Evidence-Based Design

This is creepy.

This is funny.

While it’s old news by now, this article on the lack of social play in Warhammer is very good. Conan had similar issues, as I wrote about earlier this year. While encouraging social play isn’t as crucial in a PvP game with prebuilt sides, it’s still sad to see any MMO deny its fundamental nature.

Speaking of PvP: in the midst of a discussion on PvP itemization in World of Warcraft, some talk on tracking player performance in battlegrounds. I don’t know what Blizzard’s planning, but I hope they haven’t forgotten that a bunch of people have been trying to solve this problem in other contexts.

Getting back to Warhammer, gamerDNA’s been printing some interesting articles based on Xfire data and surveys. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a data mining company pretending to be a social networking company, so we can expect lots of intesting stuff from them in the future. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already.

In an oddly similar direction, this NYT article suggests that people are eating better food these days because the NPD says so! Somebody call the Daily Plate and Sparkpeople and Fitday and hell, Weight Watchers Online, and let them know about their exciting new business model.

Blizzard’s been taking advantage of the Wrath of the Lich King beta to make major changes to their core RPG. This is a nice situation for them — they get to iterate, they get tons of player feedback, people are actively playing (unlike most games’ test servers), and they don’t destabilize their live service.

One of the latest changes is a change to the way that mana costs are calculated. They’re switching from the normal fixed costs for particular spells (Generic Fire Nuke (Rank 1) costs 17 mana and by god, it always costs 17 mana) to scaling percentage costs (Generic Fire Nuke (any rank) costs 10% of base, unmodified mana no matter what).

A few players are excited, but the majority are unhappy about this because it does away with “downranking” — casting a lower-level version of the same spell because it costs less mana and is more efficient for your purpose. Healers do this quite a bit. If I know that my target only needs 1k HP healed, why should I spend a ton of mana to cast my max-rank heal that heals for 3k, when I could cast a lower-ranked version that heals for 1k and costs much less mana? Smart healers usually play with a couple of different ranks of several of their spells on their cast bars. Hey, it’s strategy!

Usability-wise, in World of Warcraft, where your spellbook displays all the old ranks, it’s not hard to sit there and do the mana-per-HP healed calculation yourself, or you can use a mod like DrDamage to do it for you. (People downranked in Shadowbane too, but they had to rely on oral tradition to get the slash command to access those “obsolete” spell ranks.)

Loss of the strategy of downranking aside, it’s a good change for the designers, in terms of using their time efficiently.

When I’m costing a spell the traditional way, I’ll use a spreadsheet that says something like “okay, this is a level 10 spell, and at level 10, you should have about this much mana and this much mana regen, and I want you to be able to cast this spell this many times before you run out of mana.” I’ll have to do that for every rank of the spell, taking into account how much mana and regen I think the character should have at that level. And later on, I may have to revisit those numbers once I mine the character data to confirm those expected mana values — if that data is available to me.

Generally speaking, I want that number-of-times-cast value to remain consistent as the character gains spell ranks, because it fits the player’s expectations — a lowbie spellcaster knows that she can kill a certain number of mobs with Generic Fire Nuke before she has to rest, and every time she gets a new rank of Generic Fire Nuke, that should remain the same as before. In other words, her downtime shouldn’t fluctuate dramatically as she advances, because downtime is a defining class characteristic.

The percentage cost model makes my life a lot easier. I don’t have to figure how much mana I think you should have at that level, and I don’t have to check the character data to confirm. I just say that I want you to be able to cast Generic Fire Nuke about 10 times before you run out of mana, so I say it costs 10% of your mana. DONE. (Okay, it’s not quite that simple because I need to account for mana regen, but I’m still DONE in a lot less time.)

Now, this breaks down a bit if new spell ranks aren’t granted quickly enough. Lowbie Spellcaster will find that she has to rest more often, killing the same number of mobs, because Generic Fire Nuke does less damage relative to the content she’s doing, so she has to cast it more times, but she can’t cast it more times because it still costs the same percentage of her mana. Theoretically, with traditional fixed costs, if her mana pool was scaling at the same rate as her other stats, she’d be able to cast it more often before resting to make up for doing less relative damage. (However, this means that her mana pool needed to scale properly … but math is hard and it doesn’t always work out that way.) And she still feels slightly less powerful with every level that passes without a new rank, because she has to cast more often.

