I don’t play PvP-heavy MMOs anymore. I haven’t for over a decade now. I have, occasionally, participated in organized PvP battlegrounds, but it’s not a big part of what I spend my time doing, and a lot of people have, over the years, assumed that it was because I simply didn’t like PvP. My previous Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane posts wherein I talked about spending a lot of time not just PvPing, but as a straight-up player killer surprised some people, and I’ve had a few people since then ask why I never participated in battlegrounds and whatnot.

Straight answer: it’s because it feels artificial to me. PvP flags, organized battlegrounds, it’s more a sports team metaphor than a high-stakes danger metaphor. I’ve never been one for team sports, and organized PvP feels, to me, like a team sport with a slightly different interface. It’s occasionally entertaining, but it doesn’t really thrill me.

It’s probably worth telling a brief story about the first MMO I played, which wasn’t Everquest. I played Ultima Online, one of two games to break my spirit (Star Wars Galaxies was the other). I was excited about a game in which I could be a crafter, and make items for the really skilled heroes. I didn’t have a lot of faith in my own abilities in games at the time– I loved them, but I never considered myself very good. Rather than trying to play something good at combat, that might fight on the front lines (scary!) I decided I would instead be a blacksmith, and make swords for the real heroes.

It took a ton of work, but I eventually was able to save up for a small house with all of the supplies I needed to craft things. I made nice items and stored them in my house, and sold them to other adventurers (keeping the money, of course, in my house). It was a pretty good time, and I enjoyed the brief conversations I had with people, all of whom were much more powerful than I was. Rather than fighting, I’d spent a lot of time working on my sneaking skills, so I could go out and collect ore for blacksmithing without getting into any trouble. Sometimes, if I needed an item that could be pickpocketed from a mob, I did that, rather than fighting– I had effectively no combat skills, but I could make fancy items and I was sneaky.

At one point, I had a window shopper looking at my wares and house. He hung around a bit longer than most people, and while I thought it was strange, I didn’t really think about it. What I didn’t realize was that he’d pickpocketed me while pretending to chat, stealing my house key, going inside, using the key to open my chest of valuables, and claiming the deed within. He made his move while I was standing outside of my own home, and when the deed transferred, the house belonged to him, and he locked me out. It was a pretty effective scam, and I’d (foolishly) put all of my valuables in one easy-to-find place, so he had my stock of items, my gold, and my house, and laughed when I raged at him.

I was devastated, and angry. I’d worked hard for the house and money, and it seemed monumentally unfair that another player could just rob me of it all in a blink. I alternately whined and raged on forums, getting mild sympathy but mostly responses of “you didn’t use X to protect yourself? what were you thinking?” suggesting common knowledge that I’d somehow missed out on. Angry at the lack of help I was getting, I went after the guy who’d stolen everything from me, hunting him down at my own house and attacking him. In my angry frenzy of button pushing, I hit the pickpocket button, and for a brief moment, I saw his inventory window before he cut me down. It was surprisingly sparse, three teleport stones labelled “home” and some simple other things like potions and a spare weapon. I wondered why he would have three teleport stones that were all the same, and I returned, stealthily this time, stealing one from his pack. I was surprised at how easy it was– he’d spent time working on pickpocketing, but nothing on sneaking, so he never noticed me. As I left, I saw him looking around for the thief, because he must have looked in his inventory, and to hasten my getaway I hid and used his teleport stone without thinking.

I was dropped in a house, not unlike mine, but much more remote, in which there were simply piles of money and items, all stolen (I presumed). On a whim, I grabbed as much as I could quickly (after all, I had no qualms about stealing from a thief) and used my own teleport stone to leave, vanishing just as he got wise, used another teleport stone, and appeared in the same room. Not taking any chances, I deposited my loot in a secure bank and chuckled as he chased me down. In addition to a healthy pile of gold, I’d nabbed a handful of items I didn’t recognized, most of which I couldn’t use but grabbed anyway. It turned out these were incredibly valuable items, some of the best items in his vault, and without a care I sold them to other players. The thief would harass me as I did so, telling people who were buying that I was selling items I’d stolen from him, and every time I’d merely comment “You stole my house, turnabout is fair play!” and eventually simply “maybe you should’ve protected yourself better”, mimicking the jabs I’d gotten from other players on the forums.

