Can you be addicted to something that doesn't take much time, money, or energy?
I was thinking about games that pull me in and don't let go. They're addicting because they're demanding. Most games are very demanding; you're either playing or you aren't.
But there's a bunch of games that aren't as demanding -- browser games, play-by-mail games, play-by-email games, the turn-based games that were popular on BBSes back when that was cool, etc. You play once a day, or maybe more, but you're not stuck to the keyboard. I don't think these games are very addictive. You might wait expectantly for the next turn to show up in the mail, and maybe that's a bit addictive, but it's also easy to go a week without playing, or planning, or thinking about the game other than "I hope my turn shows up soon."
Except Travian has been like that for me. You don't need to be at the keyboard all day, but it helps. There are those that play "speed" servers like speed freaks, and have "sitters" (people on the other side of the globe) that play the game with them -- where each one of them plays the game for 12 hours a day.
You can play the game by stopping in once an hour, or every three hours. The game is like compounding interest, though. You collect more resources, which you use to make bigger fields or more combat troops, which then respectively either produce or steal more resources. Which you then re-invest in bigger fields or more combat troops.... The faster you re-invest, the greater the growth. If you delay in turning around those resources, you'll collect a certain percent less -- say, 10%. And just like compounding interest, over the course of a week that 10% turns into 100%. Week on week, it adds up to orders of magnitude.
For me there's this very real, mathematical incentive to re-deploy troops as soon as they come back. Why leave them sitting around when they could be out making money for you?
In some sense the game's a time sink. A more elegant troop-command interface would make sending out raids faster, especially when one is raiding the same targets over and over. A way to queue orders for, say, an entire day would mean you don't need to log in and check so often.
And yet the game isn't like that. I feel compelled to log in, in order to play "efficiently." I'm addicted; I need my quick little fixes, over and over. I keep coming back for more, obsessively pounding the lever and getting my food pellets in tiny doses.
A similar mechanism happens in "full-time" games, ie games where you generally stay logged in / connected / playing for longer sessions. Tetris has levels; Diablo has levels; World of Warcraft has character levels; Half-Life has levels; Guitar Hero has songs and venues and stars; Mario has stars and levels; etc etc. There's always "just one more" task, and it's small.
Sometimes the task is, well, kinda stupid. I'm sitting here thinking about how to spend less time mucking with Travian, because I'm obsessing over it at the moment. I was tempted to just delete the account, about an hour ago, and move on to the next game -- or get back to writing code. That's because there's not a lot of 'game' to Travian. It's a bit like Chess in that regard; the pieces move rather simply, but it's the complexity of human opponents that makes the game so rich. It's not a puzzle, nor a simple strength or skill test; there's a lot of strategy involved in doing well. (Strategy of the planning variety.)
Addictive games give out rewards frequently. When the player expects some new trinket in a short while, they'll keep playing, and then stay, expecting the next trinket. There's easily more complexity to add here -- such as adding high-level or bigger rewards every so often. And tons of other stuff. But the basic notion -- small rewards at frequent intervals -- is the heart of addiction. All the better if the game demands constant attention and rewards that attention.
Showing posts with label wasting time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wasting time. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Thursday, July 31, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
One more thing (ATITD)
A followup to my previous post, a rant about A Tale in the Desert.
The ATITD New Player guide (which is on the Wiki, meaning that it was written by players, because the devs would be damned if they could be bothered to write any documentation) has this quip:
I vehemently disagree. Noobs asking dumb questions like "how the fuck do I get a camera that isn't utter shit" isn't social. That damn noob should look that stuff up on the web. I hate Barrens chat, in part because it's dumb questions like that. "How I mine for fish?" Damn, noob, google that crap.
It's a different problem in WoW, because most of these easy questions are things like "Where is Orgrimmar?" What makes those people noobs is they haven't yet found the Map interface, or they're too lazy to use it. It's really easy to find -- there's a button right there on your screen that takes you to the world map, and Orgrimmar is right frickin there on the world map. The world map is not hidden very well. If you can't find the map in WoW, you're a moron. And if you ask in chat, then I hate you and want you to die in a car fire.
