Casual Friday

The following post starts out as specific to a particular MMO. Normally I try to avoid that sort of thing (working on one tends to make you a wee bit gunshy about talking specifics), but in this case, the specific example is World of Warcraft, and pretending that issues brought forth within the most popular MMO on the planet by an order of magnitude have no impact on development discussions is just rather silly.

One of the more interesting arguments on the World of Warcraft forums is that of “Casuals vs. Raiders”. It’s caused so much argument, in fact, that the WoW community managers will often lock posts on the subject, simply because it’s been driven into the ground at this point. To summarize the points:

Casuals: “I bought this game because I wanted a game I could play. I have a life, and don’t have the time to spend 12 hours a day staring at the screen hitting buttons hoping I get a shot at a +12 Krang of Otyugh Slaying. World of Warcraft was perfect for me… until I hit level 60 and had to get into raids to do anything. I hate raids. Fix the game so I can get my Krang of Otyugh Slaying just like everyone else, because I pay for the game too. Thanks!”

Raiders: “omg learn2play nub. OK, that’s out of the way. Seriously, raiding is the end-game of World of Warcraft. It’s the most challenging stuff in the game. It’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. We beat it anyway, because we’re hard. So beating the most challenging stuff in the game gets you the best stuff. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? What, you just want stuff from Ragnaros or Nefarion handed to you? What is this, World of Warcraft, or World of Government Cheese?”

I’m reminded of this due to Seth Scheisel’s recent sports piece (no really! it was in the sports section!) where he asked Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan “What are you doing for US lately“. Us being raiders. Seth says it flat out -

Casual players complain that they can’t get rewards comparable to those earned by hard-core raiders, like the Claw of Chromaggus or Mish’undare, Circlet of the Mind Flayer. Raiders like me often respond that casual players just want a handout.

Pause to reflect on a staff writer for the nation’s newspaper of record being able to correctly spell “Chromaggus”, and no doubt without looking it up, either. And they said we’d never amount to anything!

But the money paragraph follows:

Q. Why not just let casual players get rewards comparable to those from raids?

A. It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they’ll get rewarded for it. As soon as we give more equal rewards across the board, for a lot of players it will diminish the accomplishment of killing something like Nefarian. My favorite times in the development cycle are when there are encounters that are close to being defeated but have not yet been beaten. It really creates a sense of awe among the players that there is something big and truly dangerous in the world. But it would be very disappointing if the items found on Nefarian were the same thing you could get in your nightly Stratholme run.

Well, yes. Regardless of whether you’re a raider outfitted in Tier 3 gear or a level 10 gnome cursing the spam in Westfall, you’d think this would be somewhat obvious. Unless you follow the World of Warcraft forums!

This is no longer the case. In order to compete, or even advance your character, you are forced to schmooze the end guilds undergoing their stupid hazing only to find out that they have plenty of your class. You have to sell your soul to whatever whim the guild comes up with or risk being kicked from the guild.

I have not heard one person on the forums say they want easy epics. This is in fact the worst argument Raiders have against fixing the itemization problem. We want difficult dungeons, long difficult chains so that we too can have accomplishment when we finally get items. This article is a joke and is truly damning on how clueless Blizzard is.

–

Did you say you game was “casual” tigole?

YOU ARE A LIAR.

Go raid.

–

Read between the lines. He said casuals arent getting Epics. Even your little PR spin cant save you here. Raiders get epics, period.

–

I would like to believe the CMs, but us casuals are led to believe that additional patches will address our concerns and NOW we are hearing ,” Well additional armor sets(no mention of weapons, mind you) and the expansion will address our concerns. I don’t want to wait til the expansion for casual friendly content. I don’t want to grind millions of bugs or Furblogs. I want content that will provide me positive advancement with-out relying on 39 other people.

Tigole, in response, posted:

While I understand that a certain audience would rather hear about more ‘casual’ oriented content, I cannot force the hand of a journalist to skew his story. In fact, I think its pretty cool that someone who writes for a newspaper as esteemed as the New York Times shares a common interest with us as World of Warcraft players. Its refreshing to talk to someone from the mainstream press who is intimate with the issues we face as players and developers of this game. It speaks to this community as a whole.

So I think its very important not to get up in arms over the fact that the article focused on part of the game that you might not necessarily be interested in. Were definitely committed to supplying content for all audiences of this game . Its not an argument as simple as ‘hardcore versus casual’ — it goes way beyond that.

For the people who seem to be upset, you might find it encouraging that a big focus of patch 1.10 is supplying more content for casual, max-level players. While I cannot promise ‘the ultimate fix’, I can at least hope to show you guys that were working on making things better. I think it also needs to be mentioned, that players need to keep in mind that by railing against content that you dont personally enjoy — whether it be raids, casual content or PvP — it wont improve anything. In fact, its detrimental to our community. As a development team, were going to add content for everyone. Just because we might be adding PvP content in a certain patch, does not mean were forgetting about PvE players. What is helpful to us, is when you identify what you liked and want more of. But leading a crusade against something which other players enjoy nightly is counter-productive to everyone involved.

You mean MMO players resent any development time and effort put into a playstyle they don’t personally engage in? O RLY?

So then, here’s the problem. World of Warcraft is TOO accessible. By that, I mean, it’s possible for someone who hates the MM part of MMOs – other people – to progress through the entire game without ever needing to, well, group. Eventually, in the 50′s, they might start getting pick-up groups for the lower level “end-game” instances or more difficult quest sequences. But the wall between “LFG Stratholme” and “finding a guild that will get me into MC/BWL gear” is abso-freakin-lutely HUGE. And it’s quite obviously a leap of design. It’s a very clear point of departure – once you get to this point, you’re no longer casual. Your character won World of Warcraft. You got level 60. You got the powerup. YOU WON THE GAME.

It’s no coincidence that Blizzard, no doubt driven by their community people (all of whom I really need to FedEx bottles of hooch for taking more bullets than we in other games can ever imagine – email me your preferred flavor plz) put up a page on their website detailing exactly what to do when you, well, win. “Hey, you can… uh… do PVP? Raid? Roll an alt? Play our expansion?” Kind of obvious stuff – unless you have a player base composed mostly of people for whom this is their first MMO, and definitely the first MMO they’ve reached the endgame in. They want more stuff. They want more stuff like they already played.

They absolutely do not want different stuff. They want stuff like they liked. If they wanted that other stuff, they’d have not quit that other MMO they tried for a month. They want more stuff like the old stuff.

And… they ran out of stuff. And Blizzard can’t make enough stuff. And most of the stuff they are making… uh… it’s not that stuff. It’s the other stuff. The high-level raiding stuff that, to keep a tradition in every other MMO alive, wasn’t included with the original game, but was PatchedInLater.

So until the expansion comes later this year, which will deliver a DVD full of MORE STUFF, you have millions – millions of players who are out of stuff. It’s getting pretty ugly. And most of those have no interest in being in the top 25% or 10% or whatever of the pyramid of players that enjoys organizing raids to whack the most powerful foozles. They feel bait and switched. They had a good year or so of stuff. They want more stuff.

But every game eventually runs out of stuff. There’s never enough stuff. What’s left at the end – the endgame – is what the players can come up with to make their own stuff. Be it PVP or high-end complex PVE raiding until their fingers bleed (to quote the nightly conversation at the Casa Del Lum: “In Molten Core again, hon?” “YES.” “Tired of Molten Core?” “YES.“), every game eventually has to figure out how to keep players happy – either in cranking out More Stuff on a regular basis (/wave Everquest) or in keeping people happy in making their own stuff. Thus why PvP is such a common end-game goal for designers – hey, people have an endless appetite for beating each other over the head with sticks.

