People who think like me are really useful to have on your MMO team. They won’t just dig into the guts of your game, they will revel in the guts of your game, sorting them this way and that, modeling them in myriad ways. This will, generally, result in a better product.

But they won’t ever come to the producer and say, “Okay! The balancing is all finished!” Trust me: that will never happen.

In the latest WoW update, the systems designers are revising everything. Why? Because it wasn’t perfect. And it needs to be perfect. Take the Hunter ability “Volley”. They cut it from the game, because:

Channeling a spell that makes arrows fall out of the sky doesn’t feel like a hunter ability and doesn’t even really match the name of the spell.

But fear not, because hunters can now launch their traps! And a long-distance snake trap should be a hit at parties; the snakes have various debilitating effects. Of course, propelling traps a great distance is a bit odd, as players were quick to point out:

Trap launcher? 

I have to admit, I find it silly that they think Volley is too “magical” but us tying a bag/box of snakes to an arrow and shooting them at people is perfectly reasonable.

But this is how designers think. After manipulating these skills for years and analyzing them from every angle, it starts to make sense in a way that sane people can have a hard time seeing.

Ah, a classic: I remember when Strider used a snakes-over-time attack to slow the ring-wraiths' movement speed for 15 seconds.

Summoning arrows is ridiculous, that’s something a wizard would do — and the WoW hunter is no wizard. No, the Hunter is apparently modeled after the cheesiest version of the Green Arrow, who has a specialty arrow for every situation. That’s pretty cool, actually… but I’m not sure how that makes more sense than abstractly raining arrows on a target. Then again, I haven’t been poring over these skills for thousands of hours, either.

Expect Systems Designers To Think Like… Systems Designers

What I’m trying to say is this: you hired these guys because they love to create fun mechanics and then balance them. The same personality traits that make them good at this job also tend to give them a bit of an obsessive streak, to put it mildly.

To a systems designer, the game is always imperfect. And not just mildly imperfect – radically imperfect. In need of a total do-over. And when you finish the total do-over, it won’t be perfect either, and you’ll need another one. And then you just need to touch up every single thing four or five times over several years, and then, you know what? We really need to just wipe this system and do it over.

It will never end.

Philosophical question: is the boxing-glove arrow more insane or less insane than the bag-of-snakes arrow?

At first, the designer is completely right, and the game probably really is horrifically imbalanced. But at some point, perhaps years later, the designer’s opinion of “imbalanced” will be so subtle that players will have trouble even conceiving of the problem being solved. At this point, further changes will have very small return on investment. However, knowing when you reach that line is not easy, since it requires your systems designers to step away from their beloved spreadsheets and be objective about a problem’s actual impact on the game. This is a learned skill that systems designers do not just magically have.

Conclusion

So here’s what I’m telling you:

1. If you’re a systems designer, realize your obsession, so that you can occasionally take a step back and see if you’re still sane.
2. If you’re a producer, realize your systems designer is obsessed with perfecting the game and they will never ever be done. And every problem will always be presented as a heinous game-ruining problem. It’s up to you to decide what to do about that, if anything.

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This experiment from 1999 was quite astonishing. Framed as a test, the video asks you to count the number of times some kids pass a basketball back and forth. Partway through, a person wearing a gorilla suit saunters into the video, mugs right in front of the camera, plain as day, and leaves. In the experiment, fully half the people who watched this video did not notice the gorilla. They were too busy counting basketball passes.

None of those people would believe they could miss a friggin’ gorilla. When the gorilla was pointed out to these people, some insisted that the experimenters had switched the tape! They pretty much universally said “of course I would see a gorilla.” But yet, half of them were wrong. The new book by one of the authors of this experiment is engaging and worth a read.

If you didn’t see the gorilla in that video, you aren’t stupid. Even after many experiments, the researchers couldn’t find any way to predict the people who would notice the gorilla (or whatever other random thing they added, in any context). Regardless of the experiment or the person, some people notice the external details sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. But people always think they will notice all major details. Worse, when they see somebody not noticing an important detail, they assume those other people are idiots… even though it’s just dumb luck that they noticed it themselves.

EDIT (bonus paragraph): the first thing commenters say is “well, but the gorilla blends in!” That was the first thing the psychologists assumed, too. I’ll give you that they are psychologists, but in this particular case that doesn’t mean they’re completely stupid. They tried numerous additional experiments, including, for instance, one where you are supposed to count the number of small black digits floating by in a big white empty screen. Then a gigantic red letter E flies by. Half the people still missed the giant letter. It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it’s not about something blending into the noise. Even incredibly distracting interruptions will still get tuned out. That’s why this is an interesting phenomenon.

We have a highly-ingrained belief that we notice everything around us, but the truth is that we have very selective attention. When we’re focused on something else, we often miss very obvious things in our surroundings. But we believe only idiots would do that.

This is the crux of the book, although it unfolds into a lot of other interesting experiments and diversions. The authors are concerned with how this affects our court system, among other things. I am more concerned with how it affects the games we make.

Instant Death

It’s an MMO designer classic: stick some giant horrific monster into an area to keep players on their toes.  If the players refuse to run away from said monster, they get killed. But they always have plenty of warning. “The earth shakes when the giant walks,” says the designer — “they can’t help but notice that! So it’s not unfair. It’s just something to keep them on their toes.” Or how about the old “random firetraps in the middle of a raid dungeon” trick? Spices things up without being unfair, right?

Unfortunately, half the time these sorts of encounters end in unavoidable death. The players are deeply engaged in playing the game — watching the little bars tick down and using the right skills at the right time — and half the time, they miss your deathtrap cues, no matter how obvious you think they are. When they die, they are understandably upset.

The really frustrating part is that other players think they’re morons. Hell, the players themselves often come to think they’re morons. “How did I manage to get ganked by an elite cavalry unit when you can hear the horse steps a mile away?!” The general conclusion seems to be that the average MMO player is really stupid. Right?

Caption: Unpredictable instant death is not a fun game mechanic.

But in actuality, designers are being just as misguided as the players. Most designers would agree that it isn’t fun to die instantly without any warning. But yet half the time, these “easily avoidable” deathtraps go unnoticed. There’s nothing the players could do to pay more attention. It’s not possible to focus on the gameplay and also notice 100% of the other stuff going on all the time.

The result is that half of those kills are insta-kills without any warning. They are the antithesis of fun. Worse, other players often make fun of them for something they couldn’t avoid. What a stupid thing to include in an MMO!

To HUD or Not To HUD

A related study referenced in the book looked at pilots being trained to use new HUD systems. The pilots would get so transfixed managing the HUD data that they would miss things going on out the window — things happening literally underneath the translucent HUD, or just an inch away from it. It’s not about visually missing something, it’s about our brain completely filtering things out as noise.

We’ve all played games where the GUI was more important than everything else going on. Hell, I still have no idea what the 3D characters do in Rock Band — I can never take my eyes off the fretboard GUI long enough to notice anything.

Among designers who have learned about this psychological phenomenon, there is a tendency to try to integrate the gameplay right into the world. (I have often been in this camp, with mixed success.) For instance, in Red Dead Redemption there is no health meter. The screen just gets redder and redder as you are about to die. I find that this does make it easier me to focus on the world around me instead of constantly glancing at that damned health bar… but on the other hand, I am often surprised when I suddenly keel over dead. (I can hear you thinking “But the screen turned bright red! How could you not notice that! Oh… wait, right.” Just because it’s impossible to miss doesn’t mean we won’t miss it anyway, half the damned time. HALF THE TIME!)

