[Wildstar] Game difficulty, player confidence.

“… each struggling MMO is struggling in its own way.”

— Tolstoy (sort of)

I have read a few blog posts this week about Wildstar, and the inevitable subscription drop-off and server merge. I’d be hard pressed at this point to name a recent subscription MMO that hadn’t experienced a drop-off after the first couple of months. Players have wondered whether the game’s difficulty compared with other similar MMOs may be part of the explanation for why the new MMO on the block has failed to break the 3-monther pattern.

I played the game in Beta and wasn’t hooked, but at the same time, when so many other MMOs have trodden the same path it’s hard to pick out anything exceptional about this one. Except that the magical lightning-in-a-bottle MMO factor that will get a game to go viral and grow the playerbase rather than shrinking doesn’t seem to be there. It isn’t doom for Wildstar though – other games such as SWTOR and Final Fantasy 14 have recovered from the slump and stabilised the playerbase at a lower level. At this point no MMO is going to go viral unless its new and different, or appeals to a wildly different audience from the usual crowd. WoW did it. Minecraft did it. Lots of other games were decently successful but without setting the world alight, and that’s fine.

At the same time, if their target core audience was hardcore raiders, that was only ever going to be a small proportion of the player base. And it was always likely that unless those people were very burned out with WoW, they’d be tempted back for the next expansion. It’s certainly possible to raid hardcore in two different games at the same time, but not when one of them has a new expansion out.

I did like Keen’s analysis of ‘the quit wall’ in games. “People reach the wall and they quit.”  It could be a frustrating grind, or a really hard solo quest, or dungeon that it is impossible to find a group for – whatever it is, it becomes so frustrating that players no longer enjoy the game because they cannot see a path to the next goal that looks achievable.

I think of difficulty as being in two types:

1. Something you could do with time and effort and/or help from other players, but it might take more time and effort (and motivation) than you want to spend.
2. Something you just can’t do, and you aren’t confident that time and effort would change that.

When you describe it in these terms, 1) sounds like a rational choice. If it takes me 2 hours to run a dungeon and I’d need to run it 20 times to get the tokens that I need, I could rationally step back and think “Whoa, 40 hours for one doodad that will probably be obsolete in the next patch. No thanks.” Sometimes the sheer sticker shock when you realise how much hassle will be involved is enough to put people off even trying.  2) is a judgement call – how long do you try an event/ grind/ etc. before you decide that it isn’t possible?

So our judging difficulty is all about confidence. How good am I at succeeding in difficult things? (Women, incidentally, tend to underestimate this, men are more likely to overestimate – they call this ‘the confidence gap’). If people are already stressed out by other aspects of the game (eg. being yelled at for being a newbie in instances) then they are already likely to be feeling less confident.

So if you put a difficulty wall in a game, the least confident people are most likely to leave first. If your game attracts a crowd who are bullying and elitist, more of the other players will lose confidence and leave. It may be because they are bad players who couldn’t keep up. Or it may be because they lost the will to try or felt they would not be able to learn quickly enough. In either case, the player base reduces.

But still, admitting to yourself that a game is too difficult feels like failure for a gamer. It’s hard to do and even harder to discuss – I think every time I have written a blog post about where I thought part of a game was overtuned, I’ve been challenged on that by people who felt quite strongly about wanting their games to stay difficult.

So this is a tough topic. But does anyone want to share a time when difficulty made them decide to drop a game and how that felt? I never did complete the solo part of the legendary WoW quest this expansion – it was too hard for me and my shadow priest, and I don’t play MMOs because I want to do hard solo content (I’d get Dark Souls if I wanted that). And though I will play the game again, I will always now feel that the designers are telling me it’s too hard for me, and I’m probably not going to raid other than very casually. Because I got the message.

[Diablo] Seasons greetings, and the demotivating effect of world achievements

wn.com review of GoT episode

So, a new patch dropped recently in Diablo 3 and with it new loot and the new concept of game seasons. A season is like a ladder event from Diablo 2 but with fewer scoreboards and more season-specific loot and rewards. If you create a seasonal character, it will be wiped at the end of the season but other than that, you will have an entirely new game to play with other season specific character. Tragically, there aren’t any seasonal graphics changes – I thought maybe some season-themed foliage or NPC garb might have been cool but clearly Sanctuary is clearly Not That Kind of world.

