Reusing End-Game Content

I read a post on end-game content over at Player Vs Developer and was reminded of a suggestion I made to Blizzard long ago.

There are basically three problems that I'll address in this post: players want new content, they want a variety of content, and devolpers don't want to throw away old effort or see great content go unused.

Quake and CTF

One issue I had with Warsong Gulch (a 10-vs-10 Capture the Flag PvP zone) was that the map got boring. This is one issue with FPS games -- many players like having different maps.

Back when I played Quake, there were a handful of maps that everyone played on, and it was interesting to continue playing on the same map, over and over. I was actually learning new things about the maps after a year of play; specifically, I was learning player behavior. Learning where things are on the map is the first step; then one develops patterns; then one learns what patterns the enemy has; and then a metagame starts where players start trying to deceive their foe about what pattern they are running, etc etc. In Quake, I was learning very specific timing patterns, and how to juke out other players and make them think I was somewhere else. I was counting on my opponent knowing the map so well that I could play against that knowledge.

This is like tennis, or basketball, etc. Everyone plays tennis on the same court, don't they get bored of the same layout game after game? The answer is obviously no; the game isn't about the court, the game is about the other player.

Not so with online games like Quake or Warcraft because most players (especially new or casual players) don't want to become PvP pros. And many other players resent having to learn a map well, and instead just want to win without putting in effort. Don't underestimate your players' arrogance. Many players that suck don't believe it; they blame their losses on bad map balance, or the fact that their opponent knows the map 'too well', or some other lame excuse. Players suck. People suck.

When I played Quake on the LAN at work, I would learn the maps quickly (I'm good like that), or I'd remember the map from online play. I'd grab the rocket launcher and red armor and then start tearing people up -- in part because I also played a lot and was a good player. They'd get frustrated or bored, because to them the interesting bit was the new map, not the game mechanics themselves. They wanted a slot machine, where sometimes they won. They wanted to win; they didn't want to earn the win.

My point is that a great majority of people that will pay for your product want variety, not challenge. Don't force them to play competetive tennis; they want wacky new rules and a roll of the dice.

So am I now just bitching about WSG because I want to see new maps? Not exactly. Quake was played on a handful of maps; WSG only takes place on one map. Every time you want to play Capture-the-Flag (CTF) in WoW, you have to go to WSG. The other PvP maps have different gameplay -- Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm both have a Battlefield/Team Fortress-like base capture mechanic; Alterac Valley is a back-and-forth push to the enemy's base.

My PvP Suggestion

My suggestion to Blizzard was to make more CTF maps, then change the queue mechanism to be somewhat like Arena, so that when someone queued for "WSG", they'd really be queueing for CTF, and sometimes they'd play in Warsong Gulch, sometimes in Netherstorm Gulch, sometimes in Grizzly Gulch, etc.

The major problem with just adding those as separate queues is that it's hard to find players. Now, even with queues spread across an entire battlegroup, sometimes it's hard to find people to play in Alterac Valley. Imagine if there were three times as many PvP queues -- some of those games would never get started! Hence: group several WSG-type maps into one queue. You get more players funnelling into the same queue, and players get to experience a wider variety in online maps. (This is why most Counter-Strike and Team Fortress servers rotate through maps!)

Players Want More Content.

This issue with finding players is also a problem (now that a new expansion has come out) for old end-game content. Who wants to run Scholomance or Kharazan? Those instances are lame! There's level 80 content to do! As much as players want variety, they don't want to do irrelevant content.

Scholomance is old. It takes too long to do all those quests. Once you hit level 61, the content starts becoming trivial, and the rewards for the grind too small. The problem is the same for level 70 instances -- it was hard then to find a group that wanted to do Mechanar, or Arcatraz, or Botanica. There were too many places to go for there to be many people that want to do one specific instance.

One way to fix this is to rebalance Scholomance so that level 80s can do it. They did that with Naxx; it's a fun challenge for 80s and the rewards are appropriate. Yet if they did this to every 60 and 70 instance, it'd be a pain to find a group to do anything. It'd be the problem with Mechanar but far bigger. Especially with the way itemization works -- one person wants to get his hat from here, the next guy needs a pair of pants that drops off a boss there, and once they got their drops they'd never want to do the instance again. It'd be nearly impossible to find someone to do any one specific instance, just because there'd be so few people that want anything that drops from there!

