I wanted to give my condolences to the folks who are losing their job at NCSoft due to Tabula Rasa shutting down. Tough luck, guys, and I hope you bounce back. On the other hand, I can’t say I liked the game.

Actually I have two strong memories of Tabula Rasa from before it shipped. One was from an E3 many years ago, when Tabula Rasa was the darling of the show. Groups of four sat down together to play through a prescripted scenario. I played a futuristic warrior that blasted the enemies with my electric guitar, causing musical notes to fly at him and knock him down. As a group, we managed to take out a boss monster and clear a dungeon. It was fun. The cumulative thinking was, “Huh. Really odd setting, but it has fun gameplay.”

There was troubling talk, however. The presenter told us that they were going to add aspects of a Great War, and everybody was going to be fighting everybody else and it was going to be great. That didn’t seem like a very compelling addition to me. It looked like a fun future-space-opera MMORPG with nice dungeons and interesting set pieces. Having a big PK war didn’t sound like the secret sauce this game needed, but whatever. Still reasonably optimistic.

My other strong memory about Tabula Rasa came from the Last Real E3 Ever, a couple years ago. Tabula Rasa was not the same as before. Now it was all about the big war, I guess. Gone were the silly space opera aspects, and now it was a game where you run around as a marine shooting people but not aiming. I watched people play it for a while, feigning enjoyment before wandering away. The presenter asked me if I’d like to play it, and if so I’d get a free T-shirt. I turned him down. In other words, Tabula Rasa didn’t look fun enough to play it for free, even if they paid me with a free T-shirt. I played a lot of other, much more terrible games at that E3. But this was all about market. I didn’t find the “be a space marine!” hook to be at all interesting. And that combined with the “you don’t have to aim!” hook meant nobody was interested. The wacky vibe from the earlier incarnation of the game had actually been a decent hook — something new and fresh enough to at least get people to play it for a few minutes. But that was gone.

I think the moral is threefold:

1. Don’t re-make your game from scratch. There’s no surer way to fiscal failure than having to completely change the target audience of your game after it’s already through pre-production.
2. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. They redesigned Tabula Rasa so many times that it became a sterile and bland thing.
3. Have a target audience in mind AT ALL TIMES, and for God’s sake, spend a few grand testing to see if your target audience actually wants this thing you’re offering. They have companies to do this, they’re called polling consultants. Use them. They are not prohibitively expensive for an MMO company. $10k can get you a lot of really useful data about whether your $20m game is going to work or not.

Hey guys. I was frustrated after killing 60 or so patriachs and matriach and not having a single drop. Then it hit me. “No beat up or broken horns, please!” said the quest log. I’m was playing a warrior and I’ve been Executing every single one of them. So I tried letting my auto-attack do the killing.

1st try: horn dropped
2nd try: auto attack kill but no drop
3rd try: accidentally executed
4th try: horn dropped

Anyway, I have no idea with classes that relies on spells like mages and priests, etc but can anyone try this method and support my claim?

Now, there’s no way that WoW has implemented this quest in such a way that you need to use only auto-attacks to kill monsters in order to get their loot. WoW is famous for its clear quest direction, and when it fails at clarity, it’s due to errors of omission, not outright hidden mechanics. And even if they did have this weird mechanic, wouldn’t it be a 100% success rate if you followed their weird secret rule? If you search around, you’ll find people saying that this worked for them… it only took 20 kills to get the two horns. That’s not a trick, that’s just random.

But wait! There are other competing theories!

I think people are seriously right about that magic theory. I’ve killed over 40 of these mobs and the one where I decide to stay in human form and cast magic (I’ve been using bearform for Druids) I get the horn.

So now you’ve got to use magic to get the horns? That doesn’t sit very well with “you have to use auto-attacks”, does it? And if you search, you will find more and more of these theories for the quest. Most of them conflict dramatically with each other, but all of them have one or two other people who vouch for how effective they are.

And this is hardly the only occurrence of players being superstitious.

“There’s something wrong with the attack calculations!”

City of Heroes went to great lengths to remove “streakiness” from their attack rolls. Players complained when their attacks missed many times in a row, even though this is a reasonably likely occurrence given a true random number generator (and CoH’s rather low chances to hit). It was not possible for the developers to convince players that this was just randomness (and anyway, everyone agreed that it was frustrating), so they added hacks to keep the streaks from getting too long. If you miss too many times in a row, the game will cheat and help you hit.

“My tapers are burning faster!”

In Asheron’s Call, mages use “tapers” as material components for their spells. These tapers have a small random chance of “burning up” whenever a spell is cast, so players tend to carry hundreds of them at once. Then something weird started happening: players became convinced that their tapers were burning at a faster rate than before. This became a trend: “hey, you’re right, I think they are burning faster!” and so on, until the developers were compelled to get a log of the actual random rolls to make sure everything was fine. It was… but some players could never really be convinced of this. They had noticed a pattern, and they were 100% convinced it was really there.

The amusing part is that after every update, players would insist that the new update had made tapers burn even faster. If this had been true, by about the 50th game update, the change should have been pretty noticeable…

Even to this day, some wise-ass players will say “my tapers are burning faster!” which means “you’re imagining patterns that aren’t really there.” The more modern version is ”Onyxia is deep breathing more!“, which is the equivalent scenario from World of Warcraft.

What’s going on here?

Human beings don’t deal well with randomness in general. Our brains are powerful pattern-matching machines, and we will see patterns no matter what it takes… even if the patterns are fake. It’s hard to convey randomness in a way that doesn’t cause our brains to tick into overdrive in order to “figure it out.”

