Do you remember this part from the Wizard of Oz movie? It’s my favorite part:

				GLINDA
		You don't need to be helped any longer.
		You've always had the power to go back to
		Kansas.

				DOROTHY
		I have?

				SCARECROW
		Then why didn't you tell her before?

				GLINDA
		Because she wouldn't have believed me. She
		had to learn it for herself.

It turns out that Dorothy could have gone home at any time during the movie! But if Glinda had just told her that clicking her ruby slippers together would teleport her home, Dorothy would have been unable to believe it. She had to learn it for herself or she could never learn it.

We’ve all been there plenty of times, right? The Ruby Slippers Phenomenon is part of human nature. Of course I had to date that girl even though everyone told me it would end badly. Of course I had to make an indie casual game even though everyone said it would be a flop. No amount of talking would ever convince me.

In my professional life, I’ve made conscious effort to avoid this problem — that is, I’ve tried very hard to learn from the experiences of others. And I’ve had, eh… sub-par results. It’s really hard to believe in the slippers if you didn’t figure it out for yourself. So I’m not pointing fingers at other people who have the same issue. But we do need to try to avoid learning every lesson the hard way.

The #1 reason we dismiss other people’s lessons is by pretending that they “aren’t applicable here.” User-created quests are a great example. No achievement-oriented MMORPG has ever had user-created quests before, so there’s “no possible way anybody could know if it would work”. (Let’s pretend that Anarchy Online didn’t have a simple custom mission generator … remember, most game developers burn out within 5 years, so very few working designers were around for AO!)

When designers would bring up this feature (and yes, it’s been brought up on every game I’ve worked on), the veteran designers would tell them, “That’s going to backfire tremendously. People will exploit it to make the easiest possible missions, and you won’t like the results.” This is always countered by some variety of “you can’t possibly know that for sure!” But actually, working on a live team teaches that lesson very quickly. From AC2, I learned:

• Players subconsciously calculate the cost-to-benefit ratio of content when deciding if it’s fun. For most MMO players, more reward = more fun. (This is a bitch of a lesson to learn, too. “My custom-scripted quest was so incredibly cool! Why aren’t players doing the quest? Well, yes, the reward was a little sub-par, but so what? You’re telling me they aren’t playing it because of THAT? Players can’t be THAT shallow!” Ha ha, newb.)
• Players aren’t objective reviewers. If you ask them to grade content, they will grade more rewarding content higher than other content even if it isn’t as good by other metrics (like plot, writing, annoyance factor, or originality).
• Many players spend incredible amounts of time finding ways to min-max the system so they can get more power for less effort. That’s part of the fun for many players. So there are tens of thousands of people actively looking for mistakes, loopholes, and gray areas in your game. All the time.

“Yes yes,” the other designers would say, “those lessons from the live team are interesting, but that isn’t exactly the same situation as user-created content, is it? Nobody can say for sure if user-created quests are problematic.” Maybe, just maybe, users could be convinced to grade content fairly. Maybe they would discover how fun it is to run really well-plotted quests instead of just trying to level up as fast as possible. Maybe players can change their stripes. Nope. MMORPG players are as predictable as the sunrise.

When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

This was not what the designers hoped for. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the number of exploiters would be relatively low — certainly not the vast majority of the users. But they were wrong, and now they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They feel they must counteract these abusive quests, “for the sake of balance”. But how? Well the first step is to ban people who make cheaty content. But what’s cheaty? Do they explicitly list every possible exploit condition? What if they miss one? Nah, then the problem would start all over again. Instead, how about if they just issue blanket threats that they’ll ban missions that seem “exploitative”, without actually explaining what is and isn’t “exploitative”? They went with the latter.

So now, any user-created mission that is “exploitative” will get deleted, and users who played it will get their XP retroactively lowered, or even lose their character. So what counts as exploitative? One or two of the “exploits” are pretty obvious, but it’s really unclear where the line is drawn. Their forums are struggling with this very problem:

Are all-boss maps ok? Are all-AV maps ok? Are custom enemy groups with only one mob ok? Two mobs? Three? Five, but with no minions?

Or do we not get to know before they sack us?

Bingo. You don’t know if you’re breaking the rules until you get punished. So the developers are creating a chilling effect on their own content generator. Now it’s risky for players to even use user-created quests. What if some customer service rep decides the quest is exploitative? You’d retroactively lose your XP. It’s best to just to stick to the old dev-made quests, the ones you know won’t get you punished.

They made the wrong call here. Without some guidelines about what’s legit and what isn’t, I would certainly keep away from most user missions. Their lead designer reinforced that they won’t be giving useful guidelines out, saying:

I would say that a good interpretation of abuse is “Disregard for the risk and/or time to reward ratio”.

This is startlingly unhelpful to people trying to figure out how to make ban-safe, but fun, content. To keep this fiasco from chilling the buzz, they need to publish guidelines about what is and isn’t “fair”, or better yet, code this fairness into their tools. As I write this, pick-up groups are running user-generated quests consisting of nothing but max-level boss monsters, so that doesn’t seem to be “unfair”… of course, since there’s no guidelines, who knows if those quests are about to get banned? Since deletion only happens after an “abusive” quest is reported to customer service, it could just be a matter of time before any quest you play gets banned and your hard work gets reversed. Worse yet, since the rules are secret and enforced by numerous people, it is very likely that they will be enforced semi-arbitrarily, and will tend to become more aggressive over time.

But the thing is, even if they make the rules explicit, it’s not going to help the “power-leveling problem” which is ostensibly the reason for all of this grief. Unless they remove all difficulty options from the system, there will always be easier and harder ways to level. And remember what I said above: users tend to prefer easier content with better rewards. This isn’t limited to user-created content — it’s true for designer-made content, also. But designer-made quests don’t get graded by the players. Player-voted content like this will always gravitate towards easy. And pick-up groups will always be picking the most rewarding content with the least annoyance. And the game devs will keep being unhappy about it.

I hope they can find a compromise that makes this all worthwhile, but even when they do, the costs will be huge. All the tweaking, pleading, balancing, and customer service time involved is hard to imagine. Man, the customer service costs alone are tremendous! Think about it: CoH now has customer service personnel evaluating tons of content and deciding if it’s “fair” or not. Plus they have to deal with “incorrectly flagged” content, plus handling the thousands of additional complaint calls … unless they make clever decisions quickly, the labor and maintenance costs of their system will be in the millions of dollars over the next few years. This is not what game owners like to hear. And to add insult to injury, what started out as a PR win seems to be turning into a PR failure almost overnight. Personally, I think the most tragic cost is that their developers will have to continue to tweak this system for months or years to come. They could be adding other features, but instead, they have to try to bandage this system over and over again. Even if they win the battle, they may lose the resource war.

I’m not saying CoH is doomed — this won’t kill them or anything, even if their user-content tools aren’t a success in the long run. I’m not even saying they were dumb for trying this. Every game has “proven the ruby slippers” about a few things. These are missteps that seem really obvious in hindsight, and were pretty obvious beforehand, too, but somebody had to try them… because they couldn’t quite believe it if they didn’t learn it for themselves. So I’m really happy that CoH added this. They’re proving the ruby slippers by showing that this sort of system takes tremendous effort — Herculean effort — to be successful. And I’m pretty sure the CoH team will never be happy with the level of “exploitation” that happens with the system.