How Do We Fix It

The authors of The Invisible Gorilla want to make you aware of the fact that your attention is extremely selective — that you are missing crazy things happening around you all the time. That is a great thing to teach people, but that’s not the role of video games.

Most video games (including the ones I like to make) are escapism, much like books or TV. Here, we want you to feel good about yourself. We don’t want to teach you that your brain can miss important things going on around you — instead, we want to hide this flaw in the human brain. When you’re playing a video game, you shouldn’t be surprised about unfortunate outcomes. You shouldn’t go “How did I die?!” or “Where did that level-80 elite mob come from!?” Those questions indicate that the player is feeling abused. Moreover, they aren’t learning anything, either (except, perhaps, not to play your game): it is not possible to “learn to pay more attention”.

The only band-aid fix is not to have nasty traps like that in your game. That isn’t really a deep “fix”, though, because the problem happens with rewards, too – I mean, you are probably running past tons of ore mines, rare monsters, spontaneous treasure chests, and who knows what else, without ever noticing them. On the one hand, that stuff didn’t kill you, so it doesn’t hurt you. On the other hand, designers didn’t factor in that you would miss half the stuff they stuck in, so the game may feel more sparse and empty than they expect… because if you’re focusing on combat, you are literally missing half of the cool stuff around you.

More Research

Until reading this book, I didn’t realize that psychologists have done quite so much research on selective attention. The book is obviously not too concerned with video game design, but I’m hopeful that there are experiments by human-computer interaction psychologists that may help us understand how to work with this issue when designing games. If I find some, I’ll post about them. (And if you have leads, please share them!)

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Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or “Life Grip”) is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can’t seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

But some priests hate it:

The main problem with Leap of Faith is that the raid member who can’t learn to get out of the fire in time now is able to point the finger at the healer and shout “I died because you didn’t pull me out of the fire”. /facepalm.

And on and on; this is horrible because players will hate it, why didn’t Blizzard think about whether players will hate it? How stupid are they? Think for a minute, damn! What players mean is, “My initial impression is one of fear, and I am afraid of this (and most) change,” and they should be ignored.

Now, I don’t mean they should keep getting ignored forever… they just need to be ignored until they have in-game time with the actual changes. If you’ve come up with a potentially very fun new game verb, you should try it out and let players use it for a while. If there are social problems with it, you can usually fix them, and if you can’t, you can always remove the power.

Why bother? Well, think about what your goal is here. If you’re even considering adding new game verbs to a live, launched game — in an old class to boot — it’s because you’ve decided that the gameplay of said class needs to be “more fun”. Assuming number-tweaks are not adequate for the task, you need new verbs — new fun things for players to do.

And there are no interesting game verbs that do not cause alarmed panic among some part of your audience. Most of the time, it turns out the verbs work fine after minor tweaks. Not always, but usually. It’s definitely the way to bet. Fun verbs that work in your engine are precious and should never be thrown away unless their problems are absolutely insurmountable.

Of course, fine-tuning this during beta-testing would be sane… which looks like what Blizzard is going to do, anyway.

[I am having a hard time finishing any of the vast, overly long articles I wanted to post next, so I figured I'd just do some really short blog posts for a few weeks. And even this post is based on weeks-old news. Blogging is hard! I blame all the really good games out these days. And sun spots.]

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Mixed Bag of Fun and Crap

Get ready to blow up countless numbers of space jerks! Wait, wasn't there an ethics code in Star Trek? Whatever. Let's genocide some species!

Confusing. Buggy. Laggy. Did I mention confusing? And yet … here I am waiting for the servers to come back up.

As I write this, it is Friday night at 2:30am and the Star Trek Online servers are down. They have been down for hours. The game was patched at least twice today, with huge hundred-meg patches each time. My naive inner voice says, “Maybe they fixed the quest bugs!” but in reality I know they’re just trying to get new hardware working. Something has gone very wrong and they’re scrambling to fix it.

The launch has been problematic. Tons of downtime. Problems with the billing server. Severe lag in some parts of the game. But the space combat is fun.

I had to Google where a great many quest NPCs were because the in-game maps are cryptic and terrible. I had to ask other players for help about how to advance my crew members’ level, and how to increase in rank, and I spent twenty minutes remapping the keyboard keys because Cryptic doesn’t playtest for lefties. But it doesn’t matter because the space combat is fun.

The ground combat is not fun. It’s not bad per se. It just isn’t anything to write home about: it’s boring. The space combat, though, has just the right amount of tactics and pacing to keep you glued to your chair, killing Klingons until the wee hours of the night. Why is it fun? It just is: the moment-to-moment activities are entertaining. Okay, it starts off a bit slow and it takes a bit too long to open up the next ship — but the payoff is great.

Space combat cribs extremely heavily from Star Fleet Command, but who wouldn’t use that as their starting point? It’s the best of the Star Trek space games by a large margin.

A Very Special Audience

This game hits a very specialized audience. Sandra is a Star Trek fan and an avid MMO player; she would be an ideal target audience for this game. Except that they used vaguely-3D space combat … just 3D enough to make her seasick whenever she tries to fly anywhere.

A lot of people get seasick when navigating in 3D. It’s one of the things they teach you in any gaming school. Cryptic had to know this. So they made a very specific choice: “Fuck those guys! We’re making a 3D space game for the nerds who like epic space battles.” That’s what they did, and it paid off in fun. Nerds like me think this is a fun game.

But this game is far from being even as accessible as other major MMOs. Sandra can play WoW for 12 hours straight but she can’t handle STO for more than 15 minutes. I hope they weren’t expecting to gather the casual gaming crowd with this thing.

Also, if you don’t like Star Trek, don’t bother. I have a friend who is loving the game, who admits to “doing the voices” during fights. He loves the game. (Yelling things like “Emergency power to the starboard shields!” or “Dammit I need those torpedos now!” definitely makes the game more fun, unless of course people around you are pointing and laughing.)

Another friend couldn’t get past the tedious beginning to get to the good parts. To enjoy STO you need to like Star Trek and space battles and not get seasick when the camera swings around and have a bit of patience to wade through some dull bits.

Amazing Achievement Even With Help

Meet my tactical officer Mordak. Don't make fun of his 70s 'stache or he'll break you in half.

I worked as a designer on STO when the license was owned by Perpetual. Perpetual disintegrated (because their engineering department failed to make an MMO engine), and the license was sold to Cryptic. I assume Cryptic obtained all of Perpetual’s assets and docs as part of the handoff, because the game has many little touches that come right out of our original docs.

Just as an example, I worked on the character classes, races, and traits, and many of the bits I had planned are in the game. For instance, Bolians have acidic blood when they get hit by melee attacks. That was one of mine. Not special or important, but recognizable. There are too many for it to be a coincidence — and yes, it is awesome to see random bits of my design docs in the game.

On a larger scale, they reused Perpetual’s notion of how Warp Space works. They obviously used the mock-up screens we had made. However, in our design, the blue ribbons that flow along the map were highways that increase speed. In Cryptic’s STO, they seem to just be pretty ribbons of light.

However, there are big differences too. Perpetual had designed the ground game to some extent, including the three classes as seen in Cryptic’s version, but the big thing that Perpetual didn’t have was a fun space game. When I abandoned Perpetual’s sinking ship, we still had no fun space-combat prototype.

