We Can Fix That with Data

In the future, you’ll be able to store saves for your Steam games on Valve’s servers.

I don’t know how often people play the sort of games they’d want to save on multiple machines — in other words, narrative games as opposed to multiplayer. I can understand burning some time at a friend’s house with a fast game of Some Multiplayer Shooter, but I don’t think I want to sit down and pick up a story where I left off. Narrative games would seem to lend themselves to longer and less social sessions.

But since Valve knows what you’re doing all the time, they must know how often people play the same narrative game on multiple machines, so maybe they see some demand.

Or … maybe there’s another reason. What can they data mine out of save games that they don’t already know? They already know how far you’ve gotten — if that’s what “Highest Map Played” means. There must be something interesting in there …

There’s been some discussion on the Age of Conan newbie experience, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about the biggest problem — at least, what will become the biggest problem for the people who are counting the money.

It’s an intensely anti-social experience, and that’s going to cause problems in the future.

A lowbie Conan character will spend half of her time soloing in solo instances. Solo instances have chat — sometimes (it seems buggy). Chat is a good way of staying in touch with the world — it reminds you that there are people out there, even if you’re playing on your own. (As an aside, this is also why chat notifications for events are awesome — they give people something to talk about, and they show newbies that there’s stuff going on out there. Cool stuff that you might be able to participate in someday!)

The rest of the time, our Conan lowbie is running around in town, doing quests. Sometimes she gets sent out of town — there is a group-oriented zone with some group quests nearby. It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of people grouping there, though. Besides, once they get to the next level band, they would have to drop group anyway to go finish their next batch of solo quests.

There are other things to do in a few other zones that are PvP enabled on PvP servers. People are grouping there! The PKs are grouped together, anyway. So far, it’s generally true that if I run into a solo player, I’m okay. If I see a group, I need to be ready to switch instances.

So that’s another thing — the entire world is instanced. You can switch to (the entrance of) another copy of the zone you’re in at any time with a few clicks. On one hand, this is pretty cool (if a little morally dubious) on PvP servers. On the other hand, it splits players up. I see people asking where their friends are, because they should both be in the same place — player confusion I haven’t seen since the launch of City of Heroes. (At least you don’t have to go to the tram to switch instances in AoC.)

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with solo play. But things are different for open PvP games. In worlds where players can’t make it on their own and don’t know who to trust, it’s vitally important to hook them up with potential friends and guildmates. Repeated gankage, with no recourse and no support network, in a game that’s supposed to be about more than that is bad for business. People quit over that kind of stuff and they don’t come back.

Here’s the business outcome of weak social features, and new player experiences where new players aren’t welcomed with open arms by a waiting community.

They create a Recruitment Problem. New players need to be directed into guilds as soon as possible. L33tz0r PvP guilds need a reason to take newbs under their wing, rather than giving them a Darktide introduction to the game. (Remember? The camping of the new player start locations on the Asheron’s Call 1 PvP server was legendary. Players said they did it to discourage the weak.) So the game needs to provide valuable roles for new, inexperienced, or just plain bad players. Give the newbs grunt tasks that the guild wouldn’t want their best PvPers doing during the siege.

(This is also a really compelling argument against PvP l33tness ranks for guilds — if the guild’s ranking will fall when you invite your newb little brother, you won’t invite him. You won’t invite him and he won’t play, and that’s a lost subscription.)

I’ve heard that Age of Conan sieges are limited to 50 on 50 players. That means only the l33test of the l33t get to participate. Sure, it lessens technical headaches and makes people think it’s “fair,” but in the long run, it contributes to a recruitment problem that hurts profits.

Over time, the playerbase dwindles into the hardest of the hardcore, ever more hostile to outsiders. Outsiders that are worth $14.99 a month … if they make it past the first month.

And when there’s no reason to recruit or even communicate with anyone outside of your little group, we get the Us vs. Them Problem. Picture a social network. Picture a sad, stunted little social network with no links outside of a single guild. Now, give that guild a catastrophe — city gets burned down, guild leader gets hit by a bus — and every $14.99 in that guild has nowhere to go but the unsubscribe page.

