Solo content is too hard

Do we want trivial content? I think not. Maybe sometimes. But it's not an evil elitist conspiracy that causes games to have difficulty parts. It's fun. I mean the difficult parts are fun, not to suggest that evil elitist conspiracies are not.

But sometimes it's hard to find other people. Or we don't want other people. Maybe today I want to do ICC and I don't want to be around other people. Not a problem! I'll just pull out my raid size menu and click down a few notches to... there we go, solo mode Icecrown Citadel.

Okay, not trivial, so how hard? Wrong question. How do we make solo content hard? We could go off reflexes, but that is going to create wide variation in individual difficulty.

We could call for interesting tactical decisions, but balancing those across classes will be pretty hard. So some might be easy, others ways too hard. Heals could trivialize it or be mandatory. A pet might make an otherwise challenging gauntlet into a cakewalk. As much as there has been sharing of abilities and crying of homogenization (guilty), the classes are still different enough that they are not balanced for specific solo situations.

This is the value of a group and of the holy trinity. Together, they give developers some sense of what players can do, what capabilities they will have. Imbalances can be smudged over a bit with a group. So can variation in skill. While the term "carrying" gets so much hate, it's not such an awful thing to be able to boost someone up a bit, to get groups where they could not go otherwise.

I'm not eager to see a solo end-game. Balance would be on a knife-edge. Except more like the head of a needle. Like dancing angels. Given that the Rapture didn't happen, maybe it's all bunk. My point is that balancing a challenging, but not impossible, solo end-game is asking for trouble. Too much trouble to justify what I think would be a fairly small payoff.

In general I think we should be wary of soloing. It's not going to destroy a game. But it's not going to save it either. Instead we should figure out what we can do to help players to play together. That includes figuring out why they wouldn't want to, and fixing that. Maybe it's the toxic culture (not fixed). Maybe groups are too hard to form (fixed). Maybe we can't play with friends (bad idea, but fix in progress). Maybe there's just no one out there to play with, ashttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif I lamented in Hello, person I met in the middle of nowhere.

Blizzard announces new "realism" patch

Responding to years of complaints from paying subscribers, Blizzard has finally taken action. Patch 4.3 is being internally, and thanks to my big mouth, externally, labeled as the "realism" patch.

The circulating memo about the patch, which is for the most part incredibly boring, includes this interesting tidbit:

It is our initiative as innovators in this important and growing field to take the opportunity to tap into new customer bases and secure existing customers by means of henceforth adopting the initiative known as Realism, in which we try to more accurately model the interactions of real life through this groundbreaking virtual setting.

Okay, I admit it, that part was still boring. Something about memos makes everything sound boring.

Essentially what they are aiming for is realism. You know, that word I keep using. Realism. Not to be confused with Real Sim, a life-size replica of a Sim of your choice, made by my sponsor Real Sims Inc. Yes, that's the company who runs giant banner ads along the sides of my blog, which you cheap jerks have been blocking with your fancy adblocks and popupblocks and buildingblocks. I'd be rich by now if you'd just click the damn links. Did you know my commission per sale is actually more than the sale cost of the model? It's true. They are pretty damn desperate for customers.

But to get to the point: mages, get ready to cry. First off, you're no longer vending machines. No really, you should be crying, because if you at least could conjure food, you'd still be useful. All your spells are gone. Including your many highly-desirable buffs. I'm kidding about the buffs part; they're still being removed, they're just not "highly desirable." If it's any consolation, warlocks are pretty much entirely screwed. Not only do you lose all spells and demons, but you will never hold elected office in the United States. That goes double for you foreigners.

On a similar line, priests can no longer heal, buff, or shield. And the armor benefit of your robes is now zero. Also, shaman totems no longer have any effect. Druids cannot shapeshift. Death knights are being removed as an available class. Paladins will be merged with warriors, who will no longer be able to use rage as a power source for damage and will instead slowly run around, heavily encumbered by their armor.

Rogues cannot stealth within line of sight of targets.

Hunters will no longer have autoshot or combat pets. However players might as well figure it out now: they're going to be the only worthwhile class anymore. So huntards, rejoice. Everyone else, welcome to the planet of the apes.

