Category: General

Whenever I post on grinding, there are the inevitable comments from people who enjoy it. The note that seems to be missing is, “in some ways, in some contexts, at my option.”

Good grind gives you the choice in those things. Having played MMOs for years, I clearly must love me some mindless repetition for its own sake, and sometimes that is really what you want. Killing ten rats is reliable in its difficulty and reward, comforting in its consistency. There really are times when you just want to farm something. It lets you decompress after work, it gives you something to do while chatting, or it lets you gear up to or down from more intense activity.

There are many examples of good grind. The game might not kick you out after you beat it, so you can keep playing if you like. “Survival mode” is popular, in which you click the button for an endless stream of zombies. I love New Game Plus in all its forms. (My apologies again to Kingdom of Loathing for whining that it was feeling grindy on my 80th Ascension or so.) Or maybe you can do a bit of rat-killing on the side for a cosmetic reward or a small, non-essential buff.

Bad grind is required. Bad grind is when the NPC says, “Now go do that five more times!” before you get any new options. Bad grind is when no NPC says that but the next boss is balanced around your having farmed five more levels. Bad grind is when a game has 8 hours of content and makes you repeat it 5 times so that it feels like 40 hours of content before the big end scene. Bad is when “New Game Plus” is required to get to the “real” game (arguably: or all the trophies/badges/achievements). Bad grind is when the repetition is not the game itself but is keeping you from the rest of the game.

There is an intermediate case where the grind is the entire point. (Some might say that MMOs inherently fall into this category.) You know walking in that you are going to be doing the same thing for hours. That is why you are there. Either you classify the whole thing as “not fun” and skip it, or you wallow in it. The only problem is those poor souls who wandered in expecting something else.

: Zubon

There has been some critical concerns about the anticipated gameplay of SWTOR – namely that it you, the gamer, will end up playing large parts of the game solo. This is a concern that echoes design decisions made in other products as far back as reducing the grouping size in SWG from 20 to 8 or Azerothian mobs being stripped of their elite status and becoming easily soloable. “The MM in MMORPG means ‘Massively Multiplayer’! Why play a ‘massively multiplayer’ game if you’re going to play it solo?” was the argument put up against these changes. Luckily for me and my absolute inability to post here more than a couple of times per year, Zubon has recently touched on this very subject in his post, Unforced Grouping. But I think there’s a more subconscious reasoning going on than the low investment requirements of soloing or the high potential for a bad grouped experience. I think we’re afraid.
Continue reading L’enfer, c’est les autres

City of Heroes has practically an embarrassment of riches in game design. I keep hearing design dilemmas in other games and thinking, “Oh, City of Heroes solved that problem years ago.” The solutions are usually heavily reliant on instancing, but how much of your WoW time are you spending in instances anyway?

Many games borrow the City of Heroes sidekick system, in which you can bring a teammate up (or down) to your level. City of Heroes has gone beyond that: everyone on the team is the same level, and all the instanced content is always the right level. It really is that simple. Set everyone to the same effective level. Set all the enemies to that level (or let the players dial up the difficulty). Done.

Some of this works due to a good design in ability acquisition. You do it once. City of Heroes trainers do not try to re-sell you Fire Bolt every five levels with a new number attached. You buy it once and it scales with your level. If you join a team that changes your effective level, your abilities scale up or down appropriately.

Not enough content in a level range? Every quest can work for every level range. Friends just joined, or you are joining a group of level-capped friends? Everyone can play with everyone else. And content scales to team size, so bring as many friends as you like.

Fun bonus thought: if Blizzard really wanted to, they could have the hit points and damage of every enemy in every instance scale to the gear score of the party.

: Zubon

An MMO guild needs constant renewal. If you are not recruiting, you are dying. People unsubscribe all the time, so you are trying to keep a colander filled.

I am not all about the new recruits. I may not learn their names until they have been around a while; until proven otherwise, I assume that everyone is just passing through. I do not have the reserves to get emotionally invested in a series of people who are going back to X or just playing until Y comes out, whether or not they mention that. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy in expecting people to leave soon, but over the years I have invested a lot of attention and gold in people who did not always bother leaving the “this game just isn’t for me” note. I understand that many people are capable of taking an appropriate level of interest in an acquaintance, but I do not relish the hazy zone between “some guy” and “close friend.”

