I'm coding again, and somehow that also means doing "research" - playing new games for a bit. A friend suggested I check out Lord of Ultima, since I like Ultima and also played Travian for a year. I also wound up playing some Facebook games, and checking out some of the other online, browser-based RTS games, including Ikariam and Nile Online. I've played Evony before, and I checked into a few other real-time strategy multiplayer browser-based games, like NationStates and Monopoly City Streets.
I've got a few major complaints against these games. The time element tends to suck in these games. The facebook games are spam-based. Help and tutorials tend to be abysmal, and goals are rarely well defined. Tack on some obsessive play-to-pay rules and I don't wonder that they're not all making bank.
Time Element
The worst sin is the time element; you can't log in and play. Log in, hang out for a bit, watch, scroll around the map, contemplate your navel - then 10 minutes later you make a move. Great! Now wait another 10 minutes before you can move again. Most people play games because they want to play games; stuff like Lord of Ultima and Travian both are centered around a mechanic where you can't make any moves for hours. I'm on my fourth day of LoU and I have to tell myself not to play, because it's a waste of time. Come back in three hours.
Nile Online does this a bit worse, because the first thing you do is stare at the map trying to figure out wtf is going on. I'll get to that later, but when you finally do read the primer, it's basically "click some stuff for about 3-4 minutes, then go get caffeine. Come back in 20 minutes cuz you won't be able to do shit for 20 minutes." You read about it, looks like fun, sign up, play for 5 minutes -- then you're done. Quit. Go do something else now, please!
They like to compare themselves to a garden or other sort of tend-it-here-and-there activity. But if you wanted to, you could go out to your garden and weed & plant & water & fertilize & fence for hours, for a whole day. And if you run out of stuff, it's easy to leave for a day, because it's not a game. You can't really tend a real garden every 10 minutes, but these virtual gardens want you to do just that. Games are fun, and can be addictive - but an addiction that you can't feed is lame. Stupid. Why do you make me hate you?
The thing to do is to log in and chat with your buddies, possibly spending your evenings chatting - while occasionally making a move or two. That's what I did in Travian, and that game did tons of things right to make such socializing possible. Coordinating with other players is a big part of the game, and it's easy to make friends there. The stuff you have to do can be done in batches, once or twice a day, so it's easy to log in and putter around for a couple hours, chatting while you wait. Raiding, especially, is something that you can kind-of-actively do: send out some raids, wait twenty minutes for them to come back and chat while you wait. Poke around your other villages.
It sucks if you're lonely. One thing WoW did very right was to allow solo gameplay. Want to log in and play for a bit? Sure! There's quests, farming, crafting, the auction house - tons of stuff to do. If you're not max level, questing solo is cake! The game is made for it. These browser-based games? Bzz! Sorry, you're not wanted! Give your money to someone else, please.
spam
Facebook games are a bit better in the time-wasting department. They can be played in 20-30 minute chunks, then you run out of energy or mana or whatever. That's a great model; 20-30 minutes of constant fun, no waiting, and then a clear indicator that I should go do something else for four hours.
Nile Online was offensive with its 5 minutes of initial gameplay. After playing it for a week, I'm a bit more at ease with the 5-minutes-here, 5-minutes-there model, but it's not really a game. It feels like the tend-me-occasionally garden that it wants to be - but it's not really a garden. Guh. I'm not really drawn into that gameplay model. Maybe you'd like it, there's others out there that seem to like it, but I think my time with that game is over. Not my cup of tea, but at least I'm not saying it's a cup of piss.
Anyway, back to spam.
The big downside to the facebook games is that they're asking me to spam all my friends with a half-dozen or more posts in my 30-minute play session. Optimum play requires being one of those boring jerks that spams all their friends with crap. And I'm not going to be that guy; most of my facebook friends don't play these games. I'm not going to crap on their wall with what are, effectively, ads. Multiple times a day. In sets of 5+ posts.
Which doesn't address the fact that all of the facebook games I've tried so far are slot machines. I ranted a bit about that when I talked about designing fun, so I'll leave it alone for today. A slot machine that asks me to piss off my friends? Fuck you.