The thing is, stairstepping is required to make advancement feel meaningful. I wouldn’t do percentage damage to make up for that problem. Damage is usually figured as a percentage of the intended target level’s HP, same as the traditional way of doing mana costs. The Generic Fire Nuke I intend for Lowbie Spellcaster to use at level 10, versus level 10 opponents, is probably supposed to do N% of the average level 10 mob’s health. If Lowbie Spellcaster use that rank of Generic Fire Nuke against level 12 opponents, it’ll do less relative damage. But this is the way it should be. It motivates Lowbie Spellcaster to get off her ass and level to earn the next rank, same as Lowbie Fighter should be motivated to level to use a new sword. When they get their respective rewards, they feel like they’ve accomplished something.

Going back to WoW’s situation: the loss of downranking, to be fair, might increase workload because the designers may want to build and maintain abilities that perform the same purpose (like small, low-cost heals for that poor shaman in the thread I linked). But in the long run, percentage mana costing makes their lives easier. If I were balancing an RPG right now, I’d be inclined to make the same decision.

WoW’s original UI had a very distinct goal: do not display anything that every player would not absolutely need to know. If it’s class specific, it’s out. If it could be confusing in any possible way, it’s out. Let the players handle it. Said players have done a very fine job with this task over the years while the default UI remained largely unchanged.

At some point earlier this year, I’m guessing that new management forced a change in direction, or maybe everybody collectively realized that the game was mature enough that they didn’t have to worry so much — maybe it’s okay to have possibly confusing class-specific stuff, maybe it’s okay to show information that you don’t absolutely need to know. And that’s when we got the new local map tracking options and shaman totem timers and the ability to mail multiple items at a time and other stuff like that. And oh my god, a number on your backpack to show how many empty inventory slots you have! And an on-screen clock (and SWG’s alarm system)!

There’s more to come in the expansion. Here’s a nice comparison between the original UI and the Wrath UI. The most recent changes are largely convenience features for established players, with stuff like pretty much anything that ever took up space in inventory getting its own UI instead. The mount and vanity pet change, in particular, is convenient but highly unintuitive.

Imaginative types might take all this to mean that the team is now officially prioritizing retention over recruitment.

• The excellent new Official Team Fortress 2 Blog discusses their class design process.
• Greg Spence reveals SOE San Diego’s “on-site brand new usability lab” and its role in testing EQ2’s new voice chat feature. (I am pretty sure that exactly nobody uses WoW’s recent voice chat feature, but as we all know, voice chat is THE FUTURE. Yeah! That guy from Vivox is the SIXTH most influential person in the industry! … Also, we can’t have other games having features we don’t.) (Actually, I’m actually kind of disappointed that I never hear kiddies using WoW’s voice chat in battlegrounds.)
• A little bit about EQ2 and the Agency’s content tools:
  

  I use Microsoft Access (and Excel, heh!) for some of my writing now for The Agency. With EQII, we had proprietary tools. I first started out writing everything in TextPad or Word, then laboriously copying and pasting everything into the quest editing tools. Eventually, though, I wrote everything directly into the editor itself.

  I will forgo the opportunity to snark on those proprietary tools that must not have had spellcheck and stuff.

• The Legends of Norrath Photo Contest! This is so cool. I badly want to see the entries. Good thing that the contest requires that photos be posted publicly.

Because these things are good to know.

Shadowbane’s combat outcomes were similarly based on ratings, determined by gear and base statistics, not level. But if I remember correctly, attack rating and defense rating only determined chance to hit. Damage wasn’t scaled.

Remember how way, way back in the day, the Shadowbane team was promoting servers with different rulesets? We ended up not doing that until some time after launch, but we had the tools all along — we had cool server config files that allowed us to change all kinds of variables quickly and easily. One of them was an experience multiplier, so we could, say, jack up the experience rate on the Korean servers while leaving the North American servers alone.

If I remember correctly, we first temporarily changed that variable to make up for some server downtime — “sorry the server was down for so long, but here, you can have more experience for a few days!”

Eventually, we started doing occasional weekend events just for fun (and increased server populations and press and drawing people together and all that). I don’t remember when they started, but here’s an announcement of one in 2004.

A while after that, we started doing various events every weekend — repair costs are reduced this weekend, experience is increased next weekend, and so on and so forth.

City of Heroes picked up on this concept and started doing their own special-occasion double experience weekends at some point, but I can’t find a record of when. Here’s one in 2006 and the article phrases it as something special — was it their first?

It’s spread into other NCsoft games too.

World of Warcraft uses the concept for battleground weekends — I suspect they wanted to speed up battleground queues by encouraging players to congregate in a single battleground. Not quite the same thing, but I mention it so you won’t in the comments.

And finally, today, I see that Call of Duty 4 is having their very own double experience weekend on Xbox Live. That’s a long way for that idea to travel.

What are some other examples of holiday weekends, where a single variable is temporarily changed to encourage players to log in? Was Shadowbane really the first to try it?

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.