We were, of course, playing tons of Starfleet Command, but we were running in random directions, trying to do too many things at once. We argued, “You should be able to beam a PC bridge crew onto your ship, and take stations!” or “If the ship is severely damaged, the captain should be able to rush off the bridge and put out the engineering fires!” and on and on. In other words: we had just begun to brainstorm what would be fun space combat in an MMO.

Cryptic must have spent a good amount of energy making the space game fun. They certainly didn’t crib from Perpetual’s notes there. This was all Cryptic. And it’s the best part of the game. So hats off to them!

Space combat is the core of the gameplay; it’s a lot more fun than ground combat, which feels chaotic and mushy and has terrible AI. And all other aspects of the game — such as crafting or exploring your ship — are barely there. They’re just little placeholder systems that are clearly supposed to be improved later.

The amazing thing is that they made this entire game in two years. Yes, they reused Champions’ engine. (It even has the same bugs as Champions had when it launched, so it’s obviously based on an older branch of Champions.) And yes, they cribbed from Perpetual’s docs and probably from anywhere else they could, too, because holy crap they had only two years to make a HUGE game. But I gotta say, for just two years of work, this is an amazing accomplishment and I am quite impressed at the team’s finesse.

Containing an entire space game and a ground game at once is an incredible undertaking. Now if only they’d spent another year finishing the game, they would have a knockout product that would … well, it’s too inaccessible to steal many players from WoW. It might have stolen some from EVE Online though … hmm, yeah, okay I agree: better to ship it now. They did at least do one crucial thing: launch with a core gameplay mechanic that is inherently fun.

Buggy, Confusing, Boring

Tactical officer applies harmless fire suppressant to an out-of-range opponent who is not on fire anyway.

That said, the game is a mechanics nightmare, with so many interactive parts that a million little quirks occur in the game. Here’s a bug report from their open beta just a few weeks ago:

So there I am, rescuing scientists from a burning science station. There are fires everywhere, so I rip some fire extinguishers off the wall, and pass them out to my away team- keeping one for myself, of course.

When we came to a fire, sometimes the team would try to find a way around; other times they would just stop at the fire, and go no further; and once in a while they would just run right in and catch on fire. The one thing they never tried was putting out the fires- well, if you want something done right… So I put them out myself, and we rescued the scientists.

A mission or two later, we’re down in the swamp, surrounded by Gorn warriors, mortars, and pet dinosaurs- I’m talking about some really nasty troops here, and the whole swamp was full of them. Luckily, I had my bridge crew with me! What would I do without these guys, right? They’re my brain trust, my A-Team! So the Gorn attack, and my crew charges into the fray (very outnumbered, mind you), and do the only thing that makes any sense in this situation. They use the fire extinguishers.

On Gorn assault troops.

I kid you not. They pulled out those fire extinguishers, and started spraying gray smoke everywhere! Much dying ensued. Not the kind I had hoped for, either.

After we rezzed, I went around the group and confiscated everyone’s firefighting equipment before we went back into battle. I just hope my ship never catches on fire, because we will be doomed.

I reproduced this awesome glitch myself and it is awesome. I gave one of my tactical officers a fire extinguisher, and every so often he breaks that sucker out and goes to town.

And there are a great many other funny stories to be had, especially on the ground combat (where you basically play a “pet class” role, managing four pet NPCs at all times). Some of them are intentional (try equipping Tribbles on your crew members), some not so much — I gave my science officer a bunch of medical hypos, and then watched in horror as he injected all of them into his body, one after another, like a burned out junkie.

Less amusingly, the game’s skills are a muddled mess. Buying the first point of training for any of your bridge crew actually decreases their effectiveness, according to the in-game GUI screen. Buying the second point brings them back up to where they were before you bought any points. Buying the third point is when they actually get better. This is, of course, a bug, even if they did it on purpose.

And certainly the worst problem is that the game doesn’t get to the exciting parts nearly fast enough. You will be stuck on your newbie ship for 12 hours or so of gameplay before you get the better ship with more options and interesting setups. This is a long time to be flying around in a ship with two phaser banks and one photon torpedo tube. They should definitely give you more options more quickly.

The Future: Brighter than Champions

The game is woefully imbalanced. Let’s just get that right out there. But they didn’t make the mistake they did on Champions, where they jacked up the difficulty through the roof on launch day. Kudos to learning from your mistakes, guys. It’s imbalanced, but it’s imbalanced in the player’s favor. They can slowly make the game harder until it reaches the desired point.

The ground combat is really boring. And I am sad to say that, because they obviously cribbed the basic ideas from design docs I wrote at Perpetual! But nevertheless, boring boring boring. To save it, they will need to cut out boring bits and add in new bits until they find more compelling moment-to-moment game mechanics. However, space combat has the spark of fun needed to carry this game forward in the meantime.

I thus predict a nice strong (200k?) audience for this intentionally niche game. When it comes out on XBox 360, with lots more polish, it could do even better. They just need to focus on bringing the fun mechanics to the light and fixing up all the broken and incomplete stuff.

This is a great game for being a part of the live team, because they will be able to make the game a lot better with relatively small amounts of effort. Good luck guys.

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What’s Turbine been doing the past year? Nothing too exciting, it seems… even though DDO went free-to-play and is apparently making lots of cash, it still has only a skeleton crew working it. But Turbine did just launch a new Lord of the Rings expansion — Siege of Mirkwood. It’s supposed to be really good, too. “Okay cool, it’s probably time I check in on Lotro,” I thought, early this morning. As of 1:30 am the following day, I am still not finished downloading.

I went and got the “Play in Under An Hour” download package. It started off downloading really fast, faster than my regular torrents, even. Then it stopped. I mean, it completely stopped downloading at all, for an hour. I shut it down and restarted it and it went for a while longer and then stopped. Repeat ad nauseum and finally it was finished! I logged in to the character-select screen, and … hey, that’s not what my old character was supposed to look like! He’s only wearing underwear!

Ha ha, of course, the quick downloader hasn’t downloaded my old avatar’s clothes. That’s fine. I’ll just look naked or whatever until it downloads. I click Log In. No, actually I will sit at the “loading” screen for HOURS without any feedback, while it downloads the needed art in tiny scrips and scraps. After hours of waiting, I gave up. (EDIT: apparently I should have shown up as red with a note that my character wasn’t available. But he was in the newbie town of Bree so I guess it figured he was available. I dunno.)

Eventually I uninstalled and tried to get smarter about this. “I do own the original disks, I’ll just install from disk and then patch.” As of this writing, the CD install is still patching. It’s been patching for 10 hours, with an average 200 KB/s download speed. So that’s like 8 gigs of downloaded data and I’m still at -700% complete.

No, really, I’m at -700% complete.

Is that good? Am I almost done? I don’t know. It went to 100% and then kept right on going, all the way up to 800% or so, and then flipped. Now it’s a negative number, but it’s slowly getting smaller. Maybe when it reaches 100% again it will be done.

I don’t know. All I know is they need to work harder to make this game accessible to returning players, because this is the second time in recent memory that I’ve tried to play Lotro and the second time I’ve failed to manage to play at all. Turbine could spend some time on this. I think that would be okay. I mean, they would make their money back for the time spent.

Okay, I’m done with the vitriol now.