Help and Tutorials
Mostly these games seem to be built by companies that get the idea to clone someone else's popular game, shove it out the door, then start collecting money. Game design? We've got artists to make the pixels, that's game design, right?
Tutorials are essential in complex games. They're a way of taking what can be a forbidding mess and make it appealing to new players. Another alternative is to start with a simple, obvious game and gradually add complexity to it. One of my favorite city-building games, the Settlers series, does this great. It's the gameplan for PC-based RTS games: start the player off with a few tools, let him learn to use them through the play of a scenario, then add another tool or two in the second scenario. Somehow the makers of all these browser-games never learned that lesson, or didn't bother to apply it. They throw every single tool at you in the first five minutes. Confusing = lost = bored = quit = zero revenue. Negative revenue, after including the costs of hosting that player's little play session.
Nile Online has a Primer, not an in-game tutorial. It got me started, but it didn't mention the heart of the game: upgrade stuff, balance your workers, and upgrade your palace to get more workers. That's its core gameplay. Yeah, sure, you eventually choose a specialty good and make your mark in the world that way - but that's not what you do.
Games should explain what you do as well as what you strive for. They tend, generally, to put the shine on the game's goals, how the game can be fun, but don't teach players how to play the game. That's a great way to lose players! Someone went through the work and commitment to try your game out, create an account, and start playing - keep them playing! Show them the light!
Some of the games do have good tutorials, not all are necessarily bad. The worst documentation is reserved for the goals (see next section), but I wanted to split that out so I could talk about it more. Travian, Lord of Ultima, and Ikeriam all have decent tutorial/quest chains that get you started. They don't tell you where you're going, but they do tell you how to look busy.
Goals
Some games define their goals well (like Nile Online), others have good tutorials. The most popular games, though, feel like time-wasters because they don't explain their goals. Lord of Ultima seems to be grossly negligent in this way, mostly because it doesn't actually have a goal. The "goal", if any, is to "win" the game - apparently by being Rank 1 when it ends. Maybe it doesn't end? Maybe the server keeps going? Who knows? They apparently don't. So why are you playing?
"To have fun!" Ugh. These aren't games, they're toys - but competitive toys. Someone can come into your sandbox and kick over all your castles. That's one reason why people hate Travian and quit. It markets itself as a sort of multiplayer sim-city, but that's not what it is at all. That's a fucking lie. It's a competitive game. The goal is to help your alliance build up enough members, cities, armies, and allies to grab some plans, build a world wonder, and defend it against the other alliances. It's a team game! It's a fun team game! (One that just happens to have really bad time-demand issues.) Travian really should push what it's about. It doesn't. It does something really well, and they should brag about it. That's what I mean by goals: tell everybody what their goal is! Tell them how they, too, can be great!
"Do whatever you want!" I don't want to do whatever. I'm looking for a game - something with a goal, a way to win. What's your way to win? Nile Online does this somewhat well; it doesn't have a "win" condition per se, but it does lay out the promise of being a notable player. Everyone in the game has their own specialty; everyone can be special. That's a great promise, especially since everyone wants to be special and well-known.
To be clear: I'm saying it's a bad thing to refuse to specify goals. There's games, then there's toys - sandboxes. Trying to do both tends to piss off players; doing both well is extremely difficult, such that I seriously recommend not trying. Especially if you're gonna half-ass your way through the design process. Lord of Ultima is kinda bizarre in this respect, until you figure out what must have happened. Some suit must have said "Travian is popular, Ultima is IP that we want to make money from, throw a bunch of money at this!" They then refused to hire an experienced designer (or to listen to the one they hired) and built a pile of shit.
Play-to-pay
The idea of microtransactions is to give players some cool little doodad that they can buy with just a wee bit of money. Make it optional, so that people can still play your game for free (or cheap), but allow the guys willing to spend money a chance to set themselves apart.
