I talked a bit before about a different kind of MMO system, with only two roles: Frontline and Flanking. Actual abilities while in these roles would vary based on player choices, but the core concept revolves around the idea of a front-and-center player and up to two flanking players, who aren’t in the direct line of fire.

A structure like this would have a number of ramifications on encounter design and group content. I’ll split things up by working my way up in encounter size.

Solo Encounters

A player playing solo is going to still have a Frontline and a Flanking setup, and is mostly going to be using these to change up their tactics mid-combat. The enemy is going to be attacking them no matter which they’re using, so it’ll be more akin to stances than role-swapping. There’s a lot of possibility here for creative solo builds, though it’ll be instantly familiar to a lot of players because it’ll look like the games where you can weapon-swap easily, like Guild Wars 2, WoW’s stance-swapping, and similar.

Design of solo encounters isn’t going to change much, although the variance in how effective players are at fighting enemies on their own should even out a bit. What’s most likely is that players will build a particular ‘stance’ to be their primary, and then put utility and other functions on the secondary, to fill in gaps and reduce downtime.

Duo and Trio Encounters

Players playing in pairs will start to see the system take shape (yes, that sentence was fun to write). It’s at this point that the Switch mechanic will enter play, and in theory combo chains can start rolling, giving two players large benefits for playing together as soon as they have a duo. Mostly, it won’t require anyone to change their solo builds much, although some players may set up Switch combos and start to fall into preferred roles at this point.

With a third person added into the mix, we’ll start to see group dynamics form. There may be two players who switch frequently, and a third who spends most of their time flanking and supporting, or all three players may switch frequently. It’d be important to playtest various ways of Switching in a trio, whether a player calls a specific other player to Switch or if they simply call for a Switch and the first player to respond is the one who switches. Normally I’d be against that kind of imprecise design, but with a small number of players it can stay organized pretty easily.

‘Standard’ Groups (4-9 players)

At this size group, we’re looking at dungeons, the kind of everyday delves that you get into with a group, do some exploring, fight a few bosses, collect loot. For standard dungeons, I would tune them for 6 or so players, but allow players to enter with as few as 4 or as many as 9 players. Keep the rewards static, but split them among the party, so the fewer players you bring, the more rewarding the dungeon is for each individual.

In this sort of setup, you’re looking at 2-3 trios, and I think the trio would be the basic group unit of the game, because that’s where the Switch mechanic works best. As a result, encounters are going to need to think more about supporting multiple groups and splitting groups up, with fewer single large bosses and more “controlled chaos” fights. I generally think this will be fine, especially because it allows us to introduce tank-swapping mechanics (in which a boss will overwhelm a single tank, so two or more tanks take turns, usually a much more advanced skill) at a very early stage.

Groups will quickly learn to work together in both their trios and in the party as a whole, which makes the overall transition to larger-sized groups a lot smoother and more natural.

‘Large’ Groups (12-24 players)

This size of group fits solidly in the “raid” encounter size, and it’s here where the difficulty comes in, because these fights are going to need to scale to the player number for them to make any sense. One possibility here is to have a “vanguard” group that gets further bonuses based on the players’ choices and can Switch with other whole groups, a sort of second-tier advanced mechanic that sets one team as the ‘heroes’ of the encounter until swapping out for another group.

There’s a certain amount of appeal to this structure, just because it adds an extra layer of strategy to fights based around juggling Vanguard bonuses, but also because it creates a situation in which different groups can play to different strengths. A group with a very strong core group can focus skilled members in one group and have them be the Vanguard, whereas a group where skill is spread out a lot more might perform Vanguard Switches more often, spreading the punishment (and heroism!) around. A particularly skilled and coordinated group might set up a strong combo, in which they perform rotating Switches in their group to chain combos, while also Vanguard Switching to the next group for them to continue the chain, until everyone in the entire raid has participated.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have the Vanguard buff scale based on the number of group members, though I wouldn’t make that the only scaling mechanic for encounters.

Encounter Design

One of the things that would go away fairly quickly is the idea of the basic tank-and-spank fight, where one tank holds a boss in place while a healer keeps them alive and the rest of the party burns it down. When even a ‘basic’ group is likely to have two tanks, there’s going to need to be a lot more variety in encounter design.

I’d likely move away from single large bosses as the exclusive “major” encounters in a dungeon, and would quite likely change the way dungeons worked in general. With scaling in place, I’d consider freezing most resource regeneration, so players would need to be much more careful about how they played– being less wanton with their health and more careful about throwing around big spells. With that kind of design, every encounter becomes interesting, because it stops being about blowing everything to win, then recovering, then moving on– efficiency of combat becomes a significant factor. A dungeon might have a number of rest points, acting as checkpoints and letting players restore resources once per run, but keeping even minor encounters relevant.

It would also naturally make it valuable to bring more players into a dungeon, to swap in as resources dwindled. A smaller party might get more rewards, but would be much less likely to be able to complete the dungeon. It would also encourage Switching, particularly if Switching could be used to restore some resources. This would conflict with the idea of having resource regeneration be a core boost to slot, but could be used as a “switching restores more”. If Switch was only usable in combat, with the first party member to gain aggro being the default Frontline player, it would prevent spamming Switch out of combat to restore skills, but potentially open up interesting group dynamics wherein combat is prolonged as a resource faucet.

I left WoW in late spring of 2007, burned out from the stress of trying to hold together a fragmenting group. A lot of the raid had left to join other friends on other servers for the expansion, and others were taking the expansion slow. Some of the core group had pushed quickly to the new level cap and were raring to get raids in, causing tension. They wanted deadlines set for people to hit max level, something I staunchly opposed. When it became clear I wouldn’t push people faster than they wanted to go, most of the gung-ho raiders left.

What remained was disorganized and, in many cases, bitter from the infighting that had characterized the last few months of raids pre-expansion and the post-expansion disagreements. The heart and soul of the group was gone, so I did what I could to make sure people would land on their feet elsewhere and, burned out myself, moved on.

A few months later, I was pulled back into WoW by a new group of friends. I’d moved across the country for my job and while they’d all played WoW before, they’d never raided and in some cases had never reached max level. It seemed like a nice way to relax, and I missed the game, so I came back, fully expecting that I could avoid my old haunts. This was easier, because we rerolled on the opposite faction, so I had a lot of content I’d never seen and could leisurely play through.

Old habits die hard. Without even trying, I was experimenting and optimizing, and had a newly max-level character in appreciable gear in a couple of months. I’d passed by people who had 60-level head starts on me and gotten the attention of the leader of the guild I was in, who’d already heard stories about me and saw me as a way to get to see top-end raid content that he’d never seen before.

It’s worth noting at this point that the guild’s leader was, to put it politely, incompetent. Capricious and thoughtless, he would demand that the guild come together to do some activity or another, most of which he wanted to brand with his own ‘creative’ twist. It wasn’t enough simply to run a dungeon, we would run it without a tank, or without DPS, “for an element of fun”. Prior to my joining, these efforts were doomed to failure– because I was geared and familiar with playing the game at high levels, I could often push through these nonsense restrictions, which only fueled more.

It got bad enough that several of us created our own channel to get away from the guild leader, calling it “element of fun” as a jab at his scattered whims. It was through this back-channel communication line that we started having fun with the game again, free to talk and have fun without worrying about the constant reactions of the guild leader, who was insecure enough to feel threatened whenever anyone had an idea other than him. It was here that we started talking about raiding again, and where I started building a new team.

I’d had some friends who I’d left behind when I played WoW previously, particularly from college, who I’d kept in touch with but had never played with. I rolled a new character, different from my rogue, and offered to level up with them, and we could all be a group. None of them had formed any particular ties to where they were before, and so were happy to level up something new and different.

We also pulled in people from elsewhere on the server that we’d met, slowly forming a core. A few of my former LNR raiding buddies had left and missed having contact, so I pulled them in as well. We had a motley crew of players of vastly differing skill levels, but I had a good handle on how to run a group, and the 10 or so of us were a lot easier to manage than the 80 or so I’d been managing before.