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Fate Was Not Kind To You, WAR, Because You Were Developed By Morons

Some readers have asked me why I didn’t pick on Warhammer Online. The fact is that I did write about how doomed they were… but those posts never left the “drafts” section of the blog, because it was too easy a target. It’s like making fun of the mentally challenged kid: you don’t get points for showing them up. Anybody in the industry could have predicted what happened to WAR with 100% accuracy.

Gee, was WAR created by somebody who thinks people who disagree with him should be “burned at the stake”? Wait, and did that same article point out that WAR was developed primarily by inexperienced developers because they were easier to cow into obedience? Yes? Wait, literally? That wasn’t even exaggerated? Huh. And they said they hate playing other MMO’s because it “gives them ideas”? Weird. Maybe… maybe… could any of that have had something to do with the tons of newb mistakes they made? Nah. It was probably just the economic downturn.

In case you are confused by sarcasm, what I mean is the company deserved to fail due to their incompetence and they did, and anybody surprised by this is probably surprised by other predictable things, like the sun rising. They made a DAoC clone that wasn’t as compelling as the original, with a weaker IP (sorry, Warhammer tabletop fan(s), but it’s true: your IP is not even as big a draw as the free “Vaguely Camelot” IP), and they spent an amazing amount of time and money making the game, yet launched it with a pittance of content. And then they did all sorts of crazy things, like opting not to open forums, even for support. This made many players’ initial experience, including my own, pretty miserable. I had originally predicted they would have only 100k by their first-year mark, and I don’t know what exact number they have now, but I’d be a little surprised if they have that many playing customers.

Champions Online Falls On Face

I just canceled my Champions Online account yesterday. The place is a ghost town; I’d be confused and amazed if they have more than 50k subscribers (because, if so, where the heck are they?). Frankly, the game was launched way too soon, and they did the dumbest thing you can possibly do to a fragile game: they made a launch-day patch that made the game tons harder. After months of beta-testing, they threw ALL their data out the door, jacked all the monster difficulties way up, and shipped it. What kind of an idiot would do that? Actually, every newb team makes this mistake. It’s caused by thinking, “Holy SHIT, players will reach level 50 in a month of play! We have to fix it!” And so they fix it, all right. They make the game so un-fun that nobody bothers to get to 50 at all. Ta-da!

The thinking is really just that simple, and it’s always this stupid knee-jerk last minute reaction among the team. MMO’s need players to survive, and a traditional boxed game gets 90% of its players from its initial launch. So MMO companies are really keen to keep all those players paying for at least three months… ideally six months. But they realize they’re out of time, so they just flip some knobs, twiddle some monster skills, and hope for the best. Inevitably, they would have been better off letting people level quickly. Some might get bored, but they are likely to come back later when more stuff is added. If you make the game into an unbalanced muckball, everybody’s experience will be terrible and they won’t come back.

Sandra and my newbie experience was pretty amusingly bad. Our level 13 characters got stuck, unable to continue playing because we picked the wrong skills — we could no longer defeat monsters anywhere near our level. We had to roll new characters! That was basically when Sandra quit. I kept going a while longer, but the imbalances were pretty dramatic (both too easy and too hard, randomly, in every aspect of the game), and it sapped the fun out of being a superhero.

It’s better now, actually. It’s kind of fun now. If you like playing in a ghost town. Because there’s almost nobody left. If you want to play, I recommend you do it now! It’s getting hard to find PvP arena groups as it is… soon it may be impossible. I don’t know what they’re gonna do… well, if Cryptic can hold on until the Xbox 360 version launches, I’ll be happy to give the game another shot on the console.

“Of course Cryptic will stay alive!” you say. “They have Star Trek Online coming out in a couple months!” Uh, hrm. Well, here’s where I don’t pick on Star Trek Online because it’d be like making fun of the mentally handicapped again. Sorry, guys. I love the IP, and I know Cryptic is working hard, and I’d love to be proven wrong, but I can’t see it happening. STO won’t be substantially more polished than Champions was at launch. Why? Because it’s a significantly more complicated game, and it’s launching much too soon to be good enough. It will be lucky to retain 100k subscribers a year after launch. That number would be fine, except they probably need a lot more money than that to keep the lights on at Cryptic HQ, let alone repay their debts.

Aion Core Gameplay Involves Grinding and Being Murdered Repeatedly

Oh god Aion is a beautiful game. I don’t just mean the inhumanly pretty avatars. I mean the whole world has great art direction. It feels like Asian Disneyland From Hell. It’s wonderful. Cute kangaroos hop up to you and box you to death. Mole people squeal and fall over in mid-combat, too excited to keep fighting. One of the first surprise encounters comes from cute animated stalks of evil corn. There are beautiful lakes full of loons calling, fish swimming, adorable lobsters nipping at your feet. This game has serious atmosphere.

But it has the biggest grind EVAR. I had lots of friends who started it and were excited by it, and they have all left, except for one. The invariable reason? “This game is grindy as hell.” It’s got serious pacing problems, and for a PvP game it takes WAY too long to get to the PvP part.

And then when you get to the PvP part, turns out it’s full of these bird men who are 20 levels higher than you who continuously kill you, for fun, just for the hell of it. I had read that there were, like, these elaborate tiers of combat, so I could occasionally fight people somewhere near my level. That has yet to ever happen. Well, sometimes I can sneak up on an enemy while they’re fighting in PvE, and gank ‘em. That makes me feel like a big dickhead.

I’m still paying for Aion, but… I can’t see myself staying in it for much longer. And I lasted longer than almost everyone I know. The worlds are still relatively populated, though not nearly as much as two months ago. But it’s a beautiful game, and the US maintainers are desperately trying to fix things — they’ve gone to double-XP weekends every weekend in order to try to get people up to higher level so they can PvP. Will they succeed? Search me.

Aion is still a big hit in its homeland. But it’s a just modest success in the US. And the sad thing is, it’s the biggest US hit of the year by a long shot. (Ignoring WoW, which is on its own scale.)

Big-Ticket MMO’s Still Sucking, Facebook Games Growing More Fun

Another thing Scott’s blog pokes fun at are the terrible Facebook games that seem to be soul-sucking leeches, designed to hook players like crack and then spam their friends list for more suckers. Those games really are pretty terrible. But why is everybody focusing on these leech games? They are the dying breed on Facebook.

I was just working on a Facebook game with a lot of actual gameplay. It’s in Flash and it’s actually got a real virtual world and avatars and everything. And content and gameplay and so on! This is the future of Facebook games: actual games that happen to be integrated closely with Facebook.

Smart devs should get in on this while they can — there’s still time to make one of these second-gen Facebook games… that is to say, games with actual content. But I understand if you want to just make fun of Farmville some more instead. It is definitely easier.

Games Are Nickel And Diming Me, But I Am Still Not Angry

Another thing Scott’s blog pokes fun at is how games are charging for more stuff now. He listed off a lot of examples, but none of them were at all upsetting to me, with one exception: charging for rerolls in Champions, because Champions was designed to need lots of rerolls in order to play well. So charging for it is exceptionally mercenary for a subscription-based game.

But the other stuff? Charging for world transfers, race changes, character renames, whatever? Yeah, go ahead. In fact, please do more of it. I like these sort of options and I don’t mind paying a few bucks for them. You are not losing customers by adding a for-pay race-changing option. You just aren’t. It’s not a problem. I don’t know what Scott is smoking.

