Playing Guild Wars 2

First my daughter started playing.  She calls her character Rufflebutt the Barbarian.  She posted screenshots to Google+.

Then my wife, Lobi, started playing, and telling me how much fun she was having.  I was still busy playing Torchlight II solo and with friends.

Finally Dusty Monk posted about his Mesmer.   Given the choices of classes in GW2, it was inevitably the right one for Toldain to be, even though it doesn't actually let you, you know, mez anything.  (Of course I was going to play Toldain, don't be silly!)

So I sighed, and popped off to the store for the game.  Actually, I kept playing Torchlight II until I at least finished the main story arc.  Then I popped off to the store.

Installed from the DVD's, and then - hurry up and wait for all the updates.   That took basically all night and then some.  Sigh.   I'm hearing Carly Simon, and thinking of ketchup:



Of course, when I start the first character I create is my beloved, 3000 year-old-redhead.  However, there are no "elves" in this game.  Sylvari is kind of the corresponding thing to elves, but they are really more of a wood-elf thing.  They have the potential longevity to front Toldain's 3000 years, too.

But the hair!   I don't want leaves for hair, I want fabulousness!   I can have red leaves, but that just didn't cut it for me in the end.

So I created Toldain as a human, a noble human.  Except that secretly, he's still an elf who slipped through an interdimensional rift and wound up in Tyria.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I'm somewhat like Wilhelm in that I always try for the same look, at least in the first character.  He says, of GW2:

I always just try to make me, and this time around the “me” seemed a bit more effeminate than I would like to imagine myself, in an anime hero, pretty boy, male model sort of way. 

Of course, when it comes to Toldain, being a pretty boy is a good thing.   And my hair did come out looking very fabulous.

Actually, it's pretty much the exact hairstyle, color, and facial shape that Toldain had in EQ2.  I am very pleased.  The ears aren't pointy, though.  Sadly, it's very hard to get much of a closeup, at least out in the field.   I'll try to get a better one.

Let's go over a few of my likes and dislikes about the game:

Events and Frictionless Cooperation

This is by far my favorite aspect of the game.  Something's happening in the world, and you can just jump in and do something about it.   Other people will be doing it, too.   

Bandits are trying to poison the water reservoir.  Can you stop them?   If not, then the reservoir is poisoned and you have to try and collect poison globules and bring them to a brainiac, so he can make an antidote.   It's a chance for redemption.  I don't know what happens if this fails, or if it can fail.

But I like the dynamic aspect of it.  I like that there is frictionless co-operation.  In fact, most of the game is built around the idea of "frictionless cooperation".  If I do buffs, they affect allies that are close to me, they don't have to be grouped with me.  Experience, karma, and loot are applied to everyone, there's no need to group, nor is there any sense of kill-stealing.   Yes, this would allow power-leveling, except that the game automatically reduces your level to the maximum level of any area.   Leveled-down characters do seem to be slightly more powerful than true-level characters, but what the heck.

This is frictionless mentoring.   You can just wander into a noob zone and help people, and their's shared risk.  This is what I've been wanting from an MMO ever since EQ2 got this so, so wrong.

Only One Hotbar

You have only one hotbar.  Half of the 10 slots (well, really there are 14, with F1-4 adding more) are predetermined by your choice of weapon.  The other half are chosen from two pools, which you unlock over time with points garnered from mini-challenges within the game.   

The thing I like the most about this is that it presents the possibility of strategy being important.  It's easy to switch weapons when you aren't in a fight, but not so easy when you're in one.  Slot skills can't be switched at all, and you can only switch from one weapon set to one other set, and there's a cooldown on switching back.

At first, the approach among players seems to be "which of the possibilities do I like the best" and they will pick a combination and stick with it.   Psychochild complained that with his engineer he seemed to stick to one thing.   However, there's a huge potential space here, and one that I'm having enormous fun  learning and thinking about.

Persistent Buy and Sell Orders

EQ2 had a "persistent sell order" model.  Player merchants would offer things for sale at a set price and other players could buy them or not.  EVE Online added the persistent buy order, where you put up money and an offer price, and players with stuff to sell could just dump them down.

Of course, a persistent buy order doesn't work if there's no friction to selling, and it's not clear whether there is much friction to selling.   ArenaNet has made it incredibly easy to sell stuff on the Trading Post, and harder to buy.  Selling can be done anywhere, and you can empty your bags in the field.  

There must be some limit to how many sell orders you have, right?   Otherwise there's a spam issue.  I haven't seen it, though.

I prefer this kind of selling to auction selling, especially the sort of auction that charges you even if what you auctioned didn't sell.   That's sort of necessary because of spam.  But it has a chilling effect on sellers, which means that often in mature games with auctions (LOTRO) there would be categories of items that just didn't exist.  It wasn't worth the risk/effort/friction to bother to sell low-tier ore, etc.  This will not be an issue in GW2, I think.  

The Trading Post is not very good for economic game play.  There is almost no opportunity for arbitrage, because it's so easy to sell.  Prices are driven way down.  This is good for buyers and not for sellers.  But I think that's probably what they wanted.   Economic gameplay is secondary to killing stuff.  This isn't EVE Online.

Artwork

The game is beautiful.  I upgraded my system to play it, getting a quad-core AMD chip, a lot more memory, and a SSD.  I kept my fairly recent gfx card, though.   However, I ended up having a cooling problem.   The computer had this bad habit of just overheating and shutting off at awkward moments.

Dialing down the gfx features didn't seem to help.   So then I found that it was on free-run framerate.  So dialing down the gfx features probably meant that each frame rendered faster, giving me a higher framerate and thus making my cpu overheat even faster!  Sigh.

However, I went out and bought a liquid cooling system and installed it.  Now the thing runs fabulously, in much higher res and art settings.  I will have new screenies soon, I think this is at reduced settings:

Exploration, Viewpoints, and Jumping Puzzles

I have Achiever habits, but I'm really an Explorer and Socializer at heart.  Each area has lots of places to find.  In the lower left of the screenshot above is a vertical streak of light with some sort of flag or parchment on it.  If you look closely, you will see my 3000-year-old self standing next to it.  This is a viewpoint.   You get some experience for finding them, as well as a breathtaking view of the gorgeous graphics.

(By the way, since this whole MMO thing started it's either got a lot easier to hire more artists, or a lot easier for  an artist to drop a buttload of architecture into a game.  Probably both.)

Sometimes it isn't all that easy to figure out how to get to these spots.  Sometimes it involves combat, sometimes it involves jumping places.  Sometimes there's both.   I got a viewpoint last night in Kessex Hills that required a blind jump off a cliff.  I was rewarded with a little exp and a breathtaking view of a waterfall.  Which like the in-the-moment rube I am, I completely forgot to screenshot.

It doesn't matter. I love this.  I got all 50 stars in Mario64, after all.  I haven't done a true "jumping puzzle" yet, I look forward to it.

Server Interaction

All of your toons must be on the same server.  I imagine this made more sense when you could arrange to do an instance or otherwise hang out or do battle with people on another server.   However, this isn't working now.   So I can't play a toon on my daughter's server.  I could move everything there, but it's marked as very high load.  And if I'm sitting in a queue for an hour waiting to log on, I'm not actually playing with her, am I?

I really like the EVE Online model where everyone is in the same universe.  In a fantasy MMO, however, putting that many people in one place would pretty much crash everyone's experience, both from graphics, and from server lag.   Still I can dream, can't I?

I'd really like them to get this working.

Last words

I leave you with my Asura Engineer, Festus Wockle.   Festus comes from tabletop RPGs, where he was a gnome with a high voice, an inclination to sing, a love of bright colors, no fashion sense, and a slightly irritating manner.   I think he's realized quite well.  I love all the techno-gibberish in some of the Metrica quests, or whatever they are called now.  I look forward to seeing what they've done with the other races.

Fabulous Red Hair is not a Game Mechanic, Either

Raph Koster has a post up that seems to explain why I like DDO so much compared to other games. Provided you squint at it a little bit, and relabel some of the nodes. It's called "Narrative is not a Game Mechanic".

He develops a picture language that has yellow circles as user inputs, black boxes to represent the 'black box' of game mechanics, and blue squares to represent feedback. All of these are necessary to have a game:

Cut the input, and you have a screensaver.
Cut the problem inside the black box, and you have a slideshow.
Cut the feedback, and you have something ridiculously confusing that no one will tolerate.

You can diagram the structure of a game thusly, with the size of the boxes representing the complexity or weight of the components. Here's a sample.



Feedback can take the form of narrative action: point the camera at a window and press A and you get a fast cutscene of Batman gliding off the rooftop just ahead of the explosion! That's a small input, a small black box, and a big feedback.

Raph points out that this leads to a problem: The narrative cutscene gets old pretty fast. You've seen it before. Due to a well known process known as "hedonic adaptation" fun things lose some of their fun through repetition. (Or is that systematic desensitization?)

Ok, most of the MMO's I've played don't rely all that heavily on narrative feedback. Yeah, there's some cutscenes, and a nice death animation, but the big feedback comes in the loot. And I think that has the same problem, if a bit slower. What turned me off of EQ2 was exactly this: Going into an instance with a group had absolutely zero focus on the black box. The inputs were well determined and done as quickly as possible to get the loot. But the loot was random, so mostly you didn't get the loot that you wanted (How many times did I do Vault of Eternal Slumber, never to get Praetor's Guard?)

