Category: General

General

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No Need to Bribe

Something frequently (willfully) misunderstood in politics is that you do not need to bribe people to say things in your favor. It is much easier to find someone who is already on your side and promote/support them. That think tank is not saying nice things about Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart is funding them; Wal-Mart is funding them because they are the kind of shop that will say nice thinkgs about Wal-Mart. Bribing a senator is more expensive and uncertain than funding the campaign of the guy who already agrees with you.

Syncaine has not been bribed to say nice things about Darkfall. Darkfall is funding its most passionate advocate in the hopes that he just keeps talking. These companies give away accounts and free time as promotions anyway, so why not pass some to someone who will promote your game in the process?

For we the gaming bloggers, the key is removing barriers to play. If the game is there and available, odds are better that I will play, odds are better than I will write about it. I phrase many things in terms of LotRO because I have the lifetime account, so it is always there, ready, never needing that decision point about re-subscribing. $15/month is nothing to me, but the trivial inconvenience of re-subscribing and allocating my attention across multiple games is a barrier. If Blizzard granted me free play, heck, half a dozen friends re-subscribed last month, I would join them occasionally. And then I would find myself noticing and commenting on patch notes, events, etc. Were we not such a bunch of hate-filled vipers who constantly attack the games we play, I would be surprised that so few developers have offered bloggers free play.

Bloggers are not like the advertising-funded sites and magazines. Even if we have ads, they are usually through an ad network rather than a direct relationship with a publisher. It is hard to buy good blog reviews, although you could try buying goodwill with a bit of swag. You can buy attention, which may or may not be an issue for you the reader, and which may be an issue for the publisher given how much venom we have in the blogosphere. And, of course, full disclosure.

: Zubon

I have not bothered to keep track of whether I got into betas randomly or as “press,” not that I visit many betas these days. I don’t have anything to disclose for live games. I receive few bribe offers. I want a pony.

Character Recycling

In Torchlight, you can retire a character who has completed the game. Retired characters pass on one item, which gets upgraded stats and lower requirements to equip it, and items can be passed down several times to become ridiculous. Later-generation characters also start with more fame, effectively free skill points. You can also toss your items in the shared stash, but your new level 1 will be a long ways from using that level 50 equipment. (There is also an infinite dungeon for characters who will not be retiring.)

In Kingdom of Loathing, you can ascend with a character who has completed the game. Ascended characters pass on one skill, so players accumulate many skills over time. All non-quest items go into ancestral self-storage, and they can be reclaimed at different times depending on your difficulty setting. Some smaller bonuses also accumulate across the generations or just by merit of having been playing for years. (There is also an infinite dungeon for characters who will not be ascending.)

In Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures (not DDO), any character reaching the level cap automatically retires. Retiring characters pass on one item, which can be equipped at level 1. Many classes, modes, and abilities are opened based on the number of characters retired, no matter what you retire.

What would you think about a MMO that offered something like this? All of the above are single-player games with limited interaction. D&D Online had a steady stream of hate about the design decision to give your first character a lower stat total than later ones, which I think was reversed. This would be more extreme: every successive character receives some improvement. That sounds potentially painful in a game with a level cap and PvP, where being the best would involve having mulched a dozen capped characters already. Balance could be difficult, hitting that window between “not worth it” and “absolutely required,” particularly as the game ages and you need to decide whether the new boss is balanced against newly capped characters or 10th-generation characters.

It could be the worst grind ever. It could also be an exciting way of re-visiting content and mixing the Explorer and Achiever perspectives.

: Zubon

Update: I should note, this is well-worn territory for the MUDers. But the populations, if nothing else, are rather different between MUD grognards and WoW players.

Digital Carrots II: Meat Brains

In the most important neurological finding I have read all year, mammals have correlated but entirely separable systems for wanting and liking. Ponder that a moment. To some extent, that seems intuitively obvious: you can get what you want and not be happy. This is not, however, about mis-calculating how happy something will make you. Your basic theory of the world presumably includes some version of, “If Bob keeps doing X, he must like X.” You might make exceptions if X is heroin.

Some have proposed that MMOs should be in that same category of unhealthy addictions, and I suddenly find myself forced to take the idea seriously. You don’t need surgery or drugs to skirt that connection between motivation and enjoyment, any more than you need to hack the server to exploit flaws in the system. Our brains are meat hardware that worked well enough to reproduce itself on the savannah, while modern memetic software can develop quite powerful malware.