Conclusion: It’s The Business Model, Stupid

It’s tempting to say that these big-league MMOs are suffering primarily due to the economic downturn. But I have a hard time buying it. The Flash casual game market has really heated up this year; our FlashGameLicense.com brokerage site is showing huge monetary growth in terms of online games of all sorts: casual, hardcore, whatever. I’ll admit that no Flash product is as hardcore as “go to the store and buy a $50 box to play this game”. But DDO is apparently breathing new life into Turbine as a “freemium” downloadable game. Champions and Warhammer could be doing this, too. Why aren’t they?

The reason they don’t is that small MMO companies are venture-capital collection machines. They seem to exist to get venture capital. They do not exist to eke out a modest profit off of their games; they need to show HUGE (500%) return on investment in order to keep getting more venture capital. So what happens when their game isn’t a 500% ROI game? They don’t try to salvage it and turn a nice sum. They immediately go about desperately making another game, another gambit, another roll of the dice, maybe we can keep this boat afloat before the VCs shut us down, maybe they won’t strip us for parts if this next game/expansion/repackaging/acquisition is a hit!

VC’s are used to most of their bets not paying off. That’s why they demand such huge rewards from the ones that do. Would it be possible to take 5 million and make a game that returns 15 million in ten years? Yes, that’s not even that hard. But good luck getting only 5 mil in venture capital. You’ll need to set your sites bigger. You’ll need to go for the mega-game that jousts with WoW’s popularity in order to get venture capitalists excited.

It’s a dead-end dream for most companies. The thing Sandra and I have always wanted to do in the MMO world is take one of these modest games, these Champions or Warhammers or Asheron’s Calls or whatever, and run them, and turn a tidy profit for many years. That dream is hard to realize because these companies aren’t interested in turning a minor profit on a game. (With the very notable exception of SOE, who is happy to keep a game going as long as it’s in the black. Good on ‘em. Note that they aren’t a venture-capital company, though.) For most game companies, when a game goes out the door and flops on its face, it’s not time to repurpose the game and figure out how to make a profit — it’s time for a hail-mary pass with the entire company.

In other words, yeah, these 2009 MMOs sucked. But not really. If the stakes weren’t so high, these would all be little success stories. They “suck” because they threw millions and millions at a product, scrambled as hard as they could for a few years, and then rolled the dice to see if they got rich instantly. They didn’t. So, bam. They suck by fiat.

I think we’re seeing that infusing game companies with fifty million in venture capital is not a reliable way to make or run a game. But we’re at a dead spot right now, where MMO’s are still too hard for a small privately-funded team to make, but not profitable enough for a VC firm to get rich off of. So the games keep imploding, the same sad story over and over. And yes, there will be more of the same for 2010, but we’re going to start seeing more of the small companies making names for themselves, showing reasonable profits and carving into the mainstream gaming audience. 2011 is when the flood-gates will finally burst.

Conclusion Part 2:

To be clear: I don’t mean to be picking on Scott Jennings. It does seem like I am, but this is just what happens when you single-source your vitriol-post. Scott’s a good guy who knows what he’s talking about, he won’t mind.

So, yeah, this is why I try not to share my random game opinions on the blog unless there’s something constructive to add. But I guess I’m averaging one hate-post a year, which isn’t too bad.

So yeah… I’ll see you later, when I finally manage to get the next of those Psychology for Designers articles completed!

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Anyway, it is very easy for an early-launch fiasco to turn one of these small-to-medium games, like Champions is destined to be, into a tiny speck of a game. Right now Champions is in grave peril of this happening, and I really hope they fix it.

Champions is not a polished game. It’s got the heart of a really fun game, but it is so glitchy that it can be hard to see that. The only reason any sane team would launch the game in this state is because they have too much pressure not to (from their funders, publishers, or just their bank accounts). So they knew it wasn’t perfect. The game’s dense and confusing GUI doesn’t do it any favors; boss monsters pendulum between trivial and instant death; oh, and half of the game’s abilities are broken or buggy, often to the point of uselessness.

They got the client and server stable, the graphics pretty, and then they launched it, ignoring all those “little content bugs” that are actually huge issues. Been there, done that. It sucks, but you can salvage the game and get a nice medium sized, 300k subscriber base out of it. That’s what you should be striving for now, guys.

I want to love this game. It is an ambitious, Warcraft-meets-City of Heroes, directed game with lots of variety and options and possibilities. It’s a wonderful playground, but with plenty of goals, too. At the same time, it’s also stupidly punitive. As I said, nearly half the game’s powers don’t work, or are so underpowered that they effectively don’t work. But others are so powerful that they simply must be purchased… and the game is clearly balanced around you owning one or more of these potent powers. However, you’re left on your own to discover what works and what doesn’t. So far, so … good! This won’t appeal to the part of the WoW audience who wants more direction and simplicity, but it will appeal to a different audience, one that will explore their little hearts out. But then Champions ruins this by charging an arm and a leg to alter your character later.

My first character is actually ruined. “Telepoet” can teleport, and he can spout poetry, but he does not own a defensive power and so he cannot solo. Alas, I picked his options in the wrong order and I can never afford to undo these changes. Right now, to get him back to a usable point, I’d have to spend 6 times more money than I’ve ever owned. As a final cruel jab, the cost actually scales up with level, so I can’t even save up money to buy it: if I just farm low-level monsters for money, I earn XP which levels me up, and the goal actually gets further away. The character is truly stuck.

My next character is usable, but gimpy. He picked a power that worked great at level 5, but stopped being useful by level 10. When I tried to reset him at level 12, it cost the rough equivalent of Fort Knox’s vault. I can play him, for now, but there’s always a nagging feeling that he’s not as good as he could be. And he seems to be getting weaker. It gnaws at me. Do I really want to keep going with this guy, if he’s going to get ruined soon too? Maybe I should just go back to EQ2.

Cryptic can trivially stop the gushing loss of players: Make it cost next to nothing to reset your character. Call it an Early Player Advantage that wears off in three months (presumably when you have vaguely-working powers, if not balanced ones). Don’t worry, Cryptic, you can take this away again. You’ll get bitching, but not nearly as many people will quit as are quitting now. Talk amongst your team until you figure out the compromise that works best, but here’s the thing: my level 13 guy has 50 silver, and I need to completely reset him. Make it happen. Your post-free-month concurrency numbers are going to make you very sad. Take steps now to buttress them.

Despite this, I have really enjoyed myself in the game. Yes, the game systems are hilariously buggy, and every patch seems to fix two bugs and add two more. And did I mention that half the powers are buggy? But it’s still fun. Really fun. However, I need some insurance against the miserably bad game balance. Cryptic needs to throw players a lifeline here. And fast. If I was producing this game, I’d make this a hotfix patch going out tomorrow.