Does it really hurt your game if players are making up crazy theories about how it works? Well, it’s not ideal. This misinformation gets propagated until it becomes “common knowledge”, at which point it can literally become impossible to convince players that it isn’t true. This, in turn, can lead players to do weird things that are frustrating for all involved, and to blame you for having to do it.

The cure for this is communication. If the quest actually said “Yetis drop pristine horns 5% of the time,” we’d have far fewer crazy theories running around. Then again, players would have just avoided the quest entirely because they would instantly know it’s not worth their time… which points out the flaw. This quest really wasn’t worth doing at a 5% drop rate. There are better ways to spend your time in World of Warcraft. Obscuring this percentage didn’t make the quest better, it just made it harder for people to realize that it was sub-par, thus delaying how long it took developers to get around to fixing it.

Another cure for it is to remove randomness entirely. I’ll get into that more next time!

Of course, before you answer that you might ask, “do we even have levels in our game at all?” Maybe you don’t have “levels” per se, but if you are making  an RPG then we already know that the characters become more powerful over time. You need to represent that power numerically to the player somehow, whether it’s in the form of character levels, space ship hull armor, sword damage stats, or the number of magic spells in the spellbook.

Whatever the numbers may represent, something tangible makes some players more powerful than other players. So let’s lump all of that together as “levels” for now, because it turns out you have to ask similar broad questions regardless of the particular form of level you use.

So back to the question: “How do levels work in my game?” First off, you need to know how big a difference there is between levels. How much more powerful is a level 10 character compared to a level 9? Do they become 20-25% more power when they level, like EQ1? Are they 10-15% more powerful, like WoW? Or is it only 3-5% more power, as in AC1?

This may seem like an overly narrow place to start, but the power differential between levels has a lot of gameplay ramifications.

If level differences are large:

• When a character gains a level, the player can often go different places and kill different things than they could before, so levels provide a good way to break up content and provide a feeling of progress.
• Players feel much more powerful when they level up, so gaining a level is a meaningful accomplishment.
• Players have trouble grouping with characters of different levels players because their power levels vary dramatically. This limits the opportunities for grouping, especially at lower and middle levels.
• PvP between differently-leveled characters isn’t very balanced, or fun, even if the players are only a few levels apart. Again, this limits the opportunities for PvP play.

If level differences are small:

• Players don’t get excited about leveling up, because it doesn’t make them feel more powerful or open up new venues of gameplay.
• Players can group with a broader range of other characters easily, making it easier to find a group to play with.
• PvP between differently-leveled characters is more exciting and accessible for a broader level range.

Breaking up Content

Levels are an important part of giving players direction: levels are how players understand where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to do. They intuitively know that they should be in areas with similarly-leveled players and opponents. Levels also control exploration. When the power differences between levels are big, players are not able to roam very far. The less important levels are, however, the more characters can roam the world at will.

In AC1, level differences were originally so miniscule that a level 20 archer could often kill a level 80 opponent. How could they tell that they could do that? They just had to try it and see what happened. This was a lot of fun for a certain type of player, but very confusing and even “cheaty” for many others.

On the other hand, players who liked exploration loved AC1 for this reason, because they could meander through most of the enormous game world with impunity.

PvP Considerations

You might be thinking, “Everybody knows that if you want a PvP game, you want small level differences.” When the power differences between character levels are small, then player skill has a larger impact in the outcome of PvP fights.

Certainly this is the case for EVE Online, as well as for AC1’s Darktide PvP server. Both games owe a lot of their PvP success to the fact that relative lowbies can kill players much higher level than them. This is a powerful enticement for new players and helps keep the competitive landscape fresh for long-term players.
So  a small level differential is a good place to start, but it’s not a magic solution. You still need to give your players a sense of forward progress and accomplishment over time, and if levels aren’t the primary means then you must have some other way. And those other ways can also represent strong power differentials that can limit PvP.

For example, it is often said that  Warhammer Online has a shallow level curve, but that’s not the whole story. WAR does have a relatively shallow “character level” curve, but then your power level becomes measured by your items and equipment. There’s still “high level” and “low level” equipment, and it still has a meaningful impact on the outcome of battles. So you haven’t gotten away from the problem of power differentials: you’ve just mitigated it significantly.

You can also mitigate this problem by making levels increase the breadth of game verbs available to a player, rather than by increasing the potency of the verbs. In EVE Online, for instance, mastering a skill isn’t particularly hard — but there are a ton of skills for you to master. You’re gaining more verbs, which can affect your overall potency in PvP somewhat, but not nearly as dramatically as if you just kept jacking your damage-dealing statistic up directly.
Grouping Considerations

Grouping in PvE is another important consideration to keep in mind when you are designing your leveling system. Players can generally only group up with other characters that are within their relative power range. In most games, if you were 500% more powerful than your team mates, it wouldn’t be a lot of fun for the weaker group members - they’d feel like hangers-on rather than part of the team.

So most games restrict groups to a certain power range. But this drastically narrows the population of characters who are available to group together at any given time. In a game with a lot of group-centric content, the inability to find a group can be deadly - especially for players who join the game after the majority of the players have reached maximum level.

Of course, there are nifty mechanics like Sidekicking and Mentoring to help fix this: they temporarily alter a player’s level so that they can group with friends at all levels. This is an elegant fix that neatly side-steps the question of power levels, but keep in mind that it may require some serious design planning to fit into your particular game.

Making Leveling Up Fun

Finally, we come to the most important consideration: fun. Players get more excited about leveling up if they get significantly more powerful when they do so. When they get new verbs, new places to explore, and new things to kill, they tend to find leveling up to be pretty rewarding. If leveling up doesn’t give them these things with reasonable frequency, leveling up becomes rather dull … or worse, a grind.