Let’s make that more concrete. Your brain gives you the same neurochemicals for watching that little bar fill that it would for actually accomplishing something. Even if you know you are accomplishing little, we can fill that bar faster than reality could and give you lots of numbers popping up telling you that you are advancing. There are lots of flaws in the human brain we can exploit to make you feel like you need to continue, preferably keeping you from pausing to consider whether you are having much fun or if you should stop. Too many players quit when you make them stop to think about whether they should keep going.

Why play worthless “social games”? We have found formulas that line up with how our brains pass out neurochemicals, even if they provide no value, even if they provide no enjoyment. The relevant neurochemicals go together often enough that you are conditioned to think you are having fun when you are just feeling compelled to continue. Cognitive dissonance should carry you through the rest.

Sometimes you take a week or two off and are eager to get back. Sometimes you take a week or two off and completely lose the motivation to log on. For some in that first case, congratulations, you really are having fun and not just following your highjacked motivational programming. For some, I worry that we just failed to make it through withdrawl symptoms the way that people in the second case successfully did.

: Zubon

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to refresh the waitstaff in my Facebook restaurant. I wish I were kidding.

In the Future, We Will All Be Hybrid DPS Classes

One positive incremental change in the MMO world is the introduction of different character modes. That is, you can hit a button and switch the focus of your character. You can fulfill multiple roles, but not all at once, with a way to switch between them. Examples include Champions Online and DC Universe (no classes, just modes), dual talent specs and Druids in World of Warcraft, and the Minstrel and Rune-keeper in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢. If you have the skill points and cash, you can also switch ships in EVE Online easily enough, which would be like hopping classes in another game.

These vary in their ease or extent of switching between modes. The two main LotRO healing classes need about 10 seconds to switch modes fully mid-combat. My WoW Paladin lost all her mana when switching. Other games might require you to go back to town to switch, which is still nice although certainly not the one-click, mid-adventure thing I am talking about. The effectiveness of doing so depends on how flexible other aspects of your character are. In LotRO, you must visit town to change your traits, and I know how I hate it when our healer is traited for damage. In WoW (late game), you would want to be carrying a second set of gear if you switch from Retribution to Holy.

Another way to implement modes is to switch focus within a role. A Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Hunter has solo and group DPS modes, the former with higher threat and mana costs, the latter decreasing them but losing bonus damage. (Solo mode: good for pulling targets off the healer, not worth much else post-Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢.) Switching your Warcraft Mage from ice to fire is probably a less dramatic change.

While I love my alts, I am in favor of anything that will let you stick with one character. Let me stack all my options on one guy and switch which option I use, rather than switching between Zubon, Zuba, Zoobown, and Zupwn. While that will make hotkey management interesting, it saves me from having separate friends lists, guild rankings, vaults, key bindings… (You could also implement saved (and importable) or account-wide friends list, guild affiliation, shared vaults, key bindings…)

: Zubon

[Update: I see that Tobold just hit this theme from the POV of a DPS class in the post-LFG WoW world. Yeah, dual-spec does not seem like a huge boon for them. Having played ranged DPS in quite a few games, while I cannot address how WoW is this week, we are generally doing fine and soloing brilliantly, even if we are over-competing for group slots. I feel more for my healers, like my poor CoH Controller who fought bosses by putting his damaging hold (“stun” for WoW folk) on auto-repeat while I went AFK and waited for the pitiful DPS.]

Digital Carrots I

I recently suggested that you separate the intrinsic reward from the extrinsic reward in your gaming. Do you enjoy doing it, or are you just pursuing the imaginary shiny? My notion was that while our primitive simian brains reward us with neurochemicals for raising that number on the screen, it is probably better to do things we actually enjoy rather than chasing imaginary carrots on digital treadmills.

I am fascinated by the phenomenon of judging an activity by the reward at the end, rather than the quality of the activity itself. Adding achievements to a game increases its ratings. It is not just cognitive dissonance from people spending all that time chasing transparent dangling carrots; people really seem to get more enjoyment from that extra “Hurray! You did good!” from the achievement pop-up. My reaction to the Borderlands ending was that it was incoherent, but many commenters are far far far far far more bitter that they were not given a giant gun for beating the boss.

I understand why people repeat certain dungeons for loot, but some seem to lose the idea of having fun in the game apart from character advancement. An ideal design would make the most fun content the most rewarding (I know, tastes, preferences, play styles, etc.), rather than reinforcing the idea that you must slog through something to get the best rewards. That would seem like better word-of-mouth advertising. I usually hear players raving about how fun the early advancement is, rather than the late game. Is that just the novelty of the new shiny? A design change switching to late-game slogs as a slowdown technique? Or are we just irritable because the units of advancement are futher apart, and everything is fun when you level twice an hour?