Travian does this well. For about $5 a month, you can double your monthly growth. You only buy a small percent increase in production, but because the game basically runs on compounded growth, a small percent each day translates into integer multiples in strength each month. But if you don't pay, you can still contribute to your team's success. Plus, by spending a bit more over that, you can jump around a bunch of other restrictions.
The last is probably the worst microtransaction model. You don't want to make gameplay annoying, and then offer to make it less annoying for a small fee. The correct response by a player to that offer is "fuck you, I'm gonna go play a different game." This is one reason why WoW has gradually reduced the level when you get horses. Travel is a pain in WoW. At low levels, it doesn't matter too much because everything you do is right there. But at some point, you have "enough to do" in the game world that you want to travel further - and getting there by foot sucks.
But browser games often commit worse microtransaction sins. The thing you buy with money is the actual game itself. The facebook games I've tried are all like this. The game that you play for free is a slot machine version of Progress Quest: pull the handle, get your chips, and brag to all you friends about how many times you pulled the handle. (WoW is kinda this game, in that you get to brag about your level, but there's strategy to killing mobs; it's not just a button-press.)
Alternately, a player can spend $50 and get a sandcastle where they can build a cool little diorama to show to their friends! Now that sounds like fun. Give me some cool diorama parts, let me find (or better yet, quest for) some rare parts, and let me create something cool. Plus, show me other people's cool dioramas, so that I can be encouraged and inspired to create my own!
but wait! You gotta pay for that!
Ugh. It's bait-n-switch. It looks like a treasure-hunting game, or a farm sim, or somesuch - but it's actually a very expensive dollhouse. Why not just get rid of the slot machine? Or, better yet, let me choose to go questing for the parts I want? And replace the 'slot machine' with something that requires strategy?
-conclusion-
Yeah, in conclusion: that last paragraph. I don't mind microtransactions. Some games, I am willing to pay a bit to be stronger, to get something cool. Others are diversions I don't enjoy enough to pay for - which really means they're sucky games.
A cool browser game would be one that's (1) not a slot machine, but requires some strategy in its play, (2) allows players to specialize the way in which they're awesome, and (3) lets me play in meaty chunks. Tell me (4) how to play, and (5) what my goal is.
Game audiences are a stochastic thing. Some people are willing to pay for the diorama. Others get caught up in building their little world and don't mind paying a bit extra for it. Others have addictive personalities and get sucked in by slot machines. And others are too stupid to realize that there are better games out there.
Like WoW. Bye, Treasure Isle / Lord of Ultima / Nile Online, time for me to start getting ready for Cataclysm.
Showing posts with label travian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travian. Show all posts
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Friday, April 10, 2009
Noobs and Information
Many games have large noob populations, and they suck. Dealing with noobs is a pain. They don't know what they're doing, they don't know what to ask, and they're asking all the wrong people in the wrong places.
I think the same thing happens in many domains, not just in online games.
The problem is that the noobs have no information. Games with strong documentation and community features reduce their noob load; games where information is spread out among third-party sources and where game mechanics are not explained by the developer have much higher noob loads.
Warcraft has extensive online documentation, but they still have a high noob load. 'Preventing' noobs requires addressing the needs of the noobs, not the needs of the marketing department. Keeping players interested, getting them to come back, giving them something to look forward to -- these are all great. But it's not what noobs need.
Travian has crappy documentation. There's a lot of different info sites, but many of them are paltry. They focus on a few of the major concepts in the game, and although often broad and deep, are broad and deep in the wrong places.
Single-player games tend to not have noobs. Single-player games tend to require that they explain themselves to new players or else players just stop playing. I've played a number of 'innovative' single-player console and PC games that just didn't make sense. Although these games hint at depth and complexity and something fun, they hide it. And if I can't find it, the game gets returned and I don't recommend it. And I expect they get bad reviews, too.
What noobs need is direction. They need to know how the game scores them. They want to know the roles that they are expected to take. They want to know the consquences of their actions, before they take them. They want a place to go for this information, plus a forum lively enough where they can ask obscure questions.