In my experience, by far the best way to keep leveling up feeling fresh instead of repetitive is to introduce new gameplay verbs as often as possible.

You might also consider exactly when players earn their new power: in discrete chunks or smoothly over time? In Asheron’s Call, players didn’t need to reach new levels to get more powerful. As soon as they earned any XP, they could “spend” that XP to improve their skills. At low levels especially this provided immediate and continuous advancement, but at a price: when you actually leveled up, it was extremely anticlimactic. The level didn’t mean much of anything in itself.

Your choices here  will really depend on the game, but if you do have explicit character levels, then you should make it fun to reach those levels. Otherwise you’re just missing out on an obvious chance to give players fun.

Choosing The Right Leveling System

As always, it comes down to: “What experience do I want my players to have, and why?”

Are you making a game for mathematically-inclined nerds? They tend to have a broader perspective of overall power, and weaker level differences may make the most sense. But if you’re aiming for young people (tweens, say), you almost assuredly want strongly differentiated levels to act as a carrot and keep them playing. In fact, all the issues I’ve talked about here can be answered by figuring out how your target audience might think.

And one final  thing to keep in mind: if you are having trouble making a leveling system that will appeal to all of your demographics, then your target audience is almost certainly too broad.

Well, Scaleform does deliver what it advertises. But it’s not a no-brainer decision. Here’s why.

Do you really want to use the Flash development tools?

Scaleform supports ActionScript 2, not the more modern ActionScript 3. This means that all of Adobe’s neat Flex development tools are completely off the table. It also means you can’t use all the nice GUI widgets made for AS3. (Scaleform told me they are developing their own custom GUI library specifically for Scaleform development, but I don’t believe it’s available yet.)

So this means that you will need to use the Flash 2 IDE. If you are a traditional programmer, you will find this torturous. The Flash IDE is not for you. It is made for 2D animation artists who might know a little programming on the side. The workflow is not like anything you are used to.

Engineers will inevitably want to mod the living crap out of the Flash workflow. You can create plug-ins for Flash, but you will have to do a lot of work to get it to the point that an engineer can use it comfortably.

Can your artists actually use the Flash tools?

“Silly blogger,” you say, “the Flash IDE won’t be used by our ENGINEERS… it will be used by our ARTISTS!” Well, better start training them now, because artists who have the necessary skillset are very hard to find. Oh, you can find Flash 2 developers by the yard… but you need good ones, don’t you? You need developers who can animate stuff well, and then wire the animations together with code, and connect it all to a custom interface your engineers make for them. This significantly raises the skill bar. Now you’re not looking for a mere animator. You’re looking for a technical artist who also happens to be good at 2D animation and coding.

But it gets worse! Scaleform is optimized for GPUs, not CPUs. This has numerous ramifications: bitmaps need to be certain sizes, and not too big; scripting needs to be kept to an absolute minimum in order to not bottleneck the pipeline, so you’ll need to know clever timeline tricks to get good performance; and some common Flash effects are just not available at all (because they can’t be done efficiently on consoles’ GPUs).

So you need a really experienced 2D animator who is not afraid of code or technical details at all. The folks at Scaleform told me that the best way to look for Scaleform developers is to look for Flash Lite developers. Flash Lite is the version of Flash for cell-phones; these developers are used to working within limitations that are very similar to Scaleform’s limitations. I haven’t personally looked for Flash Lite developers, but I do know that very few Flash Lite games exist, so devs may be very hard to find.

Can you actually use Scaleform for your GUI?

Scaleform works best for console games. Civilization Revolutions is a great example of a Scaleform game. It doesn’t have a ton of resizable windows and it doesn’t have widgets with dozens of functions. It has a really flashy GUI but simple, clean interfaces. MMORPGs tend to have much more complex GUIs.

Now you can easily argue that this is a flaw in MMO design, but let’s face it: if you’re pitching an MMO today, you are probably pitching a game with resizable chat windows, dozens of floating interface panes, macro-scriptable interfaces, and elaborate drag-and-drop systems. You can do all this with Scaleform — but not for free. You’ll have to do some heavy lifting in the engineering department.

Don’t count on “free” user modding

Lots of developers see Scaleform as the secret to free user-generated content. Users can just use Flash to create new replacement SWF files for your game, and can make it do anything! Free mods! Well, yes and no.

You can definitely make that happen, but you will face three big problems. First, you still need a well-documented interface to the game systems proper — otherwise, their SWF files won’t be able to make the game do anything.

Second, you will have to relinquish a lot of control over what users can and can’t do. The modding system in World of Warcraft is carefully crafted to keep users from being able to make combat macros. You would have a very hard time pulling this off if you let users plug in their own custom SWF files.

Finally, you have the problem that Scaleform is not appropriate for typical Flash developers. The Scaleform guys said that they currently actively discourage companies from using Scaleform for user-modding. Suppose a user creates a popular mod with a 2000-pixel texture in it — your game’s perf goes to hell, and you turn around and say that Scaleform is crap. They don’t want that, and neither do you.

When to use Scaleform

Use Scaleform when:

• You are absolutely, definitely creating SKUs of your game on multiple platforms (preferably three or more).
• You have procured one or more people with just the right experience and skillset to use it.
• You have relatively simple interaction interfaces, or can live with keeping a very streamlined UI everywhere.
• You don’t intend to let users mod your GUI.

The Future Probably is Scaleform… but…

ActionScript is a really good choice for a multi-platform GUI development tool, but traditional MMO interfaces will be constantly straining at the limitations of AS2. When you can use AS3 instead, you’ll have more options. Scaleform is working on this, as well as a system that uses the CPU for more of the processing, which (among other things) will make it more practical to have user-created content in your game. But that’s not now: that’s in a year or two.

