Penalty vs. Reward
People often talk about balancing risk and reward. If a player is taking risks, they should be rewarded significantly. If a player isn’t taking risks they should be rewarded insignificantly. Most of us can agree with that — but have we agreed about it on a more fundamental level? What is risk? What is reward? And, are risk and reward opposite sides of the same coin?
Reward, I would argue, is one side on the Risk scale. The opposite side on the Risk scale is Penalty. In order for a reward to feel rewarding, there has to be penalty. In order for penalty to feel punishing, there has to be reward.
The greater the gap between the reward and the penalty (or each vs. the baseline), the more impact it will have on a player. But it has to work both ways. You want reward and penalty to be perfectly balanced as the baseline, with reward greatly outweighing penalty when a player is being rewarded, and penalty greatly outweighing reward when a player is being punished.
Many games have taken half that approach and run with it: the baseline is “meh” (that’s a real word now) and the reward is great. But, the penalty is usually pretty “meh” as well. So, the impact of the reward is diminished and the penalty for failure is nearly absent (both because the gap between reward and penalty is reduced and the gap between baseline and penalty is reduced).
Let’s use the easy example of death: Death (failure) must be a punishment for survival (success) to be rewarding. If you overcome a difficult battle and death is a minor penalty, the elation you’ll feel when triumphing will be moderate. If you overcome a difficult battle and death is a major penalty, the elation you’ll feel when triumphing will be extreme.
But, failing (dying) follows Newton’s Third Law of Motion — there is an equal and opposite reaction for players when they die. If death is a minor penalty, players will feel the failure, but it will only be moderate. If death is a major penalty, players will feel the failure, and it will be extreme.
What designers have realized is that it’s safer to just reduce the gap between penalty and reward. Players will have lower highs (reduced feeling of reward for success), but they’ll also have higher lows (reduced feeling of penalty for failure).
In games like EverQuest that had a large gap between penalty and reward, you did get an incredible sense of accomplishment at times, but you also got an incredible sense of failure at other times.
Those failures drive many people to quit in part, I believe, because people psychologically focus on all the negatives at once when they are being punished for one failure. Meaning, when I lose all my gear, I think back to all the other things that pissed me off in the past. Those mount up and enhance the desire to quit.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, people don’t psychologically focus on all of the positives at once when they are being rewarded for one success. Meaning, when I kill the uber dragon and get a great item, I don’t think back to all the other times I was happy in the past.
Yes, I’m saying that people are pessimists. Designers have learned to design around the tendency for players to focus on negatives more than positives by making both less significant. There is a smaller gap between reward and penalty. We’ve tried to increase the gap between reward and baseline, and reduce the gap between penalty and baseline, but that’s just introduced its own set of problems (because penalty must be far away from baseline for it to be a penalty, but it’s not).
My solution? Rewire humans! Ah, I wish. No, there is no perfect solution. I believe, however, that we can increase the gap between penalty and reward a bit more if we focus less on the instant (risk) and take a wider interpretation of penalty and reward. I prefer effort rather than just risk.
Effort vs. Reward: Players are rewarded equivalently for equivalent effort. Effort can be described with, at the very least, risk and time. So, a solo player who puts in many hours of time can be equivalently rewarded when compared with a raider who puts in a couple hours of risk. It’s all effort to me, and it deserves to be rewarded.
If we reward players more for effort instead of just risk, the instant penalty can be greater, while over time they can still achieve the same, greater reward. How? Let’s see if it works for item rewards.
There’s a boss mob named Blackguard the Bard on a sweet pirate ship in Yarr Harbor. He has a crew of pirates with him and hangs out in his cabin all day. His greatest enemy is Moorgard the Monk, leader of a dojo of ninjas.
For every pirate you kill, you get faction with the ninjas and a few pirate doubloons. The greater the challenge, the more faction you get, and the more doubloons you get. If you manage to kill Blackguard the Bard (success), you also get some awesome pirate-themed loot.
But, let’s assume you never manage to kill Blackguard the Bard even though you’ve tried a dozen times. Over the course of those dozen tries, you’ve been getting pirate doubloons and ninja faction for killing pirates.
When you are friendly enough (i.e. have enough faction) with the ninja dojo, Moorgard the Monk himself will speak with you. And, you can give him doubloons for some awesome ninja-themed loot for all the effort you’ve put into killing his enemies. Some of this gear is just as good as what you’d get for killing Blackguard the Bard.
So, in this example you are rewarded greatly for successfully overcoming a risk (killing the boss) and you are rewarded greatly for effort over time (killing lots of pirates). The punishment for failure, I’d contest, could be greater here than in most current games because there is eventual reward even with repeated failures.