Direction
Single-player games tend to have scores or mission directives that communicate to players what it is that they're trying to accomplish. Warcraft is fairly open, yet there are a few major goals: get to the level cap (80), accumulate gear, and work through the hardest dungeons. A more subtle point is the things that they should look out for along the way; some guidance on which goals are worthwhile. Many mid-level players worry about gear, spending hours and days getting just the right piece. Then they out-level it a few days later.
Travian takes pride in its opaqueness, supposedly because it gives players 'freedom' to choose their own path. Yet there are a few paths that are extremely useful to the over-arching goal of winning the game. Winning the game is something that's done by an alliance, not by a solo player, or one player that happens to be in an alliance with some friends. It requires the cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds, of players. There are a few strong roles that players can take, as well as some rules for how to be most effective. Yet the publishers don't do any of that; they leave it up to players to discover all of that on their own.
The discovery process can be fun, but there's two important concepts that limit where a game designer should put discovery: consequence (see below) and direction. If a player first has to figure out where he's going, then he's not discovering the game world, or developing strategy; he's figuring out what the user manual would look like, if the user manual had something more constructive than a simple list of all the units in the game and their cost.
Roles
Role is related to Direction. Whereas Direction shows the player what they have to do to win (what obstacles they have to overcome), Role is the set of tools that the player has available to do it.
A Priest in World of Warcraft knows about the spells that he can cast, but a good role is a bit more than "cast these three spells over and over." In a raid, a healer can stay focused on one target, heal several targets, look over a whole bunch of people and top them off -- or stick to some of the utility spells that they have.
Over a career levelling a priest, that player might go Holy (and heal in groups), Shadow (and focus on damage and mana generation), or Discipline (for... PvP?). Ignoring the accuracy of those descriptions, these are ways of telling new players: if you choose this class, you will have these roles that you fit into.
In Travian, roles could be as a Defender, Hammer, or Feeder; one might work solo or in a group. There's an infinite variety of combinations, obviously -- yet there are no general guidelines. Travian noobs wonder what they should be focused on. They try to do all things, without picking a role. They want to be offensive, but don't know how that plays out over a year. It's very frustrating to spend a lot of time on a game building a character (as in WoW) or a bunch of villages (as in Travian) to find out that you made fundamental mistakes early on, and that your current effectiveness is gimped because of it.
Giving new players guidance on the Role that they'll play can help players get started on the road to contributing during a game, rather than observing. Links to discussions will help them understand how other players feel about that role, letting new players find their sweet spot that much faster.
Score
Score defines direction. Score tells players how they win. It gives them feedback, and it's through feedback that players learn to play better. I don't like mashing buttons; winning for random reasons is not an achievement. Score tells me if I mashed the right buttons, so that I can see patterns in the game, start developing a strategy, start discovering the game world, meeting new people, and then killing them.
Open games sometimes have visible 'score' charts that measure inconsequential things. Statistics can be fun to browse; some people like that. I often do. But if you give everybody a useless metric (but one easy to manipulate), many will shoot to maximize that metric, even if it is a detriment to their play experience. If you put up a score-board but that score-board only applies to some players, or is completely irrelevant to the rest, you misdirect your players.
Travian shows village population for all the players. This is the major score rank in the game, since it's something that everyone has and it's relatively easy to see. Yet it, ultimately, isn't a strong measure of performance. But that's a problem with team games; how do you measure 'performance' when so much of the contribution one makes is building social networks, establishing trust, etc?
For vague, open games like travian, maybe the best way to communicate 'score' to players is to give them an overview of previous rounds. Show them the target, and how they measure progress, and then what last round's measuring stick looked like. They might choose a different metric, but at least with this kind of guidance they can make an informed assessment about how well they are proceeding.
Consquences
This was one big problem in many MMORPGs: players were 'free' to destroy their characters, spending hundreds of hours building a character that was sub-par. I remember putting points into Charisma in Dark Age of Camelot. As a Cleric. It did nothing for my character; they were wasted points. The 'freedom' to distribute points as I felt wasn't backed with enough information to make a good choice (unless I had been playing the game through to the end-game already, which didn't even exist when the game first shipped). Further, my choice was hard-locked; it could never be changed. This was a combination of asking players to make choices without sufficient information and then penalizing them, for the rest of their online career, for the wrong choices.