In the mean time, you need to look carefully at this choice from every angle. Don’t jump on it just because you heard some other MMO is using it. Remember, most MMOs you hear about don’t actually ship, so you can’t use them as a barometer.

I like Flash, and so does my company

I have been particularly interested in Scaleform because (along with regular contract work, which I’m still available for), I’m also the part-time CTO of an internet startup that brokers Flash games. FlashGameLicense.com is all about pairing Flash developers with people who need games. It’s been around for about 10 months now, and we’re growing very quickly — we now have about 2000 games for sale, the majority of which have never been seen anywhere on the internet yet. Flash is definitely heating up as a gaming platform.

Anyway, it’s sort of tangential to this post, but I figured this was a good time to plug my company! :)  If my dire warnings about using Scaleform in your MMO haven’t scared you off, we might be able to help you find a developer that fits your needs, so feel free to contact me. Most developers on our site are only looking for work-from-home situations, so it’s hard to tell how many bites you’ll get, but it’s probably a better bet than a blind post on Gamasutra or monster.com. (And if you find yourself needing some fun Flash mini-games for a project, definitely visit!)

So I’m confident that Flash is the future. But Flash embedded into MMOs? That’s the bleeding edge of the future. If you’re bleeding edge, go for it. Just know what you’re getting into.

• As an industry developer, I found Mythic’s fear of running a forum to be a bad business decision. As a user who is trying to get Warhammer to install and run, I found Mythic’s lack of a forum to be anger inducing. At worst it feels like a sleazy move to distance themselves from angry players; at best it comes off as a lack of confidence in their product. Sorry guys, you can’t not have a forum when everybody else has one. You look like idiots, or like sleazebags… take your pick. Talking with folks here at the Austin Game Conference, it sounds like this is mostly Mark Jacobs’ handiwork. I don’t care that people hurt your feelings when they post, Mark. Get a damned forum, and get some good moderators.
• Speaking of Mythic, this Gamasutra article by Mythic’s Paul Barnett shows just how terrible a workplace Mythic is. Paul (the creative director for Warhammer) hates it when developers play WoW because they get ideas from it. He much prefers barely-competent sheep-like workers who will do what he says rather than experienced and outspoken team members. He thinks people who disagree with the game’s design should be publicly humiliated in front of the team (”burned at the stake”). Do you think I am exagerrating or misrepresenting Paul here? Go ahead and read the article. I’ve talked with people from Mythic, and it’s true: you don’t want to work at Mythic.
• Age of Conan made an embarrassing, newbie-developer mistake a while back when their female avatars were dramatically slower than the male avatars. This was due to the animations being longer. Chalk it up to a lack of communication between teams. But then they compounded their failure when they announced that it wouldn’t be fixed until new art was created, which would take a month to make. This is something that an engineer could have hacked a fix for during a single all-night session. The fact that they couldn’t or wouldn’t band-aid this problem tells us that Funcom’s intra-team communication skills (or perhaps their programming skills) are embarrassingly bad.
• Hmm… the rest, I’ll save for another day when I can be a bit more upbeat!

In fact, since most MMO players have never tried EQ2, they have no idea what they might be missing. And far too often, I find that MMO designers haven’t played any MMO too seriously… except the one game they happen to really like. That’s a tragic newbie mistake, because you end up reinventing far too much.

So I figured I’d talk about a few of the aspects of EQ2 that are very well done.

Guilds

Leveling Up: Guilds in EQ2 have levels. As they level up, they earn all sorts of neat privileges, like more guild bank slots, discounts on items like mounts, and access to more prestigious houses. Players level up their guild by collecting special items and turning them in, or by completing special quests that raise the guild’s XP bar (as well as your own personal XP bar, of course). This is a great way to bring the guild together, and the leveling mechanism is a lot of fun. This also helps to keep guilds together longer, which means that guilds in EQ2 tend to be larger and more structurally sound than the ones in WoW.

Shared Experiences: Whenever a guild member finds a treasured item, completes an epic quest, earns a level, or so on, everyone in the guild is notified via the guild chat channel. This helps build community, because everyone can see what you’re doing and chat with you about it. It’s also a great way to get “gratz!” type messages without having to prompt for them. All in all, it just feels nice.

Management: EQ2 has had guild banks for far longer than WoW, and its guild banks are still superior. It also has neat devices like an easily-accessible log of all the guild’s activities — so you can see at a glance that your friend Bob won the fabled Book of Dread while raiding, and Sue leveled up to 75 last night. EQ2’s guilds have lots of other little touches and polish that should really be emulated in other games.

Housing

Customization: EQ2’s housing is probably the best I’ve seen. You can decorate your house, fill it with books and knick-knacks, change the wallpaper, even set up crafting stations in it so you don’t have to leave the house to make some new sandals or swords or whatever. The customization possibilities are extremely deep.

Interactive House Stuff: The game is full of interactive trinkets to put in your house, like talking statues, genie bottles that whisk you away to hidden dimensions, or seasonal items like the halloween skeleton that sneaks up and surprises you.

House Pets: You can buy or earn pets (not unlike the non-combat pets in WoW) that can run free in your house and interact with people and things there. They will interact with other house pets, too, sometimes fighting each other or stunning one another and so on. It definitely adds a lot to the experience.

