“Our research shows that trial players who play World Of Warcraft past level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold.”

[Quote via Digital Spy. Apparently if you register on the Activision investor site you can listen to it yourself.]

Morhaime went on to talk about how they intend to use the upcoming Cataclysm expansion to improve this number, but at the moment I am more interested in the number itself. Most of the comments I’ve seen today focus on how terrible it is: OMG, 70% of trial players quit before level 10! That’s … that’s … awful! WoW is dying! Blizzard, do something!

Except it’s not terrible. It’s amazing. A five year old game, content that for the most part hasn’t been touched at all in five years, and three out of ten free trial players are putting in the 4+ hours of gameplay to get to level 10? (Remember, a new player will take longer to level than an experienced WoW-hand.) And for many players, that four hours is going to be more than one play session, which means that they have to remember to come back. Amazing.

Do you know what kind of numbers other MMOs have? Here’s a hint: For most games with downloadable trials, less than 30% make it to level 2 — let alone log in a second time. Seriously. Even new AAA boxed games that have no trial mode — which means that you’ve already paid $50 just to play — often fail to keep 30% of their players for 4 or more hours.

I know that if you haven’t seen the numbers yourself, you won’t believe me. But it’s true. Either Blizzard’s newbie game is miraculous or the people joining have other strong incentives to stick around (like friends in the game or the game’s reputation).

This is the first AAA MMO that has avoided dramatic player drop-off for so long. Normally when drop-off happens, all sorts of gameplay flaws are exposed. Eric and I have had the same discussion about World of Warcraft in various forms over the past couple of years. It goes like this:

Me: Game system X in WoW works really well.

Eric: It only works because they have an infinite newbie hose. Once the hose breaks, it will all fall apart.

But it looks like WoW’s newbie hose really is infinite. I shake my head in awe.

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And it’s true. AC2 had a great community in its later years; people would help one another; in-game chat was friendly and relatively benign (there was cussing and off-topic chat, but not a lot of slander and racism). How’d we do that?

Just to compare, when I started playing Aion a few months ago, if I asked a newb question in chat, people would compete amongst themselves to come up with the most outlandish lie they thought I might believe. If the lie would get me killed, so much the better. And we’ve all had experiences in WoW where people were rude and insulting in chat. What’s the difference between these games and AC2’s community?

Sadly, the difference is size. That’s all, just size. As Aion has bled off players over the past few months, the professional trolls have all but disappeared, fleeing to greener pastures. The people that are left actually hope to play with you some day, and they care about how you remember them. And they are, generally speaking, more patient than the people who left early.

Same with AC2. When it launched, it was full of cheaters, gankers, and the regular collection of assholes. But then chat broke in AC2. I mean that you could not chat, at all, for two months. (It was broken sporadically, but more often than not.) This wasn’t exactly a technical failing as much as it was a political failing with Turbine’s publisher at the time, Microsoft. But the details didn’t matter. The game bled off over half its players in two months, and never recovered momentum. But who was left? It wasn’t the people who delighted in verbally insulting others — those players had gone elsewhere. What was left were the people who loved the game, or who were very patient, or who didn’t even realize there were other places they could be playing. These people tended to be a bit older, but even when they weren’t, they acted older, to fit in. Most of them didn’t want to get ostracized by the small community remaining.

Small = Less Anonymous

The smaller your community is, the less anonymous you are. When I was playing EQ2, I would see the same dozen people every day when I played. If one of those people was a dick to me, you better believe I would remember it. They wouldn’t be invited to my group. Their behavior mattered! Of course, that’s only because EQ2 has a tiny population remaining. If it was WoW where there are literally hundreds of people I can group with at any given level, I couldn’t possibly keep track of all the assholes.

This idea of “smaller communities are nicer to each other” isn’t new. In fact, when DDO was first being designed, that was one of its design features: they planned to cap each world to just 1500 concurrent players, far smaller than the server architecture could actually support, in order to keep each world small, tight-knit, and friendly. Since DDO was designed to be a grouping game, the designers believed that fostering relationships among players was key to creating the social fabric.

Of course, DDO was re-envisioned many times after that first design, and in the end the game launch was basically a dud, so it was good that the game was designed to work with small populations, because that’s all they had. But this setup did still develop friendly groups of people who knew each other and would be nice to you even if you sucked. Now that DDO is open to the public, I assume the population has a lot more immature people in it. (Does it? I haven’t had a chance to play it again yet.)

