The Ideal Purge Game

[Hoofhurr]

Playing devil's advocate. Ok so let's say you create a highly valuable object to fight over. What makes the object highly valuable? It seems like the most valuable objects would be those objects which improve your chances of beating your opponents to the next valuable object. But we don't want those in a game because that leads to the advancement model. Barring that, the object would have to have a wow factor that compels people to fight over it.

Let's say you find something that is worth fighting over, doesn't that drive players to organize themselves up to a level at which they are then assured of securing that object over other organizations, either by employing more players or by training their players to employ more complex strategies? How then does a pug have a chance at ever securing that object? The more organized team would have to be absent for the pug to have a chance but then you can't make the object too valuable because how valuable should the object be if you don't have to fight to obtain it?

[Snowreap]

Some would say it's "the ultimate sandbox" and I guess some people like that but I find it to be less than ideal and I think it's a huge part of why EVE has always schlepped around the bottom of the MMO pile.

to put it another way: some people are too stupid or too lazy to come up with their own goals, and need others to set goals for them. the question then becomes, "who should set those goals? the game developer or the players?" Blizzard says the developer should do it. CCP says the players should.

they're both right.

there's no single answer that's right for all players. some players really don't want to come up with goals -- they see it as work, and they want the game to set clear goals for them to pursue, because pursuing goals is fun (or they see it as a waste of time because meaningful e-peen comparisons can't be made when different players are pursuing different goals). other players want to come up with the goals themselves, because that's the fun part -- actually pursuing the goals is an exercise left for less imaginative players.

the biggest problem with player-set goals is that the game needs a good way to hook up the goal-setters with the goal-achievers. in that kind of game, it doesn't work if you have too many chiefs or too many indians -- you need the right balance.

-ken

[Slamz]

to put it another way: some people are too stupid or too lazy to come up with their own goals, and need others to set goals for them. the question then becomes, "who should set those goals? the game developer or the players?" Blizzard says the developer should do it. CCP says the players should.

I'd say it depends on what you want: a game or a gaming platform.

WOW is a game. WOW is like basketball: clearly defined rules and clearly defined objectives. When 10 people meet up in WOW, they already know what to get together and do. WOW is pug-friendly for this reason. We've never met, but we log in beside each other and head in the same direction because we both know what the objective is.

EVE is a gaming platform. EVE is like a parking lot. Maybe you can play basketball, maybe you can play roller hockey or kickball -- there is very little guidance provided and when 10 people meet up in EVE, the first thing you have to do is spend 30 minutes deciding on what to do. EVE is not very pug-friendly because of this. We log in beside each other and head off in different directions because the game has provided no objective.

Playing devil's advocate. Ok so let's say you create a highly valuable object to fight over. What makes the object highly valuable? It seems like the most valuable objects would be those objects which improve your chances of beating your opponents to the next valuable object. But we don't want those in a game because that leads to the advancement model.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that people need well defined objectives in a game. You log in, maybe look at a map and immediately understand what the next objective is.

This objective could be created by putting value onto particular objects but it can also be created by pure artificial manipulation of the environment, like a lattice.

Both WW2O and Planetside (and maybe WAR) are good examples of why "game" > "sandbox". You give 20,000 people a sandbox and they all spread out and do different things and you don't have much of a game at all. You slap down an artificial structure that direct the flow of gameplay towards battling over specific objectives and now you've got a game.

Let's say you find something that is worth fighting over, doesn't that drive players to organize themselves up to a level at which they are then assured of securing that object over other organizations, either by employing more players or by training their players to employ more complex strategies? How then does a pug have a chance at ever securing that object? The more organized team would have to be absent for the pug to have a chance but then you can't make the object too valuable because how valuable should the object be if you don't have to fight to obtain it?

I think Planetside and WW2O offer us the real solution here:
You keep pugs relevant by making objectives so big and widespread that no single organization can dominate it.

Small matchups like 5v5 Arenas or 20v20 battlegrounds are a disaster for pugs because it's really easy to get 5 people to play together a lot, and fairly reasonable to get 20 people together. But the bigger the number, the harder it becomes. There were organized outfits in Planetside that could dominate one battle, but that was one battle out of several on a continent, and one continent of several in play. In the end, Planetside and WW2O were dominated by pug power because the objectives were too big, too spread out and too populated for an organized group to completely dominate. You'd hear about big guilds dominating the battlefields but they were still only a small part of their overall team.


I think there was a study somewhere saying how maximum stable guild size tended to reflect the ability of people to hold any kind of large social group together. There's a point where it just naturally begins to splinter. I think that's what you want in an MMO: objectives that aren't fought over by 5v5 in a small room or 20v20 in a small field, but 500v500 in an area so big your section of it is only a 20th of the whole.

And IMO, that's what an MMO should be.

If it's 20 v 20, it doesn't need to be an MMO at all.

[Hoofhurr]

Ok then to take it one step further you have to decide how wide spread and how plentiful those objectives are or you run into a situation where conflict can easily be avoided to achieve objectives e.g. the fort swapping in WAR. How do you deal with fluctuations in server population relative to map size and number of objectives? It might be super easy to take a base at 3 am on the other side of the planet and nearly impossible during prime time. Or in Eve there are so many valuable resources that conflict is easily avoided and only experienced by choice.

This is something that all open world games struggle with and I've never seen a good solution. I'd advocate for a world that opens up or closes down with the number of people on the server but I've never seen it done. Instancing of zones in Conan I guess but frankly I hated that solution and it's negative effects on community.