Ladders have an evil Pavlovian effect. You think ‘Oh, I could start a new character!’, and then the first levels go so quickly and you find yourself levelling up the Blacksmith again and before you know it, Diablo has neatly inserted itself (again) as your go-to game for those moments when you want to kill demons in an explody way by clicking on them, without needing too much thinking. I think the seasons will be massively successful for Blizzard. The other bonus is that a new season/ ladder is the perfect time to lure your bestie/ partner/ sister into playing the game with you again. A new start with everyone back on a level playing field is appealing for drawing back old players who drifted, and it is the same reason MMO expansions tend to clear the decks swiftly of any game changing advantages for people who played the last expansion to death.

Not only is new game plus (which this isn’t strictly, I know) a time honored way to encourage players to keep playing a game they already finished, but levelling ladders were a mechanic that was closely associated with Diablo 2 also. Thematically, it fits. Genius really.

It’s all great until you and your levelling buddy have knocked off the Skeleton King and reached the heady heights of level 25 and …. you see a world broadcast informing you that legolasxx has just gotten the world first paragon 50 seasonal character. But this season only started this morning, you protest, how is that even possible?

Same old, same old. Anyone else lured back by the new season? I think D3 is playing very well these days.

[Problem Players] Guild culture, game culture, gamer culture (with notes on GamerGate)

 In life, a lot of the way we behave is drawn from the social groups we hang out with and the wider culture and societies we grew up in. Humans are social animals. We know what kinds of acts will make our friends like us more, and we also can look at high status figures in our groups and try to be more like them. We also fear being shunned or cast out of the group.

There are also reasons why (most) people don’t do things that local culture feels to be anti-social.  Negative consequences include being thrown out of the group or being punished by group appointed peacekeepers  — eg. guild leader, forum mods, or even the police or feds. And for anyone with social anxiety (that’s most people to some extent), fear of those things happening – particularly social exclusion – is very strong.

So if a group culture can reinforce positive behaviour and punish problem behaviours, if we could encourage groups to take on board behaviours that we want to see, that could keep problem players and behaviours under control. This is a particularly timely topic right now, when parts of the gamer community are fracturing because of differences in the behaviours they are prepared to tolerate (or reward).

That fracture will never be repaired. Moderate gamers could make common cause once the ultra hateful total-war-against-women faction are pushed out though, and that is very likely to happen.

The other baseline for talking about gamer cultures is the notion of geek social fallacies (GSF). This goes along with the idea that gamers are poorly socialised geeks – I don’t think this was ever true in the main (you can tell this by the number of us who hold down perfectly decent relationships with friends and family), but there is a subgroup who cling tightly to that self-identity. In any case, their social groups were always likely to feel angry and oppressed and that they need to be loyal to each other because regular social humans won’t want them.

Guild Culture

Time was, your guild was your portal to multi-player gaming. They are your team, the people you play with regularly, the people you train with regularly if your game has group content that is difficult and/or competitive. At the more competitive ends of the spectrum guild leaders, with their power to kick people out of the guild, are pretty much dictators. Players who want to maintain access to the social and gaming benefits of the guild need to not piss the guild leader off, or they risk being thrown out. Alongside the dictatorial guild leader, hard core guilds tended to be quite fascist in their demands that players should put the needs of the group above their own. Loyalty was demanded, ‘treachery’ punished, and the way to prove yourself could be made arbitrarily difficult. The rewards were good though – being part of a tight knit cadre where you could schedule your weekly routine around your hobby. Shared victories. Great memories.

When servers were more limited, a guild would care about its server reputation. Players would care about their reputations. If a player showed some bad behaviour, you could report it to their guild leader who would probably tell them to knock it off. Sure there were always some bad boy guilds who felt they were so superior to the common folk that normal rules didn’t apply, but they were never the majority.

So guild culture is set by the guild leader, and every player in the guild contributes to it.

What has changed as MMOs have become more gamified is that being able to play at the desired skill level of the rest of the group has become more important to this social cohesion. It becomes harder and harder to keep a social guild together when the best X players are heading off every week to do hard, well rewarded content and everyone else is sitting around. I don’t say social guilds are impossible, they work very well when everyone is very clear about their expectations (one of those expectations is that ultra hard-core players will probably go find an ultra hard-core guild and stop trying to turn the social guild into something it is not.)

And as that changed, suddenly guild leaders felt more pressured to keep ‘problem players’ (could be anyone with poor impulse control) in the guild if they are needed for the raid team. Other players felt forced to put up with a horrid guild culture to sustain that raid access. Suddenly the only criteria are ‘can they play well’ and ‘will they turn up regularly’.

