We Can Fix That with Data

Thanks for all the kind comments and emails. My wrist’s recovery isn’t quite on schedule — I was supposed to be able to type by now, but the doctor’s telling me to wait for another freaking month. This has significantly hampered my ability to work, but after a few days learning to target with the keyboard, I’m playing WoW at about 90% efficiency. It helps that I’m a caster druid, so my job is to either “tab to target, hit Moonfire hotkey, hit Insect Swarm hotkey, hit Wrath hotkey a bunch of times, tab to next mob” or “hit f key to target groupmate, hit Lifebloom hotkey, wait … hit Lifebloom hotkey, wait … oh shit, hit Healing Touch hotkey, wait …” About all I ever have to type is the initial “am I healing?” when I join the group.

This may say something about group gameplay and dynamics in WoW — not that I’m complaining. I’m happy I can do something other than watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD.

In “stuff I wish I could comment on further that’s come up in the last few weeks:”

• The discussion on guilds at Will’s is timely, because another one of my recent WoW activities has been shopping for a raiding guild. It’s been an interesting experience, and I plan to rant about it later. See also Kevin’s followup commentary.
• Terra Nova talks PvP balance. I’ve done PvP balance for a long time. I eventually discovered a secret to making changes that feel responsive, rather than change-for-the-sake-of-change or an attempt to jerk players around: wait until the last minute to commit changes. Producers hate it, QA complains, but if you fix a perceived problem and sit on it for two months, nine times out of ten that’s enough time for player ingenuity to solve the problem on their own. Then you post the patch notes and they think you’re an out-of-date idiot, and you are! (Well, regardless, they always think you’re an idiot.) (And assuming that the game mechanics allow for sufficient emergent behavior.) I’ll have lots more to say on this in the future, heh.
• Darius Kazemi’s new metrics middleware company gets off the ground. They have an extremely awesome blog so far. I expect they’ll be an extremely strong competitor to Emergent.
• Holy shit, Rush Limbaugh intelligently defends games. Well, he defends games by way of comparing them to guns, which doesn’t really work on the target anti-game audience, but hey.

The “lead balance designer” of the next Command and Conquer game, Greg Black, has written a nice article about the RTS balance process. It involves manually timing combat with a stopwatch!

In other RTS balancing news, Blizzard’s looking for an RTS balance designer.

Until I saw these two things, I wasn’t actually aware that “balance designer” was a valid title anywhere outside of the credits for Shadowbane’s second expansion, wherein I was named as such. Heh.

The Blizzard job ad is also interesting in that it asks the applicant:

What games are you currently playing?
Which competitive online games have you played?
What is your win/loss record in your “Top 3″ favorite competitive games?

Whatever. You don’t need to be personally good at games to be good at balance. Balance is an art, not a science. It’s about feel and intuition. Play experience is vital, but I don’t see where personal kick assery has a role.

It’s entirely possible that I’m just saying this because I’m terrible at RTS games.

In the Slashdot thread for the aforementioned Gamasutra statistics articles, somebody pointed out Dystopia, a Half-Life 2 mod that used beta test metrics to balance weapon DPS. There’s an audio interview on the game’s website; I listened to a bit of it and I’m still intensely curious as to how they corrected for player skill bias in accuracy.

This is the first public word I’ve seen on FPS weapon balancing with metrics.

There’s very little out there on FPS balancing in general. Here’s a conversational article at Unreal Wiki, where the writers argue that math doesn’t really have a place in it. Maybe that’s why no one talks about methodology. When you say “I made some shit up and iterated until it felt right,” people tend to think that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Check out Tyler Sigman’s series on MATH AND YOU at Gamasutra.

• Part 1: Probability for Game Designers
• Part 2: Statistics for Game Designers
• Part 3, “which should hit Gamasutra shelves around 2010,” will be called “Shaping Game Mechanics with Probability and Statistics”

Great stuff.

It’s interesting to see a discussion of metrics in console titles, since I wasn’t aware that there was a whole lot going on. (To be fair, I’m not aware that there’s a whole lot going on outside of a handful of MMO companies either.)

Tyler also talks about “sportscaster errors.” I’d just like to point out that I’ve had a link to Fire Joe Morgan on the sidebar for forever.

Update in the afternoon: there are comments at Slashdot, where people seem to have a hard time believing that “the stats guy” isn’t really a common part of most design teams.