But if you play WoW, and you got to level 60, and you don’t like raiding, and you don’t like PvP, and you don’t particularly want to level up a new character… well, you’re out of stuff.

And that’s where some people get REALLY ANGRY. Because they have a lot invested into their characters, their friends and the connections between the two, and they REALLY. DO. NOT. LIKE. BEING. TOLD. NO. Queue the hundreds of threads on the WoW forums. All of which boil down, in the end: “More stuff, plz.”

Because, despite the claims by both sides on the forums, the “casuals” don’t really want free government cheese from Nefarion. They want more character development. They want to get to 70, or 80, or 60.0009. They don’t want to feel like they’ve reached the brick wall of character development that, well, they have. They don’t want to completely switch their playstyle to keep developing the character they’ve grown attached to. They don’t want the game to end.

And that sentiment is universal to all games. The fact that we’re seeing so much of it expressed in World of Warcraft bespeaks more of its success than its failures.

Fine, newb. How do you propose they fix it then?

The task of the WoW designers – should they choose to accept it, and it’s quite likely they won’t, being that it’s Different and thus Scary – is to move players from a developer-driven character development model to a player-driven character development model.

Whether it’s through PvP (a “cop-out” that many players won’t accept), some form of guild-based PvE advancment that even the smallest guilds can participate in, or something entirely new… maybe a dancing contest! Everyone loves dancing. Really. But the point is that the life cycle of the character has to move beyond the racetrack that the quest lines and character levelling aims the player down. And the only way for further points in the life cycle to self-perpetuate is to enable the players to make, and track their own goals. There are five million WoW players. While there are probably a lot of WoW developers, there most assuredly are not five million of them. Numbers are not on their side.

And yes, this means getting more “world-ly” and less “game-y”. But games end, and worlds don’t. And players who are demanding that their character’s life cycle not end… are demanding more world. Not necessarily more content – but more ways to participate.

But that would require a good deal of thought, and development work. Maybe even an expansion! Never seen those before. But in the meantime, we’re seeing what happens if, in the days of Everquest pre-any-expansions, somehow five million people managed to cram into Lower Guk. Demanding more stuff.

http://h2.mondrary.com/~reina Megyn

Man, and I remember when it was just rants about the ongoings of UO and Great Lakes I’ve always understood the plight of all sides of this argument. Unfortunately, I think developers always pick one of the sides and cater exclusively to that one. Blizzard knew this was going to happen in beta. Because several developers astutely observed “we’re out of stuff to do,” which was preceeded by the testers levelling through the whole game three times and saying the same thing. They won’t fix it because I don’t think they know how.

That or they’ll build a money boat and sail to a money island and forget about this world of warcraft thing.
Vargen

I know this has been said over and over and over again for years. By you even. But I don’t believe it’s ever been quite this well said. *cmd-d*
http://www.raphkoster.com Raph

See, I knew you’d come around to my side eventually.
http://serenya-loreden.livejournal.com Loredena

It’s the never-ending cycle. WoW exacerbated it because it spends 59.9 levels training all those new players to play a certain way. And then they get to 60, and they can’t play the same way any more. ‘Experienced’ MMO players don’t feel quite as betrayed, because they’ve seen it before. (Not that, as a casual player, I don’t still get ticked off by the whole ‘end game = raiding’ concept, but at least it doesn’t come as a total surprise to me).

And it didn’t escape my notice that in an ostensibly grouping game, you either grouped for instances or soloed — my husband and I learned fast that duoing was both inefficient and not entirely fun — if we could duo it, we could solo it, and we’d both get better experience.
Pharkas

MMOGs are to one degree or another about free will, and the end-game raids (and end-game guilds and the assh^W dedicated players who run them) effectively strip you of all free will. Most classes become defined by one or two spells or actions and you get be a raidbot for hours and hours (and hours) executing the same patterns/combos.

Suddenly that flexible, vibrant class that you’ve explored and come to love over the last 60 levels becomes a horrible, mostly static tedium that is barely more interactive than watching American Idol. Eww. Eww eww eww!

So it’s not about more more more content as much as it is about content that doesn’t make me wonder why my skill window has three tabs instead of one (in my case Restoration). I’d happily run a good handful of end-game instances over and over if roles were not so so rigid and if I could do it with people who don’t make me want to get a rifle and climb a clock tower.

From what I’ve read though it sounds like the developers are planning more high-end content for smaller groups. Cheers to that.
http://ptsoft.blogspot.com BugHunter

I’ll admit up front that I’m not level 60 so I don’t really have a lot of facts.

It does seem to me like you could make some end game stuff for people who want to solo or remain in small groups. Why does it require 40 people to be considered challenging?

My brother and me tried shadow fang keep while we were at the low end of the appropriate level. Just the two of us. We got to a part early on that we kept pulling too many enemies and we would wipe. We tried multiple times and we finally only pulled 2 and won. I think it was a challenge and more importantly it was fun.

I took on an elite mob one level higher than myself just the other day. I had to flee for my life the first time. The second time I devised a strategy that would play to my classes strengths and my enemies weaknesses. I used every buff potion I could come up with. Used every trick my class has access to and won. I won just barely which made it all the more exciting.

At level 60 why could we not have solo instances or 5 man instances that are as challenging as the 40 man raids? You’d probably have to tone down the HP and dmg to even it out. You should be able to get a nice shiny (epic whatever) if you can single handedly take out a level 60 elite dragon, or at least have a shot at the same loot table, maybe with worse odds.
http://www.flyinglab.com isildur

Every time I read something like this — and it’s more often than I’d like — I find myself wondering ‘What about players like me?’

See, I’m not the hardcore player raiding at 60. I’m not the casual player soloing to 60.

In WoW, I have a level 25 character, and that’s my highest level character. In EQ, I made it to 40 or so. In DAoC, I hit 35 and stayed there. In FFXI I got to 64 and quit from boredom. I’ve never been on a ‘raid’. I’ve never been in an uberguild.

In WoW, I solo-ground my way up to 25, and looked at the next 35 levels, saw nothing that suggested they’d be any different than the last 25, and I stopped. I soloed a priest to 20, thinking I’d get groups. I did: I got groups with mouthbreathing morons who were typing by pounding their bloated ham-hands against the keyboard.

And yet, I hear people at work talk about their latest level 60 adventures. I read articles like this one, where the choice seems to be ‘do I find raiding fun or not?’ rather than ‘can I get past level 30?’ I talk to people who assume that anyone playing WoW is playing at level 60. And I ask myself: Why is anything that sounds even remotely interesting in any game always locked behind arbitrary dull activities? Why is ‘max out your character and *then* have fun’ the recurring design in MMO-space? WoW didn’t do anything different; they just shortened the distance between start and max.

This experience drives my designs. I start with this principle: You should not have to wait to start having fun. You should have fun immediately. You should not have to play Game A in order to unlock Game B. If Game B is more fun, you should be playing it on day one. If Game B sucks, you shouldn’t be playing it at all.

I like Puzzle Pirates. In Puzzle Pirates, I participated in a blockade — arguably the Y!PP endgame — on my second day. In Puzzle Pirates, I’ve been playing a month and I own a ship, and me and my crew sail around pillaging. This seems like a far superior design to anything else I’ve played, simply because I was doing ‘the fun stuff’ on day two.

I don’t think there’s an easy way to apply the clever and bizarre Y!PP design to the standard level-up-and-kill-shit MMO model. Nevertheless, I think it’s better to acknowledge that the ‘play for months and then you can play the *real* game’ is a stupid design. At least make an attempt to give people the ‘real’ game as soon as you can get their fingers onto the right buttons.

