phyra

Gurgthock locked his original "Thoughts on Game Design" discussion thread because it had degenerated into too many particulars and chatroom conversations. I had come across the discussion late through a link in the Raid and Dungeons forum and hadn't taken the time to respond yet. So I'm creating a new thread starting with my own thoughts, because I would love for this conversation to continue. I've honestly been more excited about the start of intelligent dialogue here than about the imminent release of 1.9 and the long-awaited promise of another short burst of new content.

First, let me point out that this discussion need not and must not be limited to the World of Warcraft game itself. WoW is merely the most recent iteration of a collaborative process of commercial game design that dates well before the days of computer games, back to pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons. Likewise, the modern game design conversation extends across that forty-year history as well, through pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing, the development of the computer game, through text-based Multi-User Dungeons and the expansion of the Internet, to graphical multiplayer games, and finally to the current crop of commercial MMORPGs and their monthly subscription revenue models.

As my guildmates may well know, I take my games quite seriously, and I like to play quite differently from your average gamer. I entered academia to study games (as a PhD student) in hopes of contributing to the discussion of furthering creative work into something more substantial and lasting than the stagnation of popular entertainment. I play games in order to discover and enjoy the most profound gaming experiences possible - even imaginable. I am always eager for something more than an activity I can perform when I have some idle time in between more meaningful work. I want a life-shaping experience that I would give up everything to be a part of, that I would expend every resource in my mind and body to realize. I want a ritual practice imbued with spiritual meaning not from recourse to some external theological, or symbolic discursive grounds, but directly from its own systematic properties, an intrinsic value of personal significance - 'fun', whatever that term may mean, in its highest sense. My own ideal of fun is not idle entertainment the likes of serial television dramas, romance novels or 'casual' gaming like Solitaire or Bejeweled. Give me something on the order of epic sites of ludic struggle, whether primarily mental such as Chess or Go, or physical such as baseball or track and field. Where the hardest of the 'hardcore' spend hours every day across spans of months, years, entire lifetimes in study, training and preparation in order to test and push the very limits of human intelligence, performance and creativity. When a computer game manages to deliver social experience on this scale I will hail it as a high point of human creative experience. From this perspective, MMORPGs are an amazingly interesting development and they exhibit great potential.

I started playing WoW in response to a conversation I had with one of my close friends. He was an EQ addict for a couple of years, and after he finally quit I was atonished at the incredible time investment he had devoted to the game. I asked him whether the time he spent idly in front of the computer, often for no reason other than performing some mundane task, actually made the experience that much more meaningful than if the required tasks were compressed, and designed to occupy a shorter length of time. He thought that the mundane 'timesinks' that sucked away months of his life did make the experience more meaningful, but I wasn't convinced that this was the best or only answer. After the same friend introduced WoW to me in January of 2005, I decided to engage in some 'hardcore' playing in order to explore this question for myself and to discover what made the genre tick. I've had tons of fun in the process - some of my WoW experiences have even rivaled the intensity and rapture of my eight years as a 400m sprinter in high school and college.

After playing hardcore for a full year across around 100 days of playtime on my character, and having been seriously engaged in the endgame along with my friends in a well-organized high-end guild, I've come to my conclusion: Empty timesinks, or the application of repetitive, mindless activity, are not a necessary component of any meaningful game-playing experience. And its logical extension: Eliminating the empty timesinks from MMORPGs will only improve the game-playing experiences generated.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that any empty timesink necessarily detracts from such an experience, because downtime cheapens the overall value of your time invested. I would venture to say that somewhere less than 50% of my WoW playtime was spent doing something I would consider meaningful. Mind you, this was not due to a lack of effort - I always play my games to the best of my ability, it was a limitation of the game's design that prevented me from making more meaningful use of my time while playing.

Was my tepid experience the result of game addiction? Or was game addiction the result of a flaw in game design? Would I have enjoyed the game more if the game's design halved the required playtime while doubling the average enjoyment? Or would that have only caused me to quit playing twice as soon, all the while clamoring for twice as much content?

I think a constructive way to approach these questions is in relation to the emergent secondary market of entertainment economies that have sprung up in response to the MMORPG game designs. I'm talking about companies such as IGE that buy and sell gold, and the (primarily Chinese) 'gold farmers' that accumulate virtual resources around the clock for tiny sweatshop wages. The economic forces that dominated Lineage and many other virtual worlds. The secondary market that Blizzard promised to squash with its firm public stance against exchanging in-game resources for real-world money, and even more significantly with innovations in game design. Namely, shifting the majority of the pressure of timesinks from the emergent economy to the individual, by employing such design techniques as item-binding and parallel systems of personal experience/reputation/honor.

I see these design decisions as temporary fixes to a serious underlying design issue. They impose a protection on the mindless grind as something that should be safeguarded from rather than eliminated via this emergent economic process. After all, what these secondary markets provide is a dynamic regulating force on what is and is not fun in your game. If an element of your game is dominated by teams of unskilled professional gold farmers from third-world countries, or better yet, automated keyboard scripts and third-party programs - perhaps that's a good sign that it wasn't fun or engaging or challenging enough to begin with, and that the beneficial value or requirement of those activities should be reduced or eliminated. If the market exists for people to outsource their timesinks to others, it's a pretty good sign that those timesinks are not wanted in the first place.

A well-informed game developer might make use of these secondary markets as automatic quality assurance, separating what is perceived as 'fun' from what is perceived as a 'grind'. And even in the absence of secondary markets, the rest of us can use the idea as a conceptual tool to do the same.

Just ask yourself, 'if I could assign someone to perform this task for me, would I?' The price of the service is irrelevant in this theoretical example, assume that the service cost is insignificant. Would I assign someone else to:

- Take my place on Molten Core farming run #51 for yet another chance at my Tier 2 pants/caster trinket/Thunderfury?
- Farm outdoor monsters, resource nodes and run pickup instances for rare drops/faction/shards?
- Camp out in Battlegrounds for faction and PvP honor ranking?
- Keep nightly vigils at the outdoor world bosses, and text-message/summon me and my guildmates as soon as they spawn?
- Powerlevel my character (or alt, or rerolled class/server/faction) from 55-60? 40-60? 1-60?

I know I sure as hell would, because these are the empty timesinks that make the game boring and tedious to play.

On the other hand, would I assign someone else to:

- Take my place scouting unexplored territories or enter the newest raid dungeon full of difficult and undefeated monsters?
- Kill a raid boss or clear an instance for the first time?
- Design my raid's new strategy for defeating the next difficult raid boss?
- Manage my social contacts/reputation, guild relations, equipment and inventory, GUI?
- Create and maintain my guild's webpage and forums?
- Perform my Hunter or Priest epic quests?
- Form a PvP raid to assault the opposing faction's town and kill their leader?
- Set up a competitive Battlegrounds group and challenge other guilds?
- Accomplish something I would be proud of?

Certainly not, because these activities are the fun parts that make the game worth playing.

My theoretical argument is that the wheat can always be separated from the chaff, and that we can enjoy a game full of the same fun aspects without any of the nasty grinding. One might just call this a much shorter or quicker grind, but if you would honestly rather have someone else perform those tasks for you anyway, wouldn't the elimination of the tasks from the game design altogether be equivalent to having someone do them for you for free? You're not really missing out on anything, right? Let players spend their hours with the game because they want to, not because they need to.

Now that I have expressed my main point, let me touch more upon the present discussion. Gurgthock suggested that the problem of the endgame's perceived lack of content is pacing, that we wouldn't perceive such a long, slow grind in the endgame if we were able to savor the middle-game for longer. While this might well have kept us away from the limits of Blizzard's content production for longer, it would in turn make the relatively tame level grind that much more tedious and exhausting. Several reasons. First, level differences are quite pronounced, doubly so because they also determine the iLvl of equippable gear and such. This would generate a more stratified playing field for PvP and instance groups, which is probably not a good thing. Second, the raiding game and to a large extent the AH/economy game don't start until 60, primarily because the pronounced differences in level-determined abilities are eliminated at a level cap. Finally, a slower level pacing would limit the strength of the endgame social experience tremendously, and the game would shift in focus from endgame raiding and group PvP to a scattered mess of experience grinders and pick-up groups of varying levels. Because I started playing WoW months after my friends, I didn't have the chance to play together with them until I had reached Level 60. If I had to grind monsters by myself and run instances with pickup groups twice as long, I probably never would have invested the solo time to reach my friends at the level cap to begin with. As opposed to the endgame, there is no real challenge of the level grind other than that of the clock, and in my opinion the quicker the level grind is done away with the better. Best not to even incorporate that sort of mechanic at all.
If we look at this in terms of our secondary market example, a more drawn-out middle-game would most likely generate an even greater secondary market for power-leveling services and existing accounts at the level cap. This would indicate an empty timesink. (This is in fact true in games like Everquest that had a much longer middle-game.)

