"Raph Koster" <raph@areae.net> wrote:
> IMHO, the biggest issue with the downtime was not that it was extended
> -- it's that it was poorly timed. There's a natural cycle going from
> adventuring to wanting to hang out, chill out, swap stories, and so on.
> Being forced to the latter prematurely just makes you itchy -- you want
> to PLAY more. And that's what was happening a lot.
>
> But there were MANY "timing off" things surrounding combat and stats in
> SWG. The rate of damage, the rate of wounds, the rate of healing, the
> rate of incap -- none of those were really right, IMHO.
I'm not so sure that's how it works. I don't think you can make those
kind of generalizations about how people work. For instance, most people
have a circadian clock which helps decide a person's 24 hour cycle - but
there's plenty of people who have it reversed (awake at night) and some
with 25 hour cycles (constantly pushing their schedule forward).
I absolutely do not think you can say there is a natural cycle to how
players want to play. You can find specific unnatural cycles - select
groups of people that flock in a similar manner - but a blanket
statement about the nature of man or play is bound to fail sooner than
later.
Some people have nothing but down time, some prefer no down time at all,
some like it about 50/50, some 20/80, whatever. Any effort to affect
something like that is going to end up pissing off a lot of people. Even
if you get 90% of the players, when you are talking about 150,000
people, that's just not enough. And when genres work to weed out the
"unworthy" in single player games, online games have many other factors
that attract them. I wouldn't play a single player game like World of
Warcraft. I would play a MMORPG like it.
It's the same thing with forced group and forced socialization. If you
are making a MUD with about 30 simultaneous players, you can choose what
kind of behaviors to support and reward. But when dealing with thousands
upon thousands of players, any assumption you make will end up festering
among one minority group or another until something happens and they are
given the chance to explode. To purposely design a sweater with a bunch
of loose threads is just asking to walk around naked.
> All of the above is true -- but I am still going to tell you that there
> was a MASSIVE difference brought about by forcing players to play skill
> trees they didn't want. A player who is playing entertainer macros
> sometimes because they find stretches dull, but they also chose
> entertainer because they wanted to do it. A player who is playing
> entertainer because it is an obstacle on the way to Jedi macros ALL of
> it. And that is what happened, and in droves.
We are talking about degrees here.
There are a lot of things in MMORPGs and other games that players will
power their way through because they want the cookie at the end. It
reminds me of the book "Punished By Rewards", in which the author Alfie
Kohn suggests that the best way to make sure a child fails to retain
knowledge is to give him rewards for success in school. The idea is that
when the reward becomes a factor, children will take on less challenging
projects, study only the material they will be tested on, or even cheat
to get that reward.
Game design seems to be entire based around the concept that you need
carrots to heard players around one way or another - I don't believe
that to be a case. The Jedi thing just exaggerated the problem until it
was obvious, but it didn't create the problem, and while it may have
been the straw that broke the camel's back, it wasn't the only pressure
there.
I pose this question: How would SWG have been different if every player
automatically started, from square one, with EVERY skill box filled.
Every skill, every abilities, every possibility available from the
start. How would the world and community suffer?
> This is pretty well documented, even by the entertainers in question:
> the rise of bottomfeeding "buffbots," the proportional drop in number of
> "real entertainers" and so on. It's very evident in the stats on the
> proportions of users in each profession over time. And it's also, alas,
> evident in sub numbers pre- and post-Holocron drops.
How are buffbots bottom feeding? Within the confines of the game world,
game system, and game rules, they are breaking no law. Even morally,
they aren't offensive. If your hot dog stand goes out of business due to
a nearby vending machine, its because you aren't providing anything the
vending machine isn't, and charging high prices.
It wasn't the fact that these people didn't want to "roleplay" doctors
or entertainers - it's the fact that they could do just as good a job or
better (cheaper) without giving a crap.
For instance, let's say that an entertainer supports himself through
tips. Obviously, the guy who gives the same service for free is going to
have superior business. And in this model, business is more important
than money - since money can be given (by an alt, guild, rich friend,
begging, etc) but experience must be earned. You've created inequality
of needs between gameplay and enjoyment.
