What was most interesting was the sheer wealth of information that is available to players about OTHER players. History of guilds joined and left, gear, last time logged on, and more. Upon reading this article, I was actually shocked and would not want this much information about my characters available to other characters.

Some of these concerns were first raised when WoW went like with the WoW Armory. Blizzard even mocked it in one of their April Fools web pages. That mocking was out of place though when you look at how the armory has evolved. With the invention of Gearscore (a user addon that creates an actual, exact, numerical score for someone’s gear) it became possible for web sites to farm Armory data and develop minimum gearscores for certain instances or content. This in turn affected player perceptions, who would then run the user add on in game (or when looking up someone’s armory data) to decide if they were willing to team with someone. It even goes further than that – arguments on official forums would often devolve into someone looking up someone else’s guild or gear and using that as evidence they were a know-nothing “n00b.” This is just scratching the surface – I am sure readers here have even more examples of such uses.

It seems to me that MMOs are making more and more information about players and characters available to other players. Does anyone else think this is a bad way to go?

I can definitely see where he is going with the argument, and I agree to a great extent.

There was a time on MMOs where a guild could be formed for any manner of reasons or purposes. It could be just friends and family. It could be for roleplay or story purposes. It could be for a theme like all-orcs or all-women or who knows what. But nowadays, unless you want to completely divorce yourself from any hope of meaningful “end game” participation, your guild is hugely important.

Whether it is raiding or RvR style PvP, you are almost required to be part of a large, effective, well organized guild with stringent membership requirements and all sorts of policies (DKP or others). All too often, players are faced with a very real and uncomfortable choice between guilding with friends they actually LIKE, or guilding with people who are good enough at the game to successfully partake in the same level of content.

Guilds have become too important. They have lost their purpose and have become a burdensome barrier to fully enjoying the gameplay and content in MMOs.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Raiding Sucks (click the picture for an even more disturbing image)

I have written about this topic many times before. The two biggest examples are:

Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment

Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.

This would be a pretty dull post if all I was doing was encouraging you to go back and read those posts (though I do feel it is worth your while, as they are pretty good, and they provoked good discussions in the past). I bring those up because I am finally starting to see some of the same points being raised by a lot more MMO bloggers than in the past. It would appear I was at the forefront of this point, and I am very gratified to see it finally getting some traction.

I will cite a couple recent blog posts by Tobold, a well known, highly regarded MMO blogger (with a significant focus on WoW): Could you still dance with Heigan?

“What wiped raids in that encounter was the back and forth “dance” you had to perform correctly to avoid the floor erruptions, moving at exactly the right point in time, and neither too short nor too far.
…
And that is exactly what I don’t like about raiding in Wrath of the Lich King. There is no real “progression” from “easier” raid dungeons to “harder” raid dungeons. It is all just the same, various different encounters for which you and your friends have to practice the moves until you all can do them without fail. Places like Naxxramas become obsolete because of the loot they give, not because of a lack of challenge.”

and I don’t think Gearscore is the culprit here:

“The second factor is the nature of Wrath of the Lich King raiding, which I already discussed last week: Whether you play your character well, and even your gear, are not good predictors for the success of a raid encounter. The real difficulty of a WotLK raid encounter is “learning the dance”, practicing a fixed set of moves requiring sub-second reaction times.”

I have been making these points for years. I am glad other people are finally seeing it as well. The reason modern WoW/EQ style raiding is not actually epic or truly fun is because it is not about playing your character well – or even developing your character well. It is about following some rote set of moves designed by uber gamers who mastered the raid in beta before it was even released. You are all just puppets on a stage, following a Youtube script your raid leader downloaded and memorized. That is not fun. That is not epic. That is boring and dull.

Bard's Tale Riddles and Puzzles

There are probably many other examples where the internet (or more specifically, the extreme easy access to virtually any information) has been detrimental to games and game design. I invite anyone to share their own examples. For purposes of this post, I am focusing on one.

In the 80s and early to mid 90s, there were many games that made use of riddles and puzzles that were solved through player skill, not character skill. It didn’t matter how smart your character was – if you, the player, were smart, you could figure out a riddle and really help your character(s) out in the game. Wizardry, Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic, and many other games were examples of this. Further, every time you replayed the game you would benefit from the fact that you could get past such riddles and puzzles instantly – often reaping significant reward.