Anyway, that’s my little rant about how ‘easy’ WoW supposedly is.
http://jnfr.com Kytelae

Best post since your old days, Lum. Very well said.
Vuddy

As a long time MUD dev and MMO player I have always wondered why ‘raid’ zones (epic instances, whatever you want to call them) can’t scale in difficulty based on the levels and number of players entering them. I have done this a few times on the MUD I work on (dont mock me for still working on a MUD). There are math guys out there (hundreds of them) willing to spend a lifetime writing an algo that will calculate how many HPs the High Priestess of the Otyugh should have, how often her Kill-All-Rangers spec should go off and how often she should drop the +3 Krang of Otyugh Love, put them to work. You could even adjust the drops to the classes involved (no more cloth drops for a 3 druid, 1 warrior, 1 rogue DM west run).

Why are NPCs abilities (hps, spec chance, damage done, drop rates, etc) so static? And yes, someone will find the right combination of 50 level 1′s grouped with 2 level 53′s that make the area easy to clear and get all the best krangs from, but you just hire those math guys as consultants to debug and rework the algo a bit. Area design would become more difficult for sure, but it isn’t like it is easy now.

Does this fix the casual VS raider argument? No, but it means any instanced content added can be applied to both groups equally. You are loading each group its own instance, why not do something interesting with that instance other than just load the same thing for everyone? Its obviously a technical and design hurdle, but nothing insurmountable. I believe DAoC even tried something like this in the Catacombs expansion, I could be wrong though, I gave up on Catacombs during the beta.

I dream of the day I can enter Molten Core solo and have a very hard road in front of me, but still a possiblity of completing something and getting a drop or 3 I can use.

Of course that will be nothing but a dream for a long while…
Bob-O

Developers could just add mini raid dungeons to existing dungeons that you could have 10 man missions in. Yes, that has been done to death before but wait! What happens when the 10 man dungeon is cleared? the majority of the trash mobs in the parent 40 man dungeon could either get weaker or dosent spawn for a set amount of time (5 hours per 10 man clearing?).

You could also “role play” it any way you like. For example: A small team goes into the sewers of Stratholme and pours holy water into the tap water, poisoning all the mobs in Naxxramas and making them have less hp/dps. Also, you have 15 min before the “evil undead sewer bunny guards” come and do their sweep, so chop chop. You throw a few bosses in there and call it “stuff”. Then you have a decent way to keep the small frys happy with the new stuff.

I think the two or more dungeons should be linked togeather so that the people who enter the sewers would not be able to go into Naxxramas – they should share the same raid timer for the parent dungeon. The timer wouldn’t block you from the sewers. You could play in the sewers as much as you like.

The best thing i could think of how to make it competitive and interesting is to have different mini raids in the same area, kinda like how LDoN played out in eq. you could have time trials and slaughter missions that give better rewards if you have a good time, and an epic item to beat the servers all time best time! Competition in small groups that could be as fun (lol) as pvp in warcraft is.

P.S.
lum is my hero!
Sardic

Never played WoW, but it’s seems strange how close to EQ 1 it sounds.
People got to 60 in pickup groups, then hit the barrier. Then you needed a guild to get the numbers to do the encounters for the better gear, and it was a leap. The modern raid system was practically invented with the Kunark/Velious expansions with the tiers of gear matched to tiers of encounters and timesinks :p

There was stuff available for casual groups of six, but it either took some very good players, or it was a quest that would take you forever anyway since it was a rare drop of maybe 4 different mobs all over the place and everyone would roll on it.

Like others here, I still don’t know why they don’t design mini raid encounters that scale down. A raid is really the old school dungeon crawl with a boss and a few mini-bosses thrown in lol.

It’s funny sometimes how far things have not come :p
Lietgardis

All this commentary is fine and well, but this is my takeaway: JESUS CHRIST, THERE’S AN MMO DESIGNER INTERVIEW IN THE NEW YORK TIMES SPORTS SECTION. Designer. Times. Sports. Goddamn!
Raguel

I know I’ve said this a billion times already (this week lollerskates!!) but I’ve killed my last foozle, thank you kindly.

This is why I hope Seed makes it. I think Runestone is going to run into trouble sooner or later, but from the sounds of it, the game will be based at least partly on player actions.

I’m just wasting time, waiting for that beta invite. Any second now, I’m sure of it…
http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

Blizzards failure lies in the fact they have done nothing to bridge the gap between the two segments. You say it perfectly when you state “But the wall between \’e2\’80\’9cLFG Stratholme\’e2\’80\’9d and \’e2\’80\’9cfinding a guild that will get me into MC/BWL gear\’e2\’80\’9d is abso-freakin-lutely HUGE.”

There is not enough stuff and Blizzard refuses to provide enough stuff to bridge the gap between raiders and casual. Why is there raids in the first place? Its a fucking conundrum of a reality that doesn’t exist. 40 people don’t get together in real life without a paycheck.

5 people get together every weekend to bullshit in the garage.

The first MMO developer that gets it through their head that humans don’t congegrate for hours on end in 40 man formations for fun is going to have a hell of a game on their hands.

I also hate the fact that people believe 40 person raids are harder than a 5 person group. 40 man raids only are harder to organize. Content can be developed to be equally as challenging to a 5 man group as it can be made to a 40 man group. I would also wager it is easier to balance towards a 5 man group.

And I challenge any MC raiders to take Stratholme in a 5 man to prove me wrong.
Patrick McKenzie

I always considered myself a casual gamer but I guess lately I’ve been sinking deeper and deeper into the raider end of the pool. That being said, while I know its natural for MMORPGers to hate the development of any content they won’t use because it detracts from the development of content that they will, *some people enjoy raiding*. Yeah, crazy but true. Do a /who druid Molten sometime at the peak raiding hours on your server and multiply that count by about 15 — thats a rough estimate of how many people are raiding MC on your one little server at this particular instant in time. I’m in Japan so I only see US peak hours on the weekends, but on Draenor (a medium-population server) there are anywhere between 5-8 MC raids going on at 8 PM on a Saturday evening American time. That means something like 10% of the server population is in MC. Apparently, people really *do* get together in 40-man formations for fun. Some people I raid with really love the “Guild X downed Rag 2 weeks ago, we’ve got to push outselves, 3% on our last try wtf bbq” aspect. Some really like the phat purple pixels. Some really like the challenge of organizing a raid — which, beyond getting 40 people to MC at the same time, also requires outfitting those 40 in suits of FR gear that the guild collectively worked for a couple of months to obtain (by running more 5-mans then I care to remember, incidentally)

What I would love to see is more content in the UBRS -> ZG and the ZG -> MC gaps. (And ZG is, incidentally, my favorite content in the entire game — I run it once a week, every week, despite having almost nothing I want still in the instance. Its just FUN in the same way that my instancing experience was almost always FUN and in a way that MC is not exactly FUN to me. Onyxia, on the other hand, still FUN. BWL, don’t know, haven’t been inside yet.) If some of these are 5-10 man instances that would thrill me, but there are a bunch of ways.

I have high hopes for AQ20 in the FUN department, too. AQ40, probably outside of my league for the time being. And I’m fine with that — my guild is in the beginning stages of BWL at the moment but I don’t feel a relentless urge to beat the game like some folks.

I wonder how folks will treat the upcoming Field Duty quests? Its repeatable, which counts in its favor, and it gets loot which is desireable even to someone with regular MC runs. It can also be done by someone without ever entering a group of more than 5, and you can use WoW’s excellent quest system and even split most of the quests into 30 minute chunks if thats how your play schedule works. But it looks punishingly grindy, and I don’t know if “OK, we can work around your schedule and your guild size” is enough to placate folks who might feel they should get purple pixels at a greater rate than one item per every X hours invested. (Incidentally, my raid has most of MC on farm status and we get one epic per 12 minutes, which means all else being equal thats eight hours of work per epic for an individual player)
Freakazoid

I miss rants like these, Lum. I really do.

