasonable to find a situation where you were invulnerable and you could kill a massive monster that you created by throwing a bunch of monsters on top of each other so they merge. Or you could find combos on the tiles that clear out the whole map and give you insane bonuses. And you might even decide to permanently kill some of your party members to buff other characters. Or deliberately damage yourself as much as possible so that you could spend money at the hospital to unlock bonuses.

—

What’s interesting is how the game was designed to encourage players to break the systems, and the algorithmic advancement supports long-term challenges.

I wouldn’t want to try any of this in a PvP game, because it’d create too much frustration if players are abusing these mechanics against each other. Indirect competition would be fine, such as leaderboards.

Obviously, doing this would be Really Hard in the context of an MMO and there are so many arguments about where it’d be flawed that I’m not even going to try to list them. It’s an interesting thought experiment. It has to be completely different than the typical MMORPG. Has anyone seen an online game take this approach?

While there’s a wide range of appealing elements to MMOs, there’s one that they all have in common that’s more important than the others: the ability to play with other people. (I’d also rank persistence quite high)

In light of that, I see the inability to play with friends as the biggest problem in current MMOs. When it comes down to it, MMOs are social experiences, even if you solo. A brief look at some the MMOs I’ve played:

• I played Meridian 59 because of friends.
• I played Ultima Online because of friends.
• I played Everquest because of friends.
• I played Anarchy Online because of friends.
• I quit City of Heroes because my friends left.
• I didn’t play World of Warcraft at launch because of friends (more on this later)
• I play WoW now because of friends.
• Etc. etc.

To add some context to this, I’m someone who’s commonly described at being anti-social. I like MMOs, but I really play them because of other people. I solo a ton, but I won’t stick around long if I’m alone in the game.

Let’s look at some of the common barriers:

• Irrevocable character decisions (typically faction/race)
• Technical restrictions (shard server architecture)
• Statistical gaps (levels, equipment, etc.)
• Logistical limitations (travel time to meet up, disincentives to group, etc.)

These are all things we can address, although some of the problems are quite challenging. Players can surmount some of these by spending sufficient amounts of time. Forcing players to work around those barriers offends my user-centered design sensibilities. It’s understandable, yet disturbing.

EVE circumvents the hard barriers, as it has a single server and the faction selection does not prevent playing with anyone. Of course, EVE’s setting and gameplay makes it much easier to do the single world. Since it’s more fleet-based instead of level-based, players who haven’t invested a lot of time into the game can contribute if they get in a good guild.

Every time I thought about playing WoW for over a year after launch, I didn’t because I knew too many people playing on different servers. I didn’t want to pick a server. WoW allows high levels to group with low levels and get them experience / run them through instances, but there’s no cooperative play with a level gap.

City of Heroes landed a conceptual success with sidekicks, but I consider it to be an implementation failure. I tried sidekicking/mentoring extensively, and I was never able to get into a situation where it allowed cooperative play, particularly when the sidekick didn’t have SOs. It was good for powerleveling, and not much else.

Pirates does a poor job of letting low level players group with high level players, but it’s much easier for a high level to group with a low level.

Most the other MMOs I played didn’t even take a stab at the issue.

At last year’s ION, there was a lecture about third places. I didn’t see the lecture, but I bet it was this one. It goes like this: we have different social spaces where we spend our time. The first place is the home, while the second is the workplace. Third places are where we have our community lives. The TV series Cheers is entirely about a third place - the bar where those people hang out after work. MMOs are third places. They’re our extended social networks.

Outside of MMOs, there are no barriers if I want to do an activity with a friend. I might be better/worse than someone else at tennis, but we can still play and have fun. Imagine that traditional third places treated you the way MMOs do. “Sorry, Bob - you weren’t here last week so you can’t join us when we go out tonight. You’re not experienced enough for this bar.” The progression systems and combat math cause this in many MMOs (although removing level from the math creates new problems to solve). Clubs may have exclusive access, but members can generally get other people access. If a friend can go somewhere and do something, I can join them.

This all goes back to user centered design and barriers to entry. We take the critical element of MMOs and make it hard or time consuming to access. Players shouldn’t have to earn the right to team up with their friends. Removing barriers helps maximize the advantages we drawn from the key strengths in our genre; but that doesn’t mean we should haphazardly attempt to remove these barriers in a game that was designed with them in place. I’d like to see more MMOs designed from the start to allow people to play with anyone, anytime.