The biggest issue I had was timidity. Most of these players had never played the game at a high tier before, so there was a tendency to wait, heal up to full, wait for full mana, ask three or four times if everyone was ready, and so on before a pull would happen. It was polite and thoughtful, which I appreciated, but it wasn’t conducive to exciting runs or holding everyone’s attention. A dungeon run that could be completed in 25 minutes could take more than an hour, and people who could only be on for 30-45 minutes were twitchy about committing to something that might take that long.

I gently encouraged faster pulling, but it didn’t take. I had flashbacks to old LNR days, when a hunter would pull mobs well before people were ready and we’d all come together once danger was imminent. I had a pack of throwing knives on my rogue, and could easily pull the next pack and force the tanks and healers to react lest we all die. Stealing a comment from our old raiding days, I’d throw a knife at some nearby idle enemies, declare “hlep!” as they attacked, and see how the group handled it.

As it turned out, the group figured it out pretty damn quick, and we went from slow progress to aggressive powerpulling in short order. Our tanks would start pulling on their own, just to stop me from creating chaos, and one of our healers started being able to heal through truly ridiculous situations largely, I think, from not realizing that he shouldn’t have been able to do so. I’d started with a group of timid, inexperienced players and quickly had a successful crew. We never raided in Burning Crusade, but by the time Wrath hit, we were a well-organized, high-functioning group, working our way through all of the content in Wrath from start to finish, very close to keeping pace with content releases.

This group has stuck with me for more than half a decade at this point, and while the precise makeup of the group has changed a bit over time, it’s been these folks that have jumped games with me for years. Even when we’re not playing the same games, we’re in communication and we’re talking about what we like and don’t like. It’s this group that fumbled our way through Karazhan once or twice and it’s this group that will be working at and taking down Turn 9 this weekend.

I could tell more MMO stories, but they’d all center around this group, so this is about the point at which I leave off on the game progression. Since they’re probably reading this: Thanks for sticking around, y’all. It’s been awesome, and I wouldn’t be looking forward to Heavensward (and every other game we play) anywhere near as much were it not for this crew.

Probably a few WoW posts this week, as old MMO memories continue.

Late Night Raiders (LNR for short) hummed along for about two years, from not long after launch to slightly after the release of the first expansion. It taught me a lot about large-scale organization and how to manage teams, and its eventual implosion only added to that. It was also one of the hardest decisions I had to make.

Organizationally, LNR broke down fairly neatly. A raid group at the time was comprised of 40 members, spread across 8 classes. In the ideal case, this meant five players of each class filled a raid. Perfect attendance across 40 people was laughably impossible, so we drew from a fairly significant pool of people for our raid. At any given time, LNR had about 20-25 members with very high (80%+) attendance, and so on any given night we were “filling” the last 15-20 members from the pool. This pool, at the peak of LNR, was somewhere in the range of 100 people, give or take a few.

LNR was further subdivided by class. Each class had a separate channel that was used for that class’ organization, and which usually wound up fostering unique subcultures for each class. This also helped us disseminate information by class, rather than having long discussions across raid chat about specific class tasks, most of which weren’t relevant to anyone listening. As a result, a standard LNR boss fight explanation would start with a very basic and quick overview of the fight, and discussion of the details would happen through class channels. This had the secondary benefit of allowing class groups to set up larger-scale decisions (like attendance and loot distribution) amongst themselves– some classes had extremely well planned structures for deciding who would attend a given raid and who would get specific pieces of loot, sometimes worked out months in advance.

The game also allowed filtering through party chat, as the game’s raid structure broke people out into 8 groups of 5. These channels were used for any cross-disciplinary discussion, and we would frequently rearrange groups to fulfill particular strategic needs.

Owing to people having fairly regular habits, we had a very broad categorization of people, though it was never fully codified. We had people who were reliable with high performance, who could be relied on to show up for the vast majority of raid nights, perform well at all of them, and on whom we could rely for the overall success of the raid. There were people who had high performance and who could often make raid nights, but weren’t around quite often enough to be relied upon. Then there were people who were either very reliable but had mediocre or unreliable performance or who had excellent performance but were around rarely. Finally, there was a pool of people whose performance was unreliable and who were relatively rarely around, or who had not run with the group often.

At first, we prioritized based on performance and reliability, always inviting those players first and working our way down the list. It was a functional but ultimately problematic setup; people who were performant but didn’t often get invites would look for other groups, leaving us with a strong core that could do very well when all of our best players were around at once, but that would deteriorate quickly if a few key people were missing or if we needed a lot of stand-ins. This led to one of the major recurring issues that LNR had to deal with: morale.

Raid structure in WoW, as in most MMOs since, has focused around a group working their way through a dungeon, learning and ultimately defeating various boss encounters. Each boss encounter would then be practiced until it could reliably be defeated and loot claimed from it, called “farm” status. A dungeon might continue to be worth running for months after the last boss of it was defeated, thanks to the slow trickle of loot, so by the time a group was fully finished with a dungeon, everything within it would solidly be on “farm” status, in theory. In LNR, due to the high variability in our team, we often found ourselves backsliding, particularly on difficult encounters. Too many stand-ins or too few key players and a boss that had been farmed the previous week was suddenly unbeatable, either due to a deficit in power, performance, or simply a lack of teamwork.

About a year into LNR’s life, I suggested we restructure a few key raid constructs, having watched the above play out on multiple occasions, and the strife and finger-pointing it would inevitably cause. I suggested that we mandate class channels for all classes and assign class or role leads to run those groups. Instead of 5 key players and 7-8 potential stand-ins, as we’d been doing before, each class would have 7-8 key players and a smaller number (2-3) of stand-ins. At the time, I’d already been testing the concept with my own class, and we’d not only set up an amiable loot system, cutting arguments over rewards out almost entirely, but we had a more-than-regular core of strong rogues, and we determined on our own who would get to attend any given raid night, in advance. Sitting out every third or fourth night but knowing you were guaranteed a slot otherwise was significantly better than waiting weeks or months in the hopes that you might get a slot, then knowing you were too far behind and too disconnected from the group’s teamwork to contribute as effectively as you otherwise might– which would lead to you getting invited less frequently.

It wasn’t a popular decision, because at the time LNR had a very bloated group of potential players. Many knew they wouldn’t be able to get into the ‘core’ rotation and rejected the suggestion as unfairly exclusive and too cliquish. It was both cliquish and exclusive, but I’d seen the same arguments put forth when the rogue team had made the same transition  few months prior, and while we did lose a number of potential players, we also significantly improved our team’s reliability and performance, as everyone was getting time in with the group to both gear up, get more skilled, and get used to working with the raid.

The jump in LNR’s performance was visible within a few weeks. We went from being stuck on a particular halfway-mark boss to blasting through the entire rest of that dungeon in less than two months, propelling ourselves from a largely unknown raid group to competing for top three on the server. We were one of the very few groups capable of taking on the highest-tier content in the game at the time, and morale, at least as it regarded performance, was way up.

The big problem we ran into after that was one I place squarely on the game design side. In WoW, many pieces of gear were divided up into “sets”, and wearing more pieces of a set gave you often significant bonuses. Unfortunately, these sets were divided up in an extremely unhelpful way. The final boss of the first raid dungeon had one piece of the set, an unrelated solo boss elsewhere had another piece, and the rest of the pieces were available in the second raid dungeon. While inconvenient, once we had things properly farmed, we could blast through the first raid dungeon and the solo boss in about 3 hours, but this required the entire raid to be on their toes the whole time and offered only two bosses’ worth of relevant rewards. That same 3 hours could be spent on nearly ten times as much in the way of relevant rewards elsewhere, making the time spent hoping for two rare drops feel much less worthwhile. This got worse when the third raid dungeon was released, which offered a lot of difficulty in exchange for relatively little in the way of appealing rewards… except for a certain subset of players who couldn’t get relevant gear from anywhere else, thanks to poor itemization. Finally, where things began to break down, a fourth raid dungeon was released that offered vastly superior rewards for everyone except those people who were still trying to complete their sets (from the FIRST dungeon) and those who couldn’t get relevant gear from anywhere except the third dungeon.