Here is where I throw around some half-baked ideas and what-ifs.

One solution to the plethora of wasted midgame content would be to eliminate the experience level grind altogether and to incorporate the vast world of quests and dungeons into an endgame feel from the very beginning. Make a master chain of quests that leads smoothly from your initial orientations in the newbie zones, through the small-group instances, and finally down into the raid dungeons of Blackrock Mountain and beyond. Balance all of the instances across a similar range of abilities and skill sets so they get harder and more complex as you continue.

A system based on experience levels is a self-regulating system that provides an adaptive difficulty as well as a guided path of progression through monsters and dungeons. However, separate mechanisms for tuning difficulty and progressing through dungeons might work better in some cases. If an experience level system must be used at all, they may be more effective simply as a way of fine-tuning (or idiot-proofing) a dungeon's difficulty level as opposed to limiting progression altogether. For example, if I keep wiping on a boss because he is simply too difficult for me, I will eventually gain some levels from killing the trash mobs, making it more likely for me to kill the boss on my next attempts. Accordingly, if I kill the boss the first time around, I will enter the next dungeon at a lower level, making the next area that much more challenging for me. With smaller increases in character ability across levels, one can then use the system as a way of achieving quicker progression via accomplishment at lower levels. This would go well with how I see blizzard envisioning their midgame, as an engaging, individual or small-group experience that is not a tedious grind but that everyone can eventually accomplish.

Expanding on this idea, a constantly rolling level cap with more subtle level gradations (instead of an overemphasis on instance farming-based itemization) would also have been a viable option for quality pacing of endgame content. It would also provide for a fun and competitive endgame without being reduced to grinding. At a certain level cap, only a few top guilds would be able to beat a premier raid zone. Then, when the level cap is increased a while later, more mid-range guilds would be successful, and some time after that the level cap is raised once more and pickup groups can roll in there and zerg the place to their casual delight. This will be the effect of the level cap increase in the expansion, but I think a more controlled and consistent expansion would contribute better to a smoother trickling-down of endgame encounters. (What if the entire game expanded this way from the start?)

I had a few more thoughts and ideas, but I think I'm getting disorganized, so I'll wait for responses to continue the discussion in whichever direction this might be headed. I think I forgot to touch upon many short-term practical fixes to WoW's ongoing development, but that's largely because the underlying design changes I've outlined here are probably too contradictory to be incorporated in the current project's vision. They're more along the lines of things I'd like to see considered in future projects when the current model begins to run out of steam.

 

Raylen

The newest dungeons if I remember correctly were Mauradon and Dire Maul. It is because of the fast grind that we didn't utilize these dungeons enough...

** sidenote not very relevant or funny. The link to the Mauradon patch is here ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/...h-12-18-04.html ). It says the date December 18th, 2004. And here is the link to DM patch ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underd...mented/1p3.html ) Where is the date of the patch in the page? Oh wait, I had to go offsite to get the date of 1.3 and it was released March 22nd, 2005. All this info was from http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...v/implemented/ **

Nice info. Anyway, carrying on...

That's 3+ months of nothing to do but MC, UBRS, etc. Instead of the fast grind, we could have had a reasonable pace and done Razorfen Downs more or other instances more before DM was released. Then after running DM enough times to get most of the good stuff out of it, we could move onto MC. Also, let's not forget the big mistake with making an 8 piece epic set for MC. Should have been 3 epic and 5 blue. I remember when ZG was first patched in and Gurg was discussing the sets. Wasn't one of the postulates that the MC sets were planned for BWL but WoW had to be rushed and instead they were implemented into MC? Anyway, that's off topic to the current argument.

Yes, the level grind was too fast and thus negated a lot of the content they had implemented when a lot of the guilds were towards the end of MC. DM was especially overwritten by a majority as good gear because I don't think Blizzard had realized how many people wanted to raid. There is some great gear from DM, don't get me wrong on that part. However, many of us had a few pieces of our MC sets already so we didn't want to replace those pieces with inferior pieces. I know I had three pieces of MC gear before DM opened.

As for the timesinks argument, I don't disagree in the slightest but the IGE stuff is :blink: :blink:

I hate timesinks myself. Faction grinds for the BGs is so uninteresting and Blizzard really needs to take a step back from that and look at it better. I know I only did the exalted AV grind for the Lei of the Lifegiver, and I love it so, but it was about the dullest game experience ever. Sure, it's a rush to take out Stormpike GY or whatever the GY is called before the zerg bridge of dumb. I did however enjoy having more suitable gear for suicide missions than every other Alliance player. It was fun to shield myself and dive bomb into a pack of Alliance, physic scream and run away before they can kill. But the same thing over and over in the same fixed space dulls the hell out of me. Even WSG is boring. I don't feel any ill will to the people that PVP regularly but I'd rather have the battle move around the world instead of having it be constricted to instances. It lacks flavor and is rather uninteresting to me. And I'm sure many others feel the same way. right kaubel, how was the constant av getting that lei of the lifegiver B)

All I'm trying to say is bring more flexibility into the PVP environment. If I want to take over Refugee Pointe for an hour, let me. Don't punish me for kicking twigs into their campfire. This is fucking war, not some pansy lets-hold-hands and not murder the citizens. Faction rewards are not war. War is being able to storm the castle (fuck you BWL access quest lore, you suck) and take out the commander before they can react. Then I want to slice off the commander's head and take it back to Thrall for a bounty prize.

Fuck. I want to cannabilize the Pie Vendor in Ironforge, for God's sake let me feast on the Pie Vendors flesh.

:angry:

 

XI-

I think this is the most important part of your post, but also the part where the ideology, and reality diverge.

-Farming Raid Zones for items. I think blizzard is SLOWLY working to conteract this with the token system. I wish they would go a step further and get rid of the extra random trash drop crap and just have the boss drop 2x slot token. If you think we should be able to in effect choose every loot on the boss, I think this would cause the quitting/whining 2x as fast because we'd have EVERYTHING we wanted in something like 20-40 runs (or no time at all).

-Battlegrounds/Faction - I think the problem is AV is the most awful thing ever invented. It was designed to be two skilled teams of 40 competing with each other, and this almost never happens/happened. Instead its 40 clueless morons zerging each other with no strategy/clue. I can win pretty much every session with a good 5-10 man.

On the other hand I love WSG, and to a lesser extent AB. My only problem with them is sitting in queue but I would gladly play 8-10 hours of WSG because I find it fun. I played BF2 for 6-8 hours this weekend, on the same map, over and over. That might drive some people insane, but I found it a lot of fun.

-Make the honor system linear. It's the only reasonable solution.

-ORB's. This is a player created and driven problem NOT a design issue. The idea was for people to wander upon the spawns, and then mobilize to kill them. We the players, created the need for 3x lvl 20 warlocks one of which is 2 boxed 24 hrs a day so as soon as a boss spawns the summon/phone train starts and the boss is dead before our fellow players knew it existed.

-Powerleveling your character - I've had this discussion with some of my guildmates before regarding alts in raids, and from my PoV, if you don't do this yourself, you're basically robbing yourself of the experience of learning how to play your class. I'm sure for all of us there's intricacies and tricks of our class we didn't learn for months, that would take who knows how long to discover if you were tossed onto a premade 60.

With regard to the good things. What you're asking for is an endless supply of new and interesting content, which frankly is impossible. We, as players, are too good at the game. We know how to raid, and we will min/max every situation. It would take a very rare and brilliant mind to create something that the playerbase couldn't disassemble in under a week, while still being reasonably possible. There's just too many other intelligent minds out there to compete against. A few examples. Within 1-2 attempts on the drakes we learned that, 1. Shadowflame is on a timer, 2. Wing Buffet is on a timer, 3. If you cast holy light when the shadow flame begins casting it will land within 1 second after shadow flame hits. Maybe the problem is the developer's give us too much information, and if they cut back on it, the difficulty of encounters would increase, who knows.

Fighting a difficult group can be good or bad. Is it fun in AB where the game inevitably ends, sure. In WSG the first 90 minute game is interesting but after that the both of us suiciding into each other's flag room gets really old, really fast. Its part of human nature that sometimes we like 4-0ing the other side in AB so we can camp them in their spawn while we win 2k-0.