Now maybe we won’t have to debate whether user-created quests in an achievement-oriented game are a good idea or not. Oh, who am I kidding? In just a few years all the designers will be new again and nobody will remember CoH’s hard-earned lessons. Sigh…

The Need To Make An MMO

Sandra and I worked in the mainstream MMO industry for a long time, but a couple years ago, we stopped. We stopped because we better understood what we wanted: neither of us was real happy making MMOs. What we wanted most of all is to run MMOs. Unfortunately for us, running an MMO tends to require you to make one first. This is tricky, because the traditional AAA MMO takes three or four years and 50 people, and has a 50% chance of success at best. These are not odds we like.

So we’ve done other things — consulted on MMOs, web games, and all sorts of other things, and it’s actually been a lot of fun. But in the back of the mind there is still The Calling. So we tried to make our own indie MMO on the cheap. These were 2D or text-based, and we just couldn’t get into them. We needed our MMO to be 3D. We’re spoiled like that. And for practical reasons, we needed it to be web-based, because we can’t imagine being able to get a boxed product on the shelves.

But making an MMO is a huge undertaking. It’s not just a fancy 3D client; it’s also a scalable server, tools to develop and maintain it, and infrastructure to run it. But Sandra and I are experienced server engineers; we believe we can use off-the-shelf tools and some cleverness to make a reasonable little game server. And we are becoming more comfortable with various infrastructure approaches. But how do we get a 3D game on top of it? One that’s web based, too, and one with powerful development tools already made for us?

We tried various client applications, but they sucked. However, there’s a new contender.

Enter Unity 2.5

I’ve been watching Unity for a year or so now. It’s been frustrating to watch, because the numbskull developers created their first versions only for the Mac! (The resulting applications could run on any platform, but the development tools required a Mac.) When you’re an indie, it’s hard to justify doling out a few grand for a Mac in order to test-drive a piece of software you’ve never used before. This restriction didn’t stop Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall from using the Mac-based version of Unity, but it kept most small developers, including us, on the sidelines.

However, two weeks ago they finally got around to making an accessible version of their program, one that runs on Windows or Macs. Finally! Sandra and I reorganized our schedules so that we would have a full week to experiment with Unity and a simple off-the-shelf server product called SmartFoxServer. Basically, we spent a week prototyping an MMO. Successfully.

What makes Unity special? Three things, in order of importance:

1. An enviably powerful tools pipeline, 
2. A rendering engine that works on any platform (and can run on web pages), 
3. And a very reasonable price tag. 

Let’s go over each one.

1. The Development Pipeline

“Development pipeline?” you may be thinking. “Who cares! How many polygons can it push? How many draw calls does it take to render things? Where are the technical stats?!” That’s basically irrelevant for us. We can design our game to run well under whatever conditions the engine allows. This is fortunate, because tech-wise, the engine just doesn’t seem that amazing. If you’ve played Fusion Fall, you may have noticed the low framerate for relatively simple scenes. It’s just something that has to be worked around.

There are lots of free or cheap 3D engines out there, and many of them are far more powerful than Unity in terms of rendering. But those were completely useless to us because they had no tools pipeline. A real MMO needs a client program, sure, but it also needs dozens of man-years worth of tools to build the content for the client. Indies don’t have the resources for that.

This is where Unity 2.5 shines. The Unity development environment integrates directly with Maya, Max, or various other 3D clients, plus code editors, sounds, and Photoshop files, to make a really compelling development environment. Import your 3D characters and drop them right into the scene, then start scripting them to respond to animations. Create terrain in Maya or directly from within Unity. Configure the built-in physics engine, position lights in real time, and then run everything together, watch it work, and fiddle with things on the fly. This is a great way to prototype stuff. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s … pretty alien to most programmers. If you’ve learned to develop in Flash, it’s sort of that mindset: it’s more resource oriented than scripting oriented.

Placing an asset on some terrain I just made

This can take some time to get used to, but it’s plenty powerful and elegant when you do master it, and it’s sufficiently versatile that you can use it for a whole lot of games.

On the other hand, this complex development environment makes it harder for programmers to manage lots of code. For instance, scripts are attached to assets and then the script’s variables are individually configured. This is done automagically and makes for a very cool customization experience. But if you decide that you need to change the values of a variable, you may not be able to find all the uses of that variable with a text-editor search: the user may have overridden those variables in the project itself, leaving you with no way to find the values programmatically.

It also presents some co-authoring issues: you’re all working on the same assets, after all. Unity did a decent job of letting you merge projects together, but that’s only if each developer is working on completely separate parts of the client. If you’re each fiddling with the same prefabricated object, you’re screwed. You can’t merge the binary assets: somebody’s work is going to get lost.

So this pipeline is ideal for small teams, or for larger teams who have spent some serious planning time figuring out how each person is going to avoid stepping on other people’s toes.

But let me just quantify this toolset’s value: Sandra and I were able to download the demo version, learn how to use it, and then create a 3D zone with mobile, animated avatars that talked, punched things, exploded, lit on fire, and so on — in a week. We also had to learn how to use the server library we picked, too. Fortunately for us, SmartFoxServer actually comes with a demo that shows you how to synch up multiple Unity clients. We achieved pretty amazing results in a week, but we took advantage of a lot of demos and free assets to make it happen.

Still… this is an unsurpassed prototyping tool. Even if you don’t use it for the final client, just imagine that you could get your next prototype up and running in a week, then iterate on the design every day after that. Now you can. I wish we’d had this when we were trying to prototype Star Trek’s space combat.

2. Web Based 3D Out of the Box

Another important advantage is its flexible runtime environment. It runs on Macs and Windows. It can be a stand-alone program or embedded in a browser. And it isn’t hampered by the “you must support the lowest common denominator” mentality that Flash has. For instance, your game can support multi-button mice, even though Macs may not have them. Conversely, you can program for that weird meta-key (the Command key, I guess?) even though its analog on PCs is the Windows key — and when you press the Windows key in a web page, the web page loses focus. But I’m very happy that they just gave us all the obvious capabilities and left us to figure out how to sanely use them, rather than oversimplifying.

The compiled files are nice and small, for what they are. I was able to get a pretty complex scene, complete with lots of scripts, animations, and networking, into an 8mb file. (Of course, users also have to download and install the Unity plug in for their browser; that’s where the “engine” code lives.)

It also has some complex tools for data streaming, which we didn’t get around to testing out yet, but they seem pretty robust. They also require a lot of planning, but that’s still a whole lot easier than coding it ourselves from scratch.

3. Cheap Price Tag

The price is very reasonable. It’s a couple grand for Sandra and I to each get professional licenses. That’s it; no percentage cut or anything scandalous like that. You even get free minor version upgrades added in (which is good, because that’s the only way they do bug fixes).