This is another one of those posts that I started an eternity around and just never got around to wrapping it up. More specifically: I wrote this back in 2007, so it might be disjointed.

Although I like both, I’m more of a game guy than a world guy, and the setting isn’t one of my priorities in game design (partially because I’m not senior enough to have a say in the setting). Even though I’m not overly concerned with the setting of the projects I work on, it’s a huge piece of any game. As a customer, it’s often going to determine whether I have any interest in the game, and that does translate to a degree of excitement for designing the game. When I write up various crazy-game concepts for fun, sometimes I leave the setting rather vague. That doesn’t work well if anyone else reads the concept, because the setting is one of the most visible elements and it’s easy to grasp. So, I’ve been thinking about various elements of a setting and how they relate to Pirates, my concepts and various other games. This isn’t intended to be a complete overview of the features of settings. Also, this is only about the setting’s impact on the game, and is not the sole determinant for any of these factors.

• Recognition: What degree of recognition do players have when they see a brief glimpse of the setting?

If you see a fantasy game, you immediately recognize the setting and the implications. If you see Pirates of the Burning Sea, you immediately understand the setting… it’s the Caribbean. High degrees of recognition make something more accessible.

• Instant Appeal: How strong is the immediate appeal of the setting?

Once the player recognizes a setting, is it going to appeal as a place they want to visit? High degrees of instant appeal attract new players.

• Long-term Appeal: How strong is the appeal of the setting once you’ve broken the surface and delved into the depths?

Someone took the leap and visited the setting, but do they want to live there? A post-apocalyptic setting might work great for a game like Fallout, but it sure didn’t do any favors for Auto Assault. It’s important to make the distinction between a place where you want to visit and a place where you want to live. WoW’s world is a very appealing place to live overall, but there are numerous places within the world where you would only want to visit. That’s important. High degrees of long-term appeal keep players interested in the game.

• Curiosity: How much curiosity does the setting evoke?

You want an element of mystery and the unknown, places to explore and things to discover. High degrees of curiosity translate into long-term appeal.

• Historical: How historical is the setting?

Historical and realistic settings are a double edged sword. High degrees of historical accuracy means increased recognition and instant appeal with decreased design freedom.

• Freedom: How much design freedom is there in the setting?

When it comes to determining if I want to work on a project, this is the big one for me. Pirates certainly has a lot more flexibility now than it did in the past, as a result of our development history. When you are deciding on a setting, it’s critical to consider how much freedom it offers. The more something is based on an existing premise, the less freedom. This is true for both historical/realistic games and licensed games. If you’re set in the real world at a real place in history, then the users are going to expect things to be a certain way. They’re going to complain when you deviate from their expectations, and they are going to want justification for everything from skills to art. This funnels energy towards recreating the known instead of creating the unknown. Also, there are always going to be users who know more than most of the development team does (before the game launches) if you aren’t using your own setting.

Here’s my point of contention: complete setting recognition is a Bad Thing. If players know everything about the setting before they begin playing, then it doesn’t create a spark of curiosity. They may feel a strong instant appeal, but there’s less long-term appeal. It’s harder to surprise people if they know everything about the setting before they play the game. This is another place where WoW succeeds, because it has a highly recognizable setting that still offers plenty of new experiences and rewards for curiosity. There’s a fine line to cross here, because it’s very common for people to want to live in a world they know.

However, it’s crucial to provide the element of discovery in familiar settings. Otherwise, too many players will quickly reach a point where they realize they’ve seen it all. Just because you’re in a known IP doesn’t mean that there can’t be any sense of discovery. Think about how similar this is to art history. Paintings gradually became more and more realistic until they reached a point where they had to take it in other directions. They reached a point where reality no longer held the same appeal.

Rant warning.

Quest chains drive me mad. I almost talked about them at ION, but I cut that part because it was superfluous. So, now I’m going to complain about them here!

Kevin recently convinced me to return to WoW, and I’m working on leveling up a new character. As a level 28 shaman, I tried to group with my brother’s level 31 warrior to do some quests. Yes, grouping to level in WoW is generally a mistake, but it shouldn’t be maddening. Three levels really shouldn’t be a problem. Anyways, I ran into the same problem I always end up having when I try to group in MMOs with quest chains that reward the individual quest holders.