 

Slug

Good stuff. Glad to see this back on track. I'll continue to assume a US gaming audience in this reply, since the Asian markets contain a number of interesting deviances from the Western world's general ideas on what is "fun". Chiefly, I speak of the fact that for all time, Japanese and other Eastern markets have lived and thrived on "The Grind". The grind is often more important than plot, to them. It is more important than loot, or dungeons, or bosses. A properly implemented grind in Asia will sell games, which makes it an ideal area for pay-to-play games. In Asia, you can generate so much extended revenue from far less content, compared to what you'd have to sell to a US market to keep them paying. It's almost the polar opposite of what western gamers tend to, though there will always be some overlap and exceptions.

Probably the hardest part in making the right changes is in knowing how many changes to make, and when. MMO's and RPG's in general have become very formulaic over the years. When tweaking on a holy grail of gaming, you must be very careful and only change a little, or you must risk awful sales by trying to change a ton of things at once. Difficult choice for a producer to make, given the economics of making games these days.

I maintain that pacing in Western-targeted RPG games is everything. It's the single most influential factor of a given game, even above plot; which makes it the most difficult to get right. No matter how good your plot or designs are, they will not overpower a badly paced game for the common gamer. The most annoying part of this concept is the fact that it becomes very difficult to nail down "proper pacing" for a given game, as Blizzard is finding in their first effort. Getting it right in a console game isn't everything, since you've already made your money if the game is at least decent. Getting it right in an MMO is everything, since you must keep people subscribed to return your investment and gain profit. In a console game, your only concern is that a title is good enough to sell future games.

This is the reason that nearly every console RPG in earlier history began to have "US" and "Japanese" versions. It's the reason so many of the games that sell huge in Japan will never see American shores. Pacing them properly for the Western audience is a massive chore. In a location where "The Grind" is welcomed, you have a far greater margin for error on how you pace your game. The gaming public will find ways to entertain themselves, even if your content plays out for a bit. In an area where gamers are fickle and the grind is a detractor, you can't mess the pacing up at all or you're boned.

Games that were blockbusters in Japan came to the US and fell flat over this. If you look at the differences they began to make for localized versions, they were mostly related to difficulty and pacing changes for the US market version of a given game. The US tends to associate "difficult" or "time-consuming" with "lack of fun", which explains why so many gamers choose to cheat their way through games the first time, buy gold or accounts in MMO's, or just play with strategy guides from the get-go. There is a large portion of the US public that don't seem to care about exploration or challenge as much as "winning" or being godly in their efforts. If something's too hard or takes too long in their mind, to hell with it.

Looking back at your list of things you would rather do personally than hire out for; you must realize that for everyone like yourself, there is someone who would put your entire list into their "stuff I don't care about" column.

Therein lies the greatest difficulty in video game design. You must choose your target audience from the start and then try to implement things that will draw in gamers from outside of that very narrow initial band.

WoW represents the first MMO for the "television generation", in my mind. It is geared toward the short attention spans that the US population has developed, while trying to retain some of the elements that make the more devoted RPG'ers play games such as these. If you look at the game in this light, the way they have handled things to this point might make a bit more sense. They painted themselves into a corner and threw some grinds in by necessity, but their entire goal has been to avoid that as much as humanly possible. They're finding it more difficult than they had imagined and for reasons they previously could not have anticipated, unfortunately. It is obvious that their pacing accomplished exactly what they intended to this point, because you don't have to look past Orgrimmar or Ironforge chat to see their Battlenet customer base represented in all its glory. :rolleyes:

One must remember that those were their target gamers when releasing this game. They wanted to pull some of the EQ crowd and the other people, but they knew those folks would come, regardless. The battlenet and FPS gamers typically don't play things like MMO's, so their drive was to tap an untapped section of the gaming public. Their high sales and high customer base would appear to be a result of success in that vein. With a slower leveling system or an EQ-style grind, they never would have retained people with such short attention spans and desires to win fast. The fact that these people quit, only to come right back with the next content patch, suggests that their model is continuing to be effective (if not as efficient as they would like it to be).

As I see it, they've already done everything they set out to do with this game and they have done it very well. The rest of this game's life cycle will serve as a learning experience for their next venture.

The problem they're currently running into is that it's not working like Diablo 2 did. The D2-style loot hunting is what I believe they were originally gunning for when they designed their WoW itemization, but they found it hard to realize in this game. When people run out of content in Diablo 2, they keep grinding for better or more items. When people run out of content in WoW, there just isn't anything left to do at all. Itemization killed a lot of this game's potential from the outset.

----

If you want to analyze MMO gaming and RPG gaming as a whole, I would encourage you to pick up an old Playstation/PS2 and a number of RPG's for those systems, assuming you haven't played most of them already. As a western gamer pointed out in the initial thread, he's played all of the Final Fantasy games from 7 on, but he only ever finished the 7th one because the plot kept him interested. That would be a key note of interest to me, as a designer. Why did they keep buying the games if they kept getting bored with them? One good title can sell a number of subsequent games and you don't have to finish a game to enjoy it, necessarily.

I still hold that were FF7 not paced in exactly the right fashion to move the plot for the US audience, that game would never have become the milemarker that it is today, regardless of the technology and style advancements it brought at the time. The Seventh Saga was an excellent RPG for a number of reasons, when it released. The equally impressive sequel never saw US shores. Both of them would fall in with FF7 in terms of "innovative technological and gameplay changes", but the pacing in the Saga games missed just enough for the US public to largely ignore it.

If you have a pedigree, you don't have to sweat as much. If you don't have a pedigree going for you, much of your success will ultimately depend on how well you pace your game. Nobody enjoys content they can't be bothered to experience.

Altering the leveling system in RPG's has always been a highly dangerous task. For an example, I'll turn to Chrono Cross. That game is a Playstation console title which took a manner of the path you suggest here. To this day, it remains one of the only games to have ever done so. It was highly rated and highly successful, so why were there never any other significant games made with that particular style? It is interesting.

Chrono Cross was one of the first big console RPG's to abandon a standard "level system" and it did so to mixed reviews. It is difficult to say how well it would have done, were it not a sequel to one of the more highly-regarded games in history and backed by some of the titans of industry. I somewhat doubt it would have done nearly as well as the majority of level-based games at the time, were it a standard title.

With the pedigree, you are afforded a lot of leeway. You can change things without fear that it will cripple your sales. Squaresoft has always done this between Final Fantasy games, to keep their games from becoming overly stale and to keep looking for the "next big thing" in RPG gaming. The first 3 Final Fantasy games (only one of which was originally available in the US) followed almost the exact same formula with a different plot. I venture to say that US gamers would have booed the 2nd and 3rd games badly at the time of release, due to the sameness. By contrast, FF4 came out and involved a plethora of new technologies and design styles, which is why they chose to skip those similar titles and go with that as the next US release. Back to the Chrono Cross version of leveling.

While there were a number of unique innovations to combat and other areas of the game that served to make it less draggy and more interesting on the whole, the sense of progress was lessened somewhat through simply watching your stats go up and not having an actual mile-marker. When you won a battle, you didn't gain XP, you gained stat points (hp, defense, occasional skills, etc.). The game had more of a feeling that you were "on a rail" than most RPG's, because you would experience bursts of leveling between content points, then stagnate completely until you got to the next area.

With an XP and level based system, the gamer always has an indicator that they are moving forward to a goal. When you begin to tweak the carrot system, you get into dangerous waters. Chrono Cross got lucky and managed to tweak enough other things the right way to keep an interesting and well-paced game. What if the combat mods hadn't been interesting or unique? What if the plot hadn't been enough to drive you when your stats stopped going up? What if it had been "just another game" instead of "The Highly Anticipated Sequel To Chronotrigger"?

I think that questions like that are what has ultimately prevented people from following that progression design in RPG's since that time. Most people seem to believe that the game was successful in spite of the changes they made, not because of them.

That's the most important of the balance areas, regardless of how you choose to do player advancement ingame. This has always been the way of the Japanese RPG market, but the point spread is extended in comparison to the Western versions. The Asian public will often revel in killing the same monsters for hours on end to reach high enough stat levels to finally kill a boss. In the US, if a gamer gets to a boss and can't beat them with what they consider a "reasonable time investment", they tend to abandon the game.

I've always loved Japanese console RPG's. I don't mind the grind, to a point. I'm the person who wasted hours in FF7 to max materia for the Emerald Weapon speedkill. I'm the guy who spent probably 8+ hours making cash at the end of Xenogears to see if I could load out my gears in such a way as to kill the final boss in two combat rounds. This style of play is not something I want in my MMORPG's, however. I refuse to do faction grinds in WoW, because I only have so much time to play in a given day and I want to do something enjoyable in that time.

