MMO Development Lesson #36
Without the risk of failure there is no risk of success. You need a balance of positive reinforcement and negative punishment–too much in one direction is a bad thing. For the most significant feelings of accomplishment, there must be significant risks and significant punishment for failure (not that I’m necessarily recommending significant punishment, but the more significant the punishment for failure, the more significant the psychological reward for success).
It’s hard for me to picture what you mean by more significant the punishment for failure. I think it would be better to make it harder to succeed than punishing people for failing.
I’ve played a lot of MMO’s but the only one that made me feel like I accomplished real psychological success was EQ. Camping pipes for monk epic and stormfeather for the eyepatch was just so tedious you can’t help to feel excited when you complete them. Killing your first raid mob with a guild you were in from the ground up is a lot more physiologically rewarding the joining a guild that is farming the raid mobs.
It seems like games today are just lacking that reward of success for me. I hope something I talked about had something to do with the topic you mentioned.
@Xorok
I think it’s probably best to look at it in terms of risk rather than punishment. EQ is actually a perfect example of this, but in my opinion not necessarily because of the tediousness required for success so much as the risks you take. The death penalties in EQ are some of the most frustrating in any game I’ve played (and that includes EVE), and since you lose XP and levels when you die it is not at all guaranteed that you will ever get to the highest level content. Every time you decide to go out and kill a mob that was remotely difficult you take the risk of losing significant portions of the work you have put into that character. I think that is the biggest reason why the successes feel so real.
Playing a game like Age of Conan, for example, when you die you respawn with only very minor penalties that go away if you find your corpse and then you’re right back where you were before you died, but now with full health, mana, etc. When you complete a dungeon in that game there’s basically no feeling of success, you aren’t completing a challenge so much as doing some mindless activity. Certainly there is fun to be had from that sort of thing, I’m not knocking it entirely, but I do wonder how long it can hold most people’s interest.
Also, Richard Bartle had a pretty similar albeit more inflammatory (as is his style) write up about this same concept. I seem to recall a version of it that included a length discussion in commentary but I cannot find it anymore. The original article is still available here though.
People say I’m crazy to have liked EQ’s death penalty, but it is one of the things that made playing the game more exciting. In a game like WoW where the death penalty is, technically, more grinding (money for repairs), there is no loss to risk, just tediousness. In my experience, Pick Up Groups in WoW suck because most people don’t care about dying, so are more prone to being stupid/running off/whatever. In EQ, PUGs were by and large a viable way to play the game because no one wanted to die, and the game shined when you could find a group willing to get off the wall, roam a little and risk that loss. For me, WoW never really shines because there is nothing to lose.
Punishment is implicit in risk. People tend to refer to EverQuest when speaking of the game within which they felt the greatest reward, as well as the game within which they felt the greatest punishment. There was incredible risk camping those mobs for hours–if you failed to kill it, you lost experience, had to go get your gear again, and more than likely someone else got the kill. And, even if all went well, there was a chance that either someone else would tag the mob first or you would be taking a bathroom break or something similar when it popped.
Without that incredible risk and punishment for failure, you wouldn’t have felt the incredible rush for succeeding in accomplishing your goals. If you dial down punishment, you automatically dial down reward.
Thinking of a simple example where this makes sense…
In Contest A, the person who loses the most weight gets $100, and everyone else loses $100.
In Contest B, the person who loses the most weight gets $100, and everyone else gets nothing.
Which contest would you be happier about winning in the end? Which contest would you work harder at?
Contest A is similar to EQ: You get a lot for succeeding, but you can also lose a lot for failing. The psychological reward for success in EverQuest is more important than the tangible reward.
Contest B is similar to WoW: You get a lot for succeeding, but you can’t lose a lot for failing. The psychological reward for success in World of Warcraft is less important than the tangible reward.
Granted, but the risk and punishment should involved activity, as opposed to mere anticipation of activity (like in the case of waiting for a spawn). Simply standing and watching is only gameplay when there’s something to watch. Staring at a stale patch of grass while waiting for some epic mob to spawn is not play, regardless of the eventual reward.
Aaron brings up an excellent point. I’d rather the mob be made a difficult spawn (as in, you have to spawn it yourself), than have it a “sit around with your thumb up your butt for a week” spawn.
some kind of ritual (yep, this is going to involve a lot of “kill 10 rats” to get all the parts, but with a story), lots of journeying, rare drops, proper discourse (think Vanguard’s parlay system), dungeon crawling, etc. Then, yes, instead of ending up bored and brown-thumbed, I end up entertained and feel like my work was worth something. I also don’t have to miss nearly as much work/school/sleep to pull it off.
Yeah, I really don’t like waiting around for spawns either. I only used that in my response because it was mentioned. Even ignoring that, a single fight in EQ was more exhilarating than a single fight in WoW.
The thing that has always bugged me about that argument is that the people making it are almost always fighting only the low end stuff. I mean yes, fighting the least difficult (for your level) thing in WoW is orders of magnitude easier (and thus less exciting) than fighting the least difficult thing in EQ… but theres enough range to get up to where there’s some challenge. It does require you to search around, which may be a problem, but people who have never done anything hard in WoW (for WoW) talking about how easy the game is is kind of a pet peeve. Get into a hard pvp fight or into a hard pve fight (they exist but require you to want to search a bit) and then say WoW isn’t exhilarating… I will suggest that the worst part of it is no real death penalty.
