Category Archives: Richard Bartle

The Unbearable Lightness Of Stranglethorn Vale

Richard Bartle explains in great detail exactly what goes through an MMO designer’s mind when playing one of the more painful zones in WoW. Except he rather likes it, see.

So, my view is a bit different. As I noted, I actually see Stranglethorn Vale (STV) as one of Blizzard’s less well designed zones. To wit:

  • It’s too large, and until very recently there was no easy way to move from one end of the zone to the other. While ideally, as Bartle noticed, there is a slow progression from one end of the zone to the other, realistically players will not play through the entire zone in one sitting. This is especially annoying for Alliance players – they have a small NPC hub, without a “innkeeper” resting area, in the northern end of the zone, while Horde players have a more central location, with an innkeeper, to work from. This is really the largest problem with the zone – it’s just too large. And because it’s too large, it keeps you there far too long. What may have given you a sense of place and wonder at level 30, to put it mildly, no longer does by level 45. (Another zone, Dustwallow Marsh, was recently revamped specifically to give players a place to escape to during that level range.)
  • The quest design relies far too much on “kill 10 of these. OK, kill 10 of these! OK, hey, kill 15 of these.” Yes, that’s inherently what WoW (or any Dikumud PVE) game play is. But those sorts of concentrated kill quests, while gravy to powergamers looking for the easiest way to leverage the mindless button pressing that destroys them of everything that makes them human, really highlight the artificiality of the enterprise. And that’s what most WoW quest design manages to hide very well. You’re not just killing 10 wolves, you’re saving a troll village from starvation or whatnot. Sure, it’s just a storytelling veneer, but it’s important veneer. It also helps break up the inherent tedium involved in “kill 10 of this, fetch 5 of that” questing. And because WoW is usually so good at this smoke-and-mirror hand waving style of quest-driven storytelling, when it breaks down, it’s notable. And STV is an excellent example of where this breaks down.
  • Hitting more on the specifics of faulty quest design as opposed to the content, STV is where players begin to be punished in earnest by poorly thought out world design. When you have too many players hunting the same thing in the same area, you either encourage cooperation or competition. However, WoW by its very nature as a solo-friendly MMO rabidly discourages cooperation (at least until it’s hit forcibly over your head when you switch to end-game raiding), so very few people actually think “Hmm – we’re all hunting for 10 panthers, we should group up and kill them together!”. Instead, they think “Hmm, we’re all hunting for 10 panthers, I BETTER TAG THEM FIRST!”. Other poorly thought out mechanics include the “Green Hills of Stranglethorn” mega-collection quest (which the author himself is on record as regretting as “the worst quest in WoW”) which usually serves as a focus of inventory-related frustration for the intended new player audience and as powergaming grist for those already familiar with the zone, and some quests with an insanely low drop rate for quest-related drops that, again, encourage frustration over fun.

So, that’s generally what I think of when I remember that zone – long, tedious, lots of panthers, and an abiding hatred for Hemet Nesingwary. A hatred, by the way, which Blizzard gave a knowing wink to in Northrend – after Nagarand, aka STV 2.0, reuses the kill-20-panthers quest design yet again to even more wretched excess – when you can actually start killing off Hemet’s buddies. Generally, if a well-regarded part of your content involves killing off a quest giver, that may be a sign people didn’t like those quests.

A lot of what Bartle writes on STV is interesting, especially as it relates to its quest design. He definitely comes at looking at STV from a different angle than I do. Specifically:

    Well no, because these quests are stepped: the levels appropriate for the tiger mastery steps are 31, 33, 35, 37; for the panther mastery steps they’re 31, 33, 38, 40; for the raptor mastery steps they’re 34, 36, 41, 43. The final boss is also 43, but elite (so "bring friends"). This interleaving allows for variety, and it despatches the players off to various different parts of STV where the target creatures lie, thereby causing happy interactions with other quests relating to areas they pass through. However, even though this is very well done, it’s basically just well-accomplished craftsmanship. No, what we also have here is some actual art.

    The stepped nature of these hunting quests mean that whatever level you first encounter the Nesingwary camp in STV, there’s going to be a quest of an appropriate level for you. It’s like a net, spread wide to catch players.