One way to solve that is the token system used at the end of the 60 lifecycle and was fairly widespread in the Burning Crusade world: kill a boss, get a token that can be used by a handful of classes for a number of different armor slots.

Now imagine if you needed Keeper of Time rep for some level 80 gear that you could only get from the Keepers, but that you could get the rep from any of a half-dozen old instances (rebalanced for level 80) and that it also didn't matter at all which one you did. Now you could say "I want to do one of the Caverns of Time", and anyone that wanted Keeper rep could do it. It used to be that people wanted (say) Durnholde specifically because that's where their item dropped. What if their item dropped from all of those instances instead of just one boss in just one instance?

Now everyone could do Caverns of Time again. The developers could re-use end-game content, and players would have a wider variety of options for where to go. The developers could add in one or two new CoT instances, and maybe redo one of the old ones, and everyone (new and old players alike, ancient characters and brand new alts) would have a much wider variety of content to choose from. A group of five players could choose which instance they enjoy rather than which instance that itemization forces them to pick. Players would be far more likely to be able to play a new instance, instead of feeling forced to go do the same instance over again.

The downside to this, of course, is that maybe players are bored of the Caverns -- especially those that were playing before BC came out and have been playing since. I have a hard time believing that Bliz couldn't just redo each of those levels. Seriously. They're making billions of dollars a year on the game. And they could reset KoT rep to Revered, or maybe add something past Exalted, or add a new faction that automatically becomes Revered 0/21000 if the were Exalted before, etc etc, so players would have a reason to go back.

Players want new content. Players want varied content. Developers don't want to develop content, and then effectively throw it away because no-one is doing it any more.

The easiest thing to fix, really, is throwing away content. They removed Old Naxx from the game. They could remove Old Scholomance and who would know or care? Spending the money to develop New Scholomance would be trivial to them, it would be new content even to old players, and (with sufficient itemization eg through tokens) would give players a broader set of dungeons to explore, instead of hitting Kara week after week after week after week after zzzz....

Social Dynamics in Travian

Travian is a browser-based MMO. I've mentioned it a few times before. The game is a cross between Risk and SimCity. You construct buildings and improve them, train troops, and go wage war. Players have villages that spawn on the big grid, which ranges from -400 to +400 in both X (east-west) and Y (north-south). There are roughly 20,000 people on each server; right now, there's around 12,000 people that have been active on my server in the past week.

Only one person can win, but that win is really for his alliance. And, since alliances are limited to 60 people, his confederation (which is a group of alliances; there is some in-game support for confeds). After a server runs for about 10 months, an NPC race show up. You (and your alliance) beat them up, get plans for a new building type, then you up that building to level 100 (whereas 20 is the max for most building types).

Out of those 12,000 active players, roughly 120 will be said to win. That's 1%. What are the other 99% doing?

Usually alliances in the game divide up into the quadrants -- to the northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest of the origin. That's four confederations, one per quadrant. Those confederations might be two or three multi-wing alliances, so generously about 1,500 people are in the running to win. That still leaves over 10,000 people that are actively playing and not likely to win.

And let me qualify that 'likely to win' bit. Prices in the game are exponential -- a level 2 building is 29% more expensive than level 1, level 3 is 29% more expensive still, and so on. A player with all level 20 buildings is 29% more powerful than one with all level 19 buildings, and nearly thirteen times (1278%) more powerful than one with all level 10 buildings. If you're not up there at the top, you have no chance to compete.

The players in alliances outside of the top 4 have 0% chance to win. I haven't chased down who has won each game; I'm don't even know that it's recorded anywhere useful. But once you drop off the top dozen alliances, power drops considerably. Number 20 is 1/3rd the size of #1, number 40 is half of #20, and the 60th alliance is an order of magnitude smaller than the top dog.

So what do you do? Or, what do I do? If I'm not in one of the top few alliances, then I'm just ... having fun? Not winning, that's for sure. So why play? Why do other people play?