The simple terminology for this is "I hate grinding".

Ok, so most of the instances I run in DDO don't drop anything I actually upgrade to. But they are interesting. One reason for this is that the game system itself is interesting. And that's true because it's D&D. It was developed to be interesting on the tabletop, where there is no cinematic cutscenes. Although there is, to be fair, loot. Well, at least sometimes. My daughter's game is notoriously lean on the loot.

We get rewards: success. Sometimes its obvious what to do, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes (in DDO) we have to try again, or snatch things back from the Precipice of Wipe. That's just darn fun when you can pull that off.

Granted there is also the more visceral, media-based feedback: Holding a dance contest in the middle of the dungeon to see which demon is the best dancer ranks right up there. It's just fun to see them dancing when Karayasama uses Otto's (Theoretically) Resistable Dance. It's also fun to see which outfits show off the fabulous red hair to best advantage. But those sorts of things existed in EQ2, as well. They probably aren't quite enough to drive continuing subscription on their own, and they aren't game mechanics.

The striking thing to me is that as black boxes go, DDO isn't very black at all, maybe 18% neutral gray. At least to me, the D&D mechanics are second nature and public. There is a die roll, but that's the only element that is unpredictable. Everything else is based on mechanics from the tabletop RPG, where how everything works is spelled out.

Yet, it's still fun. Interest comes from not knowing what the mobs will do, and not knowing whether your spells or swings will miss, hit, or crit. Reacting in the moment is the joy.

The past few Mondays, Karayasama, Johnson (the cleric) and Marty (my tank with thief tendencies), have been running instances in Sentinels of Stormreach. And we have been tearing them up on Normal difficulty. Maybe it's time to move to Hard? Our ease surprises me a bit. Different groups have had more difficulty with these instances, particularly the Bazaar. (Remember how I mentioned the Precipice of Wipe?). We blasted through it. Not that it wasn't complex, it was just that we handled it.

Does this mean we're going to get bored with DDO and stop playing? Well, it might. We play a lot less. Karaya is playing SWTOR now, and I'm stuck on Skyrim. I'm not sure what Phritz is doing, and Lobilya is playing Skyrim, too.

Pizza and Storybricks

Last Wednesday, I had Pizza in Palo Alto with Brian "Psychochild" Green, along with spouses, girlfriends and daughter. We had a great time swapping stories of RPG's and MMORPG's and crazy stuff we'd done in them. Brian works for Namaste, which is running a demo at GenCon this week of Storybricks, a brand new technology and approach which Namaste is trying to bring to the market.

It's my sense that Brian (and possibly others at Namaste) want to make MMO's more like tabletop RPG's. Which I love, so that's good.

Phil Carlisle of Namaste says this:

What I’m more interested in, is the ability to actually feel like the world is allowing me to play a role. That I’m part of a story and can explore the world while the story unfolds, where the drama of the world evolves over time and where the mechanics of play in the world are less about accruing items and more about social play. Which I guess is why I’m here working for Namaste.

Yeah, that's the cool thing about a tabletop campaign - the stuff your characters do matters. This could play out at the level of lore. Stephane Bura, also of Namaste, writes:

lore is useful for giving some context to the players’ goals: there are Demon Princes and Forger Kings, pick a side and kill the other one. It’s the wrapping paper on the quests. There is some reason, somewhere, why it’s important to slay demons in this game. This is comforting for some players because it brings a sense of order to the world – a sense that the developers know where they’re going. This kind of lore is also useful for setting up worldwide events and giving context to new content. However, even if lore distilled through quest texts can be very well written, most players skip it (trust me) because, in the end, it’s inconsequential. Players have no influence over such lore and its details have rarely any bearing on what they effectively have to accomplish.

But that's only one level of lore. Stephane goes on to write about others:

So, there’s this magic item called the Scepter of Life and it control plants. A King owns it. You can bet that the farmers in this kingdom have a completely different life from your stock farmers’. They don’t fear droughts and they don’t need to take care of their lands so much. They’re much better at harvesting, since they do that all year-long. Inns serve soups, salads, jardinières and pies, as much as you want. Commerce is based on the exports of virtually free food, with dozens of caravans and shipments leaving the kingdom every week. Nobles fight over the amount of woodland and arable lands they control. The woodcutters have the most powerful guild. No imagine how all this would change if the Scepter of Life were to be stolen by some Demon Prince…

And the world is ready for virtual worlds that are like this. Liz Danforth, who is joining with the Namaste crowd at GenCon, says this:

Something has fundamentally changed in our expectations about entertainment and our interactions with the things we love. We expect to participate, tinker with someone else’s creations, to contribute and to share what we make. When Time magazine featured an article about fan fiction and the writer gets it entirely right, warts and all … Time magazine for heavensake! … the world has truly changed (and is continuing to do so).

So there's a hunger for worlds that players can change, and canvases which are collaborative and expandable. That hunger goes back to Tolkien, who imagined Middle Earth to be a place where others would dally, and write songs or stories about. This is an entirely different approach to fiction from that of, say, Lois McMaster Bujold, who ascribes to "just in time" world creation. There's a lot fewer continuity issues to fuss about her way, to be sure.

Anyway, I got a demo today of the Storybricks system pretty much as it will be demoed at GenCon. Kelly Heckman of Namaste took time out of her own preparations for GenCon to show me the latest build. What I saw was in two parts. The first was a screen that looks like the graphic I've posted above. The second was a typical Medieval street scene, with a guard, a citizen, and a thief. I watched as Kelly added Storybricks to say that the citizen would be happy to see me and the thief would be angry. The guard stayed neutral. As the player character approached each of these characters, it triggered animations that portrayed those attitudes. The guard turned to look at me, but showed little emotion. The thief glared and put a hand up in the universal stop sign. The citizen seemed very happy to see me.

These are the basic building blocks of storytelling. I've seen this kind of thing in a few places before. Specifically, once you did enough writs for the Qeynos Guard in Everquest 2, guard members would sometimes stop and salute as you ran past them. I have to say, that felt fantastic. Presumably this was done, for EQ2 via special ad-hoc programming in a scripting language and added to the guards. Storybricks, at the level that was demoed to me, would codify that kind of thing, and make it easy for content creators, be they professional or amateur, to add this kind of thing to a virtual world.

Tools matter a lot. I don't think it's a coincidence that writer productivity is a lot higher now than they were in the days of Tolkien, who wrote all of his manuscripts by hand in soft pencil and then wrote over them in ink. And at that level, Storybricks already looks to be something useful. The system will allow one to describe changes in attitude. For example, you might retrieve a Philtre from a crypt on behalf of a shopkeeper, and he will be grateful when he finds love. You might think that the point of the episode was that sword of smiting that the player gets, but it might be that the point was to make people happy, because that would foil some other plot. Or make someone like you. The potential for matchmaking is there, and that will definitely encourage competitive shipping. I can see it now: Factions competing between making Bella like Edward or Jacob more.

Err, never mind. Namaste isn't really promising that. But they're dreaming about it. Psychochild described to me, over that pizza, how you could have instances in which Bella preferred Edward and instances in which Bella preferred Jacob. (Actually he was talking about the dictator of Freeport Lucan D'Lere who has a crush on Bella and .... never mind) And by their interactions with those instances and the characters, one of those realities would get promoted to the default reality. ( I think we can safely say that three-ways are out of the question.)

So, I think they are on to something that players will like, and that's possible. It's a big job, though. But they have the sort of goals that, even if they don't make all of them, they will still probably get something very cool. My only request is a Storybrick that says: "If (elf has red hair) then (NPC thinks he's fabulous)"

When No Doesn't Mean No

Eve Online recently launched its latest expansion Incarna. As part of the expansion it introduced a microtransaction market, through which players can purchase items by spending a currency known as Aurum. Aurum, as I write this, can only be obtained by purchasing a PLEX, the same ingame item that can be redeemed for play time, and instead redeeming it for Aurum.

The market is thin, and mostly consists of vanity items, boots, skirts and, of all things, monocles.

As it turns out, Incarna introduced full-body 3d avatars for the first time to EVE. However, in the game as it is today, these avatars are only used in your Captain's Quarters, which can only be occupied by you. So, it seems, nobody can see these vanity items, with one exception - monocles. To add insult to injury, the real world cost of said items is pretty stiff - upwards of $50 to $80. There are no low priced items, and nothing that seems functional.

As if this weren't enough, a copy of an internal newsletter (with the title Fearless) was leaked to the general public. This particular issue was titled "Greed is Good?" and had a picture of Gordon Gekko on it. On page 7 is a pro-con debate on having microtransaction items available that enhanced gameplay in Eve Online. You can download it here.

Kristoffer Touffer is described as "a driving force in CCP's game design department" Kristoffer says

I would like virtual goods sales in EVE. In fact, I’d like to sell a lot more than vanity items. Does this mean I’m an evil capitalist that, unless stopped, will cause the entire company to catch fire and be buried at sea by a secret team of Navy SEALs?
Let’s hope not, although that’s the impression I get sometimes when interacting with our customers. There is a pretty overwhelming perception amongst EVE players that these changes are bad. I think they’re brilliant, but our players
don’t. We’re going to face an uphill struggle, and the reason many of us never talk about this publicly is that we’d be burned at the stake by the players.