I was soon flush with cash, and had plenty to buy a new house and set up my blacksmithing shop again, several times over. I set up shop again, but this time spent a huge amount of money buying and preparing elaborate traps, ensuring that anyone who tried the same trick on me wouldn’t have it so easy. After all, I expected a vengeful thief. It wasn’t long before it happened again. I’d become paranoid, and kept my inventory open, so even though I didn’t detect the thief, I saw when my house key vanished. I waited a few moments, then walked in. The same thief that had started this mess was lying dead on my floor, having been variously shot, stabbed, impaled, ignited, and otherwise maimed by my collection of traps. Considering it my just desserts, I looted his body and replaced the traps. He never bothered me again.

I could say that I stopped my PvP-related theft there, but it’d be a lie. I wound up doing to several other people what the original thief had done to me, and ultimately realized what I was doing, felt awful about it, and quit the game while sitting atop a huge pile of ill-gotten gold.

What stuck with me, though, was the sense of weight to my actions. Exerting influence on another player, whether that was making them a weapon, stealing from them, having a nice chat, or brutally murdering them in my deathtrap dungeon, was a choice I made. It wasn’t fighting nameless AI-controlled mobs that were mostly dumb and offered me little in the way of challenge or thought, or wandering around gathering from static nodes with only those same AI-mobs to stand in my way, it was an actual interaction with another person.

When I moved to EverQuest, the same sort of interactions with other players were there– I couldn’t do very much without a group, and so I spent a lot of time either seeking out people to play with or playing with (and getting to know) other players, who were doing the same things by necessity. It made our playtime horrendously inefficient in terms of getting to the highest level, and I often stood around doing nothing, because the penalty for going out on your own and failing was severe– a lengthy corpse run (that you had to do, or your body would disappear with all your items!) and often some severe experience loss. The stakes being high meant that I valued my time with other players.

As I’ve talked to people about Archeage, there’s a recurring comment that I hear: “I wish I could play that game without the PvP”. I’ve rolled this around in my head, because at first blush I’d agree. I (think I) want a game where I can better myself and build and have interesting, interlocking systems to explore without the fear of another player coming in and ruining my day. The more I think about it, though, the more I’m not convinced it’s true. I’m put in mind of Minecraft, especially its build-only mode, which some people love but I have no patience for. I can certainly build interesting things, but without anything to threaten my construction, I have little motivation to achieve. It’s the same thing that drives me to succeed in raids– taking something that looks impossible and gradually, over time, building and executing a strategy that overcomes it. Every new boss could be the one that breaks us, which makes every boss we defeat a rush. If we’re not challenged by a boss, there’s little joy in its defeat, only frustration if for whatever reason we fail at it.

In a game where other players might affect your experience, every victory has the weight of achievement. The threat of actual loss makes the world feel more organic and real, because you interact with it in an organic and real way. You don’t simply hop a teleport back to the local bank when your inventory is full, you think about what items you need to carry and you plan your excursions. You don’t throw yourself off a cliff to expedite travel back to a town, and you don’t treat other players like inanimate objects at best, direct opposition at worst. The next player you run across could be the one that saves you from a player-killer or the one who stabs you in the back. In most modern cases, the game doesn’t even let any of this happen to you until you’re fairly familiar with the game’s mechanics, so the bygone days of cheerfully slaughtering newbies are largely gone, outside of periodic exploits.

I don’t think that PvP is a “better” way of playing MMOs, but it certainly shifts my viewpoint. Even in my short time poking at Archeage, there’s a clear culture and players have actual reputations, something I haven’t seen in ages. I couldn’t tell you who the notable people on my FFXIV server are unless I know them personally, despite playing for a year now, but inside of a week I can rattle off a handful of names that cause a stir in Archeage. There’s weight to your decisions, and the game lets you make your own bed, but forces you to sleep in it.

It’s possible to have the same kind of stakes in PvE MMOs, but the concerns about “forced grouping” become very big in that kind of game, because the “Environment” half of PvE has to be extremely punishing and essentially require multiple players working together at all times.