All of this led to a logistical nightmare as far as deciding where we were going to go on a given night. There simply weren’t enough raiding hours in a week to hit all of the possible goals. Initially, we tried to message out beforehand where we would be going, but we discovered sharp dropoffs in attendance from people who had little or nothing to gain from going to those places. We wound up having to avoid communicating where we were planning on going until moments before the raid started, which slowed down our startup time but kept raids full, though it didn’t cut down on grumbling when we went somewhere people didn’t want to go– and there was no way to keep everyone happy.

The fourth raid dungeon was problematic in its own way as well. While appealing to everyone and rewarding enough to the players who preferred raid dungeon 3 to be worthwhile for them, it was punishing difficult and extremely frustrating. Very difficult mechanics had to be practiced, and to save time and everyone’s repair bills, we started having smaller teams practice to get used to the mechanics without sacrificing the whole raid to failures. Among the rogues group, who were largely unnecessary for a lot of this practice, we’d all download a poker addon and play poker while sitting around. Progress in that dungeon was slow, and while each victory was extremely satisfying and caused a surge of excitement, they were few and far between for a while.

The beginning of the end was the ramp-up for the game’s first expansion. We expected that the gear we were working very hard for would be outdated almost immediately in the expansion (while not true in our case, it was for a majority of players), and it became a bit of a question as to why we were bothering beating our heads against this content. People wanted to finish their goals before the expansion dropped, and everyone had different goals. Furthermore, the expansion announced that raid groups would be changing sizes, from 40 members to 25 members. This became a brutal problem for LNR– our reorganization had left us with enough players to reliably run a 40-person raid, but not enough to reliably run two 25-person raids, and there was immediate bickering over who would be part of the “A” team and who would be relegated to the “B” team.

By the time the expansion had hit, keeping the raid together had become extremely stressful, to the point where the raid’s primary leadership was fragmenting. The raid’s founder and primary leader needed a break, and passed raid leadership to me. I kept the raid going for as long as I could, but at the time I was dealing with my final year of college and couldn’t devote enough time to the group. Furthermore, some of the group had already pushed extremely hard to clear through the expansion and start raiding, leaving most of the rest of the group behind and quickly becoming exclusive, forming their own group and breaking off from the main raid. Unable to reconcile the work required with the other demands on my time and feeling extremely stressed and burned out from the previous few months, I also withdrew from LNR and left the game. My understanding is that the group fell apart to infighting shortly thereafter.

I took a short hiatus from WoW and focused more on my local, physical friends, many of whom I’d gotten into the game and would be leaving when I graduated college. I wanted to keep in touch with them, and while I’d sworn I wasn’t going to lead another raid group, I ultimately came back to it later, rebuilding a team on my own terms.

This week continues with more MMO stories, but I want to take a break to talk a bit about mechanics and teamwork, why they’re important, and what the design space for that can look like.

In a majority of MMOs, there is the “holy trinity” of tanks, heals, and DPS. It’s a construct that a goodly number of people are fervently opposed to (often claiming it’s little different from the mechanics in old MUDs, as if age were a salient point against a functional system) but the vast majority of players have bought into and are more than happy to operate in. The way the construct works is as follows: a significant number of enemies in the game cannot be defeated by a single, solo player. Groups of players are thus required to bring down these (groups of) enemies. To create synergy and allow groups of players to be more effective than a set of individual players all standing near one another, games generally offer “classes” or otherwise sort players into particular roles in the party. Tanks are resilient and are good at both holding the attention of enemies and minimizing the effect of the enemies’ attacks. While enemies are thus occupied, DPS (short for damage-per-second) role players do the job of killing the enemy, reducing its health at a rather more significant rate than the tank can. Healers, for their part, primarily keep tanks alive in the face of the enemy’s incoming damage and secondarily keep the rest of the party alive if there’s any incidental damage (there is).

As a result, a party is vastly more effective when it contains the right balance of roles. This balance is determined almost immediately as players start to figure out how the game works, and in some cases is proscribed directly by the game itself, not allowing parties to form unless they have the requisite types of players. Herein lies the crux of the argument against the mechanic– rigid party structures don’t allow players to get creative with their strategies, and tend to lock players into a certain playstyle. I’m ignoring, for the time being, the argument that MMOs should allow solo players to experience whatever game content they want, because I feel like it’s fundamentally invalid for the same reason that not every singleplayer game needs must include a multiplayer component.

That having been said, there’s no real reason the “trinity” construct needs to be the sole mechanic governing MMO parties, other than it’s very well established and easily recognizable and usable by players. It does, however, bring along with it a number of important benefits that are worth paying attention to if we want to explore that design space:

–A group is greater than the sum of its parts. In games that allow more freeform roles or allow players to switch roles easily, there’s little incentive to group and when groups do form, it’s mostly groups of individuals fighting in the same place, rather than a team working together.

–Having well-defined roles helps communication between players and goes a long way towards setting expectations. Classes double down on this, allowing players to explicitly know both their own capabilities and those of their team. It ALSO allows players to have a certain level of expectation in terms of enemy behavior, so that fights can be overcome and controlled with skill rather than devolving into every-player-for-themselves chaos.

–Role-based systems allow for much more robust enemies with significantly more depth and strategic/tactical complexity. This is because they allow players to subdivide the enemy’s attacks and mechanics among the group, each handling different parts of the encounter and allowing more parts to form.

–Because of the first and third points, enemies can be more powerful and more intense, demanding a higher tier of skill from players because the capabilities of a given group of players at a given level is better known and can be planned for when designing encounters.

Any system that doesn’t contain these core concepts is going to have a lower ceiling than a system that does. Any system we create that doesn’t use classes (or whose classes don’t correspond with particular roles) needs to address these concepts, or it’s going to offer a subpar grouping experience. There are, however, a few things that the role-based system DOESN’T provide that are worth looking into as a way of improving the construct:

–Player variety. Players who choose a role are often stuck in that role with no way of diversifying their play experience, which may cause them to get bored quickly. A high amount of hybridization within class options has a tendency to exponentially increase the number of balance issues in the game.

–Scalability. In role-based MMOs, party sizes are fixed, and are either notably suboptimal at smaller sizes than “recommended” or simply unable to bring more players than “recommended”. This puts a hard numerical barrier on players playing with their friends which is antithetical to the MMO concept.

These aren’t easy problems to solve, and there aren’t very many successful models that take them into account. I’ve been watching a few other games and other teamwork inspirations (The Avengers, Sword Art Online, Persona as examples), however, and there are some interesting things we can take away from that in trying to break the MMO paradigm without sacrificing the experience.

First, a great many fighting games use a “tag out” mechanic. There’s a primary fighter and at certain points on command, they can tag out with another, secondary fighter who takes center stage. Sword Art Online’s fictional game world is clearly inspired by the same sort of concept. It’s not well defined, but frequently parties of players call for a “Switch”, either to enable a powerful attack or to get a breather from front-line fighting. It’s a neat concept, and one we can do some interesting things with. At the very least, it allows players to have two roles in combat that they switch between; something front-line and something supportive. We also see this sort of thing in the Avengers movies, as various characters tag out and swap roles to let, say, Captain America’s shield defense hold the line when Iron Man’s all-out offense doesn’t do the trick, and vice-versa.

We can start to construct some mechanics from here. Let’s say we have a Switch mechanic, which puts one player directly in front of an enemy and a second player off to the side, either flanking or out of harm’s way. These players can Switch, swapping positions in the fight and changing tactics, or simply recharging. There are some immediately interesting possibilities here. A pair of players might both go for defensive styles, Switching to give each other breathing room, wearing powerful enemies down. A different pair of players might go for all-out offense, Switching to set up devastating attack chains, defeating enemies quickly and efficiently. Yet another pair of players might focus on supporting one another, with the front-line player healing themselves while the secondary weaves in debilitating effects and increases the potency of the front-line player. Any of these concepts can be blended, allowing a very wide set of tactics that are still relatively effective. A flat set of game-wide effects for being the front-line or flanking player would help cement this system.