There were two acceptable areas for us that we could both easily access. I had done some quests in one, and he had done some in the other. That meant our attempts to get any shared quests were futile, because we weren’t eligible due to the chains. That meant we needed to grind if we wanted to make reasonable progress. (It’s off topic, but that failed too - I did virtually no damage to mobs a couple levels above him, which were the only ones worth decent xp)

So, we’re left with a choice. One of us must make a sacrifice in order to group. Do I need to emphasize how bad that is in an MMO? Whoever is getting quests completed is going to be making faster progress. The other person’s way better off playing alone, even though it’s not as fun.

In a loose quest structure, we would have had plenty of tasks in common. With the damned chains, there wasn’t anything we could do and we just wasted our time trying to sync up some quests. And it only gets exponentially worse as the groups grow larger.

I understand why we keep using quest chains. Need chains to tell the story? Fine, but that should never impede someone’s ability ability to play with their friends. It’s not like it’s a hard problem to solve, but it seems like we’re reluctant to take the necessary steps.

This one’s long. Want the take away but scared by the wall of text? Read the last sentence.

Damion Schubert caught me off guard me with a tough question after my lecture at ION. In rather broad terms, he asked me what my thoughts were on high-end advancement in relation to the things I discussed in my presentation. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about the subject, but rather it’s trying to put together a coherent and as-close-to-comprehensive answer as possible in a few seconds. It’s really a subject that deserves its own lecture (perhaps not from me). I hastily threw together an answer, but it’s something I want to talk about in more depth (although this is still quite brief).

Warning: This is going to be chock full of generalizations, and of course there will be exceptions. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume the trappings of a traditional MMO.

One of the odd dichotomies in our industry is the stark contrast between pre-max and level-cap gameplay. It’s common to have several types of groups. Some examples:

• Solo
• Duo/Small Group
• Full Group
• Multi Group

Then, there different types of combat:

• Grinding a location
• Exploration Killing
• Questing
• Instances
• Raiding

These all appeal to different players, and any given player is likely to be interested in different activities on any given day. The problem is that we don’t allow players to pursue the activity of their choice.

Want to solo/duo at the level cap? Hope you picked the right classes, and even then you’re going to be seriously limited. Want to raid at low levels for anything other than a goofy experience? Not supported. Want to keep the same playstyle throughout the entirety of the game? Yeah, right.

We expect our high-end gameplay to keep players engaged and playing the game for months (or years) to come, so why do we act like we have so little faith in these systems? If we expect it to be good enough to keep players late in the game, then why can’t we introduce it to them early?

Of course, we do need a tutorial period, and that’s often what leveling becomes. But it’s so damned long. Should it be necessary to spend a couple hundred hours playing a character to find out if you like what it becomes, or to discover the gameplay changed drastically and you can no longer play the way you want?

There are many barriers to entry for endgame systems. With raiding, there’s the leveling, learning the character, finding a stable guild, gearing up to the same level as that guild, etc. For designers, the social barriers are the biggest obstacles. We can reduce the social obstacles (provide them with tools to find guilds and like-minded players), but they’re hard to remove. The other obstacles are under our control.

So, here’s my argument: The core gameplay options should not be gated based on the stage of the game. If you think raiding’s a good part of the game, open it up to everyone. If solo’ing important, then don’t stop providing it at the high levels. The specifics of what each element entails will evolve and change as players get more experience, but it shouldn’t be governed by ingame on/off switches. This relates to the unrestricted flow of movement I discussed in the section about system triangles (which I need to explain better - apparently I lost over 90% of the audience with my marble maze analogy).

— — —

That part’s simple. The bigger question: how? I’ll take a theoretical stab at that question. First, the goals mentioned earlier:

1. Allow players to pursue their activity of choice
2. The core gameplay options should be available throughout all stages of the game

Typical MMO character progression impedes both of these goals. I’m going to approach that as the underlying problem to address.

For those who know me, you probably won’t be surprised that I threw out Vagrant Story (VS) as part of my answer to Damion’s question. I experienced something in Vagrant Story that I haven’t seen in any other RPG, and I’ll share my disjointed memories of that experience.