I try to avoid these sorts of predictions, but I predict that this patch is going to kill WoW. That earlier something-hundred-thousand figure from Cataclysm? Drop in the bucket compared to this. Folks, we're seeing history in the making. This is on par with IBM ignoring software to sell computers or Napolean being a great military leader/demagogue and joining France, when as a Coriscan he had options, OPTIONS! And he threw it all away. He could have led Italy! Okay no, bad plan, they make France look like Germany. Spain! Spain conquered South America with nothing but a few greedy sociopaths and an entire continent of natives for whom they were the perceived lesser of two evils compared to the Aztecs. Or maybe Incas. Mayans? No, they were gone long before. Right? Who cares, the point is, Napolean should have joined Spain. They knew how to do the ruthless empire thing.

My point is this: I forgot my point.

In unrelated news, Blizzard announces a "realism" patch.

Players should see content

But how much?

For $15 a month you have access to all content in WoW. With a catch. There are barriers. These take three general forms: time, skill, and organization.

Time
Time barriers mean needing more time for content than you have. These can take the form of needing large blocks of time during the content, such as multi-hour heroics or raids which take even longer, which was a serious problem before raids could be saved week to week. Or the barrier can be not one of continuous blocks of time, but just time overall. Consumables can be major material sinks, meaning time sinks, as best symbolized by the original Naxxramas where the consumable requirements were so bad that a few high-end guilds became notorious for gold-buying (to buy pots) and eventually alchemy was er, tweaked (heavily nerfed) which is where the battle/guardian elixir system came from. Repair costs are somewhere between the two categories, being incurred by the raiding but using time outside the raids to compensate.

The ideal spot for a time barrier isn't simple to figure out. While no barrier at all sounds ideal, this can instead deprive players of a sense of investment. It can also act as a filtering mechanism. While it's hard to say that farming flask materials indicates skill, it does indicate some level of dedication, a quality which is frequently as necessary as skill. It's like a guild application: the actual answers are frequently pointless, but the guy who cannot even fill out an app is probably not the person you want around for serious content.

Skill
I'll keep this short: If someone isn't skilled enough for content, they aren't going to beat it. Let's just ignore the carrying/overgearing bits because those are beside the actual point. Skill is a barrier to seeing content. No, I'm not going to define skill. Pretend I did.

Organization
This is the task of assembling the required number of competent players, with competent being a theoretical mix of skill and gear which matches the minimum required for the content. This is closely linked with skill and time, since it's harder to find players if skill matters and time constraints get ever more difficult as you add people. Think of organizing five people for an hour. Now make that forty for three hours. See why there weren't a ton of raiders in vanilla? Now add a bit of skill requirement and it's a wonder anyone even got past BWL. A big server population will help, just by giving more chances of sufficient numbers of sufficiently skilled players being on at convenient times.

All
At this extreme content requires little to no skill, not much time, and is easy to organize, or done for you. Think LK heroics. Weren't those a blast? And there we go: why a "everyone sees all content" ideology isn't so great. Or as I said yesterday: "Get rid of all this “we want players to see content” crap. It’s not working out so well. It’s fundamentally incompatible with challenging content and good community." In retrospect, I could have phrased that less in a less combative manner, but I still think it's true.

The problem with this extreme is that everything ends up meaningless. There is no challenge overcome. No sense of investment. Nothing at all to inflate an ego, and if an MMO isn't inflating an ego, what is it doing? Oh sure, there's that social angle, but if the organization part is trivialized, that's going to take with a lot of the social binding.

None
Time, skill, and organization requirements are tuned such that you, whoever you are, will not have the combination of time, skill, and personal connections to even attune yourself for the Raid of Doom. This is the second job type thing, but working overtime, with a side job to pay the gold costs. Anyone who cannot do this is free to prance around the world at level 5, hoping the Doomboars doesn't kill them forever.

This is clearly the opposite of the All ideology. In both causes and effects. Sure, you cannot possibly get anywhere in this game. But if you did, oh man, would it feel awesome. If you beat the Raid of Doom you'd have the courage to do anything, like expose your by now translucent skin the the sky-bound nuclear ball known as the sun, protected by only some wisps of assorted gases known as the sky.