With the rise of the internet, and even more specifically with the power of google, gamefaqs, game hint/cheat sites, etc. many (especially mainstream) game designers moved away from riddles like these. They exist, but they are pretty rare these days. Instead, they went with riddles that are only solved when your character has found specific clues, triggered certain locations, or executed specific dialog with the right NPCs.

More often, game challenges and puzzles focus on character skill or character stats. For example, in Mass Effect 2 there is a mission where you have to figure out who killed someone or stole something (for reasons I’ll explain later, I don’t really remember the details). The perpetrator can be one of a number of different people. You get clues by going to 5 specific locations, clicking on a computer terminal, and listening in to something and getting a hint. If you figure out the answer before listening to all 5 terminals, it doesn’t matter. You cannot solve the mission. You are only allowed to solve it by listening to all 5, then going back to the mission giver who then accepts your perfect knowledge. You cannot even mess up at that point by giving the wrong answer. Your character knows the answer, so your character gives it. You, the player, really don’t have to even pay attention. You just click the 5 terminals and move along. That’s why I barely remember the details. I didn’t bother paying attention because it was obvious it didn’t matter. In an old school game, I’d have had the option of answering right away and either getting it right (and getting a reward) or being wrong and failing the mission. Or I could get a few clues and then answer. On subsequent replays, I’d know the correct answer immediately and could just give it right away. Yay for player knowledge! (Standard caveats apply: I am not saying ALL riddles/puzzles should work this way. But it would be nice if more of them did.)

I can begrudgingly understand why game developers have done this. It is frustrating to have a cool riddle in your game and know that the instant many players happen upon it they will just google it and move on by. There was a time where knowing that really discouraged me from having riddles or puzzles at all. But now I say: “so what?” Unless the riddle is a gateway to some kind of exclusive content in a competitive multiplayer game, why does it matter?

I can tell you right now that I remember very, very few puzzles from RPGs of the last 10 years, but have vivid memories of the puzzles I solved from older RPGs that rewarded *MY* intelligence over that of my characters.

It would be really nice to see games return to rewarding player skill and intelligence rather than relying totally on character skill and intelligence. Ultimately, I think it makes for a deeper, more meaningful, and more memorable experience when your personal abilities and brains are vital to your success. Escapism is great in RPGs. It is wonderful to play characters who can do and accomplish things you would never be capable of. But it is also nice to be able to think “these avatars of mine are pretty tough, but without my intelligence guiding them, they’d still be stuck in that maze!”

In Primordiax, I decided that I wanted to keep track of the “last location” any clone (a clone being any object – an item, a player, an NPC, etc. that exists in the game world). The last location would basically be the environment that it was in last, before it came to be in its current environment. For a player, this would be the last room you were in before your current room. For an item, this would be the room it was in before it was picked up, or the PC/NPC that was holding it before it was dropping in a room. Knowing the last location of something is useful for a variety of things. For PCs/NPCs it can be useful for knowing where to send them with a retreat command/spell, or a good place to send them if they somehow get stuck. For items, it is frequently interesting to know who held an item last when you are investigating it on the ground. There are a variety of divination spells that can potentially make use of that information.

So I added this feature in and everything was wonderful.

Until all of a sudden players started having trouble stacking similar items (like resources, animal body parts, etc.) in their inventory. They were unable to stack things manually with the stack command, but they were able to stack things if they dropped them and picked them both up – letting auto stacking do the work.

Fortunately, since Primordiax is new and is primarily played by excited early adopters and very few (if any) jaded, grumpy people, nobody got freaked out about this problem. On an older game, something like this would very likely result in the complaint I mentioned at the beginning: “stacking worked fine yesterday, why did you mess with it? Work on new things rather than tinkering with stacking!!!!11!!!one!!”

But as you know from reading this, I wasn’t messing with stacking. I was actually adding a new feature that would then make a number of additional player abilities or spells possible. The problem was, when the “last_location” variable was set on items, that meant that two different stacks of an item could potentially have a different data value for that variable. One stack of ore might have a last_location of one location (the place you harvested that stack of ore), whereas another stack of ore would have a different last_location setting from wherever it was harvested. The stacking code is coded such that you cannot stack two items that have different data settings. That’s because different data (other than quantity, which is ignored) means the two stacks/items might have different quality or some other important data that you don’t want to be wiped away when it gets merged in with a similar stack.