When you finish VS, you can choose to start a new game with the same character. I did so, and hopped into the same difficulty just for kicks… and I found out the game wasn’t trivially easy. The trash mobs filling corridors were pretty easy, but bosses still had some kick. It was still an enjoyable difficulty level. I got my brother to give the game a shot on my new game + character, and he had a normal game experience. The game was still quite challenging for him.

That’s not so abnormal on its own, but the real kicker comes from the character advancement. When I was playing VS, I felt just as rewarded by my character’s statistical growth as I did in any other RPG. I increased my stats, built up weapons, learned skills, etc. They built the game in a way that I had a great sense of progression, but that growth did not trivialize all the game’s content.

In order for this to work:

• Vagrant Story is a very challenging game, perhaps one of the most satisfyingly challenging games I’ve ever played.
• Vagrant Story starts you off as a badass. IIRC, I started with around 250 hitpoints and ended with 450.
• Vagrant Story’s character development is spread out across multiple axes. You build up your ability to fight against the games 7-8 different types of enemies (humans, phantoms, beasts, etc.).
• Vagrant Story’s combat requires quite a bit of skill and strategy, such as precisely timing your attacks, hitting specific body locations and discovering enemy weaknesses. It uses a mixed real-time/turn-based system.

Now, let’s look at the goals in light of what I’ve just described from VS. Content is a huge part of the problem. We provide different kinds of content for acquiring items versus advancing through the leveling curve, which leads to the split in gameplay. This upsets the people who want to raid because they have to spend so much time leveling, and it upsets the people who want to solo because they lose the ability to progress through solo gameplay at the level cap. Additionally, it’s expense to fully build out all the different types of content.

Part of the problem comes from the rate at which content becomes obsolete. Another part of the problem is that the meaning of character advancement changes drastically.

Although the experience changed, the content in VS didn’t become completely obsolete. The content near the start of the game was still relevant to an end game character. Of course, VS is a single player game. The time investment and advancement scale barely has any resemblance to an MMO, but there are still lessons to learn.

One way that VS creates the feeling of advancement without overpowering the character is through weapon customization. There are several different archetypes of mobs, and weapons attune themselves to specific monsters as you fight them. They also grow weaker against the opposing monsters. This means you are constantly working on building up a set of weapons to be strong against all types of monsters, then you want weapons with different properties too. As you progress through the game, you shape new weapons out of the old ones to keep the same properties.

I believe this gives us one possible solution to the general issue of high-end advancement.

The theoretical plan:

1. Shallow out the leveling curve. Create a newbie island that is similar to the one in Guild Wars Factions, where you hit level cap by the end of the tutorial. This helps players experience the core of what they will be doing in the game. We want players to start “strong.
2. Change the advancement scale so that you aren’t increasing hitpoints by orders of magnitude. It’s the relative values that matter (250hp to 450hp instead of 250hp to 10k hp).
3. Provide sustainable/repeatable content, such as PvE arena battles that are automatically generated.
4. Create content with tiers of difficulty. Nightmare/Hard/Heroic/etc.
5. Layer multiple axes of advancement that are not 100% cumulative. Allow advancement of all types to occur for players with any playstyle (you can get loot solo, you can gain new skills in raids, et cetera).
6. Create a very broad range of content that gradually scales up in difficulty, but with the expectation that the bulk of the player base will be able to access that content and will be repeating it.

This poses some pretty big challenges. Mudflation is a huge concern. A dragon should feel like a dragon - massive, powerful, intimidating. You don’t want to flatten out the content to the point where there’s no distinguishable difficulty or tiers of accomplishment. Players will still progress through stages of content, but it’s more open and doesn’t trivialize content quite as fast. But the bigger issue lies in the advancement. Players respond to big rewards better than small rewards. The challenge lies in setting up the progression to feel just as rewarding as any other system, but doing so without cranking up hitpoints to absurd ranges. The rewards must be fulfilling. Fail to make the micro rewards fulfilling and the entire setup is a failure. The newbie island is also problematic, because it gives players a taste of a type of gameplay that ultimately goes away. It’s essentially a crutch.a

How can we create that sense of progression in an MMO with such a different curve? I think it’s possible, but it’s risky, time consuming and complicated. If it was achieved, it would mean I can use more bullet points:

• High-end advancement is the core game - we introduce it much earlier.
• Playing with friends is much easier due to the different statistical scale.
• Each piece of content will see more use because it’s not obsolete so fast. I have no reason to quest in the Barrens if I already did Ghostlands.
• We get players into the content they prefer as quick as possible, including the parts of the game that are “massive.”
• It’s possible to make progress regardless of the preferred playstyle.
• Players are always getting rewards as they work on several different advancement axes.