     

    Well, no. Thanks to how WoW quest chain dependencies work, you actually have to start at the beginning no matter what your level, and work your way through the chain. It would be awfully nice if the quest givers did actually recognize that, yes, thanks to being Level Awesome you can dispense with the Somewhat Mighty Junglecat slaying and move straight on to the Fiercely Mighty Junglecat part of the quest. (Which Warhammer Online also tried to implement, by the way.) At least, it would be if you were playing the game as designed. Players, who are playing the game to win much of the time, would then resent the loss of experience and faction and gold and everything else, and hammer away at the lower level quests despite their being level-inappropriate, because they don’t want to lose any rewards due them at all. (The fact that they will then kvetch about that content being tedious is entirely beside the point.)

Bartle’s primary point, to move away from nitpicking semantics, however, is that the entire Hemet Nesingwary saga is an artful storytelling device which funnels you through the wonder of the jungle, forcing you to ask if you were predator or prey, as you travel down a road which mirrors your character’s growth and confidence. And as designed, the core of STV – which can easily be a metaphor for WoW’s character development model itself – does indeed work that way. Proper game design (at least as one cynical wag put it) doesn’t present you with a complex challenge, but tricks you into believing you’ve conquered a complex challenge. And in WoW, that “complex challenge” is the investment of time. Invest enough time in STV – or WoW itself – and you will eventually win. That’s its inherent promise, and to a large degree the polish in which that promise has been delivered is why WoW is so incredibly popular, even years after its release.

And yet, even with that well-executed promise, there are problems along the way. Server queues. Lack of meaningful social gameplay. Class imbalance. Lack of meaningful PvP. Same old diku, different day. And STV mirrors that as well – even with all of WoW’s promise, and even with STV’s world design and immersive environment, there are times when it falls flat on its face.

And so we have Dustwallow Marsh. Which is everything STV isn’t – a hub-spoke model of world design, less immersive world crafting, more attention to detail and interesting quest mechanics. And with a game and community the size of WoW’s, this is really the solution to STV’s problems – simply create so many options that everyone can be happily grinding their way to vir
tual nirvana.

"Worst. Presentation. Ever."

Richard Bartle recently posted the presentation slides from his IMGDC keynote.

Note: bad presenters slam their entire presentation script into each Powerpoint slide, then read droningly from each slide, word for word, as if their audience were a crowd of illiterates waiting for the shaman to explain the pretty picture pages. Bartle is not a bad presenter. Thus the slides are more a hintbook into the presentation (and somewhat amusing that way) than an actual talk transcript. Still, it’s fairly good, and he makes some good points.

  • Cloning WoW is expensive, you will probably fail, and the result isn’t very good from a design standpoint anyway
  • There’s a vast difference between user-created content (such as City of Heroes’ architect system) and user-generated ‘content’ (such as the Eve Great War) – the latter is compelling and why people come back to MMOs
  • Elder games to date kind of suck thanks to the adherence to theme park-style game design as opposed to free-from social world design
  • This happened historically in the MUD development era, which no one knows about because for decades designers have ignored everything that happened in game development before the debut of their favorite MMO (note: Bartle was probably far too polite to actually say this)
  • The fairly obvious solution (which of course, no one has actually attempted) is a hybrid/balanced game akin to early MUDs where users begin on a theme park and graduate to an Eve-style freeform/social/user generated game
  • Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls” is pretty raunchy.

All seems very obvious (note: the best presentations point out obvious truths that everyone seems hellbent on ignoring for some reason in an amusing fashion). F13 didn’t get it.

Nothing in that presentation that hasn’t been stated by any armchair developer with more than 6 months gaming experience under their belt.

Physician, heal thyself.

This seemed like a thinly veiled attempt to make EVE/Shadowbane (that’s right, I said it) look good. Oh, and an excuse to use a lot of abstract terms in different combinations.

I think i’ve suddenly realized the attraction of being an academic. You can write “from on high” about the problems inherent in a topic without feeling obligated to present detailed solutions.

He’s spent thirty plus years saying the same crap and never putting his hat in the ring even though he could go to any publisher with a proposal, assemble a team and get funding. That’s the difference between us schlubs here and him: he could actually make the game he thinks is going to change the world and get all those subs but he refuses to do so.