Sure, it's great that the few winners feel awesome, but so few people will possibly feel awesome that no one is going to play for long. Even the winners will have no one to gloat to. Trust me, that girl over there has no clue how awesome you are for killing Doomlord of the Doom Council on heroic mode in the Raid of Doom. Or that guy. Or that guy and girl. Two guys. I don't know, whatever you're into. Beside the point.

Some
Ah yes, the theoretical happy middle. In this magical land there are time sinks to keep us busy and feeling invested. We need a bit of skill, not so much that we're hopeless, but we're pretty sure that someday with practice we can go to the Raid of Significant But Not Overwhelming Challenges. Meanwhile the Raid of Puppy Flowers is fun enough. And man will it be cool to see the Raid of Doom! Organization isn't too bad, with raids which aren't gigantic, but we're still always eager for another person to play with.

But how much content do we actually see in this magical world?

Barriers should be such that players feel confident that they can progress, eventually. Enough content should be available to keep them entertained. But there must also be content that they cannot yet reach. Maybe some that they will never reach. But they can strive for it and not feel that it is in vain. Or another way to see it is that content should block players enough to feel meaningful to overcome, but not so much that it is unable to be overcome.

This still doesn't quite answer what to do with the amazing player and the garbage player. Can they play in the same world? To challenge the better player will mean blocking the lesser player, and likely the majority of players. Content creation must be profitable, attracting/retaining players to at least cover the cost of developing it. However the simple math of "this many players saw X content that cost ~Y" is not the full story. We also have to know how exclusive content affects the rest of the players. Is it something to strive for or is it a frustration? The attitude of the game company and how it communicates will affect this. Do they create the content as something to strive for or as an exclusive gift to their favorite players?

Expectations
These are the killer.

In vanilla I did three raids: MC, ZG, and AQ20. I never even saw Naxx or AQ40 and BWL killed me on the first boss. I have mixed memories of this. On one hand I wanted to see more content, and I did feel that there was a bit too much catering to the highest tier of play, but it wasn't a game-ruiner for me. I thought that someday I'd clear BWL and maybe even make some progress into AQ40. Someday.

I also did every 5-man, and the UBRS 10-man, many times. And some of the now-gone dungeon 2 upgrade chain, a set of quests which turned my blue set into a slightly better mix of blues and epics. This chain was long and for the time, expensive, but told an interesting story and even gave some more content in the form of additional bosses that I could resummon. This was the attempt, or impression of, alternative content.

In BC I had higher hopes. I really wanted to clear through Tempest Keep. I didn't. But I did do Kara (best raid ever), Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Giant Room, Zul'token'trollraid, and a little bit of SSC. I'd also hoped to clear SSC. Alas, BC introduced a stupid problem: the 10-25 man transition in raiding, with kara being the starter raid with 10 people and then every raid but ZA (which was released very late) needing 25 people. This created an organizational problem that constantly tore apart guilds and were generally a huge headache. If not for that, I think things might have gone better. So that may be my first time when I felt I should have gone further than I did and the devs were to blame. That is not a good thing.

I don't remember what I'd hoped for in LK. Honestly, I think by then I was starting to burn out. But I was disappointed at not clearing Ulduar. Very. But next thing badge inflation set in and I was progressively pushed into an incredibly shitty excuse for a raid called ToC (I refuse to even look up or remember what the stands for, trial of the crusader? Tournament? Who fucking cares?) and then the overhyped depressing place known as Icecrown Citadel. Sure, I killed the Lich King. Didn't really care. I wanted to get going on Shadowmourne. In this way Blizzard managed to combine the depressing power of trivializing content with the depressing power of excluding players from expected rewards. These go together.

As I see it, I should have barely even seen ICC. Ulduar, sure thing, all dead. ToC, yes, but in this theoretical space it is a raid worth caring about, not a buggy (no pun intended) gimmick festival to distract us from the lack of content. In this imaginary version of LK raiding, I'd not think that I in any way deserved the last legendary in the game. But because everything was made easy easy easy have this have that and that as well, and then suddenly something is help back: not fun.