Kristoffer gives an example of what kinds of things he'd like to see sold in game:

I’ll give you an example of something I think provides value to our customer, which I’d like to sell. Right now, you can store 50 personal fittings on our servers. That’s more than enough for the average EVE player, but for a subset of our users, it’s too small a number. Why not be able to add more storage space for a small amount of money? You’d even be able to upgrade it multiple times if you needed and permanently add this benefit to your character, making it even more valuable. And you know what? If you don’t like paying for this, you can always buy a PLEX off the market, and never have to get your credit card out. I think that’s pretty goddamn cool, and I’m not entirely sure why that makes me Hitler to some EVE players.

Which touches my first question: Why have Aurum at all? Why not just make everything ISK based? You can already buy ISK in game from CCP by buying GTCs, converting them to PLEXes and selling them on the market. I have a guess at why they introduced Aurum: So they can sell it or give it away directly eventually, and set their own price for it, rather than letting the market decide, avoiding in-game market arbitrage as well.

On the same page, John Turbefield is described as a "Renowned master of spreadsheets and works his Excel magic in the Research and Statistics department". He is "worried that the rules are changing:"

Virtual goods sales can be positive in certain circumstances. However, when you introduce something that can create an imbalance where others can’t compete with their spending power, you inevitably decrease their satisfaction with your product. As such it is essential that a game is designed from the ground up to incorporate any major virtual goods sales that fall outside of this. PLEX (and time codes before that) work extremely well as they not only largely replace a black market for ISK, but provide substantial benefits to other players in the form of offering additional subscription options. The negatives caused from the ISK for real money trade such as hacking and botting are reduced as their profitability declines. PLEX differs from typical virtual goods sales because we allow players to pay their subscriptions this way using in-game currency.

To me, virtual goods sales are far less appealing when the gameplay is affected and they aren’t replacing a black market. When we’re adding additional things into the game that enable users to gain an advantage over other people for real money in a way they simply wouldn’t be able to if we hadn’t done so, then it becomes an issue. I feel that if people have already paid a subscription fee then unless there is a good reason for the overall community to introduce a gameplay-affecting virtual goods
sales (such as with PLEX), then gaining an in-game advantage isn’t justifiable. More revenue is of course an aim, but making our customers feel like they are being ‘double billed’ to be able to play on the same level as others is just a step too far.

The most visible example of another game introducing virtual goods sales is certainly LOTRO. It is worth pointing out though that they made almost everything microtransaction based and at the same time removed subscription fees. Because other games with very different communities and very different gameplay styles are able to do something it doesn’t mean we can do the same thing with the same levels of success. EVE is a far more complex game with significantly more social interaction, which changes a great
deal about how you can approach virtual goods sales. While it’s true that others, such as Blizzard have gone down the microtransaction path, they have not implemented any gameplay affecting items. They also do not offer a microtransaction to gold conversion as we do with PLEX. [Actually, Eve offers a gold to MT conversion, not the other way -toldain]
I don’t oppose the concept of virtual goods in the case of vanity items, merely in cases where the monetization of items impacts the balance of the game.

Well, that was kind of long, but I wanted you to really get the argument being made. John touches on the idea of "double-billing", which is pretty important to overall sentiment. He also tries to explain something that puzzles me as well.

CCP already sells currency within its games, via the PLEX mechanic. ISK can be used to buy things that enhance your gameplay, and gain an advantage with. I've heard players respond to someone complaining about how long it took to earn enough ISK to buy a carrier with, "Sell some PLEXes!"

Furthermore, characters can be bought and sold for ISK. So if you want an "endgame" character, capable of flying Titans, let's say, you can. Buy a crapload of PLEXes and buy both a Titan and a character who can fly one. Be careful that its in space where it's safe to log on, though.

Ok, so why are the playerbase so upset? First, players, because they are people, really resist change. And they are wary of being ignored because that's what big companies do, right?

However, the worst is yet to come.

On page 9 of the same issue of Fearless Scott Holden writes an article called "Delivering the goods: virtual sales in Incarna" Scott Holden is described on Page 3 thus: "As Director of Content Design, Scott works from the Atlanta office overseeing all content for the EVE property; he regularly shuttles between our offices and his homeland of Canada."

CCP is in the process of adopting a virtual sales model for its game products. While this model has
always been intended for World of Darkness and DUST 514, you may be wondering how this will
work in EVE Online. Specifically, how will this new strategy unfold in Incarna?

In short, it’s the same in Incarna as elsewhere: we give players the means to buy stuff in addition to their base subscription, offering things like new “nano-paints” that allow one to customize ships while docked; new articles of virtual clothing, tattoos, and other avatar customizations; tokens for customizing Captain’s Quarters and so on. Not all virtual purchases will focus on customization: some will simply be new items, ammunition, ships, etc. that can be purchased outright. The devil, as always, is in the details.

You don't have to read much further than this to get the picture. New items, ammunition and ships? The player base of Eve is not naive. They've seen other games. The MT items are always just a little bit better than the normal items. Ammunition and ships really hits Eve players in the gut. Put this together with the perception that the current items are really overpriced and what is the prediction that a reasonable player will make?

Currently one round of T2 ammunition costs something like 200 ISK, depending on just what kind. That's less than one cent, probably that's 100 of them for a penny. My math may be wrong, but it's tiny, when put in terms of Euros or USD. Will that be true of the MT version of ammunition, which you know will be just that much better than even faction ammo?

But that difference is really really important to Eve players. A battle could turn on that difference, and losses of billions of ISK could turn on that battle. So of course they would have to buy it, regardless of whatever insane price is charged through the MT store. Either that, or quit playing the game. So when the Director of Content Design for Eve says, "we're going to sell ammo and ships", that seems like a done deal, doesn't it?

The player base has been very clear that it doesn't want this, as is evidenced by Kristoffer Touffer's remarks shown above.

Many of the players I've met in 0.0 are pretty much all-in when it comes to playing Eve. They have multiple accounts. They play long hours. At least one appears to be logged in all day long while at work. They play so much that they fall asleep at the keyboard. And now the feel that CCP is trying to squeeze more blood from that turnip. As I write this there is a serious rage on the forums and some sort of protest flash mob in Jita 4,4.

Every aspect of Eve is PvP. Even the most carebeary (careberry?) of carebears is enmeshed in economic PvP. There's competition and cooperation. The competition is what makes the cooperation so delightful. So even the non-hardcores sense that the game would be deeply changed by what Mr. Holden suggests, strike that, he didn't suggest it, he flat said "it's happening".

Holden goes on to describe another item contemplated for sale through MT, faction standing.

One other service we’re looking at is selling faction standings. We want to offer convenience for a price. As an example, your friend might give you free tickets to see her band play simply because the two of you are friends; meanwhile, other fans have to pay for a ticket because, well, that’s how it normally works. The more noteworthy the band, the more those friendships (and thus the tickets) are worth. If that doesn’t seem quite an accurate analogy, think of it like this: you can develop a friendship by “spending” your time, or you can pay to get the same benefits that friendship would otherwise allow. (I’m sure you can think of a few other situations where one might temporarily “buy” services otherwise gained only through social interaction.)

Wow. Just wow. He's comparing (correct me if I read this wrong) what they want to do to prostitution, and saying, "That's why we should do it!" Do you seriously believe that people like this, as opposed to merely tolerating it? And why they might not want to see it intrude on their precious leisure time, fantasy world? Do you have a shred of empathy for those players who play Eve because they can buy PLEXes with ISK, play for free, and still remain competitive? Can you understand why players might prefer a game where their ability to play the game matters rather than the size of their bank account? If you can't, you should be fired immediately, do not pass Go, do not collect 2 million ISK. No "Director of Content" should be so clueless about what players want in their virtual worlds.

Imagine you had ground missions and spent tons of ISK on building faction with the Caldari. Now all that means nothing, and you feel like a sucker. Is this what you want to have happen to your game? I don't.

What makes this much, much worse is the fact that CCP said, to the Council of Stellar Management that there would be no gameplay-affecting items available through the MT store. Pretty much at the same time Holden was writing this, I think. Mr Holden clearly believes that it will blow over and players will drop their opposition over time. Why do I know that? Because he says so:

First, we don’t want to glut the virtual market with too many offers right out of the gate. Instead, we want to provide a steady stream of digestible goods and services over a long period of time, allowing cus- tomers to sample and purchase as they get used to the new model. We want to cater to long-term customers who will gradually acquire a taste for our wares.

It's never pretty to see someone openly plotting a seduction. Or is that the right word? Do you really think we'll get used to that in time, or that we'll go away only to be replaced by other people who don't care? Will we embrace ships, or merely be so beat down that we won't put up much of a fight. Scott, "no" really, really means "no".

There's another paragraph he writes that's nearly impenetrable. I'll reproduce it for you.

Regarding the notion of “virtual sales in Incarna,” though, I’d like to elucidate one point before closing: Incarna cannot be considered a product distinct from other parts of EVE. Incarna and “flying- in-space” (and in due course DUST 514) are merely aspects of the EVE Online experience; in virtual sales, as in development as a whole, we must all adopt this way of thinking. Thus, we will not and cannot focus on virtual sales only within the In- carna environment, nor build that environment around such sales; rather, we will effect a universal strategy of micro-sales throughout the EVE experience. So, as a play- er, while you are inside a station, you will find gameplay that links to other aspects of the game and that also presents you with virtual purchasing opportunities — just as you will while you are in space or on a planet fighting as a DUST merc.