It’s not dirt cheap, but let’s be realistic: 3D games are still expensive. Sandra and I made an off-the-cuff budget that cost $40k for 3d artwork. That’s peanuts compared to a mainstream MMO, but puts it well out of the reach of the very smallest of indies. If you can’t afford a couple grand for an engine, you can’t afford to make a 3D game just yet. Maybe in five more years it’ll be at the cheapness level that 2D games are… but it’s just not there yet.

(There is also a cheap “indie” license that costs $200. This is a good way to get started with development, but the restrictions mean it’s not too practical for developing a complete commercial MMO. It should work okay for other 3D games though.)

What’s the Down Side?

So the good news is that this is a realistic way for a small team to cheaply make an MMO. Fusion Fall already exists: it proves that it’s possible. But Unity is not without it’s painful side. Once again there are three main issues:

1. Bugs
2. Language Issues
3. Documentation Flaws

1. Bugs

The primary down side is that Unity 2.5 crashes a whole lot. It’s essentially version 1.0 of the Windows line of Unity, and it shows this in its lack of stability. As the military would say, its “mean time between failure” is about one hour. This is not good. You’ll have to get used to saving every few minutes. But worse still is that two of our crashes caused the project to become corrupted. Maybe if we’d been more advanced with Unity we could have repaired and moved on, but as newbies, this was devastating. We lost many hours of work when this happened. We eventually instigated a “back up to a new folder every few hours” policy.

Obviously this needs to get fixed. Unity 2.5 has only been out a few weeks, so I am reasonably hopeful that they won’t leave us hanging for too long.

2. Language Issues

Unity has a schitzophrenic relationship with programming languages. Officially, it supports three languages: C#, JavaScript, and a variety of Python called “Boo”. But this is basically a lie.

It supports C# because it’s written in C#. This is the language you should probably use if you’re a team of experienced developers. However, none of the examples show how to use the code in C#. You will have to muddle with it for many hours to get the nuances.

It supports “JavaScript”, and this is the preferred language. The demos are all in JavaScript, and the code examples are in it, too. However, this isn’t really JavaScript. It’s an upgraded version that takes a bunch of ECMAScript features that aren’t in JavaScript. Then it tosses in some special functionality specifically for Unity. And then… it doesn’t document any of it. There is no language reference for their made-up version of JavaScript.

The support for “boo” is entirely mythical. I’ve seen no code for it ever, nobody on their forums uses it, and it goes without saying that there is not a lick of reference to it in their help. You’d be really stupid to decide to use boo for your project.

More annoying still? The languages are poorly interoperable. We were pulling in code from lots of different demos, and needed to use both JavaScript and C# code in the same project. It turns out that when you have two languages in use, there are dependency issues that can only be worked out by sticking your code in special “load me first” directories. Very kludgey. At least it can be done. 

3. Documentation Flaws

The “Unity Manual” is a tiny wisp of a thing. There are no real docs on how this stuff works. What there is, is a massive step-by-step tutorial that teaches you how to make a platform game in Unity. This is awesome… if you’re the sort of person who learns by doing. I am the sort of person who prefers to absorb all the data available and then start exploring. I simply can’t do that with Unity. Those docs don’t exist. For a commercial product they are significantly under-documented.

Expect to spend days just screwing around with the demos in order to have any clue what’s going on. Expect to search frantically through their forums in the hopes of understanding the syntax for their scripting languages and complex GUIs. Expect a few sudden jarring inconsistencies in what is otherwise a smooth and orthogonal interface.

The docs looked especially paltry when compared to SmartFoxServer’s luxurious documentation. Yes, SmartFoxServer is a much simpler piece of software than Unity. I don’t care though. Fickle that way. Need docs.

The Bottom Line

If the question is “can Unity be a viable MMO client?”, then it’s been answered by Fusion Fall: “yes”.  But the neat thing about Unity is that after spending a week with it, you would easily come to that conclusion on your own.

It’s not for everyone, of course. If you can’t deal with the relatively paltry graphics level allowed, or if you need your tools to conform to your existing pipeline, then you’re not going to like Unity. You have to be agile enough to work with it instead of against it.

But after a week of using it, I’d have to say that Unity feels pretty good. Maybe this program is the missing piece in our indie MMO plans.

Learning Is Fun …

Have you read Raph Koster’s book, Theory of Fun for Game Design? It’s one of those books that people are always telling game designers to read. But I hate it.

I hate Raph Koster’s book because it teaches such a shallow and non-universal lesson: that the core of fun is learning, and that a good game is one that teaches you everything it has to teach you before you get bored. This is a convenient definition for a lot of game designers, because it fits them. They like games that they constantly learn from. It’s almost like some sort of pre-requisite for being a game designer.

There are also apparently studies that show that learning new things releases endorphins in the brain, and I have no doubt this is true. So does eating chocolate, and acting out violence, and reacting to outside stimuli that you’ve come to associate with rewards, and sex, and… on and on.

To suggest that learning alone is the core of fun is a really … well, arrogant … thing to do. It reeks of the forced-grouping hypothesis that held sway over the industry for half a decade — made popular by designers who got into the industry after playing lots of EverQuest. Maybe you remember it: “MMO’s are all about interacting with other people. That’s what makes them different than single-player games! So we need to force people to group, even if they say they don’t want to, because they just don’t know what they’re missing.”

It’s crap. These bogus theories of motivation are a dime a dozen because:

1. Designers tend to create hypotheses that allow them to create games they like to play. (Duh!)
2. Designers aren’t typically scientifically minded. It’s not our strong suit. Like stone-age philosophers, we simply correlate what we see with the most obvious possible explanation. This is how superstitions get started, too: the mind loves to correlate things at the drop of a pin, even if they shouldn’t be correlated.

You can probably tell that this pushes my buttons. It’s fine for Raph to hypothesize, but the real problem is that his thin little treatise is used by a lot of other designers, many of whom should really know better, as a way to rationalize their personal style of game development. Entire systems of game design are now based around the idea that ”learning is why games are fun”.

It’s not a bad model for making certain types of games. Miyamoto’s incredibly fun action games fit this model well … up to a point. But learning is hardly the only way to have fun with games.

… But Other Stuff is Fun Too

The thing is, for most professional game designers, learning really is the most fun part of a game. We tend to instantly strip away the context, the art, the story, and indulge in the mechanics. “Ooh, here’s something new! This is great!” We subconsciously assume that other people are like us. (”I’m sooooo bored of traditional MMO mechanics, and everybody else is too!” Not so. You are projecting, wishing it to be true.)

But this interest in mechanics and learning is hardly universal — even for designers. What struck me when reading the “learning = fun” theory is how bad it is at explaining my MMO behavior. For months after I stopped regularly playing EverQuest 1, I kept logging in occasionally just to fish. I wasn’t learning crap, and I didn’t even care what I caught or what my skill was. I was immersed in a fantasy world and I enjoyed the simple escapism provided by watching the virtual sun set.

Escapism is fun for me sometimes, but so is the feeling of being a part of a well-oiled team. And sometimes I like to just beat the snot out of things weaker than me. And so is … huh, I guess I have a lot of reasons for playing MMOs. So do you.