There’s a lot more to discuss on this subject and I haven’t even talked about dealing with high-end achievement in a traditional progression structure. But this post is getting too long, so I’m going to cut it off here. This isn’t “the way” - it’s simply one of many.

In summary: Make the end game the whole game.

Here are the slides for my presentation (Powerpoint 2003 format) that I said I’d be posting, although apparently I missed that whole “after the conference” part and I kept getting questions on where to find the slides.

They include some brief presenters notes. They’re generally cryptic, but I added a few words to make it so there’s at least a chance to cypher them.

At Austin, I saw some really stand-out presentations and some really horrible ones. For most of ION, it was all middle-of-the-road. There wasn’t much that was just awful, and there wasn’t anything that stood out as being exceptional.

Part of the problem comes from there being so many panels. Frankly, panels just aren’t that interesting compared to lectures. They usually rehash the same subjects, and they just don’t get into enough depth or detail. I talked to some other people about this and we had a general consensus: people who are preparing lectures spend a lot of time preparing. Panelists usually don’t spend much time preparing, and often there isn’t much they can even do to prepare. The effort that people put into lectures shows, and it’s much more useful when you’re presented with a coherent package of information.

I also thought the design track was pretty weak this year. There weren’t many design lectures that I cared to attend. I missed several of the design lectures, so it’s possible that those were was some good content hidden away. I also missed a lecture I wanted to see because I slept in. Actually, my own lecture is the only 9am time slot I made it to, and that’s only because I had to be there!

In hindsight, I missed a couple of the lectures that might have been interesting. Because I went to way too many panels and none of them were useful. It’s not that they were bad and not entertaining. It’s just that panels seem to plateau at a level well below what lectures can achieve, even with a collection of panelists that all give awesome lectures. Maybe I just haven’t been to that really enlightening panel, but I’m doubtful.

Sara Jensen Schubert’s lecture about game balance tools and longevity was fine, but it’s hard to judge I was really the wrong audience. Since I’ve basically lived in the whole MMO balancing and tool scene, I already knew all the issues and what we really need. Joe’s postpartum presents a similar problem, especially since I already saw the lecture! I wasn’t fond of the Stargate talk.

And then there was this boring keynote by Alex St. John about The PC Gaming Comeback. Or, that’s what I thought. Then I went there and it blew me away. It’s the best keynote I’ve seen. Usually, keynotes are so drab, uninformative, safe and fond of telling the audience thing they heard ten times before. This one was different. His presentation style turned away some viewers, but it didn’t bother me. He started off pretty much by trying to stir up controversy in a way that could upset people to get them to pay attention. But he backed up everything he said - including the controversial statements - with math. The presentation was filled with charts, numbers and graphs. It was worth the price of admission alone. I might talk about the actual presentation, but there’s probably a much better write-up elsewhere.

Up until that point, Brandon Reinhart’s mini-lecture on narrative design was my favorite talk. Joe claims that’s just because I want design to have our own personal concept artist to use to communicate our ideas.

Overall, it was a really valuable conference. I just wished I saw a few more substantial lectures.

ION’s all over for this year, and it was a good experience. I did a lot more networking than I did at AGDC ‘07 - that speaker’s badge helps.

I’ll be making a series of posts about ION, including my lecture slides (probably tonight), chunks from the lecture (more detailed than the slides) and conference/lecture impressions.

It’s about time for ION. I’m spending the weekend incorporating the advice other FLS staffers gave me on my presentation.

We also just released a major skill update to Pirates testbed, including a new career. My schedule’s going to be incredibly hectic once I get back into the office. I wonder how many times we’ll get accused of ignoring feedback and not interacting with the community due to a week without  when I don’t post on our forums for a week.

I finally picked up Portal a week ago. It’s lived up to the hype so far, but it’ll probably be another week or two before I finish it.