I’ve said it before, but I look forward to the next technological advancement that gives us MMOs-as-sims instead of MMOs-as-games again. I’ve come to miss the uncertainty of a game world that doesn’t conform to formulas, and that I can’t be assured of succeeding in so long as I follow the dotted lines. It isn’t for everyone, but that uncertainty makes every victory that much sweeter for me. In a weird way, it makes me feel like I’ve earned my place in the world, as opposed to simply putting my time in to accomplish it. Sometimes I do just want a ‘safe’ game to delve into with some friends, but other times I’ve come to realize I miss the uncertain, dangerous ones, too.

I picked up Archeage (by which I mean, hit “install” on the Steam client) the other day because it came up in conversation. I’d picked it up originally when it launched in the US and quit within fifteen seconds when I realized the game lacked an inverted Y mouse setting. Couldn’t play it, wasn’t going to go to the effort of hacking in some kind of fix, done with the game. Easy.

I loaded it up recently, mostly to check to see if they’d added that feature. A Google search suggested they had, so I booted it up, patched, and hopped in. To my very great surprise, I’m having a surprising amount of fun with it, enough so that I want to put the brakes on playing until I have a chance to run around with Kodra and Thalen.

There’s a nasty catch-22 I’ve noticed in MMOs over the past few years. The bar for content and systemic density is so high right now, and people so invested in their existing MMOs (or not playing any at all), that there’s essentially no hope for a new MMO to compete at the same level as existing games when it’s released. On day one, before there’s been any chance for anyone to hit the servers, for kinks and bugs to be worked out, and so on, most MMOs are pretty rocky. Our standards for “acceptable” rockiness have changed over the years, but so has our expectation for a new entry into the genre as well as the skill of the teams creating them. Put simply, we no longer have MMOs that brick your motherboard on day one, but we’re also no longer willing to tolerate that sort of thing, nor would that sort of thing happen in a modern MMO team.

I say all of this to say that, like a good steak, an MMO isn’t quite finished the moment it leaves the pan. It cooks a little bit more after release, and it’s that little bit of extra that turns an okay game into an excellent one. A year after its release, Elder Scrolls Online is getting rave reviews– all of the changes, fixes, and additions in the game have brought people back, not to mention a shift to free-to-play which, far from the herald of doom the internet pundit crowd likes to crow about, is often a new lease on life for an MMO that has stabilized.

So, Archeage. I hopped in, and after confirming that yes, I can in fact turn on inverted Y and actually play the game, I started running around. A few things stood out to me very quickly:

— This game is built like FFXIV; I can master every class, I just can’t use them all at once.

— There’s a pseudo-deckbuilding component, like Rift, in which I combine various classes to form a custom build. Presumably some of these are better than others, but there’s a lot of potential room for experimentation, and it’s easy to move them around.

— The visuals are impressive and not overwrought, especially the animations.

— There is an absolutely insane level of content density, from random interactable activities to hidden quests to standard quests that I can overachieve in, to detailed story quests, to fully integrated climbing and boating systems… all of which I’m not only allowed to do, but the game encourages me to do very early on.

I like the idea of mastering every class, provided there’s some tangible benefit to me doing so. It’s something that’s stopped me from playing all of the classes up to max level in FFXIV– not just the time involved, but that I already have my favorite classes to play, which fit any role I might want to fill, and there’s very little I would get from leveling up another class. The only thing that gets me really excited about leveling a new class in FFXIV is if it has some really fun gameplay elements or suits a theme I like a lot. I leveled Ninja, and I’ll likely level Dark Knight as a replacement for my Paladin. In Archeage, my “build” is comprised of three classes, so there’s a lot of benefit to me having focused on a few and slowly increasing my repertoire to be more flexible and be able to create more builds. I’ll need to spend more time with it, but at least what I’ve seen is promising. At some point I’ll sit down and start theorycrafting good, functional builds, but I want a better handle on how the game feels before I do so. It feels a lot less contrived and unwieldy than Rift, which is a very good thing in my book. I loved the concept in that game, but not the execution.

The animations are really impressive, and I find them a lot of fun. I have never enjoyed warrior-style classes, because I feel bulky and inelegant, wielding a huge weapon with brute force and no finesse. I’m currently playing a warrior in Archeage, because the dual wielding style is graceful and feels powerful, even though the two-handed weapon animations feel brute-force-focused and smashy. At least as far as I’ve gotten, the game feels like it’s going to let me play the skillful swordsman type of character that I’ve always enjoyed but rarely gotten to play, substituting speed and finesse for brute force, and actually making it feel that way in the character animations. When I hit a mob with a warrior ability, I FEEL it, and that’s incredibly satisfying to me.