It’s not true of every guild or even most. There are plenty out there who continue to require that members behave like grown up human beings and not lord of the flies. Players who value that will be able to find a home. There will also be plenty where ‘don’t talk about politics’ is one of the pieces of guild culture.

But now times are changing again. The hard-core, never a huge proportion of the player base, has less of a grip on access to group content. Group finders, raid finders, these things all make that need for guild membership less total for a player who wants to see the endgame unless they are committed to the most challenging content. In truth, staying with a game long enough to see endgame is probably less prevalent than in times past. At the same time, the gamers who used to make up those hard-core guilds have gotten older, and in many cases more mature. It is more accepted now that people will want to plan their game time around families or other commitments. And also, the real problem players tend not to be good team players anyway so wouldn’t fit the disciplined guild team model. There are exceptions. Some of those are connected with larger game culture (such as griefing being widely acceptable in EVE). And finally, people are more likely to game in groups dominated by people they have met outside the game, either online or in real life. So the culture and the leadership doesn’t stay in neat game silos.

The key point though is that the culture of this type of group is dominated by the leadership. And that a lot of players will go along with being led if the results lead to fun gameplay for them. And they will do it without too much critical thought about what they are being asked to do, and will be willing to swallow a lot of objections if it means staying in the group. This is more of a human weakness than anything specific to guilds.

So how can games encourage better guild cultures? I’ll leave this as an open question, because I think it is less of an issue now than in the past. If there were hard rules in the game to discourage problem behaviour, guild cultures would automatically improve (for those who need improving). Less requirement for organised grouping is more likely to destroy guilds, rather than just change them. And it’s hard to reward people such as guild leaders for basically being decent human beings.

The issue of what to do with a problem guild is larger than ever, especially when they aren’t limited to a specific game. How to stop people whose idea of fun is making your life miserable. And how to make sure they know where the lines are beyond which it isn’t right to go.  But most players, most of the time, will not have to deal with problem guilds.

Game Culture

Why is it that in pick up groups in FF14 or SWTOR, other players seem more polite than they do in WoW? (This is based on my observation).

1. It’s the culture of the game. They are all similar in other respects.
2. WoW is just that much larger. While the good runs vastly outnumber the bad ones, you are just more likely to run into that one bad egg in WoW. And people always remember the bad experiences more.

When we talk about game culture, we are discussing something that describes a whole swathe of behaviours ranging from when you are ‘allowed’ to roll need on loot to what kind of discussions you are ‘allowed’ to have on the in-game chat channels. Unlike with guild culture, there is no single person with authority to reward or punish behaviour. Instead, in MMOs, the rest of the player base will tend to make its feelings known. Come out with something homophobic (for example) in public chat on a more tolerant server and expect to be a) reported and b) slagged off in chat by many other players, some of whom will be more influential on the server.

Every game and every server will have its own cultural quirks, but there are still a few general observations. There are always exceptions, of course.

• Competitive PvP games tend to have more aggressive, anger-tolerant communities
• RP servers tend to be more sociable and well behaved
• Games where everyone does things with their guild tend to have quieter chat channels

Sandbox games also offer many more opportunities to grief other players. Where the game does not explicitly prevent behaviour, it is very difficult for the rest of the player base to show their distaste for it.

Gamer Culture

Gamer culture is currently in flux. Here’s my brief rundown though. In the beginning of computer gaming, through to the early 80s, gaming wasn’t particularly strongly gendered or associated with bad boy behaviour. It was geeky for sure, but it was also really common when I was at school to go round your friend’s house to play on their ZX Spectrum or BBC B computer.

The gaming industry had a crash mid 80s. After that, when it was being rebuilt, marketing people decided that their core audience was going to be young men. They were dubbed core gamers. Games were marketed explicitly to them. And the core audience responded. Games sold. The industry did well. A lot of gamers got very entitled – after all, video games were for young guys, along with guns, beer, titties, fast cars, and Maxim. All the advertising tells you so. So the majority of AAA gaming was aimed squarely at this group.

Some of the other gamers drifted away to new hobbies. Others kept on supporting the games they liked but drifted further from the mainstream. Why even buy a console if the only games it will have are genres you don’t like? We could see this pattern breaking up though. Nintendo proved with the Wii that there was a huge market longing for fun family games. Sony ran with Japanese RPGs, massively popular among the non core gamer group. Themepark MMOs picked up a lot of female gamers.