As an example, a player may be able to pick a certain set of buffs to gain while in each role, standardized across players. Say we have “reduced incoming damage”, “increased ability potency”, “faster resource regeneration”, “faster skill/spell speed”, “shortened cooldown rate”, “increased mobility” and “increased enemy attention (threat)”. Players then split these among front-line and flanking bonuses, and may even map different abilities to each. With a limit set on how many bonuses can be set at once, players are then made to choose what they value.

You can create specific roles if desired without altering player fantasy– one player who favors heavy armor and a sword+shield might have a “reduced incoming damage”+”increased threat”+”faster resource regeneration” front-line build, allowing them to be up in enemy faces longer. Another character might take “reduced incoming damage”+”shortened cooldown rate”+”increased ability potency” in their flanking build, allowing them to stay right beside the first character with their own sword and shield and stay in the enemy’s face, creating a tanking duo team. Similarly, those players might focus on something more standard– “reduced incoming damage”+”increased threat”+”faster skill/spell speed” in the front-line builds and “increased ability potency”+”shortened cooldowns”+”faster resource regeneration” in the flanking builds, allowing them to use Switch to continually switch off.

I can only imagine the kind of person who would focus on tanking at all times forever.

With more than two people in a group, builds get more interesting. Another pair of players might join with the first pair, creating a symbiotic duo that meshes with the original pair. It could also be possible to form trios, where two people are in a flanking role (possibly/likely doing different things) while one is in the front-line role. When Switch is called, either player could then switch in, either creating longer potential Switch chains or allowing a player with a particularly potent flanking build to remain flanking for a longer period of time while the other two party members focus on Switching. It creates a space for players who want to focus on doing a single thing and doing it extremely well without breaking the construct.

Any given party can be broken down into duos or triads, allowing parties to scale up organically, possibly even rearranging the duos/triads in between encounters. Using Switch as a combo function (as in some fighting games) would also allow the duos and triads to use the mechanic offensively rather than defensively, making it a versatile mechanic that still allows for a wide variety of options.

Note here that this mechanic, as designed, does away with classes and gives players a lot of freedom while retaining the concept of roles. While these roles are very fluid, they still exist, giving us the benefits of role-based systems without the rigid structure.

More possibilities with this sort of thing later– how it might affect encounter design, large-group battles, etc.

In 2004, for the launch of World of Warcraft, I was in college, enjoying the benefits of a lightning-fast internet connection. When WoW came along, I was burned out of MMOs, having had a string of intense experiences paired with my classwork. I wanted something light and casual, and while everyone was talking about how awesome WoW looked, I was in the camp deriding its cartoony graphics and lack of player-controlled features– I’d just come from games where I could build entire cities, and the idea of “questing” to level up brought back memories of Everquest’s somewhat laughable chat-to-NPCs system.

I got into WoW’s beta and immediately fell into my old tricks, because I knew it was ephemeral and would get wiped. I rolled on a PvP server, burned through levels, and became immediately disappointed with the lack of PvP features. I could fight and kill other players, but there didn’t seem to be much of a point other than bragging rights. It was fun for a little while, because I played a class (warlock) that, in beta, was an unstoppable PvP machine and could feasibly take on parties of players by themselves, but outside of the fun of getting into fights I shouldn’t be able to win and coming out on top, there wasn’t a lot going on for someone who’d just come from multiple PvP games. I decided this wasn’t going to be a game to test my skill in, but it had some very cool stories so it would make for a good roleplaying game.

Come the game’s actual launch, I jumped in very casually, testing out a few characters I thought might be fun to play before settling on one, the rogue that a lot of people are familiar with. I started up a small but close roleplaying guild (themed around my old PvP class choice from Shadowbane), would write and play out stories with the group and with other people I met, and mostly had a leisurely route up to max level. As I got close to the level cap, my old instincts kicked in because I had a guildmate who was already max level and wanted more people to group with. I burned through the last 10 levels and immediately started running dungeons. It quickly became apparent that this was the skill focus I’d been looking for, and I started making a name for myself as a group organizer, putting dungeon parties together and running the groups.

I spent enough time in those dungeons that I was able to pick up rare gear– I never got the pieces I *actually* wanted, but I picked up things that were just as good and that forced me to look at stats in the game differently, which would give me an edge later on.

Flash forward a few months. The rest of my guild and friends had caught up to the level cap and we’d fallen into a pattern of running things together. We were in pretty good gear and had gotten used to working with one another, so when we saw an open invitation in a major city’s general chat for a raid team, we signed up. We kept chatting in our little group, since we suspected that it was going to be a tragic failure (we’d had enough bad pick-up group experiences that we were pretty jaded about players we didn’t personally know), but we jumped into this raid as a full group and rapidly all died… to the first pull. For an hour or so, before enough people had dropped that the group disbanded.

We had our laughs and called it a night, but when the call came out again for a probably-doomed run, we laughed again and jumped in. The cost of repairs was worth the laughs, and we weren’t doing anything else.

Within a couple of weeks, we’d stopped dying to the first set of monsters in the raid and had started (slowly) moving forward. Success begat stability, and people hung around because maybe this was going somewhere. We got to know regulars, individuals who’d joined the group. We were slightly more outspoken than others, because we had our own little group as a support structure. We became anchors in the group very quickly.

I fell into old patterns, analyzing the groups and making quiet suggestions to the person in charge. Raiding in WoW was like a mix of raiding in EQ and keep sieges in DAoC, so I had some idea of what I was talking about and my suggestions were successful enough that they started getting listened to more. I also got to know more of the people in the group, and started adjusting my suggestions to fit.

Our raid was a late-night group, well past the usual primetime hours, which meant we had a lot of west coast players and Australians in our group, complete with lag issues. This healer isn’t necessarily as strong as that other healer, but has faster reaction times. This tank is geared really well but is bad at stance dancing. This DPS is really competent but has an ego, this other one could be just as good with a bit of encouragement, without the ego problems. These people are totally awake and functional at 1AM and are raring to keep going; these other people aren’t. I took all of these observations in from my position as a participant but not a leader and passed them onto the group’s leader.

never got that 200g.

I quickly became the “personnel manager” for the raid, and started getting pulled into “officer” conversations, until I had an important say in a lot of various things. The group’s leader was extremely organized and very structured, but hated confrontation and had a hard time dealing with people whose personalities he liked but who weren’t performing well. Filling a need, I wound up being the person who’d talk to people behind the scenes and make sure they were okay, and help them get up to snuff if needed. I wound up learning a lot of other class’ mechanics than my own to help with this, and it gave me an edge in working out strategies.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the need to coordinate and motivate people without any tangible, reliable reward structure was a non-trivial problem. The only thing anyone was assured of in a given night’s raiding was a potentially fun time and an increasingly-expensive repair bill. Really exciting loot was a possibility, but a given boss might drop one or two items, and a raid had 40 people. Even assuming a full clear of the first raid (which took us months to accomplish), that’s 10-15 drops total per week split among a group of 40 people, and that’s the ideal case where there’s no repeated drops that no one needs (very rare). Keeping people motivated in that kind of environment was my job, and I took to it because it needed to be done.

Most of my strategy for this revolved around being personable and cheerful. I knew that pushing people too hard would drive them away; there wasn’t much tangible motivation to be had, and while someone could slack off and not be noticed, if too many people were doing it we’d fail, which often happened. I was one of the first to download and install performance-tracking addons, running them behind the scenes so I could check on people. In one particularly notable case, I had another raid member set as my focus target so I could watch their resource bar. Every attack in WoW consumed some of a given resource, so watching resource bars could often be an indicator of performance and attention. In this case, I would watch the resource bar dip slightly at the start of a fight, refill, and never move again in the next 5-10 minutes of combat– a clear indicator that the person was doing next to nothing.

