Thinking Too Much

Think about it

2012-01-16T14:54:00.001-08:00

"I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real."
-Garth Risk Hallberg, NYT Magazine Jan. 15, 2012

I am Verilazic

2011-08-12T00:19:00.000-07:00

Who am I? I am the son of two parents. I am an employee with the company I work for. I am related to innumerable other people in the world. I also am known by several names. There's the name on my birth certificate, but there's also the name I go by when I interact and play with other people online. That name can be a few things, but most of the time it is Verilazic. If you google "Verilazic", you get 1920 results, most (if not all) of them are things I've written or said or done. It's a humble list, but it's still me and mine.

Today, I read a blog post by a person I greatly respect. The name I know him by is Tobold. He wrote that Google was threatening to delete his online identity because it does not match his identity in real life. I'm sure this is the result of Google trying to remove various false identities out there that exist for nefarious reasons, such as spam. However, if it's at the cost of destroying identities that have positive purposes, then it's not worth it.

I don't know Tobold in real life. But I've read his blog for several years now, and I respect his opinions, even when I disagree with them. My knowledge and understanding has been enriched by the existence of that identity. Moreover, if "Tobold" is at risk, then "Verilazic" is at risk as well. If I don't have the option of keeping the various spheres I exist and interact within separate, then I do not want to use Google's services.

Education is like Basketball

2011-06-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

How's that for a title, eh? Allow me to explain this simile.

In the NBA, basketball teams are constantly trying to get the most out of their players. After all, winning sells tickets. If you don't win, you have nothing. So coaches tinker with their game plans, what plays to run, what defensive systems to employ, who to focus on, who to ignore, etc. They also tinker with which players on their own team should be playing and when. Obviously, the star of the team needs to play the most, but no player should be on the court the whole 48 minutes, so then begins the question of who should play when they're taking a break. And what players effectively complement that star? The value of "team chemistry" is debated perennially, but when a game can be decided by a single basket, in just a few seconds, that "team chemistry" matters as much as anything.

On top of that, team managers are watching every player, and compiling statistics on all the players in the league, in hopes of trading a player here or there for another team's player. The best trades lead to an improvement in both teams. How? Because we're talking about people here, and everyone has something different to offer.

In this extremely tense atmosphere, people have come up with dozens of numerical methods of measuring players' abilities and contributions on the court. One of the more interesting ones is referred to as "plus/minus". It shows a simple number that's either positive or negative: if while a player was playing, his team scored more than the other team, it's a positive number; otherwise it's negative. In theory, a player with a plus/minus of zero has no effect on how well his team performs.

So you would want to get rid of any player with a negative plus/minus, and only stock your team with players with positive plus/minus, right? Well, it's much much more complicated than that. It's quite possible to do in theory. However, plus/minus depends on a lot of factors. First of all, if you have a player who's only on the court with the best players on his team, he might have a much better plus/minus than if he was only on the court with the worst players on his team. Also, some positions in the game of basketball have been shown to have a greater potential effect on the performance of a team. The center position, held by the tallest player often has the greatest effect defensively, while the point guard, held by the shortest and (usually) smartest, has the greatest effect offensively. On top of that, if a great player is somehow playing more often against bad players, he might appear to be more effective, when in reality he just doesn't have as much of a challenge.

The point of that explanation is to show that a seemingly simple and elegant measurement is actually full of weaknesses when it comes time to use it in a practical environment. It's the same case with education.

People right now are trying all sorts of things to come up with a way of measuring teacher effectiveness. However, the problems are legion. A teacher with a gifted class of students from a high-income neighborhood will often seem to perform higher regardless of the teacher's ability. A teacher with a class of challenged students will obviously perform worse. How do you account for that numerically? Furthermore, a student's parents have been shown to have an equal if not greater effect on their child's performance in school. And what about the students' peers? A child in a class of gifted students will have an easier time learning regardless of whether he/she is gifted him/herself.

These effects are compounded over time. Imagine grading teachers based on how their students do after leaving their class. Well, what if those students go on to have several extremely effective teachers, or end up in classes with more gifted students. Or even more confounding, what if after a difficult year their parent signs them up for tutoring?