I’ve played through the first ten levels of the game thus far, and it’s striking to me how much there seems to be to do. There are entire systems that the game hasn’t introduced to me yet but that I can see portions of as I play. There’s a currency that accrues over time spent in game that I use to access my loot drops, which is a clever system for a variety of reasons but also ties in with crafting and gathering, as far as I can tell. The game is very open, and while I’ve spent a bunch of time simply following the main quests, every time I venture off the beaten path I find something at least somewhat interesting. The game seems tuned to give you key systems early on, then expand them as time goes on. I’ve raised my own horse and can ride around mounted now, but my horse has levels and can get attacked by enemies– I have a follower who benefits from watching me fight but is a potential liability. It’s an interesting trade-off that adds just a bit of interesting flow to gameplay.

Right now I’ve gone the path of the fast, agile swordsman, taking Warrior, Rogue, and a secondary skillset called Auramancy, which seems to be focused on resistances and shedding debuffs but importantly includes a Blink-style teleport spell, one of my favorite tools in any MMO. We’ll see if the content density continues to be compelling, but I get the impression the game hasn’t finished showing me what it’s got to offer.

It may be a bit before I continue updating, but I’ll continue talking about Archeage as long as I continue playing it. I’ve already made it past the point where a lot of people quit in disgust due to the initially toxic community, but a year on, things seem to have settled down. The odds that I’ll be able to ever have my own property seem slim, because space for that sort of thing seems to be in short supply, but we’ll see if that’s something I care about.

There’s a really common business concept that I’ve heard a lot of, mostly through my time making games. It’s often suggested that you should “take ownership” of your work, and that doing so gives you more investment and makes you care about it more.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/229464652/hand-painted-coffee-mug-this-is-my

It’s an effective strategy from a leadership perspective, but it’s not without cost. To truly allow someone to take ownership of something, they need to have the freedom to shape it in their own way. In a lot of endeavors, this is fine, but as nice as it is to have an invested employee building something for you, if you really do need it a specific way there’s a good chance you’ll be robbing them of ownership.

To look at it from a different angle: a big part of my attachment to the minis games I play is the personal touches I give my collection. Even beyond painting them, I do a lot of careful work in assembly, often significantly converting a model, to put my own personal touch on it. I can’t remember the last time I assembled a mini precisely how it appears on the box, and in some cases I’ve done some conversions so extensive that the mini in question is almost totally unrecognizable. I do my best to be careful about the minis being confusing on the table top, but the personal touch is important to me.

SAO’s Yui, work in progress

One of my recent projects is an extensive conversion of an ALEPH Steel Phalanx force to SAO characters. I’ve carefully constructed a playable list from the minis I have (and a couple of additions), and am converting the entire group to match the main cast of the show. Prior to this, I’ve never liked Steel Phalanx, it’s a faction made up of characters that don’t really resonate with me. By turning them from characters I couldn’t care less about to characters I’m interested in, I’ve been inspired to do a lot of work converting and painting the entire team, and I suspect I’ll have a lot of fun actually playing them, too.

The Infinity community (as represented on the forums) has been publicly supportive of this project (and others!), but I’ve gotten the occasional bit of criticism– why change the models that are sculpted the way they are for a particular reason, or why make your games more confusing with bizarre proxies or heavily altered pieces? It’s a similar type of criticism I’ve recieved from a recent Ariadna team I put together, which was based on my Shadowrun campaign and is about half-comprised of non-Ariadna minis that fit the Shadowrun characters but aren’t necessarily part of Ariadna as a faction– potentially confusing for someone, even if I’m very consistent about how I use them.

Volt Securities and Interdiction, my (commissioned) Ariadna force.

The reality is that without my own personal touch on these groups of minis, I wouldn’t own them, or they’d collect dust on a shelf. At any given time, I usually have a handful of minis that I haven’t assembled, sitting around in boxes because I picked them up from a tournament victory, as part of a sale, to round out another order, or just on a whim, and I haven’t made a personal connection with them that gives them value to me beyond game pieces. When I put my own spin on them, they have meaning for me even when I don’t like them. I often go as far as telling myself my own stories about them, determining fictional personalities and stories about the groups I put together, which inspires paint schemes, details, and even extends to list construction.