Anyway, things like the EQ-style uber-harsh death penalty have their place. By raising that kind of barrier to entry with difficult content, eliminating easy content and adding significant penalties, you significantly increase player enjoyment of your game because you get people significantly more invested in what’s going on. The downside is that by definition raising barriers to entry excludes people. You have to decide up front: do you want to make a game for a relatively small, relatively hardcore audience or a larger, less devoted one? There is no wrong answer to that question, but a game that tries to be both is going to fail at both, because you achieve one by eliminating the other. They ARE mutually exclusive beyond a certain point.
I think the death penalty is fine in WoW (durability loss) and, actually, I’ve found it to be more punishing than EQ ever was for me. At the very least, it feels equal.
You’re probably thinking I’m completely nuts, but hang on a second. It depends on the stage of the game you’re playing at.
Leveling up, EQ’s death penalty is clearly much more severe. XP loss and facing a corpse run means you have a very real fear of dying while leveling up. But the thing is, once you got to a certain point it started to matter less and less. I’m not talking about late in EQ when we had the Guild Lobby to summon a corpse to either. At higher levels, I cant think of a single time that I wasn’t able to grab a rez from someone, especially after the cleric rez-stick epic was introduced. When raiding, it was absolutely guaranteed that I’d get a 96% rez after every death. Even on progression nights where we wiped endlessly, I didn’t lose much XP. Killing a few mobs that I was probably AAing on anyway usually got my buffer back.
WoW is the opposite. Leveling up, the death penalty is very light. The durability loss on such low levels items doesn’t mean much, so you don’t really fear dying. On the other hand, once you’re max level and wearing mostly epics (and especially if you’re a Plate class) you’ll start to see some serious repair bills. I’ve lost hundreds and hundreds of gold in a single raiding week if we happened to be struggling with a boss or achievement. Considering I had been saving up for some stuff at the time, I actually felt that loss. There’s no rez stick to get any of that gold back! Sure, we have dailies and harvesting and other methods to make gold, but getting your XP back in EQ was just as easy as doing that. That’s where I feel the penalties sort of meet and become even.
I think, even as a former hardcore EQer, I ultimately prefer WoW’s method. I attribute this to the fact that I’m mainly an Explorer type, and I enjoy knowing that I can go dive into that interesting-but-undoubtedly-suicidal area I come across without really hurting my play session with a time-consuming corpse run.
Shifting slightly, I’m curious what you think of this topic in regards to crafting? I’m of the opinion that the risk/challenge should come in acquiring the mats needed to create an amazing item, but that once acquired the player has no risk of failing that combine. Others might disagree and say there should be some risk in the creation itself so that the result is more satisfying. Isn’t it satisfying enough to have finally gathered the necessary materials and see that item fall into your pack?
The problem with that, drawmeomg, is….
“You never get a second chance to make a first impressionâ€
The “low end” is what matters because that’s what people see for a couple hundred hours.
That is absolutely true.
“Shifting slightly, I’m curious what you think of this topic in regards to crafting? I’m of the opinion that the risk/challenge should come in acquiring the mats needed to create an amazing item, but that once acquired the player has no risk of failing that combine. Others might disagree and say there should be some risk in the creation itself so that the result is more satisfying. Isn’t it satisfying enough to have finally gathered the necessary materials and see that item fall into your pack?”
I agree with you. I’d argue that the acquisition of ingredients and (if possible) design of the item are the fun things about crafting distinct from adventuring; the possibility of failing once you’ve done that undercuts the things that make it fun (whereas the possibility of failure in a fight underlines the things that make it fun – the pacing, strategy/tactics, and risk inherent in combat are the selling points). There’s a case to be made for making crafting more combat-like, in which case the risk of some degree of failure is probably desirable. I respect that design particularly in a more social-style game, but in my opinion a combat-focused game best leverages crafting as a significant counterpoint to its combat rather than as a second combat-esque path for players. You get more value, imo, with something significantly different from the main purpose of the game rather than with something mostly the same, since players who want that already have an outlet for their energy.
I agree with Drawmeomg about crafting. It’s all a matter of the game’s intent. The risk of failure should be present in some games, in others it should be more about acquisition and subsequently playing the market with items (the risk being more about establishing and maintaining relationships, or creating too much of a certain type of item that the market doesn’t need, things like that). If the challenge/risk doesn’t exist in the act of crafting, it has to exist somewhere else, or the system has to be very minimalist.
As a meta comment, these lessons are awesome. You should seriously put these in a book, with just one or two per idea – no big essays.
Check out the book 201 Principles of Software Development. It is exactly the kind of book I wish someone would put out about game design. Forget the 900 page mega-tomes. Give me a $20 book on game design that has ideas that get me thinking.
I’ll consider getting these lessons into some kind of book after I breach 100. I’m still learning quite a bit as I go myself, so I don’t think it would be ready, or even necessarily correct, until after the launch of Copernicus. But, yeah, perhaps one page per lesson could actually be useful–whether you agree or disagree with the lesson… well, that’s actually the point of these anyway, it’s not to lord over people with information.
This is maybe not quite what you were getting at, but I think that rewards in the form of loot/levels should be divorced from rewards in the form of overcoming a difficult challenge:
http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/06/let-us-eat-cake.html
Tangentially, it should be noted that, as with investors in the stock market, people have different tolerances for risk. Tuning a risk/reward system to some sort of “one size fits all dev ideal” is dangerous in an MMO, where you generally want a lot of people playing.
So yes, risk is implicit in rewards, but some people want that risk to be akin to permadeath, while others consider risking their leisure time sufficient. You can’t satisfy everyone with the same risk/reward. The finer grained your system, with risk/reward calculations for everyone, the more people you’ll be able to make happy. It’s sort of a market segmentation mentality, just writ in risk/reward game design terms.