Recently, in my other life as a rabid consumer of MMO-related fansites and blogs, I’ve begun to notice the prevelance of ads for paid fan-written strategy guides. But I didn’t think much about the depths of this topic — or its potential impact for developers — until I stumbled across a fascinating article called “Learn2Play, the new Real Money Trading?“. In short, this article suggests that the secondary market in selling game knowledge deserves as much attention as the secondary market in game gold and goods.

Of course, companies like BradyGames and Prima Games have made it their business to print strategy guides for quite some time. But now some players are getting into the business as well, selling guides for their favorite game. Sometimes these are traditional bound guides, but more often they are strictly online — as e-books or websites — and they may even involve a subscription for ongoing, updated content. Many of these strategy guides are free (and about what you would expect for the price), but the best of them are surprisingly professional — and incredibly useful.

But what does this mean for developers? Well the first question you may ask is: Should we let our players get away with making money off our game this way? Don’t we do everything in our power to shut down gold and item selling? How is this different?

The biggest difference is that, while gold/item RMT arguably harm your players’ experience, stategy guides arguably enhance it. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about hacks and cheats here, but rather suggestions on the best place to level from 20-30 for different character types or an expanded explanation of how the crafting UI is supposed to work. You players benefit from being able to access this information if they want it, and if you are not able or willing to provide it yourself for whatever reason, then at least it’s still available to them.

(There are actually quite a few reasons you might not be interested in providing this information to your players directly, from the particular type of audience you are nurturing to the expense and difficulty involved. We’ll be discussing some of those topics later on.)

So no, you shouldn’t usually bother trying to shut down the sale of legit strategy guides. But here’s a much more interesting question: What’s stopping a developer from offering similar services? Asking players to spend extra money for a simple strategy guide is probably over the top — you’d run smack into player expectations on that one, I’m afraid — but what if you extend the idea? A small game with the right audience might find success selling roleplaying lessons, for instance, or a one-on-one in-game ‘Intro to Our World’ session. Or how about an interactive ‘Basics of Grouping’ course for a group of friends that wants to play together? I know one or two MMO teams that have considered this idea, although I don’t believe any of the big US games do this right now.

Well, it’s an idea anyway. *grin* And in the meantime, I’m very interested in seeing how the secondary market on strategy guides continues to develop.

It’s safe to say that all the successful mainstream MMO’s have very simple AI. At best, they have good heuristics about when to use certain abilities. This is a far cry from FPSes, some of which have very convincing AI.

But why do MMO’s have such bad AI? Well, many Korean MMO’s just don’t have the server CPU cycles to support it. A common architecture there is to use a single CPU for every aspect of the server, which relegates NPC interaction to the more minimalist variety.

But the architectures common over here do not have this limitation. We could go hog-wild with the AI if we wanted to. In fact, back when AC2 was in beta, we did just that — I remember a version of AC2 where Drudges, the goblin-like low-level monsters of the world, had been given elaborate AI help-finding routines.

In this version of the game, which thankfully never made it to the live world, Drudges could decide if they were overmatched, and if so, could run and get help. If they got back and decided that they were still overmatched, one of the monsters would run and get more help, and so on until they were sure they could win. And they did win. It wasn’t any fun. But it was pretty easy to code!

 
Think you could take him? During development, this little Drudge could
call in more back up than a Mafia Don.

Okay, so sure, that was stupid, and was quickly toned down. And then it was toned down again, and again, and again. In the end, the poor Drudge could only stand perfectly still and scream for help, which was useless unless there was a monster within thirty meters. And what do you know, the AI ended up just like all the other MMOs.

AI is relatively easy to code, once you’ve got path-planning in place. But figuring out what will be fun … that’s the hard part. Players in a traditional-model MMO like to know their odds before they begin. MMO players expect to win 90% or more of the fights they undertake, and they can only do that when things are extremely predictable. Monsters who can get help are much less predictable than monsters who stand around waiting to get chopped up.

AI can be extra annoying in games that center around groups of players working together. Here, MMOs tend to use an elaborate “aggro system.” Players have abilities which make the monster more or less likely to attack them personally (rather than somebody else nearby). These abilities can only work when the monster is very predictable.

“Ah, but what about raids?” you might be thinking. Raid encounters need great AI, right? No! Please do not give your raids good AI. Raids are scripted encounters. One of the most appealing parts of raids (for the hardcore raiding audience) is learning how the scripted encounters work and overcoming them. Although the scripting needs to be more complex and interesting, the actual encounter needs to be more predictable than regular encounters, not less.