One thing DDO got right, 6-man dungeons have been just as challenging, if not moreso, than 20+ man raids from other MMOs. They don’t even need uber mobs to do it.

I do have some doubt about player-driven content. If it’s anything like other forms of player made entertainment, we’ll see maybe 1 good piece of content out of 5-10 others, and all that good content will be re-done into the ground like raiding is now. This should be especially true with WoW, because there are a lot of dumbasses in that game.
Paolo

Hi, I made that YTMND. Thanks for the link! IMO the non-raiding contingent (be they casual, time-deprived hardcore, hardcore soloer, casu-core or whatever else) doesn’t resent the fact that development effort is going into raid content. They resent the fact that five-out-of-five of the newest zones (including the upcoming necropolis) are raid zones, which gives the impression that a disproportionate amount of development effort is going towards the playstyle of a minority of players. This may be false. Why there may be 10 or more new 5-man instances just waiting in the wings for the non-raiding crowd! Buuuut I highly doubt it…
Firecrak

[quote]Sardic says on January 30th, 2006 at 9:55 pm:

Never played WoW, but it\’e2\’80\’99s seems strange how close to EQ 1 it sounds.
People got to 60 in pickup groups, then hit the barrier. Then you needed a guild to get the numbers to do the encounters for the better gear, and it was a leap. The modern raid system was practically invented with the Kunark/Velious expansions with the tiers of gear matched to tiers of encounters and timesinks :p

There was stuff available for casual groups of six, but it either took some very good players, or it was a quest that would take you forever anyway since it was a rare drop of maybe 4 different mobs all over the place and everyone would roll on it.

Like others here, I still don\’e2\’80\’99t know why they don\’e2\’80\’99t design mini raid encounters that scale down. A raid is really the old school dungeon crawl with a boss and a few mini-bosses thrown in lol.

It\’e2\’80\’99s funny sometimes how far things have not come :p[/quote]

Funny that Tigole is running the show eh?
Ironwood

I think ‘Running The Show’ is a little bit of an overstatement.
Pingback: A Clockwork Mind : The Endless Shortage of Stuff
D-0ne

The original EQ solved this problem but keeps the solution hidden from the player-base fairly well. Soft-caps.

The best gear in the game really doesn’t improve the player to any real degree on the whole of the game compared to the second or third best or even the fifth best gear in the game.

It’ll be interesting to see the next sets of EQ gear, as it appears to me at least that, the best gear in the game will become “encounter specific” but the fact of this specific effect will be hidden from the players. Brilliant.
D-0ne

In other words… The stuff need not run out. The stuff just needs to get specific. Like the branches of a tree casual players need paths too. Most if not all MMORPS have a trunk and no branches, hence, at level 60 you run out of things to do. There is no sideways that gradually goes up, a narrower path but a path up nonetheless.
Donal Mor

This is where UO still has a one up on sooo many games. There was so much more to do once you reached that ’60′ pount in UO. The opportunities for player driven content in UO are much much greater. I see WoW’s 1-60 progression as a more entertaining grind than what UO had to get to 700 skill points. But once you capped, what next? In UO they introduced artifacts. Like in WoW, only the really hardcore ‘enjoyed’ farming them. But what was fundamentally different was that in UO, they could be sold. So… if the casual player who really only wants to bake bread, could amass a 1000 coins, he too could buy that artifact. Not so in WoW.

Now.. if in WoW, you ran an end game instance, and say Epic X dropped and everyone in the 40 man raid could get a copy of it. That would resolve some of the casual frustration. But that is not what happens. Only 1 of that epic falls. Then people have to negotiate who gets it. As a casual, I would like to do MC or BWL, or some of these others a few times… but not the perpetual grind that exists now. The difficulty in organizing a 40 man anything, let alone how to deal with drops, is really irritating and not fun. I normally only run an instance once, twice.. maybe three times and thats it. Was nice fine.. move along.

Maybe Bliz should rethink player looting. Make all purple epics lootable. The victor gets 1 random purple from the defeated? BoP resets. Then maybe the non raider could win a piece from that uber hardcore player?

Some other things that would benefit casuals… customizable clothing that does not alter its stats and appearance (haircuts?). What about the ability to alter the environment? I can’t see how Bliz could introduce housing at this point. How about being able to make a chest on the ground and put stuff into it so people can loot it? I don’t know… but the end game to WoW, is gonna be a drag. I will probably quit then.

This is from someone who played UO for 7 years (Siege Perilous).
Kalain

The lack of stat caps and the rampant mudflation is killing their high end (simply by making that gap between Strath and MC/BWL even larger), but overall the issue seems to be that it’s been decided that number of people needed = difficulty. I’ll agree that BWL and ZG are fun, interesting, and compelling zones to learn and play in. But I’ll say that MC today requires less thought and effort than Dire Maul, but the loot is massively better simply because you need more people. So it turns into 3 hours running DM = about 20 blues. 3 hours running MC once you have the zone down = about 20 epics (and we’re not even talking about killing rag here).

So what’s the issue? Basically, 20 man raids were closer, but even then ZG has a few nice toys, and an amazing amount of really bad loot, while being more challenging from a technical perspective than MC. Again not counting rag since you don’t need to kill him to get a ton of epics, Mar’li is a far more technical fight than Geddon, which is about the only fight where half your dps can’t be watching TV.

I really can’t think of a solid solution once they’re on this path though, and I’m really really annoyed (which is why I quit) with the concept of “trust me, we’re working on smaller scale content!”. I got into raiding because I found nice people to raid with and no drama. I got out of it when I realised I was spending more time during raids chatting it up with other warlocks than actually doing something beyond hitting “assist, debuff, nuke nuke, repeat”. At least in small groups, I’m responsible for CC, damage, debuffs, dots, and generally keeping my eye on a fight where we’re outnumbered and need to work to stay alive. Where I actually use most of my skills to pull through an encounter, instead of being a nukebot or a banishbot depending on the specific pull.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game, I just think the raid mechanics of it are mind numblingly dull for 80% of the players on the raid. The tanks and the healers need to be awake. Everyone else is pretty much using an assist macro in the majority of the fights. And that’s why ZG knocked so many MC guilds for a loop. The fights are technical, and require Everyone to be awake and functioning at a high enough level to understand that “STOP DPS” doesn’t mean just one more nuke won’t hurt.
Staarkhand

I’d just like to say that I spend about 1/3 as much time playing WoW as most Americans watch TV and I was killing Onyxia and BWL bosses as recently as last night. I have to wonder why none of the discordant mass of nonraiders take a break from trying to enforce their worldview on others (you think the hardcore crowd is bad…) in a game they don’t apparently enjoy playing and freaking organize. I know it takes some work and dedication, but the 12 year-olds are showing you up and not just with leet button pressing skills.

That may require more time than some people have, but whenever I see people complaining about how hard it is to get into endgame guilds it implies to me that they think they actually do have the time, but just can’t stomach the maturity level and playstyle of the uberhard. I can’t really blame them, but I have to assure you the dicotomy between solo-only players and the immature lootwhore tragically leet straightjacket-specced roflcopter riding players is a false one. 5 million people play WoW, you think there’s not maybe, oh, a couple hundred who want to play like you do?

Or you could just continue to expect the game to change to force others to conform with your playstyle. Let me know how that works.
Staarkhand

I’ve been wanting solo instances ever since I heard the term ‘instance’, and scaling is a great idea. It’s obvious to me that the most time is dedicated to hardcore content because hardcore players have the highest rate of content consumption, but since the casuals have numbers, it’s a worthwhile return.