Okay, this has become far too long of a post and I’ve probably lost the attention of all readers with my rambling, so let’s summarize:
In order for success to feel rewarding, failure must be punishing. In order for failure to feel punishing, success must be rewarding. The greater the gap between the penalty and reward, the more impact each will have. The highs will be higher and the lows will be lower. And, there must be a gap between penalty vs. the baseline and reward vs. the baseline for each to have significant impact.
Having a large gap between penalty and reward can be risky and eventually unhealthy for your game in the long term. But, if you reward players more for effort (long term) instead of just risk (short term), you can maintain a fairly large gap between penalty and reward because players will know that they can achieve what they are after in the long run.
If the only subtext to a given situation is loot, then X game has more problems than we might realize. This is where a solid story and quest elements, come into play. What if karma was the choice, or faction points, if your actions had a further reaching effect instead of just which loot did you get. Character story driven advancement vs loot driven advancement.
Great post!
I don’t have much to add except to say that I completely agree with the philosophy and especially liked the example given.
Ensure that the loot Moorgard hands out is different than what Blackguard drops (though nearly as good like you said), and you’d also be creating a favorable scenario where players who struggled to defeat Blackguard may be able to do so with the upgraded equipment they received, thus finally achieving their goal in the end. I bring this up because you don’t want to just say “You couldn’t do it, but we’ll give you the same gear this way instead!” I think it’s important to ultimately help the player overcome the original obstacle, thereby increasing their “high” of success overall.
Is your baseline assumption that raiding is always risky and that soloing is not? I’m not sure I buy that. If raid encounters were dynamic so that bosses and their flunkies had different locations an actions every time maybe….but that’s not what I hear. Raiding seems to be risky until the script is found and then it’s ‘follow the recipe’.
Nonetheless, I’d love for a game to reward perseverence [grinding] with the same level of rewards as raiding.
RE: Loot as the only reward (Garthilk)
I’m just using loot as my example because it’s the easiest thing for many people to wrap their heads around, and because WoW is our common MMO language right now, and WoW is an extremely itemcentric game. Any reward can apply, though… Experience, abilities, buffs, skill points, access to a new location, a pet, a home, people celebrating when you arrive in town, etc.
Re: Different but equivalent rewards (Myrix)
Yep, Moorgard’s stuff would be ninja themed and would have different stats, but be just about as good (possibly better depending on your character). That would help you achieve the ability to defeat Blackguard.
RE: Raiding being riskier than soloing (JuJutsu)
Raiding is not necessarily always more risky than soloing. It IS, however, one of the few things that people end up getting rewarded for in most games. You either raid or PvP for the best gear in WoW. I’m suggesting that those are not the only paths to great rewards, and that any situation can bring about equivalent effort to raiding (it could be an extremely challenging solo class instance, it could be something that takes a lot of time, it could be a raid, etc.).
And, really, raiding (and grouping) is always possible to be more risky than soloing. It’s a lot harder to make something that is challenging to all classes or skill sets than it is to make a raid that can assume many different roles exist within the raid makeup. The best way to make soloing challenging is generally through the use of class-or-role-specific quests.
Great post! You’re getting as long winded as me (and I like it)! It is funny you bring this up because I’ve been working on some “MMO Antiquities” articles for Epic Slant that talk about some things I feel modern MMOs have lost. Those should start running, I believe, next week.
On that note, and without giving away too much, I mostly agree here. Designers have gotten a little too lax when it comes to the scale of reward and punishment. I know EQ1 could be extremely frustrating. That said, I have never felt as accomplished as I did there. Success really felt like a success in the material world. EQ2 extended this. I have achieved a lot in multiple games and I’ve never cared half as much as I did in EQ1 and EQ2.
One article I will go over is the importance of loot. I won’t spoil it here but essentially I think the Diabloization (tm!) of items is the downfall of modern society. It cheapens the experience. “Oh I got the Healthy Breastplate of Cows. Awesome! Tomorrow though I’ll immediately replace it with the Healthy Breastplate of Greater Cows.”
I will (obviously) disagree about the reward for raiding versus solo. It is my party line after all. You can never design an encounter that is as complex and challenging for one player as you can for 24. You can also not say it is equal effort for one person to do something alone that 24 people work together to achieve. Motivating that may bodies to go the same way takes a whole lot of work.
The example is fine, however. I have no issue if a solo player can spend a ridiculous amount of time to achieve something near what I can achieve shortly with a raid. That said, I maintain that the best rewards, by a noticeable margin, must be reserved for raiders and even more so for raider-craftsmen. I know that is unpopular, but again, I don’t believe in the equity of experience theory.
On a side note, I noticed “Causalities of War” has moved to Monolith. You should say hello! (I’m Ferrel there)
There’s a boss mob named Blackguard the Bard on a sweet pirate ship in Yarr Harbor. He has a crew of pirates with him and hangs out in his cabin all day. His greatest enemy is Moorgard the Monk, leader of a dojo of ninjas.”