So how do we unify all these motivations into a theory of fun? We don’t. That’s stupid. As H. L. Mencken once wrote, “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.” Just because you can unify every source of fun into one simple theory doesn’t mean it has any hope of being right. Our brains are chaotic, confusing, complex creations. A lot of different things trigger pleasure in our heads.

So how do we tell why people play games? Well, we can start by doing some empirical research.

…Wait, really? Empirical research? In the gaming industry?

Yes. It is true. Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project is based on surveys of real MMO players instead of empty theorizing. This is why it’s more valuable than your pet theory or my pet theory. It’s probably fairly flawed, but it makes theories like “learning is the core of fun” look like sun-god-worshiping prehistoric nonsense in comparison.

Here, let’s look at the Model of Player Motivations Nick Yee uncovered. Because I know you didn’t bother to click that link above, I’m just going to steal some of the important charts from his website. (Sorry, Mr. Yee. Hope ya don’t mind.)

Nick Yee's Motivations

Another common source of “motivations” is Bartle’s famous player types. After many studies, Nick found that several of Bartle’s types don’t really map up very well. For instance, Bartle hypothesized that Explorers love finding new places in the world, as well as unraveling game mechanics. In reality, these two motivations don’t tend to appear in the same players too often.

Most players do have multiple different motivations from this chart, though — and that’s one of the most important takeaways from Nick’s work: most of us have many reasons for playing games, which vary from day to day and game to game. You probably have motivations in many of these categories. (You can even take a little quiz to see which ones.)

It’s true that many of these motivations can be mapped to “learning” — especially if you’re willing to make really tenuous connections like “competition is just a form of learning about other people!” and silly stuff like that. But many of them are just simple human needs, like being dominant, being liked, being part of a group, or escaping from reality for a while.

Pick What Your Game Is Good At

Every MMO in the “virtual world” vein supports a large number of gamer motivations; this is part of the secret to MMOs’ success. But no MMO can be great at all of them. I suggest you pick several motivations from Nick Yee’s chart (three or four at most) and be really good at them, then let the others happen as best they can happen.

It’s tempting to conflate motivations with demographics, but that’s a mistake. For instance, it’s true that slightly more females than males prefer “socialization” motivations in MMOs, but the gender difference is pretty small. Similarly, you may be tempted to assume that any game aimed at 18-24 males should be all about achievement. But that demographic’s motivations are all over the place, and older demographics are strongly motivated by achievement as well.

One method of getting a handle on your target audience is to create personalities to represent them. This is an old marketer’s technique: create a handful of personal stories and backgrounds, and then tailor a game to what those people would like. If you have a well-established IP, you can pull from the demographic data of your IP to help you figure out what personalities to use; otherwise, you’re going to have to do some research on the sort of people you envision playing your game. If you’re planning to reach out to existing MMO players, maybe you can start by picking some bios of traditional MMO gamers.

It boils down to the First Question: who is this game for, and why? In theory, you should know this before picking motivations. But on the other hand, if you don’t have a clue who your game is for, choosing several key motivations will at least narrow down your choices!

If I had to guess, I’d say that WoW’s three most powerful motivations are advancement, competition, and teamwork. EQ2’s strengths, on the other hand, might be mechanics, teamwork, and discovery. Asheron’s Call could be mechanics, discovery, and competition. All of these games are considered “hard core” MMOs. They just don’t focus on quite the same motivations to quite the same degrees.

Unfortunately you can’t safely pick, say, your three personal favorite motivations and run with it, because there may not be a large enough audience to support that mix. So when you have your polling contractor research your target demographic, make sure they include some questions that can highlight their motivations.

And please don’t tell me that your $20,000,000 game can’t afford to use a professional pollster, because if you think that, you obviously haven’t even looked into the prices. Hey, wait, you were just going to make a game without even deciding who it’s for, weren’t you? Shame on you! You’re not a novelist who can just write anything you want and hope somebody likes it; you’re spending a ton of money to create a service. You need to know who your service is for.

Thanks, Daedalus Project

I’d like to thank Nick Yee for his many years of researching MMO players. He recently put the Daedalus Project into hibernation, which makes me sad, because this is impossibly valuable data for any MMO developer. If you haven’t perused his data collection, you should go do that now.

His stuff isn’t perfect: there are some motivational categories that aren’t as strongly tied together as others, and his polling subjects were largely self-selected, which no doubt influenced the results. It’s also highly biased towards Western culture in general and EQ1 (early on) and WoW (later) players specifically.

But it’s a lot better than what you had before, because before you were just making stuff up and pretending it was universal. I know you were. Yes, I saw you doing it. Cut it out!

You still haven’t clicked the link above, have you? Fine, I’ll leave you with another Daedalus Project chart, stolen for your amusement. This one breaks down how various stereotypical statements relate to player motivations.

Nick Yee's Motivations - Breakdown

Tobold, my favorite MMO-player everyman, recently posted a short piece on the value of combat targeting. He seems pleased that the developers of both Darkfall and Age of Conan tried to do something new with combat, but notes that the lack of targeting in Darkfall especially doesn’t do the game any real favors because it is too easy to exploit.

But here’s what interested me: if you happened to still have the boxed version of the original Asheron’s Call 2 game published by Microsoft, it includes a keyboard shortcut sheet. Look at the bottom left of the key map and you may see that the left Ctrl key maps to “Wild Swing”. That was an untargeted attack that could hit multiple enemies.

AC2 had a complete physics engine that made this feature easy to implement, but AC2 didn’t launch with this feature. It was cut, albeit too late to change the first batch of  box inserts, because — just as Tobold notes — it created too many exploitable scenarios.

But now that Age of Conan and Darkfall are doing it, untargeted combat is considered “innovation”. If you want some more innovative features, maybe your next MMO will have one of these crazy ideas:

• Real physical projectiles that can be dodged by strafing from side to side (both AC1 and AC2)
• A constantly evolving storyline that alters the face of the game world, adding and destroying stories, quests, cities, even landmasses on a monthly basis (both AC1 and AC2)
• A variable-length jumping system, where holding down the space bar longer makes you jump further (AC1, complete with puzzles that require you to use it well)
• The ability to travel quickly around the world, while still providing a sense of grandeur and rewarding player knowledge, by mastering an elaborate network of teleport portals and spells (both ACs)
• The ability to improve skills by spending your XP on them (both ACs)
• A “trickle down” guild system where new players automatically feed XP to higher-level members of the guild, thereby encouraging guilds to grow large, and to take care of their lower-level members (both ACs)
• The ability to inscribe your name and a paragraph of text onto every item you own (both ACs)

And on and on… I could list dozens more. AC1 and AC2 had tons of features, large and small, which differed dramatically from other MMOs at the time — while still remaining recognizably MMOs. Were all these innovations successful? Hell no. Many of them were design failures. But they were innovations.

The point here is not that AC1 and AC2 were more innovative than other MMOs. Every big-league MMO in existence has had scores of unique features. Sometimes they don’t get noticed because the designers don’t do a good job explaining why the feature is awesome. (Often they aren’t really that awesome anyway.) Sometimes the company’s PR department fails to trumpet the feature, usually because they don’t understand it or why it’s a cool innovation. Sometimes the game sucks in so many other ways that the flaws outweigh any new features.