Solo and casual group friendly semi-epic sets (already being called tier .9) were posted last night on the WoW boards. AQ has the 3 piece tier .5 sets. Stuff is happening.
http://scoregasm.blogspot.com Michael Neel

I read your whole post, so you’ll forgive me if I skipped all the comments so far and restate something that’s been said… I *am* at work after all.

I played UO at release (never got into beta…. something about living in Korea at the time). Moved to AC, then a month in AO. Moved into DAoC for a few years then tried EQ for 3 months. Hopped in SB and tried, really tried to make it work. Then join WoW, account has been closed since July.

WoW for all it’s hype, is one thing. No serious crafting, no alternate things to do with your time but raid (@60). I have been out before the battlegrounds, but they strike me as meaningless… like a mini counter strike game between raids.

UO (old UO) has a good crafting system… not because you could make leet stuff, but people needed the basic stuff you could make. Nice set of armour? You get punked when you leave the town and it’s taken. A blacksmith never went long without a customer. (And if he did, he could just kill people or have them killed to steal their stuff and help his market). UO also had a sense of real danger… you walk along the road alone and you could be jumped and loose everything (hell, you would b e jumped).

AC had (mostly) monthly content. A really cool guild structure that worked well – this in the face of on of the worst communication systems ever. People helped each other in the guild; sure it started because of the exp earned for doing so but many, many people I knew just enjoyed helping guildmates. AC also had big death losses, though not as bad as UO. It did however create a sense of danger that would keep you out of the dires until you were ready.

DAoC started out pretty bland, but patched in a decent PvP system with the realm vs realm concepts. Taking a keep, having your guild banner on the map, this is a big deal. For the most part, crafted gear or your epic would do you, and you could get one no matter if you were a powergamer or not. Politics were always a hot topic, as the vnboards provided a place for realms to whip it out and measure size. And RvR could be done with 8 man team (highly skilled in what they did) or large battles (assuming you had the pc for it). Then came SI, worse TOA, and it became EQ itemquest. And the items were needed to fight well in RvR. There was a slight sense of danger if only to die in RvR meant a 15 minute timeout.

SB had a good idea. Players make everything, and players destroy everything. No dungeons to 100-man raid though; cities to 100-man seige. Talk was cheap, only action mattered. That… and servers. Servers matter too. And bugs, they matter. Oh yea… a balance to build vs destroy… that balance matters if the servers are up and the bugs don’t hit. SB did give playerrs a chance to “sim city” and I know several people loved that idea.

So now we have WoW. Has it learned from all the above, mixed what worked, added to what’s cool, and created an evolution into a dynamic world that leaves “game” behind? Not even close. WoW could be a single player game and not loose much… just interesting chat really. Everything is static, there is no danger sense, even in PvP you’re only out a minute at most. Thing was, in all games prior I was a powergamer. Now I’m 30, and I don’t want to spend the hours I used to in a game. If 8-10 hours a week isn’t enough (and that’s a pretty heavy casual gamer) then I won’t bother. I like groups, but hanging around for hours while listening to some leet dude try and “lead” a raid is just too much. And to what, mark a tick off so that I can raid the same place another 50 times so that if the item I want does drop I have a chance to win it on a roll? WTF happened to the instantance concept so I would never have to wait for an item because we could go at anytime?

Here is a message to take to the devs; you waste your time pleasing the powergamers. They *must* play, they are addicts. If there is an item that offers .0000001% stat increase, they must have it. They don’t quit, they just fill up forums talking about it. Casual gamers don’t tell you when they leave, they just do. Ignore them and they stop logging in and eventually close the account when they realise they haven’t logged in for 3 months. They are less likly to look around if they are happy, but a powergamer has bookmared ever in development MMO out there.

And there are more casual gamers out there by far, if you can get and keep them.
Comstar

Does it matter? After all, Blizzards won the argument. 5 million players, over 10-100 times bigger than most of the other MMOGs. They can afford to spend a year or two before releaseing an expansion for most stuff, because they still have MegaX amount of players still.

They can keep the raiders and still have enough causals going through the turnstyles to keep everything running. In 2-3 years the’ll release WoW 1.5 (probably Worlds of Starcraft) and repeat the proccess.
Nicademus

Not to sound like a Brit Bank Protest leader, but didn’t UO solve all these problems by its very design? Guilding should be based on affinity and actually liking to hang out with people. The idea of force people to party with jackasses in order to play the game is the worst MMO concept ever. Instead of letting Dread Lord Jr. PK me at will you now force me to party with him and listen to him blather on about how r33t he is for hours on end. Frankly I’d rather he just too my Warfork of Vanq off my corpse and then went the fuck away.

UO had tons of problems like kill stealing etc etc. But the fact that grouping was elective and left to human dynamics was what made the game for me. I like to solo play mostly, and so yeah in UO I couldn’t just go fuck around in the Blood Elemental room for hours on end, unless I got my guild together.

Free wheeling, instantly scalable challenges based upon common sense judgements of what you can handle.

UO solved all this shit. You fuckers just couldn’t deal with the side effects any other way than locking down free choice to a bare minimum.

Dare I say bR|nG d@(k 0| zk00| UO!!!!!!! Well not really UO, that’s dead and really should be buried. By why can’t someone just design a friggin world again where people have free choice. No don’t allow unlimited PKing, but that doesn’t mean I should have to prove to a mob of 15 year olds that I’m r33t enough to come play with them.

In closing we clearly need to give Raph 10 million dollars so that he can build the dysotopia of the future!
http://www.ddo.com Eckelberry

The real question for the successful MMO may not be “how do we solve the content problem?”, but instead, “how do we live with it while we relish and profit from our success?”

Could Blizzard have done a better job transitioning their players from solo play to more grouping-based play? Probably. Would that decision have made their came more challenging and unfriendly to casual players, who can do everything solo from levels 1 to 60? Probably.

The illustrative level 60 casual player has begun to whine nosily, a year and change after the game was launched. So what? Players always complain. They complain about every space, virtual or otherwise, that they spend a lot of time inenvironment that a lot of time in. Work, home, marriage, highways, and yes, games.

MMO games, reflective of real life in many ways, are a lesson in effort and delayed gratification. And so even if players don’t really want all of their needs and wants immediately gratified (because then they would have no value), they’re still going to whine about the effort and time.

Put it another way. You don’t solve the content problem by changing the obviously successful game model. You especially don’t change the game model to one that hasn’t proven half so successful (I’m talking to about you, virtual worlds) and seems so contrary to the rest of the game. Because, for all the noise that these illustrative level 60 characters create, they are still paying customers. Instead you do your best to placate them and keep them busy. Expansion, patch, update. Up the level cap. Add something like EverQuest’s alternate advancement. Just find anything to keep them tied to your game with, well, anything to do. They’re addicted to your content, and too lazy to make their own, so just make more of it.

I’ll take the five million+ noisy complaining customers all day.
Staarkhand

As much as you want to harp on WoW for being trite and meaningless, it is the only (western) MMO whose concept survived contact with (western) reality. I suppose I should exclude EQ as well because at least it was honest with its embrace of many hardcore elements which are now out of favor.

But UO, Shadowbane, even SWG v1.0, all the big concept games were made by idealists and are remembered fondly only because we see them through the haze of nastalgia. In theory they were great (I was a huge SB fanboi before release) but when you actually insert players into the equation these games sucked. World concepts simply don’t scale from PnP roundtables and 50 active account MUDS up to 5 million players.