In a console game, you never get "left behind" while taking a break. That's why they can get away with so much more downtime in games of that sort. You don't have to choose between which things you want to do when and what's most important. You can take things at your own pace and not miss out, because the game always waits for you. MMO's do not wait. If you don't do everything in a specific timeframe, you will find yourself unable to play with your friends or do the things you might find "fun". That's the bugger of it.

 

Boozbazz

You guys bring really good points to the table and have some great food for thought.

I guess I'll bring what I have to say here as well.

I like challenge in games and not every player does. As an above poster said, many people like to feel the godlihood in their every act while playing a game. I had a freind that I played Dungeons and Dragons with and I was DMing. He wanted his character so strong he could pick up a tree and swing it at an enemy. I was getting fed up with his reminder that he wanted to be godly and I gave him the power. Boom, his STR stat is way up there and he picks up a tree and swings it, killing a bunch of enemies in a single blow. I asked him if he was satisfied and well he was and he wanted to keep playing! I was amazed. Shouldn't there be a challenge or some mystery? I guess you can't please everyone.

Blizzard is in a situation where they are trying to make a game appealing to such a broad spectrum of people. It's pretty much impossible to keep everyone satisfied, but we can clearly see they are making an attempt at it.

Sure time-sinks suck. But that's only a slice of the entire pie. I like certain parts of the game but not all. I like roleplaying sometimes and dueling. What I think would be very cool is if they designed the game so that each player could decide which rout they would like to take to get the same in-game rewards. Like the pvp epic armor. Maybe they could have a different set of armor but with the same stats that could be obtained through..oh I don't know- duels? You see what I'm saying?

Anyways, the reason I play the game is because I like slice X of the big pie and that's why I think most people play WoW. If the whole game was the way I wanted it, then there would be a lot less people playing WoW. I just wish that the rewards could be obtained in a way so that I didn't have to eat a peice of yucky slice Y to get them.

 

Raylen

The problem is not that the time sinks suck but rather some of the PVP is so cut and dry it has bored many former avid PVPers. Alterac Valley has had a few changes but for the most part it is the same thing over and over. The games may take longer or shorter than average but that's about it. I've done them all extensively and I just got burnt out of it after this summer.

Hopefully they do something to make those wins so much more than they are. I remember talking to Caydiem and Fangtooth the first night of Blizzcon. They said that wins in the BGs will start to affect the outside world. It's all speculation right now but it could start to mean new merchants, spells and outposts in the future. For example, the Horde has more wins in AV, therefore they gain the ability to have a solid foothold in domination over Northrend when it's released. Thus, the Horde has the best chance of killing Arthas first on their server. And you could then couple a race to kill Arthas first to obtain Frostmourne or just SOMETHING. It's not much but it's something to build on at least.

 

◊ Praetorian

Xi already beat me to many of my points. :o

Phyra, you raise some interesting points, but the basic premise that timesinks are something to be eliminated entirely strikes me as somewhat unrealistic. Resources are finite. The amount of time it takes to design, script, animate, test, refine, and implement new content far outstrips the amount of time it takes me to consume that content. How many man-hours went into the creation of Dire Maul? I'd seen everything there was to see in the zone the first night it hit the live servers. Now, I went back for quests and for my class trinket and to get all my recipes from that damn goblin, but let's say I got at most 30 hours of pure enjoyment out of that zone. And it's a damn good zone. It simply is not economically feasible to produce an MMO where an entire team has to work X hours in order to give a player 0.1X hours of entertainment. That's fine for a standalone PC or console game, but not under a business model that requires ongoing subscription revenue. That's why there are timesinks. I disagree with the proposition that timesinks are inherently bad. The trick is to pace them properly and dangle carrots appropriately so that the player doesn't mind.

Another answer to this is dynamic content, which can take two forms: 1) dynamically generated PvE content, like an MMO version of a Roguelike (Angband/Nethack/etc.); or 2) PvP content that is by its nature dynamic. As Xi said, people can play the same Counterstrike map 50 times in a row because the experience and the challenge differs slightly each time, and that's the fun of it. Battlegrounds certainly have the potential to fall into this category, but there often simply isn't the depth of players on a single server to sustain that. Stomping the same two PUGs and then having a closer match with the same guild group that uses the same tactics every time isn't limitless diversity. I know the WoW holy grail right now is interserver BGs with a ladder/matching system, and that would solve so many problems right there, but that's still just an aspiration until I see or hear otherwise. As for the first category, that's incredibly hard to do well, and nearly impossible to balance and implement in an MMO setting. There's definite potential there, however.

Anyway, so much of these design questions really tie into plain human psychology. It's part of why it's nearly impossible to have intelligent conversation on the subject on the official forums because most players can't wrap their minds around the idea that successful MMO design is about exploiting human behavioral tendencies in order to keep us placated and interested. Also, what the players think they want may not in fact be what will entertain them in practice.

One great point that Xi makes is the fact that the players themselves break systems. It's hard to account for this, but it's something that must be accounted for. You can have a vision of how content will work, but if players all approach it differently, then your vision is irrelevant. I believe a Blizzard quote from Blizzcon was something along the lines of, "We figured the higher echelons of PvP ranking would be for the hardcore, but we had no idea just how hardcore." The PvP grind is probably the best example of failing to predict player behavior. Blizzard cannot possibly have intended for their content to actually require upwards of 80 hours a week of dedicated PvP on many servers, and yet that's what the system inevitably will produce. Same with the world bosses. And as for the instance grind, that actually isn't something Blizzard created or intended. It's just the players doing it to themselves because there isn't any other content available. I'm going to hit Exalted with the Hydraxian Waterlords in 2 weeks. (I'd be there already if I were human.) You don't need to run MC for 6+ months in order to advance in the game, much less for 11. But people do it because there are only two 40-man instances in the game, and they feel the need to keep busy. In January 2005, I spent 30-40 hours a week in Strat, Scholo, and UBRS, trying to complete my blue set and get other things I wanted like a Gift of the Elven Magi. That was a pretty rough grind. By my 20th or 30th time through those instances I never wanted to see another scourgestone. But was it really a Blizzard-created "grind?" I could have run Wailing Caverns 20 times until I got my shield, staff, axe, ring, and anything else I might have wanted from the zone, but I didn't, because that would've been retarded -- there were other things to do, progresison awaiting me, and content to explore. Those things would become quickly outmoded. Today, a new level 60 can spend two weeks in BRS/Strat/Scholo/DM and come out better-geared than I was after two months in those zones last year. A year from now, the idea of doing MC until you get Exalted with Hydraxian will be laughable. We can just stop playing entirely, come back when the new content is available, and pick up where we left off. A lot of people do precisely that. But we don't, for whatever reason, and then we complain about the "grind." Interesting.

Player response to faction is also very interesting. In theory, faction should work as just a secondary source of rewards for behavior that has its own independent value. That's "good faction." Players will run Z'G anyway for the loot. But as they do so, they also unlock other items in the process, as a nice side benefit. Maybe the RNG will screw them repeatedly on their actual drops, but at least the faction guarantees them something. People will play Arathi Basin for fun, but those who do it more should get some perk out of it. On the other hand, an example of "bad faction" would be Timbermaw rep, which exists solely as an end in itself. You do not accrue Timbermaw rep in the course of any normal activity, except maybe a couple thousand points doing some Winterspring quests. You only get Timbermaw rep if you are deliberately farming Timbermaw rep. You don't unlock things with them by virtue of anything you would just happen to be doing for other game reasons.

But players react badly even to "good faction." You design a system that is supposed to just give a bit more incentive and reward for player behavior, but it ends up transforming that behavior. People would otherwise play AV just for fun, but dangle that Exalted carrot out there and suddenly the player mentality shifts, and it's not "Hey, cool, PvP." It becomes, "Ugh, 11 more AVs to Exalted.... 8 more to go... 5 more... fuck I never want to see this place again." You get people freaking out over missing their queue spot in AB when it's AB weekend because it's their best chance to fill up that bar in their Reputation window. Same with Z'G -- I probably would've been done with the zone sometime around 6000/12000 Honored, but instead I went roughly 20 more times after that just so I can get +33 healing on my shoulders. The point was to reward people for spending time in Z'G, but instead it turned a fun instance into a grind. I can guarantee that Blizzard was not intending to create a "timesink" in those areas, but that's what they ended up doing. At this point, players are so poisoned against the idea of faction that there's a kneejerk negative reaction to it in all its forms. Just look at the offcial boards re: the AQ40 drops. The AQ40 loot system is a strict improvement over MC/BWL loot, and yet people recoil from the mere idea of reputation. Bronze rep actually comes very quickly, as you guys well know, but everyone immediately assumes it's going to be a horrible grind based on past experience. I'd be shocked if we haven't reached Friendly/Honored well before we actually kill C'Thun and get the drops that require those rep levels.