So back to now when there are a large number of gamers who don’t fit the core gamer archetype. Games of all sorts are getting out into the mainstream, helped by smartphones and mobile gaming.

In addition to this, a subset of  gamers identify as poorly socialised geeks. It doesn’t matter why this is exactly except to note that gamer communities have been accepting to them and have been their safe spaces to hang out. Add to that the guild/ group mechanics of liking to follow strong leaders and we can see how vulnerable these people (mostly guys) are to being used as massive griefing machines by bored sociopaths who don’t see why the boundaries of the game end at the client – or to put it another way, they want to play MMO PvP in real life. It would actually be better for a lot of these people to just find a game they like and play that, they’d be fine in EVE if they would just stay there. They might even enjoy it.

But now gamers are up in arms. Core gamers feel as though they are fighting for their ancient rights against the legion of social justice warriors who would like to play female characters in decent armour. Everyone is against game journalists. And the ultra arseholes are taking an opportunity to punish women (also other minorities but the level of abuse that female devs and journos get is shocking).

The oddness to me about GamerGame is that it all seems so pointless, unless you buy into the culture war. No one is going to stop making video games that appeal to young men, there’s no much money in it. We have known for years about the close links between the gaming industry and journalists, anyone who was paying attention knew that. So all that we have left is a small number of people who think its fun to make death and rape threats to women who get out of line. Then a larger number of people who are tired of the sexism in the industry (again this isn’t really debatable) and have decided this is a good time to make a stand.   Not to mention the usual 4chan suspects who are trying to fight a MMO PvP fight for the lulz. And a load of people in general who are exploring what tactics work to get their messages over on social media, and mostly just annoying each other a lot.

Just as an experiment, I retweeted a headline from the examiner “#GamerGate revealed as misogynist and racist movement from 4chan” ; within a minute I had 5 tweets from strangers telling me how bad examiner is or that 4chan doesn’t work like that. None of them were rude. And 6 other people had retweeted my link. It wasn’t harassment. But my retweet got to a lot more people for a lot less effort than the attempts of the people who wanted to tell me they thought it was incorrect. In social media, it is very hard to suppress the message.

Gamer culture is changing, though. The trolls will increasingly be excluded, because everyone else will realise they just make them look worse. But social media right now is like the Wild West, it cannot yet be tamed.

[Problem Players] What if games didn’t make people angry?

So I talked a bit in the last post about problem behaviour. I haven’t tried to define yet what it is. Before I try to do that,  I want to talk about what triggers problem behaviour – because we assume that people are not like this all the time. (If they are, then they probably are problem players.)

The reasons that players act up or rage out are basically down to: rage/ frustration, boredom, and/ or peer pressure/ local culture. Maybe another way for games to tackle this issue is to address those directly.

 

Gaming and Frustration

Things that (can) cause frustration while gaming:

• Losing in a competitive game
• Team members playing badly
• You playing badly
• Waiting around
• Playing a game you don’t really want to play because you want the rewards
• Being taunted by other players
• Facing a barrier to an in-game goal
• Feeling let down by other players
• Being excluded socially by other players
• Learning new content
• Guild drama
• Having to miss an in game event due to RL
• Playing with people who don’t speak your language
• Playing with people of very different skill levels to yourself
• Playing with other people
• Bugs
• Staying up too late
• Having a bad day (anything else outside the game)

 

Yup, a game that tried to eliminate frustration would lose most of its gaming aspects. It would have no competition, probably no multi-player, minimal challenge, and might start playing calming music at you and telling to relax if the time was getting late. It might still be fun. There are games like Journey that are designed to be as calming for the player as possible – and I love Journey — but it wouldn’t be an MMO as we’d know it. It is debatable how far it would really even be a game, and no game can really stop you from having had a  bad day at work or an argument with your partner.

Some of these areas could be addressed in games, though. You can reduce the frustration of team members playing badly by making team events easier, or making the matching better so you are always playing with or against people of similar skill ratings to yourself. You can stop people staying up late by having the server close down at night. You can reduce the frustration of people feeling excluded by having random group finders (most MMOs these days). You can reduce guild drama by not having guilds. You can reduce the frustration of not understanding people by not allowing players to communicate using free text (Hearthstone, Free Realms (RIP)). Learning new content can be less frustrating by making it more obvious what the player needs to do, or making the new content easier. Different games can and do experiment with these kinds of mechanics.