This also points out the big drawback of the “One World” MMO architecture, such as Guild Wars or Champions uses, where every zone is an instance on the same global server. In a game where people can have the same name as other people, and may or may not be in the same version of the world as you at any given time, it’s basically impossible to make friends or keep track of who’s who. That doesn’t stop people from being nice to you in those games, but it definitely lets them get away with being assholes with relative impunity.

Of course, many players would prefer having hundreds of people to play with, even if there are a handful of assholes in there, rather than having only a dozen people to play with on an EQ2 server. The single-world architecture definitely has benefits. But the anonymity it provides is not one of them.

Bad Apples Ruin Entire Pies

But really, what are we talking about here? What’s the difference between a good community and a bad one? It’s not like AC2’s community changed when half of the players left. The remaining players didn’t get replaced with nice friendly people. They were always nice friendly people. And they were always helpful. But it’s easier for us to remember the bad apples than the good ones.

Log into WoW and ask a newb question, and you’re likely to get four or five answers. One of them will call you names and tell you to GTFO. Four of them will give you the right answer, and one of those people will go to the trouble of guiding you precisely to where you need to be. Similarly, in Aion, even if you got a bunch of lie responses, a few people would IM you and say, “Don’t listen to those guys, you need to do such-and-such, located here”, and then send you an automated map showing exactly where you needed to go. (One of Aion’s cooler features, btw.) There are always nice people in MMO’s. But we don’t count the nice people when determining if the community is friendly or not. We count the assholes. So when the population is diminished, and there are fewer assholes to count, we interpret the community as being nicer.

It’s an interesting bit of psychology here: if you ask a question and get five responses, and just one of those responses is insulting, you’ll still walk away with an unhappy memory of the experience. People don’t like being insulted; it hurts our feelings and creates negative connotations in our heads. Similarly, this is why blogging requires such a thick skin, or posting on forums or Youtube or anywhere else. The vast majority of people aren’t going to insult and attack you, but the few that do attack you really sting, more than you let on. I don’t mean they hurt you consciously, necessarily. Even when you don’t take it personally, you still remember it as a negative experience. The fact that they’re anonymous cowards doesn’t dilute the insults.

This is why anonymity is bad for cooperative games. And it’s why small games with less-anonymous audiences tend to be perceived as friendlier.

Making Friendlier Communities = Removing Anonymity

What we’re talking about here has very obvious real-world counterparts: living in New York is a whole lot different from living in a small town in Indiana. A big part of the difference is the population size. In New York, you can get away with being a jerk to people on the street. You’re never going to see them again. But if you live in a small town of a few hundred, you don’t want to piss off the neighbors. So people are friendlier. Okay, maybe a bit oversimplified, but you get the idea.

So far, MMOs have mirrored the behavior of real-world populations. When the population is small, you’re less anonymous than when the population is large. But that doesn’t have to be the case… MMO’s don’t have to be like real life if we can think of a better way. Maybe there are ways to remove the anonymity to an extent — just enough to keep people from being rude and hurtful just because they can. Or maybe that’s not possible — maybe our culture, at this point in time, couldn’t accept anything like that. I dunno. But I do know that MMO’s are young. Really young. One clever idea can still flip the MMO industry on its ear.

And if you’re just looking for an MMO with a friendly community, might I suggest visiting LoTRo? I’m enjoying myself, and so far, all six players have been very pleasant.

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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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Option 1: Everything is perfectly fine, citizen. Move along now.

I’ve been playing Aion for a while now, and it’s a fascinating game. I’ve never been on the crap end of a localized game before, and I have to say it sucks. Instead of being responsive to my needs, I’m treated like a second-class citizen. This must be how the Korean AC2 players felt, or how the foreign-language EQ2 players feel now. Poor bastards.

Through no fault of their own, the English language team for Aion doesn’t have as much control over the game as they’d like. They get new game updates from the home office, as determined by their schedule, not what the English team wants. And then they have to get all new text translated, and then re-QA it… it takes time. They aren’t nearly as reactive as they would no doubt like to be.

