Hades Essay on Online Gaming (2007)
MMORPG's Today
Articles on CNN, Bluesnews, Cnet, etc have
indicated that the average PC gamer is 30 years of age. In LotD the
middle of our bell curve is about 25 years of age, but a third of our
guild is 30 or older. Console kiddies are significantly younger, are
taking up more of the gaming market, and in the future there's likely
to be more PC / Console crossover games. Either way the current MMORPG
market is a 3 billion dollar a year industry, and there are many more
games in development. The question we have is whether or not
development studios are developing their games with any knowlege of who
their true audience is, or do they think they're going to sell millions
of copies to 15-21 year olds who have nearly unlimited playtime?
The Audience
Why
does any of that matter? Because you need to target your game to a
potential audience that's going to be loyal, buy future expansions from
your company, and you've got to keep an eye on competitor products (PC
or Console) that can introduce cross sector products. Those products
could rob you of customers, and that's not a good thing. An audience
that is 25+ years old is going to have different expectations of their
gaming experience than an audience that's 15 years old and has no
responsibility. More MMORPG's are hitting the market today after
spending years in development, and simply failing within the first
year. Others are a success, but two years down the road can't sell an
expansion pack to keep their subscriptions from falling each month.
It
could be that MMORPG development studios are simply leaving their
audience behind because they still think they are competing for the
18-24 year old market. Here was a good statement by a guy who was
responding to a post about why a working adult could care less about
buying an expansion to a game that provided some new content, but
mostly just lots of new "filler time".
What
many of you don't understand about casual players is their schedule
limits. This ISN'T some teenager who bargains with his mom to get 30
hrs / week of play time between homework and dinner and weekends. This
is the husband who happens to wake up 90 minutes before his wife and
wants to kill time playing a game, and isn't going to even consider
browsing the boards waiting for the next scheduled dungeon raid because
chances are it's happening the same time he has to do honey-do's. This
is the software engineer who hit "compile" on his work machine and has
30 minutes before the result, who's not going to spend 29 of those
waiting for groups to form. This is the college student who has 45
minutes between classes and work that's usually busy but today, and
today only, can spend those 45 minutes logged into DAoC. This casual
gamer can log in and get to 50 on multiple characters, even make LGM
crafters and get moderate RR, but next to impossible to synchronize
their schedule to rarely ongoing raids or even well-balanced groups.
Now
this happens to be for the upcoming DAOC expansion, but quite frankly
I've seen this type of argument going on for the last 6+ years. Mainly
due to every game after UO trying to use the EQ model of time sinks to
try to retain customers. EQ created the rise of Class based systems
over UO's old skill based systems. Skill based systems give players
near absolute freedom in how they want to develop their characters,
while class based systems lock players into a predefined role such as
"Healer, Tank, Buffer, Caster".
Now they are copying the WoW model, which is basically the perfected EQ model.
Grouping in a Class Based System - The Horror
My
problem with class based games is that it creates tons of downtime that
simply isn't called for. Most of the downtime, inside or outside a
guild, comes from organizing your group. You can litterally sit there
for hours trying to organize your groups, especially if you are relying
on pick up people, just to do a task that takes 30-60 minutes. When it
comes to dealing with groups in PVE or PVP, I stand by my statement
from 2003.
Class Based Systems:
Imagine
the United States Infantry having to fight like this:
"An infantry platoon is about 28-30 soldiers broken down into 4 squads.
Instead of each soldier carrying his own weapon and ammunition so they
are well rounded warriors, they have been modified to fight using
today's class based environment. In each 8 man squad you now have 1
soldier carrying the weapon, 1 soldier carrying the bullets, 1 soldier
carrying 30 round magazine to put the bullets in, 1 soldier carrying
the gas mask and chemical attack kit, 1 soldier who does the scouting,
1 soldier who has to apply the first aid kit in the event of a wound, 1
soldier who will aim the rifle, and finally 1 soldier who will actually
do the firing. 1 warrior, and 7 support soldiers who have limited
capabilities.
If the soldier firing gets killed, no one else can fire the weapon. If
the soldier carrying the bullets gets killed, the weapon has no ammo.
If the soldier with the first aid kit dies, there's no one to heal. Etc.
Back
then I was applying that statement to PVP, but it equally applies to
PVE because there's plenty of instances in PVE where you wipe on a raid
when Bubba the Tank goes down and he was the only damage dealer.