When I brought this up to that player privately, I got some apparently-genuine contrition and a marked performance improvement the next night, followed by an identical dropoff the night after that. It became apparent to me that this person was only going to put work in if they were directly being watched, and with 40 people to monitor, they weren’t worth the energy. I slowly upped the stakes. I’d spoken to them privately and that proved to be ineffective. I suggested replacing them to the group’s leader, who was averse to the idea of booting anyone. They were clearly holding us back, but I was limited in my tools to deal with them. I took a slightly different tack, and called them out in the raid, while they were slacking off. There had been an ongoing chat conversation that the underperforming player had been a part of while not actually participating in combat, and I called them out for spending time chatting rather than actually helping us.

The defensive denial response was immediate, which I’d suspected would be the case. Being called out directly was a lot different from being spoken to privately, and the player in question hoped to trade on their popularity with the group to make up for poor performance. I knew it was likely to escalate quickly, so I immediately followed up with collected stats– the player’s entire damage-output contribution to the raid for the night amounted to less than one of our healers, who had thrown in a handful of damage spells between keeping people alive.

The raid leader was angry with me for turning it into a confrontation, but I stood by the fact that I’d done everything I could to improve performance short of that, and that the direct approach had become necessary. In what I think was intended to be an implicit punishment, I was made to find that player’s replacement– if I was going to make us kick people from the group, I’d be responsible for recruiting as well.

I already had someone in mind. By the next raid, I’d found someone who I’d already vetted at some length and who I knew could perform. His gear was significantly behind the old player’s gear, because the old player had soaked up a lot of drops while not contributing. Despite this, his performance was instantly better than the person he’d replaced, and it was clear he was really *trying*, because he could see immediately that he was behind the curve. The same stat tracking I’d used to indict the previous player was used to praise the new player, and I discovered a secondary benefit.

In kicking an underperforming player, a number of other people who’d been less invested suddenly became moreso, and this was amplified when a new, undergeared player started quickly outperforming some of the group who’d been there for a while previously and had significantly better gear. Within a few nights of kicking and replacing an underperforming player, three things happened: First, the overall performance of the group shot up, and we started winning where we previously weren’t. Second, the morale of the group improved, as did confidence in its leadership– it became clear that we were committed to the group’s success and willing to make even severe changes if needed, and it put everyone on the same page as far as the group’s goals. Third, a number of people started coming to me to ask for help in improving; many weren’t very good, but wanted to become better for the sake of the team.

It was the first time I’d been directly involved in managing people on an individual level. I’d worked with groups and directed big-picture strategies, but actually getting into specifics with individual people was a very different experience. I grew to appreciate the people who genuinely wanted to try and improve, versus those who were already skilled but weren’t inclined to listen to directions. When vetting potential new recruits, I had a fairly simple ethos: I’d rather bring in someone with a good attitude who can improve and learn than someone who already has the skills but doesn’t have a good attitude about it. We turned down many high-performing candidates because they had clear issues with ego, excessive demands, or other attitude problems, and brought in a goodly number of people who blossomed as part of the team.

More MMO stories next week, probably. It turns out I can’t tell all of my stories in a week.

I left off yesterday with my taste of serious, I’m-a-superior-player PvP, and a foray into shady dealings. I left Dark Age of Camelot when I logged in as one of my spies and saw the effects I’d wrought. The players in my faction didn’t suspect I was a spy, but one of the others did, and chat was laced with misinformation and slander. Apparently some players had started griefing their own faction by delivering false “scouting reports” that led raiding parties right into traps. They were reasonably high-level players, which to me made the betrayals make even less sense.

It bothered me to see these players resorting to infighting and disorganization even given their relative disadvantage, and I wound up talking to one of them at some point as my spy, commenting that I knew some directions he’d given a few days ago had been a trap and asking him why he did it. His answer was blunt: “We can’t win, they’re spying on us and know our moves ahead of time, so it’s funny to me to watch people eagerly run into traps. The other factions own this server, we’re just bait.” I’d taken some pride in my duplicity before that, but it evaporated after talking to him. I retired my spies, but the damage was done. I’d helped set up too strong a stranglehold for the faction to make a comeback– their own heroes had turned on them, and it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I quit DAoC shortly thereafter.

I’d gotten a taste for PvP, though, and not long after I got into the beta for Shadowbane. This was a game I was excited about– lots of customization, a world with fascinating lore and interesting non-standard races, and full, open PvP with player-made cities you could fight over. Very exciting, and I jumped into the beta with both feet. I’d gotten in fairly early on the the beta, so I had a very good idea of hunting spots and places to get rare items. In Shadowbane, special powerful class options were hidden by drops in certain specific places, and while the world was somewhat randomly generated, there were ways of finding them if you knew what to look for. I did, and quickly became a very nasty duelist, using skills most players hadn’t seen and using lots of tricks I’d learned in DAoC to win fights. I particularly enjoyed picking on spellcasters, because I’d carefully arranged my kit to make myself extremely deadly against mages, who were squishy and usually couldn’t mount an effective defense in time.

I’d gone from playing a healer in EQ to playing, essentially, a rogue in DAoC and Shadowbane, and I revelled in proving that I was better than other players, even with the handicap of satellite connection lag. It went to my head, and as beta session after beta session rebooted things, I got faster at becoming powerful and more callous about my target picking. It was a little shady, because I was beelining for rare skills and items and telling no one else about them, but I told myself I was just playing the game, and wasn’t even doing anything I shouldn’t.

At one point I ran into a pair of players sitting at the edge of a zone, chatting and emoting. There’s a particular cadence to roleplaying text compared with normal, utilitarian text that I recognized– these two players were RPing, and I was hunting them. My ego was engaged, though– PKers — player-killers — were usually thought of as lowlifes and brutes; skilled but not intelligent. I came up with what I thought was a clever scene in my head, stepped out and started roleplaying with them. They engaged, and as I’d planned, the scene came to a head and I drew my weapon and murdered one of the two of them. It had all played out as planned, and seemed to me like a fantastic arc in the game. Rather than killing them outright, I’d tried to make it fun.

“Oh. I guess that figures. I thought you were going to be better than that. Oh well, I’m going AFK, kill me or whatever.”

The other player had dropped character entirely and left herself standing there. Both had put me on ignore, shutting me out from any discussion. I’d thought it would be a fun thing in the game, death stung but not too badly, but I’d clearly sapped their enjoyment of things and without them putting up a fight, it wasn’t fun for me. The remaining player could’ve made it a good fight, but she wasn’t doing so. I didn’t like being brushed off, so I waited.

About an hour later, her AFK flag went away. She saw me still sitting there and made a comment, one I couldn’t reply to because she was /ignoring me.

“Oh, you’re still here? Hope it was fun, asshole. That was my brother you killed. He’s in the military and we get a few hours of playtime a month, which we spent running out here to RP and tell stories. Thanks for ruining it.”

And then, she logged out. It stung, and I had no way of saying anything in my defense. I knew how the ignore system worked, so I created a new character so that I could say something when she got back. I saw her a bit later on, hopped on my alt character and sent her a tell, mentioning that I was the person from before. I was swiftly ignored again, without so much as a return comment.

A search on the forums revealed that she did a lot of roleplaying on the RP forums for the game, using an alias that was the same as her character name. Mine wasn’t, and I didn’t want to say anything directly, but it got me reading the RP forums. I was fascinated by the stories people were telling– I could tell stories like that too, and how much fun people were having with just text and without the game to play. When the game was down or when I couldn’t play it, I lurked the RP forums and read stories, eventually starting to participate myself.

I’d forgotten about the brother and sister I’d griefed until she appeared in one of my RP threads, taking an active part in a story. In it, she was playing the character I’d seen, and spoke often of her weak younger brother, who she’d periodically take on adventures to see the world. She called herself Challi, and her roleplaying mimicked the high-level player I’d seen chatting with the much lower level player, and I realized that her RP was a mirror of what she actually did in game. It was inspiring to see, and I got the impression that Challi’s forum roleplay fueled her storytelling with her brother, and vice-versa. I was roleplaying as a duelist, effectively a mirror of my existing character but with a more fleshed out story.

