Get your Story out of my MMO

With all the WoW and SWTOR news, something just hit me. I knew this was true, but it didn't really set in until now. It's been seven years since WoW released, and SWTOR is about to launch as the same exact game!

The same black and white, two-faction faux war with safe and "contested" zones; the same action combat with the same pace, hotbars, and skills; the same solo quest grind with the occasional dungeon run; the same poo-pooed crafting system that has little consequence to players; the same "hyrbid" classes which really aren't hybrids at all, but rather 3 min-maxed role specializations that are the Holy Trinity through and through.

And then, as if lack of innovation isn't enough, Bioware is going to completely eradicate players stories. The "fourth pillar" already existed in MMORPGs: there wouldn't be countless blogs devoted to retelling events that players experienced if "story" didn't exist (and unsurprisingly, Eve has the most numerous and varied story blogs I've ever read).

Let's assume Bioware is the leader in crafting video game stories. They create the most compelling canned stories anyone has ever written for a video game. They are still Bioware's stories! They are not player stories. Stories are born from extraordinary events. What would a SWTOR story blog look like? "Last night I had this really humorous and emotional dialog scene with these NPCs. I chose this light side option that resulted in an awesome cutscene!" The comments will read: "me too". What is worth telling if everyone experiences the same thing?

By the way, developer story has been done numerous times before; Bioware isn't doing anything new. Speaking from experience, FFXI had fun in-game cutscenes with your character in them and told some really amazing stories. But contrary to SWTOR, FFXI also put players in challenging situations and let extraordinary events transpire that morphed into player tales.

Developer stories, like graphics, are a selling point, but not important once the playbrain takes over. Games are systems. Choices are identified, outcomes are weighed, predictions are made, and then the brain gets a little shot of endorphins if it guessed correctly. MMORPGs are immensely layered and complex systems with an added layer of socialization. The interaction with other, irrational human beings spices the systems to the point of addiction. Humans crave knowledge and social interaction. Developer stories are an initial motivator, a driving force, an excuse to start down the path of playing a game, but they are not an ends of a game.

That's a lot of tall talk, but look at the numbers: "Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions." As expected, once the game system is mastered, the vast majority of players don't care about the "story" and see little reason to continue playing.

If SWTOR has the same systems we've all mastered seven years ago, and everyone is trapped in instances not experiencing extraordinary events around which to socialize, what is the point of playing? This seems like a way to charge $15 per month for KOTOR 3.

Where Has All the Content Gone?

What started as a conversation about Aion's level grind and their promotional Double Experience Weekends, quickly turned into a conversation about end game and leveling. I recalled FFXI, my first MMORPG, as evidence of how things used to be before World of Warcraft, and how this generation of MMORPGs tend to be about getting to max level as quickly as possible. This urgency to hit level cap is very off-putting.

This post is going to get extremely anecdotal, but bare with me. I never hit level cap in FFXI (level 75). I had a few jobs in the level 50-55 range after playing for about 3 years. But I did not mind hovering at those middle levels because there was stuff to do. The world wasn't devoid of interesting quests and fights for low- and mid-level players. Gaining experience simply opened more doors. This is in contrast to WoW's model where you don't even get a key to the building until you max out.

The mechanic FFXI employed to make this low level stuff interesting was level caps. This wasn't a "use it or lose it", loss aversion technique, wherein you locked yourself out of content if you leveled beyond the cap. It was an explicit lowering of a player's current job level to at most the cap (you remained at your level if you were under or at the cap).

One piece of capped content was also an excellent way to make money. Mobs in the world had a chance to drop Beast Seals. Collecting these non-tradable items gave you a non-tradable token, called an Orb. Gathering a party, you went to the zone entrance and used the Orb to start an instanced arena fight against special monsters. As soon as your party zoned in, you were immediately reduced to the appropriate level. All your buffs were removed, and any gear above your new level was immediately removed. With a 55 Bard, I would do BCNM 40 fights. I had my gear for level 55, but I also kept a set of level 40 gear for this particular fight.