So here’s my point: any twist on an existing mechanic you can come up with, any obvious combination of MMOs and other genres, I can pretty much guarantee you that many MMO designers have already considered it. They may have already implemented it in some game you’ve never heard of. Hell, they may have implemented it in a game you have heard of — do you really keep up with all the game systems in all the new games and new expansions?

But unfortunately, innovations and new features don’t automatically make MMOs successful. Being “new” doesn’t make a feature good.

Innovation isn’t the key to fun. Fun is the key to fun.

The past few days I’ve been helping prepare a pitch for a roleplaying game based on a kid’s cartoon. I can’t say the cartoon is my favorite, but I really have enjoyed diving into the IP — watching the episodes, reading the story notes the writers sent over, figuring out how things work, and trying to form a cohesive game experience around it all. I love this part — making a design fit into an existing universe — and it turns out it doesn’t really matter what the IP is. It’s always fun! The extra restrictions force you to focus on the goal of your project and keep you from meandering into random territories, plus the IP gives you a clearer view of your audience.

There are some things to keep in mind, though.

Games Are Not Mainstream Media

Remember, games are not a mainstream media like TV shows and movies are. (At least not yet! We’re getting closer… maybe in a decade we will be.) We have to keep our “semi-niche” status in mind.

A movie might take a tiny IP based on a book and literally reinvent it for a completely new audience. A video game cannot do that. Video games must take an already-mainstream IP and play off of it to make something that appeals to existing fans of the IP. Don’t ever forget that, because it means two things:

1. You must use an already-successful IP or you aren’t getting much out of using an IP, and
2. You cannot reinvent the IP to suit a different audience; you must work with the IP’s existing audience.

The IP Defines The Audience

One of the key reasons to work with an IP is that it helps to solve the most important design question: “who’s the target audience of this game?” The audience is: people who play games and also enjoy the IP you’re using. With that in mind, you can much more quickly figure out what sort of game to make.

For example, the average Star Trek fan is older (25 to 65) and typically middle class with decent incomes. The fact that these are older individuals means that a reflex-intensive game like a first-person shooter won’t be super appealing. (There have been some fun Star Trek FPSes, but they weren’t particularly monetarily successful because they didn’t take the audience into account.)

It doesn’t make sense to homogenize your audience too much, though — Star Trek fans enjoy the show for very different reasons. Some fans love the notion of exploring space; others are enchanted by the Utopian universe where mankind has overcome its petty problems. Still others watched Voyager primarily because Seven of Nine was hot.

When we polled the broader Star Trek audience we found that the average Star Trek fan that also plays video games tends to be male, skew a bit younger (late 20s), and enjoy certain elements of Star Trek more than other parts. They like the over-the-top races, starship battles, and the sexy aliens. The Utopian universe wasn’t that important, and most of them would only play the game if they got to be a ship captain (as opposed to a crew member). That helped define what sort of game to make.

So an IP isn’t a magic solution to defining your audience. You still need to poll your audience to find out what they want in a game. (Remember, polling consultants are your friend, and will pay for themselves many times over!) But your IP will narrow the problem down dramatically. Use this advantage. Don’t fight to escape your IP! Work with the IP to deliver something the target audience wants. 

Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online is a great example of a game that didn’t let itself be defined by its IP, and suffered as a result. It’s a fun game on its own merit, but it was not inherently attractive to D&D players. Turbine would have been better off inventing their own IP for this game, and they would have saved money, too.

Your Game Isn’t Canon

As I mentioned, games aren’t mainstream media. But there’s an up side to this: for most IPs, the things that happen in your game are not going to be part of the IP’s canon.  That means you can take modest liberties with the universe in order to make the game more fun. Do this.

People will tell you that some IPs can’t be altered in any way or the fans will get angry. That’s not true. Well, it’s true that most IPs have some very hardcore fans that will resent any deviation, but unless you’re creating a very niche game, they are only a tiny part of your audience.

Star Trek’s most hardcore fans would be unhappy with a game that took any liberties with the IP — even something as simple as letting every player have their own ship makes them angry — but that’s irrelevant, because you can’t make a AAA game just for Star Trek’s most hardcore fanbase; it’s much too small. When you extend your reach to the entire spectrum of people who like Star Trek and also like games, you find that the audience is okay with some pretty dramatic liberties. And here’s the surprising bit: even the hardcore fanbase can become pretty understanding, if you explain and justify why you need to take liberties to make the game more fun.

On the other hand, sometimes the least maleable party is the IP holder. The Tolkein estate famously screws over game designers by forcing them to stick too close to the original IP. They don’t understand the point or audience of video games, and that’s their loss. You should think twice about working with an IP if you have to slavishly follow the canon.

There’s a Game For Every IP, But…

Technically, every IP can be turned into a fun game. It’s an entertaining design exercise: start with a tricky IP (let’s take, I dunno… “Night Court”). Inject action or intrigue elements (how about a post-apocalyptic setting?) and voila… you have a game. You’ve made Nightmare Court, a simulation game set in the year 2130 AD, where only the tough-as-nails (yet very funny) judge can keep the peace, all the while managing the courthouse’s food and electricity levels. Sell guilty criminals into slavery in exchange for water and grain. Make sure your bailiffs can subdue the laser-cannon-wielding mad men who break into court to rescue their friends … okay, that’s terrible, and I’m sure you can do a better job turning Night Court into a game, but the point is that most game approaches are going to ruin this IP, even if the resulting game is fun.

I remember a pitch session for an MMO based on HBO’s “Deadwood”. That would have been a hard IP to make into an MMO, so they pitched a secret ingredient: zombies. “Deadwood with Zombies will make an amazingly fun MMO.” And you know what? It’s true. A zombie game set in the grim, gritty world of Deadwood would be atmospheric, intense, innovative, and fun.

But HBO didn’t buy it, and they made the right choice. If you’re going to make a game based on a TV show, you need to be able to sell the game to people who watch the TV show. Deadwood plus Zombies worked for only a limited subset of the Deadwood-watching audience, so the IP wouldn’t have helped much at all.

Just for the record, though, you often can make an IP better by adding complementary gameplay elements. The Travel Channel’s “Lonely Planet”  TV show chronicled adventurers who explored remote countries. This could make a great game for the explorer crowd (which fits the TV show’s demographic pretty well) with just a few additions. Add some ancient treasures for the explorers to find, maybe a gang of bandits or two, and you’ve got yourself a fun exploration game. (However, Lonely Planet fails the “is it mainstream enough?” test, so it’s not much use.)

If you have the luxury of picking an IP to work with, make sure it’s one that can actually be turned into a fun game without breaking the soul of the IP.  Tweaks and adjustments are okay, but over-the-top alterations sap the IP’s strength and make it useless.

Designing For IPs Is Fun

Although a few types of designers will chafe against an IP, most designers find the restrictions liberating. That may sound weird, but it’s not. If you use someone else’s IP, they’ve already answered a bunch of hard questions for you, and now all you have to do is make a fun game within those restrictions.

Picking the right IP is obviously pretty crucial, but it’s just as crucial to work with the IP, allowing its natural boundaries to define your game, rather than hacking the IP to bits.