I think the same thing happens in many domains, not just in online games.
The problem is that the noobs have no information. Games with strong documentation and community features reduce their noob load; games where information is spread out among third-party sources and where game mechanics are not explained by the developer have much higher noob loads.
Warcraft has extensive online documentation, but they still have a high noob load. 'Preventing' noobs requires addressing the needs of the noobs, not the needs of the marketing department. Keeping players interested, getting them to come back, giving them something to look forward to -- these are all great. But it's not what noobs need.
Travian has crappy documentation. There's a lot of different info sites, but many of them are paltry. They focus on a few of the major concepts in the game, and although often broad and deep, are broad and deep in the wrong places.
Single-player games tend to not have noobs. Single-player games tend to require that they explain themselves to new players or else players just stop playing. I've played a number of 'innovative' single-player console and PC games that just didn't make sense. Although these games hint at depth and complexity and something fun, they hide it. And if I can't find it, the game gets returned and I don't recommend it. And I expect they get bad reviews, too.
What noobs need is direction. They need to know how the game scores them. They want to know the roles that they are expected to take. They want to know the consquences of their actions, before they take them. They want a place to go for this information, plus a forum lively enough where they can ask obscure questions.
Direction
Single-player games tend to have scores or mission directives that communicate to players what it is that they're trying to accomplish. Warcraft is fairly open, yet there are a few major goals: get to the level cap (80), accumulate gear, and work through the hardest dungeons. A more subtle point is the things that they should look out for along the way; some guidance on which goals are worthwhile. Many mid-level players worry about gear, spending hours and days getting just the right piece. Then they out-level it a few days later.
Travian takes pride in its opaqueness, supposedly because it gives players 'freedom' to choose their own path. Yet there are a few paths that are extremely useful to the over-arching goal of winning the game. Winning the game is something that's done by an alliance, not by a solo player, or one player that happens to be in an alliance with some friends. It requires the cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds, of players. There are a few strong roles that players can take, as well as some rules for how to be most effective. Yet the publishers don't do any of that; they leave it up to players to discover all of that on their own.
The discovery process can be fun, but there's two important concepts that limit where a game designer should put discovery: consequence (see below) and direction. If a player first has to figure out where he's going, then he's not discovering the game world, or developing strategy; he's figuring out what the user manual would look like, if the user manual had something more constructive than a simple list of all the units in the game and their cost.
Roles
Role is related to Direction. Whereas Direction shows the player what they have to do to win (what obstacles they have to overcome), Role is the set of tools that the player has available to do it.
A Priest in World of Warcraft knows about the spells that he can cast, but a good role is a bit more than "cast these three spells over and over." In a raid, a healer can stay focused on one target, heal several targets, look over a whole bunch of people and top them off -- or stick to some of the utility spells that they have.
Over a career levelling a priest, that player might go Holy (and heal in groups), Shadow (and focus on damage and mana generation), or Discipline (for... PvP?). Ignoring the accuracy of those descriptions, these are ways of telling new players: if you choose this class, you will have these roles that you fit into.
In Travian, roles could be as a Defender, Hammer, or Feeder; one might work solo or in a group. There's an infinite variety of combinations, obviously -- yet there are no general guidelines. Travian noobs wonder what they should be focused on. They try to do all things, without picking a role. They want to be offensive, but don't know how that plays out over a year. It's very frustrating to spend a lot of time on a game building a character (as in WoW) or a bunch of villages (as in Travian) to find out that you made fundamental mistakes early on, and that your current effectiveness is gimped because of it.
Giving new players guidance on the Role that they'll play can help players get started on the road to contributing during a game, rather than observing. Links to discussions will help them understand how other players feel about that role, letting new players find their sweet spot that much faster.