In ATITD, the option is hidden. Or broken. Or doesn't even exist. The only way to find out is by asking someone, or reading a web page.
The web page is written by people that know the game well and hence are likely to not remember what exactly was so frustrating to new players. This is a problem in lots of places in the world: either you're in and you know everything and don't recall what it was like being new, or you're out and no-one has bothered to put anything together to help you get started. This might be OK for maintaining a sense of elitism; a special barrier to keep riff-raff from joining your private social club. But for an MMO? The devs should want a ton of players. Maybe the ATITD devs thought 2000 subscribers was "too many."
Apple had awesome documentation for the Macintosh. I guess they still do. That's my standard for documentation, and by that standard, 99.9% of the documentation in the world is utter shite. If Apple gets an A+, then everyone else is failing the class. It's not even close.
The problem is that most people don't know jack shit about epistemology. And I don't mean the nonsense spouted by Wittgenstein and the like; I mean simple concepts, like "concept." Concepts are mental entities. You form them most efficiently when you see a few positive examples and at least one negative example. The negative examples are crucial.
Spouting words that you feel are similar to a concept you are trying to communicate doesn't make your listener understand you. Good communication understands the position that the listener is in. A good communicator draws a mental map; he points the way and points out hazards. The work is done by the listener; the listener has to be able to see the similarity underlying the concept you're trying to communicate, and to be able to delineate that similarity from background noise (which is the purpose of negative examples).
Good communicators have an idea of what the listener is thinking. It doesn't matter how well you know the concept; you have to know how that concept is different.
You can show a kid a picture of a golden retriever, and a dachshund, and a labrador, and a pit bull, and a german shepherd, and a chihuahua, and say, "these are all dogs." Showing him the breadth of the concept isn't enough; you also have to point out where the breadth ends, and where a different concept begins. That child might see a cat and exclaim "dog!" proudly. Or see a particularly fluffy couch or shrub and say "dog!"
The person who knows most what a newbie needs to know is the newbie himself. He'll tell you what he's wondering. Beware of newbies writing guides without adult supervision, though, because they might label that cat as a dog.
so... wow. Totally off topic.
My point was that bad documentation doesn't make a game more social. Good documentation answers the questions that you don't want the game elders to have to answer over and over. That's what FAQs are for; they're primarily a benefit to the elders, not the newbies. And they also benefit the game developers, because if a newbie can get accurate answers easily and quickly they're more likely to hang around and pay for your game. If your documentation doesn't answer the question, the newbie will ask in general chat and get his answer, pissing off everyone else who has to read the same damn question for the 20th time this hour.
The questions that you want your elders to answer in-game are questions of judgement: where should I start my settlement? What spec should I use when levelling up? Should I do X or Y?
You don't want them answering "how do I do X?" Your documentation, in-game tutorials, and UI design should make that easy for the new player to figure out.
The ATITD New Player guide (which is on the Wiki, meaning that it was written by players, because the devs would be damned if they could be bothered to write any documentation) has this quip:
One thing I am sure you have noticed already is the dearth of documentation or in-game hints and tutorials. Some say this is the developers being lazy, but there is another reason. A Tale in the Desert is a highly social game. You are meant to interact with other people.A dearth of tutorials and documentation means you can't ask the game how to play. Some say "it makes the game more social."
I vehemently disagree. Noobs asking dumb questions like "how the fuck do I get a camera that isn't utter shit" isn't social. That damn noob should look that stuff up on the web. I hate Barrens chat, in part because it's dumb questions like that. "How I mine for fish?" Damn, noob, google that crap.