I've been in the corporate world for years, and can usually translate corp-speak. But this kind of has me baffled. Could this mean he was thinking of Dust514 (which will be F2P) when he said "ammunition"? No, because he said "ships", too. Maybe this is just cross-selling.

Eve as it stands, drives away the instant-gratification crowd. I will never forget an exchange I witnessed in the noob channel on my first night playing Eve. Someone asked, "How long does it take to skill everything up and go PVP?" The reply was "Twenty years!" To me, that felt good. It felt like I had found a home. But selling stuff like ships via MT? That's instant gratification land, and would be a massive change to Eve.

It's as if just anybody could have fabulous red hair, just by dropping some cash, rather than cultivating one's style over the course of 3 million years.

Fabulous Failure Fun

Today seems to be the day for lots of people to complain about the lack of failure in MMORPG's. Except they didn't really say it that way.

First up, Psychochild links to Tobold who links to an article by Doctor Professor titled "Addicted to Fake Acheivement". Doctor Professor describes the difference between a performance orientation and a mastery orientation:

It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Some people see them as opportunities to perform - to demonstrate their talent or intellect. Others see them as opportunities to master - to improve their skill or knowledge.

Say you take a person with a performance orientation ("Paul") and a person with a mastery orientation ("Matt"). Give them each an easy puzzle, and they will both do well. Paul will complete it quickly and smile proudly at how well he performed. Matt will complete it quickly and be satisfied that he has mastered the skill involved.

Now give them each a difficult puzzle. Paul will jump in gamely, but it will soon become clear he cannot overcome it as impressively as he did the last one. The opportunity to show off has disappeared, and Paul will lose interest and give up. Matt, on the other hand, when stymied, will push harder. His early failure means there's still something to be learned here, and he will persevere until he does so and solves the puzzle.

The language he uses demonstrates that Doc has a definite preference for mastery orientation, by the way.

The two kinds of players are separated by failure. Someone who is performance oriented - or who might be otherwise described as just looking for a little mindless fun - will walk away from an activity that serves them repeated failures.

Next is Pete Michaud's article "Achievement Porn"

One salient example is our education system. Like a role playing video game, one educational challenge leads to the next, with each challenge being trivial for the people who are at the right level to undertake it. After years on a treadmill that’s too easy to fail at, players—students, in this case—are acclimated to the game of education, rather to real achievement. Their work for those years is not valuable at all, and often doesn’t even simulate what valuable work would be like: they have only managed to repeat patterns they’ve been shown back at the educators. This is the game.

An all-too-common complaint about the educational system. Just keep going and you will move through the system. There's no real failure here. Pete says "The easy part to culling the bullshit is to ask yourself: Is this activity making a positive, tangible difference in my life or anyone else’s life?" I think this misses the point. As Psychochild points out, self-actualization is pretty important.

Finally, Syncaine complains about upcoming changes to Rift:

While the above is not yet live, and hence I have not experienced it myself, it looks like Trion is nerfing expert dungeon difficulty. That’s pretty sad, because honestly right now they are a solid challenge while not being min/max/ubergear hard (some are too long thanks to trash, but that has nothing to do with difficulty).
[...]
Casuals: Why MMO players can't have nice things.

Syncaine has some pushback from commenters, claiming that "casuals" are necessary for the financial success of MMO's such as Rift. He holds up EVE Online as a counterexample, but Eve Online was launched with an investment of $2 million, not $100 million. Eve is not different in this one dimension, but in many dimensions. The accomplishment of EVE Online's design is that the game has an easy mode, and you can stay in that easy mode for a long time, or you can choose harder stuff. There is no "leveled progression", but there are lots of invitations to do harder stuff.

Where is the failure? In comments (hat tip to Wilhelm Arcturus, who has several comments there):

At a high level, I don’t think it’s really that difficult; design content so either someone improves, or they don’t progress. The current model is basically “if you play well, you progress 2% faster. If you drool on your keyboard, it will take you a extra day to become a god-slayer”. That’s pretty terrible for long-term player education.

I think this is the same discontent - there's no failure, as such.

I have spent the last 10 years or so learning to love failure, primarily through the vehicle of martial arts, specifically ju-jitsu. If you go to throw someone and they don't fall down, the failure is obvious. It's also pretty darn frustrating and embarrassing. At least, until you learn to remap the meaning of a failure. I now teach ju-jitsu to kids every week, and one of the most valuable experiences I can give them is failure. The normal social meaning of failure is "I'm a loser" - it's shameful. We give them failure in an environment of laughter, affection and fun. I want those kids to lose their fear of simple failure. It's ok to be afraid of getting shot or losing money, but the fear of the shame of failure itself isn't very functional.

There's a reason I post every single time I get podkilled in Eve. Sometimes, the stupid burns, but I want to learn from it, and celebrate it. Because that's how I'll get better. So, I'm kind of there about wanting failure.

I haven't played Everquest II for nearly a year now. There are two reasons for that. The first is social. I ended up being online with pretty much nobody else I knew from my guild, and lonely. Leveling yet another alt, by myself, just stopped being interesting.

The other reason is that I too felt the game was now too easy. When the PUG you are in pulls an entire room and then burns them down in a button-mashing frenzy, then hustles off to do the same thing in the next room and then the next instance, and then...

That's not what appealed to me about these games. I'm more puzzle/strategy/skill oriented. There were a few instances that had puzzles in them, but the groups I was in had someone who had done it before and just did the stuff with little comment in chat. I had no chance to fool with the stuff myself.

There's nothing to keep me engaged. Keeping me engaged may not have meant only failure, but exploration and mystery. But exploration and mystery have that element of failure. This is where failure is truly necessary to enjoyment: Consider a novel or a movie. As it goes along, you form expectations about what's going to happen next. Would the novel be interesting if all those expectations were accurate? If you were never wrong? No, it would be boring. Agatha Christie novels would lose something if she wasn't so good at fooling you. But she is, and it feels good to be fooled. It must, or we wouldn't read the next one, or complain about how other writer's plots are easier to see through.

So I play Eve Online, and DDO and Civiliazation 4. I'm currently trying to win Civ on harder levels, and on different maps. I'm exploring the space, different maps, different sizes, different game speeds. Surprises are fun, but there wouldn't be any if you were never wrong.

What I don't agree with, though, is the idea that MMO's take no skill. They do. I've been developing those skills for more than 10 years. (More than 30 if you count tabletop experience). It should not be surprising that I'm good at them. It's often hard for people to see their own skills.

We've been playing DDO for about a year now. Going back to the starting dungeons on the island, we find that we blow through them now, they seem much easier than they used to be, even with minimal twinking. I think this is an unmistakable sign that we are more skilled. (When I say "we" I mean me and Mrs. Darkwater).

And yet, we keep finding new modules, new instances that can kick our butts. It's glorious. (Vault of Night, I'm looking at you!)

Crunch and Fluff

Brian "Psychochild" Green asks the question "Why all this number focus?" in MMO's today. To clarify, he's talking about number focus on the part of the game designers.

I played a lot of D&D in college, along with other RPGs like Paranoia, White Wolf's Vampire and Werewolf, etc. I met my GF of 16 years playing D&D. Our group played together for nearly 4 years, and some of us played virtual tabletop RPGs and MMOs together later. Now, we weren't originally the most story-focused group. We often played Vampire: the Masquerade in the "fanged superheroes" mode rather than purely as the goth "oh my tortured soul" way. Personally, I liked Werewolf: the Apocalypse better for this style of play, but we did some good role-playing as well.

Playing DDO for a bit has put this into stark contrast. Despite being a fairly power-gaming heavy group, I don't think I focused on stats nearly as much as I have in DDO. For example, in DDO, you have items that give bonuses to your individual stats. I might find some Ogre Power gloves that give +1 to +6 Strength. These items are pretty common in the game and increase in power with levels. In my pen and paper games playing 3rd edition for several months, we saw 0. That's right, none. Even back in university playing power-gaming-focused 2nd edition we had less than a half dozen items that increased stats after years of regular play and multiple parties.

Lest you think this is essential to the genre, I offer a counterexample: Legend of Zelda. Link has no stats at all. There is no "build".

As a player, I often think that high stats are the refuge of the unimaginative. The obvious thing to do for a fighter is push your AC and hit points to the maximum. The obvious thing for a dps focused role is to maximize damage output - for a melee type that means STR and weapons.

But why game designers? I'm not sure. Maybe they think that the endless quest for improving gear is what motivates player to keep playing. And for a long time, it did. I think there are other things that will motivate people though. Things like autonomy, mastery and purpose.

But designers face the same dilemna as players. If a player strays from the defined path, they risk failure. And they will fail on their own. If you can't tank the raid boss when you have the best hp's and AC on the server, then it wasn't your fault. But if you don't have the best numbers then it was your fault.

For a designer the success criteria is different. If a designer got rid of the gear/numbers grind, then when players stop playing after a month, they will be second guessed. And the bigger the budget of a game, the bigger the repercussions if a game flops.

Psychochild's commenter Stabs has a really interesting comment:

I feel diku MMO is a soap bubble about to burst into dozens of different types of games. The only thing holding it together is the feeling you have to add every feature to attract every type of player (eg WAR crowbaring in a rudimentary and ridiculous form of crafting, mocked in the latest Kiasacast, when they suddenly worried about not appealing to the crafting sub-market). There are many game elements that just don't work together any more - open world gameplay conflicts with instancing, battlegrounds kill rvr (the losing side just queues for honour on a plate rather continue with asymmetrical conflict).