Reasons For Visiting: Players can optionally buy special “display cases” to sell items directly from their home. (When selling from your home, the items are also on the auction house, too.) If buyers choose to visit your house and buy them directly from you, they save the 20% auction-house fee. This can amount to quite a lot of money for top-end items, so picky buyers are willing to trek to somebody’s house and visit their home in order to buy the item. (The owner doesn’t have to be online in order for someone to visit their house, of course.) This is a neat mechanic because it gives you a reason to decorate your house and make it impressive. And I’ve seen some really impressive houses. Many players take this very seriously.
 

Group Play

Options Galore: Although EQ2 has tried to graft a deep solo experience onto the game (and has succeeded to some extent), the core of the game has always been the huge, epic dungeons designed for a six-man group. There are a whole lot of these dungeons — some instanced, some not — and grouping in EQ2 is fun and very rewarding at almost any play level. This isn’t true in WoW, where there are many levels that are just simpler to grind through rather than trying to run instances. I also find EQ2’s group PvE experience to just be better — more polished, more rewarding, more fun than WoW or Lotro.

Difficulty Curves: Although EQ2 has a fair number of instanced dungeons that are similar to WoW’s group experiences, it also has more free-form areas. These are typically community dungeons — meaning lots of people can hunt in the same instance, and can find each other and group up while there. These dungeons have a wider range of monsters in them, and generally have very good layout and flow, so multiple groups can explore the same vast dungeon.

These less-directed, community-accessible dungeons are important because they allow groups to scale their difficulty on the fly. If you’re missing some people, you can just hunt the weaker monsters. If you’ve got a really strong group you can forge a path to the tough monsters deep in the bowels of the dungeon. If somebody leaves, you can stay right in the dungeon and start advertising for other people to join you. In the meantime, you can kill weaker monsters while you wait for replacements.

Collection-Centric Gameplay

The game really rewards collectors and offers strong incentives to people who like to explore nooks and crannies.

Collection Quests: Shiny objects on the ground can be picked up and added to your personal collection GUI panel. When you have all the items from a particular, you are rewarded with XP. If you find duplicates, the extra items can be placed on the auction house to earn money.

Named Monsters: The world is riddled with NPCs and monsters that have unique names. The first time you kill each named creature, you earn bonus XP (and alternate-advancement XP), so it is worth going out of your way to kill these creatures.

Recipe Collection: The first time you complete any given crafting recipe, you earn bonus craft XP. This gives you a meaningful incentive to collect all the recipes in the game (for your crafting profession).

Numerous Discovery Locales: Like many games, EQ2 rewards players for exploring the world map. EQ2 takes that a bit further and has numerous rewards for reaching off-the-beaten-path locations; for instance, if you figure out how to get to the top of a hill, you may be given bonus XP for discovering it.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other strong areas in EQ2, such as the intricate and rewarding crafting experience, the recent racial revamp (they did a good job “balancing for awesome” on the race abilities), the alternate-advancement XP, and the built-in collectible card game. I’d also like to discuss the difference between EQ2’s and WoW’s combat model in more detail, because the subtle differences are very revealing. But another day.

Of course, EQ2 also has serious drawbacks and lacks a lot of polish that WoW players expect. It’s very easy to accidentally pick a class that can’t solo well, for instance. Many of the outdoor zones are banal and uninspired. In the older areas, the graphics are extremely ugly. The solo questing path is disjoint, so it can take some work to figure out what zone you’re supposed to go to next. And there’s not a lot of people to group with on many of the servers.

But EQ2 has lots of clever and unique game systems that are well worth exploring. If you’re thinking of making an MMO, you owe it to yourself to spend a few months in EQ2.

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“Mentors do receive viable amounts of experience and advance toward their actual level while mentoring, though at a slightly reduced rate.”

Woohoo! Viable amounts of XP! Yes, you can read between the lines too: mentoring normally returns unviable amounts of XP. I am honestly excited about this, because I like EQ2 and this gives me some more opportunities to group up. But really now… this is just another example of outdated balance methods.

We systems designers need to start balancing for awesome. Traditionally, we balanced for perfection. Older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot show this most clearly: they have tightly-controlled classes with an extremely limited range of effective verbs. Most classes have a “right” way to build the character and myriad “wrong” ways to do it. The systems designer makes sure that the classes’ “right” ways are all reasonably in sync, at least at max-level. Everything else can go to hell, and does, but hey, these particular best-case builds are balanced!

This is dumb. I can say this with hard-earned experience, because I did this very thing in my first year as a system designer for Asheron’s Call 2. I did real damage to the funness of that game by balancing it. Those were rookie mistakes which I deeply regret. But I learned my lesson. AC2’s expansion pack balance was a whole lot more fun than my earlier balancings. It took a lot of beatings for me to get it through my head, but I got it. And I’m here to tell you to stop making the same mistake I did.

There are little lies we tell ourselves, we system designers. “Making the game perfectly balanced is key tothe long-term sustainability of the game.” “Without extremely tight balance, PvP will not be any fun.” “Only a handful of forum whiners will even notice this nerf.” That’s all rationalization. Truth is, we’re just being anal.

It grates on you, those imperfections. It looms so large that it seems like it’s ruining the game. “This class is 10% too powerful [in the right builds, with the right equipment]. 10%! I have to fix this now before this class becomes Flavor of the Month and everything I’ve strived for disintegrates before my eyes. We have to hotfix this nerf NOW.” I’ve been there. And I guarantee that EQ2 suffers from the same thing. Their game systems designer(s) are too close to the game, too anal-retentive, and too controlling. They need to get with the times, or move to a more old-school game than EQ2 wants to be.