WoW is what it is which is pretty darn near what it has to be. If you’re looking for niche, go niche.
DaveT

Nicely put Lum!
I don’t believe it’s the content that is the biggest issue with the ‘hardcore vs. casual’ debate, but the LFG aspect.
Many of my self-described casual playmates are constrained by time, not ability or social skills, and the amount of time it takes to find a group to play with (the larger the group needed, the greater the wait time) often is the determining factor as to whether they stay logged in or go quest solo.
They *do* meet people: there are several instanced dungeons that open up from the early 50s that scale up in party sizes from 5 to 15 people before getting to MC, so it’s not a socialization problem. There’s ample opportunity to add some names to your friends list before hitting 60. Your example UD Strath->MC, is actually: UD Strath->BRD->DME->DMW->SC Strath->Scholo->DMN->Lbrs->UBRS->ZG->MC. As you say, abso-freakin-lutely HUGE, and honestly, if you can’t add a dozen names to your friends list throughout all of that, well, can you be helped?
Every week, the devs post a list of the most dangerous mobs in the game, by number of players killed: every week the #1 spot is a Black Wing Lair boss. This tells me wow *is* a raiding game at the high end, and the devs are correct to cater to that segment (of course, not exclusively). Players also spend more time at 60 than below (Yee), so again, the focus on end-game content is correct.
Solo: table for one. Raid: table for 40. Do people complain to the restaurant that they aren’t having as much fun, drinking as much, laughing as much, as that ‘other table’ when dining alone? Harsh, I know but…
Full disclosure: I have a max toon I raid with (exclusively) and I play alts with rl friends as well as folks I’ve known for 2 years+ that I have never met in person. For kicks, sometimes we 4- or 3-man team through the 5-man instances. For loot? No, just to see if we can. Fun is where you make it.
May all your rolls be high ones,
http://stgabe.blogspot.com StGabe

They absolutely do not want different stuff. They want stuff like they liked. If they wanted that other stuff, they\’e2\’80\’99d have not quit that other MMO they tried for a month. They want more stuff like the old stuff.

Absolutely.

The task of the WoW designers – should they choose to accept it, and it\’e2\’80\’99s quite likely they won\’e2\’80\’99t, being that it\’e2\’80\’99s Different and thus Scary – is to move players from a developer-driven character development model to a player-driven character development model.

Ahh, but you see … that is different stuff.

Blizzard doesn’t do innovation. They do polish. And that’s why they have the audience they do. They polished up a genre and threw it at the masses who responded well. WoW players are playing WoW and not that other MMORPG because it offers them very good, polished content that of the static, old, tried-and-true variety. Not some experimental, worldy thing that could go just about anywhere.

Worldy games are going to be niche games, for a long time. In 10 or 20 years the worldy subgenre of MMORPG’s finds its feet, Blizzard can polish it up and take over that subgenre. Until then, you’ll see WoW expansions and then maybe World of Starcraft or World of Diablo. And people will keep playing it.

(not that I wouldn’t prefer worldy games)
Aufero

I lost interest in the Casual versus Raiding debates on the WoW boards pretty much as soon as they started, (It all seemed like a rehash of EQ history) but Scott certainly hit the nail on the head about content. It’s why I like world-y games – when I get bored with soloing and frustrated with grouping or raiding, there are other things to maintain my interest.

I’m on a break from MMOs at the moment, mostly due to irritation with grouping and raiding. Soloing can only maintain my interest in a game for so long, (although soloing with the occasional group carried me through almost a year of fun with WoW) and I have a low tolerance for stupidity and banality, which tends to make me gun shy of grouping or raiding with anyone I don’t know well.

Expecting MMO designers to to design around my increasing misanthropy is probably a bit unrealistic, so I don’t complain when I run out of solo content these days, I just move on to a new game.
Wanderer

For the people who say casuals don’t matter: A very large percentage of the WoW playerbase is casual or semi-casual gamers. A lot of them are just hitting 60 right now. And as they do, they find out that there’s no stuff for them anymore. They’ve spent a year being taught “The game is played this way.” Now they’re getting hit with “No, the game is played that way, and there’s no stuff for you.” Doing the grind all over again on an alt is not the answer. They don’t want to play weak newbies, they want to play the powerful characters they’ve earned. They just need somewhere to play them.

The raid problem is this: In order to particpate in a 40-man raid, you have to be a member of an organized raiding guild. In order to join such a guild, you have to commit to participating on the guild’s schedule, which is generally a minimum of 3 nights a week at primetime. If you can’t commit to that full schedule, the raid guilds don’t even want to talk to you.

What’s the problem with that? Simple: Gamers, as a demographic, are getting older. More of them — and especially WoW players, since the game has been advertised as being casual-friendly — are adults with jobs, families, and other responsibilities. Prime raiding time conflicts with the time those adults need to eat dinner with their families, pick up the kids from soccer, etc. Being a member of a raiding guild is not far off from holding a second job, complete with inflexible schedules and the threat of termination, and many adults do not have the space in their lives for more jobs than they already have. If the spouse is not a gamer, it’s even more difficult. So they are being shut out of what is rapidly becoming the majority of WoW’s content.

People who started playing EQ when they were teens back in 1999, people who have loved the WarCraft franchise since WC1, are now in their mid-20′s with careers and families. But, of course, they haven’t suddenly lost interest in gaming. What they have lost is the ability to religiously devote the hours between 7 pm and 1 am to the schedule of a raiding guild. That ability isn’t going to come back until they retire.

So there is a whole segment of the WoW playerbase which simply cannot join raiding guilds because of the scheduling. They’re the people who have run out of stuff. They’re also the people who are seeing other players talking about their MC farming, Onyxia kills, BWL raids, etc., and realizing that they are paying for creation and improvement of stuff which they will never, ever be allowed to see. They pay the money, other people get the stuff. They are seeing, more and more, the developers’ emphasis turning solely to the creation of even more of that high-end stuff, which should come stamped “Raid Guild Only.” It’s not that they don’t want other people to get stuff — it’s just that they want some stuff, too. They don’t want government cheese; they want something to do with their gaming time that isn’t running BRD yet again with a bunch of n00bs.

Blizzard is pulling in $75,000,000 a month from WoW subscriptions. Seventy-five million dollars. That’s a staggering amount of money. Even after operating expenses, that should be enough to hire staff to create stuff for everybody, not just that segment of the market — the high-end EQ raid community — that many of the current WoW developers came from.

Small-group instances reward playing skill, not just guild size. In a 5-man group, there is far less margin of error than in a raid group. It’s a different kind of challenge, and there should be a place in WoW for that, too.

There are other things they could do, too, to make the game more accessible to the non-raid-guild player. One of the barriers is the matter of actually getting a group. When WoW launched, there was a “LFG” function somewhat like (though not nearly as developed as) DAoC’s. You could flag as LFG and it would show up on a /who. Blizzard removed that in order to force people to use the “meeting stone” system they were so gung-ho about. That, of course, was a huge flop. Players want to choose their own groups, not stand around waiting to be assigned to a group that only makes sense to a computer. If they simply turned the LFG flag back on, that would cut down immensely on the time spent spamming the LFG channels trying to get a group. If they really, really have to have their meeting stones because some high-level dev’s e-peen will wilt into permanent flaccidity if they’re removed, then put the LFG functionality there: sort of an AH for groups. Let players sign up as LFG or groups as LFM, check off the instance(s) they’re interested in, and match them up. Hell, just make LFG/LFM status available and players will create mods to implement the “group AH” concept!

A better guild recruiting system would be another huge help. As it is, guilds that want to recruit are reduced to spamming general chat. The forums? Only a small percentage of players read them, and they tend more towards the hardcore. How hard would it be, really, to give the guild registrar a “find me a guild” function? Guilds would check off their emphasis (raiding, casual, social, etc.) and level range desired, provide a sentence or two of description of the guild, and click whether they are currently recruiting or not. Someone looking for a guild would pick the type of guild they’re interested in and get a list of guilds that met their criteria. Guild recruiters, likewise, could use it to pull up a list of people looking for guilds. This would make it far easier for the casual gamer to find a guild matching his needs.