You got one attempt per orb. If everyone died, tough. If you won, a treasure chest appeared which had tons of goodies in it. These were slowly sold on the Auction House, and all participants were given an even cut. (This amount of trust speaks volumes about the community in FFXI, but that's another topic.) Spending a few hours on a Saturday, running half a dozen BCNM netted you a few hundred thousand gil, certainly not chump change. This would be equivalent to a few hundred gold in WoW. At level 40.

Other BCNM fights were capped at various levels from 20 to 75 (uncapped).

There are Garrison fights capped at level 20. These are open-world fights where waves of monsters attack an Alliance (3 parties of 6 players = 18); the last wave contains a boss which drops loot.

The Mission for Rank 3 (Missions were FFXI's way of communicating the main story to the players and are otherwise indistinguishable from Quests) was capped at level 25. Another Mission fight was capped at 50. One of the expansions had tons of level 30 capped Missions until you got near the end of the arc.

FFXI had a realm event where Giant Treants spawned all over the world. They reduced the players to level 20, 30, or 50 depending on which one you fought.

Crafting training didn't require levels. Exploring, and thus mining, logging, or fishing from, any part of the world required spells like Invisible and Sneak so you did not aggro mobs (these were available as a level 25 White Mage or you could purchase consumables which gave the same status effects).

So even though FFXI's forced grouping leveling system is sometimes called Draconian or grindy, or simply took too long, you were not at a loss for things to do. I managed to get 3 years out of the game without even hitting level cap. Today's MMORPGs don't even start until cap, which is such a shame.

In WoW all signs point to leveling. Players cannot even craft without leveling. The only low- and mid- level stuff to do are instances, which are really just quest locations and group leveling sessions.

What could be done to WoW to make those other levels interesting? An idea which immediately comes to mind thanks to FFXI is low level capped raids. Create a 10- or 25-man raid for level 50s. Loot that drops can be both soulbound and sellable. Cap Deadmines at 20. Cap SM cathedral at 40. Remove the level restrictions to crafting training. Write some epic questlines like Scepter of the Shifting Sands, but cap players at 60. Possibilities are endless.

At the end of the day, players just want interesting things to do in the world. There is no reason to require them to hit level cap for those interesting things to occur. The question players ask of developers should not be "What is there to do at level cap?" but rather, "What is there to do?". Players have forced developers' hands by simply demanding shorter leveling curves. Why would designers spend months trying to balance content for mid-levels if the average time a player spends at any one level is 8 hours? Might as well funnel everyone to max ASAP and make the content there. I personally hope for the return of longer levels and less cap-centric content.

Remnants of an Age Past

What shall be named The Mistake, I started playing It again. I was trying to save myself like a Kama Sutra monk, waiting for the Aion release (double entendre definitely intended). The last flirtation involved gallivanting through Northrend, an unexpectedly fun experience (pre-Tournament Icecrown is my favorite zone in all of WoW).

But this time I am trekking through Azeroth, all the old content, and I have come to a realization. I must call it a revelation, lest I get so frustrated at the bait 'n switch that I end my adventure here and now. I have finally understood that "killing with purpose" motto pronounced several times by the WoW designers. It's like the missing link between EverQuest and Aion. Newer quests are not as crude as 1.x WoW quests as to reveal this dark secret. I feel like I've discovered Ida.

Prior to WoW, mobs were simply grinded for experience points. You or your party found a camp somewhere and just killed mobs for hours. WoW quests are a layer of story on top of this grinding. The quest gives you a "purpose" to go an kill 100 boars, but you are still camping somewhere and killing mobs for hours. This is prevalent throughout much of 1.x WoW:

• Recipe quests which ask you for several animal parts which would require you slaughter an entire field many times over.
• Enemy stronghold quests which make you kill an entire cave of humanoids only to get a follow up quest to go back into the same cave and kill the leader (after all the mobs have respawned).

The idea of grinding mobs doesn't really go away; now there is bonus experience for doing the "purpose" layer.

I'm putting purpose in quotes because Blizzard seems to think that players just killed willy-nilly without rhyme nor reason prior to the Deliverance. Those xp camps had purpose: get experience points. And as I've said before, I enter some twisted, meditative state when I'm just farming mobs for an extending period of time. I also like xp parties, something I'm looking forward to in Aion.