It's a good time for games.

[The link to a definition of "diku" is mine, -toldain]

I Am Flynn

I saw TRON: Legacy just before Christmas. Twice. I loved it for some very personal reasons.

When I'm not pretending to be a 3000 year old high elf, I'm a computer scientist and developer. I've worked on some games, I've worked on operating systems, I've worked on system software such as compilers and linkers, and I've worked on a silicon compiler as well.

When I was in grad school, I went to see TRON with a bunch of my CS grad school friends. We saw it in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley. We stayed for the credits so we could see where it said that it had been rendered on a Cray supercomputer (THE most powerful computer at the time)

Tron was fun for us in that it invoked all sorts of little things that were a kind of "secret" lore at the time. Tons of concepts in computing were given physical manifestations. Overall, though, it was kind of a dumb movie, but I loved it because for once, my life was up on the screen. I'm not a hot pilot, or a whip-bearing archeologist, or even a county sherriff who thinks we need a bigger boat. But here's my world, being portrayed by Hollywood, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The same holds with TRON: Legacy, primarily in the character of Flynn. Flynn is a programmer, a very talented one. I am a programmer, and I have a few decent credits, nothing so astonishing as Flynn. Flynn dresses like Steve Jobs and decorates his house as though he were in an Apple commercial. My own house could be an Apple commercial, as I own probably half a dozen computing devices made by them.

Flynn spends a lot of time in the film's present practicing meditation and action through inaction. I have been studying Tai Chi for years. One of the companies I worked for, Silicon Graphics, had a CEO - Ed McCracken - who was known for his practice of Transcendental Meditation.

And then there's the central idea of the plot - that Flynn created CLU as an agent of himself, in a kind of parthenogenesis. By the way, programming seems to me the closest equivalent our world has to Athena's creation, springing from the brow (the locus of thought) of Zeus.

But it's gone wrong. CLU manifests the same issues that HAL did, or Skynet did - what we see as valuable, he only sees as imperfection. But Flynn's response to this is not that CLU must be destroyed, but that he must be re-integrated.

I love this part most of all, and it's got nothing to do with computing. Evil is not something perpetrated by some unknowable other, it is the product of good desires carried out to extremes, and in denial of the consequences. To Flynn, the error was not anything that CLU did, but in turning him loose.

And if I am Flynn, it must follow that I am also CLU, which is a sobering thought.

****************************************

At Terra Nova, Timothy Burke writes that in the MMO world, World of Warcraft is CLU. Psychochild discusses the issues of order vs chaos in MMOs thus:

In general, many people strive to impose order on chaos. Along came World of Warcraft and imposed order on MMO gameplay. Using deep pockets, Blizzard created a world that was more orderly and stable than other competitors... and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more popular and financially successful than those competitors. The wild nature of the other games had been diminished in favor of a tightly scripted and controlled environment which people flocked to in large numbers. For some people, this is frustrating because with all this order there's no room for the chaos needed to show new possibilities in game design. People keep chasing after the order imposed by Blizzard, but can't quite match it for various reasons.

I don't think that World of Warcraft is evil. It's exactly what its developers and players want it to be. Which is pretty much an argument in favor of Wow = CLU. However, I don't think that its success has all that much to do with the imposition of order, on the transition from "open gameplay space" to "closed gameplay space" And I argue that because Everquest II, which launched one month before World of Warcraft, had many, many features which promoted order and structure, most of which were despised by the player base. No, it has everything to do with how well it enabled solo play, via the same quest-heavy structure that EQ2 had, only EQ2's was oriented to groups.

EQ2 promoted group play endlessly, with group-only encounters, group bonus experience, group-only buffs, and shared experience debt. Well, that last was meant to enhance good group behavior, but it didn't work out so well. The crafting system was highly structured and also was meant to impose more interdependence among crafters. The player response to this was to make alts to do the crafting of needed subcomponents. Independence and self-reliance are a high value among MMO players, and WoW let them do that.

The other two pillars on which the success of WoW rests are, in my opinion, low system requirements and the Blizzard sense of humor and story. The success of WoW certainly has spawned many imitators of the solo-friendly, quest heavy style, but few of the "low system requirements, but still looking good" variety. Which has kind of stifled creativity, but don't blame Blizzard, they are us; they are me, and I don't even play WoW much any more.

Where "High Heat" Has a Whole New Meaning

I watched the Giants win the World Series for the first time since 1954. In a sports bar in the Bay Area, no less. I normally watch sports from home, sitting on the couch, or lying in bed. But these days, I don't get cable, we just don't watch too much of it.

It was fun. The crowd was loud, but really pretty well-behaved. The most memorable moments for me were the deep flies. The first was Posey's long ball that Cruz ran down on the warning track, succeeding where he had failed on the prior batter, whose dying quail was just beyond his reach.

Then there was Renteria's game-winning home run. For most of the flight of the ball, the outcome was in doubt. Those of us in the bar were silent until we saw it drop safely in roughly the third row. By contrast, Cruz's home run for Texas in the bottom half of that inning was never in doubt. The swing, the sound and the lower hang time all said "home run".

What makes baseball special to me is suspense. Not knowing what the next pitch will bring. Not knowing if that fly ball will make it to the seats or get run down. I love that delicious moment when you don't know if the ball will be caught or not. I also love the little crazy moments, when what ought to be routine is not. But we didn't see any of those last night.

I have talked to some folks who really don't get baseball. They decry the lack of action. I get their point, but I think they miss the point of baseball. Which is suspense, not action. It is a Hitchcock thriller, not a Stallone action flick. The world is big enough to contain both.

But this thought got me wondering. Would it be possible to capture this sense of suspense and drama in an MMORPG? Or in some online game, not necessarily an RPG. MMORPG's seem to focus more on action, and it's understandable. There are a lot of Stallone fans out there.

Of course, maybe that game already exists. In Eve Online, at least in PvP. At least once I've been aligning while the target alarm is going. I did not know, nor did they, whether they would lock and scram me before I got into warp. And that would make all the difference. Kind of like waiting to see if that long fly is fair or foul.

But I'd like to see more things like this in MMO's. There are a lot of Hitchcock fans out there, after all.

The Long Lag: Favorite Quotes

Today CCP Warlock posted a devblog called "The Long Lag". CCP Warlock has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the MIT Media Lab. If you didn't know, that's a pretty solid credential. She's working on lag and distributed system performance in EVE. It's always tricky when a computer scientist has to tell a non-specialist audience that they can't have something. It's tricky to tell the difference between the easy, the trivial, the hard, and the impossible, even if you ARE a computer scientist. If you aren't, you might often say things that sound a lot like, "Well, why can't I have that cloak of invisibility? Are you dumb or just lazy?"

I've read through her post, and her presentation at Para this year. I assure you that she isn't dumb or lazy. Forthwith are some of my favorite quotations, and my (and mine alone!) interpretation of them.

• CCP Warlock: What both software and human groups are fighting at a very fundamental level is a nasty relationships between organizational structure and available real time communication capacity.
  Toldain: There just ain't enough wires to go around people! In a fleet fight of 1000 pilots, each and every client needs to pass some information to every other client. To handle this you would need to have 1000 different wires coming into your house, connecting to your computer, to handle the communication need. And so would each and every other players. Well, maybe one wire can handle communication with 10 other pilots, but that only cuts it down to 100 wires needed. More than one message can't go down any wire at the same time, that's the nature of the problem. And we can't push harder on the internet to make the bits go faster.



• CCP Warlock: Our goal is to not only give you the best possible performance across the cluster as whole, but also for specific activities like fleet fights, measured against the theoretical limits.
  Toldain: Hey there players!!! There are limits to this. There are conceivably big enough fleet fights that no computer and no software can handle them correctly. When the company was started we were happy to get 1000 players just logged in at the same time, let alone fighting on the same grid! Ok, ok, we aren't performing up to theoretical maximum, and we really really want to fix it, but let's keep this in perspective: Getting an 8-processor cluster on a much simpler application to simply go 50% faster than a 4-processor one, never mind getting to theoretical maximum, was a major, major accomplishment back in the days that I [Toldain] worked for a major computer vendor.


• CCP Warlock: From time to time we also discuss scaling issues with game design, since that is the only place where some of these distributed scaling problems can be solved.
  Toldain: Help us please, game designers, you're our only hope! There's no freaking way that 2000 pilot fleet fights are EVER going to work! But the players are headed down that road, for perfectly good reasons as far as the game design is concerned. Please turn this battleship off of its present course!


• CCP Warlock: Probably the most frustrating part is that based on past experience, when we do find this issue (or issues) it will be something that, in retrospect, appears incredibly obvious and silly to have caused so much pain. So we will continue to beat our heads against this problem until we solve it, and then I suspect we will beat our heads against the nearest wall for a quite a while afterwards.
  Toldain: I have personally beat my head on that very same wall.


• CCP Warlock: A complex system is a network of homogeneous components which interact non-linearly. Many scientific fields are currently blocking on complex systems issues.
  Toldain: This stuff is really, really hard. Lots of scientists out there would give their eyeteeth to have some better tools to deal with this stuff, but the fact is that we find it easier to prove that certain kinds of programs and tools can't be made, than it is to do something as simple as figuring out how to put all your inventory into boxes. Even figuring out the simplest things can get you to the point where it would take from now until the heat death of the universe to figure them out on an input set the size of, oh, say, 1000. And still, we try to do something, doing nothing is not an option.