Man, you just can’t let it go, can you? LOL
I like where you’re going with this. I’ve argued it for years. But you get those damn raiders who think they should own the world because they’ve put in all the effort to take down BadAssDude or whatever. In part, maybe they should. But I’ve raided and I’ve soloed in games for years. While raids are more work for the devs, soloing is more work for the player. It should be rewarded equally but differently, which is what you are getting at.
I have to respectfully disagree with Ferrel. I think it is more challenging to design for the solo player in mind than for groups of any size. A developer has to be aware that they have a captive solo audience when designing content for one player. Then the dev also has to take other game mechanics into account – profession, skills, attributes, talents – and try and balance it across the board.
In some cases, groups become monotonous and developers can design for them easier. A typical tank, healer, DPS, crowd control group is pretty much the norm and you can design for that. Designing for separate professions in solo content poses more of a challenge. I’m sorry…but raids are always about beating RandomBigDude. Unless you are the tank or the healer…you’re just along for the ride. The dev’s design work is lost on all but a couple people in the raid.
This is where equipment as trophies can really come into play. I may have spent five hours to get the “pirate’s cutlass”. As a solo player, I’m cool with that. Or maybe I’m not. I can always make the effort to put together a group and be rewarded with “Blackguard the Bard’s Cutlass”. People will know I was in on killing Blackguard if I have his cutlass. I think there is definitely a reward system waiting to be developed there.
I totally agree with what you stated, it kind of explains why Eve online is not mainstream, but has a group of very dedicated followers that would not exchange it for any other MMO. The emotions you get when you win are amplified by the fact that you lose like 8 hours or even weeks (the amount of time required to get the money and buy a good ship) when you die.
So a lot of people are driven away as soon as they lose their hard earned ship and go bankrupt in 40 seconds. While others are prepared to spend a week to get the few strong success moments that you just can’t achieve doing scenarios for a week in WAR, no matter what kinds of items you can buy with renown you can achieve… When I think about it – in some games just staying alive is more satisfying than that huge sword you get after grinding faction/renown/whatever for 2 weeks.
Though, I guess I am conflating emotional rewards and monetary rewards together, of course the value of any item is increased if it is possible to lose it, on the other hand – WAR scenarios are giving less emotional impact than killing someone one on one, while being a faster/easier way to get renown. Same with Eve – you can make money faster and safer in Empire (non-pvp zone) than in 0.0 (all out pvp zone) at the moment, so even if the emotional reward is lesser, a lot of 0.0 players are feeling bad about this, because they think it is not fair.
So even if Game designers feel that they have balanced the effort required (grind 2 weeks vs kill the boss), some people still will be unhappy, because “anyone can grind for 2 weeks, how comes they got the cool stuff”, “they got the same reward in 3 hours, and I spent 2 weeks grinding” and “I spent 2 weeks grinding an all I got is this sword”, i mean – you are giving both types of players the same monetary reward, for the mostly same amount of effort, but the emotional investment in trying to kill the boss for 3 days, and barely succeeding is different from the emotional investment of grinding. And emotional reward when you kill the boss is different from the one when you kill the pirate number 2001.
(I’d still want both sets, so I’d spend the first week killing the boss to get Pirate loot, and then grind the other week just to get the ninja gear)
One should also remember that reward does not have to be fully tangible, it can also be a certain level of uniqueness. You beat Blackguard the Bard and you get his pirates cutlass that has a visual music effect around it, or if you go the slow solo route, you get Moorguards Ninja-To with no effect around it. DPS is the same, Bonus’s are the same…the visual reward however is quite different. In many cases this might be all that is needed. (Housing rewards are great for this sort of reward system, btw.)
This sums up almost perfectly the main problem I’ve had with modern games, primarily the death penalty. My favorite (yet almost dead) multi-user dungeon leaves you with a sizable exp loss, full equipment loss, and if dead from a player a short time sitting out from the game after death. Closely behind this is the gear-focused mentality of the games; sometimes there are more important rewards than that piece of purple loot.
Are games without challenge fun? That’s a little about what we are talking about here. I’m back to playing WoW. I’m levling quickly for not having much time to play. Of course, the XP changes help out. However, I’m an old dog and I haven’t changed the way I play the game. I take on critters higher than me to get more XP. I die a lot…but I level fast. There’s really no death penalty other than equipment maintenance. I’m having fun, but I doubt the lack of substance will keep me going very long.
The discussion is more about reward and challenge for solo, group and raid players. I also agree that items shouldn’t be the only reward focus. Playing the game and having fun do need to be goals. Otherwise, why play?
There’s a ratio in there as well. For every 5 rewards, it takes only one punishment of equal magnitude to bring players back to a neutral opinion. If the game has too high of a punishment/reward ratio, that’ll turn players away. (This ‘rule of 5′ applies to all sorts of things; customer service, road rage, anywhere you have negative and positive transactions).