>> Yes, I realize that some people liked these systems, but obviously, a
>> significant portion of the playerbase did not.
>
> Yes, particularly the combat-centric types.
I'm not a combat-centric person by any stretch, and I have huge problems
with these things. To put things in perspective, my first character was
a droid engineer. A crafting class where you can define functionality?
Where you can control form? Where you can manipulate a complex and
interrelated structure to unique goals beyond profit or superiority? I
would make wild passionate love to that class if it ever lived up to
that promise, and I'm not one to make sexy time with game mechanics...
not without dinner and a movie usually.
> Players are going to have arbitrary barriers to what they want to do.
Ah-hah! I disagree completely!
> Period. It's a truism. The combat ITSELF is an arbitrary barrier to many
> folks -- all they want is the loot. Everyone has different tolerances
> for these barriers, and everyone has a different take on what the actual
> barrier is.
This goes back to the rewards thing. Is the purpose of a school child to
learn or to succeed? These are mutually exclusive goals, since learning
requires failure, experimentation, and exploration. Likewise, is the
goal of a game player to do X or to succeed? A vast majority of game
designers believe that games are entirely built around success - that
it's about rewards, competition, and obstacles. It certainly can be. But
what if it wasn't?
I expected you of all people, a huge proponent of virtual worlds and
systematic gameplay, to appreciate that a reward doesn't have to be
something that is given or "earned". The journey itself can be
rewarding. Creativity can be rewarding.
Let's go back to Star Wars Galaxies. Have you seen some of the amazing
homes people have designed? There was one where somebody took a bunch of
boxes and built an enormouse scale model of a star destroyer, complete
with mid-air combat between x-wings and tie fighters. This creativity
was allowed by the game, not enforced and not prevented. Something as
simple as allowing objects to exist in mid-air (unlike Everquest 2) and
overlap has created a huge potential for creativity - with no tangible
reward given or acknowledged by the game proper.
Likewise, if you look at massively multiplayer online games like Club
Caribe or Second Life - games with no overarching purpose - you can see
people doing the most amazing things. When I hear stories from World of
Warcraft, it's about the interesting things the people did above and
beyond what the gameplay provided. Leeroy Jenkins wasn't funny because
he made a stupid gameplay decision. He was funny because of the context
under what that situation happened - under the repercussions. But
mostly, it's because he yelled LEEERROOOOYY! through a voice over ip
system completely separate from WoW itself.
I don't seeing gaming, especially online gaming, as moving between
various barriers of different tolerability. Nearly every post I've
written to this mailing list has been, why doesn't game X allow me to do
Y? I've never once written that I thought barrier Z was particularly
thrilling.
> Quite a lot of combat folks disliked the buffbot experience more than
> they disliked the wait involved in the entertainer experience.
I preferred the vending machine.
> And they were rather pissed when the buffbot experience crowded out the
> entertainer experience. Good entertainers were *fun to watch and listen
> to* and the wait didn't feel like an issue if you were in the mood. The
> issue was the timing of being in the mood.
I'm never in the mood to socialize with strangers. I like monologues,
not dialogues. Does that make me broken? Unusual, sure, but should I be
forced to be like everybody else for the purpose of something so simple
as reducing a few numbers to zero? That's absurd. There were no other
options, and I for one, was glad when the vending machine entertainers
showed up.
> Campsites also had some of the functionality, and the idea was to add
> things like public performance squares, etc. A lot of folks were setting
> up in the towns as merchanting spaces too. Pre-Holocrons, I really
> didn't see many barren towns.
I remember it being pretty busy at launch, when people started in all
sorts of crazy towns, but some time before vehicles were introduced, the
population had already fixated around a single major city per planet.
Some places like Doaba Guerfell or Vreni Island were always barren.
> The ghost town thing can be largely attributed to a world that basically
> demanded a population of a certain scale; without that population, whole
> regions basically get abandoned. It relied on population density to get
> people spread out as they went to avoid lag from crowded spaces.