Over time, I noticed my forum RP leaking into the game. I picked targets differently, and hunted other PKers. I had a few dozen macros ready to say precise lines to put whatever I was doing in context for the character. It was fun, but as the game got closer to launch, I realized that while I’d spent a ton of time as a loner, there were big guilds forming that I didn’t know how to become a part of. I was leery of joining another big guild after what had happened in EQ less than a year before, but I knew that they, together, would make my solo play obsolete. I’d be able to have my fun until the game launched, but after that it would quickly end.

I wanted a group, but the known guilds were snapping up people left and right, and some of the requirements of the guilds that tried to recruit me were too strict for my tastes. I wanted the freedom of being a loner with the benefits of having a group. Total nonsense, but there you have it.

What bridged the gap was my newfound set of roleplaying friends on the forum. I’d become close to a number of people who didn’t know I was the ruthless PKer mentioned elsewhere on the forums, and I realized I could reinvent myself when the game launched. I scoured the game’s lore until I found a tidbit I could use as a hook, then introduced a new character– the brother of my previous roleplaying character, who was a mage-scholar. I planted the seed for a guild of lorekeepers and scholars, trying to rebuild an ancient lost library mentioned in the lore. I started going to the big guild battles near the end of beta, lurking as my rogue but keeping notes, and then reporting on the battles, complete with carefully-edited screenshots, as my mage-scholar, talking about events in the game.

not actually us– i’ve long since lost my shadowbane screenshots. same blue and white robes though.

It sparked interest among the writers in the crowd, and when the game launched I quickly had a small group who wanted nothing more than to travel the world telling stories on the forums. I set up a website for us, the first one I’d tried to make, so that we could type our entries and report on events in the world. I knew the PvPer ego, because I’d been one, and got good at crafting stories to appeal to it. People loved reading about themselves, and we started having guilds who were about to participate in battles give us advance warning and ask us to witness their battles. I got everyone in the guild a set of distinctive, brightly-colored newbie clothes, blue-and-white robes, obvious on the battlefield and obviously inferior gear for anyone looking, and it became our uniform. We’d be able to take pictures as the battle swirled around us, and our caveat was that if we died, we wouldn’t report. Both sides would fight to keep us safe, so that we could write and inflate their egos.

One of the people who joined the guild was Challi, the girl whose brother I killed, and I kept quiet about who I really was. I was happy to have reinvented myself and, in a twisted sort of way, gotten forgiveness for my previous asshat behavior. It was frustrating that I couldn’t participate in the major battles, which had been my favorite part of DAoC, but it was worth it to see the stories that came out of them, and knowing that people would remember them after the weekend or night they happened.

We were a small guild, though, and while our goal was to rebuild the forgotten library, realistically we would never have the resources to do so. To build a city in Shadowbane, you needed a city-seed, which planted a huge tree and was incredibly expensive, plus more expensive walls and buildings. We’d never afford those. This was okay, but we never really had a home city, which was a crucial part of the game’s progression. There was only so much we could do without one. We chafed under the lack of resources, until one of our guildmembers came up to me and dropped a city seed and over a million gold on me– enough for a modestly sized city and enough money to pay upkeep for a while. He wouldn’t say where he’d gotten it, just told us to build the city that night, before he had to log off.

Building the city was a party. We had a ton of fun with it, and when it was all over we had a replica of our library, right in the middle of the map where it was easy for us to get around. I’d already used my game knowledge to hook up the rest of the guild with a rare teleportation skillset, so with a home city we could travel almost anywhere we wanted with relative ease.

A week later, the player who’d given me the tree and all the gold was gone. Banished from guild roster, gone from friends lists, had never put any buildings in the city, just gone. I had a message on our shared website: “banned for duping, sry.”

All of the gold he’d gotten had been from cheating, and he’d given it to me so that when they banned him the city would work. I’d been suspicious, but the windfall was too good to pass up, so I’d taken it without questioning. I debated for weeks whether I should tell the guild about it, particularly given how a great many members had come out as heavily against cheating, to the point where my own beta knowledge of the game was considered shady. Actual duping would have been an unforgivable crime, and our whole city was built on it.

I had no idea how to handle the situation, and I knew college would be starting soon for me, so I fled. I went on vacation with my family and beat myself up over the situation, enough that my parents thought I wasn’t enjoying the trip. When I got back, I logged into the game, said my greetings, and started a private conversation with Challi, who’d become my second-in-command. I told her everything– who I was, where all the money for the guild had come, and that I was leaving Shadowbane because I couldn’t take it. I passed guild leadership to her, and as the chorus of surprised voices popped up in guildchat, I logged out and cancelled my account.

I told myself it was because I was going to college, and that I wouldn’t have time for games there, which lasted until an e-mail popped up in my inbox, informing me that I’d been invited to the beta test for Star Wars Galaxies. I’ve already told this story, but suffice it to say I played it for nearly a year before it broke me and caused me to ragequit the only MMO I’ve ever ragequit.

——————————————————

I found out later that Challi had told the guild that I’d had to quit because I was moving to college, and that she’d kept everything else she’d heard from me to herself. I never found out how she felt about my self-reinvention, but she kept in contact for a while and I continued forum roleplaying with the guild afterwards. Challi had no idea how to run a guild, and I fed her tips from what I’d seen in DAoC and EQ, both what to do and what not to do. Apparently, I quickly became something of a legend within the guild, particularly as Challi would tell stories about me, and several of the guild members who came after I’d left thought I was a lore NPC that stories were being told about, and that the guild had been themed on.

I wouldn’t run into any of them until SWG, when the Library in Shadowbane got destroyed by a guild of PKers who decided to raze it and the guild couldn’t afford to rebuild. Rather than sticking around, the group all moved to SWG, and I wound up a satellite part of the group again, until the aforementioned ragequit.

Sorry about the lack of images. This post got eaten in a server outage and has been reconstructed.

No heavy stuff today, after the last couple of days. This week is apparently “old MMO memories” week, but rather than jumping a year gap to talk about more relevant lessons learned, I figured I’d take a short break to talk about Dark Age of Camelot.

I played DAoC after EverQuest, on a lark. I knew it was a PvP game and my only prior experience with PvP had been in Ultima Online, where I had become an awful griefer after spending a lot of time getting griefed myself. It left me with a sour taste in my mouth regarding PvP, particuarly because my UO tricks were simply that– tricks– and for the most part I wasn’t able to hold my own in a straight-up fight. I was very good at stealing things from unsuspecting people and setting up awful traps for them, but my successes there were based on me being clever, not me being good at the game.

Post-EverQuest, I started to think that I possibly could actually be good at games rather than just trying to use smarts to make up for a lack of skill. I was done with EQ, and the games I was following weren’t yet out. I didn’t want to go back to UO, and Anarchy Online didn’t hold my interest very long, so into DAoC I went. At the time, a couple of local friends joined me, getting multiple-month subscriptions for their birthdays and jumping into the game with me. They’d missed the EQ boat but liked my stories, so wanted to try a new game where we all started at the same point.

By the time we got into it, Camelot was already fairly populated and a lot of stuff was going on. I quickly realized how far “behind” I was and wanted to catch up. I rolled an alt to play alongside my friends (knowing that I was going to leave them well behind as my main) and started trying to understand the game. It happened quickly, and I flew through levels as my Nightshade while hopping to a different server to level my Friar with my local friends.

I quickly found myself in RvR (DAoC’s large-scale PvP game), and spent a lot of time watching people’s movements and scouting. I realized quickly how important unified fronts were, and I started getting in on assassin teams, there to disrupt lines, break ranks, and drop reinforcements. I was good at this, but it wasn’t until a bit later where I found an edge.