To return to your points about leveling... I think we just disagree. You're approaching the idea from the perspective of someone who joined the game solely to quickly catch up to his already-level-60 friends (note that if the pace of leveling had slowed down, your friends may not have all been 60 when you started playing ... raid progression also would have been similarly slower ... DM would've come out before anyone really had any MC loot to speak of, Onyxia probably wouldn't have died until March or so, and BWL may have even been out before Rag was killed for the first time). For most players, though, leveling 1-59 was the most fun part of the game, and the part that hooked them on an experience they're looking to revisit now that they're finally at 60. Which is one of the bases for my point -- that Blizzard squandered a lot of their most polished content by letting players burn through it too quickly.

Returning to my earlier discussion of timesinks, logistics, and human psychology, I think that you need to balance reward against time investment. Time investment is fine. Aspects of the game that sometimes feel like "work" are fine. Not everything should be as quick and convenient as players might like. Having to fly to Silithus is a pain in the ass. But if we could all just teleport instantly from town to town the world would feel like a tiny place and that would seriously harm the overall experience. We curse at killing Ragnaros 10x and not getting any weapon drops, but if he always dropped the loot we wanted, there wouldn't be anything special about it anymore. It gets back to my point in my original post about free private servers that emulate various grindy MMOs. Turning exp and drop rates up to 50x is fun for a little while but people invariably move on after a couple of weeks, if not a couple of days, because getting from point A to point B in the blink of an eye often leaves you wondering what it was that was so special about B that made you want to get there in the first place. I think that you need timesinks, but you also need corresponding rewards, and careful measuring of those rewards against the investment of time required.

A major problem with WoW, in my eyes, is that you had a deluge of juicy carrots during the first 200-300 hours of gameplay, which has slowed to a trickle of dry and bitter ones thereafter.

 

• Greybone

The human mind is a fascinating thing, for example:

I want my claw of chromaggus, along with my band of dark dominion, mantle of the blackwing cabal and a few other upgrades, I want it bad!

If you give it all to me today, where would I go?

 

Raylen

to hell

 

Boozbazz

What you say right there makes so much sense. The idea that it's fun and all until there's a marker saying to get X you must to this -->| |<-- much of Y.

I think you right that the general idea for many of the factions was "Hey it's mean to be fun, it's about the journey not the destination"
People should be playing AB because they enjoy playing AB. Unfortunately the mentality of many players of the "winning" or "godlihood" variety is that there is this plateau and they have to get there. Those players are doing it to themselves, but despite that- the theory of secondary rewards sounded good at first, but for many it's not happening in reality. Some players are putting the secondary rewards as their primary goal- in front of having fun.

The only thing that the afmormentioned statment does not apply to is the situation where you're farming timbermaw faction, or perhaps Thorium Brotherhood. Those are time sinks. Those are things that some people enjoy as described in an above post about how the Asian market revels in grinding. Now I'm not going to say that these time sinks should be removed, I'm not going to say that the rewards are crappy compared to the investment because that time investment has a different value from person to person. I'm just wondering...are those people who revel in grinding, meant to be the only ones who get those rewards? If not...what gives?

A nice thing about the "good" faction systems is that it incorporates an involving and challenging activity while having something some people can "grind" towards at the same time. In theory it should be fun for many breeds of players, but similar to what Praetorian said, the phychological response players are having to factions is what's sucking the fun out of it.

 

• Thrillho

I agree that you need timesinks. Technically, nearly every single game features 'timesinks' of one kind or another in order to stretch out content that's there; they slow down the progress so you don't just zoom through everything. I think, though, the timesinks that are useless are ones where a player is inputting his/her time or effort, and the player doesn't get any sense of progess. If you're giving the player a reward for their effort, it's not really a timesink anymore -- at least to me. Timesinks are wasted time. BG queues are an atrocious timesink, for example. The timesinks that are OK aren't useless; they can even enhance the feeling of progress. But it's a fine line.

You don't need to "dangle the carrot," such as with a long rep grind with the reward at the end, so much that you need to give them bits of the carrot along the way so they feel like they're making progress. But give them sizable chunks. Unlocked recipes or a fractional upgrade (ZG rep) doesn't really match up; they're like tiny bits of a baby carrot, barely enough to keep you sustained. Things become a timesink when the player feels that the rewards do not justify the time invested to get them -- essentially, they feel no sense of progress from it. The flipside of this is that timesinks are relative to the players themselves.There's a big difference between Counterstrike and BGs: time investment. The biggest problem with the PvP in WoW are the queues, and in a BG-dominated PvP system, you will always have queues of some kind, regardless of if you have Cross-Server Queues or whatnot. After I hit 60, I did my share of instances, got a lot of fun loot, and then I didn't really play all that much for around two months because I was doing other things. But I kept playing, because I could log in, run to Hillsbrad and PvP. If I had 30 minutes to kill before going out? I'd go kill some people. I got to Legionnaire with only a few hours a week of playing. Right now, in WoW, there's nothing for me to do if I have a 30-60 minute chunk of time to play, other than play an alt because there's literally nothing that can fit into my time budget, except for farming. If WoW had existed then as it does now, I would have stopped playing back in March/April. From the perspective of being able to pick it up and play for a small chunk of time -- which is a key facet of the 1-60 game -- as patches went in, the game has gotten worse and worse at it at level 60. That's not a good thing.

I really enjoy the PvP in WOW. But I rarely get to experience it.

 

XI-

On the topic of BG's/Queues.

Cross-server BG's WILL NEVER work, from an alliance perspective of course. Same-faction BG's are the only answer. If you examined the statistics of WoW you would find that there is a proportionally larger population of alliance players overall, and thus no matter how you grouped the servers, someone would be shafted with a problem at least as big as we have now. If the BG's are supposedly created to be balanced for both sides (I'd kill for the horde side in both AB and AV, but that's another topic). Then how much trouble would it be to have alliance vs alliance BG's. Skin your opponent horde if you want, and hide their names if it makes you feel better. Then there will never be more than 1 group sitting in queue.

If blizzard does implement cross-server BG's without same faction here is my fear. SH as an example shows an a/h ratio of 1.4/1. Seems reasonable enough to me from what I've seen. But I can tell you for sure that there's easily 2-4x as many alliance queued for BG's as horde(8 AB's open 45 minute queue -_^), and this doesn't even come close to the real figure, as there's plenty of people who don't queue because they'd have to wait too long. So even if they matched us with a server that was 1.4/1 H/A, I could forseeably have to sit in an even longer queue than I do now, depending on the horde's tendency to queue.

 

◊ Kaubel

The horde waits, on average, 3 hours to get into AV on Mal'Ganis. And that's peak hours on an AV weekend.

Anyway, like I've said before, you can get away from people feeling the need to grind if you give them something to do that relates to the community as a whole. The world event that was just implemented is just one example, but things like that should be going on constantly.

Crap should be happening, man. The game should not be static. Dragons should be spawning just outside of Org demanding answers for why Onyxia's head in being displayed on a giant pike. A caravan (that actually trades a very limited number of rare items, even stuff that was previously BoE) should be moving from UC to Booty Bay. Give us world wide plagues that no one has a cure for....unless they've quested for it (and then decided whether or not to provide it to others for free or for a cost). Maybe the ocean levels unexpectedly rise, putting places like Grom'Gol and Theramore underwater.

My point is, the game should always have something going on, consequently changing our normal routine and/or giving us something different to do. Throwing dungeons at us, where our actions have no consequence or impact outside our own little group, will forever and always become stagnant, unavoidable grinds.

 

XI-

Gurg feel free to delete/edit my posts if you feel we're straying too far from the topic, hate to see another good thread go down the tubes.

With regard to your first comment. That's about the same as SH is for AV, IF a game is up you're waiting until it ends to get in, IF you're lucky. Otherwise it might be a two game cycle. BUT if we look at (http://www.warcraftrealms.com/realmstats.php?sort=Ratio), now we can't be sure these numbers are anywhere near 100%, but lets use them as a baseline. Mal'Ganis is the worst server in terms of H/A activity ratio, from a horde perspective, and yet on a pretty good server in terms of A/H ratio we have the same problems and queues as you do.

As for things constantly happening. They're trying to expand this with darkmoon faire/etc. But you'd need a huge live team and capitol investment to be constantly producing and controlling events like this, which would get stale after the 10th or 15th time the dragon spawned outside org, and raped the duel monkeys.