When I was growing up, I once complained to my dad that the essays I had to write in school were boring and meaningless. He suggested that I use the essay prompts as a way of springboarding into a topic I *was* interested in– his actual phrasing was more like “use the prompt just long enough to lead you into something you actually want to talk about, then talk about that”, which appealed to my teenage subversive side, but the end result was the same. My writing quality jumped immensely after that, partly because the satisfaction of “tricking” the teachers into letting me write about whatever I wanted gave me a smug sort of glee, but also because once I was writing about something I actually cared about, I put more effort in the work. On several assignments, I was told later that I didn’t exactly adhere to the prompt as such, but that it was a good enough essay that the teacher would let it slide. I took ownership of my writing and the improvements were noticeable, though the end result was often not what had originally been envisioned.

The same is true elsewhere as well. My writing, my minis, and my work all get a lot more care and effort put into them when I can take ownership and make them my own, but it also means they’re very likely to be significantly different from the standard set of expectations. As a team leader, I take care to be aware of this double-edged sword. I can give someone a lot of freedom to work out how they want to do things, but if I then come back and “make corrections” or otherwise deny then the freedom to add their personal touch, especially after the fact, I’m both sabotaging my own credibility and damaging the work of my team member. When I delegate a task out to someone on my team, it’s important that I support their efforts, even if they’re not what *I* would choose to do, so long as they’re effective. If I want something done my way, I had better be prepared to do it myself, or I can’t expect to draw upon the additional motivation and value that comes from someone “taking ownership”.

I’ve been playing a lot of mobile games lately, for a couple of reasons. The big one is that it’s a hugely underappreciated segment of games that’s increasingly the most relevant part of the industry, and the other is that I spend a lot of time away from my computer, and lightweight mobile games are increasingly my go-to.

At the recommendation of a few people, I picked up Knights of Pen and Paper, a turn-based RPG in which you play as a bunch of people sitting around a D&D game with a DM. It does the whole pixel art thing, trying to evoke a classic feel in its characters and monsters. It’s hearkening back to NES-era graphics and gives the vibe that it’s a DM running a game with some rough edges while itself being a polished, solid experience.

It takes a lot to pull off what they’re trying to do, and I think it works really well. The DM sprite narrates quests and adventures to me, and my party is made up of five other characters, all playing particular classes. I get to pick who’s playing, and different people have different special strengths for me to choose– I’ve got the pretty, popular girl who gets discounts at shops, I’ve got the studious, top-of-the-class girl who’s pretty good at everything, I’ve got a guy in a band, I’ve got the pizza guy who dropped in to play a game, and I’ve got an artist girl who’s lucky. Each of these characters is playing a particular class, which I also get to pick– I’ve got the choice of Paladin, Warrior, Cleric, Druid, Rogue, Wizard, and there are other classes I can unlock with quests.

The setup is entirely charming, and the writing is often really funny. I can have random encounters as I travel from place to place, and the DM always sounds vaguely surprised or disappointed when nothing awful happens to me. When I get into an encounter, various players make outraged comments or jokes about cheating. The writing is lighthearted and fun, but still moves things forward. It hits a sweet spot in between telling a coherent story and making nods to the kinds of ad-libbed nonsense that happens in real pen-and-paper games.

Gameplay is split into two pieces– quests and the overworld. In the overworld, I can choose to go shopping, travel around, take on a new quest, swap my party around, rest, etc, all by talking to the DM. When I take a quest, I have to travel to wherever the quest is located and then fight encounters there, which is where things get interesting. First off, I get to pick how challenging the encounter is. I can customize most quest battles to be as easy or hard as I want, selecting appropriate enemies and adding them to the encounter. More challenging encounters are more rewarding, and certain boss fights and random encounters have a set difficulty. Quests will often ask me to fight a certain number of enemies of a particular type, and I can fight them all at once or take them on more slowly, depending on how my health and mana are doing.

Recovering health and mana is done by resting, or through spells. My choice of classes determines what abilities I have to work with, and building a balanced party is important, but the means with which you go about it is entirely up to you– there are a lot of combinations that work, and if you have one that will be strong later but is weak to start, you can still make it work by lowering the difficulty of your encounters early on.