My friends stuck with the game for a while, but it didn’t stick. They still had a few months on the accounts, so they gave them to me because they weren’t going to use them. I had no idea what to do with three accounts, other than multibox, which I did a little bit of but never really excited me. It felt too mechanical and not enough like I was playing the game, though having a buffbot was nice. On the other hand, I had a second computer next to my main gaming one, that I’d set up for when friends were over and we wanted to play something on LAN. I’d loaded up the game on it but started thinking about how else I could use it.

DAoC only allowed you to play on one faction on any given server, to prevent spying. You picked a faction when you entered a server to create a character and couldn’t change it unless you deleted all of your characters on that server. My friends had never made characters on the server that my main was on, so I could easily make two characters in the two different factions on that server, then camp them in specific places to watch the flow of chat, particularly the organizational stuff. I set up my second computer to run the game at the lowest possible settings in a tiny window, only showing me the chat boxes and occasionally the map. It was unplayable, but those accounts weren’t there to play on.

Instead, I used them as a direct, live feed to plan my assassination runs with my stealth team. We went from attacks of opportunity to coordinated lightning strikes at key targets, and I would occasionally run the group by places I knew big forces would be moving so that we could “scout” them and report their location. Spies were heavily looked down on in DAoC, at least on my server, so I kept it very quiet how and where I got the knowledge I did. We became a terror on the field– neither of the other two factions felt safe reinforcing their lines with anything other than large groups, which made them clumsy and unable to react.

I got a taste for PvP, and especially organizing groups subtly and in ways most people didn’t expect. I felt pretty bad about my duplicity, but it was incredibly effective. I wound up wanting something more permanent, though, and that’s about the time I started heavily following both Star Wars Galaxies and Shadowbane.

I talked about Julie yesterday. I never heard from her after her e-mails, but she left me with a bit more than lasting impressions. I kept playing EverQuest, and I was later approached by someone who knew Julie: a guild leader whose raid group was short a healer and who’d heard good things about me from her. He wanted someone unassuming who could take orders and not cause drama; I fit the bill pretty well.

I got plunged headlong into the world of raiding in EQ. I’d reached max level and had, up to that point, spent most of my time camping rare spawns for items and gearing up alts. My druid wasn’t my most powerful character; my Enchanter was, but this group needed a healer, not a chanter, so Druid it was. Anyone who raided in EQ is probably cringing at the idea of replacing an established raiding cleric with a relatively newly max-level healing druid. Let me add onto that that I played EQ for years on an iffy dial-up connection, so I lagged out constantly and would often have my connection stall without it actually kicking me from the game. From the perspective of anyone watching, I was just standing around, doing nothing.

I was horrible. Absolutely, appallingly bad. The other healers in the group carried my weight for me (with a smile, because they all missed Julie), but it was painfully apparent to me that I was contributing next to nothing. Occasionally, someone would speak up about how terrible I was, and a chorus of people would shout them down. It was extremely uncomfortable, doubly so because I knew that most of them were thinking of me as a memory of Julie; she’d apparently talked about me a lot.

Prior to this, I played aggressively casually. I really wasn’t very good at the game, and had gotten to high levels mostly through sheer stubbornness rather than any actual skill. I very, very quickly started picking up skill at the game, reading what few guides existed online and discreetly talking to some of the other healers about how to improve. It was the first big lesson of working in a team for me– I learned very quickly that the chorus of people shouting down the naysayers couldn’t give me useful advice; I got a lot of “no, you’re fine, don’t worry about it” saving-my-feelings kind of responses. Instead I started asking the outspoken critics– okay, so I’m terrible, what do you want me doing better? Most backed down when confronted, but a few gave me tips, and I started using those to improve.

This was really enlightening for me. I couldn’t get useful help from the people who were ostensibly on my side, but I could from my critics. I hadn’t heard the term “echo chamber” before, but it would have resonated with me (ha!) if I had. It changed the way I started working on mods for games like Morrowind and Oblivion in my free time– rather than listening to the people who said only good things, I got a lot from the people who criticized me. I started to crave brutal criticism, and it wouldn’t be until later that I realized the value of positive feedback. At the time, I felt like I didn’t deserve positive feedback– that was for people who were actually good at things, whereas I was demonstrably not. I reserved my praise for other people who I thought were more skilled than I was (read: everyone) and retained the criticism for myself.

I also started intentionally subbing out for other healers. It would be easy to say that it hurt my pride to do so, but it really didn’t– I was a pretty insecure teenager at the time and I wanted the group to succeed, so I’d show up on time but then opt out for someone who I thought was better (read: everyone). On the rare times I played at a friend’s house who had DSL, my performance was dramatically better, enough that people commented on it. I took this as a sign that I shouldn’t continue holding the group back. I eventually said I couldn’t play anymore, making up some nonsense story about me using too much internet time, and while the group was sad, they told me I should come back if I could get playtime. I thought that was unlikely, but I agreed, and figured they’d forget about this terrible player and move on. For me, it was a relief, because I was still hyper-insecure about my skill and thought it would be better if I wasn’t dragging down the group.

A little while later, we got a satellite internet connection at home. It was laggy, largely terrible for games, but perfectly functional for MMO speed and, more importantly, STABLE. I hopped on EQ and immediately had tells waiting for me– want to hop in a raid? I couldn’t imagine why, but it turned out they needed a healer badly enough that I’d make or break their ability to go. I didn’t like it, but I figured I’d do my best and see.

I had already had terrible ping from my out-in-the-boonies dialup connection, so I was used to that, but the stability of satellite meant I could actually predict what might happen. I had things down cold, and it felt like it was easy to see what was going to happen and prepare for it. It was obvious to everyone who was paying attention that I was much, much better, and it was at this point where I got to see my first massive leadership failure.

The raid leader was thrilled that I was back and now actually *good*, and wanted to give me a permanent spot on the raid. This annoyed a number of people, particularly those who had criticized me before but now didn’t have a leg to stand on because I was legitimately skilled. It was seen as the leadership playing obvious favorites, and it absolutely was. I watched as I became the reason why this raid group and guild imploded. In retrospect, the problems were there and I had just been a catalyst for everything, but at the time it felt like I was the problem, why this otherwise perfectly functional and successful group was now failing.

I couldn’t take it, and after the guild shattered, I quit EverQuest for good. I hated the drama, and hated myself for causing it, but it did leave me with a little seed that became really important later: I could be good at these games. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about for myself before– I liked games but wasn’t very good at them– but now I was thinking it. Not just “good”, but “better than other players”. It got me eyeing a new sort of game, one where I could prove that I was better than other players. I got into DAoC shortly thereafter, where I did a number of things I’m not proud of and tried to atone for them, though that’s a story for later.

My experience with Julie’s guild left me looking at organizations though, especially online ones where it’s easy to miscommunicate, and thinking about how it could be done better. It would be a little while before that took root, but that’s where the seed was planted. I thought a lot about how groups functioned after that, spending my time in the next few games I played looking at how things were going. It eventually drove me to start my own guild– also a story for later.

Advance warning: some feels in here. I haven’t told this story in a while.

I spent much of the weekend watching Sword Art Online with Kodra– as of this writing, we’ve watched everything that was available on Netflix, so the first two seasons. The central premise of the show focuses on the concept of a relationship borne of a game and a relationship borne of a real-life meeting. Specifically, the show’s underlying message is that while most people have a hard time understanding it, the relationships forged digitally are every bit as ‘real’ as ones forged in ‘real life’.

I’m in a not-so-unique position to comment on this. Of my closest friends, nearly all of them are people I interact with digitally above all else. I have friends that I’m physically close to that I interact with more online than I do in real life. I’ve heard this described as ‘sad’, and I find that sort of dismissiveness irritating.

Let me tell you a story, of the first online friend I made. I was in high school, playing Everquest shortly after its launch. I had just hit level 29 on my Druid, which was an important level for that class as it unlocked a bunch of potent spells and let me travel and hunt like I hadn’t been able to previously. It was a big deal, and so I very quickly started using my new spells and got myself killed while soloing. Everquest had experience loss on death, so I was looking at a level drop to 28, locking me out of my new spells and setting me back days of progress. I was out in the middle of nowhere, on an island in one of the ocean zones, but I thought it was worth shouting for help, seeing if anyone could assist me. A reasonably-high level cleric could resurrect me, restoring enough XP to return my level to me. I didn’t really expect anything, and I told myself I’d wait an hour to see if anyone might come.