I feel like this is really one of the central, unresolved issues of pvp online gaming. I think psychologically people want conflict in their gaming but more so than fighting they want to win. People will avoid conflict in order to feel like they are winning. This is key and a problem imo.

[Slamz]

How do you deal with fluctuations in server population relative to map size and number of objectives?

If it's pure PvP, this seems to take care of itself. What was 200 vs 200 primetime is 20 vs 20 at 4am.

WW2O took things a step further with the way they do logistics and supplies. Maybe you have 5 players defending a city and the enemy is attacking it with 15, but supply-side, you have "400 rifleman" spawns and so do they. So it's basically 400 spawns vs 400 spawns, regardless of how many active players there are. Having more active players is still a nice advantage (it's hard to flank and avoid being flanked when the enemy has more eyeballs than you) but it's not as cut-and-dry as you might otherwise expect 5 vs 15 to be.

Other games (EVE, SWG...er...AOC? SB?) did things to simply make it impossible to attack at certain times. To destroy someone's station in EVE you really have to attack it twice: once to put it into "protection mode", which is basically like a signal of a challenge, and once when the protection mode ends and you can kill it for real.

That's not really my ideal solution, but it does show that game designers can contemplate these situations and come up with reasonable solutions.

I feel like this is really one of the central, unresolved issues of pvp online gaming. I think psychologically people want conflict in their gaming but more so than fighting they want to win. People will avoid conflict in order to feel like they are winning. This is key and a problem imo.

I wouldn't say people will avoid conflict to feel like they're winning.

I'd say people will always take the easiest path to "winning", whatever that constitutes. If it means fighting, they'll fight. If it means not fighting, they'll avoid fights.

When Planetside launched, the best way to gain XP (especially command XP) was to capture bases. The best way to do that was to find undefended ones to take over. Fighting someone over a base would, in the end, give you less XP than just taking an empty base.

The Planetside dev team did some smart stuff, though. They made it so that you got no XP for taking an undefended base and they added the lattice to help channel players into conflicts with each other. That really ramped up the head-to-head fighting. They fixed the problem by making it so that avoiding conflict did NOT make you feel like you were winning.

This also speaks to your fort swapping comment in WAR. WAR launched with exactly the same mistake that WW2O and Planetside launched with, and I expect WAR will eventually arrive at the same solution:
If you make it more rewarding to AVOID conflict than the ENGAGE in conflict, then people will tend to avoid conflict. In effect, the game has created an objective to avoid conflict and players are simply responding to that objective. The solution is to do a re-design of the objectives so that the most rewarding thing to do is to engage in conflict.



In retrospect, Planetside really was an amazing game that has a lot of design elements that really worked and were either amazingly well thought out or just really, really lucky.

Kind of a shame that it sucked as an FPS, though. And that the bases were all the same. And that the global map was so small. And that game design prevented them from ever updating the maps and base layouts...

But it got some fundamental elements exactly right, I think:

* Multiple teams to prevent any 1 team from ever easily dominating
* Battles sized so big that no single "pre-made" could ever dominate.
* Tactical objectives arranged so that no single small space ever turned into a complete clusterfuck (spawn room battles could sometimes turn cluster-fuckish but even there when you saw the hallway was jammed, you just went around and blew up the generator. There was never a need to squash your entire fighting force into one room with the entire enemy fighting force.)
* Objectives designed (eventually) to create conflict rather than support avoiding it

[Vllad]

Playing devil's advocate. Ok so let's say you create a highly valuable object to fight over. What makes the object highly valuable? It seems like the most valuable objects would be those objects which improve your chances of beating your opponents to the next valuable object. But we don't want those in a game because that leads to the advancement model.

You don't want the objectives to be individual advancements. Not if you want balance anyway. Team advancements are where you want your goals set.

In Planetside you gained team bonuses in exp, damage etc based upon who got the most base caps from the day before for example.

In Shattered Galaxies you locked in certain resourse area's based on the previous days military successes.

As long as you make team advancement the key to individual advancement you are good to go.

Shattered Galaxies was a much larger strategic game in scale so if you wanted to take over regional area's in order to use those area's it required dedicated efforts to do so. Once taken over individual accomplisments could be achieved. The battlefront was so large however that the front pushed over months not days and since their were multiple teams you could make progress in some fronts but not others.

The problem with Planetside is while it was fun and mayhem the goals were still tactical and not strategic. Their was no benefit to taking over the map. Planetside was a tactical game with no strategic goals. That is why it couldn't keep players around long term. Even then long term is realative. I played it for a year total.

[Hoofhurr]

The other thing about planet side is that sooner than later your character has access to everything he could possibly want access to. You're basically at end game to begin with which means the tactical game better be very interesting because that's all there is.

[Vllad]

The other thing about planet side is that sooner than later your character has access to everything he could possibly want access to. You're basically at end game to begin with which means the tactical game better be very interesting because that's all there is.

To there credit those last 5 levels were a hell of a grind.


Vllad

[Crice]

If a game needs a single leader to succeed then it is broken. Having leaders should enhance the experience not drive it.

Any game will fail with that need.

Vllad

I agree you need directors or officers in WoW terms that can do the same as the CEO or Guild Leader. It is tough finding, keeping and having them active in my experience but if you have enough then one will make up for the other that is AFK,.