So what are their comunication options? They can constantly say, “We told the Koreans, but they haven’t gotten around to caring yet,” or they can lie and say “We are fixing that right this second.” Aion uses the third option: don’t respond at all, or insinuate that there’s not even a problem. They subtly suggest that bugs aren’t really bugs. This is brilliant. When that doesn’t work, they use the “we are totally fixing that now” routine.

Some examples?

• The game sticks to its guns about everything. It never says “I don’t know.” Try using the /where command with random gibberish.

  Type this: “/Where is my ass”
  You’ll get back this: “It is at a hard to find location.”

  That’s the error message for any invalid location. Brilliant, isn’t it? They never admit they are wrong. Sometimes important items in the game can’t be found with the hyperlink-based lookup feature. That’s where you see this error message more often. The items aren’t “hard to find” at all… there are just bugs in looking up some items. But you can’t prove there’s a bug, can you? Maybe the developer meant for that guy to be hard-to-find, to encourage me to explore the world. There’s always a tiny seed of doubt: it’s possible that there’s a rogue developer who refuses to make his quest items locatable with the game’s locator feature. And then they get fixed  in later patches when we complain about this “feature”. That could be what’s happening. It isn’t. Yet… you can’t really be 100% sure it’s a bug.

• Many quests are buggy. (Gasp! Real shocker there. All games have buggy quests.) The Asmodians have a main-line story quest to collect some baubles from mole people and cat people. But the game tells you to kill the wrong ones! This would be treated as a simple bug in some games, and players in game would say “Oh that’s bugged.” Here, players will tell you things like, “Oh it’s just tuned for Korean sensibilities. It’s a rare drop!” That’s even what Google told me while I tried to complete this quest. Right. This one quest out of hundreds has a 1% drop-rate but no other quests do. That would be retardedly bad design. But what else could I do? So I killed 200 of the buggers and never found anything. Actually, it turns out it drops almost every time from the mole people 100 yards away, the “farmer” moles who had absolutely nothing to do with the quest plot. It’s just a bug. But nobody wanted to believe that. They gave the game the benefit of the doubt.

• There appear to be some population imbalances between the two races, which can be quite problematic in a PvP game. I don’t have first-hand experience with it because I’m still relatively low-level, but Asmodians on my server are often talking about how they’re outnumbered in battles, and frankly the Asmodians aren’t as attractive as the angelic Elyos, so I would be pretty surprised if they were played in the same numbers. That’s why it’s so interesting that there’s nearly a 1-to-1 correlation of races according to the Aion website. Almost every world says it’s 49% Asmodian and 51% Elyos. I know they balance the server loads by selectively allowing people to sign into realms, but really? That means that overall, Elyos are precisely 1% more popular than Asmodians. That seems pretty fishy. But I can’t prove anything. I too give them the benefit of the doubt. Now, if they had come right out and said “Yes there are some imbalances, and we’re working on it,” I’d be a lot more worried about this problem. But if they’re lying, they’re doing it whole-heartedly.

• When I first logged in, I was flabbergasted by the amount of gold spam in chat. It made chat unusable unless you spent a lot of time manually blocking every spammer. The developers said, “We currently have Game Masters monitoring all our servers. They track chat channels closely and have been banning thousands of spammers every day.“ In reality, spammers stuck around for about two hours before they got banned. Even one customer-service person looking over all the 14 worlds would have done a better job finding spammers than that. (The spammers are not subtle. They literally spam as fast as the chat system will let them, which is once every two seconds.) What was REALLY happening was that the system was auto-flagging users when they got blocked by too many people. They lied to us. Didn’t they? Maybe they’re just really incompetent customer service people…

And so on. The game has its share of problems (like the most flagrant and embarrassing combat-macroing problem I’ve ever seen), and they try to fix them. In the mean time they ignore it, or else they spin spin spin. There are no developer interactions with players. Players yell into a vacuum and then one day they get a new patch, which rarely (but occasionally) addresses their concerns. Because of this reality, the team comes off as aloof and distant, but we give them trust they didn’t earn. Being generally optimistic human beings, we like to assume that the game is in good hands. If a quest acts weird, hey, it’s probably just because of some design decision we don’t understand.

Where this breaks down is in the case of things like spammers and botters. It’s much too big a problem to assume the devs know what they’re doing. Seriously: on my server there are a half-dozen botters standing a few feet outside of town, right in the road. It’s the worst botting problem I’ve ever seen by leaps and bounds. If they had a reasonable number of GMs they could get this problem under control, but they don’t. They also don’t have a code solution ready to go soon. Know how you can tell? They’re spinning. They ban a few each day, and they play it off like it’s not the most egregious case of botting in a decade.