 

Roane

In these sorts of games, there are two faces of the content: that which was made for us and what we make for ourselves. The first is intended, in RPGs this is the natural progression of power and plot. The second is what happens when the first runs out. If the game as it was designed was good and hooked us, we're not ready to put it down when the curtain goes down on the final boss and the plot dies. We do ridiculous things like grind for as many hours as it took to beat the game in the first place, just to take down Ruby Weapon or clear the final hidden stage. When that is done, we've truly reached the end of the game, beaten it in every way possible, and we move on.

This doesn't always apply to MMORPGs, since there's always the dangling carrot of possible future content. We played WoW under this circumstance until today, patch 1.9. Everything had been beaten, every boss dead multiple times, every encounter mastered. We now have a potentially brief glimpse at exploring and challenging new encounters with new tricks. But when that's done, we'll again be standing at the edge of the content that was made for us. It'll again be time to come up with something to do until some new dungeon or boss is patched in. What do you think, can we 10-man Lucifron? Hmm, I bet with the right classes we could five-man Onyxia, though the Warders would simply take forever...

When waiting at the end of all available content, we usually revert to the grind. The WoW journey from 1-59 was short by the standards of these sorts of games, but really 14 solid days of play is quite a long time. Why did we do it? It was fun. The first few levels are very short but highly scripted. We didn't know it at the time, but we followed the path tread by three million other people who whacked sleeping peons or reclaimed candles from wretched kobolds. They knew where we'd go and planned quests around the things we'd have killed even if there had been no quests. Quests acted as guides, telling us when we're done with one area and where to go next. They held our hands through the early levels, dividing the objective of levelling into the pursuit of completing a quest, divided further into counting up so many kills or doodads. The progress we made was tangible and quickly evident. We did unremarkable things, but were rewarded well.

At the cap, things are a bit different. We've done it all. Having slain the biggest dragon in the tallest tower of the grandest castle of them all, rescued the princess, and stormed hell itself, we're terribly bored. What to do? Slaughter those furbolgs, I guess. When we zone into Molten Core and Blackwing Lair twice a week, we're playing Superman; the rest of the week we're playing Clark Kent. Nobody wants to be Clark Kent. We want to play Superman.

The grind may be unavoidable. It is something we invent to do in our own time while waiting for the frontier to be moved forward. If it took half as much time, we wouldn't play half as much, we'd just blow through it twice as fast and grind the next thing. For all the talk about enjoying the journey, remember that the destination is the same for everyone in these games: quitting.

 

• Wodin

I actually tried formulating a less verbose version of what Gurgthock posted a couple of days ago, but scratched it because I couldn't properly express what I wanted to say. To provide some context, I have a mage alt that I use almost solely for PvP. He's got mediocre gear cobbled together from purchased epics, blue instance drops, and PvP reward armor along with a few nice ZG items that I've managed to scam, and yet I have much more fun pvping with him than I do on my completely pimped out rogue. Why? Carrots. My greatest triumph on him was staying up just one more WSG game after my permagroup had gone to bed, queueing solo, getting into a horrible pubbie WSG against an equally horrible pubbie alliance team, capping two flags(as a fucking fire mage), and getting my honored rep so that I could go buy two Advisor's Rings. They're tiny, marginal upgrades that are only better for PvP, but the accomplishment of being able to get that upgrade for doing nothing but having fun was great.

As far as "bits of carrot" go, I'd love to see gradated rewards at different levels. The Frostwolf trinket in AV was a great idea - it started out as a shitty green and got better and better as you leveled up. If the various necklaces in ZG weren't so horrible at lower levels they'd also be a good idea. If, every 2000 rep the necklace got 2 ilvls better then that would be damn cool and a lot of fun. Again, if you give the player too much too fast then they'd be bored to tears. They just need to be better about finding that balance.

 

jubelio

some of the necklaces are just as bad at higher levels

 

Slug

Right. Timesinks are only a problem when they actively get in the way of your enjoyment of content. There are things which, by right, should only be available to the most devoted or hardcore players. I see the high warlord rewards as something of that nature and properly implemented. It's not game-breaking that they're only available to certain types of people (those with no lives...lol), but it does give a specific and useful reward to those who are able to play the game in a certain way and enjoy doing so.

Things like that result in people noticing the lack of worthwhile things to accomplish for those with less time. If a timesink will suck up 50 hours of your time, many will finish it within a week or two. What of the guy who only gets to play 2-5 hours a week, though? Would that particular grind be worth devoting all his time to, considering what he might miss out on while doing so? Would the reward even be worth it, by the time he finished?

With content constantly going in, it becomes a huge fear of the more time-conscious gamers that they will waste precious hours of their time doing something that is outphased in importance before they even manage to finish it.

[top]

Every single time I have to jump into WoW and say, "Is this actually worth doing?", I have stumbled upon a questionable timesink. AV faction? Not a prayer, for me. It's impossible to even get in, given my schedule. I've been to two AV's since it was put in. One lasted 10 minutes before the alliance AFK'ed out, the other I got into for about 30 minutes at the very end and I didn't get to see much before we'd won. Too bad there's no other fashion in which to gain a majorly cost-reduced epic mount, eh?

Given that BG experience, why would I bother waiting in queues even if the rewards were worth it to me? Wasted time during which I can't commit to a 5-man or anything useful if I want a possible chance at doing something fun in PvP? Ugh. Most times I queue when farming gold, I wind up getting a good farming spot and don't feel like leaving by the time the BG actually opens up. So scratch BG's for the moment...what's next?

What about AD faction for the +5 resists on shoulders? I did a ton of strat, scholo, and engaged in mass undead genocide on my way to 60 and for my blue set. By the end of all that, I was still nowhere near close to the rep requirements for the things.

So my options at that point became grinding undead and cauldrons for a ridiculous amount of time, or going without the only enchant available to me for that slot through solo-play. (ZG faction is a pipe-dream for someone like me who can't get into a ZG group regularly, after all. You must also remember that ZG wasn't anywhere near at the time that I had to consider this.)

You get gold and possibly items while farming the faction, right? Oof got two BoE epics while grinding AD, as I recall. But what's the bottom line for me, personally? Is +5 resist fire or (God forbid) resist all worth literally dozens of hours of nonstop grinding in an area where I have to frequently deal with artificial downtime in form of claim jumpers from my own faction and gankers from the opposing one? Not to me. I'd rather play an alt than waste that much time on such a marginal increase.

What if we changed one factor of that, though? What if AD faction was available through turn-ins available from anything non-instance that I might farm at level 60? What if I could save the ones I farmed on my rogue for use on my warlock, or sell them on the AH? Suddenly, that particular timesink falls more in-line with things I'm already doing and I have other options available in case everyone's killing the undead when I want to be there.

In a case like that, it continues to be a functional timesink, but it becomes less of a perceived "pain in the ass" type of timesink.

Exactly. That was the single thing AC2 had going for it, from the outset. In that game, there was massive potential never realized. The seasons cycled with the ones IRL. In winter, the streams and lakes would be frozen over. What of a dungeon that was at the bottom of a lake during that time? Guess you just can't get there during winter, eh? What about using a frozen waterfall as a staircase to another dungeon not reachable through other means? That concept alone is pretty damn cool. Did they do it? Not to my knowledge. So much wasted potential from such a simple to implement game element.

While many would look at such content as "wasted" during the months it is not available, I suggest it is the opposite. The anticipation factor adds to the enjoyment of the game. Just look at holiday events in WoW. Small though they may be, everyone tries their best to check them out, because content like that is different and cool. I'm still eager for the day I manage to get that stupid Ace for deck completion so I can go to Darkmoon Faire and cash in. If it happens while the faire is in Alliance lands, I get to try and sneak over for the turn in. How totally cool.

Saying to a gamer "you cannot go here during this timeframe" or "temporarily unavailable" is okay provided there is an eventual payout. Blizzard's getting the hang of that, to some degree. (AQ & Darkmoon). The key point is to periodically change content so that it's not always there, but there are comperable and equally useful things to do while it is gone.

===

The best thing EQ ever had going for it was "GM events" and they happened with fair regularity on servers with low petition queues, back when I was involved in that. You'd end up with a number of GM's on during low queue times, which left some of you free to interact with the customers and up their enjoyment factor on a personal level. Most times, you'd get one in a day at the very least, unless GM's were swamped. We'd frequently roam around the realms in character on slow days and roleplay with those who were game for it. Things like that add so very much to a game like this.