Not all of those things will make a game more fun for all players. That is the payoff for less frustrating games.

The elephant in the room is the trigger that I have marked in red in the list – it is frustrating to feel forced to do content you don’t enjoy because you feel you need the reward. The reward doesn’t need to be big or important to lure people into this play style. People who feel they need to min-max (for whatever reason – being an elite gamer, playing ‘properly’ etc.) will feel pressured to pick up as many of the rewards as they can.  This has been an ongoing issue with Themepark games. Warcraft for example has made a lot of tweaks to their raiding schemas due to players feeling they need to maximise their loot options. And every tweak reduces options for those players who don’t feel the need to min-max. The players who are mature enough to manage their gaming do suffer for the sake of those who claim they are being forced to run content. HINT: No one is forcing you.

Not all of those things will make a game more fun for all players. That is the payoff for less frustrating games.

On a more futuristic level, games could try to measure when a player is becoming frustrated. Maybe the player’s avatar jumps around more, for example. Maybe some day authenticators will be worn and will have blood pressure or heart rate monitors built in.  Or the game could ask if the player is feeling stressed, or give them a button to press (“press this button if you wish you could slap your opponent”). If so, maybe they could be directed to less stressful content. “Go pick some flowers, deathknightxxx, you need to chill out!” At the cost of removing some player choice, bad behaviour could be reduced. (Would it be a fun game? Who knows?)

Perhaps we don’t need to reduce player choice. Maybe when there is some calmer paced content available, players will choose to do that instead when they don’t feel up for the hassle of grouping. “Yeah right,” you may  think, but actually this is one of the appeals of big MMOs. If you log in and want to do something non-stressful, you can opt for gathering or redesigning the interior of your guild house.

 

Boredom: For the Lulz

Bored players are both the joy and the pain of MMOs. This is because boredom is a trigger for player initiated activity. Some people use it to devise really cool ways to entertain themselves and each other. Plenty of social guilds run really fun events, for example – quiz nights, scavenger hunts, wide ranging RP events, server-wide markets.

Boredom triggers players to sit around talking to each other. When people talk about modern MMOs being less social due to lack of downtime, this is what they mean.

Boredom triggers players to go and explore, or think up new challenges for themselves and each other.

Boredom has probably been the source of most of the best MMO player stories we’ve ever had. And it definitely is the source of most of the good stories you have ever read about sandbox games (in which the player is expected to be bored a lot of the time, that’s part of the appeal, and is why people say you have to make your own fun in these games).

But boredom also means the cat starts to play with the box. It can trigger people to go off and try to mess around with other players, for the lulz. And that means it can trigger problem behaviour also. Granted, in some games, the difference between problem behaviour and productive behaviour is very small – that is where the game culture comes in.

So this leaves a couple of questions.

1. How to encourage players to start thinking about whether it’s time for them to take a break from the game?
2. How to help boredom trigger good outcomes?

With (1), MMOs often try to keep people as long as possible which means a committed player will be encouraged to stay in the game long after they are actually burned out and bored. It doesn’t have to be this way. They could be more proactive with a call and return approach. To do this, the game needs to give benefits for the players who keep playing but also make it quick and easy for players who have taken a break to catch up and be able to play with their friends again. I think Blizzard has transferred smoothly to this type of model with Warcraft. There seems to be an understanding now that many players will not stay for an entire expansion. But at the same time, the game needs to stay fun for the players who don’t dip in and out. They need to feel their commitment was worthwhile.

Again, it’s a payoff. Making it easier for players to come and go will reduce the number of bored players hanging around, it will also reduce dev income and may make the game less fun for the committed core players. That’s a big risk. We also hope people will be able to decide for themselves when a break is warrented.

With 2, it is all about the in-game culture and the player’s social circle. Most people don’t do things for the lulz without an appreciative audience. And they can’t recruit a group to do it with them if no one is interested. It is also harder to recruit people to the cause if the majority of the players shun that type of activity. In any case, this brings me to … guild culture, game culture, gamer culture – which is a subject for the next post.

[problem players] Pictorial version – problem players or problem behaviours?

 

“Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
― Winston Churchill

So imagine we have a group of people in the room. One of them is secretly a dalek who actually hates all life and has anger management issues and a disintegration beam. Those people might argue, they may have bad days, but only one of them is going to ever disintegrate people.