Whether its PVE or PVP more downtime is created because other guilds or
groups have to sit there and evalute someone's class, potential damage
output, support based utility to the group, and their gear. Its almost
like you're doing a virtual job interview just to get a stinking group.
Now add all this downtime to the fact that MMORPG high level raid
encounters can take several hours ON TOP of the time it took to form
your group.
Where does the average online PC gamer fit into this
picture? How often to people 25+ with a job, kids, etc have to blow 6-8
hours straight on a game? I know from our experience that its about
once or twice a week for a large PVP or PVE event. But before you can
get to that level, you've got to develop your character..............
Character Development - The Agony
In
the old days you spent your time killing a few rats, moved up to ogres,
and in a couple of days you might not be a master of the universe but
you had enough skill where the outcome of the fight wasn't a given if
you ran into someone who had put in more game time than you. You didn't
need to worry about groups, if your friends were higher level than you,
or if you weren't the right class. The bottom line was that the games
of yesteryear wanted to get you out of character development mode, and
into the game as soon as possible.
These days its the
reverse, but with a twist. Since most games are class based now you
need to form some type of a group to develop your character faster than
a snail's pace. Caster, Healer, or Buffer? Well you won't be killing
any mobs because you either have no offense worth a flip, or if a mob
so much as stares in your direction your casting is interrupted. No,
you have to search for a tank to keep the mob aggro. Without that tank,
you're dead meat and going nowhere. Tank? Well you can kill the mobs,
but without the healers, buffers, and casters running with you then
you're going to be doing a lot of sitting or expensive potion drinking
while you rest between nearly every fight.
When a game is new
this isn't so bad, but as the game ages the newbie game experience gets
worse and worse as the new player population diminishes. Eventually a
true new player gets no help at all because the new areas are either
barren, guild reroll groups don't invite PUG's, or people are just
botting themselves and don't have time for strangers. To me, this is
where the class based games litterally doom themselves. Who cares how
many expansions you can crap out if the new players you are trying to
lure can't make it past level 5 without a group.
The end
result is that existing customers don't like to relive the leveling
experience, and new customers rarely make it though to the end game
content. Some games have tried to create middle content, but it just
doesn't feel right when the rest of your friends are going on a dragon
raid or some massive PVP castle siege and you are sitting there in an
empty mid level zone.
Gear and Quests
UO had it
right with its player economy. UO relied on players using an efficient
travel network to get around the world to acquire resources, and then
having player crafters turn those items into the best equipment in the
game. Things wore out and broke with enough frequency that it kept the
player economy going. Players who didn't want to be dragonslayers could
be respected as master crafters, and there were tons of things that
players could make. There was a whole economy based on people who
obtained the materials to sell to the crafters, and then the crafters
selling the finished products to the players. Good stuff, and it hasn't
been replicated since.
Nowdays player crafting is about running
around to merchants in a town to grocery shop, or obtaining materials
as a byproduct of some boring quest or instanced area. Then the player
has to macro nothing but crafting for weeks on end while burning up a
lot of money, and getting no return on their investment until they
reach that master level. Boring, few games have virtual markets for
players to sell their goods unless they show up on a list with 10,000
other guys, and in many games player crafted gear is inferior.
Now
to get the best gear for templates that guilds or groups will accept
you've got to go on long quests or raids. Players have developed DKP
systems that award points so that the rewards can be passed out, and it
creates a loot driven drama society in player guilds. Not only that,
but there is an insane need to have a certain number and types of
players or the quest/raid can't be completed. How would you like to
spend 4 hours on a quest that requires 40 people, get wiped at 3 hours
45 minutes because a healer went down, and get no reward? Well, welcome
to a lot of today's MMORPG's. The time investment is massive, and
eventually alienates customers who have a real life outside the game.
A
good player economy design with trade skills can give people something
to do other than PVE all the time, but there has to be a need for their
goods and an outlet to sell them that doesn't involve sorting through
50,000 pages.
PVP - Saving Grace or Developer Curse
Depending
on the dev studio PVP is a blessing, a curse, or both. After seeing
what happend in UO with a 90% game landmass that had unrestricted PVP
future games either didn't offer PVP, offered it in special areas of
the game, or created special servers with special rulesets to support
their PVP populations. PVP stagnated in many games because the PVP
zones had no incentive for people to be there, or the special ruleset
servers would get fubar'd due to patch changes intended for PVE servers
but ended up having horrible consquences on PVP servers. Shadowbane
offered a ray of hope for a while but last minute changes to the game
that made defeat too crushing and an inadquate game engine ultimately
confirmed a lot of the dev studios that PVP shouldn't be the driving
force of a game.