Really, if you were the poor community manager, what would you say? The English team probably has a minimal set of GMs, or nearly so… that’d be 9 people, 3 for each of three shifts. They probably have full workloads for most of their shift, but when they do have free time I’m sure they tackle some of the botters. But unless the game adds more staff, they won’t be able to tackle it robustly. They’re being cheapskates and waiting for a tech solution so that their bottom line doesn’t get hurt. This, again, is a tried-and-true approach that most every MMO uses at one point or another. But in the meantime, the community manager has to basically fabricate a story to keep people calm.

Aion is hardly the only company to use this basic method of communication. EverQuest 1 was infamous for it, back in the day. Other teams have tried it to various degrees. The thing about this approach is that you need to really embrace it and you need to tightly control your message, like Aion does. If a few people spout off details they shouldn’t, your whole elaborate facade crumbles.

Option 2: We suck and you know it, please bear with us

The other commonly successful strategy is to be open and earnest and to trust players to see things your way. Champions Online uses this approach. Their developers engage users on the forums, talk about specifics, explain what they are trying to do to fix things, and sometimes (rarely, but occasionally) change their plans based on feedback from forum-goers. Here’s the sort of hands-on specific details I mean: here a developer explains why they don’t routinely let players become 50 feet tall (which was a bug that a low-level item caused for a while):

when we can do the growth effect without any of the bugs that the massive size caused, we’ll add stuff that uses it for sure. But until we can do it without causing all sorts of awful graphical glitches, camera issues, exploits and client breakage, we’re not going to have it. Regardless, a rare drop for fun off a lvl 9 quest mob is not where an effect that level 40s want to farm for will get hooked up, once we can safely do it, expect to see it on something more appropriate that doesn’t mess up missions being done by low level players.

Nothing earth-shattering, but the developer acknowledged that the existing item was hella broken, and that someday they hope to fix it and use the technology on purpose… if they can make it work. Some day. This is not something you would ever see Aion say.

Moreover, they have a blog that address major game issues and explains what they intend to do about it. (This one is a bit old, but a good example.)

This is completely the right approach for Champions to take. The game is not nearly as polished as Aion; they couldn’t possibly convince us that the serious bugs in the game were intentional. (Anyone who experienced the 50-foot-tall bug knew full well it was seriously buggy.) Instead, they play to the crowd, giving them insider tidbits about how stuff is going, explaining their motivations, and basically feeding the forum trolls to keep them relatively sedated.

This approach is a common one. AC2 used this approach because our game, too, was far too buggy to pull off the “we know what we’re doing” trick. We also had a developer who was eager to spill the beans about everything (that’d be… uh, me, actually…), so this communication style was a good fit for the team. The Champions designers are in a similar boat and obviously enjoy talking about their game. They seem to be relatively good at not feeding the forum trolls, either, and staying on target.

This approach works well when you have small bugs that you need forgiveness for. ‘Fessing up right away and telling players you’ll fix it next week works. Actually, it works great for retention: players really like it when you respect them enough to really tell them what’s going on. When you trust players, they will often surprise you by trusting you back. That is, as long as you actually fix the problem, and quickly. (Aion couldn’t do this style if they wanted to, because the English-language team obviously has little insight into when bug-fixes will really arrive.)

This communication style fails when you have to admit that serious issues are broken and that you can’t fix them quickly. A common theme on the Champions forums is that the game doesn’t have enough content. There’s not a damned thing the developers can say about that to make people shut up. They can’t add content quickly enough to make people happy. Contrast this to Aion, which also is missing content in several level ranges: Aion just doesn’t say anything, and they delete threads that are too complainy. When Aion users rage about the lack of content, they tend to rage in a vacuum, unable to commiserate with other players. I believe this causes players to “grind through” Aion longer than they do in Champions, because they aren’t sure that the game is in the wrong. Maybe they’re just playing it incorrectly…

Screwing It Up

Both of these communication styles have pros and cons. But the biggest danger is that developers can easily screw it up by saying inappropriate things.