That’s one model of problem players – that some people are not like other people and are inevitably going to go dalek. The reason is not important, just that when you put them in that setting, they are going to be a problem. So if you can find and turf out those guys ASAP, the game space instantly becomes less threatening for everyone else. For lulz you could separate them into their own space where they can exterminate each other rather than just turfing them out completely.

 

dogshaming.tumblr.com

Here’s another model: dogs aren’t bad, they are just dogs. And sometimes that means they might do things that annoy other people (or dogs) if they aren’t properly trained.

So if you socialise your dog properly, identify the behaviour you want to stop, and put in some training,  then all will be well. If we want people to stop being abusive online when they lose a PvP match or end up in a PUG with someone who they think is a noob, then we have to teach them this is not acceptable and that bad dogs will be shamed. It is, ultimately, behaviour that players can control if they want to.

 

“In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others” (Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres).” Candide (Voltaire)

An example of using a ban as a teaching mechanism for others.

So let’s try this again with less labelling

I don’t like labelling people as problem players. Or in other words, everyone is someone else’s problem player. But there are legitimately some people who struggle more with playing with others. We don’t need to know the reasons for this – some people are on the autistic spectrum, others have abusive backgrounds, others have been used to a community where smack talk and rage outs are acceptable, others are roleplaying being internet heroes. Maybe it’s patriarchy to blame, or capitalism, or the internet, or testosterone, or the NHS, or young people today, or the parents.

In the ideal world, there would be help and support. In the real world, they get to stomp all over the rest of us while society figures out how to best regulate the internet. And at this point I am equating problem players in MMOs to trolls on the internet. It isn’t the first comparison I am going to make but it does demonstrate how there is a difference between committed, organised trolling and people who just rage out from time to time when they’ve had a bad day at work. And as an added bonus, lots of people rage out when they encounter any kind of rules or regulation that involves them being told off. (I can say this from my experience as a mod on rpg.net).

And as soon as we shift from talking about problem players to problem behaviours, we have a problem which (potentially) could be solved. Make no mistake, solving the problem of online bullying is up there with climate change and water shortages and war in the middle east as one of our generation’s Big Problems.

Unfortunately, bullies don’t want to be ‘solved’ and will spend many happy hours figuring out ways around any mechanisms that are in place, so that they can  make other people’s lives more miserable. Or in other words, Lum is wrong and actually it may be a problem if the cats want to play with the box rather than the cat toy. Why do I say it? Because if some people are determined that their game is really about playing with the other players whether they like it or not, they are ruining the sandbox for others.

For a lot of others though, the behaviours can be channelled and the larger and more successful massive online games are finding ways to do that. I will talk more about Blizzard later this week because I think they and Riot are right up there with the best of any online organisation, public or private sector, in managing the player base. MMOs/ massive games are going to be where these techniques are honed and the ones which work will see use more widely later.

And at the same time, we can argue about how well this behaviour management is working. WoW is still a game in which you may zone into a PUG/ LFR and be abused/ booted while you are a new player and trying to learn the strategies. LoL still has a reputation for similar types of abuse. There are other games which have more pleasant communities and reputations. So the other angle would be – how do we build nicer communities?

Thanks all for the feedback on yesterday’s post! I see some agreement with the general principle that we’d like our online spaces to be less hostile, and some equally valid concern about the mechanics of how this might happen and what kinds of rules could be fairly applied online.

Should MMOs ban more problem players?

Quick post today. I am going to spend the rest of the week writing about the problem of problem players, both in MMOs and online in generally.

There has been a tendency for devs to feel “don’t ban paying players.” I think that’s way outmoded. It’s time to moderate these game spaces properly, recognise that the bar for good behaviour (ie. don’t be an arse, don’t harass people, don’t deliberately spoil a group event for your grouup) is pretty darned low, and start banning people who can’t meet those criteria.

What do you think? Would you be more likely to play a game which was proactive about bans? Is it just the cost that stops devs from implementing this? (Yes I know Riot games has been quite inventive here, but LoL still has a pretty poor reputation for player behaviour).

The land of lost content: Lum on the lifecycle of the MMO player

*coff* Is anyone still here? (I love you all!)  I thought I’d catch the Blaugust train before it completely left the station.

This is Lum’s masterful summary of the lifecycle of an MMO player. He’s just looking at the cycle in one MMO, not the part where you try to repeat the experience fruitlessly a few times and then wander off to find some other hobby.

 

XL. Into my heart on air that kills

INTO my heart on air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

 

Listening to Welcome to Nightvale.