Both of those are things which could be done for a fraction of the time and expense that goes into designing even a tiny part of the high-end content that has been released since launch. They could be done a lot better than I have described. And they would go a long way towards making the game fair and accessible to all styles of players, not just one.
Firecrak

The funny thing in UO is you could PVP naked just as well as you could PVP with l337 gear farmed like a good PVE bitch…and was usually the prefered method to PVP, as dying with no gear meant…you didn’t lose any.
Staarkhand

Seriously Wanderer, how can you say almost all raiding guilds work a certain way even though almost everybody wants them to be different? Does that actually make sense?

If gamers are aging and have less time, then guilds are aging and have less time, because the profound truth is that guilds are made up of players.

How a guild needs to operate in order to raid is not handed down by god, and in almost all circumstances not by game mechanics either. They’re shaped by their players’ wishes.

I keep reading like the 99% is being marginalized by the 1% because that’s the way their guild works. Guild charters are actually rather cheap, and I guarantee that guilds can be made to support players who want to raid 3 times every 2 months instead of 3 times a week because I belong to one. We’ll never be the first to down an uberfoozle, but we’re usually not the last either. And we have fun without drama.

It’s not their fault they want to raid 24/7. And it’s not their fault you’re not having fun. They found a group of people they agree with to play alongside, and it’s not their fault you can’t. How about less scapegoating and more personal responsibility.
Wanderer

Staarkhand, it is clear that you did not actually read my comment. Please read it (for comprehension, this time, rather than to just find a few keywords to throw a reply at) and try again. Then I’ll reply to you.
http://blog.psychochild.org/ Psychochild

Small nitpick.

Wanderer wrote:
Blizzard is pulling in $75,000,000….

Not quite. Not every person of the 5 million subscribers is paying $15/month. A large number live in China, and pay significantly less. Someone had a link on their blog with details, but I don’t remember where. Yes, they are making a lot of money, but it’s not quite that much.

The whole discussion is very interesting, because it really touches upon my experiences as a player in WoW. I had a regular group of 5 people that enjoyed playing together, and we “5-manned” a lot of instances. We figured out most of Dire Maul without using help sites and had a blast doing it. But, we were hitting the limit of our ability and needed better stuff in order to tackle the instances more effectively. But, the only option was to join up with more people to do raids. It was a major shift in our play style, and most of us decided we didn’t want to do that. So, we stopped playing as regularly.

I also feel the pinch because of my class in WoW. My main is a Druid, and I had quite a bit of Feral focus even before the 1.8 patch. Our 5-person group worked so well together that I could off tank in bear form even before this became a truly viable option. With the 1.8 patch, I actually respecced primarily to Feral. I like being flexible in what I can do with the spec. But, the problem is that most raids won’t even talk to me if they know I’m Feral instead of Restoration. You’re expected to heal and Innervate the “real” casters as a Druid on a raid; playing multiple roles as Druids are theoretically capable is too much to consider when organizing the raid.

Even if you have the time and desire to join a raiding guild, it’s not always easy. One of the five people I regularly grouped with wanted to get into a raiding guild one of his friends had joined. After jumping through the hoops of submitting an application and doing an interview (not a job, eh?), he was still on “trainee” status before even getting invited into the guild. He had to attend raids without any possibility of getting an item (or even DKP), and was regularly bumped from raids if enough “official” guild people showed up (even after he was invited into the raid!) It eventually got too much for him and he stopped playing again.

From a dev point of view, though, I have a hard time demonizing Blizzard for their actions. The hard-core that eat up raid content are often some of the most vocal people in the game. They live, breathe, and eat your game up, so they’re the ones most likely to go onto boards and complain if they feel bored. So, while the casual players might be more numerous, they don’t complain quite as loud or quite as long as the raiders do. So, the developers keep the vocal minority happy and things keep chugging along with less complaints.

This situation is also what the market encourages. Blizzard “wins”, to paraphrase Eckelberry above, because they have 5 million people and other games don’t. People look at smaller games like my own and scoff, “My guild in WoW is bigger than the population of this server!” So, you get worlds that have more and more people and content which focuses on getting more people together in order to look more impressive. After all, bigger is always better, right?

I don’t know what the “right” answer is here, but the topic is interesting. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with Blizzard’s success. Even if they are a bunch of incompetent boobs for ignoring the casuals, they’re still pulling in a lot of subscriptions. What they’re doing is obviously working for a lot of people willing to pay them for it.

Some random thoughts,
Pingback: Notes in passing. . . » Blog Archive » Casual Friday
Saxxon

Aside form ramming raids down the throats of a good percentage, if not a majority of their clients who don’t want nor like that style of play, Blizzard really missed the boat in ignoring the RTS origin of Warcraft with this game. The BGs are a joke, there is no lasting effect from them (unless you count the rep & rank rewards – more grind, more raids).

“Player driven content” is a mantra I’ve heard for a few years now at GDC etc, and yet here is the flagship MMO currently ignoring that iceberg. If guilds and players had fixed assets to gather resources for, build, fight over, destory – in a *balanced* fashion a good portion of this current crisis would not exist. Such a dynamic end-game would lessen the need to put the treamill slope to 90 degrees vertical that it is currently with the raid paradigm. While a few statistically may enjoy it, most of us see it as a wall and get bored beating our heads against it.

Large raids like that are somewhat new (Camelot had them, but not nearly as controlled), instances are somewhat new to the genre and in this case its overkill, overuse and over-reliance on them. Grinds don’t work as a substitute for content for very long before people buck the yoke. Apparently that was a lesson from other games missed by WoWs devs; about the time they slept thru the idea of a player driven content system providing entertainment by leveraging player action on a system to keep things interesting longer.
Wanderer

There’s a problem with “player driven content” in the form of conquest, claiming and destruction of assets, etc. That problem is the tendancy to form a positive feedback loop.

Take a look at any RTS game: if you seize the majority of the resource points (gold mines, for instance) you cripple your opponent’s ability to produce units and enhance your own. This enables you to seize and hold more resources, and around we go.

In Shadowbane — specifically in the first few months after release — the beta guilds claimed certain advantagous pieces of land: Undead Island, for example. A guild or alliance of guilds that dominated Undead Island could level its members virtually unscathed while groups trying to grind on the mainland were frequently attacked by marauders. Likewise, they could farm gold with near-impunity and put that gold into the construction, upgrading, and maintenance of their cities. Therefore, those guilds acquired powerful assets — high-level members, buildings, trainers, item-creating NPCs — at a faster rate than the guilds which were under constant pressure from rivals. Those assets enabled them to strengthen still further and begin taking assets away from rivals: destroying their cities, farming their farming groups, etc. In most cases, one guild came to dominate the server within a couple of months after launch. They reached the point where their power was sufficient to prevent any rivals from gathering enough power to challenge them. Then they quit the game because “winning” was deadly dull.

Positive feedback loops like that can wreck any persistant world game. One of the simplest loops — “kill mobs, get gold, buy better weapons, kill mobs more easily, get more gold, buy even better weapons, rinse, repeat” — is a constant problem to manage in MMORPGs. It gets more complicated from there.

If you allow the players to change the basic parameters of the world in a persistant world, you’ve got a huge positive feedback loop, and it’s one that will break your game.