I prefer a small, tight-knit group. This is hard to maintain across games, jobs, families, time zones, to say nothing of across the years. This would be a major factor of my taking the year off MMOs.

: Zubon

There is a good post on socializing and not at Of Course I’ll Play It. Keep reading for the comments, which are also good. It starts in the context of social media games and addresses the age-old topic of forced grouping. I will not repeat what you can read there.

I want to group more than I do. A good group playing experience is far better than solo, but a bad group playing experience can be actively bad, not just worse than solo. Solo is reliable, subject only to the vagaries of the game itself. Solo is also low-investment. Putting a group together for X can take a long time, and it may never come together, and then I have the risk of its making my night worse than not playing at all.

Finding the right guild is a huge boon, because that gives you a reliable source of good group experiences. That is high investment, maybe less so for the extroverts. That is a better investment if you tend to play the same game for a long time or if you have a large, multi-game guild that will be consistently available in whatever game you play. (Of course, if the guild is that large, it may not be much different from a PUG with strangers.) Otherwise, you start fresh in a new game, trying to find a group that has the right social norms, has people in your level range/time zone, and is otherwise a good fit. There are many posts to be made on “finding the right guild for you.” I miss my City of Heroes supergroup, but we moved on in different directions over the years.

: Zubon

On one hand, I am sick and tried of seeing this in half the games being released. It does not mean “role-playing,” it means leveling and/or unlocking abilities. I am still unhappy about the usurpation of the term, and I get tired of grinding in games. The big fight at the end was either balanced assuming a certain amount of leveling, in which case the grind is required, or the levels really are a bonus, in which case the big fight will be trivialized. Neither is good for your game.

On the other hand, I do like customizing characters. It seems that the standard way of doing that is via leveling up and unlocking abilities along the way. This is a good way of introducing options gradually, to give time to learn them, but I would also like a “just give me all the options” button so I can decide how to approach the learning curve. I love being able to pick out how my character looks, how he specializes abilities, what equipment to use, etc. I will put in extra hours to unlock options I will never use, just because I like having more options.

On one foot, that is what it comes down to: we react to the ability to “earn” things whether or not we say we like it. People rate games higher when they have achievements, and we completionists must click off every last thing. If players will lock themselves in Skinner boxes, it is not shocking that developers will offer them.

On the other foot, the other alternative seems to be packing the game with even less optional crap. We decided at some point that games needed to have X hours of gameplay, and you extend your content across X by whatever means necessary. We could have taken the other path, making low-/no-padding games like Portal, but go try to sell a 5-hour video game. This is why we cannot have nice things. Freaking flash games add padding to extend their playtime.

On an unspecified fifth limb, even if I fall prey to your padding, I will still hate you for it. Yes, I am a badge/achievement whore like no other, and I gotta catch ’em all. (So it’s a good thing I do not play Pokémon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh…) I don’t know how much that will help your bottom line: you are not getting more money from me on a single-player game; in a single-player game I also likely have the option to edit the grind away; in an MMO, I am unhealthily hardcore and am more likely to push a month or two really hard rather than spread the grind over many subscription months; and at any rate, if most of my time was spent grinding, that is the impression I am likely to write about. Not that you are making games for bloggers, but is a buzz of “it pads its content with a ridiculous grind” better than “it is short”?

: Zubon

… well, this is how we would look. Ugh, and sound.

Ah, the early net.

I am reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. I need to read further to decide whether it will be worth recommending, but chapter 3 has some great insights for reward systems and game design. Chapter 3 is about errors, how our simian brains will vainly search for patterns in randomness and provide excessive neurochemicals to keep us focused on what is actually unpredictable.

We are a pattern-seeking species, with self-programming neurons that seek to predict risks and rewards. We are very good at developing intuitive understandings of situations in which we do not have enough time for a rational analysis, kind of like how your dog can catch a frisbee even if he cannot do the math of plotting three-dimensional vectors in real time. Unfortunately, we apply the same mental programming to completely random sequences, seeing patterns that do not exist and feeling bigger highs from wins strictly because they are unpredictable.

I say that again: unpredictable wins produce greater emotional reactions. Your brain is programmed to look for surprises, and if it really is a random system, success will always be surprising to some degree. Continue reading Dopamine