Since the Enlightenment, Blizzard has seemed to have forgotten how things were and are addressing the outcry of monotony originating from the mistake of calling these story purposes "quests". We have bombing runs, vehicle combat, and other mini-games focusing not on "killing with a purpose" but on "fun".

Maybe we can change how bonus experience is distributed.

In FFXI, when you killed mobs within a time window of each other, you received bonus experience. It wasn't something to sneeze at; you could get upwards of 50% extra experience. What if we changed the quest experience system to something resembling the bonus experience system? Instead of stocking up on "Kill 20 Monkeys" quests, let's reserve the title of Quest for actual quests. When players start killing mobs in a certain area, give them a heads up as to how to acquire the bonus experience. Ask them to kill 10 mobs in 5 minutes; or 50 Rats total. Once they complete the objective, give them the bonus experience.

Of course this is assuming we have the standard, target-hotbar MMORPG combat system. A few months ago, I had envisioned a high-intensity combat system--somewhat of a throwback to Action RPGs. Characters have large amounts of AOE attacks, designed to cut through hordes of enemies quickly. Think of Diablo II. But instead of giving experience points just for killing mobs, we make the players run Gauntlets. Think of Gauntlets like instanced dungeons, with start and end locations and checkpoints along the way. Players receive bonus experience when they reach checkpoints and ultimately the end.

Simple. Fun. Flashy. Not monotonous like "Kill 30 Vultures". There is even the potential to record times of parties as they race to the end: have a leader board for the Achievers.

This originally was part of a grand territory control system, but as a middle layer game, what do you think?

Outrageous Tasks Revisited

Building on some of the "outrageous tasks" (long travel times, forced grouping, harsh death penalties, grinding mobs for money) I mentioned in my previous post, I'd like to talk about what they accomplished in terms of dynamics, and thus what MMORPGs have lost over the years. I would be an interesting exercise to then reinstitute these mechanics and discuss methods to improve them rather than cut them.

Long Travel Times

The first journey into unknown lands is thrilling, but that excitement suffers extreme diminishing returns. The 80th time you fly from Ironforge to Stormwind, that mock Drawf battle isn't cool anymore. So to pass the time to chat with your guild or party. This is downtime for the player: a time to stop and smell the roses. Problem is that not everyone has the time to have downtime. Casual gaming is coming to the forefront and players want to get in, play the game, and get out.

Exploration should be a part of character progression, not a hurdle. Make the player undergo memorable sojourns to a new town, but then accelerate his trip thereafter. I think WoW's travel system is near perfect. A change I'd make would be to require players to have been at a teleport destination (much like the taxi system) before they are able to teleport there. I think the Summon spell needs to be tossed out the window also.

Forced Grouping

I've already commented on forced grouping and how to lubricate party creation.

Harsh Death Penalties

Games need to have a losing condition and some risk and reward. MMORPGs have gotten soft though. There is no more loss of experience or that terrible experience debt system (seriously, how did this even get past the alcohol-saturated napkin is was written upon?). Players praise Blizzard for removing these Draconian practices yet curse the newbs in their end game content. Guess how these baddies got to the level cap? Insufficient death penalty which failed to properly teach the players.

In Mario Bros. or Portal if you can't learn how to use the tool, you don't progress. If you don't understand that you must run full speed nonstop in order to cross the series of tiny pits, you have to restart the level. If you don't get the hint to "fl...ing you...your...elf", you don't get to hear GlaDOS' next snide comment. In WoW, if you don't understand how the threat system works, don't worry about it, you'll be level cap in no time.

(My first level 60 was a Tauren Warrior. I had come from FFXI in which tanking was done primarily by spamming an ability called "Provoke" every 30 seconds. Think of Provoke as Taunt. So when I was tanking Scholo for the first time, I would spam Taunt and watch my party die mercilessly. It was then that a kind soul informed me to use Sunder Armor because it generated Threat. Sunder Armor wasn't even on my hotbars. I had gotten to level cap and tanked various dungeons along the way without even a basic understanding of a very important mechanic. That is design failure.)

A resolution would be to change the attitude toward leveling systems. If players are in a Diku-style MMORPG, the mobs need to get more challenging. As players get new abilities, AI designers must present situations in which those abilities must be used in order to advance. The fun comes from learning how to use these tools. Leveling in an MMORPG becomes monotonous if players can succeed using a only tools from the beginning of the game and they aren't tested with the possibility of failure.