Score
Score defines direction. Score tells players how they win. It gives them feedback, and it's through feedback that players learn to play better. I don't like mashing buttons; winning for random reasons is not an achievement. Score tells me if I mashed the right buttons, so that I can see patterns in the game, start developing a strategy, start discovering the game world, meeting new people, and then killing them.
Open games sometimes have visible 'score' charts that measure inconsequential things. Statistics can be fun to browse; some people like that. I often do. But if you give everybody a useless metric (but one easy to manipulate), many will shoot to maximize that metric, even if it is a detriment to their play experience. If you put up a score-board but that score-board only applies to some players, or is completely irrelevant to the rest, you misdirect your players.
Travian shows village population for all the players. This is the major score rank in the game, since it's something that everyone has and it's relatively easy to see. Yet it, ultimately, isn't a strong measure of performance. But that's a problem with team games; how do you measure 'performance' when so much of the contribution one makes is building social networks, establishing trust, etc?
For vague, open games like travian, maybe the best way to communicate 'score' to players is to give them an overview of previous rounds. Show them the target, and how they measure progress, and then what last round's measuring stick looked like. They might choose a different metric, but at least with this kind of guidance they can make an informed assessment about how well they are proceeding.
Consquences
This was one big problem in many MMORPGs: players were 'free' to destroy their characters, spending hundreds of hours building a character that was sub-par. I remember putting points into Charisma in Dark Age of Camelot. As a Cleric. It did nothing for my character; they were wasted points. The 'freedom' to distribute points as I felt wasn't backed with enough information to make a good choice (unless I had been playing the game through to the end-game already, which didn't even exist when the game first shipped). Further, my choice was hard-locked; it could never be changed. This was a combination of asking players to make choices without sufficient information and then penalizing them, for the rest of their online career, for the wrong choices.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Power is Power
or, On Information Management as a Game Mechanism
Power is Power.
or
Power¹ is³ Power².
Power¹ is the ability to express complex ideas. Power² is power -- buying power, the power of command, the ability to get more done. What does "is" mean? Well, see, it means "is." Try to keep up here.
I'm still playing Travian. As part of playing the game, I've developed a complex information-management system that lets me assess what's going on in the game world and perform actions in a fast, efficient manner.
Specifically, I've created a map of all the other players in a 21x21 grid centered on my village. Once a day, I copy that map (it's text in a monospace font) and update all the population numbers. This lets me assess who is growing and who isn't. Also, I add in markers indicating the race of the player at that village, what guild they're in, if they're still in Beginner's Protection (and therefore can't be attacked), and, if I have already attacked them, whether it was a profitable raid.
Good players in Travian have a city that is constantly growing in population. It's how you get more power (military power, in this game). Hence, it's important to assess how strong my neighbors are. If they're not growing quickly, then they're weak players. If they're not growing at all, then they're inactive and I can then raid them with impunity. If they're growing quickly and allied, then I definitely stay away.
It took me the two weeks that I've been playing the game to move to my current system. It'll probably be tweaked further. I started with a post-it note, with the populations of the villages around me; I was basically only indicating which villages were active (by hilighting the population with, um, a hilighter). Then I switched to a text file. Then I made the map larger -- it grew from 7x7 to 11x11 to 36x48 and then shrunk to 15x15 (with two lines of 8 characters per village) and now to its current 21x21, five characters-per-village format. The width fits just fine on my monitor, allowing me to have the game open in one window and the text editor open next to it, with no overlap.
Basically the process I went through was to record different statistics and find out which were important to me. I was also subtly tweaking how I was storing and representing the information to make it easy and effective to use.
And all along, I thought, "why doesn't the game give me this information already?" This is precisely the sort of thing that a computer program would excel at.
I don't really need all this extensive record-keeping. (What does "need" mean, anyway?) (And I haven't mentioned the spreadsheet that tells me who to attack next, either.) Luckily, it doesn't take long to manage. It's unlikely that past winners and other successful players keep these kinds of records. At one point I was playing four games, though, and in that case these sorts of records are essential. But if you're only playing one game, chances are you can memorize what's going on around you without much effort.