I’ve been DM’ing a 4th-edition D&D game for the past few months. It’s very, very different from earlier editions, and there are lots of little gripes from the group about how things have changed, but one gripe stands out more than others: the loot sucks in this edition of D&D.

When you create any sort of roleplaying game’s progression system, you have to decide right at the beginning how important loot is going to be. You can think of it as a percentage of the player’s overall power. Suppose a character didn’t get any magic items for a whole level. Then they fought their evil doppelganger with all the same abilities… PLUS the magic items they should have gotten this level. How much more powerful is their doppelganger? 5%? 25%? 1000%?

Any decently balanced game is designed with the power of the equipment taken into account. The game designer knows approximately how many magic items you should get each level, and how powerful they should be. That way, the game designer can create monster encounters to challenge players with that amount of power.

In earlier editions of D&D, magic items could make some players many times more powerful. Getting a good magic item would often make you MUCH more powerful than you would have become just by gaining another level. Levels meant very little for most classes, but items were incredibly valuable.

In the new D&D, the potency of magic items has been tamped down to a very modest level. Even the most potent items are mere baubles compared to the stuff you got in the last version of the game. Players become much more powerful by leveling up — that’s where the power comes from now. The magic items are a secondary power source.

This causes players not to care about loot. My players often overlook magical items because they don’t even bother to search around before moving on to the next encounter. Sometimes I’ve had to force magic items down their throat in order to make sure they have their RDA of trinkets, lest they become underpowered compared to their opponents and get killed by some wandering medusa. After all, even though a better magic sword will only make you 5% more powerful, you still need that 5% or else you will fall behind relative to the things you’re fighting. Put another way: without the sword, you’re 5% more likely to die. So players still need magic items, but the magic items are boring.

This is a problem in a lot of RPGs. The whole time you’re leveling up, magic items in WoW and EQ2 are excruciatingly dull. Ho hum, 1% more overall health. Woopie, 3 more damage per second. Yawn. These items are boring as hell. But if you ignore your loot and avoid getting any magic items for too long, you’ll discover you’ve become underpowered. The result of this setup is sad. Equipping your character with the best stuff should be really exciting, but instead, it ends up being a chore that you have to undertake every few levels. You visit the vendor, buy the best stuff, and then ignore equipment for a few more levels. If you’re lucky you get a few usable quest items along the way or run a dungeon or two to get some better loot. But it’s not that important.

So why don’t MMO designers make loot more important? Well, if they could do so by fiddling with numbers, they would. But numbers are boring. Sure, if you raise the numbers high enough they become exciting for a while — a ring that gives you 25% more health is pretty neat — but normal-level items aren’t. A ring that gives you 2% more health is just lame.

So give out rings that give you 25% more health! That’s awesome the first time. But what do you do for an encore? A ring that gives you 26% health? Boorrrrinnng. You can’t just keep topping yourself by jacking the numbers higher and higher — either it stops being interesting, or it stops being maintainable. Or both.

There’s also the problem that your number-jacked items stop being “nice to haves” and start being “must haves”. If your magic ring is powerful enough, it will make you invincible versus monsters your level. Now you need tougher foes. So the game designer makes tougher monsters, to the point where they’re once again challenging to people wearing the ring. But what if you didn’t happen get the ring? You’re screwed. The ring is now “mandatory.” Mandatory items aren’t fun to obtain; they’re just a chore.

So if you can’t just tweak the numbers on an item, what’s a designer to do? A good approach is to use more verbs. Verbs are the secret sauce that makes MMO combat fun. A magic ring that temporarily gives you 25% more health for, say, 5 minutes is more tenable than a ring that always gives you 25% more health. You’ve given the player control, and changed a statistic into a choice. That’s fun. Of course, if you use too much secret sauce you just get a mess. My EQ2 character has over 60 verbs I use regularly. That’s too many verbs; I can’t even keep track of them all. (This contrasts sharply with my WoW character, which has so few verbs that I’m put to sleep by the combat.)

Perhaps it makes more sense for items to have “passive verbs” — that is, verbs that are activated automatically. The ring that temporarily gives you 25% health might automatically kick in when you’re about to die. The flaming sword starts flaming when you critically hit. With this model, we’ve avoided making combat itself more complex, but we have made the pre-combat stage more elaborate. Players now have to carefully choose what items to equip! Assuming a large number of items with different passive verbs, they are free to strategize about the interplay of their items. “I’ll wear the magic sword that does more damage but makes me more vulnerable, and I’ll counteract that vulnerability with this magic ring that heals me when I’m dying.” Suddenly equipping your character is interesting, intricate, difficult. Stressful, too, especially if you have no idea what strategies will work and can’t afford to buy tons of items to experiment.

At the end of the day there are no perfect solutions, so we make trade-offs. Do we want to have a game where people who don’t carefully accessorize their characters are dramatically underpowered? Do we want the complexity in our combat to come during the pre-planning stage, or during combat itself? How “must have” is our equipment? How much of the character’s power comes from items, and how much from innate abilities? And so on. 

How do you answer those questions? You determine your target audience. Are you making a game for strategists? For people who want exciting fast-paced combat? Or is the combat in the game not that important at all? Like all the other design decisions about your game, this one is based on who you’re trying to please.

The loot in the new edition of the D&D game is aimed at a different audience than the previous edition. There are fewer equipment choices to make, which means there are fewer “wrong choices”. In other ways, too, D&D has been changed to meet the needs of a new target audience. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless you aren’t the target audience anymore.

You probably heard that a little while ago, EverQuest 2 started offering items for sale as micro-transactions. I’m all for this. I think the only people who get hung up on microtransactions in these games are the fuddy-duddy “hardcore” users, whose number dwindles daily (in proportion the rest of the MMO audience).

You can buy:

• Cosmetic armor that doesn’t do anything (you put it in EQ2’s special “appearance” slots, so it looks cool without affecting your stats)
• Pets you can let run around in your house
• Potions that boost your earned XP (in various flavors) for a few hours

However, EQ2 was really just following WoW’s lead. WoW, of course, handled their payola scheme much more elegantly. They called it a “refer-a-friend” service, and supposedly it’s to help you get your friends hooked. But most of the WoW players I know bought a second account for themselves in order to take advantage of refer-a-friend. And who wouldn’t? You get:

• 30 free levels to grant to another character, after you level the first one to 60
• The ability to teleport all around every hour
• A free unicorn-zebra mount
• If you dual box (or actually have a friend) you also earn triple XP! up to level 60

I loved this. It was the most fun I’ve had in WoW by a long shot! If I could pay another $50 or whatever in order to have that much fun in WoW for the rest of the levels, I totally would.

Of course, the old-school hardcore WoW players were angered by this. (The “sanctity of leveling”? Tee hee… super-invested gamers, you gotta love ‘em.) But Blizzard has finally realized that their old-school hardcore demographic is tiny compared to everybody else — the silent majority, people who would never imagine logging into a forum, but who play weekly or monthly just the same.

I give WoW credit for spinning a good pitch — the whole “refer a friend” thing is very clever, even though most people I know used it just to power up alts. In contrast, EQ2’s bald-faced “give us money to spruce up your character” plan is pretty meager.