Grinding Mobs for Money

This actually hasn't gone away. WoW's daily quest system has reduced its importance slightly, but grinding is still grinding, whether you are just killing mobs or "killing with a purpose". I find there is a meditative quality to grinding mobs for money, but perhaps I'm just insane.

I don't know how to reconcile this. There has to be a mechanic to inject money into the MMO economy, and you can't just toss out the MMO economy; that's a major feature in MMOGs! Perhaps economic advancement can be the main attraction, and players play together for resource gain rather than Experience. Now we have issues with illegal gold farming and selling.

Maybe this is just one of those "real life" lessons where you hate your well-paying job but do it to pay the bills... Yea, I didn't think you'd buy it.

Balancing with Tiers

Melf_Himself and I have been having a discussion in the comments of one of my DotA MMO entries.

I've not played DotA, but it's a bad idea to include a large percentage of classes that would never be chosen by competitive players. 10% is a very low number and is much lower than what you'll see in well balanced fighting games. It really makes things hard for new players, making the amount of information they have to possess before they can start playing the actual game a lot higher. Ideally any choice that you make before a match starts should not affect the likelihood that you will win the match, only how much fun you will have.

I'm not sure what you mean by "painstakingly difficult to balance because there are so few". The more classes there are, the harder it is to balance them all.

I draw a lot of my design and game-playing principles from David Sirlin. Not only his Playing to Win articles, but also his Multiplayer Game sections.

DotA has over 90 heroes. I would say about 20 (22%) of them are viable for competitive play. My favorite fighting game of all time is Naruto GNT 4 and only 9 out of 25 (36%) characters are viable competitively. A more Western SSB:Melee has 5 characters out of 26 (19%) at the top tier.

DotA isn't a very newbie friendly game, partially because of the reason you described with tiered heroes. That doesn't mean DotA isn't fun or isn't competitive--quite the contrary.

If DotA had fewer heroes, say 10, then all of them need to be viable. That is much more difficult than making 50 heroes and letting the players figure out which ones are the best. The designer obviously needs to make sure that none are dominant and none are dominated, and over time he can try to pull their differences in power closer together. But with "tiered-balancing" the success of the game isn't dependent on the viability of every character.

You are quite right when you say that choices made before the match shouldn't affect your chances to win, which is why MMOs are very difficult to balance. Every class needs to be viable because players have invested resources into the character and are locked in to that choice. Compare this to DotA or a fighting game where players can see what character their opponent (or team) has chosen and react appropriately. I love drafting in DotA and MTG for this very reason. There is a game that takes place before the game starts.

Many moons ago when Blizzard announced that switching gear in Arena was going to be disallowed, I was heartbroken. I have never played Arena, but here was a counter to team composition, and they completely removed it! They had valid reasons for doing that, but it removed an entire level of depth to Arena PvP. Players were not locked into their stat choices and could react appropriately to the opposition.

So for the DotA MMO, we can have hundreds of abilities and scores of ability groups. Allow the player to react to his opposition (either through the meta-game or with a pre-match draft system). Abilities and builds will fall into tiers (WoW talent builds are tiered, by the way). As long as no one combination is dominant, and players have counters to abilities, builds, and team compositions, then the game will be fun and competitive.

Horizontal Progression and Hybridization

Horizontal and vertical progression seems to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I caught wind of Word of Shadow's definition and was going to write a comment. But looking around the Internet, it felt as if I needed more explanation for my thoughts. Personally I was focusing my definition too narrowly, but I have my reasons, as I will explain. I wasn't thinking about it from a high level point of view, but let's start there.

In the broadest sense, if combat were the only viable path to end-game, then the system would be vertical. Being forced into leveling and combat feels confining for some people, and they'd prefer a "horizontal system". I really don't know what that means. I've seen definitions ranging from a player-skill only system to a system in which there are multiple progression paths to end-game--combat isn't the only means to the ends.

To me, horizontal progression is more of a hybridization technique. If you have a player-skill system, players are still going to min-max implicitly and pick a role. If you have multiple paths to the end game, you are still going to pick one and vertically climb the ladder. A horizontal system means that as you progress, whether through leveling and talents or through some other means, you gain skill equally across all roles.