Why would mentoring need a boost just to become “viable”? And why on earth is this a temporary bonus, something just being done for a while lest it ruin the entire game? There are answers, and I’m sure they are plausible ones. Let’s see, how about, “mentoring already has valuable benefits like alternate-advancement points, and mentored players are more powerful than regular characters of that level, so we don’t want people to mentor all the time.” So what’s the fix? Make mentoring utterly useless… except this summer, when it’s sort of usable. Mentoring doesn’t need to be controlled this tightly. And even if it did, the answer is not to make it useless for 9 months out of the year. That’s the easy way out.

Another example: about a year ago, my low-level Templar character got all of his meager crowd control powers nerfed. These were not awesome powers — they were cute emergency powers. His mez ability used to last 9 seconds, usable every 5 minutes. Then it got nerfed so that it lasted only 3 seconds. I had to take all of those nerfed powers off my power bar — they were rendered useless. (They are slightly useful again now that I’ve leveled the Templar to 65… but still not really worth using anymore.)

Why did those mildly useful powers become useless? Because some Templar build at max-level was too powerful… at least on paper. So they nerfed all Templars down the line. Cheap, lazy, and very detrimental to the game. If you’re going to nerf, you owe it to your players to find the very least amount of nerfing necessary to achieve your goals. Yes, that means you need to play-test characters at multiple levels, and you even need to playtest characters without optimal gear (*gasp*) because not everybody has optimal gear. Really! I know, nobody on the forums is wearing crap armor, and the ultra-hardcore people in your guild are wearing awesome stuff, so it sure seems like everybody is wearing awesome stuff. That’s another rookie mistake. Use your data analysis tools! As a systems designer, they should be something you refer to every single day. Don’t guess. Check.

It’s also critical to get a perspective from some distance away from the problem. This is incredibly hard to do on a live team, but it’s the only way to do your job well. All the end-of-the-world scenarios we tend to imagine are crap. For instance, suppose an overpowered class really does end up a flavor-of-the-month class as thousands of people reroll. Oh no, you have flavor-of-the-month classes. What ever will you do?! Huh, would you look at that? It doesn’t reduce your populations at all, and it even encourages players to reroll alts. It’s not a particularly bad problem. You don’t need to hot-fix for it. But it feels soooo wrong. It feels like failure to a game systems designer. And what will the board trolls say? They’ll start talking about how stupid you are! You’ve just got. to. fix. it. NOW. Even if it makes more of a mess than you started with.

But what’s important is that your game is fun, and you need to make that the primary goal of everything you do. If you have to nerf something, nerf the particular scenario, not the underlying system. Over-nerfing is the easy road, but not the road to fun. Having a cool mentoring system and then making it give only pitiful amounts of XP is a cop out. Maybe some games can only afford to balance the cheesy way, because they have a live team of six people. But games like EQ2 have plenty of time and money to do it right.

Anything else in my little rant here? Let’s see… oh yeah, as a whole, can we systems designers agree to stop copping out on verb breadth? I know it’s a whole lot easier to balance a class when they have only a tiny range of options. But that isn’t very fun. It’s a lot more fun for every class to have a lot of different things they can do. That probably means the game will never be truly balanced, but that’s okay. Better fun than balanced. It’s okay for a Templar to have a couple crowd-control powers. It’s fine for a Guardian to have a neat DoT ability. Do what it takes to make them fun, and don’t get hung up on whether or not you’ll be able to perfectly balance it. Because you won’t.

This is my rule of thumb for game balance: if all the classes feel really fun, then I’m doing a good job.

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It’s a frustrating problem for developers because so few of your users are actually using your forums. On Asheron’s Call 2, we determined that about 10% of the playing audience read our website or forums (it spiked on patch days, to a whopping 15%).

This small percentage of people are not randomly pulled from your userbase. They tend to be very similar to each other and not very representative of the rest of your player base. That means you can’t use them to judge the quality or merit of ideas or implementations. But of course, the ones who do post are your most vocal users, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Every product in the world has forum issues, but MMOs have it worse than usual because forum-goers are often playing “the forum game”: they like the game so much that they want to keep interacting with the game even when they’re not playing. The forum game is so fun for some people that they keep playing it long after they’ve quit playing the real game. Part of this is because of the community of like-minded people. Part of it is caused by the relatively close level of developer interaction on most MMO forums. Whenever a developer posts something, it means the dev is reading what they say! That means they have sway over the developer, and they use it by complaining. Complaining is also fun because other people will join in, either to commiserate or to rebut them. Either way, it’s all content for the forum game.

Let’s go over some classic problem scenarios and talk about how to deal with them.

The Classic Scenarios

The Outrage Escalation: “This new improved quest reward is a slap in the face to the thousands of players who completed the quest last month but aren’t retroactively getting extra compensation!”

When players make comments like this, they aren’t being rational human beings. They are legitimately outraged, but they are so close to the problem that they can’t be reasoned with. Instead, their rhetoric grows and grows until eventually somebody likens the developers to Hitler, and the forum thread is closed.

This tends to make developers nervous, and rightfully so. The first time a player suggests you’re worse than a murderer you laugh it off, but the first time somebody threatens to find where you live and ”teach you a lesson,” it makes you think twice about your choice of occupation.

The key here is to keep things from getting overblown in the first place. A well-trained forum moderator knows when a thread is starting to get out of hand and closes it. That’s the right thing to do. Don’t let people get frothy with outrage. Don’t feed the fire, either, with snappy comebacks or even well-nuanced explanations. Save your posts for another place or time: never post them in an outrage thread.

The pretend quitting: “This is the last straw. The new updates on the test server are a mockery of everything this game was supposed to be about. If this change goes live, I will be forced to cancel all three of my accounts forever. Since I am guild treasurer, I’m sure most of my guild will quit too, and we’re the only decent PvP guild on our server, so PvP on our server will entirely die out. I wish I didn’t have to do this, but they’ve forced my hand.”

