Slowing Players Down

Players vary wildly in the amount of time they have to spend on a game. Some -- teenagers, the retired, the unemployed, addicts -- can spend nearly every waking moment playing a game. As far as the average player is concerned, this level of dedication is effectively identical to the player that spends every evening (say, five nights a week) playing.

And then there's casual gamers, a hard bunch to pin down. Some play casual games as much as the hardcore addicts mentioned above, but somehow they don't "count" because they're not playing "mainstream" games. Obviously I have issues with this distinction, so I'm just going to bypass the issue. What concerns me here is players that play one of these addictive games (like, say, WoW) but only casually, one night a week or maybe a few hours a week scattered here and there.

One common thread of discussion in MMO design is the disparity between these two groups. Some players will pour thirty or forty hours a week into a game and others just a handful. How do you keep the second group relevant? One obvious answer is by Slowing Players Down, a solution that can be implemented in numerous ways.

Of course, any attempt to categorize such a range of concepts doesn't really capture the full range of possibilities. Categories are there to help us cope. So don't take my categorization as an attempt to define all possibilities. I'm just categorizing to help explore the range of solutions.

One solution is to cap the amount of progress players can make over a period of time. Another option is to give players distracting time-sinks that might be accomplished offline instead, allowing casual players to catch up to more dedicated players. A third solution I'll explore is to give players resources that replenish in real-time. The non-solution, letting hardcore players outpace their slower fellows, is the foil by which I'll compare the other solutions.

Cap Progress

In China, players are only allowed to play for five hours before their abilities are suddenly decreased in power. Limiting the amount of experience players could gain in a session only limits players levelling up; players in the end-game are also limited if their abilities suddenly don't work any more.

This is a severe encouragement for players to just log off. They might stay online and socialize, but often a major enticement of socialization is the possibility of getting a group together to do something. When that possibility is gone, the only thing left to do is chat. Certainly, some players might continue chatting, but I think this is a mechanism that will catch most players.

Putting a hard time-dependent limit on players abilities is fairly harsh. Generally you want your players to play your game. For an MMO, time investment is the major factor influencing "score" or status within the game. Heavily-invested players continue to play more because they want to maintain and protect that investment. This is a mix of the endowment effect and emotions such as commitment and attachment. When you tell players they have to stop playing, they might realize that they can stop playing -- that maybe they can be doing something else with their time. I found it much easier to stop playing WoW after periods when I was away from home or lost internet connectivity at home. Being frustrated when one wants to play (eg when the servers are down) associates those negative emotions with the game. When the stop rules are arbitrary, the player also grows to resent the developers and the game by association.

That's not to say that you can't get away with it. Tuning the stop rule is tricky, though, and you'll also be pissing off some of your player base.

Ultimately, I consider this solution the default; the cop-out easy solution to take when you can't build anything else into the game to help balance out the disparity between hardcore and casual players.

Time-Sinks

Another simple solution is to make players do something boring and time-consuming to progress. This is like the hard-cap, above, but ... well, soft. ATITD happens to have a number of these time-sinks. The problem here is that dedicated players get stuck doing something boring if they want to progress. Some hours, progress is fun; other hours, progress is boring. Hardcore players decide your game is boring, and then bam! they stop playing altogether and unsubscribe.

The trick is coming up with a time-sink that can be accomplished offline, but yet is still fun. Giving the players the option of pursuing a different advancement track dodges the progress issue. But you effectively bundle two games into one product, which means you need to two games. If hard-core players will be spending as much time on (say) tradeskills as they will doing combat, then tradeskills need to be as deep and interesting as combat is. Making combat sufficiently interesting and balanced to keep players subscribed is hard enough and now you want to make two systems that complicated?

A solution like forcing players to run around, on foot, to continue progressing is punishment. You're better off putting in a hard cap.

Real-Time Resource Replenishment

Eve uses this sort of model: players gain skill points whether they're online or not. Eve's developers CCP have effectively dodged the problem of developing two different games. Most MMORPGs have two major forms of score: assets and experience. ('Assets' includes both gear and gold.) Eve just sunders the XP into its own pool. Players can continue accumulating Isk in Eve while they play online, but if they want to take a break they can log out and know that tomorrow they'll have higher skills available.

WoW itself uses this model somewhat in their rest system, and in fact this problem -- helping casual players to keep up with the hard-core -- was the major reason they introduced it. In WoW, you gain "rest experience" whenever you are logged off. It accumulates fairly slowly; you won't be able to keep pace with your catassing buddies, but gaining XP more quickly when you do have it is refreshing.

ATITD uses this model, somewhat, but it's tied in with the rest of the game being a slow, tortuous death. Am I biased? Do I sound jaded? I think I'll move on.

Travian also uses this model: your resource farms continuously produce more goods according to wall time. Every (e.g.) twenty seconds or so you see one of your resource counts tick up. I've never played Eve, but I've played Travian, and this mechanic seems the best to me for solving this process. Players that excel in Travian pay attention to the costs of infrastructure, resource, and military units, and develop strategies that help them maximize growth. The game isn't about clicking on your town and building new grain farms and iron mines; it's about deciding which one to build first -- or if you should recruit more troops instead.

And there lies the crux of the issue. Whereas the two previous methods were ways of hamstringing and punishing players, here is a mechanic that assumes an equal footing. The even distribution of resources to hardcore and casual players alike levels the field out considerably. There are still ways for the hardcore player to extract more resources from the game but it is nothing like the disparity between WoW catassers and casuals.

Conclusion

If a game allows a player to gain a significant advantage by spending more time online, one can't "fix" that by throwing in a couple hurdles. Nor is it the sort of thing one can throw in at the last minute. A holistic solution is more effective as well as more elegant. In Eve and Travian, the slowdown mechanism is intrinsic to basic gameplay.

One might take issue with slowing down players at all, and that's something I'll tackle at a later time.