EQ2 really needs to go further. Almost everything that’s for sale is cosmetic! I like cosmetic items, but I also like things that make me better. I don’t care about the sanctity of leveling, I want to have fun. Only the potions give you any sort of power boost. The best one gives you a 50% earned-XP boost for 2 hours. Sounds cool, but there’s a catch: it only boosts the XP you get from killing monsters, not from questing. Contrast that to WoW’s deal which gives you a 300% boost if you dual-box — and also boosts quest XP, not just monsters. I’m sorry guys, but that’s small potatoes compared to what WoW sold me. On the other hand, there’s no level cap on these potions, and I don’t have to dual-box, which I found a bit tedious. So I’ve purchased several of these potions for different effects and I’ve been happy with the purchases. The payment system is really very well done, too.

Since EQ2 doesn’t feel it can afford to consolidate servers, this is a nice way to help players through the doldrum levels so they can reach the place where the other players are. (They’ve made a lot of other concerted moves to push people to high level, so I know it’s on their minds. Which is good.) And hey, guys, if you sold a Give You Two Free Levels For $30 potion, I’d be mighty tempted. The market’s wide open. You pushed through the imaginary microtransaction barrier. Don’t stop now!

 If you’re making an MMORPG (or any kind of RPG, for that matter), one of the very first questions you have to answer is, “How do levels work in my game?”

Of course, before you answer that you might ask, “do we even have levels in our game at all?” Maybe you don’t have “levels” per se, but if you are making  an RPG then we already know that the characters become more powerful over time. You need to represent that power numerically to the player somehow, whether it’s in the form of character levels, space ship hull armor, sword damage stats, or the number of magic spells in the spellbook.

Whatever the numbers may represent, something tangible makes some players more powerful than other players. So let’s lump all of that together as “levels” for now, because it turns out you have to ask similar broad questions regardless of the particular form of level you use.

So back to the question: “How do levels work in my game?” First off, you need to know how big a difference there is between levels. How much more powerful is a level 10 character compared to a level 9? Do they become 20-25% more power when they level, like EQ1? Are they 10-15% more powerful, like WoW? Or is it only 3-5% more power, as in AC1?

This may seem like an overly narrow place to start, but the power differential between levels has a lot of gameplay ramifications.

If level differences are large:

• When a character gains a level, the player can often go different places and kill different things than they could before, so levels provide a good way to break up content and provide a feeling of progress.
• Players feel much more powerful when they level up, so gaining a level is a meaningful accomplishment.
• Players have trouble grouping with characters of different levels players because their power levels vary dramatically. This limits the opportunities for grouping, especially at lower and middle levels.
• PvP between differently-leveled characters isn’t very balanced, or fun, even if the players are only a few levels apart. Again, this limits the opportunities for PvP play.

If level differences are small:

• Players don’t get excited about leveling up, because it doesn’t make them feel more powerful or open up new venues of gameplay.
• Players can group with a broader range of other characters easily, making it easier to find a group to play with.
• PvP between differently-leveled characters is more exciting and accessible for a broader level range.

Breaking up Content

Levels are an important part of giving players direction: levels are how players understand where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to do. They intuitively know that they should be in areas with similarly-leveled players and opponents. Levels also control exploration. When the power differences between levels are big, players are not able to roam very far. The less important levels are, however, the more characters can roam the world at will.

In AC1, level differences were originally so miniscule that a level 20 archer could often kill a level 80 opponent. How could they tell that they could do that? They just had to try it and see what happened. This was a lot of fun for a certain type of player, but very confusing and even “cheaty” for many others.

On the other hand, players who liked exploration loved AC1 for this reason, because they could meander through most of the enormous game world with impunity.

PvP Considerations

You might be thinking, “Everybody knows that if you want a PvP game, you want small level differences.” When the power differences between character levels are small, then player skill has a larger impact in the outcome of PvP fights.

Certainly this is the case for EVE Online, as well as for AC1’s Darktide PvP server. Both games owe a lot of their PvP success to the fact that relative lowbies can kill players much higher level than them. This is a powerful enticement for new players and helps keep the competitive landscape fresh for long-term players.

So  a small level differential is a good place to start, but it’s not a magic solution. You still need to give your players a sense of forward progress and accomplishment over time, and if levels aren’t the primary means then you must have some other way. And those other ways can also represent strong power differentials that can limit PvP.

For example, it is often said that  Warhammer Online has a shallow level curve, but that’s not the whole story. WAR does have a relatively shallow “character level” curve, but then your power level becomes measured by your items and equipment. There’s still “high level” and “low level” equipment, and it still has a meaningful impact on the outcome of battles. So you haven’t gotten away from the problem of power differentials: you’ve just mitigated it significantly.

You can also mitigate this problem by making levels increase the breadth of game verbs available to a player, rather than by increasing the potency of the verbs. In EVE Online, for instance, mastering a skill isn’t particularly hard — but there are a ton of skills for you to master. You’re gaining more verbs, which can affect your overall potency in PvP somewhat, but not nearly as dramatically as if you just kept jacking your damage-dealing statistic up directly.

Grouping Considerations

Grouping in PvE is another important consideration to keep in mind when you are designing your leveling system. Players can generally only group up with other characters that are within their relative power range. In most games, if you were 500% more powerful than your team mates, it wouldn’t be a lot of fun for the weaker group members - they’d feel like hangers-on rather than part of the team.

So most games restrict groups to a certain power range. But this drastically narrows the population of characters who are available to group together at any given time. In a game with a lot of group-centric content, the inability to find a group can be deadly - especially for players who join the game after the majority of the players have reached maximum level.

Of course, there are nifty mechanics like Sidekicking and Mentoring to help fix this: they temporarily alter a player’s level so that they can group with friends at all levels. This is an elegant fix that neatly side-steps the question of power levels, but keep in mind that it may require some serious design planning to fit into your particular game.

Making Leveling Up Fun

Finally, we come to the most important consideration: fun. Players get more excited about leveling up if they get significantly more powerful when they do so. When they get new verbs, new places to explore, and new things to kill, they tend to find leveling up to be pretty rewarding. If leveling up doesn’t give them these things with reasonable frequency, leveling up becomes rather dull … or worse, a grind.

In my experience, by far the best way to keep leveling up feeling fresh instead of repetitive is to introduce new gameplay verbs as often as possible.

You might also consider exactly when players earn their new power: in discrete chunks or smoothly over time? In Asheron’s Call, players didn’t need to reach new levels to get more powerful. As soon as they earned any XP, they could “spend” that XP to improve their skills. At low levels especially this provided immediate and continuous advancement, but at a price: when you actually leveled up, it was extremely anticlimactic. The level didn’t mean much of anything in itself.

Your choices here  will really depend on the game, but if you do have explicit character levels, then you should make it fun to reach those levels. Otherwise you’re just missing out on an obvious chance to give players fun.

Choosing The Right Leveling System

As always, it comes down to: “What experience do I want my players to have, and why?”