Outside MMO-land, most games don’t have much in the way of extrinsic rewards. And looking at MMOs from the outside, all those digital shinies are still inside the game, providing no value unless you keep paying your $15/month, providing no value once the next wave of planned obsolescence hits.

: Zubon

More Gaming Metaphors From My Cat

Left to her own devices, my cat spends most of her time in the basement. I think it is because her favorite blanket is there. We close her downstairs when we go to bed, because otherwise she will make trouble. Come bed time, suddenly and consistently, she does not want to be down there and runs from me. Being a creature of habit, she runs down the stairs. And then looks surprised at how she was trapped.

: Zubon

Grinding in it’s purest form

There’s an online game with terrible graphics, terrible PVP, terrible gameplay, terrible controls, and it’s a massive grind. Yet the game has several million more player accounts than World of Warcraft. They call this terrible game Mafia Wars. I must admit, this is a free game that doesn’t require a graphics card, so it’s hardly a fair comparison to MMORPGS. But so many people willingly grind levels in bad games that there are implications for how MMORPGS handle the grind.

For the uninitiated, Mafia Wars is a browser-based game popular on social networking sites. You are are rewarded for recruiting other people to join your team. Gameplay consists of clicking on buttons that say “Do Job” or “Fight”. There really isn’t any gameplay to it at all. The only thing that happens when you click one of these buttons is that a leveling bar goes up, you gain some stats, and you’re closer to clicking on buttons for bigger jobs or clicking the fight button next to higher level players.

So the question is, why do people grind levels in a game with no gameplay?

Punctuality

Things that are valuable are measured precisely and monitored closely. This is why diamonds sell by the quarter-karat and are kept under lock and key, while your water bill comes in hundreds of gallons and you might put off fixing a dripping faucet.

Lateness implies disrespect for yourself and others. You have only so much time, and treating it cavalierly suggests that it has low value to you. Or perhaps you are strategically late, on the assumption that everyone else will be waiting when you get there. You find others’ time cheap. All we have in this life is fading time, and wasting others’ is slow murder by degrees. But it costs you nothing, as long as you are the last to show up.

“It’s only five minutes. How impatient are you?” No, it’s five minutes per person. In a twelve-person raid, five minutes late is an hour wasted. And it is rarely “only five minutes.” In a forty-person raid, fifteen minutes late is ten hours. I have seen raids and groups that consistently take as long as an hour to pull together. How many entire days are wasted per week waiting for the raid to start?

Lateness cascades. The group is not together yet, so brb bio. He’s still gone, so get a drink. We’ve been waiting ten minutes, someone needs to go check on the oven. Now we’re starting too late, someone won’t have enough time to finish the dungeon, gotta run, good luck. Recruit again and repeat. People learn that being on-time means waiting while lateness is not punished (indeed, people seem grateful when a late-comer lets them get started), so why put any effort into being on time?

But it’s hard to be the guy who says, “We do not have a full group/raid logged on and available at the start time, so this week is canceled. We’ll try again next week.” “It’s only five ten fifteen thirty minutes,” and I guess we’re committed to going through with it after waiting a half-hour. No one wants all that time to have been wasted.

: Zubon

Resolution

This year, I renew my often-flagging resolution not to look forward to things. There were three MMO releases I was looking forward to in 2009. The first made me physically ill just from looking at the graphics. If you and your friends made your own version of WoW in your garage, it would look very much like the second. The third I tried with my wife, computers side-by-side, prompting the following exchange:

“I wonder if this gets fun at any point, or if it always sucks.”
“Okay, just so you know we’re on the same page here.”

Here is to low expectations in 2010.

: Zubon

Thank You

I just wanted to say thanks for spending a little of your precious time here at KTR over the past year. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know so many of you and talking about a common passion we all have. Hope you all have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve and a great 2010.

I’d also like to thank a group of sites that have sent a lot of traffic here over the past 12 months and they are as follows:

VirginWorlds, thanks Brent.
All the great folks over at Massively.
Scott Jennings at Broken Toys.
Everyone at Guild Wars.
The staff at WoW.com.
Keen and Graev.
Syp at Bio Break, probably the best MMO blog out there.
Tipa at West Karana, you rock!
All the people behind the Official Guild Wars Wiki.
The folks at Guild Wars 2 Guru.
Who can forget about Tobold?
Sanya’s amazing Eating Bees.
Green Armadillo over at Player Versus Developer.
Syncaine at Hardcore Casual.
And finally everyone over at MMORPG.com.

– Ethic