So assuming you’re making a traditional-model MMO, where players typically kill small numbers of monsters over long (~30 second) periods of time, you can’t diverge from the mold too much without breaking the model. But that doesn’t mean your monsters have to be big stationary lumps of sinew. Here’s a few ideas on designing AI without breaking player expectations (or being really annoying to players):

• Want your monsters to feel more lifelike? Give them an “angry but not yet attacking” state. If players get within 20 meters of a monster, the monster attacks. But if players stay out at 40 meters, the monster can still appear to react to players: calling out taunts, loading its gun, diving for cover, etc.
• It’s okay for some weak monsters to run and get help from bigger monsters — as long as it’s predictable that they’ll do so, so players can plan accordingly. You may want to telegraph that they’re going to run, too (such as with a special HUD icon).
• Monsters’ combat maneuvers are allowed to be unpredictable. For instance, it’s okay for monsters to have a super power that they use at random intervals. This is one area where MMO players seem to accept a large degree of randomness.
• Your aggro system can work however you want it to, as long as it can be understood and predicted by players.
• If you add random behaviors, make them in the player’s favor. In AC2, if a Drudge killed a player, the Drudge had a 25% chance of doing a little victory dance over the fallen player’s corpse. This was very memorable, and it was okay because it didn’t hurt the player any. (It actually benefitted any other nearby players, because they could get in a few free stabs while the Drudge danced.)

Flavor over substance: that’s the (slightly disappointing) secret to good AI in a traditional MMO. Make players feel like they’re battling intelligent foes, but make the foes actually very predictable.

One of the most interesting aspects of live MMOs is the user cycle. In a good game, players who get “hooked” and stay past their first month are likely to stay for 3 to 6 months total, and then wander off. But a large percentage of these players come back later and are likely to get “hooked” all over again. This is what I call the returning-player cycle, and it’s absolutely crucial that every MMO keep this cycle running smoothly in order to keep population numbers up.

You don’t want to put roadblocks in the way of returning players. For instance, you want to keep the player’s characters and equipment around for as long as possible. In fact, keep the players’ accounts around forever, if it’s at all possible. But what can we do to hook returning players, aside from avoiding these obvious mistakes?

Nostalgia, the Key to Hooking Returning Players

Players come back because they miss the world, the gameplay, and the social interactions they had in your game. In other words, they are returning because of a kind of nostalgia.

A returning player will find great pleasure in remembering things they’d forgotten: the shortest distance between two cities, the secret hiding place of a rare spawn, or where to sell items for the best value. The more of these things they remember correctly, the more nostalgia factor you’ll have.

Big Changes, Small Changes

While “nostalgia factor” might be good for hooking returning players, it’s not good for keeping existing ones. You have to make changes to underperforming cities, zones, and systems over time. But you should make your changes with some thought towards how returning players will view things.

• DON’T change little details arbitrarily, unless it really improves gameplay, or you’re positive that all players will appreciate the change.
• DO change entire zones, systems, or cities all at once. Change is important to keeping player interest up. In fact, changing major systems is a good way to get your retired players to come back for a bit, to see what’s new. And don’t be quiet about your changes. Make sure everybody knows and is excited. Hype them up!

The EQ2 crafting system was significantly improved,
but the changes were made piecemeal over a period
of about a year, and with little fanfare.
A missed opportunity!

The idea here is that when you make a big change, you can take steps to manage player’s expectations. If they wander into the town of Holtburg and see a sign outside that says “Welcome to New Holtburg”, they won’t be surprised to find things have changed quite a lot. In addition, big changes are also much easier to hype to your existing player base, so it’s just better all around.

I admit I was a little worried that I’d be struck down by lightning for hypocrisy while writing this post. I’ve made my share of tiny little changes, breaking player’s expectations and nostalgia for no reason except that I felt like making minor improvements. But whenever possible, we need to resist this urge. Instead of tweaking a couple buildings in town every month, redo the entire city all at once and unveil it with some fanfare. Instead of making minor class balance tweaks continuously, make a big deal about your rebalancing effort, and launch the changes all at once.

Revealing big changes all at once can be hard on a live-team schedule, but it’s worth it: instead of nickle-and-diming your players’ knowledge and understanding of the game, it gives them something new and exciting to talk about (and come back for) instead. Presentation makes all the difference in the world.