While I was doing the whole GM bit, we had a few things we'd do pretty regular. "Invasion" themed events were the easiest and most common. We just spawned ourselves as souped up mobs that weren't resident to the zone in question and killed players until they banded up and downed us for loots. I had more fun with the RP'ing, though. If I happened upon solo players and they RP'ed well with me, I would sometimes send them on a personal quest to take something to another GM or fetch something specific for me. Never was it implied that there would be any reward at all, but people would almost inevitably do it, often dropping more worthwhile ventures to do so. If they chose to do it, I'd usually reward them somehow, but you could tell that the experience alone was worth it, to them.

Imagine being given something by a GM and asked to transport it to him at a city across the globe for a reward. He just teleports, but you have to find your way over and locate him in town by asking others if they'd seen him recently. Imagine being a level 10 character and having an actual GM show up and *gasp* talk to you while you were killing lowbie mobs by yourself. Imagine being asked by that GM to get them something that only drops off of a level 30 mob in a dungeon. Things like that sometimes evolved into massive events of low level people fighting for a cause, or lower level people recruiting upper level folks to escort them. It added a great deal of random fun to the game and some of my better memories were from things of that nature.

Blizzard's queue and GM system unfortunately don't allow for much free time for such events. They'd probably have to hire a part-time team of "eventrunners" for something such as that on a regular basis, and I don't know that it would be cost effective for them, really.

 

◊ Praetorian

Re: Wodin

Right, doing something that was fun and getting a little useful bonus as a reward is definitely good. That's the purest form of what the PvP aspect of the game is supposed to provide. You're having fun in the process and you're doing it because you enjoy it, but you also realize some tangible and lasting improvement to your character's strength.

But you admit that it was marginal.

That's one of the problems -- everything is marginal. None of us will ever get a single item that, by itself, makes us feel a drastic increase in our character's power. The closest thing in the game right now would be some of the burst trinkets, and completing a few of the 8-piece t2 sets (Netherwind especially). But still, to the extent that you appreciate the progression, it has to be taking a huge fucking step back to examine the big picture, and then you recognize the cumulative impact of your 10 little marginal upgrades. Going back to a 5-man instance as a warrior clad in purples from head to toe certainly makes you feel powerful, but even that is a small improvement relative to what the game gives you up-front as you are leveling up.

On November 27th or so of 2004 I was probably running Wailing Caverns. On December 10th or so I was strong enough that I could go back and solo the boss that had wiped my 5-man group not two weeks prior (hey, Verdan hits way, way harder than anything you encounter in the game prior to him). Today, I still couldn't solo my level 50 class quest in Sunken Temple, an instance that I first did over a year ago, to say nothing of higher instances.

Maybe in the expansion. But that's only because the expansion will let me continue leveling, which is real progression, and that's what this is all about.

 

cormac

Time sinks are funny things. When you get down to the most basic level, everything in the game is a timesink. The process of levelling to 60 took me around 20 days of played time spread out over a few months. Getting to a stage where we could do the raid content as a guild took another few months. Getting to the stage where we were well enough equipped to take down Ragnaros took another few months. I never really felt as if any of those processes were a grind. The only time I felt like I was participating in an obvious timesink was when I was trying to get rep in AV for the tome of shadow force. That was OK though because AV was fun enough at least until I was most of the way to exalted, and it only took a few weeks.I avoided all of the other rep grinds like the plague, because they took too long, weren't enough fun or didn't provide enough of a reward.

Timesinks are a necessary evil for economic reasons, but there is a very fine line to be drawn between keeping the player interested and putting them off totally. Somebody mentioned in the locked thread that they could only hope to get to rank 10 in the PVP system, but the rank 10 rewards were of no use to them. The way the honour system was implemented put a hard cap on how far you could progress based on how much time you could put in to PVP. The way rank decays when you slow down your PVPing negates what progress you may have made. Blizzard made some effort to rectify this when they changed the system so that you could still use the rewards after you lost rank, but the system still heavily favours people who can afford to invest large ammounts of time over a set time period. You cant progress by PVPing for a week and then taking a week off. It promotes burnout, in that once you hit rank 14 or whatever your personal limit is, you cant make any more progress at all. This is a prime example of how a timesink can fail completely. There is no incentive to take part when you know you can only reach a point where the rewards are useless. Neither you nor anyone else benefits from you continuing to participate.

PVE wise Blizzaard have done much better. When you start raiding you can see rapid progress through killing bosses. You see your raid group improve as loot drops more easily every week. You get to the stage where you can spawn Rag and get murdered. Then you set to work on getting fire resist gear, so that you can eventually kill him and move on to newer content. At every stage off this you see progress. You might not get any loot yourself during particular resets, but somebody does, and you notice that things are getting easier. Even if you have everything you want from the zone, you know that your group needs to be equally well equipped to move on to the next one. There is always incentive to keep on playing, because it acts a catalyst for your whole guild to progress further.

As far as I'm concerned, the key to designing a succesful timesink, is to either hide it from the player as much as possible, like was done with gearing up in MC, or to make sure that there is a clear worthwile reward at the end of it all, that progress is visible and that it is fun for the player to take part in. If you fall down on any one of those you will fail completely.

 

phyra

This is great, I'm glad to see that the interest from the first thread hasn't died down. Maybe I should start hanging out here instead of the official forums from now on B)

I'll start with Slug and your mention of pedigree, I'm do understand where you're coming from on those points since I had the same experiences for the most part. I grew up with Mario and Zelda and spent my childhood years playing the Final Fantasies and Dragon Warriors and Secret of Manas. I grew up with the grind and learned to love it as my master. I sunk a hundred hours into Final Fantasy 2 US and grinded the moon's Core until my entire party was Level 99, I completed FF1 with a party of four White Mages, spent hours uncovering secrets in FF3US, etc etc. Later on I became involved on the reverse-engineering/romhacking side of fan translation efforts for the Japanese FF2, FF3, and FF4 'hardtype' under the alias 'necrosaro' and the group 'J2E Translations' (perhaps you've heard of either). I also played The Seventh Saga, and worked on translation efforts for its sequel, Mystic ark, among tons of others. I later studied Japanese language, literature and film as a direct result of the influence the Japanese video game industry of the 80's and early 90's had over my childhood.

But after playing RPGs religiously for a while, I grew up and moved on. Those games were a great way to while away my after-school time in middle school instead of watching cartoon reruns, but the gameplay systems were pretty limited. After a short period of time, your brain basically shifts into autopilot mode and you slog ahead simply to watch the pretty graphics and text deliver an extended cartoon, a juvenile fable or drama of some sort. Enter the era of the infamous FMV cutscene carrots, and I completely lose interest. As a modern nation Japan has a highly creative ambition and highly cultivated artistic sense, but it's also home to one of the most consolidated, ugliest mass entertainment markets in the world. Just because shlock sells there doesn't mean it's worth anything more than the paper (or silicon) it's printed on.


Getting back to the main point. Is a game like World of Warcraft entirely founded upon this same formula of carrots and sticks, on a larger, distributed, social scale? And do those sticks necessarily need to be limited by the amount of time in a real-life day? I just glanced at an article on Yahoo by Mike Smith who wrote, 'as far as traditional, big MMOs go, the game is the stick, and the carrot is just a mirage.' Am I wrong for trying to rediscover the carrot so as to try and see its way back to its proper place?

(The second half of my post got deleted while typing so I will now paraphrase and things will be scattered)

RPGs are the only video games I know of that incorporate the direct contribution of time as an essential competitive element of their gameplay. (I disagree with Thrillho here) They share a strange affinity to linear media such as books and movies in this sense, a tension I haven't really explored fully. The contribution of time in itself, as opposed to indirectly through some mediation of skill or knowledge or experience, makes the advances gained through game-playing purely virtual as opposed to tied to your real-world person. I see it as a pretty bleak existence if all you have to show for your conquering of a timesink is 1) whatever in-game resources or recognition you have gained from overcoming said timesink; 2) a chunk of time spent. I guess it's understandable if the only reason for playing said game is to waste time as opposed to seeking some sort of competition or more substantial experience. And for those who seek competition in an MMORPG, because any single minute that could be spent in-game will always marginally improve your character's performance at some level, unless you place limits on your ambition to succeed, I don't see any satisfiable conclusion except watching every minute of your entire life become consumed in-game until you eventually burnout and realize that all the progress you thought you obtained was virtual and transient, as you watch it disappear in the blink of an eye as soon as you exit the game. Sort of a nihilistic outlook on life, isn't it. Good thing WoW has some substance apart from a pure timesink, or I might just kill myself for wasting an entire year of my life. (Think of playing Progress Quest as much as you play WoW! Oh, the horror!)

Anyway, isn't the nature of a timesink pretty demeaning to someone of any more demanding intelligence, especially one who desires to run around in a group of equal or better peers, when the mindless task he's performing is accomplished equally as well by a ten-year old, an uncommunicative unskilled sweatshop laborer, or even a script?