In combat, every character gets a turn, and you can see initiative order (determined semi-randomly, of course), so you can prepare in advance. Each character gets an action, which can be a basic attack or one of their special abilities, which cost mana. The effect is that I feel like I’m playing a D&D party, each person reacting to the situation at hand and lending their unique skills to the group.

After finishing Hero Emblems, I wanted another fun RPG-style game, and Knights of Pen and Paper absolutely fits the bill. It’s definitely worth your time, and I look forward to playing more of it and exploring what it’s got to offer. It’s got a lot of systems that I haven’t really talked about because I don’t know much about them, but suffice it to say you can equip your characters, you have a party inventory, and you can upgrade your gear and abilities as you level up and get more money, all of which change how you play. There’s a ton of optional content and (apparently) a lot of hidden unlocks, so exploring random quests is entirely worthwhile (and levels up your characters!).

I’m enjoying it a lot, hopefully you will too. There’s even a sequel!

A conversation I had yesterday really stuck in my mind. One of my raid team was talking about how he enjoyed the task of “marking”, because it made him feel useful, and let him be a raid hero for that section of the fight.

nct.org

A bit of an aside: “marking”, in general, means calling attention to a particular enemy or point on the ground that will be important for handling some upcoming mechanic. Sometimes you mark the next target, sometimes you mark a target that everyone needs to stay close to, sometimes you mark a point on the ground that someone (or everyone) needs to run to. This generally needs to happen while the rest of the fight is happening, so your attention is split– you need to be fast and accurate, and still be contributing in the usual way while doing so. It’s a difficult job, and generally your efforts aren’t noticed if the fight is going smoothly– it’s only if you miss the marks or forget to mark that things go downhill and people notice.

Our discussion went on to talk a bit more about how FFXIV does a good job at providing moments for players to be heroes in group content. A few things contribute to this. Really impressive spell effects, especially for big hits or potent cooldowns, call attention to someone’s efforts. This culminates in the Limit Break button, which charges up slowly for an entire group and can be used by a single person to execute a massive protective barrier, a powerful group heal, or, most commonly, a devastating, highly visible attack. It’s a single button, but you get to press it pretty rarely and it’s a ton of fun when you do.

FFXIV also doesn’t revel in killing you. Other MMOs I’ve played have boss encounters where a single hit from the boss will outright kill any single player who isn’t a tank. In FFXIV, this is very rarely the case. Non-tanks won’t necessarily survive very long against a boss’s direct attention, but there’s enough time to regain control of the situation. This means that, in a pinch, it’s possible for someone to stand in and take a bit of punishment to allow time for a tank to recover (or, in extreme cases, get Raised) and return to the fight. These sorts of clutch saves are thrilling, and are a lot more possible in FFXIV than in many other games.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have a heroic moment in a raid situation, and what really makes it work is the sense that it isn’t artificial. The game isn’t blatantly setting you up to look like a hero and get fanfare without you doing work, your act of heroism is a legitimate act borne of your skill and your presence of mind. It’s a satisfaction that’s hard to manufacture, and it’s gotten me thinking about how we’ve lost our way a bit when it comes to making players feel heroic.

There’s an adage in game design that drives a lot of design work: “Show, don’t tell.” It shows up in a variety of media, from writing to film to theatre, and the same concept holds in games. Put simply, having an NPC tell you about the dragon that attacked the city is much less interesting than actually seeing the dragon attacking the city. Turned around the other way, having an NPC tell you how awesome you are is a lot less satisfying than genuinely feeling awesome in your own right.

In World of Warcraft, I completed thousands of quests. To hear the NPCs tell it, I saved tens of thousands of lives and was responsible for the livelihoods of countless unseen people, all of whom (I was assured) owed me a great debt. You get numb to it pretty quickly, but what I do remember is learning how to solo elites, back in Vanilla. Elite mobs, at the dawn of WoW, were intended to require a group to fight, two or more people, and were generally pretty deadly. Being able to take on elite mobs on your own, especially ones that were at or above your current level, was a mark of accomplishment and pride. It meant that you could easily beat quests that other people struggled with, and you could traverse parts of the map that other people avoided. I would occasionally fight an elite that I knew other people couldn’t handle, and would occasionally see players stop, try to determine if I needed help, and be impressed when I’d win on my own.