• CCP Warlock Inventory: O(number of players) * number of items in the game. Eve players are packrats.
  Toldain: Guilty as charged. Actually its worse than she says on this slide. The slide says the amount of database storage needed is proportional to the number of players times the number of items you can have. But I propose it gets another multiplier equal to the number of stations in the game. Unless they've done something really, really clever, which they might have.

The LARP Ascending

(With apologies to Ralph Vaughan Williams)

Angela Webb posted today at MMORPG.com about LARPs, and how they might be of interest to MMO developers. To her, they represent player-generated content.

This is exactly how I started LARPing. At my first event, I was given a boffer weapon and a costume, a few instructions, and off I went to terrorize the town as a level-2 goblin. I had a blast ambushing players on dark trails with my foam weapon that did a crappy two points of damage. I was such a noob. But, I learned how to use a sword, contributed to the fun of others, and figured out some basic rules of the game.

One of the things I say to my friends about EVE Online is that humans make much better villains than computers. I think Angela's run at being a goblin supports that.

One of the commenters to Angela's post recalls the guide program in Everquest, where volunteer players assumed unusual avatars and carried out heavily scripted and supervised events.

I recall that Everquest, at least at some point, gave players the option to play a low-level mob, much as Angela did. I'm not sure whatever became of that.

I myself have some background in LARPing, but not of the boffer-sword variety. I played in games run by Steve Balzac and Aimee Yermish through the Society for Interactive Literature West (SILWest). They began by running LARPs at MIT while they were students there, and continued when they came to Silicon Valley to work. Now they are back at MIT, and I haven't talked to them for a few years.

Steve and Aimee's games did not use boffer swords. There was a combat resolution system which typically was turn-based, and gave you a few tactical options. As often as not, there would be magic abilities, or lasers or something else. There were costumes, most definitely. They would run their games at hotels, first as part of a sci-fi convention, but later, as its own event. We had very strict rules that we could never, ever, utter the word "bomb". We used a substitute word, I think it might have been "banana". Gameplay would last a weekend, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, with a group dinner and rehash Sunday night.

The GM's had hours, and combat and thieving were only allowed during those hours, even though the game depended on an honor-system, where low-scale conflicts could be resolved without a GM. But you could stay up all night and talk with people or work on puzzles.

Each player got a premade character with an elaborate background and motivations. Also some items and abilities. Games were constructed with many different groups with different interests, divided loyalties, and potential for spying and intrigue.

Furthermore, there was a "big plot" that developed over the course of the weekend, typically something that threatened everyone, or nearly everyone in the game world. So players had reasons both to cooperate and to compete, to trust and to suspect.

The games were incredibly engaging, exhilarating, and exhausting. I miss them.

The content was enormously expensive to create, and didn't leverage all that well. Every character had a 3-ring binder full of background information, a good portion of which was specific to that character. As a commercial enterprise, I don't think it works. However, the lesson remains: Human beings make much more interesting adversaries than computers.

As a sidelight, I note that we had many women playing in our games, far more than you see in net-based pvp games. Even though there was a decided pvp content. I don't care to venture a guess as to why, but I note that the game was a lot richer than a "I beat your brains out" format such as exists in first-person shooters. Negotiation, spying, manipulation, and simply chewing scenery were all part of the fun. And my, oh, my, it WAS fun.

That's a high bar, and it won't work as such, in an MMO format where you log in at any time, and play casually. Part of the appeal is the "I'm going to do this and nothing else for the next 48 hours. Maybe I'll sleep a little."

In order to make player-generated content really work in an MMO, the entire structure needs to be changed, I think. Humans as gnolls outside of Qeynos have limited appeal and a bunch of problems. I mean, it seems like something that might be fun for a little while, but ultimately boring. What would make life interesting is if the gnoll faction had some goals of their own, which put them in sometimes in conflict with the humans of Qeynos, but also with the centaurs in Thundering Steppes, and with orcs everywhere.

Players in a game in which the content revolves around doing quests will resent the intrusion of other players ruining their day, and mucking up their plans. So the point of the game would have to involve goals that are intrinsic to the factions somehow. The best goals would be only partially overlapping, as in, I want to destroy Qeynos, but I also need to gather components for a cure to the plague that's making all the gnoll children sick. That is, you don't want a binary, all-or-nothing, mutually exclusive goal.

Another thing that doesn't work is the sense of time in an MMO. Time moves very slowly in an MMO or not at all. They are like the old style of TV show, where every episode leaves you exactly where it started. This is antithetical to LARPs and also tabletop roleplaying, where it is axiomatic that what you do matters. Your success or failure has consequences to the world.

Because of this put me down as thinking that should multiplayer games incorporate more ideas from LARPS, it's going to have to involve a lot more rethinking of the genre. In fact, they will likely be enough different that we might not call them MMORPG's at all.

Tasting the Dirt

Wolfshead has started a discussion of risk in MMO's, titled "The Emasculation of MMO's: Part 1 - How Convenience Replaced Risk".

That title alone irritated me. There is an interesting issue here, but by using the word "emasculate", and by later on saying "...the ability to [take a] risk is what separates the men from the boys..." he gives a gender to the problem.

Yes, those are stock phrases, but the job of the writer, even a blogger, is to use words well, not to fall back on hoary, outdated cliches. That happen to be wrong, if in a subtle way.

Let's get back to the main issue. Wolfshead thinks that one ought to be scared while playing an MMO. He decries game companies that are "eager to pander to new subscribers". And they should get off his lawn, too.

Here's the thing. I like risk in a game. I play EVE for goodness sake, and every time you undock your ship, its cargo, and your implants are at risk. That's time and money at stake, and it really doesn't feel good to get ganked, be it by NPC's or PC's. But that's what gives it the thrill.

So that's an idea I agree with Wolfshead about. A game structure that associates more risk with more reward is a good one. I think there's another idea lurking here though. I personally like games where your success is not merely predicated on hours spent, but where the brain behind the keyboard matters. EVE, in pvp at least, often has the property, though it often isn't tactical, but strategic.

However, I don't think my experience is universal. Larisa responded to Wolfshead's post by describing the fear she felt as a low level character in WoW, trying to kill the Defias.

Psychochild gets into the act, both in Larisa's comment section and on his own blog, making the point that risk isn't the same as difficulty. With all due respect, I think that's a distinction without a difference.

Failure is the biggest risk for many. It isn't about how much they lost but that they failed. Emotionally, it can be hard to take, to the point where some walk away from situations where there is a chance that they might fail. Which is a shame. I personally believe that the greatest learning, the greatest growth comes only when one is experience a significant amount of failure. Dying, no matter how you slice it, constitutes failure.

Here's the thing. Fear abates with repetition. It's called systematic desensitization. So a veteran player like myself will feel less fear from a situation with equal risk than a new player would. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that the "volume control" on fear varies widely from person to person out of the womb. And life experiences other than MMOs can result in some desensitization.

So there's a big range of responses out there to the Defias bandits, going from "OMFG, these guys are going to rip me up! I'm never going to figure this game out!" to "Yawn!". At heart, game companies are entertainment companies, and their job is to make money by entertaining people, not by scaring them so badly that they run off. Making things easier for customers, especially at the beginning is not "pandering", it's their job.

I don't really think there's one MMO out there that can satisfy everyone. And recall this, the MMO that was going to go "back to basics" with an increased death penalty, more meaningful (read time-consuming) travel, and more elaborate crafting was a crashing failure. This was not because Sony sabotaged it, if players had flocked to it, rest assured that they would have devoted more resources to it.

In the end, I think there are far more interesting evaluative scales than "how big is the death penalty". I would suggest "How unpredictable is the game play?"- noting that games with a pvp element have a big advantage in the unpredictability department. But to some people, that's not a good thing. Another, more interesting scale is "How much scope is there for creativity?" Or put another way, is there more than one way to do things? Can different people with different resources and different interests interact with the same content in differing ways? And also there's "What's the balance between gear, character level/skills, and player expertise?" Does the game have a risk-reward structure or a time-reward structure?

Flash Opera in Qeynos Harbor?

We'll know we've really achieved a true "virtual space" when something like this happens in a game.



I love it. I love how it animates the singers, and engages the onlookers. This sort of thing is one of my favorite things about living at this point in history. How can we put more of this into the virtual spaces we inhabit? Is there anything like this in Second Life? Some games, like City of Heroes, now have user-generated content, I guess that's in this direction...

The Fishing Life

I had an aha moment the other night while playing EVE. Several of my corp members were engaged in a mining op, and listening to them chat on Teamspeak, I realized that they were doing the equivalent of fishing. Right down to the beer.

Like a lot of EVE, the important part of mining is strategic. Where are you going to mine? Which kinds of rocks will you mine? What ship will you use? How will you fit it? For maximum efficiency, you will need someone to deal with the rats that might spawn in the belt, and someone to haul the ore to a station somewhere for processing. There are bonuses to output - buffs - to be had from having the right people and right ships in your fleet.

But once all that stuff is in place, there is lots of - well, I won't say dead time - but space for kicking back. You can't make it go faster by hurrying. The focus is on efficiency, not speed. Which cultivates a relaxed mind-set, and gives opportunity for conversation.