WoW sort of changed all that though with their
6+ million customers, and PVP servers filled to the brim with players.
WoW has more PVP servers than several of the largest MMORPG's combined,
and the 2 million copies that Guild Wars sold a few months later
further showed that there was a larger PVP market than many people
thought. Suddenly D&D Online, EQ2, etc were jumping all over
themselves to do something to support PVP and dev studios releasing
upcoming games penciled PVP back into their plans.
This is all
great, but go back up there and read my statement about grouping again.
Too many of these modern games are class based, and create the same
problems that I outlined in my 2003 statement. The core problems with
class based PVP are:
- Class balance is more important to
group success than actual skill. No you say? See how many fights you
win without a healer and no healing potions. Or try to kill another
group with no damage dealers in your group. What are you going to
do...heal them to death?
- Gear, specifically quest gear/end game gear, that is superior to player crafted gear often has a significant impact on the outcome. Over on guildvsguild.com they had a good video a few months back where one guy with the uber quest sword of doom ran about owning 20 people. Perfect example.
- Level is too important in many class based games, and the level modifiers for hit bonuses, defense, and damage play too big a factor. In many games even a one level difference can decide victory or defeat, and that's before you get gear involved.
PVP needs to be about skill not
gear, hard coded class systems, and levels. Skill is knowing your
class, knowing your opponents, having superior tactics and
organization, and using game resources (crafted stuff, gear, potions,
etc) to keep you alive until your enemy makes that critical mistake.
The
other core problem with PVP these days is that in many games you are
simply dead before you can react. PVP damage is too high, and what fun
is it to travel 15 minutes to a fight and be knocked out in under 5
seconds? None, and eventually the casual gamers that PVP depends on
will leave. 15+ minutes of traveling, waiting, or other downtime
(waiting on a que>) for 5 seconds of PVP isn't an acceptable
paradigm. Being trapped in a class based system or a combat system
where potions take 3 seconds to drink to gain 10% health back don't
help.
Content, Content, Content
Dev studios think
they have to keep pumping out the content. To a certain extent its nice
to have some scripted quests or things to do. But long term the more
content you add the more pressure you create on existing and future
customers to obtain that content in order to remain competitive in PVE
or PVP. The people who are sitting at the end game might not care, but
the new player is going to feel like they need to invest a year just to
catch up and so they won't buy your game in the first place. The casual
gamer who's not yet at the end game is going to feel like another 80
pound bag is placed on his back, and is likely to give up rather than
feeling like he's stuck on the treadmill forever.
PVE
So
what's the answer? Honestly I don't think hard coded content is the way
to go. I think the Role Playing element needs to be put back in the
games, and that means interactive human driven story arcs with live
Gamemasters running events. If you've got a real player economy and
lots of tradeskills, then that creates a self sustaining PVE element to
your game. Story arc driven events and rewards ensure that quest type
events are happening, but that actual quest items and unique items stay
rare. At the same time you aren't mass introducing items into the
general population that will significantly effect PVP or PVE balance in
your game.
PVP
PVP guilds are all about rankings,
stats, and kill to death ratios. Give them those tools in your game.
Create areas in the game that they can fight over and have the rankings
listed, let them declare war on one another, let them earn good
experience from PVP kills, and radomly generate item drops off of their
corpses when they die in PVP just like you would for a mob kill. Full
looting was proven unpopular in UO, but a random loot generation
alternative would certainly be good. They could level and earn a living
simply by fighting other players, and never look at a mob if they
didn't want to.
Conclusion
So we've covered a lot
of material. We know that more of the playing audience is getting
strapped for time, we know that class based systems create downtime
related to grouping, we know that PVP and PVE content that relies on
near perfect grouping configurations creates unattractive downtime, we
know that new players are choked off if they have too much of a hurdle
to get to the end game and no group to get there with, why player
economies are important, and many other things.
Time sinks
simply aren't the answer, and modern game offerings need to offer fun
things to do without all the unattractive downtime. Afterall game's
can't count on having 3.5 million chinese farmers to purchase game
accounts to prop up a game, and not everyone has a widly popular
franchise game they can convert to an MMORPG.