Other initial thoughts:

After about 20 hours of play time, here are some thoughts that stuck out:

• I sure hope the designers don’t expect me to read that quest text. It’s too small and the font is too hard to read for more than a sentence or two at a time. Clearly nobody spent hours reading this stuff in game. Headaches!
• On the other hand, the big green map indicator that shows exactly where I should go? Awesome.
• The flavor text from NPC’s is great. It’s short enough that I actually read it, too.
• Here’s an example of the subtle bugginess of the game: The “Speed Boots” travel ability is described as one that is slow to build up speed, but has a higher top speed. The (nigh-indecipherable) “advanced description” of the skill seems to verify that this is so. But Sandra and I raced this power against every other, and it is never faster. (This is what the folks on the forums say, too, but we figured they were wrong. Turns out nope, they were right.) I’m guessing that the data for the ability is set right. But it’s still broken. This particular ability is at least usable anyway. (That’s not the case for most of the buggy powers.)
• I was going to show you the stats on Speed Boots, but it turns out to be surprisingly hard to take screenshots of this game’s GUI, and I gave up trying.
• The game works pretty well with a wired XBox 360 joystick plugged into the PC. I could see this being a console success. You know… after another year of bug fixes.
• When I started, everybody said, “Watch the stats! They’re important!” But stats aren’t really that important, in general. Just TWO stats are important: the ones your particular character template is based on. Most abilities seem to do damage that scales with your level regardless of your stats.
• This game has tons of visceral appeal. Bowling badguys over with machine gun fire, hitting them on the head with lampposts, leaping away from danger… it’s a FUN play vibe. When your character isn’t gimp, I mean.
• I don’t think the Public Quests are working like the designers hoped. There’s never more than one other person helping me… the game fails to rally people around these quests.
• Making your own nemesis villain that then shows up in the game to fight you? That’s awesome.
• Why did they bother with an auction house when they don’t have time to make it usable? Sorting is by done some internal ID number (as opposed to, say, price); there’s no way to transfer money between characters (even in the bank); and it’s difficult to even find the auction house anyway. I wouldn’t have even known it existed, except some forum trolls were telling people to stop whining about the cost of repairing your character… “Go and make money on the AH, noob!”
• You can’t make significant money on the AH prior to level 20, or at least I haven’t been able to.
• This game is a lot of fun to duo with. Sandra and I quite enjoyed duoing (until our characters’ gimpiness did us in and we were unable to fix them.)
• At this point, I haven’t seen much reason to group up as more than a trio, though. I’d love to get a Sunday afternoon game going with friends, but I’d need fun things to do for at least five people at once…
• I can’t make macros. That means Telepoet can’t spout battle poetry!
• This game doesn’t need a punitive death penalty. It starts out negligible but it slowly becomes pretty significant. This is a mistake. The game is hard, complex, and twitchy. Success is its own reward here. I thought the designers really “got it” … until I died a few times at level 15 and realized I could no longer kill the quest boss because I’d gotten too weak. I had to go farm low-level minions until I got my power back. Fail.

Champions: Better than City of Heroes? Yes. Or at least, it will be eventually. The question is, will anybody be left to see it?

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You’ll hear this a lot from game developers giving advice to would-be designers. And it’s not wrong … but taken at face value, it leads to being a sub-par designer. There’s no value in mimicing what you think a stereotypical designer would do.

Better advice: “Learn to understand how different types of players (including you!) experience your game, and analyze that like a designer.”

Not nearly as memorable, but way more accurate.

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Don’t believe me? Let’s just peek into our Psych 101 course book for some examples. Let’s talk about positive and negative reinforcement! Then we’ll follow up with the role of tedium in behavior management.

Positive Reinforcement versus Negative Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement is when you reward good behavior with a cookie. Negative reinforcement is when you reward good behavior by making the pain stop.

These can be mathematically equivalent, but they have psychological ramifications you need to consider.

Suppose you’re designing the food system for a new MMO, and you decide that characters become physically weaker if  they don’t eat a piece of food every few hours. (Eating food is thus a negative reinforcement because it removes the weakness that comes from being hungry.) Another way to design the same system is to give players a buff when they eat food. This is a positive reinforcement.

Mathematically they look like the same system, because you’re going to balance the game based on the “fed state” — in other words, when you figure out how tough monsters should be, you’ll assume the player is properly fed. It matters not to the spreadsheet whether food is a buff or just the absence of a debuff.

But it matters to the player! Modern gamers expect all punishment to cease when they are playing your game the right way. You can take advantage of this to train players to play your game the right way.

In this example game, since players NEED to eat in order to play correctly, you should use negative reinforcement. You’d put an “I’m Hungry!” icon on the screen whenever they needed to eat, and you’d remind them that they are weaker due to lack of food. When they eat, these indicators go away and the character pats her stomach like she’s happy to have finally eaten. This helps teach players when they aren’t playing optimally. Even if players don’t get the hint right away, it will sink in eventyally. If they’re dying a lot, they’re likely to think “I should really eat something. That will help!”

On the other hand, if eating provides only tiny effects (and you didn’t balance encounters assuming that players were fully satiated all the time), then you would present eating as a “buff” instead. This teaches players that eating is a good thing, but not something mandatory.

Now, if you secretly decided that players should always be eating food or else they are sub-par statistically (and unable to complete quests for their level), you’d really confuse them by making food a buff instead of debuff. Players intuit that a buff is an optional power benefit. They do not expect you to have factored this optional benefit into every combat encounter… if you did that, it wouldn’t be optional! Be wary of sending mixed signals like that. It’s pretty common, but then again it’s also pretty common for MMO’s to be unintuitive.

Both positive and negative reinforcement are very useful in every MMO — you just have to decide which to use in each situation. ”But I don’t want negative reinforcement in my game!” you say. It’s got that word negative in there. That can’t be positive! Actually, when used in moderation, negative reinforcement is fine. For instance, World of Warcraft treats armor repair as a negative reinforcement, and it works great. You only get into trouble when you overdo it. When a game has too many negative reinforcements, the player can feel like they’re having to do too much “work” to play the game.

The Role of Tedium

Punishment and negative reinforcement often go hand in hand, because usually you can’t negatively reinforce unless you do something unpleasant first, which the player will perceive as punishment. In WoW, you’re punished for letting your armor break: you take a lot more damage in combat. Repairing your armor is negatively reinforced by removing that punishment.

So normally they are directly related. But there’s one major case where this isn’t true: players don’t generally perceive being bored as a punishment per se. This means that developers can inject tedium into their game, and then negatively reinforce behaviors in order to remove the tedium. Brilliant! Well, sort of.

Walking from city to city in World of Warcraft is torturously boring. Using a gryphon is moderately less tedious, and having your own flying mount is less tedious still. WoW uses tedium — and the slow removal of it — as a balance and reward mechanism.

Balancing through tedium works! But it won’t keep working forever: its acceptance among gamers is quickly disappearing. Tedium is the last bastion of the old punishing mechanisms from the early days of computer games. Remember those games? Man, they were punishing.

Back in the day, if you died, you were severely punished. In Ultima Online, you lost every item you had, and you could even lose the deed to your house and all your belongings. Holy shit that was punishing. This worked great, though, because the fun of the game outweighed the punishment. No, that’s not it… let’s see… what was it? Oh yeah: players didn’t know of any other game they could go to.

Since then, punishments have mostly disappeared from games. Why? Because all other things being equal, players tend to go to the less-punitive game. From a designer standpoint this is actually a little frustrating. One of our most potent psychological tools — punishment — is slowly dwindling away! This actually makes it harder to train players to find the fun in our games. But we are never going back to the time when mainstream MMO’s punish you heavily for making mistakes. That time is over. As a designer, this is a tiny bit saddening. But as a player, this is a much happier time to be playing MMOs.