I remember when DAoC revealed too much info, causing their facade of “we totally know what we’re doing” to disintegrate for a while. EQ1 had its moments, too. Unfortunately those forums are long gone and even the wayback machine isn’t helping me find the examples I vaguely remember. Sigh. So back to picking on WoW, then…

Now, WoW is an interesting example because they started out with option #1. Aside from some hand-wringing when the game launched (and was unplayable), they generally played the “we know better than you” card really well for years. This changed when the design team switched hands. The new designers, mainly the lead systems designer, Greg Street aka “Ghostcrawler”, love to talk about their stuff. So they suddenly became an option #2 game. (I may have done the same thing… their aloofness was no longer particularly productive.) Okay, there are some big tradeoffs made there, but it’s not inherently a bad decision.

Except that Ghostcrawler posts like 20 times a day. Poor guy is totally addicted to the forum game. At first it looks really helpful:

If you ignore combo points (which we aren’t planning on adding to hunters), then the biggest decision energy-users face is whether to use a single 60 energy attack or two 30 energy attacks. The answer depends on a lot of variables, including which does more damage, what is on cooldown, the synergy between the abilities, etc.

If you consider the cat druid (because it’s slightly simpler) and ignore finishing moves, then the druid rotation would look something like getting up a +bleed attack, applying a bleed dot, getting up a +damage buff, and then doing the actual damage. You could imagine something similar like that for hunters. I don’t mean hunters are going to be a +bleed class, but more that the choice of what attack to push next should have some decision behind it. It won’t just be Serpent Sting x 1, Chimera Shot x 1000. Repeat.

But if you keep reading, you see that most of what Ghostcrawler does is literally moderating the forums, and bitching about it, to boot.

Dear OP,

Bye.

Hugs,

GC

(He edited his original angry post, but if you follow the link, you’ll see some of his very angry justification text. His anger is completely justified! But his public reaction is not useful.)

If you use the dev-tracker on their forums, you will find that it’s full of Ghostcrawler saying things like “You’re banned” over and over. Why is this a problem? Somebody has to do it, right? Yes, and that person needs to be the forum moderator. Forum mods can occasionally pull stunts like telling users to die in a fire, and get away with it. That’s because forum-goers treat moderators like “one of us” instead of “one of the dev team”. But when developers are constantly moderating the boards, they lose the last bit of distance from the players. Suddenly Ghostcrawler’s opinion isn’t more valuable than Joe the player’s opinion. Ghostcrawler doesn’t get any respect anymore and has to spend more and more time defending himself. He’s playing the forum game and losing. (He should at least make a fake moderator account for this stuff! But he’s not really thinking objectively about this anyway.)

There is an easy fix for this: Ghostcrawler should be banned from the forums. Instead, set up a Developer Blog and tell him to go crazy. Let him reference things on the forums and reply to them. Several posts a day? That’s okay! But it’s separate from the forums. And it will cut the stupid forum crap out, too.

In fact, I recommend this for all development teams now. If you are going to spend time communicating with players, don’t do it in the forums, because only a fraction of your population reads the forums. (Thank god!) Instead, take a play from Aion’s book.

The best thing about Aion’s community is a very trivial thing: when you quit playing for the night, it automatically opens up a web page to their community site. You instantly see the headlines and can read the dev blogs, look at your character, whatever. This is brilliant. Most games offer this before you log in. I never want to do this before I log in… but I often want to spend a few minutes winding down after I have finished playing.

WoW (and every other game) should do the same. Ghostcrawler should have his own blog link on that community site, where he and other developers can post technical details to their hearts content… and players can easily find it. This isn’t brain science. It’s just using the right tool for the job you’re trying to do.

Advice For All Community Management Types

If you’re an Option #1 game, you need to keep your developers away from the forums and blogs. You can’t have a distant and aloof ivory tower development team that occasionally stops in to chat about game innards. That just makes everybody look stupid. Their message gets taken as having far more significance than intended (because it’s so rare that they get information), and people will be confused and upset about why devs took time to talk about this one issue and not the 500 other issues people are concerned about.

If you’re an Option #2 game, you have to expend significant amounts of developer-time communicating with your audience. If you stop, people will freak out. “They stopped caring!” is what they will hear. If you only have one developer posting on the forums, you can actually expect your forums to get nastier when this developer goes on vacation. It’s that sensitive. You need to allocate significant resources towards communication, and that means maybe 20% of four or five developers’ time. Really. (This is also why a blog is a better choice for developers to post on. You can queue up little tidbits and release them one a day, requiring less posting overall to get the same feeling of participation.)