So the problem here was that I forgot to make “last_location” an ignored type of data just like stacking ignores “quantity.” The reason it appeared to players that auto stacking was fine was because once they dropped the two items on the ground, those two items would then have the same “last_location” once they were picked up.

The moral of the story is this: it is very easy for things to get broken in totally unpredictable ways when devs are indeed working on “new stuff.” Players should try to keep that in mind. MMOs are not single player games. Their code, just like their communities, live, breathe, and grow. That means growing pains sometimes.

Do I rejoice that the bug is fixed? Heck no. This just means a nasty bug is lurking, waiting to break again at some inopportune time that will frustrate the heck out of some player.

Integers are great. For those of you not familiar with integers, they are basically positive or negative whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, -1, -2, -3, etc. Integers do not have decimal places. In programming, you tend to use integers more than any other kind of number because computers handle them best. Decimals (or floating point numbers) require more memory to store and more processing power to work with.

But integers are not always great. For example, take the market (auction house) I have been working on for Primordiax. Assume a base listing fee of 5% of the value of the item being sold. Now assume you are selling the item for 10 triads. 5% is less than 1 unit. So how do you deduct less than 1 of something from someone? You can’t. So I have to round up to make it work, which means the listing fee is 1. (Just so you know, in computer integer math, remainders are always rounded down. Thus, 4.9 becomes 4.) So while it was supposed to be 5%, it is now effectively 10%.

Another example. Assume you have damage resistance of 20%. You are hit for 12 pts of damage. You don’t avoid 2.4 damage, you only avoid 2 damage. So instead of 20%, you only got 16% damage resistance. For this amount of damage, your resistance could go as high as 23% and you would still only resist 2 points. So in the end, for this amount of damage, 16-23% damage resistance are effectively the same.

What is the solution? Usually the solution is to just work with bigger numbers. When I was confronted with the above problems, this is how I solved it:

1) I changed the triad currency to be 100 times larger. It is a bank/economic currency only, so players convert other currencies they actually find in game to triads. The base conversion rate of those currencies was 1:1 (1 danar, drocta, or sathu = 1 triad). Eventually the economy and currencies will float with demand, but that is another issue. I changed it from 1:1 to 1:100. So 1 danar, drocta, or sathu will now convert into 100 triad.

This still means someone could potentially sell something for 5 triad and get hit with the same problem, but it is less likely since 5 triad is kinda like 5 cents in a world where people rarely buy things for less than at least a dollar.

2) I multiplied all player and mob hp by 10, and also all DPS and damage formulas by 10. Fortunately, I centralized by DPS and damage formulas in a single daemon early on (so I could easily make changes to how damage formulas worked) so this was not super difficult.

You could argue I cheated, I guess. The same problem still lurks in the depths of the game’s formulas, but at least now the effect is much smaller and thus far less noticeable.

Anyway, these are the types of issues that may seem pretty trivial but actually end up taking significant developer thought and effort when working on games.

I certainly understand why no commercial MMORPGs have experimented with the concept, but my question is whether it will EVER happen on a commercial MMORPG?

If it does happen, what type of gameplay elements would be required? I would think that to be successful, a permadeath game would have to focus a lot more on the experiences than statistical or gear based character development/advancement. I think for the sake of continuity, such a game would need some sort of achivement or unlocking system where some of the accomplishments of previous characters were either retained in some way or at least recorded in a meaningful manner.

What are your thoughts?

Engaging Players – Desgining Group Contests for your MMO Players

Read, enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Most MMOs have gone with the shard/server approach. Each copy of the game has a distinct community. You make characters on a specific server, and the character can only be played on that server. Each server has its own copy of the world.

Champions Online eschewed this setup, and only has one “shard.” Instead, each zone is instanced depending on the number of people playing. The main advantage of this is that you never have to worry about whether a friend is on the same server.

But I think there are some pretty huge downsides, particularly in community. On other MMOs, each server developers its own sub-community of the game. Some tend to have more RP, or older players, or more hardcore raiders, or whatever. A culture evolves. Also, guilds and individual players can actually make a name for themselves. Becoming one of the best 10 weaponcrafters on a single server is not unattainable. But to be one of the top 10 weaponcrafters in the ENTIRE MMO might be.

One compromise might be a free server transfer setup that let people move characters whenever they wanted (perhaps with a 1 month cooldown). MMO companies have become enamored with that extra source of income (server transfer fees) so that’s doubtful.

So where are we? What is best? What do you like best?