Judging from the forums, the two main reasons people play this game are (1) they're stay-at-home moms, or (2) they got beat up a lot when they were kids.

#1 is somewhat related to my previous post about who has time to play games that require you to log in frequently -- kids, college students, and the unemployed. Stay-at-home parents are kinda like the unemployed. And those are the people that play. Kids (and college students) are still coming to grips with being beaten up a lot; Travian is a great outlet. Someone pisses you off? Destroy their village and everything they've spent months working on! Hah!

It's a war game, though. Some people lose.

It's funny to see how some people respond to being attacked. A good many don't realize the "war" aspect of the game. And it also seems the developers want to hide that part, too. Not a lot of stay-at-home moms like getting their village destroyed by 12-year-old kids. The solution seems to be "don't tell them that happens," then just hope they don't find out. It's not like every mom gets her village 0-popped. When 12-year-olds gets attacked, whether it's a full-on assault or just a small raid, some of them respond with vitriol characteristic of someone that's just learned some new swear-words and has the freedom to act outside of parental control. More mature

What should someone in this game do when they are attacked? I think a better question is: should you be attacking your neighbors?

There are two reasons to attack another play - (1) to steal some of their resources, called "raiding" in the game, and (2) to destroy some of their buildings and/or kill off their troops. In the late-game, when alliances are competing to finish a world wonder, slowing down your competition is as important as building your own wonder faster. Before that, though, the primary reason to send troops at another player is to steal their resources. A corollary here is to prevent other players from stealing resources, so you attack them to kill off their troops and their ability to train troops.

Stealing resources is a plentiful source of resources. You can easily double your hourly production, and (if you focus heavily on troop-building) gain considerably more from raiding than from you produce through your crops. A maxed-out village will produce over 5000 resources an hour, but can support a couple thousand troops -- which themselves can produce 10,000 resources an hour. Some villages can support 5000 troops, and if that type of village is your capital, it can support up to 180,000 troops. Raiding is big business.

But let's look at this at a meta-level. Either you steal resources from someone else, or they use them themselves. If they use their own resources, they can upgrade their own buildings. The game is fairly balanced, such that each upgrade provides roughly the same return. There's a slight negative bias, such that upgrading a low-level resource gives a bigger ROI than a higher-level resources. Hence, "the universe" produces more resources if you let a low-level farm improve himself. Raiding transfers wealth from an efficient producer to an inefficient producer.

But, because of attacks and raids that prevent a player from building anything, a great many people stop playing. Inactive players are a great source of resources -- they aren't using it. And that's a legitimate reason to farm them; a low-level but inactive user is wasting resources. Anything he produces over his warehouse's ability to store it is just thrown away.

So why 0-pop someone? It removes a source of resources from the game.

Thinking about all this suggests, to me, that the strongest way for an alliance to win is to have a bunch of active players building a bunch of villages, raiding inactive players, and suppressing their foes. Raiding active players, if they're not competing with you for resources, seems to be pointless. And if they are competing with you, then allying with them is a better use of resources than throwing away troops on attacking them.

So why not ally with everyone in your quadrant? That seems like the strongest way for your quadrant to win.

And now we get to "your quadrant." Do you really care who wins? Isn't choosing to root on your quadrant just tribalism? "My quadrant is better than your quadrant!" The other 2,999 active players in your quadrant aren't your friends and relatives. They're a bunch of strangers, half of them 12-year-olds (at least in mind).

So let's come back to why to play this game. If you're competent and active, being big enough to get into one of the confederacies-that-has-a-chance-of-winning isn't difficult. If you're not the sort of person that tortures small animals and snaps at anyone that talks to you, you shouldn't have difficulty getting into those alliances. A little bit of diplomacy and a little bit of activity and presto you're in.

So if you've read this far, you, too, have a shot of winning a Travian game. But why play Travian?

Why play any game? Because it's fun, for a chance to socialize, to build up a cool little city, to compete against other players at a game with well-defined rules, for a chance to take out your aggressions on small forest creatures^H^H^H on other players.

But why attack other active players? Isn't that just griefing? I'll explore griefing in a future post.