I want to believe in EQ Next

In the jaded MMOsphere, dulled with years of falling subscriptions, shorter and shorter player lifespans (remember when we used to think calling a game a “three monther” was disparaging?) and a slow but certain move away from being virtual worlds to monetised gamification platforms, the announcement of a new PvE sandbox-style game backed by one of the main players in the business is always going to be a wake-up.

Many of the blogs I follow are projecting what they expect to see, or would want to see in the upcoming set of announcements at SOE Live tomorrow (2nd August).

• Tagn projects onto EQ Next
• Wolfshead wants to believe again
• Milady reflects on how WoW has changed, and hopes that in EQ Next the world will come first

One thing is for sure. EQ Next has the potential to shake up the hobby. The second thing that is for sure is that they won’t do that. Am I jaded? Maybe so. I want to briefly give some ideas for what I think they should do, and then some thoughts about what I think they will do.

How to do a successful PvE sandbox

I think there is a room in the market for a more accessible version of games like Wurm Online and Tale in the Desert. Minecraft shows how much people enjoy building and creating, and the incredible success of games like Sim City and Civ shows how much appetite there is for large simulations. And if the boom in social media shows anything, it is how much people enjoy creating and being part of communities. For a lot of people this could include a roleplaying aspect.

To make this work, EQ Next would need to take lessons from games like Glitch and Ultima Online as much as WoW. Instead of focussing on making a world to adventure in, make a world that people would want to (virtually) live in.

Keep direct PvP to a minimum. People don’t want to live in a warzone. And the ones who do already have games that cater to them, those players aren’t the people you need anyway. You need the settlers of the gaming world (consider this a new category alongside explorers, achievers, etc.) to inhabit your world and bring it to life.

There needs to be gameplay to keep things moving, but it can be based on a more simulation-type model. It needs a proper economic model also. Players enjoy ‘taming’ their local environment and building up their smallholdings but there are surely more interesting gameplay models with which to do this than either Farmville or “spreadsheets in space”. The players this game needs are not necessarily the achievers although there can be quests, instances and adventures for them as well. You don’t even need to encourage ‘grouping’ so much as ‘interacting’ and ‘organising’.

A sandbox needs, more than anything else, space. That means virtual space in the sense of large worlds to explore and exploit. But also space for players to carve out their own niches, explore different playing styles, think up different in-game projects to pursue, and space to step away from the levelling track.

Lore is an important part of building an immersive world, but SOE need to ditch the EQ lore. Or at least reboot it into something more coherent. No one is interested in the existing lore except the grognards, EQ2 was always a chaotic mess lorewise, and when the only thing people know about your main character is that she’s a blonde with big boobs, it’s time to start over.

What I think they will actually do

Given that the reveal is at SOE Live, they will hype up the Everquest/ EQ2 connection, which is probably not of huge interest to anyone who either didn’t play those games or didn’t like them.

I think the game will ultimately fail as a virtual world, under the pressure to monetise and to stick to tried and tested F2P mechanics (yes, they said they plan to stick with a P2P subscription model but I can’t see that happening). Expect to see lots of talk of high impact PvP, frequent world events, “a living world” (hint: the best way to have a living world is fill it with players) and some pretty screenshots.

But for all that, they have been saying a lot of interesting things in interviews about ditching the story. Maybe they will surprise me yet.

Thoughts on the Steam Sale, also Dust

It’s like Valve read my mind (or blog). I hadn’t really planned to buy much in the Steam Sale but they kept putting up games on my list so what’s a girl to do? Current haul this time around includes: XCom, FTL, Kerbal Space Program, SIns of a Solar Empire Rebellion and Dust: an Elysian Tale. I don’t feel manipulated and am a happy customer (at least now that I’ve figured out how to get XCom to save) but it’s true that I spent more than planned.

I am epically ambivalent about Steam’s strange trading cards thing – is it a game or just a bizarre hook to reel in collectors? Not sure, but it seems popular and I picked up some pocket change by selling my cards on the Steam marketplace to people who (for whatever reason) seemed to want them. It is worth noting that people will also pay pocket change for cards generated by playing the games so if you buy a game from Steam that has a lot of associated cards, you can recoup some of your outlay/put the profits towards your next purchase. This makes it one of the most excruciatingly clever promotions ever seen.

Also I kind of like the design that collectors get rewarded with being able to collect things, and I can still  get rewarded for NOT being a collector (ie. by being able to sell the unwanted collectables.)