Are you making a game for mathematically-inclined nerds? They tend to have a broader perspective of overall power, and weaker level differences may make the most sense. But if you’re aiming for young people (tweens, say), you almost assuredly want strongly differentiated levels to act as a carrot and keep them playing. In fact, all the issues I’ve talked about here can be answered by figuring out how your target audience might think.

And one final  thing to keep in mind: if you are having trouble making a leveling system that will appeal to all of your demographics, then your target audience is almost certainly too broad.

Some good news on the EQ2 front; I noticed this tidbit: mentoring bonus increased for the summer. This is great news! So what does this mean for us EQ2 players? It means that for the summer,

“Mentors do receive viable amounts of experience and advance toward their actual level while mentoring, though at a slightly reduced rate.”

Woohoo! Viable amounts of XP! Yes, you can read between the lines too: mentoring normally returns unviable amounts of XP. I am honestly excited about this, because I like EQ2 and this gives me some more opportunities to group up. But really now… this is just another example of outdated balance methods.

We systems designers need to start balancing for awesome. Traditionally, we balanced for perfection. Older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot show this most clearly: they have tightly-controlled classes with an extremely limited range of effective verbs. Most classes have a “right” way to build the character and myriad “wrong” ways to do it. The systems designer makes sure that the classes’ “right” ways are all reasonably in sync, at least at max-level. Everything else can go to hell, and does, but hey, these particular best-case builds are balanced!

This is dumb. I can say this with hard-earned experience, because I did this very thing in my first year as a system designer for Asheron’s Call 2. I did real damage to the funness of that game by balancing it. Those were rookie mistakes which I deeply regret. But I learned my lesson. AC2’s expansion pack balance was a whole lot more fun than my earlier balancings. It took a lot of beatings for me to get it through my head, but I got it. And I’m here to tell you to stop making the same mistake I did.

There are little lies we tell ourselves, we system designers. “Making the game perfectly balanced is key tothe long-term sustainability of the game.” “Without extremely tight balance, PvP will not be any fun.” “Only a handful of forum whiners will even notice this nerf.” That’s all rationalization. Truth is, we’re just being anal.

It grates on you, those imperfections. It looms so large that it seems like it’s ruining the game. “This class is 10% too powerful [in the right builds, with the right equipment]. 10%! I have to fix this now before this class becomes Flavor of the Month and everything I’ve strived for disintegrates before my eyes. We have to hotfix this nerf NOW.” I’ve been there. And I guarantee that EQ2 suffers from the same thing. Their game systems designer(s) are too close to the game, too anal-retentive, and too controlling. They need to get with the times, or move to a more old-school game than EQ2 wants to be.

Why would mentoring need a boost just to become “viable”? And why on earth is this a temporary bonus, something just being done for a while lest it ruin the entire game? There are answers, and I’m sure they are plausible ones. Let’s see, how about, “mentoring already has valuable benefits like alternate-advancement points, and mentored players are more powerful than regular characters of that level, so we don’t want people to mentor all the time.” So what’s the fix? Make mentoring utterly useless… except this summer, when it’s sort of usable. Mentoring doesn’t need to be controlled this tightly. And even if it did, the answer is not to make it useless for 9 months out of the year. That’s the easy way out.

Another example: about a year ago, my low-level Templar character got all of his meager crowd control powers nerfed. These were not awesome powers — they were cute emergency powers. His mez ability used to last 9 seconds, usable every 5 minutes. Then it got nerfed so that it lasted only 3 seconds. I had to take all of those nerfed powers off my power bar — they were rendered useless. (They are slightly useful again now that I’ve leveled the Templar to 65… but still not really worth using anymore.)

Why did those mildly useful powers become useless? Because some Templar build at max-level was too powerful… at least on paper. So they nerfed all Templars down the line. Cheap, lazy, and very detrimental to the game. If you’re going to nerf, you owe it to your players to find the very least amount of nerfing necessary to achieve your goals. Yes, that means you need to play-test characters at multiple levels, and you even need to playtest characters without optimal gear (*gasp*) because not everybody has optimal gear. Really! I know, nobody on the forums is wearing crap armor, and the ultra-hardcore people in your guild are wearing awesome stuff, so it sure seems like everybody is wearing awesome stuff. That’s another rookie mistake. Use your data analysis tools! As a systems designer, they should be something you refer to every single day. Don’t guess. Check.

It’s also critical to get a perspective from some distance away from the problem. This is incredibly hard to do on a live team, but it’s the only way to do your job well. All the end-of-the-world scenarios we tend to imagine are crap. For instance, suppose an overpowered class really does end up a flavor-of-the-month class as thousands of people reroll. Oh no, you have flavor-of-the-month classes. What ever will you do?! Huh, would you look at that? It doesn’t reduce your populations at all, and it even encourages players to reroll alts. It’s not a particularly bad problem. You don’t need to hot-fix for it. But it feels soooo wrong. It feels like failure to a game systems designer. And what will the board trolls say? They’ll start talking about how stupid you are! You’ve just got. to. fix. it. NOW. Even if it makes more of a mess than you started with.

But what’s important is that your game is fun, and you need to make that the primary goal of everything you do. If you have to nerf something, nerf the particular scenario, not the underlying system. Over-nerfing is the easy road, but not the road to fun. Having a cool mentoring system and then making it give only pitiful amounts of XP is a cop out. Maybe some games can only afford to balance the cheesy way, because they have a live team of six people. But games like EQ2 have plenty of time and money to do it right.

Anything else in my little rant here? Let’s see… oh yeah, as a whole, can we systems designers agree to stop copping out on verb breadth? I know it’s a whole lot easier to balance a class when they have only a tiny range of options. But that isn’t very fun. It’s a lot more fun for every class to have a lot of different things they can do. That probably means the game will never be truly balanced, but that’s okay. Better fun than balanced. It’s okay for a Templar to have a couple crowd-control powers. It’s fine for a Guardian to have a neat DoT ability. Do what it takes to make them fun, and don’t get hung up on whether or not you’ll be able to perfectly balance it. Because you won’t.

This is my rule of thumb for game balance: if all the classes feel really fun, then I’m doing a good job.

I’ve never been one to idolize world size or travel times in MMO games. I don’t really believe that ’slow travel makes the world seem bigger’. But I put up with travel in MMO games because, however much it annoys me, it rarely rises into my list of top ten concerns.

But … I’m finished reading all the new blog posts in Google Reader, I’m all caught up with both Salon and Sinfest, and I’m considering starting on next year’s taxes — and I’m not even halfway done with this quest. If you are familiar with WoW, here’s a quick sketch: Wintersping to Eastern Plaguelands to Azshara to Eastern Plaguelands to Un’Goro … and after that to Feralas and then back to Eastern Plaguelands.

For those of you not familiar with World of Warcraft, here’s the summary: I’ve been traveling for the past 30 minutes, I’ve had to kill one creature, and if I continue I have another 30 minutes of travel ahead of me before anything else interesting happens.

But I’m stopping here. Ultimately I don’t care about the reward or future quests in this chain or even, really, saving the world. I’m bored. I’m leaving.

So be careful when you ‘make the world seem bigger’: because it doesn’t matter how big your world is if I’m too annoyed to play.