I was originally thinking of horizontal progression in a very specific realm of play--namely combat. The reason for this is that if you have more horizontally progressed characters, you have more true hybrids. Having the same character being able to fill multiple roles more easily facilitates grouping. If every class is not only a damage dealer, but also a healer or a tank, and they progress horizontally preserving their hybridization, then you don't have to wait around for hours looking for a tank and a healer. You are at worst looking for a single role, which half of the players online can fulfill.

Perhaps an example is necessary. Let's take a look at WoW's Druid. This is supposedly a hybrid class. If you ask your feral Druid friend to shift out of Bear form and heal for this dungeon run, he will laugh at you. "I thought you were a hybrid," you retort. "I'd have to respec," responds your friend. Where is the hybridization? It was lost in the vertical progression scheme of the talent trees. WoW Druids aren't hybrids; very few classes in WoW are hybrids.

Vertical progression is much easier to design than horizontal progression. Make a tanking tree, a healing tree, and a damage tree; done. We're going to switch gears from Druid to Death Knight because Druids are too far gone to be salvaged. Death Knights are "tank and damage dealing hybrids" yet they need to spec for 1 and only 1 role. Their talent trees are labeled Blood, Frost, and Unholy. From a tanking perspective, Blood gives more health and healing powers, Frost gives more armor, and Unholy helps to reduce burst damage.

There are talents in these 3 trees which are specifically for either tanking or for doing damage, but very few for both. If we treat Blood, Frost, and Unholy as different flavors or play styles of the same class, we have an easier time thinking about horizontal progression. Blood will have a vampiric and sacrificial feel about it. Frost will concern itself with slowing and nuke capabilities. And Unholy will deal with damage over time and other debuffs. Thus, as a player spends talent points in the tree (and play style) he chooses, he will gain power equally in both tanking and damage capabilities. He will be unable to min-max into a role.

Now all Death Knight characters, regardless of what specialization the player chooses, will be a tank and damage dealing hybrid. If your group needs a tank, invite a DK and ask him to tank. The player must rely solely on his player-ability to tank, not his gear nor spec. He has progressed his character explicitly down a horizontal path of his choosing and is not gimped in any way because of it.

Group vs. Solo

With the FFXIV news at E3 and the 9th annual FFXI census, talk about forced group play is stirring once again.

I'm going to be pretty blunt: group play makes games much richer, more social, and much more enjoyable than any solo play. Solo play makes players more reclusive, less interactive, less trustworthy of their fellow players, and downright terrible at the game. I'll cite WoW and all her offspring as examples.

FFXI was a hard game which wasn't very forgiving. However, by the time you were level 30, you knew how to play your class, as did everyone else. Once the party of 6 was assembled, you decided on a place to camp, and off you went. Getting there took some time, but once you were settled, the game play was slow-paced, but not easy. You had to make sure you were paying attention, but not so thought-intrusive as to stop the wonderful social experiences. You got to know a lot of people in your level range; you grouped with them frequently. If you were a jackass to people, you didn't get an invite back into xp parties. FFXI is often sited as having one of the most friendly communities in any online game.

Sure, after playing FFXI for 3 years and tired of waiting around in Jeuno for hours looking for a party, the prospect of soloing was a highly welcomed change. But I've seen what it does to communities, players, and the game itself. Players are not very friendly in WoW. They want to get in, get their shinies, and get out. If you are new to the encounter, you are going to flamed to high hell. Once at level cap, the game changes. Players have no idea how to play in group content because they've been soloing the past 2 months. This creates bad experiences for both the newbie and the veterans.

Imagine getting a pick-up heroic instance group together in WoW and not having to worry about how good the other players are. That is how FFXI is.

There is a sense of urgency in WoW that I think is very insightful: if you can't get a group together in 10 minutes, everyone leaves the party. It doesn't matter if they are multi-tasking by questing or farming, they will still leave.

Maybe the lesson to be learned from this recent generation of MMOs is not that soloability is desired, but rather instant-action. Bring back heavy group content, but make sure someone with only 50 minutes of playtime can get something done. It shouldn't have to take 3 hours to find a group, but I shouldn't be playing an MMO by myself either.