Jamie Madigan has spent more time thinking about the psychology of steam summer sales.

So what’s the score with Dust?

I haven’t booted up Dust: an Elysian Tale yet, as am currently too occupied with XCom. But the name does remind me that I haven’t heard much recently about CCP’s Dust 514.

I assume from this that no news is bad news, given that gaming companies tend to hype every minor piece of positivity to the ends of the earth and beyond. So colour me unsurprised that Brendan Drain just slated the game on Massively after trying it last week:

Last week I finally sat down to play the game myself and was thoroughly disappointed with both its 2005-era graphics and fundamentally broken gameplay.

The review a couple of weeks back in Edge Online was also harsh.

Combat has about as much personality as the bleak, dust-blown worlds. There’s none of Halo’s gently exaggerated physics, Shootmania’s relentless velocity or Call Of Duty’s immediacy. There’s just shooting people with guns, albeit while battling against some suspect hit detection and sludgy controls.

It’s in stat-packed menu screens, not on the battlefield, that Dust feels most part of the universe in which it nominally takes place.

I don’t know of any official figures about Dust, but I remember wondering last year how much CCP had invested in developing Dust and what the knock-on effect might be on them if it wasn’t successful. I guess we’ll find out.

In which we complain about solo quests in an MMO world

I realised last week that the most frustrating moments for me in MMOs are not losing in PvP, nor being yelled at in a PUG, or having a wipe night in a raid, or being beaten to a mob (in old school games in which that still is a thing). Nope. It is being forced to do a solo quest that I can’t do.

In all of those other situations you can take a break and come back and things will have changed – maybe you’ll get a better random group, or raid makeup, or find a quieter time. Maybe you could grab some friends/ willing strangers to help. But the solo quest is potentially going to block your progress forever. Plus just as it’s frustrating to be asked to find a group if you had been happily soloing, it is annoying to be forced to solo if you’d been duoing or playing with friends.

Mirkwood in LOTRO has issues with this design. It’s still one of my favourite zones, but the epic quest there does love its solo elements. Which can be fun and all when you can do them, and crazy frustrating when you are struggling. Especially if you had been duoing (or playing in a group) and now feel that everyone is waiting for you but no one can help. Arb and I have been enjoying playing our alts through Mirkwood lately, but some of those solo quests are pretty non obvious (yes I’m talking about the one where you have to help a dwarf escape from a prison via using barrels of poison to send some of the other inmates to sleep) – not hard once you know the trick, but non obvious in a frustrating way.  I’m not sure either of us were prepared for how failing a solo quest just makes you want to log off and never play the game again. (At least for awhile).

This is partly the specific quest design – a well designed piece of game will at least give you some clues as to why you failed one attempt and how you can improve next time. But it’s also because an MMO is not the same as an offline game. Most MMOs don’t optimise solo quests for specific classes (SWTOR is the exception) so the difficulty is probably not only fixed but also likely to feel unfair if it doesn’t favour your class strengths. Which is especially frustrating if you had been duoing with someone for whom that isn’t the case. It can make a huge difference if your character has strong AE, or heals, or a pet.

The legendary WoW quest

Speaking of frustrating, I’ve tried to complete the solo stage of the legendary WoW questline (Celestial Blessings) several times on my shadow priest, for both the healing and ranged dps versions. I can’t do it at all. I’ve read tactics. I’m not really interested in trying any more.

So what does this mean really? Aside from killing my enthusiasm (admittedly waning anyway) for this expansion, I guess I’m just not good enough.

I can live with this. I don’t like PvP and I’m not big on trying impressive soloing adventures. I’m a decent healer and dps on my priest but I’m not a great or talented soloer so maybe I don’t deserve cool epic things. What I find more frustrating is  feeling trailed along by this stupid questline all expansion to the point where I will have to give up. When they put in a PvP section to the legendary, people complained but it was actually very non-PvPer tolerant  (just had to win a couple of battlegrounds, which you can pretty much do by queueing repeatedly until random chance gives you a good set of team mates). So how come the solo section can’t be non-soloer tolerant too? Why is this the point where the game decides to get elitist?

I don’t know the answer to that because there is no reason. It makes me feel stupid (for assuming that the quest was aimed at the same level of player it had been from the start), as well as wanting to quit.

How do you feel about solo (I mean forced solo) quests in MMOs? Does anyone else get as frustrated as I do?