And now time to step back to the more short-term practical side of things. Last time I suggested that eliminating all timesinks from a game would be beneficial, but it was hard to see how that would directly apply to WoW. So this time I'll support the hybrid approach that tries to balance timesinks against skill-sinks and allows the player to choose his own poison.
Aside from saying that timesinks are the bane of all game-playing existence, an alternative way to phrase the problem is that the reward for skill-based accomplishments compared to time-based accomplishments is too small. When a timesink becomes visible it's because the skill-sink is not visible enough. Take for example the grind from 1-60. I leveled up by running around, exploring the world, completing quests and finding and forming appropriately-leveled pick-up groups to run through the various instances, while my friend mostly leveled up by finding appropriately-leveled monsters and farming them nonstop. I probably enjoyed the midgame more than him, but I gained no in-game benefit from doing so - I was in fact penalized for my efforts because his xp/hour via grinding was greater than mine. This balance could be tweaked to give a larger incentive to questing and running instances in terms of progression through the midgame (not necessarily faster overall, just a shift in balance between the two). One place where they tried (but failed) to keep this balance of skill versus time was by providing a bonus in honor and reputation rewards from winning a Battlegrounds. In a well-balanced PvP rewards system, you should be rewarded for your skill in battle and for your victories against challenging opponents. In the current system, the best way to rank up is to simply ignore any game objectives and farm honorable kills in the most popular BGs 24/7. One step in the right direction is the set of difficult 'optional' bosses, including the bug family triad in AQ. Depending on the order you kill, increased effort is rewarded by higher-quality loot.

If this hybrid timesink/skillsink idea is extended further, you might see things such as alternative forked paths through raid zones with an option of a more difficult but less numerous pack of trash, or a tough miniboss protecting the more direct path to the end zone boss. Or something like a difficult optional boss that gives you a major chunk of a certain faction when killed, saving you weeks of grinding. Or maybe a treasure chest that despawns two hours after you zone into the instance that rewards you with some extra chances at low-droprate loot for an organized, quick clear.
Systems like these might reward the more ambitious challenge-seekers by cutting down their daily grind, without alienating those who would rather slog it out.

I found a good mantra on the Vanguard website that explains what I'm getting at pretty well: 'the path of least resistance should also be the path to the most fun'. Many have fun spending their time beating their heads on timesinks, many like myself prefer to beat their heads on other cognitive, social or organizational challenges. A game like WoW that aspires to cater to all types of players simultaneously is in a tricky situation but it is certainly possible to balance the playstyles against one another. But there will always be that bottleneck of the slow trickling of content and the competitive crowd always slamming their heads against the bar mere weeks after it's been raised. Maybe I'll work on sketching out solutions to that next time.

 

Slug

Yep. You guys did good work. I've still got copies of your hardtype translations for the FF games lying around somewhere. :)

Excellent point. I believe I understood it correctly, at least. The time invested in an RPG often results in a similar effect to that of an epic book for the enduser, but only if that is what they are personally after. Good movies can occasionally suck you in, but a good book is almost always a better experience in the minds of most people. That said, even the best book will fail to entertain those who approach it in the wrong way.

A book is a much more personal experience in most cases and can be tailored specifically to the enduser's imagination, but if you just read it without investing anything more than your time, your personal experience will be far more bland than those who choose to put more into it. Films and "Rail Games" offer much less in the way of room for imagination or user-personalization, but RPG's can be every bit as bland as any of those, should the enduser focus only on what they are "forced to" by the game.

RPG's frequently offer the same manner of experience that a good book can. After spending a good chunk of time with it, you tend to have a much stronger attachment to the world and characters than you would had you just watched a 2 hour film about the same subject matter. I've always felt that was a strong point of the RPG genre. They can be as dry or as involved as you personally wish them to be.

Interesting that you brought this up. I know a number of people who mourned the massive loss they were experiencing upon qutting EQ or the like. They looked at a character full of their personal time and realized it was shortly to matter for naught. I always boggled at the idea that they didn't realize this was the nature of things all along. Perhaps they did, subconsciously, but they ignored it until faced with the reality in its most solid form. Months and months of actual time spent on pixels and non-material items, all down the drain. But is it really? You have the experience, after all. If your only experiences were dull or bad, I can understand the negative view. EQ was certainly jam-packed with things that would make me want to put my head through a wall at times, but I look back on those and laugh these days while remembering how worthwhile it was due to the incredible "goods" that came from playing.

I was never bothered by the inevitable loss of all that time invested, myself. Upon reaching the end of a game for myself, I simply kill the account and say "That was fun...now what should I play...?"

You absolutely must invest in your fellow gamers to seriously enjoy these games for very long. Many people lose sight of the fact that they're just playing a game and it could all be gone tomorrow. They lose sight that it's not about loot or levels or skill-ups, but about the people they're experiencing these things with. It's amazing how very tied-in people can get and how utterly their RL world often falls apart over ingame circumstances. It's more amazing to me how someone can lose every ingame item they have, yet still be enjoying themselves if their friends are still around. Different approaches to the same situation, afforded by the personal investment and goals of the gamer in question.

I think among the keys to enjoyment of MMO's is the ability to remember at all times that it is a simple game and it's about people. Most games of this sort burn themselves out long before their social structure fails. I find that people often wind up playing MMO's for considerably long periods after the game itself has played out for them and become bland. The social aspect adds life for people who aren't solely focused on the grind and the loot.

I may have run UBRS somewhere in the realm of 100 times, but I cannot really say that it was ever a bore. Every time I went, I was with interesting people and different things happened. The mobs were the same, the overall experience was one I'd had dozens of times before, but the people made the entire trip worthwhile. I've never really cared where I was in a game or whether I really stood to gain anything from it, so long as I was spending quality time with good friends. Due to this, it's pretty darn hard to burn me out.

Again, this is where I feel the player generally has to step outside the game to enjoy it. MMO's have competitive elements to them, but most are not as seriously competitive an experience as you would find in an FPS, RTS, or fighting game. There will always be a depressing construct in most games this involved. You either enjoy a game in spite of its bugs and shortcomings, or you become disinterested and move on. There's only so much a design element can sway the individual on that, in the end. Nobody can make me want to hang out with people ingame and if I just soloed everywhere, always, I would probably burn out pretty quick. Oh well. Personal preference. That factor often leads designers down a lazy path of "it's nothing I can really help...these things are natural".

It's like you said in the end, there. It is certainly possible to find that precious balance in this game, and others. As long as the developers and community remain motivated and continue to work together on that, things can only get better for everyone. I welcome new ideas and radical new approaches at all times, because I would much rather see people with ideas and opinions than people who are simply displeased and offer no input or feedback.

Even if the ideas fall flat or wind up ignored, at least they're trying to be constructive. At least they're doing something.

 

subscience

I cannot imagine an MMORPG without some sort of significant timesink(s). In fact, I believe that they are a fundamental (and necessary) part of any MMORPG that wishes to have a sustained player base.

But maybe that's just my brainwashed mind thinking that.



However, as Gurgthock pointed out many times, physical resources to create content is a very finite thing while "what a player wants" can be considered infinite. You give a player a yard and they want ten. You give them new content and they powergame through it and are left whining for more. Unless you add some sort of timesink and (forced) replayability, then the overall "content" is diminished considerably.

Imagine if you got your drop(s) every time you ran whatever instance you wanted to do and reputation was 1000 times faster than it is now. After that first Molten Core clear you'd have your entire set of tier 1, your weapons of choice, exalted reputation for every faction and then what? Players would get bored and quit, I'd imagine.

I'm barely on my second cup of coffee for the morning so I could just be full of shit. <_<

 

hamlet

look at console solo player games. Even with as much content as they have my dad beat tour of duty 2 in 2 weeks. I couldnt imagine how much content would be needed in an MMO to satisfy people for years without significant timesinks.

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b3...mai_hime37.gif

 

◊ Praetorian

The content would have to be dynamic, as stated above, so that you can define the algorithms by which content will be generated, but the nitty-gritty will vary over time. PvP is one such type of content. Randomized instance or other content generation would be another, though very difficult to implement. Randomzied loot would be as well -- not random in the sense of selection among static items, but rather dynamically generated high-end loot, the way random greens work. People's quest for perfection kept them doing the same sections of Diablo II over and over and over because, hey, an amazing rare with perfect mods could drop... even the mods on the unique items varied significantly so that there was always room for further improvement. That's a timesink in itself, of course, but I think that ultimately the only answer to the problem of how to improve the ratio of developer time to player time would be dynamic content.