In Everquest, I remember cowering at the edge of the Kithicor Forest, which was an idyllic green forest during the day and a haunted nightmare hellscape by night. If you were travelling through the area, you quickly learned to wait at the edges of the forest for dawn, because the monsters within would tear you to bits. Occasionally, you’d see a group of players head into the forest at night, armed and armored to the teeth, after some rare item or another, and when I eventually became one of those players and did it myself, it felt significant, because I not only knew how dangerous it was but also knew that I could handle it.

Artist: Mike Henderson

I’ve played games in which I’ve stopped world-ending plots over and over again, sometimes twice before dinner and again after a bite to eat. We’ve raised the stakes in our narratives to the point where they strain credibility; every quest is an earthshattering dilemma and without our intervention, all will be lost. It’s not simply that the presence of other players breaks the illusion, it’s that we just finished saving the world over the last rise. It feels manufactured and artificial.

The alternative is to save the really big stuff until it’s more appropriate, and fill the game up with smaller, more down-to-earth tasks. It’s how “kill ten rats” became a thing, and our collective design solution for the KTR problem was to make the rats into giant slavering werewolves, until there was a deadly threat lurking behind every corner and under every bush. In some cases, this is absolutely literal– there are zones that are simply full of deadly enemies packed so tightly you have little hope of navigating without bumping into one or ten. Why anyone would live in a place like that is beyond me, but there they are, and they really need you to go collect slavering werewolf meat so that the town can avoid starving to death.

I think we solved the wrong problem. It’s not that killing ten rats is an inherently boring quest, it’s that we’re limited in the verbs we can use to approach it. We have ten rats, we have our weapon, and we apply axe to (rat) face until there are zero rats, except there are never zero rats, because there are a bunch of other players all doing the same thing.

Imagine instead that you walk into a blacksmith’s shop to get your gear repaired, and the following dialogue shows up:

“I’d love to repair your gear, but I’ve got a bit of a problem. Rats are infesting my workshop, and the traps I ordered haven’t come in. I won’t be able to fix anything until I can do something about these rats.”

Now, going in there sword swinging is a choice. You can also go and see where the traps are, or possibly you’re good at crafting your own traps and can simply make some for the beleaguered blacksmith. Maybe you’re an accomplished beast tamer and can coax the rats out, pied piper-style, or you’re a ridiculously powerful mage and can set magic wards around the workshop to keep the rats away. Instead of the blacksmith setting you to a task, he’s set up a problem and you can come up with a solution. When you do, he’s appropriately thankful that you bothered to intervene (you didn’t have to!) and is happy to repair your gear (a sensible, meaningful reward). Furthermore, that’s a quest that is appropriate for anyone of any level– being more advanced simply means you have more interesting, more efficient options at your disposal.

Quests have become an exp treadmill– go here, click on this, return, go there, kill these things, return. Sometimes they’re a bit more involved than that, but the verbs are always very simple and are almost always entirely explicit. They HAVE to be, because that’s the main method of progression. The questing system in EQ is positively archaic compared to what we can do now, but quests in EQ felt meaningful because they weren’t the main thing you were doing to progress.

Why do you feel like a hero in FFXIV when you save your raid with a sudden moment of clarity and action? It’s because you’re doing something outside of the norm, something unique to that moment that you alone are in a position to do. You’ve broken out of the usual set of verbs and are doing something a little different, just for a moment, that makes all the difference.

We’ve become so afraid of our MMOs feeling grindy that we’ve filled them with quests and stories, and in our haste to distance ourselves from the days of mob camping and aimless wandering, we turned the stories themselves into a grind. When every story makes you a hero, and you’re told constantly what a hero you are, no matter how finely crafted the storytelling might be, it’ll ring hollow.

Took a break on Friday to clear my head after all of the MMO nostalgia and get caught up on a backlog of work.

We had our Game of the Month podcast on Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and I want to talk a little bit more about that game. I’ll rehash some of the stuff I talked about in the podcast, so I apologize in advance for any redundancy.

One of the tangents we (I) got on while talking about Shadowrun was how difficult it is to make a game centered around old nostalgia and make it good. I have a litmus test for this sort of thing, that Ash mentioned in the podcast. A game needs to be good on its own, absent any context outside of its series. The further along a series gets, the more impenetrable it becomes, generally speaking, which is why the third or fourth game in a given series is often a significant reboot. To wit: Grand Theft Auto 3, Bioshock: Infinite, Assassin’s Creed IV, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the new Thief, Fallout 3, Jedi Outcast AND Jedi Academy– just a short list of games as I scroll down my Steam Library that are the third or fourth game in their series and a significant reboot, sometimes changing the game’s genre entirely.