Which is like going on a fishing trip. The important things about fishing are mostly strategic: where will you fish, what equipment do you use, what bait to use, and who is going with you? Who's bringing the boat/camper and the icebox? And so on.

And once you are on-site, at least with many kinds of fishing, the pace of affairs is dictated not by you, but by the fish. Which is the main appeal of it, I think.

I'm not much of a fisherman. This is doubly odd, since I grew up in a place where fishing was a business, in NW Washington State, with uncles who owned fishing boats. The kind of commercial fishing they did was a lot more active than EVE mining, though.

And my father was an avid fisherman. Mostly he did fly-fishing, which looked pretty fun, but I never got to lay hands on his expensive poles. We also did a little salmon fishing on Puget Sound, which I loved doing because A) I liked being out on the water and B) it gave me a chance to read.

In any case, it seems that many, if not all, MMO's have some sort of fishing equivalent in them. WoW has, well, fishing. You can skill up, buy better gear, even do quests.
Everquest has fishing. Who hasn't fished from the docks while waiting for the boat? Come to think of it, camping a room with a group in Everquest was a lot like fishing, once the spawn was broken.

EQ2 has fishing, but don't be distracted by those harvesting nodes that have "fish" in them. That's not fishing. No, I posit that the true fishing in EQ2 is gathering shinies. There's gear to be had (the tinkered shiny tracker), and strategic decisions to be made. It might be more fishing-like if you simply had to wait for the shinies to come along, instead of constantly roaming for them, but then, that's kind of like trolling rather than still-fishing.

LOTRO has fishing as such. Along with the "what's going to be on the line this time" fun.

Zork Online doesn't have any fishing. Maybe that was the Kiss of Death. That's a game where there is nothing to do except go out and kill things. It kind of seems like a job after a while.

So the success formula for an MMO includes some sort of fishing equivalent, something that doesn't involve killing things, and something that has a relaxed pacing to it, maybe one you don't control.

That, and it needs to let you show off your fabulous red hair.

Innovation in EQ2: Revisited

Someone recently put a spam comment on a post I made in 2005 called The Two-Hour Fix. How that choice gets made is mysterious to me. However, in deleting the spam, I realized it was relevant to my recent discussion of innovation in EQ2.

There's some overlap, I mention combat mode, no meditation, reduced camping, and the quest system. But there were some things I had forgotten about.

• Travel Time Reduction One of the things I wrote then is that the travel time changes, in particular the call to home city makes the customized player housing work better. It doesn't seem like home if you are never there, after all.


• Everyone gets spells, at every level I had forgotten about this. It's such a standard now in MMORPGs. But fighters didn't really get any buttons to mash in Everquest. Other than taunt. Furthermore, you get a new spell, or an upgrade every single level. This also seems pretty standard now.


• Storyline/Lore/Drama Everquest had lore and storyline. But they weren't dramatized very effectively. One had to dig for it. Now we have dungeons like Shard of Love, with it's touching, if a shade creepy, story. We have quest lines like the gnome brothers attempt to build a catapult in Zek. The devs will create an instance like the one where you ran into Fippy Darkpaw. Just to portray a story well. Book quests have fallen out of favor, but they also were a way to inject more lore into the game. This kind of thing is pretty standard now in a lot of games, but it didn't used to be. I think LOTRO has taken this a step further, their instances have more movement, more story, more interest, and they use them more.


• Class and Subclass Quests This is kind of a sad one. I wrote:
  

  
  One of the things I like the most about EQ2 is the class and subclass quests. They really do a good job of dramatizing what the class/subclass is all about, and make the player feel like he is really filling the role of that class. Rogues have to sneak around and discover information. Enchanters need to solve puzzles and discover influences. Guardians need to, well, guard someone. Brawlers, at least in Freeport, get to take on a thinly disguised WWF. This is really fun, and dramatizes what's special/unique about a class.
  

  
  
  Of course, these quests and instances are all gone now, in order to enhance the replay value of the game, the archetype/class/subclass branching at launch was eliminated. But I miss those class quests/instances. My ambition was to eventually do them all, I think I managed them for 4 subclasses (each in different archetypes).
  


• Crafting This one is out of date, too. I wrote:
  

  
  The crafting system is the most elaborate I've seen. Multiple levels of quality are possible on the same combine, so your skill actually seems to matter. And there is opportunity for interaction with other players here, too, since rare components can drop in chests as well as be harvested, so even a strict fighting-only character might get one and have something made.
  

  
  This was written before the great tradeskill consolidation, which got rid of subcombines almost completely. And the subsequent consolidation which got rid of levels of quality. I think that ended up being necessary, since the amount of time and skill it took to make a spell upgrade was becoming prohibitive. What we've got instead is a system where certain crafted goods have a solid ecological niche. There are spells and gear. The void-shard gear can be made for fewer shards (now marks at level 90) by tradeskillers, but can be bought from NPCs. So there's no monopoly, but still a value proposition. EQ2 has tradeskill quests (so does LOTRO) and tradeskill instances and the ability to build faction with tradeskills. It's at a pretty good place now, but I'm not sure the recent changes, other than the tradeskill instances, are innovations.
  

That's the view from 2005. It's changed a bit, but what can you do? Time marches on, even in Norrath.

Hard Mode Revisited

Wilhelm2451 recalls playing evil races in TorilMUD:

Your home town was considerably less friendly. Aggro NPCs wandered the streets and more often than not the town guards would side with them if they attacked you. Bam! Dead.

There's a lot more, and worth reading. He expresses his desire for a harder version of WoW.

Would you play WoW (or substitute in your own favorite PvE biased fantasy MMO if you want) if they offered a server where, say, all open world mobs over level 10 were elite and every quest was a group quest?

Just for instance, the proposal to make all mobs into their elite versions over level 10. The first question is: can that be done automatically? Does making a mob "elite" automatically give it more HPs and harder hits? What stuff breaks?

You're going to have separate deployment issues. With this plan, you maybe can avoid having level designers worry about stuff. But the servers are going to be separated, you have to turn on this stuff.

And there's another issue. A game like Will describes would give you the following issue: I just logged in, and there's nobody in my area, so I can't accomplish anything without a long journey to somewhere else. When I get there the group decides to break up, and so on. So I spend most of my evening travelling, and not making much progress. Would you enjoy that game? You're not figuring out how to beat challenges, you're traveling.

So the question is, how many people will you get to pay you subs that you wouldn't get otherwise? Some, I think. For a while. But would you do better devoting those resources to the next expansion? Almost certainly. Extra content appeals to a far larger number of people than this sort of "elite" content.

Games that are ongoing propositions, sports, if you will, have to always be evangelizing, pulling new people in. Which means they can't afford to focus on "hard-core" players much at all. That's a recipe for a slowly shrinking player base.

For myself, the urge for a "harder" game comes from two places.

First, a harder game tends to chase away a good number of people that are annoying. They are annoying in that they don't know what they are doing. The thing is, mostly the annoying people in WoW do know what they are doing, after a fashion. They have a plan, which they don't communicate, and get pissed off if you aren't following the plan in a sort of "everyone knows that" fashion. I don't think harder content will make this better.

A harder game like Will describes will also reward grouping more. That game has been tried and failed. It was Everquest 2 at launch. Soloing was very difficult. I had a lot of fun trying to solo overland and in dungeons. It was hard. I fell behind the pack in leveling, but I didn't care all that much. However, the game was a commercial failure, and they eventually made overland zones much more solo friendly.

The recipe for success of WoW is clear. It will run on anything, it's easy to understand and play, and there's lots to do. Everquest 2, by contrast, missed the mark, at launch on some of these ideas, but it had one core priciple that I think is a really good one. You were always able to do something positive in a two-hour session. Your time will not be taken up by traveling (no waiting for boats) or endless camps waiting for rare quest spawns.

I remember interviewing with a couple of guys who were looking to develop an "in-browser" MMO. They said it was going to be like Everquest "with all the annoying stuff taken out". Like long waits for the boats. I nodded and said that the long travel time was annoying but it also dramatized the fact that the world was big. There were furrowed brows there, at which point I knew I was not going to work with these guys. If they hadn't thought of that, they weren't going to make a successful game.

There are many features of early games that I love and am very nostalgic about, even though I now realize they are kind of dumb. I think waiting for the boat is like that. I loved playing Everquest, it was this completely new, and fun experience. So every aspect, every game feature of EQ is seen through those eyes of love. Waiting for the boat, wow, that's cool. A long boat ride to get to another continent, cool! Wow, there are islands in this ocean slipping by, cool! At last, I'm across the vast ocean, wow! Of course, when other options for intercontinental travel became available, I used them. I'm still nostalgic for the days when we had to ride the boat uphill both ways in the snow.

How is Blizzard like Nintendo?

I've been reading this post by Psychochild and this one by Cuppycake.

Of course, there is the usual discussion of WoW, and whether it is innovative or not. I won't address that directly here, but something that gets overlooked way too often. And it's why I continue to think that Nintendo and Blizzard are the smartest of their fields when it comes to making money.

Brian says:

Even now, a lot of people are dismissive of the Wii since it does not have the graphical capabilities of competing consoles. But, Nintendo took a huge risk that went against the grain and it paid off spectacularly. I'm certain that if Nintendo had been trying to compete directly with the graphical prowess of the XBox 360 or the Playstation 3, they would not have had the ability to try an innovative controller design.