Whatever you do, you have to stick to your guns. Explicitly decide what your community plan is, and detail it, and write it down, and make sure the people who matter agree with it. (That does not mean getting the whole company on board. It means getting the key people on board.)

Now, you can completely change your community approach. This is often useful for older games where the circumstances have changed since launch. It is quite possible to go from an Option #1 company to an Option #2 company. It is harder, but also possible, to go from being Option #2 to Option #1. (It will take about six months for that transition to stick, however, so be prepared for stress.) What is not possible is to become a hybrid company, sometimes aloof and sometimes chummy, accessible today but invisible the next. You’ll get eaten alive.

So plan it out. Decide why and how you’re interacting with the audience. I’m sure there are some other communication styles I missed here that work for different situations. The key is just to have consistency with whatever you decide.

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As far as the Champions CSR team was concerned, the game had been doing really well in beta. Sure, they were collecting 1200 bug reports a day but that’s pretty normal. In fact, it suggests a very efficient CSR pipeline if they actually managed to process all those reports. But once the game launched, the number of complaints about bad behavior skyrocketed.

It turns out that — get this — juvenile males are attracted to the superhero MMO genre in large number. They cuss. They insult. They cuss with insults whenever possible. This bothered the CSR leads a lot. Perhaps they were new to the MMO business… let’s suppose the CSR leads came from running a phone bank for a major publisher. If 100+ people care enough to call in about an issue with an EA game, that gets their attention really, really fast. Or worse yet, perhaps the CSR leads came from running a call center for a non-game product. 100+ calls about the same topic would cause an overnight hotfix in most software houses.

So they raised the alarm. “Our players,” they said, “are making other players uncomfortable with language. We need to fix it.”

Now any MMO producer can tell you that you don’t piss off the CSR leads. Aside from the forums, which are extremely unreliable for data gathering, CSR is the only way you hear what’s really broken in your game. A good CSR team is way better at bug-hunting than the QA team. That’s because they hear every bug every player finds, instead of just the bugs a handful of testers find. You piss these guys off and suddenly you stop hearing what’s going on in the game. Your ears go deaf and you start losing players without being able to tell why. This is not a mistake a good producer makes more than once.

So maybe the producer jumped right on this. If he’s done this before, he probably rolled his eyes when he got the request, because he knew it wouldn’t help much, but he prioritized it anyway. He sent it to the engineering lead. “Make the CSR team happy. Add a profanity filter to the game. Make this a high priority.” Now remember, the engineering lead has TENS of THOUSANDS of bugs to triage, plus new feature requests coming in every day. So he no doubt rolled his eyes at this suddenly-important tech request.

He then handed the request to his fastest engineer. “Marty, I’m going to take you off the rewrite of the generators for half a day. You’ve got four hours to get a profanity filter in the game.” The CSR team helpfully created a massive list of cuss words (in many languages), drug references, references to sex acts, and hundreds of other things that might be even slightly icky.

Marty’s a smart engineer, and he works really fast. He gets the profanity filter working in two hours. Hell, there’s time left over to polish this feature before he breaks for lunch! So Marty adds some heuristics to detect slight cussing deviations. His algorithm assumes that if a word is one character away from being a cussword, it’s actually a cussword in disguise. He submits his fix for QA approval by lunchtime, and heads off to get his caffeine and grease fix.

Now, the QA team is almost useless. Two reasons: the experienced QA folks got shipped off to Star Trek Online the week after Champions launched. None of the remaining guys knows how to make a test plan. The best they can do is load up the new feature and poke at it for a few minutes. Worse still, these guys are demoralized, overworked, and busy looking for their next job. They may not be good QA (yet) but they aren’t stupid. They know who gets fired first when an MMO game doesn’t have a spectacular launch. Yeah, that’d be QA. Every damned time. So these guys are hardly motivated, barely trained, and tired as all hell from the double overtime they’ve been forced to work.