This is a classic. On AC2, I did my best to correlate people who said they were quitting to people who actually quit. Almost nobody who said they were quitting actually quit, and the few who did didn’t stay gone long: they entered a rebound cycle and came back pretty quickly. Most often, they didn’t leave at all.

Here players are using the last ace up their sleeve: they are trying to appeal to the developers’ wallets. But developers aren’t in danger of falling for this gambit. After six months of somebody saying they’re quitting but never leaving, devs learn not to believe anybody who says that. And it’s not like most developers are involved with the money-making operations of the company anyway. The CFO does not read the message boards.

But this is noteworthy because it is a desperate act by a frustrated player. They feel like they have no sway over their game and they care about the game SO MUCH that it’s infuriating. (Most people who quit will just quit. The majority of them don’t even care enough about the game to fill out a “why are you quitting” questionnaire, so they certainly aren’t going to go to the forums to post this information.)

Treat these people as angry customers. Do your best McDonald’s manager impersonation. Give them small things if you can, or just be sympathetic if you can’t. Don’t encourage these people to “Go ahead and quit,” and don’t taunt them when they inevitably come back, either. Basically, you need to just ignore that they said that at all. Often times they have a legitimate complaint, and you should handle it just as if they hadn’t suggested that the game will crumble if they leave.

The unhelpful fanboy: “Yes it’s a slap in the face. I understand your pain — there’s no way that Feral Intendants are going to be any fun now that they’ve been nerfed by 6% of their damage output. But look at it this way: Turbine knows what it’s doing. This is for the good of the game! You’ve got to trust that they know more than you do.”

These posts are pro-developer, so developers automatically give these words more weight. But these fanboys are just as myopic as the people they’re responding to. In many cases, siding with them is going the wrong way, because they’re still pushing a devs-versus-players mentality… they’re just on the dev’s side. But falling into thinking about things in terms of devs versus players is a trap.

Forum moderators will rightly treat these as flame-bait. The thread will get locked and things will cool off. But the danger here is that developers will start to think in terms of black and white. We’ve all met devs who are “out to get” players. They’ve lost their direction. Fanboys like this help reinforce this stupid world view. A random suggestion: tell developers not to read locked threads. Maybe that would help. Aside from that, just be aware of the danger of turning players, who are paying customers, into your adversaries.

The burned out moderator: “Okay, if anybody else posts ANYTHING about the rogue changes, I am deleting the thread and banning their account!”

Being exposed to the forums causes real damage to developers and moderators. For instance, the QA employee in charge of WoW’s test-server forums is so badly burned out that he routinely deletes threads full of information and bug reports because users just sicken him. It’s obvious that he needs a vacation from forums. This one person seriously lowers the value of the WoW test server. I’ve watched as Sandra will spend hours testing and gathering data about a bug for them — basically doing their QA work for them for free, which is the secret goal of any test server – and then Hortus will delete the thread because he’s in a bad mood. I find it pretty funny, but Sandra tends to think it’s less funny…

Moderators face the most severe form of burnout in the game industry, so they must not be exposed to the toxic hell of the message boards too long. In fact, this is why most forums are a failure: the moderators are burned out.

In order to ensure they can sustain a long career as a moderator, they need to take on additional tasks part-time — for instance, updating web pages, proofreading game text, speaking at public schools about getting into the game industry. Obviously what they do needs to be tailored to their skills and interests. (Be wary of letting them create game content, because they may lose the last shreds of detachment they could previously muster. If they make content, it needs to be full-time: maybe a six month stint as content creator without any forum interaction at all.)

Don’t let moderators burn out. They will cause more damage than having no moderation at all.

Plummeting team morale: “Sometimes I just don’t know why we bother …”

The trouble with forums is that there is just enough actual value for developers that they can’t quit reading them. Somebody will post a really interesting bug, or give a really insightful view on balance, or post about a clever way to beat a quest that nobody on the team had thought of. But those are the gems in the big forum cesspit. The rest of the cesspit is full of cess.

If your developers read your official forums, encourage them to also read forums elsewhere. Players tend to whine and moan most loudly on the game’s official forums, because they are putting on a show to try to convince developers to change things. Behind closed doors in guild forums or fansite forums, posters tend to be considerably more upbeat. It’s very surprising to see the change of tone. It helps put things in perspective.

Don’t force your developers to read the forums. Instead, have the community send a weekly digest of posts to the team. Make sure the digest has as many upbeat or informational posts as it has complaints (even if the actual ratio on the forums is much different). Remember that forums are not representative of the user base so there’s no reason to expose developers to all the hate and anguish there. A taste is enough to get the idea.

The inappropriate dev post: “I see what you mean, TrollSlayer471, but you obviously didn’t read my explanation about WHY this change was necessary. I countered every one of your points in my first post, and if you can’t be bothered to read it, I can’t be bothered to keep responding.”

Most of your developers were not hired because of their amazing writing and speaking skills. You didn’t pick your engineers because they could moderate forums. You don’t expect your artists to have to deal with customers. But they probably think they’re pretty good at all these things. They are probably wrong. The most common problem is that developers will start playing the forum game themselves, responding emotionally or taking troll bait.