The nice thing about records is that you don't have to memorize anything, and places where your memory might be fuzzy -- well, you don't have to worry about that. You've got the hard copy to tell you what's what.
But what if the game tracked all this stuff for me? Then I wouldn't even have to bother. And other players would know, also, if the players around them were inactive, or growing slowly, and what race they were (at a glance, without requiring bouncing through a few pages), and if they were under BP (without requiring bouncing through many pages), and how many other local players were in the same guild, and at a glance where all the big-pop cities were.
What if the game gave that information to everybody? I'd have a much harder time extracting profits from my inactive neighbors; everyone else would know about them. My opponents would make fewer mistakes, increasing the challenge. The game would shift from being one of good information management plus some basic strategy to being almost all strategy. I'm reminded of Costikyan's comments on Campaigns for North Africa: the game accurately simulates matters such as where individual pilots are and how much water each battalion has, but who cares about that stuff? Generals have staff that worry about that stuff. Strategy is hard enough without also having to micromanage pilots and water.
Some games, generally PC sims, wargames, and the like, depend to some extent on making the player manage these resources. It's busy-work. It keeps the player busy, thinking he's doing something meaningful (and, indeed, if he botches it, his troops die). But it's not a great challenge; it's a puzzle within the larger game. It doesn't lend color to the atmosphere of the game and often also has no effect on the outcome of the game -- unless you fail at the sub-task.
I think a hodge-podge of activities can work. I really enjoy Transport Tycoon, even after all these years and despite it's toy-ness, because the collection of activities in the game fit the theme of building transportation infrastructure. The game isn't really about building an empire; that's something that happens while you play the infrastructure-building game.
This is a perspective that should help you hone your game. If all of your gameplay is related to things that the Chairman of the Board would never bother with, then don't make your player take on the role of Chairman. He's the Chief Engineer, or Architect, or what have you. The chairman plays with toys -- he sets his own goals. If you decided to make a game, make the player's role match. If the gameplay fits the player as an Architect rather than Chairman, then maybe your product would work better as a game rather than as a toy.
Sim City is definitely a toy. In later versions, you micromanage stuff like water distribution, and to some extent playing around with the transportation network was Architect-y, but the gist of the game -- zone and wait -- is a toy. It's like a giant ant farm. Set some parameters and watch it go. If you wanted to take that product and make it a game, I think the mechanics would have to change a lot. When you want to give the player goals, you also need to give him ways of achieving those goals, and the more direct the better.
If Travian made all my record-keeping obsolete, I think it would change the flavor of the game. Diplomacy would be a much more obvious aspect. With stiffer competition for farms, keeping farms alive and eventually bringing them in-house would be more important. Wars would be fought over inactives, since everyone would know what pieces were in play. Mechanics would have to shift to emphasize strategy, or else it becomes pure diplomacy. Or maybe diplomacy would be the major goal!
Is your product a toy or a game? Is your player an architect or a chairman?
Power is Power.
or
Power¹ is³ Power².
Power¹ is the ability to express complex ideas. Power² is power -- buying power, the power of command, the ability to get more done. What does "is" mean? Well, see, it means "is." Try to keep up here.
I'm still playing Travian. As part of playing the game, I've developed a complex information-management system that lets me assess what's going on in the game world and perform actions in a fast, efficient manner.
Specifically, I've created a map of all the other players in a 21x21 grid centered on my village. Once a day, I copy that map (it's text in a monospace font) and update all the population numbers. This lets me assess who is growing and who isn't. Also, I add in markers indicating the race of the player at that village, what guild they're in, if they're still in Beginner's Protection (and therefore can't be attacked), and, if I have already attacked them, whether it was a profitable raid.
Good players in Travian have a city that is constantly growing in population. It's how you get more power (military power, in this game). Hence, it's important to assess how strong my neighbors are. If they're not growing quickly, then they're weak players. If they're not growing at all, then they're inactive and I can then raid them with impunity. If they're growing quickly and allied, then I definitely stay away.