It's a different problem in WoW, because most of these easy questions are things like "Where is Orgrimmar?" What makes those people noobs is they haven't yet found the Map interface, or they're too lazy to use it. It's really easy to find -- there's a button right there on your screen that takes you to the world map, and Orgrimmar is right frickin there on the world map. The world map is not hidden very well. If you can't find the map in WoW, you're a moron. And if you ask in chat, then I hate you and want you to die in a car fire.
In ATITD, the option is hidden. Or broken. Or doesn't even exist. The only way to find out is by asking someone, or reading a web page.
The web page is written by people that know the game well and hence are likely to not remember what exactly was so frustrating to new players. This is a problem in lots of places in the world: either you're in and you know everything and don't recall what it was like being new, or you're out and no-one has bothered to put anything together to help you get started. This might be OK for maintaining a sense of elitism; a special barrier to keep riff-raff from joining your private social club. But for an MMO? The devs should want a ton of players. Maybe the ATITD devs thought 2000 subscribers was "too many."
Apple had awesome documentation for the Macintosh. I guess they still do. That's my standard for documentation, and by that standard, 99.9% of the documentation in the world is utter shite. If Apple gets an A+, then everyone else is failing the class. It's not even close.
The problem is that most people don't know jack shit about epistemology. And I don't mean the nonsense spouted by Wittgenstein and the like; I mean simple concepts, like "concept." Concepts are mental entities. You form them most efficiently when you see a few positive examples and at least one negative example. The negative examples are crucial.
Spouting words that you feel are similar to a concept you are trying to communicate doesn't make your listener understand you. Good communication understands the position that the listener is in. A good communicator draws a mental map; he points the way and points out hazards. The work is done by the listener; the listener has to be able to see the similarity underlying the concept you're trying to communicate, and to be able to delineate that similarity from background noise (which is the purpose of negative examples).
Good communicators have an idea of what the listener is thinking. It doesn't matter how well you know the concept; you have to know how that concept is different.
You can show a kid a picture of a golden retriever, and a dachshund, and a labrador, and a pit bull, and a german shepherd, and a chihuahua, and say, "these are all dogs." Showing him the breadth of the concept isn't enough; you also have to point out where the breadth ends, and where a different concept begins. That child might see a cat and exclaim "dog!" proudly. Or see a particularly fluffy couch or shrub and say "dog!"
The person who knows most what a newbie needs to know is the newbie himself. He'll tell you what he's wondering. Beware of newbies writing guides without adult supervision, though, because they might label that cat as a dog.
so... wow. Totally off topic.
My point was that bad documentation doesn't make a game more social. Good documentation answers the questions that you don't want the game elders to have to answer over and over. That's what FAQs are for; they're primarily a benefit to the elders, not the newbies. And they also benefit the game developers, because if a newbie can get accurate answers easily and quickly they're more likely to hang around and pay for your game. If your documentation doesn't answer the question, the newbie will ask in general chat and get his answer, pissing off everyone else who has to read the same damn question for the 20th time this hour.
The questions that you want your elders to answer in-game are questions of judgement: where should I start my settlement? What spec should I use when levelling up? Should I do X or Y?
You don't want them answering "how do I do X?" Your documentation, in-game tutorials, and UI design should make that easy for the new player to figure out.
Rant: A Tale in the Desert
my god I just had to rant.
I played ATITD before, so I'm loosely familiar with it, but I wanted to play it a bit more and try out some of the mechanics. But mein gott it's pissing me the hell off.
WoW did a lot of things right. Previous MMOs were hard-core, and one of the ways that they were so is that you either knew how to play already or you weren't welcome. You have to figure out everything on your own. WoW just tells you the answer most of the time. I had to find some tar in Egypt (much easier name than ATITD). OK, fine, I have to find it on my own. But the game didn't even give me any hints. What's it look like? Can you give me a rough idea of where to look? In old-school MMOs, you're just supposed to wander around until you figure it out on your own.