From Camps to Quests and Back: Building Better Treadmills

A common reaction to an exploitable or boring system is to complicate it by elaborating on its rules or adding new rules. In this post I'll discuss the evolution of the advancement treadmill or grind in MMORPGs and how I believe the machanics have gotten better, though they are still massively flawed.

Back in the iron age of MMORPGs, a common way to level in Everquest was to camp the spawn points of mobs you wanted to kill. This behavior was not seen as fun by the playerbase after a while, and future games tried different ways to discourage camping. The primordial disincentive for camping came in Dark Age of Camelot, a game on the coattails of Everquest that combated camping by implementing a system where players received bonus XP for killing mobs who had not been killed recently.

Is this a good mechanic?

Bonus XP is certainly simple and requires little work from the developers but it is very artificial. The player cannot intuit that this mechanic would exist without experience in the game or in the genre in general. This mechanic isn’t a metaphor for a real life phenomenon, so it breaks immersion and is naturally more difficult to pick up on. The XP bonus forces players to go a little bit out of their way to kill mobs in some sort of rotation to ensure everyone gets the largest bonus, but sometimes that’s not possible because a zone is crowded and there are only so many mob spawns. In the end, we have a mechanic that’s hard to intuit, and either easy to work around or completely impossible. The only positives note is the simplicity of the system and negligible developer time.

Such a hasty patch mechanic is seldom going to survive through successive generations of games. And it would soon see its death at the hands of World of Warcraft. Quest-based play was the next (and is the current) fad after the camping style.

Questing is a much more robust mechanic to prevent camping. The metaphor is solid; Players are familiar with the idea of being given jobs to do and then accomplishing them. As long as the rewards are reasonable, camping can be severely curbed by quest-based play. No real reason to kill the same monsters in the same place repeatedly if you’re not getting more out of it than you’d receive from running to town and doing a few quests.

Quests give an entire new layer of incentivized activity that makes playing an MMORPG significantly more pleasant, but this style of play has been reduced to a similar grind because of how familiar it has gotten to experienced MMORPG players. Quests also suffer from a relatively serious immersion problem: if everyone’s doing the same quests at similar points in their characters’ lives, doing the quests is just a meaningless way of advancing characters. The pretense of the story that underlies quests rapidly evaporates when you realize that everyone else is doing the same thing in the same world—the fourth-wall is paper-thin if not entirely transparent at points. This leakage of metaphor perhaps has reduced the quest to a slightly more meta version of the mob spawn/camp.

Quests also suffer from being a burden on content developers and being decidedly finite (barring some exceptions like daily quests, which are more like “camped quests”, in my opinion.)

So we’re left in the same situation we were in when camping fell out of favor. The trend became to instance more and more of MMORPGs, but that is just a thin patch of a mechanic that doesn’t actually address the problem: the quest is going the way of the camp and we need to move on to something new in order to keep people playing and playing for longer.

WoW Clones Are Not the Future

World of Warcraft is a mature game. No matter how many years a project spends in development, it can’t hold a candle to the maturity and polish of a product that has had 5+ million users banging on it for several years. Even if you had a few teams of the best testers in the world and top-breed developers working around the clock, you cannot attain the project maturity that is necessary to beat World of Warcraft at its own game.

Cloning your opponents success makes sense in the single-player game industry. Modern single-player games have 10-20 hours of playability out of the box. A dedicated gamer is through such a game within a week of purchasing it—this leaves plenty of room for the reskinned clones to come in and make some sales. In an industry of persistent content, characters, and a never-ending (comparatively) development cycle, there is a pattern of obsolescence, but it is on a smaller-than-the-whole-game scale. As the MMO industry age and their business models push through adolescence, it has become clear that the expansion cycle is critical moreso than the full-game cycle.

Firms will see success in the MMORPG market by carving out a niche of rabid fans, not by trying to rip the casual crowd away from WoW. Look at EVE. Those who move towards creating new games with new ideas can become the WoW of the next generation of MMORPGs instead of being born obsolete and unwanted.

It’s not time to shuffle the deck-chairs, it’s time to build a solarium.