If you don't mind my asking, what was this desired scale? The world
always seemed too large for the players, even when it was fully. Are we
talking a few thousand or tens or thousands even? I certainly think that
if you took, for example, the overflowing population of Theed, it could
support several towns - but because of the regional requirements of
starports, bazaar terminals, and the pain of travel at the time, what
incentive would they have to disperse? If there were a few thousand more
people playing, I think it would still just make the three main cities
more busy.
> Again, once buffs got out of control (an early combat balancing mistake
> in Live, driven IMHO by a lack of understanding how a levelless system
> must work) and you started needing huge specialization in order to
> engage in combat, then that all broke. But you could quite viably play
> as a low-to-mid-level combatant and also an entertainer, and also a
> creature handler (I had a pet) and so on. The game was designed for
> multiclassing more than for specialization. I could go on a digression
> here about how the skill trees did not end up the way they were
> intended, but that's a lengthy side trip.
I do have two questions that I have actually kept me up at night
wondering about.
Why 250 skill points? And why were novice boxes an absurdly high 15
points while elite classes were 6? The novice classes were so novice
that you could master every one of them and have basic functionality
like being able to fight, heal yourself, harvest, craft, and entertain
without it being overwhelming or detrimental to elite specializations.
In every other mmorpg, every class can do all of these things (ie
crafting is parallel to combat so you can do both, clerics can sorta
fight and fighters can sorta heal). So why are players penalized heavily
so early on for basic diversification?
> Well, the fundamental answer there is "polish time." A lot of what you
> are referencing is what I would consider to be finding balance points,
> not errors in the fundamentals. Adding more performance spaces, making
> the need for cantinas less frequent, or redoing skill trees to be
> non-uniform, or making sure buffs didn't go crazy, etc.
I do not feel that entertainers are an innate flaw, but most of what I
see are philosophical flaws on a very basic, fundamental level.
Balancing skill trees would've been a good start, but the idea behind
skill trees - the idea that you must do A to get B - is offensive. What
if all the skills were available from the start, or if you didn't have
to go through the tree in a specific order? What if the skill tree were
like a collectable card game, such that you could "equip" skill boxes
rather than having to constantly lose progress and grind it back again?
What if the purpose of SWG was to live, socialize, explore, and create
rather than following one carrot to the next. If you ask me, SWG's
greatest flaw was that it only went halfway there. It created this giant
world and gave you a few ways to impact it, but then made a game out of
it. It made a game out of playing but also out of being a player. The
entertainer idea is brilliant, but it was ruined by the idea that it
needed to have level progression or that you had to force other players
to experience it. It tried to hop the river between Everquest and Club
Caribe, but it didn't get far enough and drowned.
Even if SWG was perfectly balanced around the original intentions, it
still wouldn't be the game that it so desperately wanted to be. That it
needed to be.
> As an example: A lot of hay was made about the notion that entertainers
> should have been giving positive effects rather than healing negative
> effects. But stuff like that ignores that *to players there is no
> difference.* To them, there is "be at max power" and "not be at max
> power." Making it a step you did before combat versus after was really
> irrelevant. The fundamental principle is the same: another player is
> needed to get you to fighting trim. So focusing on whether cantinas and
> battle fatigue were a punishment or not misses the psychological point.
> Being "forced to buff" feels exactly the same.
I've never argued that entertained were bad because of battle fatigue.
I've argued that they are bad because they are forced upon the player
irregardless, that they have a progression that requires needless
grinding, that they never got to leave the one room, that they can be
replaced by vending machines, and so on. If you ask me, entertainers
would be more worthwhile if they just dressed in funny hats and did a
stand up routine - formalizing any of that into "gameplay" is a mistake.
People have rewarding experiences in chatrooms. The graphics and theme
are gravy. You don't have to add anything. You don't have to single them
out and reward them - and you don't have to give them special powers. A
rifleman could be just as entertaining as an entertainer, so why can't
he dance and play drums too? Why must he give up shooting guns to spend
every other day hanging out in an cantina helping others? Which is what
I think was lost in SWG.
In an effort to reward people, sight was lost of the true purpose of the
experience. Too much attention was paid to the carrot, and life became a
series of ScanTron multiple choice standardized tests.
--
Sean Howard