Some people love that, but those people are in the minority. I used to think I liked that mechanic, but I GREW UP, DAMMIT. The game isn't about figuring out where the fuck they hid the tar, it's about choices and exploration. "What the fuck is tar and where do I find it?" isn't exploration; it's confusion.
Finding cool stuff is exploration, like waterfalls or hidden buildings or new zones or statues or ruins or whatever. Fog of War in the minimap helps that -- tell me where I haven't been. A "here's everything" minimap means that you don't "discover" the Universities in Egypt. (There's no mechanic in the game to tell you, anyway.)
WoW lets you open a bunch of chat windows for example; here, you can only look at one of the System, Main, local, and Whisper windows at a time. Oh, and since you can't use the keyboard to move if you have the chat window open, either you use the lame camera and mouse-click-to-move (which makes me want to punch things) or you keep chat closed just so you can move around easily. THIS GAME IS HARD TO PLAY. Not hard as in gameplay; just telling the game what I want to do (like, "move over there") is a challenge. The UI is the challenge.
WoW does recipes very well. One window per tradeskill. The top half is all the recipes you know, the bottom half is (1) a listing of the ingredients you need, (2) a display that tells you how much of each of those ingredients you already have, so you can tell at a glance what you need, and (3) a display of what the hell the thing you're creating is. What's the difference between a Chest and a Large Chest? Build them and find out! ATITD will be damned if it's gonna help you out! If you don't have two monitors (with the second one opened to someone else's website), then you just get the "challenge" of figuring out what the fuck is going on.
Small steps and frequent rewards = happy player base. The designers don't seem particularly interested in that kinda stuff; the game had an archaic interface when it first came out, and it's only barely improved.
If you're doing one action a bunch, you can make a floating window with that button in it, but ... bleh. Figuring out where commands are hidden is bad gameplay. Mechanics like "what do you get when you cross these two grape strains, and what does that do to wine?" are great. Brilliant. Exactly what I want. Hide that stuff, let me figure it out, I'll love you for it. BUT DONT HIDE THE DAMN "plant vine" BUTTON. Dumbass.
One of the main mechanics in the game is running around. Travel time isn't fun. It's shouldn't be a barrier to play. Travel time keeps you from doing everything without meeting other people. Here, it's a lame attempt to extend the time it takes to get anything done. WoW requires some travel sometimes, but a play session isn't 90% running or waiting. A lot of the 'trick' to ATITD is figuring out how to use your time while you wait for some lame timer to expire. You can't just do what you want.
Take gathering wood. It's a grind. Click on a tree, run to the next tree, cycle, repeat, repeat, repeat, swear, log out, uninstall... It doesn't take any longer to gather stuff than it does in WoW; in fact, I think it takes less time. Hmm. I tolerate Herbing in WoW; but that's profitable. Skilling up and leveling up shouldn't be a grind. If I want to grind for extra cash, that's one thing. But grinding for basic mats is excessive.
My beef here is how boring the activity is. Herbing is ... mostly boring. I tolerate it because ... I want something special? I know I'm doing it for the cash? I guess the point really is that it should be better in WoW; that herbing is lame. Another major point is that I've already bought into the rest of WoW; ATITD feels like nothing but grinding. Gather wood (boring), make boards (boring), run to the university (boring, and frustrating because of the camera), run back, go gather more slate because the wood plane broke, grind away for another 20 minutes... There's no fun anywhere there.
Fun would be trying out crossbreading wines, or flax, or beetles.
ATITD is not quite "death is fun!" but it's damn close. It really really doesn't want me to play it.
I'm gonna play my 24 free hours and see what I can learn from that, and then it gets erased. FUCK THIS GAME. It's so sad, the economy and tradeskills are really deep and complex and interesting and really appealing to mechanics-explorers like me...
Then again, I could just read the webpages. I'd learn more, and I wouldn't be so bored. What I've been doing is reading the web (and working on this blog) on one computer, while I mindlessly run around or do whatever on the other machine. Downtime is time to socialize, but ... meh? The whole game is downtime. I reckon the stuff that I'm hoping is fun (crossbreeding, etc) is going to be just as boring.
