To begin with, they need to seem like they belong where they are. Mountain goats shouldn’t be wandering the plains. Creatures of the night shouldn’t be basking in the sun. If something seems like it might be out of place, it probably is.

Mobs should also look like they lead lives. Would wolves prowl forests with no prey in them? Certainly not. Would mobs hang out on the edges of camps, or would they keep warm by the campfire in a cold climate? Are all members of a chaotic tribe actually chaotic, or do they have a more organized leader who surrounds himself with warlocks? Which feels right?

There should also be rests and climaxes throughout a zone. Sure, you don’t want many areas to be devoid of life, but you also don’t want players to be wading through enemies all day long. Points of interest like camps or giant trees should have concentrated numbers of mobs in them, while open spaces should be thinner. There should also be areas where a player can find refuge to rest (or take a bio break).

Players also shouldn’t be running into the same mobs throughout an entire zone. They should be paced such that players are regularly running into new mobs (both visuals and combat variants on existing mobs… e.g. a “blood serpent” in one place and a “fire serpent” in the other, even if they only use a few different abilities). Novelty wears off quick, but it’s important to maintain.

So many games miss the mark on mob placement. They might get that mobs should be cool and fun to fight, but unless they look like they belong and care is taken when determining where the mobs are, players will notice, even if it’s only subconsciously.

The focus here is too much on the macro, rather than the micro. Let’s use an example:

I want to get to the other side of a zone called Jigsaw Hills. There are two methods to get from East to West:

1. The first option is to teleport instantly to the other side for a small fee. We’ll call this the “Coin Option.”
2. The second option is to play a very fun puzzle game for 60 seconds and get there for free. We’ll call this the “Puzzle Option.”

Jigsaw Hills is included in an expansion to the game, and is the last zone players are introduced to at the tail end of the level range.

On the first day that people hit the tail end of the level range, tons of people use the puzzle option. It’s a great, fun puzzle. It’s free! What a wonderful design. Every new wave of people uses the Puzzle Option instead of the Coin Option. Not only is it fun, it’s free!

The Puzzle Option is the “Fun” option, while the “Coin Option” is the “Grind” option.

After the first week, you start noticing more people migrate toward the Coin Option. There are still more people using the Puzzle Option, but it’s no longer vastly more utilized. This is because the people on the front end of the level curve have done it several times each, and now they just want to get where they’re going quickly.

After the first month, almost nobody ever uses the Puzzle Option. Everyone has maxed out and used the Puzzle Option half a dozen times. It’s no longer novel, it’s just an annoying time barrier. Now more than 90% of players going through the zone use the Coin Option–it’s faster, requires no effort, and it’s only a few mob kills of coin anyway.

Now the roles have flip-flopped. The Coin Option is the “Fun” option, and the Puzzle Option is the “Grind” option.

The question is not whether people will choose the path of least resistance over the most enjoyable path–invariably, players will eventually choose the path of least resistance. The question is, is it worth creating the more enjoyable path AND the path of least resistance (both in terms of development cost and in terms of gameplay)?

If you just create the more enjoyable path, will the “enjoyable” sustain? In the example listed above, the answer is obviously “no.” At some point, you’ve done the little game a bunch of times, and now it’s just a pain to have to play it for 60 seconds to get across Jigsaw Hills.

That would argue for only creating the path of least resistance–instant transportation. But, without the “free but takes time” option to complement this one, instant transportation completely trivializes travel and makes the world feel small.

So, what do you do? Most of the time, the answer is to meet the mechanic somewhere in the middle. Something that doesn’t completely trivialize travel and shrink the world, but isn’t terribly boring. Hence, the carefully-crafted flight path. It is designed to give you interesting visuals without significantly shrinking the world.

Does the carefully-crafted flight path ever get boring? Of course it does. You have to find the right amount of time to make it take for it to not utterly suck. In a game like WoW, some of their flight paths do take too long. But, it does seem to be the most attractive option.

To get back to my original point, the focus on that video is on the macro level; yes there are lots of people doing the fun thing. But, each individual (micro level) probably only does it on occasion after they’ve experienced it a few times.

My design idiom is a little strange. I have different approaches to every aspect of design I work on, but all of them share some common methods that I’ve determined work best for me. A lot of it seems pretty standard, but there is one unique method I employ. Let’s go through the steps if I’m doing something fairly large in scope (the smaller scope stuff is the same process, but faster).

When I first approach something, I think. A lot. I tend not to put much of anything on paper for a while. In fact, I probably spend an entire day just thinking. How do I think? By screwing around. I jump around to websites, take turns in my online Risk games, play ping pong, and generally do stuff that appears to be me wasting time.

What I’m really doing is two things: First, I’m thinking about what I’m going to do. Second (and for me, more importantly), I’m charging up. I have to gather my energy by messing around and not burn too much fuel on actual work.

After I’ve gathered that energy for a day at work, I head home. This is really where I end up getting the most useful thinking done, especially as I try to get to sleep (after which point I accrue Rest XP… okay, bad analogy). By the end of the day at home, I usually know what I want to do.

The next day at work starts with a burst of notes. I put everything I’ve been thinking about (that I feel will be useful to me, not all the stuff I eliminated already) on paper before lunch. This usually is just a bulleted list that isn’t very organized.

After lunch, I hammer everything into something useful. I take the notes, throw those on the right monitor, and turn them into a coherent document that covers everything necessary for the task at hand (or implement things, depending on what I’m designing). This is generally done by the end of the day.