It took me the two weeks that I've been playing the game to move to my current system. It'll probably be tweaked further. I started with a post-it note, with the populations of the villages around me; I was basically only indicating which villages were active (by hilighting the population with, um, a hilighter). Then I switched to a text file. Then I made the map larger -- it grew from 7x7 to 11x11 to 36x48 and then shrunk to 15x15 (with two lines of 8 characters per village) and now to its current 21x21, five characters-per-village format. The width fits just fine on my monitor, allowing me to have the game open in one window and the text editor open next to it, with no overlap.
Basically the process I went through was to record different statistics and find out which were important to me. I was also subtly tweaking how I was storing and representing the information to make it easy and effective to use.
And all along, I thought, "why doesn't the game give me this information already?" This is precisely the sort of thing that a computer program would excel at.
I don't really need all this extensive record-keeping. (What does "need" mean, anyway?) (And I haven't mentioned the spreadsheet that tells me who to attack next, either.) Luckily, it doesn't take long to manage. It's unlikely that past winners and other successful players keep these kinds of records. At one point I was playing four games, though, and in that case these sorts of records are essential. But if you're only playing one game, chances are you can memorize what's going on around you without much effort.
The nice thing about records is that you don't have to memorize anything, and places where your memory might be fuzzy -- well, you don't have to worry about that. You've got the hard copy to tell you what's what.
But what if the game tracked all this stuff for me? Then I wouldn't even have to bother. And other players would know, also, if the players around them were inactive, or growing slowly, and what race they were (at a glance, without requiring bouncing through a few pages), and if they were under BP (without requiring bouncing through many pages), and how many other local players were in the same guild, and at a glance where all the big-pop cities were.
What if the game gave that information to everybody? I'd have a much harder time extracting profits from my inactive neighbors; everyone else would know about them. My opponents would make fewer mistakes, increasing the challenge. The game would shift from being one of good information management plus some basic strategy to being almost all strategy. I'm reminded of Costikyan's comments on Campaigns for North Africa: the game accurately simulates matters such as where individual pilots are and how much water each battalion has, but who cares about that stuff? Generals have staff that worry about that stuff. Strategy is hard enough without also having to micromanage pilots and water.
Some games, generally PC sims, wargames, and the like, depend to some extent on making the player manage these resources. It's busy-work. It keeps the player busy, thinking he's doing something meaningful (and, indeed, if he botches it, his troops die). But it's not a great challenge; it's a puzzle within the larger game. It doesn't lend color to the atmosphere of the game and often also has no effect on the outcome of the game -- unless you fail at the sub-task.
I think a hodge-podge of activities can work. I really enjoy Transport Tycoon, even after all these years and despite it's toy-ness, because the collection of activities in the game fit the theme of building transportation infrastructure. The game isn't really about building an empire; that's something that happens while you play the infrastructure-building game.
This is a perspective that should help you hone your game. If all of your gameplay is related to things that the Chairman of the Board would never bother with, then don't make your player take on the role of Chairman. He's the Chief Engineer, or Architect, or what have you. The chairman plays with toys -- he sets his own goals. If you decided to make a game, make the player's role match. If the gameplay fits the player as an Architect rather than Chairman, then maybe your product would work better as a game rather than as a toy.
Sim City is definitely a toy. In later versions, you micromanage stuff like water distribution, and to some extent playing around with the transportation network was Architect-y, but the gist of the game -- zone and wait -- is a toy. It's like a giant ant farm. Set some parameters and watch it go. If you wanted to take that product and make it a game, I think the mechanics would have to change a lot. When you want to give the player goals, you also need to give him ways of achieving those goals, and the more direct the better.
If Travian made all my record-keeping obsolete, I think it would change the flavor of the game. Diplomacy would be a much more obvious aspect. With stiffer competition for farms, keeping farms alive and eventually bringing them in-house would be more important. Wars would be fought over inactives, since everyone would know what pieces were in play. Mechanics would have to shift to emphasize strategy, or else it becomes pure diplomacy. Or maybe diplomacy would be the major goal!
Is your product a toy or a game? Is your player an architect or a chairman?
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