However, there’s one major kind of punishment still in the toolbox. Tedium is the last type of punishment in MMO games. It’s survived because it’s so insidious that players don’t really think of it as a punishment. Nevertheless, tedium was actually on its way out when WoW came along. WoW revived tedium for its travel system (and, to a lesser extent, for its food/drink system), and it got away with it because the rest of the game was so damned good. (In comparison to the other games available.)

The designers didn’t arbitrarily add tedium to travel. They had clear goals in mind. They believed that slow travel was the key to making the world seem “large” and immersive. With instantaneous travel, they reasoned, every place in the world would just be a hop, skip, and a jump away, and this would reduce the immersiveness of the world, which they believed was key to making the game fun over the long term. As an added bonus, having this tedium in the game meant they could remove the tedium over time as a reward mechanism.

They pulled it off, but don’t count on being able to follow their lead. Unless your game is so good in other ways that you can get away with an annoyance like tedious travel, you’re better off having instant travel mechanisms. Your world might be less immersive, and you will definitely have fewer rewards to give out because you can’t remove the tedium that isn’t there. But your game doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so you really have no choice. Heck, even WoW is busy removing tedium over time. The game gets less tedious practically every month. (Today’s Penny-Arcade is coincidentally about this very thing.)

I’m not saying all tedium must go. Like other types of punishment, it’s a great way to get players to think the way you want them to. Unforced tedium is not in any danger of going away. Suppose a player wants to keep stabbing low-level orcs in the newbie zone for as long as possible. It’s okay if this is a tedious way to play… assuming the player knows full well that they have made the choice to do something tedious. But tedium that can’t be avoided (such as a quest that makes players run for 15 minutes from the newbie city to a capital city) is not something players respect anymore.

Tedium is on its way out in games. Use tedium if you think you can get away with it, but … well, you probably can’t. Heck,  I personally prefer a jolt of explicit punishment over a jolt of tedium. That’s the ADHD crowd for you — tedium is worse than pain.

Punishment and tedium will never completely go away, but they have clearly waned in their influence. Keep that in mind when you design your game. If you go heavy on negative reinforcement, your game is likely to be perceived as “old-school”, and that may be exactly what you’re going for, if you want a niche title. If you want a broad-spectrum game, use sparingly.

Negative Reinforcement = Potent Spice

I want to reiterate that you shouldn’t plan to remove all negative reinforcement! Just treat it like you would a potent spice when cooking: a little goes a long way. Decide the handful of places where negative reinforcement will give your game a big benefit, and use it there. Remove it from all the places where it’s less important.

I really think psychology is a useful field for designers to study. I wanted to go into reinforcement schedules a bit, but that’ll be another time, I guess. Anyway, if you’re wondering “what should I study in college to learn to be a systems designer?”, a dozen credits in well-chosen psych courses are a good investment.

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You might be thinking my request sounds like one of the lazy animals from the story of the Little Red Hen:

“Who will help me code the MMO?” asked the little red hen (… I mean the MMO company).

“Not me,” said the independent MMO contractor. “I’m too busy doing fun easy things!”

“Fine, I will do it myself! Ah, but now who will help me run the MMO?”

“Ooh ooh I will!” said the contractor.

“No no, you didn’t help me make the MMO, so you don’t get to do the fun part! I will run it myself!”

If this is the story that runs through your head, you are definitely not from any of the major MMO companies. For the likes of Turbine, SOE, or Blizzard, making the MMO is the fun part. Working on the MMO afterwards is the terrible part.

You might expect that the people who spent five years making the game would be excited to run it after it ships. Turns out, not really. After five years of working on the same project, they’re so sick of it they never want to work on it again. They want it to be in good hands, certainly. And they want to have some oversight to keep people from damaging their vision of how the game should run. But they sure as hell don’t want to have to do that tedious maintenance stuff themselves. So companies tend to pull the experienced staff off of the live game pretty quickly, leaving behind junior people.

Live Teams Are Not Glamorous

I like the “tedious maintenance stuff.” I actually prefer working on the live team. This makes me very unusual in the MMO industry. I am also a pretty good engineer with a lot of experience, which means I don’t often end up on live teams — too experienced. At Turbine, I had a hard time getting onto the Asheron Call 2′s Live Team, because I was expected to help develop their next generation MMO engine instead. I wanted to work on AC2 after it ships?! None of my managers could understand why I wanted to be demoted like that!

But to people who enjoy the live team, well … there is nothing as good as it. The power you have! The instant feedback! The ability to literally make hundreds of thousands of people happy with just a few weeks of work. It’s very gratifying. There’s also the tedium and frustration and lack of resources and constant fire-fighting and oh my god I can’t keep up with everything… but that’s the price of the deal.

Of course, it doesn’t just happen that you hop onto the Live Team and suddenly you’re making game-design changes. At first there are a lot of smart and talented people at the helm, helping you learn the ropes, making the hard decisions for you, keeping you from doing stupid things. But inevitably they are pulled off to other projects, and somebody relatively junior gets the helm. That’s how I got to be in charge of balancing AC2′s classes.

Fortunately, I had a decade of engineering experience and understood how to tune complex systems. I wrote analyzers, modeled usage patterns, and made corrections.

Unfortunately, my approach did not take the “human equation” into consideration very well.

Learning to Balance the Human Equation

I found that the Feral Intendant class was 30% overpowered, and that’s why so many people were playing a Feral Intendant. Yet somehow, reducing the power of the Feral Intendant to the correct level did not suddenly make the game more fun… thousands of players were complaining and nobody was telling me they were happy about the change. Weird! I double checked my calculations. They were correct. So what had gone wrong?

Turns out that the people who played the other classes available to that race had taken on an “underdog” mentality. The people who played Claw Bearers liked that they were woefully underpowered compared to Feral Intendants. It was like playing the game on Hard Mode. And the people playing Feral Intendants liked playing on Easy Mode. In balancing the game I had failed to understand the needs of the people playing it. I just ham-handedly fixed the equations, instead of solving the problem with the finesse it needed. It was one of my more serious missteps. (And it’s a great example because I think it’s pretty obvious in hindsight. Most mistakes were much more subtle.)

But man, what a fast way to learn! After just a couple years of that, I became a good game balancer. The constant feedback loop helped me learn from my mistakes in a matter of weeks! Compare that to developers on traditional games, who must wait until the sequel ships before they get to try their hand at balance again. That’s why working on a live team is such a fast way to learn your craft: the feedback is so much faster than any other gaming platform, that it accelerates learning by dozens of times.

But AC2 cost millions of dollars to create. Turbine didn’t create it as a tool to help me hone my design skills, that’s for damned sure! How did I get to do it? Simple: the designers who would have done it were burned out of working on AC2, and were called away to work on the important New Project. AC2 wasn’t a blockbuster hit, so it didn’t make sense to use the rock star designers on it. Better to let the B team step in.

The Steady Hand Has Left The Rudder

But here’s the weird thing: WoW is exhibiting the same symptoms as AC2 did when I was doing the designing. The B team is in charge.

In February, we learned that lead designer (and part-time producer?) Jeff Kaplan had stepped away from WoW, off to work on the next big Blizzard game. However, if you were watching the game before that, it was obvious that major leadership changes had already happened months earlier. My guess is that Jeff Kaplan started moonlighting on the new project long before February. And many of the other key WoW live team people have also switched over, or are working on WoW only part-time.