And I need to be like level 12 anyway. Each "level" is roughly one of these grind-quests. So, just to get to what I want to look at is going to take that much grinding.
I'm torn. I think I'm going to play out the 24 hours because (1) it's free, and (2) I'll be able to do it while reading and typing on my second computer.
So, should you check it out? That depends on your grind-tolerance, and whether you've got a monitor big enough to both play the game and do something useful at the same time. Two machines helps a lot, because I can leave the game window focused and just mash the 'p' key every two or three seconds without having to worry about window focus. So, if you've got a similar setup, give it a try.
I really recommend learning about the game because the tradeskill stuff is great.
The rest... /sigh.
I played ATITD before, so I'm loosely familiar with it, but I wanted to play it a bit more and try out some of the mechanics. But mein gott it's pissing me the hell off.
WoW did a lot of things right. Previous MMOs were hard-core, and one of the ways that they were so is that you either knew how to play already or you weren't welcome. You have to figure out everything on your own. WoW just tells you the answer most of the time. I had to find some tar in Egypt (much easier name than ATITD). OK, fine, I have to find it on my own. But the game didn't even give me any hints. What's it look like? Can you give me a rough idea of where to look? In old-school MMOs, you're just supposed to wander around until you figure it out on your own.
Some people love that, but those people are in the minority. I used to think I liked that mechanic, but I GREW UP, DAMMIT. The game isn't about figuring out where the fuck they hid the tar, it's about choices and exploration. "What the fuck is tar and where do I find it?" isn't exploration; it's confusion.
Finding cool stuff is exploration, like waterfalls or hidden buildings or new zones or statues or ruins or whatever. Fog of War in the minimap helps that -- tell me where I haven't been. A "here's everything" minimap means that you don't "discover" the Universities in Egypt. (There's no mechanic in the game to tell you, anyway.)
- Movement is just lame. Click-to-move means when I'm trying to move I instead sometimes click on objects. And then I want to punch something.
- You can't move with keys AND have a chat window open.
- You can't click in scrollbar elevators to move chat by a page.
- The camera SUCKS. You can't control pitch independent of zoom.
- The camera SUCKS. You have to move the mouse to the edge of the window to yaw the camera.
- You start the game far away from anything interesting.
- To do ANYTHING requires driving through a bunch of menus.
- The intro quest has like 30 steps. WTF? That's not a gentle introduction. It's a "gentler" introduction.
- When you try running down a slope that's too steep, you get a pop-up dialog that you need to dismiss before continuing. And since you click to move, chances are you're going to get that dialog a lot. This is exactly the sort of thing the player should be left to figure out on their own -- STEEP SLOPE = BAD. They hide the tar but you give us an idiot dialog for steep slopes? Please.
- You can't split windows that start off stacked.
- Recipes are hidden. What's it take to build a chest? Try building a chest! If you don't have the ingredients, it will tell you. If you do have the ingredients, it won't tell you, it'll just dump you in the construction interface.
- Making boards? Oh. My. God. You have to stand there and hit 'p' 200 times to make 200 boards, a common ingredient in low-level stuff. At 2 seconds per board, that's 400 seconds, about 6 minutes of staring and hitting a key... That isn't a game, it's work.
- I could go on, but really, kill me now.
WoW lets you open a bunch of chat windows for example; here, you can only look at one of the System, Main, local, and Whisper windows at a time. Oh, and since you can't use the keyboard to move if you have the chat window open, either you use the lame camera and mouse-click-to-move (which makes me want to punch things) or you keep chat closed just so you can move around easily. THIS GAME IS HARD TO PLAY. Not hard as in gameplay; just telling the game what I want to do (like, "move over there") is a challenge. The UI is the challenge.