Today class, we’re going to go to my ivory tower, built from MUD, and I’m going to show you my gold throne where I sit when I want to watch the peasants try to make something that I so obviously perfected 30 years ago. After that I’m going to snort blow off a co-eds thigh, give a speech somewhere I really shouldn’t be since my last real game came out before the NES was even an IDEA let alone a console that was ready for worldwide release that would change the world. Afterwhich I’m going to say a bunch of really profound, obvious shit and show you a square I came up with back when such a thing may have been relevant. After that? Yea, you guessed it. I’m going to ride naked on the back of my golden eagle that I have named Fame.

Wow. Whole lotta nerd raging going on. Almost as if someone threatened to take their candy!

So, to retort: almost everyone in that thread (including the moderator, and not including the post I’m about to cite below) is full of self-indulgent whiny bullshit. As someone who has built a career on self-indulgent whiny bullshit, I feel uniquely qualified to recognize this in the wild. Let me respond to the more obvious bullet points:

  • No, Bartle hasn’t worked on WoW. Amazingly, this does not disqualify you from commenting on MMO design (note: as far as I can guess, very few WoW game designers are posting in that thread. Ghostcrawler was probably busy.)
  • Yes, most of what he said was painfully obvious. Guess what: people are still funding WoW clones. Guess it wasn’t painfully obvious enough.
  • I find it deeply ironic that the sort of game Bartle advocated in the close of his presentation is actually fairly close to what the F13 hivemind would be quite excited over! (Hint: it was called Ultima Online)
  • No, Bartle can’t just walk into a game publisher, announce in a booming, stentorian voice “I WANT TO MAKE TEH GAME” and be given a $50 million budget. If you seriously believe that is how game development works, you are actually the target audience for those “tighten up the graphics on level six” game school ads.
  • The slams on his credibility are especially amusing. You do realize he worked on the first MUD, right. You know. The first one. PATIENT ZERO. This does give you a bit of credibility. At least for those people who don’t believe game development history began with the launch date of their current favorite MMO. It doesn’t mean that he is a Design Moses that comes from the mountaintop and shoots lasers from his eyes at gilded cow idols, but it does tend to get him invited to give presentations and it does mean he has things to say during them. Funny, that.

That being said – there was one valid point missed in the clouds of eloquent butthurtery.

So his proposal is to begin with a hand-crafted, polished, broad, directed experience (WoW) and then segue into an open-ended deep sandbox with nebulous emergent content (EVE). This is justified by his belief that content creation is, well, hard, and he dismisses user-created content as a potential solution pretty much out of hand. Well, I disagree. I don’t believe that “emergent” gameplay compares favorably to hand-crafted polished content.

You hear about these really cool world-changing political shifts in EVE online, and they sound really awesome, but the vast overwhelming majority aren’t playing at that level– they’re mining, or killing pirates, or PvPing, or trading resources. And that level isn’t really about the game anyway, it was “played” on bulletin boards and IRC chat channels. The game was incidental, a justification.

I don’t play games to chat with old friends, or collect cute pets, or decorate my in-game house with crazy furniture or play wacky dress-up. I don’t want to be a miner, or a crafter, or a cog in a wheel of a giant corporation. I don’t want to have to “find the fun”. I pay the devs for that, it should be handed to me on a silver platter. I want to be the hero that saves the day, exploring dangerous new continents, every day overcoming new challenges, progressing through a well-written story. That’s what I pay for.

Now, that’s just me. Some people dig all that crap, and I have no religious objection to that. But it’s not my bag. I want to be the hero.

And that is a coherent summary of why World of Warcraft is a raging success years later, and why many developers who presumably know better are afraid to veer from that paradigm. Many – probably most, in fact – players *want* to be content consumers, not content generators. They want to log in, be entertained, and log out.

The problem here is that this means they aren’t the target market for a virtual world. They want a game. So: how do you craft a virtual world that *also* is enough of a game to keep that person and his millions of cohorts entertained?

*That* is what we should be discussing. Not the length of Bartle’s neckbeard. (Note: most of the neckbeards come from forum posters, not game designers. Really. I checked and everything.)

Prokofywatch: Richard Bartle Is An Evil Marxist Racist Roundeye

Most people on the Interweb are fairly normal. You know, they post pictures of their cats, sometimes they gossip about work, sometimes they bitch about politics. Much like people everywhere.

Some people on the net are… well, quite obviously crazy. You know the ones, it’s usually something about the patriarchy or the dangers of fundamentalist preachers or intelligent insect armies or long, disturbing fantasies about family members getting it on with each other. And that’s just science fiction writers.