Cataclysm piggy-backed on the LK expansion to take this to a whole new level. Maybe that's why six hundred thousand people left. There's the take-away lesson from this post: do not create expectations in players that you will not fulfill.

P.S. I expect that I won't have any more super-long posts like this for a while.
P.P.S. I wonder if I can fit more tags on here.
P.P.P.S. Woo, Blogger gave me the post back!

How to save the Story: Kill ten thousand foozles

Why do we have quests?

Story
Quests tell stories. They can do this well, or poorly. Most do it poorly. So we skip some text and load addons to tell us where to go. Having those, we can skip even more text. Next thing we're missing the truly good stories.

It isn't entirely the fault of the quests. They are little bits of literature, but are not in a literary context. It reminds me of how I have trouble finding the poetry in music because it's not in a poetic context. On the other hand, I'm not much of a fan of poetry anyway, so maybe that's my fault.

Where do I go?
In a game, such as WoW, where level and power are tightly linked, we can't just go wandering off to find something to kill. Well, we can, but trial and error involving lots of death is usually reserved for raiding, rather than getting past level one. Quests are all breadcrumbs and pointers. They say "that over there is something you can be reasonably expected to kill." And so off we go to kill zhevras, wondering where the hooves went.

Before Cataclysm, quests were pretty good at this. Talk to the first exclamation point in the Valley of Honor and keep following those until you're 60, 70, or 80, and you're going to mostly do yellow, maybe some green. It was tuned. Quite an impressive feat, I think.

Cataclysm ruined everything
Cataclysm is my new scapegoat for everything, replacing Lich King, which of course replaced Burning Crusade. Before that I blamed raiders, the Alliance, and EQ.

In cataclysm leveling changed, a lot. It sped up a lot. Too much. This created the problem that quests didn't breadcrumb properly. You might get halfway in and they go all green rather than yellow, like backward bananas, and then where do you go? It also seemed as if the devs really got into the story aspect. Fourth pillar! Screw that, fifth pillar! That's two added pillars to hold up all the story. Or gaming. I'm not really remembering the analogy, but the point is that story became important.

So what?
Wow head suggests something short of ten thousand quests in WoW, 9884 to be exact (what's something short of 120 between friends?), and the first page is dominated by non-quest quests: candy buckets and desecrating fires. Hm. Trying to tell us something?

It's hard to write ten thousand interesting stories. Or five thousand. Or even a few hundred. So we end up with very short bits. Fragments. In theory they can be put together to create an overall narrative or at least a sense of place and history. Or, we skim it for what to kill and move on. Part of this is because we're just trying to level up and part of it is because after five hundred quests that add up to "kill twenty foozles", with barely a story to go with it, who cares anymore?

Embrace your hate
It's time for devs to turn to the dark side. Embrace the foozles. Admit it, quests tell us to kill foozles and that's about it, so don't even bother. In fact, don't waste our time with multiple quests or NPCs. Just give us a wide field of foozles and tell us to kill ten thousand of them. All the grinding with none of the wasted writing talent. There could be a hundreth as many quests

But wait, there's more!
With so many fewer quests, each one becomes individually more important. It's like how diamonds are really just really hard to burn coal, but with enough marketing and artificial rarity, we start to think they're pretty. Pretty ugly, imo. If a game only had a hundred quests, and we knew that three-quarters of those would be "go here" and "kill ten thousand foozles", that only leaves twenty-five queshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifts for real writing. Can a game have twenty five good stories? Or five good stories in five parts each? I think so.

So there it is, separate the grind and the story, purify each, and I think we might even enjoy each one a bit more. After all, I like mindless grinds, and in theory we like good stories, if we had them.

Playing with friends is overrated

Why do we assume that we want to, and must be able to, play with friends? That's just asking for trouble. I think it's an unreasonable expectation. I don't do everything with all of my friends. Why should WoW, or any other game, be special?