Jim in QA gets tasked with testing the new profanity filter. He doesn’t know how to make a test plan, and Marty the engineer didn’t have time to make one for him, so Jim just loads up the game and starts typing in cuss words. It seems to work. But he knows that he needs to file a bug on the feature. When QA is in trouble, they always file a token bug on each feature if they can. That way they look like they’re working. (In fact, you can tell if a QA department is borked by how many token bugs they submit versus the number of serious issues they find.) It takes a while but Jim finds something to complain about.

The bug gets sent back to Marty the next day. “You missed cuntsuckler” says the bug report. “I say that all time so it should be in the list.” Marty the engineer adds it to the list, grumbling all the while about QA wasting his time, and then the feature is certified as done! It goes live two days later.

The *!&^%(* Feature Is Live

Cut to me playing the game. There wasn’t any mention of a cuss filter in the patch notes, so I was quite surprised when I saw a random NPC run by, saying:

Clearly this NPC was trying to cuss me out in Spanish. Whew, thanks profanity filter!

(I’m not named Templar, by the way… the NPC’s just spout off about whoever is nearby.)

It took a while to figure out what happened. The poor NPC tried to say “put a stop to the Qularr” but the cuss filter interpreted it as “put a“, which is just one letter off from “puta“, which is a cussword in Spanish.

So it’s not bad enough that I can’t say “put a” in Champions Online anymore… the NPCs can’t say it either!

The next day it’s even worse: an evil villain tries to tell his henchmen to “put that hero in a pine box”, a reference to murdering me. But alas, he said “hero in“, which of course is a misspelled reference to drug use. A reference to murder? That’s fine. Using drugs? Whoa there! So It comes out as “put that $#@*^!& a pine box“. What a foul mouth these NPCs have!

It’s ironic, perhaps, that cussing continues unabated. I can’t say “put a” but I can still say “p-u-t-a”. Turns out 13 year olds figured this out pretty quickly too.

What’s going on here? Why did this feature get out the door like this? It’s an embarrassment; it does more harm than help.

This is just a symptom of Champions’ painful death throes.

Death By Resource Atrophy

Even before they got their first months’ numbers back, Cryptic knew the game wasn’t going to be a big chart buster. Now they’re just hoping to break even: if they can keep enough players around to keep the bill collectors away and the lights on, then the company can try again with Star Trek Online. And hey, maybe in a year or two they can launch Champions for the XBox 360 and it will be a mild success.

This is very bad news for Champions players. Champions has been relegated to the role of red-headed stepchild… it’s that crappy failure of a game that keeps stealing resources from Star Trek Online, which is the game that’s going to save the company. (The same fate befell Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online when it became obvious the game wasn’t going to recover its development costs quickly… its team was rapidly stripped of resources so that Lord of the Rings Online could be a success instead.)

So now Champions has a tiny, bedraggled, demoralized team. If they’re lucky, the team has taken on that grim, “we’ll die trying” mentality that desperate live teams get. I think some of the team has that now. A few people are clearly trying hard. But there’s no support, so every few steps forward also makes them stumble backwards a step.

I’m rooting for you, guys. Yes, I’m pointing out how you’re making tons of mistakes, but I also think you’re doing the right thing. At this point, you’re not going to get a reasonable amount of QA support, so you’re best off cramming in the fixes, new bugs be damned. If you fix 20 bugs and add 3 more, that’s still better than fixing 10 bugs and adding 0. Desperate times call for desperate work.

This is also the time when the live team’s producer must shine. If Champions is around two years from now, it’s because the producer made the right calls during these first three months of the game. My suggestion: pick your goals with QA. Insist on actual test plans (that you review) for the handful of features that are really important. Having QA working closely with the engineers is ideal but not realistic now. So have your lead engineer make test plans for important features (or, if your lead engineer writes the feature, have a different engineer make the test plan.) Don’t worry about seriously testing the small features. There’s no way you can get all your new stuff covered by QA. It sucks, but it’s the facts. Focus on a feature barrage instead. (For all I know, that’s exactly what Champions is doing now. But if so, they aren’t adding the important features nearly fast enough.)

Yes, I will laugh at your embarrassing bugs, but if you address the serious issues (like useless crafting, wildly arbitrary quest difficulties and rewards, and a cruel newbie experience for people who don’t research the right build on the forums), I’ll keep playing. I think you’ve got another month to show significant progress. After that, even folks like me, who really want to play this game, will give up and quit for a while. So show us what you’ve got! Your next month’s effort can have a major impact on your population numbers. It’s do or die time for Champions.

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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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