by Damion Schubert, Founder, Ninjaneering.com (damion@ninjaneering.com) KEY TOPICS
The Exponential Curve of Death More Content?
Play Less, Please Conclusion
AUTHOR NOTE
This is another article that was originally published online and which we asked the author to revisit. You can read Damion's biography Appendix B, "Bios of Interviewees"; he's "been there and done that." What he writes about here is crucial to the long-term survival of any persistent world (PW).
When creating a role-playing game, most design teams try to aim toward providing 40 hours of gameplay. More expansive visions, such as Ultima Ascension or Baldur's Gate, easily surpass that, offering 80, 120, or even 200 hours of gameplay, depending on who you ask.
The costs of providing this additional content are substantial—both games cost millions of dollars and had schedules that surpassed two years—and in the end, all but the most hard-core fans had a hard time completing every quest and exploring every area in these two games.
However, in the arena of massively multiplayer (MMP) games, 200 hours can be one-tenth of the time that a player spends online.
Indeed, there have been numerous reports of players who surpass the 200-hour mark in a month—every month. And as a result, MMP designers feel compelled to extend the playability of the game well beyond what is healthy for either the game or the player.
[ Team LiB ]
The Exponential Curve of Death
The designer's first impulse is to create long-term play with extreme exponential character progression—one where it gets harder to advance as the game progresses. This is nothing new to gaming, but we MMP designers often take this to an absurd level, sometimes going so far as to double the number of experience points needed to advance to each level. Given that the actual work that a player has to do to gain experience hasn't changed much, this can get real old real fast.
Typically, when designing the curve, designers say something like, "It's so steep that I guarantee it will take 6 months to reach level 100!"
Also typically, this is often initially compounded by extreme penalties for failure, such as steep death penalties that can undo hours or even days of work.
The problem then, of course, is that your game starts to feel a lot more like work than fun. The results of this are stark:
Players come to resent your game and your staff— The tedium of doing the same action over and over again eventually wears on the players. It doesn't matter how fun that particular activity is either—once you've done it eight hours a day for a week to get to your next milestone, it's just not that thrilling anymore.
Hard-core gamers devour your game faster and demand more— To your hard-core gamers, the whole concept of needing six months to get to your highest level is a joke—they figured out how to get there in three months with their first character, and can now do it in one month with their new characters.
Casual gamers feel they cannot compete— Seeing another player display remarkable power can actually inspire you to try to reach that plateau yourself—unless, of course, you realize that it would take you six months to get halfway there. At that point, casual gamers and weekend warriors decide whether or not it's worth it to even try.
Your game narrows— Because it takes so much time and effort to make a tiny gain, it begins to feel as if every moment of your life where you are not doing that activity is wasted time. As a result, other features of your game fall away. These features typically offer no reward or aren't very efficient ways of reaching that reward. The best example is when players say that they "can't role-play" in your game space. You can role-play anywhere, even in a parking lot with a broken broom handle.
What players are saying is that role-playing takes too much time away from the daily grind, which they feel compelled to do every moment online.
Bandwidth costs go through the roof— Finally, this us the reason your bosses will care. Bandwidth is one of the largest costs of running an online game. If your gameplay is encouraging players to log on for eight hours at a time, you are reducing the amount of money you can spend on other things, including additional content, better support, or even development on other games.
The end result of this is player fatigue, a situation where the player is sick to death of the game but unwilling to leave. And why shouldn't they be sick of the game? After all, he or she has played the game 5 to 10 times as much as we would expect anyone to enjoy a single-player game. However, the connections the player has to other friends, and the blood, sweat, and tears that the player has devoted to building online characters at that point prevents him or her from leaving. Yes, you then have a whole bunch of paying subscribers, but are they happy? Are they having fun? Or have they become poisonous enemies of the state?
[ Team LiB ]
[ Team LiB ]
More Content?
When one thinks about how to expand the life of a game, the first thought on a designer's mind might be to identify ways to give the player more content for relatively little dollar.
The addition of more content (dungeons, quests, and so on) at runtime and/or the running of periodic in-game events is one commonly cited strategy for keeping players involved. While these are considered expected by the player base and can have many other benefits inside of the game space, additional content and quests often don't help the problem. First, players can devour in an hour content that takes a designer a month to create. There is simply no way to keep up. Second, content invariably has to be aimed at one portion of the player base. An example is creating a dungeon that only high-level players can enter. Putting in content like this can really exacerbate feelings of frustration and fatigue that other players (in this case, low-level players) might be having.