I almost structured this whole thing as if I were a blacksmith… the thinking being the schematics for what I wanted to make, the notes being the smelting of the ore, the document being the creation of a weapon… but I decided to spare you (mostly).

What does this get me? Well, I’m often very productive even though I look like I’m messing around a lot. A task that is supposed to take me 3 days tends to take me 2 days when I work this way. The company I work for (38 Studios) realizes that every designer has their own way of working, so I don’t take any flack for my methods (what’s important is that you complete your task on time and at a high quality level–how you get there is up to you).

Of course there is iteration after I get feedback from others and such, but this process gets me to the completion of the initial design.

Everything else I do is pretty normal. I usually smack headphones on when I’m in the final phase of designing anything (got some new Sennheiser HD 555s for my birthday, and they rock), like many others do. I tend to go fairly broad first, then drill into the details. Things like that. But that isn’t really part of my personal design idiom, the “how the crap did you finish that already when every time I looked over at you it looked like you were screwing around?” is my design idiom.

Do you have an interesting process you use to produce your best work?

While not quite as obvious a “hardcore” behavior as spending many hours playing a game, knowledge is a more sophisticated method of reaching a goal than simply dedicating a lot of time to playing a game.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is goal-ambiguous. A player’s goal might be to gain levels quickly, corner a market on the auction house, discover the optimal path for embarking on quests, or explore and learn all about the lore of a world. It doesn’t matter what the player wants to do (for purposes of this discussion), it’s what they are willing to do to get there.

What is knowledge? Let’s see what the dictionary has to say.

1. acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition
2. familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning

Basically, the amount of effort and brainpower a player is willing to dedicate to learning how to reach their goal determines how Knowledge-Hardcore they are.

Some people spend many hours inside and outside the game acquiring knowledge. I know people who will research different character builds for many hours before even trying a particular build in the game. There are people who search for all of the books and lore within a game, and some even catalog this information on websites. Others will learn how to decorate homes or build fireplaces out of various house objects.

In all these cases, it’s players seeking existing knowledge. Experimenting and figuring out new ways to do things is something I would categorize as Skill rather than Knowledge (e.g. the person who figured out how to build a second floor out of tables in a house is using Skill, while the person who read the instructions on how to do this from a website is acquiring Knowledge). I’ll talk more about my classification of Skill vs. Knowledge in my next “Hardcore Embarkation.”

Is there an objective way to measure how Knowledge-Hardcore someone is? If we can discover the average amount of time/effort a player dedicates to the acquisition of knowledge, sure. But I don’t know what that average actually is.

To summarize:

Knowledge-Hardcore
A player who dedicates a significant amount of effort to learning about a game is Knowledge-Hardcore, regardless of the motivation or result.

Some players are willing to put in an incredible amount of time to reach their goals in an MMO (or any other game, for that matter). When someone refers to another player as “hardcore,” they often mean that the player they’re referring to plays the game for significantly more time than they do.

Hardcore is relative; me saying someone is hardcore could mean they play 20 hours of an MMO a week, while another person saying someone is hardcore could mean they play 60 hours of an MMO a week. That relatively is an issue we can try to resolve later (by looking for averages against which to measure someone’s level of hardcore).

I believe that someone can be hardcore in the area of time no matter how good they are at a game. They might dawdle around and chat the vast majority of the time they are logged in, but if they are logged in for appreciably more than the average amount of time, they are Time-Hardcore. This claim alone is a bit of a deviation from the standard hardcore reference; if you refer to a socialite player as hardcore in a group of raiders, you’ll be strung up and left for dead. But, even a non-achiever can be Time-Hardcore if only they dedicate a significant amount of time to the game.

If anyone has numbers for how much time the average WoW player spends per week, I would love to know. World of Warcraft is likely going to be the reference for much of this analysis, because WoW is our common MMO language.

To summarize:

Time-Hardcore

A player who dedicates a significant amount of time to playing a game is Time-Hardcore, regardless of the motivation or result.

In a few weeks (after the lovely upcoming Christmas vacation), we’ll look more at other ways players can be hardcore, such as with skill or knowledge.

I won’t delve deeply into it in this post. All I’m doing at the moment is opening this up for discussion and input before I get too deep.

First, a definition of hardcore from Dictionary.com:

hardcore: unswervingly committed; uncompromising; dedicated

That’s pretty clear. Essentially, a hardcore player is someone who is dedicated to playing. What it doesn’t say is how that player is dedicated, or what they are dedicated to doing. Hardcore is a measure of degree. It’s an adjective, not a noun.

What I intend to explore is the how and the what of hardcore. In other words: What are players dedicated to doing (goal)? How are they dedicated to doing it (method)?

For example, a player might have the goal of gaining max level. To reach that goal, a method they will employ is time investment. A player who is very dedicated to investing time to reach the max level is a Time-Hardcore player when it comes to reaching max level.

I’ll work to generalize it even further, however, by taking a deeper look at Richard Bartle’s 4 and 8 Player Type Models. By utilizing those models, we can use hardcore as a measure of degree and method against the player types. E.G. Efficiency-Hardcore Achiever (4 part model) or Depth-Hardcore Planner (8 part model).

So, to sum it up, here are the questions I’d like to answer:

• What methods do players employ to reach their goals? What types of hardcore are there?
• What are some general goals players often have? Is this investigation necessary, or should we use Bartle’s types?
• Are Richard Bartle’s Player Types compatible and useful for this exercise? If so, should we use the 8 or the 4 Part model?

I’m open to everyone’s ideas along this journey, and would absolutely welcome it so we can reach some useful terminology together.

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.