A robust political system, with meaningful alliances, allows players to enjoy the magic of the PvP server — the armed and polite society — while knowing how to interact with others. You want players to make friends far and wide so they have support when their guild falls through, while still allowing them to kill the players who need to be killed. Without political systems, players have to fall back on the relationships they made before they joined the guild — “hey, I did Scarlet Monastery with that guy when we were wee little lads and he didn’t totally suck.” These casual bonds don’t form when the entire game is instanced and nobody groups and nobody talks, and every time you see another player, you get ready to run.

I fear that that dwindling, ever more hardcore, and ever more hostile playerbase is in Age of Conan’s future because of that antisocial new player experience. “It was supposed to be a single player game until 20″ nonetheless, this weird hybrid, where nobody communicates and the most meaningful player interaction is getting three-shot by somebody five levels higher than you, is bad for business in the long run.

There’s nothing wrong with getting three-shot by somebody five levels higher than you on a PvP server. You signed up for that when you chose the PvP server. But there is something wrong if you haven’t already been welcomed by a guild that’s sending five bored level cappers his way — a guild that wants you because game systems encourage it, with people you met because content was designed for a social experience.

And to be fair, AoC has a couple of things going for it — I believe it’s the first MMO to ship with a looking for guild feature. (Everquest 2 added theirs after launch, right? And Shadowbane’s was long after launch and not really a proper looking for guild feature anyway. Yeah, sorry about that.) Players can also link guilds in chat, which is really cool. Click on the guild name in chat to get an info pane. (Remember that Anarchy Online, not WoW, was the first MMO with item links in chat.)

I wish AoC the best of luck. I’m delighted to see somebody carrying the open PvP torch again.

Sayeth Jeff Hickman:

We think of Warhammer Online as a PvP game that also has monster and PvE content. So, when we balance our careers, we balance the content around player verses player, not fighting monsters. We balance the classes against each other. Then, instead of balancing those classes against the monsters, we balance the monsters against the classes. Our philosophy is to make the best PvP game in the world and build the PvE content around it. We know how much damage each class can do and take, plus all the utility each class can provide. So, instead of balancing each ability, we just need to modify the overall damage output and absorption of each career.

Excellent! That’s exactly how to do it.

There’s a helpful shortcut for building PvE content here, too — for the first pass, anyway. Keep monster performance as close as possible to player performance. That way, you don’t have to do a separate PvE balance pass. And it gives you another argument against doing separate combat formula and values for PvE and PvP, which is absolutely abhorrent and a terrible, terrible idea. It’s a bitch to maintain, it’s hard to communicate, and it’s just not elegant.

There are a whole lot of people who don’t get exaggeration for comic effect. (via)

I went to school to learn how to write stuff like this.

50 hours a week of Ultima Online (and later, Asheron’s Call) did not count as field work.

Apparently, I was in the wrong department.

I return from ION 2008 and a whirlwind tour of northwest Oregon and southeast Washington. We drove from Seattle to Portland to Salem to the coast and up 101 until somewhere in Washington before returning to Seattle via Olympia … in two days.

The conference itself was pretty good. Executive heavy.

Rather than talks, I mostly went to panels on topics that I already knew well, which made them into interesting exercises of seeing who knew what they were talking about. Sadly, I missed the couple of real talks that I was interested in.

My talk, Design for Longevity, was a little under the radar — I think I should have gone with the original title, “Your Tools Suck.” Because that’s what it’s about: you can get more done with fewer people and less money if you think about workflow up front. But most designers and tools programmers and middleware providers never thought about it too hard, so it takes us forever to make content, and then we lose subscribers the longer we go without updates. Obvious stuff, but people keep making the same mistakes. Here are the slides. I cleaned up the notes so that it could feel more like you were there.

There may be better ways to approach solutions to these problems, but I pointed out the ones that have worked for me — tools that I can build on my own with (comparatively) limited technical skills. And remember that it’s from the perspective of a small-team balance designer, which is what I was doing Back In The Day.

(Aside: I would like to point out that, while presenter view is a great idea, it really sucks that you can’t practice it until you’re hooked up to two monitors. When you create the bulk of your slides on a plane and in a hotel room, you only have one monitor. And hey, would you know it, but clicking on different parts of the screen in presentation mode appears to do different things, but of course you couldn’t know it, because you couldn’t try it! They are apparently taking cues from World of Warcraft raid encounter design … once again, a failure in workflow foresight.)