Random content generation is one interesting arena that has not been explored much, although the challenges in adding new content without oversight have some interesting ramifications for a persistent-state world. However, one can make a good argument that the random content (both the magic weapons as well as the dungeon layouts) has contributed mightily to the success of Diablo.
And, of course, the final course to consider is the possibility of allowing players to create and add content to the world. However, this has a number of challenges regarding quality control, hardware costs, and exploit-proofing that implementation of this in a full-scale MMP is unlikely in the near future.
[ Team LiB ]
Play Less, Please
When examining under these circumstances, one wonders if it is worthwhile to examine the problem from another angle. It becomes clear that the goal of designers may well be to design a game that hard-core players feel compelled to play less—admittedly a stance that most designers are unprepared to take.
Ultima Online (UO) was the first major MMP to recognize that and to experiment with changing the paradigm of player advancement dramatically. In UO, a player advances significantly faster during the first hour after he/she logs on. The results were starkly positive:
Players would still log in daily, but they would spend only an hour advancing their character. During that time, they were guaranteed to see meaningful advancement of their character and were ensured a taste of success. After they had done their daily advancement, players would either log off, feeling good about their success, or they would engage in the more fun and less work-like aspects of the game's design: role-playing, socializing, and exploring the world, for example. Both of these possible outcomes are better than the days of the endless treadmill.
This is not to say that UO's implementation of power hour didn't have problems:
It was introduced late— Since power hour was introduced well after the launch of the game, players who had gotten their characters up in levels "the hard way" felt that power hour had made their hard work suddenly meaningless. Most of the player criticism of power hour centered on this point.
It discouraged party adventuring— The clock for power hour kicks off the moment you enter the game. Given that it can take a significant amount of time to get to your friends to join a party and get that adventure rolling, most players would choose to adventure alone for power hour to maximize benefits.
It was unrealistic— Fans of realism can be starkly offended that the game rules can change so arbitrarily for no apparent good reason, but the designer has to do ultimately what is best for the health of the game. At any rate, any good designer should realize that game fiction is the most flexible tool in the designer's toolbox, and should use the background story when possible to describe and rationalize the limitations of the game.
It reduced player attachment to their characters— Because players had spent less time developing their characters, those characters theoretically would be less powerful "anchors" keeping the player in the game. One could argue, however, that casual players might have more attachment to their characters, as they could get them up to a higher level.
The parameters weren't quite right— Some have argued that power hour still creates a gulf, only now between the player who can play daily and the weekend warrior. Others have argued that players can push their stats up too high during power hour, making it too easy to create a new character. Both are certainly arguable, and both points are also certainly tunable in a new system with the same principles.
It only affected stat advancement— Power hour did not affect gold gain, and as a result, power-gamers would switch to this as a goal to endlessly acquire. However, some designers have actually argued that that is optimal, as you have then given casual gamers goals they can meet, while still providing hard-core gamers with a separate track that they can run on.
Despite these negatives, power hour was perceived to be a strong success among the team that was supporting UO, as it was extremely effective in empowering casual players and reducing the overall tedium of the game. This was despite a huge amount of skepticism about the feature among many designers at Origin (myself included) before the feature was implemented.
However, the lesson from power hour is simple: If there is a particular play pattern that you feel is ideal for your game, then don't just hope players don't act that way—enforce the behavior in code. If you don't want players to advance too quickly, cap them. If you don't want players to spend all day online macro-ing, then limit the effectiveness of such tactics. If you feel it's important to have control of these aspects of the game, then take control of them.
[ Team LiB ]
[ Team LiB ]
Conclusion
When players perform any game function for a significant length of time, the game ceases to be fun. The addictive nature of these online games is strong enough without forcing endless hours on the treadmill on the player. Quite the opposite; if you can reduce the number of hours that a player spends online, and increase the number of those hours that a player can spend having fun, socializing, role-playing, and exploring, then the good feelings that your player base will have toward your game and your service will increase dramatically.
[ Team LiB ]
[ Team LiB ]