I don’t recommend banning all devs from posting, because the community interaction has many benefits. It can help keep the community happy, it has obvious PR benefits if done well, and it can make your developers feel like celebrities, which is an important perk of the job. But developers need training before they can be expected to post well. Have your community moderator run a course for all employees, veteran and newbie alike. Teach them the basics, and lay out ground rules. Among other things, it should include all of these rules of thumb:

• Never post while angry
• Never post when distracted
• Never post when a user dares you to respond to them
• Never post while drunk
• Never post when you don’t have all the facts
• If you have nothing insightful to say, don’t post at all — it’s better to be silent. (The only person who should post just to calm things down is the forum mod… not the developers directly.)
• If in doubt, mark the thread and wait 24 hours before responding. Odds are you’ll have a completely different response.
• Remember that your words will be taken out of context and posted on other forums, fansite news boards, and repeated in game chat. Act like you’re representing the company at all times.
• Make sure each post stands alone and tells a complete story, rather than being part of a thread’s conversation. (When your post gets copied to some guild forum, people will misunderstand what you said if you left out crucial details that seemed obvious to you at the time.)

Producers need to enforce these rules by removing developer’s posting privileges if they post poorly. Posts by devs are candy that feed the “forum game” players. It makes users feel special and loved, which makes devs feel useful and loved. But when developers get caught up in playing the forum game themselves, they aren’t representing your company well. Don’t let them become an embarrassment.

The Value of Forums

The early AC/AC2 forum moderators at Turbine had a drinking game they’d play sometimes when reading forums late in the evening: drink a shot for anybody who says “slap in the face”, chug if someone says their guild is quitting, and if somebody predicts the game will be dead in a month, the whole room has to drink. I’m sure versions of this game exist at many companies.

So if your forums are a cesspit, what’s the point of keeping them? Indeed, many game teams have come to the conclusion that it’s not worthwhile, and have shut down their forums for months or years at a time, hoping to “reboot” them into something more useful. This sometimes works, but it doesn’t look good to new players: “The forums are gone because people said too many bad things? I’m not playing this game!” So don’t close your forums.

The most valuable role a forum can serve is to let players get advice amongst themselves. It’s best to try to foster this sort of interaction. There’s a very strong temptation to use forums to gather information about your game, but you have to remember that forums are dramatically non-representative. Certainly you can spot trends in posts that can help you improve the game: forums are a great way to bring problems to light. But they are not a good way to tell how big a problem is. Even the most vitriolic topic may really only be affecting 10% of your player base, with the rest blissfully unaware of that issue. Reading too much into forums is dangerous.

A very skilled moderator can dramatically improve the value of a forum by plugging the spigots of vitriol, collecting the new ideas and complaints, and encouraging players to be helpful amongst themselves, rather than making every post an “I want this feature changed!” post. However, an unskilled or burned out moderator will make things worse, so be very vigilant about that.

Conclusion

Forums are dangerous because a tiny percentage of the player population uses them, and many of them use posts as a way to change the game in their favor or to get other people to react to them. It is easy to understand this on a conceptual level, but it’s much harder to keep this in mind when somebody says the new quest you made ruined the game and you ought to be drawn and quartered.

Treat forums with a healthy respect, like you would a tiger.

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There is a point in any multiplayer game where the world suddenly feels barren and empty. And then suddenly people start disappearing even more rapidly, and then the game boils down to the most dedicated of fans only… and then you’re stuck with just those people forever.

It’s often very sudden. Your game is just cruising along, losing a few hundred people per month, and then suddenly the number of people leaving your game goes through the roof! It doubles, triples, quadruples all of a sudden.

The first instinct is, “OH MY GOD THE LAST UPDATE RUINED THE GAME!” and then there’s panicking and freaking out. The level designers are saying “I told you we needed to add three new instances each month, they got bored and they’re quitting!” And the systems designer is thinking, “I must have done the math wrong when I redid the taunt aggro system! Where’s the error?! I have to find it so we can hotfix!” and the producer starts yelling at the marketing guys because obviously the ad campaigns are less effective this month…

Odds are everybody’s barking up the wrong tree. This is one of those places where being on a live team gives you tunnel vision — it’s nearly impossible to see the big picture when you spend your day creating the tiniest details. But odds are, you need to step back and fix a really big problem. If you’re losing critical mass, there’s only one fix. You need more players on each world, STAT. If you have an expansion coming out in a month, maybe you’re going to be okay. Otherwise, you have to bite the bullet and merge worlds.

For the record, EQ2 needs to merge worlds. I know what the ramifications are in terms of publicity. But the fact is that there are fewer and fewer players of the game every day. The expansions help certain level ranges (either the <40 range or the > 70 range) but there are virtually NO people playing the game between 40 and 70. It’s a black hole where people disappear forever, and it’s not about lack of content. It’s about lack of critical mass.

There are plenty of other games that need to merge worlds, too. But EQ2 is the one that is closest to me, since I like EQ2. I would love to be playing it nightly, but it’s too dispiriting to live in a world where there are only 20 other people within 10 levels of you. Especially given that my character class, like over half the others, is only really effective in groups.

Don’t let a game die because you can’t see the big picture. If you don’t have critical mass, nothing else matters until you fix that.

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But … I’m finished reading all the new blog posts in Google Reader, I’m all caught up with both Salon and Sinfest, and I’m considering starting on next year’s taxes — and I’m not even halfway done with this quest. If you are familiar with WoW, here’s a quick sketch: Wintersping to Eastern Plaguelands to Azshara to Eastern Plaguelands to Un’Goro … and after that to Feralas and then back to Eastern Plaguelands.

For those of you not familiar with World of Warcraft, here’s the summary: I’ve been traveling for the past 30 minutes, I’ve had to kill one creature, and if I continue I have another 30 minutes of travel ahead of me before anything else interesting happens.

But I’m stopping here. Ultimately I don’t care about the reward or future quests in this chain or even, really, saving the world. I’m bored. I’m leaving.

So be careful when you ‘make the world seem bigger’: because it doesn’t matter how big your world is if I’m too annoyed to play.

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