Now, I am not being alarmist. The ship is still in intelligent, capable hands… but clearly not as experienced ones. Just as I did when I took over AC2, WoW is making newbie design mistakes that seem like a benefit on the surface, but are really not good decisions. There have been scores of examples… I’ll pick just a few.

“It’s always been stupid, and we just need to fix it!”

A few months back, the powers that be decided that Hunter ammunition didn’t work right. Hunters have to carry an arrow for every single shot they take, and in order to get the full benefits from them, they have to carry them in a special quiver — which doesn’t let you store other items in it, only ammo. All that ammo costs money, too.  Plus, it leaves the designers unable to give out awesome “raid arrows” because you’d just shoot them all and then where would you be? Even though ammo had been a fine and fun distinguishing quirk of Hunters for years, it was time to Fix It.

The first plan was announced: WoW would no longer have consumable ammo. Instead, you would just need a single “infinite arrow” that you stuck in your ammo slot, and this would let you shoot your bow forever. Problem solved! No more quivers, no more pack space wasted, no more costs. And now raids could drop “loot arrows” that wouldn’t get used up! Perfect!

Whoops, turns out that plan would be hard. So they announced their backup plan: now ammo just stacks to very high numbers. Instead of having stacks of 200, now you can have stacks of 1000. This at least addresses the “pack space” issue. Call it a win! And they removed the magical benefits from quivers, so you no longer needed to use them. So they fixed the immediate emergency, and they’ll get to the “correct fix” later.

The thing is, there was no emergency. Sure, Hunters were happy to have a few extra pack slots. But the change threw all sorts of other things out of whack: magic quivers are still given out as quest rewards… they just aren’t magical anymore. And leathercrafters can still make them! They just can’t sell them to any sane Hunter. And so on… the game wasn’t really cleaned up after this change.

But I’m sure it felt so pressing, so urgent. So they had to address the issue, side-effects be damned.

Without somebody experienced at the helm, the voice of the myopic designer tends to be the loudest. “WE HAVE TO FIX THE HUNTER” they said. Maybe they said, “Hunters have to spend 65% more on bare essentials than any other class. I will never be able to balance class expenditures like this!” Or maybe they said, “Hunters have to waste more inventory slots than any other class. It damages quest completion rates!” Or maybe they just said, “It’s SO STUPID. It’s always been stupid, and we just need to fix it! Do it now!” Obviously, nobody thought very hard about the ramifications, and nobody spent any time easing players into the idea. And nobody stopped to make sure they did a good job.

So some tiny little mistakes crept into the game. Nothing huge. Nothing that will sink the Titanic. But mistakes nonetheless… “magical” crafted quivers that aren’t magical and can’t be sold are clearly a mistake. These little bugs accumulate, like lint on a hardwood floor.

The Lint Accumulates

When we say that WoW is “polished”, what we mean is that it is surprisingly clean of linty little bugs like these. But that’s changing.

More and more little mistakes have crept into the game recently — changes that are positive on the surface, but have not been implemented with the finesse that makes them worthwhile. Mana expenditure rates have changed, rules for dungeons have been tweaked, the cost of items has fluctuated. It all seems useful. But it’s usually full of little side effects. Worse, it doesn’t take the human equation into account: it doesn’t counter-balance for the actual needs of the players very well. There are ways to meet both goals, but you have to try a lot harder at it than WoW is.

Remember when WoW class balance happened every six to eight months? Players were actually excited when their classes’ turn came around. I remember being so astonished to see players that were actually happy to have their classes redesigned. But now, every class is fiddled with every few weeks. It’s not exciting anymore. Instead of sitting on the changes and carefully honing them, the designers are just firing out every new idea they have, willy nilly, until they get it right. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if you get it right. It matters if players are excited and having fun. Balance changes are happening too fast, and for too little benefit overall.

Back in the day, QA held the game to a higher standard. Consider that there never used to be skill changes that would invalidate the client tooltips about a skill (unless it was an emergency exploit-fix). If the designer wanted to tweak a skill, they had to wait until the client could be updated. But the QA bigwigs are off doing something else now, so it’s easy for the designers to slip this stuff in. And they do. All the time. Skills are routinely incorrectly displayed now, as the designers’ need for perfect balance far outpaces the ability to do client updates.

Who’s In Charge Again?

You would never let your lead artist drive decisions for your game. Chances are, they would say “This dungeon is too brightly lit! We need to hotfix it now or the mood will be ruined forever!”

But unlike artists, designers get a free ride. They’re supposed to know what’s best for the game. If the producers are busy, they trust the designers will do good things. But designers, especially young ones, get myopic. They tune into little issues — like perfect class balance – and turn them into epic quests. If the designer could just fix this balance problem, people on the boards would stop complaining, and the game would be perfect!

No. It will not happen. Perfection will not be achieved, ever. But there’s nobody around to rein them in anymore, so they try and try and try. And leave little messes everywhere they go.

Suddenly Communications Are Open

Another surefire way to tell that upper management has left the building? The systems designer “Ghostcrawler” has suddenly started posting a lot, even about… well, nothing. For years developers were nowhere to be seen, which was a shame. And then suddenly the lead systems designer has time to play the forum game? Yeah, whoever was making employee policies just doesn’t have time for WoW anymore. Not a bad thing, in this case, but certainly a dramatic shift of policies.

Nowadays it’s common for WoW to tell people to “check the forums for game updates.” This is a total newb mistake. Only your loudest and most annoying users will check your forums for updates. So every “update” is met with derision because only assholes post on game forums. (Statistically speaking, anyway.) Game updates are specifically what the launcher’s update screen is for. If you’re outpacing the ability to update the update screen, chances are you’re changing too much too fast. Slow down and get it right the first time.

It’s likely that Ghostcrawler started posting shortly after the upper management started wandering off to other projects. Ghostcrawler’s a good guy… in fact, his posts remind me a lot of what I sounded like when I was posting about AC2′s skill balance. He knows how to balance things. But he is completely unable to see the big picture. Every tiny imperfection seems like a ruinous problem. He feels assaulted on all sides by problems, too, and doesn’t think there’s time to do things the right way. But this is an illusion that happens to Live Teams because they get so close to the product. He needs someone checking over his decisions and making sure they’re worthwhile. He doesn’t have that.

WoW: No Longer Big Kahuna at Blizzard

Ghostcrawler and the rest of the team will learn their craft soon enough. WoW will survive the experience. But what’s interesting is that it tells us quite clearly that WoW is no longer the most important thing at Blizzard… in fact, it might be third or fourth place. It’s really interesting that this happened so soon. I didn’t expect it to happen to WoW while it still had 10+ million players or more still paying. But a company has only so many top-notch people, and you always want your most-experienced people on the new thing, so it makes sense.

To be clear, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When the game stops being in the spotlight, the live team suddenly gets a lot more flexibility to make the game fun, instead of being forced to stick to now-outdated “design visions”. The dramatic increase in WoW’s mobility options is certainly due to the lack of oversight. But without that safety-net of supervision, they need to exercise a lot of willpower and a lot of wisdom.

Ghostcrawler, and anybody else on the design team of WoW right now, I have a little unsolicited advice from somebody who’s been there: convince your bosses to let you play a different MMO for two weeks. On the clock. Don’t touch WoW. I know it feels like there’s a disaster every day and you can’t possibly stop focusing on WoW, but you can. After you get back, play WoW with a different class than you normally play. You’ll see so many new things! Your priorities will do a 180. I guarantee you it will help your perception.

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