WoW does recipes very well. One window per tradeskill. The top half is all the recipes you know, the bottom half is (1) a listing of the ingredients you need, (2) a display that tells you how much of each of those ingredients you already have, so you can tell at a glance what you need, and (3) a display of what the hell the thing you're creating is. What's the difference between a Chest and a Large Chest? Build them and find out! ATITD will be damned if it's gonna help you out! If you don't have two monitors (with the second one opened to someone else's website), then you just get the "challenge" of figuring out what the fuck is going on.
Small steps and frequent rewards = happy player base. The designers don't seem particularly interested in that kinda stuff; the game had an archaic interface when it first came out, and it's only barely improved.
If you're doing one action a bunch, you can make a floating window with that button in it, but ... bleh. Figuring out where commands are hidden is bad gameplay. Mechanics like "what do you get when you cross these two grape strains, and what does that do to wine?" are great. Brilliant. Exactly what I want. Hide that stuff, let me figure it out, I'll love you for it. BUT DONT HIDE THE DAMN "plant vine" BUTTON. Dumbass.
One of the main mechanics in the game is running around. Travel time isn't fun. It's shouldn't be a barrier to play. Travel time keeps you from doing everything without meeting other people. Here, it's a lame attempt to extend the time it takes to get anything done. WoW requires some travel sometimes, but a play session isn't 90% running or waiting. A lot of the 'trick' to ATITD is figuring out how to use your time while you wait for some lame timer to expire. You can't just do what you want.
Take gathering wood. It's a grind. Click on a tree, run to the next tree, cycle, repeat, repeat, repeat, swear, log out, uninstall... It doesn't take any longer to gather stuff than it does in WoW; in fact, I think it takes less time. Hmm. I tolerate Herbing in WoW; but that's profitable. Skilling up and leveling up shouldn't be a grind. If I want to grind for extra cash, that's one thing. But grinding for basic mats is excessive.
My beef here is how boring the activity is. Herbing is ... mostly boring. I tolerate it because ... I want something special? I know I'm doing it for the cash? I guess the point really is that it should be better in WoW; that herbing is lame. Another major point is that I've already bought into the rest of WoW; ATITD feels like nothing but grinding. Gather wood (boring), make boards (boring), run to the university (boring, and frustrating because of the camera), run back, go gather more slate because the wood plane broke, grind away for another 20 minutes... There's no fun anywhere there.
Fun would be trying out crossbreading wines, or flax, or beetles.
ATITD is not quite "death is fun!" but it's damn close. It really really doesn't want me to play it.
I'm gonna play my 24 free hours and see what I can learn from that, and then it gets erased. FUCK THIS GAME. It's so sad, the economy and tradeskills are really deep and complex and interesting and really appealing to mechanics-explorers like me...
Then again, I could just read the webpages. I'd learn more, and I wouldn't be so bored. What I've been doing is reading the web (and working on this blog) on one computer, while I mindlessly run around or do whatever on the other machine. Downtime is time to socialize, but ... meh? The whole game is downtime. I reckon the stuff that I'm hoping is fun (crossbreeding, etc) is going to be just as boring.
And I need to be like level 12 anyway. Each "level" is roughly one of these grind-quests. So, just to get to what I want to look at is going to take that much grinding.
I'm torn. I think I'm going to play out the 24 hours because (1) it's free, and (2) I'll be able to do it while reading and typing on my second computer.
So, should you check it out? That depends on your grind-tolerance, and whether you've got a monitor big enough to both play the game and do something useful at the same time. Two machines helps a lot, because I can leave the game window focused and just mash the 'p' key every two or three seconds without having to worry about window focus. So, if you've got a similar setup, give it a try.
I really recommend learning about the game because the tradeskill stuff is great.
The rest... /sigh.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Grinding
Grinding sucks. Why do games have grinding?
Because without it, players would zoom through content. Something has to slow them down! Grinding is one way of doing it. Want that sword of +10 uber? Go kill mobs until you get enough faction with the right people and they'll sell it to you.