Shadowrun is a good game in its own right– you can enjoy it without having a decades-long background in the kinds of games it’s inspired by. It’s perhaps why I’ve had so much trouble getting into Pillars of Eternity. There are awkward parts of the gameplay and the user interface that are borne of the game trying very hard to stay close to its roots, without necessarily evaluating if those roots make for a modern-feeling, up-to-date game.

Games are experiences that are meant to evoke certain feelings; they create a particular scenario in which your brain lights up in a certain way. Unfortunately, the key there isn’t the game itself, but the way the brain lights up, and that changes over time, ESPECIALLY with new experiences. I can play Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, one of my favorite steampunk games, and it lights up my brain in much the same way it did when I played it more than a decade ago. It’s also a deeply flawed game, with a lot of break points and issues. I’ve played similar games since, and they don’t evoke the same feelings. I dearly loved JRPGs growing up, but now it takes a truly spectacular one that approaches the genre differently to get me engaged.

Even if we like the same sorts of games over time, our standards will rise as we get better and better games. The bar goes up, and fewer and fewer games will meet it as time goes on. If we’re not careful, we’ll find that no new games meet our criteria anymore, and nothing new will light our brains up the way the older games do.

Lone Wanderer tweaked wallpaper (FALLOUT 3) by SLiqster

It’s why I harp so much on trying games you don’t necessarily think you’ll like, in genres you don’t always play. I mentioned Fallout 3 as an example in the podcast– the old Fallout games with isometric turn-based RPGs, and lent a strong sense of wandering through a vast world on your own and having many options for dealing with whatever problems or opportunities came up. The new Fallout games are first-person shooters, but importantly they’re still pursuing that sense of wandering through a vast world. Our bar for that sort of experience has risen, and for the most part an isometric game makes you feel detached and makes the world feel constrained to what you can see on screen. In a first-person shooter, you can pull out binoculars or a scope and look out over a vast landscape, which contributes to that sense of detachment and tunnelvision when playing an isometric RPG when put in direct comparison.

As games get better, the kinds of things we can express in them as a medium get broader, and certain genres will lend themselves to certain types of games more readily. This will change over time, as genres mature and the gaming landscape changes. The point-and-click adventure game that gave you chills as a child (7th Guest anyone?) has become a first-person thriller (Call of Cthulu/Amnesia) and eventually morphed into an MMO (The Secret World), all focusing on a very similar set of experiences and lighting your brain up in similar ways, but coming at it from very different angles.

http://joshflores.net/

With a game that’s about nostalgia, about triggering those old feelings, it’s important to pay attention not just to what those games did, but how the medium has evolved in the meantime. Slavishly recreating an old game isn’t going to have the same impact as a brand new game that evokes those same feelings in a newer, tighter package. This can even transcend IP– Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall have little to nothing in common with older Shadowrun games, but it expertly pulls in references to older Shadowrun content as well as evoking the feel of old Black Isle and similar games, all without becoming inaccessible to a player unfamiliar with any of those things.

Coming off of the MMO nostalgia train of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I haven’t felt like an MMO has captured the feeling of the old games. For me, it’s because a lot of those memories are inextricably tied to the joy of discovering a new technology– the Internet, and the idea that I could play games with real people in a huge world without the constraints of a team vs team match was thrilling. That same earthshaking, intoxicating excitement isn’t likely to happen again until another major technological breakthrough that not only changes the way I play my games, but also changes the way I live my life. That confluence of events is what gave those older MMOs the spark that seared into my brain, and is (I think) why the genre has stumbled once internet multiplayer became a core feature of every video game. Certain games are trying to mine that nostalgia for older MMOs, but they’re missing the key factor; recreating the games and their features, not recreating the experience.

I hope that in my lifetime I see another technological leap that makes me sit forward, jump into a game, meet a new person in that game, and have us both get excited because, holy shit, we live in the future and we can’t believe playing this game in this way is an actual thing we can do. That’s how I’ll get my MMO nostalgia, and that’s why I’m excited about the new Shadowrun– it’ll make me remember all of the good times I had with old isometric RPGs without also reminding me that they now feel old.

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.