For example, let’s say we have a game with two hostile factions in a world that has its content (other than Newbieville) spread out over 8 zones. Half of these are initially controlled by each faction. If a faction seizes control of the central fortress in a zone, that zone provides benefits to that faction. Let’s say every zone controlled gives its controllers a 10% bonus in combat and makes that zone’s resources available to the controlling side. We have our baseline value at 60% of some arbitrary combat numbers, so that initially both sides are equally balanced, 100% each. Sooner or later, of course, one side is going to take a zone away from the other. Now you have faction A which has 110% combat strength and faction B which has 90%. Plus they’re pretty gung-ho about it. So, with this new advantage, they go after another fortress. They take it. They now have 120% vs 80% — that’s a 50% advantage in strength. Plus, human nature being what it is, many players from faction B are going to say “the heck with being A’s chew toys” and reroll on A. With their advantage in combat strength, plus their new advantage in numbers, A will proceed to roll up B like a rug. Now your game still consists of two factions, but A has all 8 zones and B is squished into Newbieville.

And thereby hangs our problem: If player actions, in a PvP sense, have an effect on the game, you get a runaway feedback loop. Competition for any reward which increases one competitor’s ability to compete will lead to such a loop. Even if that reward is apparently meaningless on the surface, such as access to purple armor dye, it will still lead to the acquisition of a resource: People, because people will flock to the winning side for the dubious prestige of walking around in purple armor.

The only way to prevent this is to have those actions be essentially meaningless in the long run, and the players see that and feel cheated. If they win something — a keep, a territory, an artifact, whatever — they expect they should be able to keep it, not that the game mechanics will snatch it back and give it to the loser. Not only are such mechanics resented by the players, but they also feel forced, and hence break immersion.

I think DAoC’s way of handling that (I don’t know if NF changed this) was insidiously clever: Players regularly organized keep takes and started rolling up the keeps, but since Darkness Falls opened to them when they held the majority, the army would start to crumble as people ran of to farm DF. On the other hand, people of the faction recently evicted from DF would have nothing better to do than get some revenge, and get their keeps back, and strengthen the defending/counterattacking force. I’m not sure if it was planned that way, as a balancing mechanism, but it worked darned well.

But again, if we as players had been able to exert any real control over the game — I always wanted to conquer Hibernia, make the Lurikeen into galley slaves, and build a house where it didn’t freaking snow all the time — that would have crumbled. All of a sudden, new Hibernian players would have had nowhere to level, and Midgard players would have had much more space and resources available. There’s your feedback loop again. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. DF was nice, but really, control of keeps and and relics was primarily an enhancement to the owners’ e-peens. That’s all that it was possible to make them within a stable game.

So if the game allows asset takeovers, it cascades; if it does not, it stagnates. Neither one is good for long-term survivability of that game.

And I need sleep.
Robin Kestrel

Wanderer, a thought regarding the “rich get richer” problem…

Every balancing mechanism is artificial if you think about it too much. The trick is to get the players having so much fun that they don’t care; it doesn’t occur to them to resent it.

What if the game rewarded the conquering side in ways that only indirectly increased their offensive power, in terms of better position and better access to resources for crafting, say, yet slightly decreased their defensive power in terms of the logistics of holding onto the extra territory? And at the same time, the game boosted the defense of the conquered side, for example, by augmenting their positions with NPCs and making it easier for them to get reinforcements to the front?

I tend to think that some mechanism like that would feel more like a self-adjusting difficulty level…the better you do, the harder it gets…while still providing a meaningful incentive to conquer the enemy. Sometimes just the bragging rights can be incentive enough. And I agree with the DAoC model: make the ultimate reward for “winning” the war must be something that both helps and distracts the winner while ensuring that the loser has a very good chance to return things to the status quo.

-/|\\-
D-0ne

The problem with player driven content is that is requires designers to give up large amounts of control.

If i were designing a game I’d plan on not controling aspects of the game. Even if those aspects turn out to be bad. In my opinion what would be harder than staying out of bad player driven content would be staying out of GOOD player driven content.

Point is, no design team can create enough content for a couple million RPG players that will last long enough to keep them interested. No. The solution must be derived from player interaction and player created content. Again, I come back to the need for good PvP that involves the more complex nature of human interaction and while there should be some element of “killing” your enemies the real goal of PvP is immersive player driven conflict on a political level.

Frankly, all end games need to end up being about politics, war, and territory. Oppression is good. Evil in all its forms is good. Good in all its forms is good. What every player really wants to do in the end is contribute to something greater than themselves.

Who deosn’t dream of a virtual battle field filled with a couple thousand avatars? The battle charge! Each side fighting for their very freedom from the oppression of the other…
David Taylor

[i]The only way to prevent this is to have those actions be essentially meaningless in the long run, and the players see that and feel cheated[/i]

Take a lesson from Real Life: Empires fall because the cost of defending them becomes too high. in am MMO, you win some territory, you get real advantages. Keeping that territory needs to cost, and not be paid by the same advantages. E.g. You win Castle Terribile, now you get to use its cannons. The downside is you have to feed the castle’s 40 guards, or they kick you out after a week.
http://gophur.playnet.com Gophur

Bingo, got it in one.

It is a nice perdicament for them to be in though. Not that world is harder than game or vise versa but in that game without world is probably a better vehicle for mass success than world without game. SWG is a case in point. Too much world focus to start and not enough game done right. I guess is WoW can figure out how to make world appeal to people who ar at the wall already then they have it made. Gonna be tough. Generally small doses of world on the road to end game act to slow the progress for most as they stop and smell the roses. Might be too late for some players, then again, they might just add a bunch of really long qwest chains to keep the casuals happy, which would be more of the same and a perpetual nightmare that just might make the casuals happy.
http://www.theamazonbasin.com/wow ReptileHouse

I can attest first hand (on several levels) to the fact that Staark knows what he’s talking about when he says a guild can be created that provides a home to both the casual and the hardcore. More than that, really. It can be done such that the casual gamer will have the opportunity to experience the raid content, if they so desire. Some do, some do not.

There do exist guilds out there which conduct very solid end-game raids and don’t require their membership to dedicate their lives, souls, left legs, etc. to the guild and the game.
http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

I said that this would be an issue…oh…a year ago. Heh.
tazelbain

> I said that this would be an issue\’e2\’80\’a6oh\’e2\’80\’a6a year ago. Heh.
I remember this conversation back when Plane of Fear opened, glad you could join us.
Saxxon

Re: Wanderer

You kind of answered your own dissent about player driven content and conquest cornering the game. The situation where victory = powerup = more victory is a very simple system, which you would find in an RTS where games are played in a matter of minutes or hours. Combining an MMO & RTS to create the kind of P-D-C I envisioned when I made the statement above is far more involved and incorporates a number of check & balance factors to keep things fluid.

You mentioned Camelot’s keep captures & Drakness Falls farming effect. There was also the effect of capturing multiple relics weakening the guards on the prize. Even that was simply straitforward. I’d expect anyone worthy of crafting a multi-million dollar project centered around such a thing to weave supply & demand, crafting, logistics, NPC faction, politics etc in a way that puts the supposition – “You’ve conquered the world, now try to keep it.” Someone above stated a similar thing, the more you take the harder it is to hold.

Shadowbane had no such safeguard built into its system early on, in fact it was the opposite on the server I was on where they handed siege tools to the strongest guild a week before anyone could rank up and produce siege weapons on their own (I’ve heard of things done later, but Elvis left the building after the server/account hacking incidents). I believe their intended balance was entirely player based on everyone ganging up on the big guy when in fact most of the sheeple knuckled under, but if you want the game to appeal to a wider audience then the mechanisms need to be more reliable. Its also fairly easily demonstrated by track record that “total loss” defeat will cause you to shed clients very quickly. The system has to let the losing side back on the field somewhere, and in a way they haven’t lost months of effort. They lose territory, a choice resource point, lucrative trade location – but they can set up camp elsewhere and reasonably defend it using the various aspects of the system.

Broken Toys

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