You know, people said the same thing about Blizzard. The graphics are stupidly simple. They are over saturated neon colors, with highly exaggerated features. This is in keeping with the art design of previous Blizzard games. It isn't a displeasing look, but it isn't "bleeding edge". This has two big qualities that win for them:

1. It says "this is a game, it isn't real. It's supposed to be fun, and funny."
2. It means that it could be run on any old computer that you had laying around.

Number 2 is far more important in my mind. It has a lot to do with why there are 10 million WoW players. Mom and Dad didn't have to upgrade Billy or Susies computer for them to play it. Or their own. If you read the first posts on this blog, you will see how much trouble I had getting a computer to run EQ2 well. It wasn't easy. And EQ was sold with much fanfare about how they had designed the game to keep updated in its appearance, as gfx cards got better.

Blizzard doesn't care about this. Lots of the hardcore MMO players didn't like the look. However, Blizzard understood that those weren't the people they were trying to please. They pleased the 10 million - 300,000 people that play WoW and nothing else. Was that dumb? No. Did it make me happy? Not really, but there are other games to play.

How is this like Nintendo? If you still haven't got it, the Wii is enormous for them. Sniff at the gfx all you want, but people are buying and playing Wii's that have never had consoles before. Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Rock Band all appeal to non-traditional videogame audiences. It's huge, it's fun, and it marks them as much smarter than their rivals.

The only people that own an X-Box seem to me to be the adolescent males with inferiority complexes who have to have the "biggest" or the "fastest" or the "wankerest". I don't mean to be sexist. These days maybe there are some young women infected with this disease as well. But that's a small audience compared to all the adults out there who are playing Wii Sports, the people doing Wii Fit, and the grandparents who are playing Rock Band The Beatles.

The argument of "improve what you have" is the cry of the devoted base. Devoted base, I'm sorry to say it, but you are asking to be abused. I have been on the treadmill where you improve your game based on the requests of the hardcore customers. This is a losers game. Some of those hardcore customers are inevitably going to peel away, due to death, marriage, divorce, job loss, and other forces of, well, let's just call them Nature. No matter what you do. You may lose slowly or quickly, but the path of pleasing only your base is a losing game. (I think that's true of politics, too, but that's a subject I stay away from on this blog. Mostly.)

If your game is going to have life, you have to be growing your base. Figuring out how to make it, or the next game, appeal to more people.

And for every vocal hardcore who harps at your door saying they want a bigger death penalty, there are 10 people who like the death penalty just the way it is, thank you very much. They aren't talking to you about it though. Because it's fine the way it is. Though maybe it could be a bit easier, I mean the repair costs are killing me...

MMO's With No Class?

Psychochild has an article up at Gamasutra called Rethinking the Trinity of MMO Design.

Brian wants to look at alternatives to the "holy trinity" of Tank, Healer and DPS. Now hold it right there. Back when I was playing EQ, the "holy trinity" was Tank, Healer, and Enchanter (me!). (People also looked for a slower/debuffer, and maybe a monk or a shadowknight as a puller.) But the statement certainly works today. In a sense, we've all got a lot better at understanding how the game works and what to do.

As a control class, I've done a lot of thinking about how my contribution fits into the game overall. In the beginning, EQ2 basically squashed the controller role almost completely. Sure, we had the ability to mez, but it was nearly superfluous. If you were grouped with any AE centric, class, they would break your mezzes with great regularity. And we soon found that in fact, I didn't need to mez in order to beat any particular encounter. And the chances of pulling multiples were pretty low, if you had a tank that knew what he was doing.

Anyway, here's the way I finally ended up thinking about it. Abilities (and hence classes, to some extent) can be divided up into offensive and defensive. Anything that puts more damage or enables more damage on the mob is offensive. Anything that decreases, mitigates or heals damage done to our side is defensive. And here's the thing: More offense is always useful, but more defense than needed is useless and wasted.

Killing is what brings rewards, not surviving. With lowered death penalties, the concern for survival is much reduced. So people want to kill as fast as they can, for good reason. Which means mezzing is something I do in a PUG only when specifically asked to do so. At some point SOE figured this out, and made a few dungeons where mezzing is a must.

Psychochild looks at the origins of the FRP MMO, Dungeons and Dragons:

Each class was based on a fantasy archetype, but without explicit roles; there was no rule that a Fighter could only absorb damage (be a Tank) and not be an awesome machine of death (be DPS). Each class had signature abilities, but statistics and options allowed characters to fill a variety of roles despite their class.

I don't quite think this is accurate. I think that the roles were pretty clearly understood. Very early on, the mages wanted the fighters to stand in front of them. Clerics would start out as melee classes but fade back as they increased in level and fell behind the fighters in melee damage output and hitpoints, though not necessarily.

Yes, the game was more sandboxy. But I think the key to understanding the difference between tabletop and online roleplaying comes to one word: repetition.

In the tabletop game I ran last weekend, we had 4 encounters in 10 hours. There was some role play, some puzzle solving and administrivia too. In 10 hours of online play you might have 400 encounters. Or maybe 800 or 1000. There's another aspect of repetition, namely, almost anywhere you go, thousands of other players have done it before you, and will do it after you, too. They've posted about it on the internet, and refined strategies to it, too. Individual players and groups will run the same instances dozens of times, if not hundreds. This never, ever happens in tabletop, where story is king. Why would we go beat the same bad guy again? Didn't he stay dead? Well, sometimes not, but that's part of the story.

So the game becomes not like solving a unique puzzle, but optimizing throughput. And roles get pretty stereotyped.

I've got EVE on my mind a lot lately, so let's look at EVE's approach to character classes: There aren't any. There are different focuses for skills, there are different ships, there are different activities. Just as an example, I've been killed in game by a very wide variety of ships. Some are more popular (*cough* Raven *cough*), but there's lots of other things that will work, depending on what you plan to do, where you are, and who you are with.

The point is role flexibility. Brian thinks this, or the version of this that is skill-based, has problems:

Unfortunately, skill-based systems also have some well-known problems. The first is that they can be hard to balance, especially for inexperienced designers. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that players will take the most powerful set of skills available, leading to a lot of "flavor of the month" setups.

Part of the flexibility in EVE isn't skills, it's equipment. You can literally change your role by changing equipment. You might not be all that good at the role, but it might be good enough.

Imagine an MMO where Toldain says, "We don't have a tank? Ok, let me get my armor..." That kind of seems weird, I grant, but we already have the ability to switch AA specs on a whim, and people with different specs for raids versus groups versus soloing. Likewise gear.

All of this flexibility has been sort of grafted on to the basic class structure of the game, and it is still pretty class centric. But what if you designed that stuff in to start with?

In fact, tabletop is headed that way, too. In 4th Edition D&D, which as PC mentions, is strongly influenced by MMO's, the ability to use armor can be learned by everyone, by the expenditure of customization points known as feats, which you get ever couple of levels. You can get more hit points, and the ability to use a giant sword, too, via feats. But that doesn't really turn a mage into a tank, though. But it allows characters to have a backup role.

Ok, Brian is on the same page as me:

Party composition was also not as strict. For example, being without a Fighter class in heavy plate armor (a Tank in the trinity design) wasn't always a disadvantage; in fact, the party could use stealth easier without members stomping around in a loud metal suit of armor. Magic items such healing potions, magic wands, spells scrolls, protective items, and so forth could also partially replace a missing role.

I would call this strategic flexibility. EQ2 now has quite a lot of it built in, in fact. The way it works is that one class is the best at some aspect of the game, but there are other ways to get that ability, if not at as good a quality. I've been through pretty tough dungeons with a scout tanking. There are tinkered items that can duplicate most of the utilities in the game, including rez, FD, Call of the Hero, and of course, repair. And any character can learn it.

The racial abilities also allow for opening of boxes. I know it's a sore point with the scouts, but it fits with the trend. Nobody is indispensable in a group setting.

It's a good trend, but I'd like to see it built into a MMOFRPG from the beginning. Honestly, something more futuristic might lend itself better, so you can have cyber implants that teach you to do stuff that can be swapped out. But since "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", there must be some way to shoehorn that idea into fantasy, no?

But it isn't a fantasy trope, is it? However the fighter-magic user combo is a fantasy trope.

Ok, one more point, more or less unrelated:

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback of allowing tactical options in combat is that it will run into technical limitations given internet latency and cheaters. The phrase "using terrain" in MMOs usually refers to the exploit of harming NPC opponents while putting them in a position to be unable to harm the character.

I do not understand why this is considered "cheating". I'm aware that it is, and that gamedevs have done all kinds of things to get rid of path kiting. Why is path kiting bad, but quad kiting by druids in EQ1 good? In order to do path kiting well, I must have found a good spot, and have a good ranged dps. Melee means nothing.

I think I understand why. It's because pathing wasn't very good in those days, and I think gamedevs felt we were picking at a sore spot, rather than winning as intended.

Use of terrain is in fact one of the big missing elements in MMO's, as far as I can see. At this point in EQ2, terrain affects "sight lines" and hence aggro range and spell/ranged targeting issues. This gives a good range of pulling situations, and positioning issues. Which to my mind keeps the game interesting. What about movement rate issues? We see the need to position mobs in spots for better DPS in raids, has this happened much in group content?

I don't understand Brian's reference to internet latency in this context. Tactics are limited by the speed of combats, not by internet latency. Faster combats than in EQ1 are probably good, but I think we've gone a bit too far. There's little time to think on the fly.