Forty minutes in, I’d gotten ten or so private messages asking for my location, and each one had said “too far, sorry” when they found out how out-of-the-way I was. When I got a response that was simply “omw!” I was genuinely surprised. It took nearly an hour for the cleric to make it out to where I was– I was THAT far out of the way (anyone remember trying to navigate those EQ ocean zones, particularly the islands the boats DON’T go to?), and we chatted all the while. I kept half expecting to hear “ugh, this is ridiculous, sorry man” but it never came. Instead we joked about the boats, the sharks, how I died, how exciting level 29 was for Druids, etc.

When she got to me, he was pretty battered. She’d had a run-in with some wildlife (who largely didn’t bother me, a perk of being a Druid that I’d forgotten about) but was still okay. It took her a while to recover and then resurrect me, and bam, I had my level back. I could get us both out of there, and cheerfully did– using the (level 29!) Druid ports to get us to safety, near a major city. I went to tip the cleric, per the standard etiquette, only to find that he was trying to tip *me* for the port. We laughed about it, I expected we’d part ways, and got a last PM for the day: “oh hey, friend me? lemme know if you need a rez, if you don’t mind porting me sometimes :)”.

We were never close in level (he was much higher level than I was, and he was gone by the time I got up in level), but we talked a lot, almost exclusively about game stuff. For the better part of a year, one of us would bug the other for a rez or a port and we’d come running to help out, often from the other side of the world, and we’d chat about whatever while we did so. I knew nothing about him in reality, but it didn’t matter– we were fast friends and the context of the game world gave us plenty to bond over. Instead of having lunch together and sharing the food experience, we’d chat while waiting on boats and bond over (lack of) inventory space.

Near the end of the year, I got a message from him: “hey, I’m probably gonna have to stop playing soon but I wanted to say thanks for hanging out with me. i know it’s rude to ask, but can i have your e-mail address? i want to send you something.”

Players left EQ on occasion; this was not a new concept for me. I was sad that he was leaving, but didn’t think much of it. This was the first time anyone who’d left had tried to make a connection after the fact, though, and I hesitated. Bridging that gap between game and ‘real life’ was sort of taboo– that was how all of the “abuses” and “scary people” on The World Wide Web got to you, to use the scare quotes of the late ’90s/early ’00s. This was my cleric friend, though, and if he’d been hiding his true self for a year, he’d done a really good job of it. With as much as we’d talked, it would’ve been very hard to hide anything, or so I told myself. I gave him my e-mail, not sure what to expect.

The next morning, I woke up to an e-mail in my inbox from a “Julie”, which I didn’t expect, with a character name, class, set of items, and a bunch of other identifying information to prove that it was, in fact, from my cleric friend. At the bottom was a link “to some pictures, nothing bad, I promise” and a note “thanks for everything, I wanted to show you the real me”. Having spent a lot of time on the internet up to this point, I was leery of clicking any links I didn’t recognize, but it was a livejournal link (yep, one of those) so I figured it was safe.

The LJ page was someone named Julie, the cleric I’d spent a year hanging out with. She was wheelchair-bound and a cancer patient– every picture from the last year was of her in the hospital. The post I’d been linked to read simply: “To my druid friend Tam: Hi.” and included a bunch of pictures and links to old posts. I wound up reading her livejournal back entries, finding out about this girl’s struggle with cancer and the ways she took her mind off it, and started to realize that all of the references to “my best friend” were me.

We never spoke after that– when she left EQ she also dropped off the internet, and her LJ stopped updating. It was updated one more time, six months later, by her brother, with a “rest in peace, thanks for reading” message. At the very bottom of the post, there was a picture of her, happy, in her hospital bed. Next to it was a laminated picture, clearly a computer printout, taped up on the wall. It was a shot from Everquest, of a druid and cleric.

There’s nothing less real about online friendships than ones in physical space. RIP, Julie.

from http://www.dex-rpg.com/index_en.php

I started playing Dex tonight, a 2D cyberpunk sidescrolling RPG. As a bit of forewarning, I’ve only gotten a couple of hours into it, so this will not be a complete review. Expect more once I get more playtime in. Throughout this, there will be very mild spoilers, so be forewarned. I’m going to try to keep it light, but I can’t really critique a game without talking about what happens in it.

In Dex, you play as the girl on the left in the above picture. The game opens up very directly, with a short tutorial of you escaping some unknown assailants and being led to safety by a mysterious benefactor. It’s very The Matrix. I spent a little while unsure of what was going on because the initial tutorial doesn’t make it clear what I need to click on vs move through, and which of the three different interaction buttons was the appropriate one to use.

In general, I feel like the tutorial doesn’t adequately explain how to play competently, but this isn’t terribly important as the first segment of the game is extremely easy. I’m basically shunted into a quick dungeon run, as I work my way to safety through that ever so convenient escape route: the sewers. Thus far, I’ve met a grizzled old veteran who works a bar, a teenager-like hacker, and a mysterious, cryptic benefactor who everyone else reveres.

If this sounds a little cliché, you’re hearing my biggest criticism of the game thus far. It’s great that the dialogue is all voiced, but several of the characters feel like caricatures thus far, and the writing feels somewhat forced. There’s a lot of dialogue, but the quality is all over the place. Some is great, some is iffy at best. It feels like the game is trying to sell me on a dark, gritty, hedonistic future and is getting way too heavy handed with it. I’ve picked up three different items that suffice as the game’s “trash loot” that you sell to vendors for money that are all types of porn. Of the five vendors I’ve found in the game, three sell condoms for some reason. It isn’t quite enough to turn me off of the game quite yet, but the details feel very sophomoric.

That being said, the overall plot arc (such that I’ve seen) is interesting, and I want to find out what happens next. The characterizations are effective– I may dislike some of the characters but they’re better than vanilla, robotic dialogue. The biggest problem I have is that I feel like I can see the entire arc of the game within the first hour of playing it. I may be wrong, and I’m hoping I am. Expect more on that once I’ve played it a bit more.

On the other hand, the art is FANTASTIC. I’ll let it speak for itself, here’s the trailer:

The environments are evocative and stylish, the characters are varied and interesting, and the animations hit that old-school 2D platformer sweet spot– it all looks really good, and messages surprisingly well minus some of the details. I want to wander around the streets of this cyberpunk city, and that appears to be the point of the game, which is great.

The controls feel fairly tight and responsive. Movement feels fairly good, but I feel needs some more interesting options. I may be able to unlock those with time. My biggest issue is that enemies with melee weapons outrange my fists, causing me to awkwardly chase them around, but I also haven’t unlocked various weapons or anything, and the enemy variety is interesting and messaged well already, within the first hour of play. Combat is simple: attack, block, dodge-roll, with new options opening up as you level up. You can also get guns, though I haven’t figure out how to use the one I just got yet.

One of the other big gameplay features is the hacking game, which is a fairly full-featured minigame that’s akin to a scaled-down Geometry Wars. It might be interesting, but I haven’t seen enough of its features yet to make a judgement call. Currently it’s a bit underwhelming but I suspect it will scale up quickly– I haven’t done much with it yet.

As you play, you level up, and can put points into a variety of skills. These seem to have either noticeable flat bonuses (like more health) or new combos or special abilities. There are also a set of “special” skills, things like lockpicking, charisma, etc, that appear to be used to unlock additional options, whether that’s getting into a locked door or charming your way past someone. Me being me, my first two levels’ worth of skill points went into charisma and lockpicking. Thus far, I’ve already seen significant returns on these points. Multiple characters have had “charisma” dialogue options, and lockpicking has come up enough times that I’m glad I took it.

Right now, it’s a game I’m looking forward to putting more time into. It’s got some rough edges, and some questionable content choices, but none of it is enough to turn me off completely. I’ll be back with more once I’ve had more time to play it.