Ideally I could play with friends, but in my experience the thing preventing that is not skill or server divides, but divergent interests. The friends I did play with were friends I had made through WoW, friends with whom I have common interests: raiding and arguing. I have a few friends I first met in real life who play/played and I wouldn't want to play with them. We don't want to do the same things in the game. It would be as ridiculous as saying "let's play sports together!" and then I want to go running and they want to play football. Or we both run, but at different paces, so someone ends up left behind or dragged along and what fun is that?

It's not necessarily that my real life friends are bad. I mean, maybe they are, or maybe not. I don't know and it doesn't even matter. But when two are RPers, another is bowing down to the cookie-cutter gods, and I'm searching for creative ways to die, it's not really a compatible experience.

I do actually want to play with friends, not the friends that I dragged into a game, but the friends that I met in the game. Those are the friends that I know want to play it and play it as I would. I wonder how much happier people would be finding more friends who share interests rather than trying to push friends into unwanted 'fun'.

Resistance Gear as an Alternative to Badges

It's pretty clear that one of the reasons for badges slowly giving the top tier of loot* is to encourage raiders to go back to heroics. The fear is that without them there won't be enough people to fill groups and queue times will be even worse. I suspect cross-server grouping has fixed that problem, but let's say it hasn't.

Is it a good idea to have heroics handing out top-tier loot? I don't think so. The problem is causes is that if/when the people in heroics get to raids, the loot is that much less impressive. It's a smaller step up. Or possibly none at all. Raids can end up looking like a whole lot of trouble for more badges. Somehow I doubt non-raiders will cease running heroics just because they aren't being given a slow drip of abnormally powerful gear.

But back to the "let's have raiders run heroics" concept. Why not bring back resistance gear? I know raiders ran many of the later instances a lot during vanilla, for the resistance items. Due to the oddities of the implementahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftion of resistance, this got them all the way back into level 40 content in Maraudon. They were often running in guild groups for the really low stuff, but it wasn't so unusual for them to join a PUG to get to it.

Then there was the crafted gear. That was a big part of the economy at some times. Crafters could be in high demand. Materials as well. Farmed materials. Which brings up another potential benefit: more farming. Some mindless grinding can be good. It can get people out of cities and seeing the world. It can diversify the economy, adding materials rather than more and more inflationary daily gold.

But didn't we all hate resistance sets?
There sure were a lot of problems.

Bag space was a big part of it. Even if a resist set wasn't filling every slot, it still added up to a lot. Fire and nature resist sets were big, BC saw shadow, and LK had a tiny tiny tiny bit of frost (frozen blows?). This isn't a problem for non-collectors, but if you're already saving all your tiers, plus some neat trinkets, and the sapta from your totem quests (guilty), adding even more to that is a lot to ask. I think adding a resistance slot to the bank would fix that. It wouldn't take away any existing capacity, only add to it, but only for this one specific type of gear: items with a resistance stat.

In terms of getting raiders into heroics, it is also imperfect. If the gear drops from anything but the last boss you run the risk of them dropping right after that boss or forming guild runs to do that boss only and reset after. Putting all resistance items on the last bosses of instances would work, but I have an irrational feeling that loot sources should be diverse, meaning not all the good stuff drops off the last boss.

It's an arbitrary gate. There you are going along killing and oh, next boss needs resistance gear. Guess we should take a week off from progression to farm that. In theory this could be done ahead of time, in anticipation of the fight, so the gear never actually blocks progress. But I think it's a bit much to expect most players to be preparing for a fight they might not see for weeks. That could lead to guild drama when some people are prepared, some aren't, and progress generally slows or stops as people race around to catch up.

I guess they were right
Adding it all up, I don't think resistance gear is a good alternative to badges. Still, I think it's worth looking for alternative ways to encourage raiders to run heroics (assuming we think this is a good idea). My early point out top-tier loot from heroics still stands and should be addressed. Or should have been anticipated and fixed long before Cataclysm came out. It's just another carryover mechanic from Lich King that Cataclysm is cursed with.

As usual, Green Armadillo has an interesting perspective on whatever is wrong this week (or always).