If a player could finish the final bossfight with a new, level 1 character -- then what's the point of the intervening content, even if it is fun?
There's a lot of places in WoW where the fun way to get faction requires being in the right guild and clearing the right instance. If you're not in that guild, then you're stuck with the slow way, which is boring. At this point you have two options: give up on your goal, or grind. This is obviously why some of the slow, boring ways don't give rep after a certain point -- the designers want you to go do something else. The designers know their solution sucks, and they're hoping you try some of the other stuff and have more fun along the way.
Now the problem has turned into a group-size constraint. Some content is hidden behind having 24 friends, a competent leader, and a schedule that allows all of you to be online for the same two or three contiguous hours. What if that's not your style?
What if the optimal grind path -- one that asks you to spend no more than an hour a day -- isn't fast enough for you? The presence of a repeatable quest that you can do for the other 23 hours of a day means that some players will feel compelled to do that unfun grinding.
Making everything fun doesn't always work. What's fun in one guise can become unfun in another; removing that mechanic altogether gets rid of some fun. Choosing only perfect fun mechanics isn't really possible in any large game. Lowbies often enjoy their lowbie quests to kill ten wimpy skeletons, but then they're done. They could continue to kill skeletons until they become grey, but they have better options. And yet the game still presents the player with that unfun advancement option; luckily, it's not an efficient or optimal one.
Here's the heart of grinding: when the most efficient path of advancement is doing something repetitive or boring. This phrasing suggests its own solution: provide a more efficient path that is fun. The trick, of course, is content.
MMOs provide thousands of hours of gameplay; the standard console game, ten to twenty. Can you imagine making the content equivalent of a hundred console games? That's a pretty huge budget. Something's gotta repeat.
I think there's two answers: (1) your game should be short enough that there's no boring stretches, and (2) procedural content generation. (Multiplayer often fills in for that second solution.)
Because without it, players would zoom through content. Something has to slow them down! Grinding is one way of doing it. Want that sword of +10 uber? Go kill mobs until you get enough faction with the right people and they'll sell it to you.
If a player could finish the final bossfight with a new, level 1 character -- then what's the point of the intervening content, even if it is fun?
There's a lot of places in WoW where the fun way to get faction requires being in the right guild and clearing the right instance. If you're not in that guild, then you're stuck with the slow way, which is boring. At this point you have two options: give up on your goal, or grind. This is obviously why some of the slow, boring ways don't give rep after a certain point -- the designers want you to go do something else. The designers know their solution sucks, and they're hoping you try some of the other stuff and have more fun along the way.
Now the problem has turned into a group-size constraint. Some content is hidden behind having 24 friends, a competent leader, and a schedule that allows all of you to be online for the same two or three contiguous hours. What if that's not your style?
What if the optimal grind path -- one that asks you to spend no more than an hour a day -- isn't fast enough for you? The presence of a repeatable quest that you can do for the other 23 hours of a day means that some players will feel compelled to do that unfun grinding.
Making everything fun doesn't always work. What's fun in one guise can become unfun in another; removing that mechanic altogether gets rid of some fun. Choosing only perfect fun mechanics isn't really possible in any large game. Lowbies often enjoy their lowbie quests to kill ten wimpy skeletons, but then they're done. They could continue to kill skeletons until they become grey, but they have better options. And yet the game still presents the player with that unfun advancement option; luckily, it's not an efficient or optimal one.
Here's the heart of grinding: when the most efficient path of advancement is doing something repetitive or boring. This phrasing suggests its own solution: provide a more efficient path that is fun. The trick, of course, is content.
MMOs provide thousands of hours of gameplay; the standard console game, ten to twenty. Can you imagine making the content equivalent of a hundred console games? That's a pretty huge budget. Something's gotta repeat.
I think there's two answers: (1) your game should be short enough that there's no boring stretches, and (2) procedural content generation. (Multiplayer often fills in for that second solution.)
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