Then you get the ones that are like speakers of foreign languages that you kind of sort of know. You cock your head to one side, because it sounds like they should be making sense, using words that you’re pretty sure are used by normal educated people, but put together differently. Until finally, after in-depth analysis, you realize that dear God, you just wasted your time, because this person isn’t just misunderstood, they really don’t make any sense.

As part of that, I give you Prokofy Neva, probably Second Life’s most infamous avatar and certainly one of its most interviewed by the mass media. There’s not usually much to comment about Neva’s blogs (yes, she has three now), mainly because she focuses absolutely on Second Life and treats other endeavours like MMORPGs and Wikipedia as ridiculous or evil or, usually, both. In fact, pretty much anything Neva doesn’t understand, or hasn’t heard of, she treats as dismissively unimportant. Like, say, SXSW, a live music and film festival that shuts Austin’s traffic and parking down on a yearly basis. Oh, wait, no, it’s not important!

While tekkies and geeks everywhere thinks SXSW is the epitome of culture, it isn’t really, because not only have most normal people never heard of it (it’s in Austin, Texas and a few thousand people go bar-hopping and watch movies and hear panels about games at it annually), those that have wonder privately if it has peaked.

Well, that explains it, I suppose.

 

However, apparently Richard Bartle made the mistake of giving an interview in Second Life, and in so doing, attracting the gaze of the lidless eye.

How *could* Richard Bartle and his MUDs and whatnot have anything to do with Metanomics when Richard Bartle, as a good British socialist and intrinsic Marxist (although he’d deny everything but the British part likely) is opposed to virtual economies. He really really hates RMT, and he wants to set up a giant commission in the sky to scold REALLY hard all those nasty smug little Chinese boys that go around gold-farming and interrupting everybody’s game! For shame! Shame, shame, little Chinese boys (and Western round-eyes who do the same thing, essentially, in Second Life or some place). Shame! Maybe if we all hold hands and chant STOP THE GOLD FARMING, KILL THE RMT really really hard, we can make Tinkerbell wake up and prevent money from leaking into and out of games! Evil money! Evil capitalism!

As I said, Prokofy looks at everything through the Second Life filter. People make money in Second Life. Therefore making money is good. Why would people be against making money anywhere else? Not that anywhere else actually matters, or that you’ve heard of. But Bartle’s said that he’s against RMT in games, and people call Second Life a game, therefore, burn the heretic! Plus, he’s English so he’s probably a Commie. Or gay. No, better go with commie. They’re all lefties there, donchanow.

 

But, we get some clarity as to what Neva is on about: it seems Bartle didn’t speak up when they came for the Jews, or something.

Or, he could have said, “Yes, we’ve seen such a textbook example of the dynamics of griefing in that utter savaging of you on Terra Nova in the w-hat thread, and the solution should be not banning people but enabling them speak in defense of themselves, to have good speech drive out bad eventually.”

 

Instead, he began this total nihilist Marxian rant about the impossiblity of ever having any sort of agreed-upon morality such as to define some minimal code of behaviour (he wasn’t even willing to concede a game-god’s TOS, it was wacky).

[Let us pause for a Moment of Reflection, and recall that when it came to RMT...evil little Chinese boys...gold...there WAS an absolute, rock-solid, non-subjective, absolutely objective moral imperative which we could all invoke, which was (*holds up Cross*): evil, evil game gold mined by evil evil kiddies disrupting the game and CHEATING *gasp*!)

But griefing? Naaah, no moral imperative. It’s anything goes. P.S. this is a good example why socialism always and inevitably turns to crime.

Note that Prokofy Neva is one of the few people actually banned from commenting on Terra Nova. Note that Richard Bartle is on Terra Nova’s masthead. AT LAST ALL IS CLEAR.

 

But just in case you still were confused, Prokofy Neva finally drives a stake in the Bartle Player Types!

Unfortunately, with the usual crashes and lags and idiocies, I couldn’t get more than about half of what he was saying, but he did dwell quite a bit (because unfortunately Robert Bloomfield set him up to dwell on it) on these four avatar classes in games, which were something like, um, let me think now: Asian, African, American, Middle Eastern. No wait. Man Boy Women Girl. Wait. Let me check my notes. Explorer. Doer. Uhhhh Entitlement-Happy Clueless Git Nutsack. And uh…

 

What was it again?

Remember kids, what we don’t understand? We mock. And I really, really don’t understand Prokofy Neva.