Developers are in a tough spot here. The majority of the cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifntent needs to be aimed at the majority of the customers - which means solo and maybe easy group content - because those customers have plenty of options to take their money elsewhere. However, taking the very top end of customers and letting them skip the 95% of content that is below their expertise is a good recipe for having those players run out of things to do exceptionally quickly. The result is what we have now - players forced to do things that they do not enjoy as a pre-requisite for things they would like to do, because that's the way the developers are getting paid.

With this in mind, it seems as if resistance gear might not actually be any worse than badges, but could at least serve to provide a different unwanted grind, stringing along raiders to buy time. The alternative would be for them to quit and go spend their time on something fun, which obviously is unacceptable.

* I mean loot from the latest raid, not necessarily the highest possible quality, since yes, heroic raid loot will be better.

Raid Entry and Population

Thank you, Google Reader for saving this post. No thanks to Google Blogger from destroying it.

For ease of writing, assume that "skill" refers to some mix of time and skill.



That triangle is a rough representation of a theoretical population. It is a skill distribution, tipped vertically. In this form what it represents is the skill requirement that players will get stuck at. You might notice that it has a slight positive skew, that is because I am bad at drawing. This is supposed to be a bell curve, but it doesn't really matter.

The lines represent the entry barrier to raiding. Or more accurately, they represent a first boss kill, with the idea being, if players get past this, they are now active raiders with raid guilds, but they may fail to get past the second boss, or the last in the last raid at the highest end. This does not indicate how much content there is at each skill level, but it is easiest to visualize, and the most straightforward, if we view it as a chain of bosses of steadily increasing difficulty, which the players will then kill or fail to kill. To be clear, anything above a line is raiding. Anything below the line is not raiding. Incidentally this means that Line 4 shows a really, really hard non-raiding game, but that's not the subject of this post. Let's assume that anything below the line just doesn't exist (devs didn't make the content).

Line 1 means that the lowest raids are really easy. It also means that players will tend to cluster further up along the distribution. This makes it top-light and bottom-light and is a perfect setup for a "left behind" scenario. This is due to most players being able to get well past the entry content. In fact, it is so easy that only a small portion of the population is bad enough to not get past the entry content. New players may find that there are not enough player to play with.

Line 2 is a system in which there are a lot of players clustered near the bottom. If we pretend that the triangle means anything at all, there are 3-4 times as many players in the bottom content, which will reduce the prevalence of left behind syndrome. There are, however, more players excluded from the higher tiers. Take note of this: excluding more players from higher up content makes it easier for those who have the skill to advance.

Line 3 is an exclusive system in which most players are not getting past the entry tier.

Line 4 is a more extreme version of line 3. And it probably represents a game that barely anyone plays. Don't make a line 4 game.

Note that no matter what system you choose you will have a dwindling pyramid at the top. This means that top guilds will always have more recruitment difficulty than the rest since they are in content that most people cannot do. There are two ways to fix this. One is to get a bigger triangle: have a larger population. The other is to crush or chop off the top tier, causing the highest guilds to be doing content below their skill levels. This is inevitable in practice, since I doubt any dev team could create content of exactly the right skill level for that very very top of the pyramid (meaning almost, but not quite, impossible, since impossible isn't very hard to make). We see this in WoW, where top guilds aren't necessarily doing harder content, but the same content as players a few steps down, a lot faster.

This model has some limitations. Such as being an ugly drawing. But also that it models a perfectly linear progression system, which does not exist, since this assumes very exact rewards from previous bosses, such that killing boss A once means you have the gear for boss B, but maybe not the skill, and killing boss A again won't make boss B any easier. Despite that, I think this is a useful visual tool. If it wasn't so damn ugly.

Does anyone have Thursday's post?

It was the one with the ugly triangle about population and raid difficulty. If anyone happens to have it laying around somewhere, maybe in a reader, please send me a copy. Or copy-paste a gigantic comment. Speaking of which, if you somehow have the comments too (I think there were only two), those would be nice as well.

Thanks!

P.S. If you're somehow magical and have Friday's post about seeing content, that would be magical. Since it seems to have gotten deleted while sitting in the schedule queue.

[edit] Never mind on Thursday. I decided to follow my own blog as a sort of back up plan, and there it was. Sweet. Still wondering where Friday's went.