One might argue that like plus/minus in basketball, many of these scenarios can be balanced out by a large selection of data. While a player's plus/minus can vary wildly from game to game, it tends to average out to a more accurate value over the course of 82 games a year. This is true, yes. However, there are few teachers that get a large enough range of students in terms of ability to balance things out in that way. In other words, a school in a low income neighborhood is not going to have enough gifted students coming in its doors to give enough data on how their teachers could perform with better students. And all of this is assuming the tests themselves are accurate portrayals of student achievement. They're not.

The point of all this is to illustrate just how amazingly frustratingly complex the world of education is. To think you can reduce it all to numbers is naive. Yet the usefulness of reducing it all to numbers is irresistible.

Balancing by "not balancing"

2011-01-26T09:26:00.001-08:00

Run with me on this. I just finished reading a great article on the Elder Game blog about how balancing in an MMO is ultimately a fruitless task. Then I thought back to another post I had read a while ago about the idea of Self-balancing systems. I have to come down on the idea that you simply can't balance everything. A truly "self-balancing" system would be probably more complex than the game itself.

But I did have one thought on how to try to... offset some of the players' expectations. I while ago I was thinking about how some many players complain about the random nature of a lot of MMO abilities. they all do random damage, and many have a random chance to "crit". When you get blown up by some mage who hit the jackpot in the lottery on his numbers and insta-gibbed it's pretty frustrating. Same for that mage who won't have that happen again for a week or a month or never. So why not take more of that randomness out of the random number generator, and put it into the environment?

What I mean is, make the effectiveness of abilities dependent on where and when you're fighting. If it's night time, an archer isn't going to hit quite as often, and maybe will get a critical hit even less often. During the winter, a character using frost-based magic will be a little stronger, while during the summer a fire-based character will be stronger. If there's a storm where you're fighting, maybe no one can get a critical hit because the wind is just blowing everyone around.

Not only natural things, but perhaps add some more supernatural effects as well. Deep underneath the ground are magical "Ley Lines" that follow paths that no one knows (but perhaps could figure out), and near them perhaps magic is stronger, or perhaps just more random.

Over time, the player community will figure out all these factors, and players will begin to consider their surroundings: "Oh why did I stupidly try to shoot down that warrior in this nighttime windstorm instead of just running?"; "There should be a Ley Line over there, I'll wait to ambush the caravan there."

The idea is that with a world that creates enough dynamic effects on how powerful each class is, players will notice a little less how "overpowered" certain classes or abilities might seem. Obviously this doesn't remove the need for balancing, but it might just lighten the load a tiny bit.

9-11: What does it mean to you?

2010-08-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is a question that's been on my mind for a few days, since then news came out that some people are trying to build a mosque in New York City, a few blocks from ground zero. Of course, some people took real issue with that, and it's not purely a partisan issue. For people who lost friends and family in the September 11th attacks, or who were there trying to help or simply as witnesses, for many of them, the idea of harboring the very religion connected to the terrorists is repugnant.

I am not so intimately connected to the incident, so I really can only empathize so much. But I know this: if we target Islam as the culprit here, if we block the construction of this mosque, that is one more little victory that the terrorists get to add to their list of victories in the wake of 9-11.

When the terrorists set out to bomb the World Trade Center, they were targeting American citizens, yes, but their primary goal wasn't just to kill people. No, their goal was to damage our freedoms and ideals. They were attacking our culture. And judging by how we changed in years since, they succeeded. We became obsessed with security, arguably to a fault. Flying ceased to be just another method of travel; we spend ridiculous amounts of time screening for possible terrorists and bombs and such. Islam, before just another religion, though one with several countries that could use some social progress, now appears to many as some sort of infernal faith of hatred and destruction.

So here are my arguments why we should embrace this mosque with open arms. First, the terrorists are still winning right now; if we allow this, and idiot extremist Americans don't attack it, we finally hand the terrorists a legitimate ideological defeat. We prove that we are better than them. They felt threatened by our culture, etc, and so attacked us. We now feel threatened by them, and if we attack back, like we've done, can we really claim to be any better?

Second, we need to end the "war". In the past, wars ended when one side achieved victory. As in the destruction or surrender of their foe. I dare anyone to honestly claim that they think that is actually possible in this "war on terror". There is no country named Terror. It has no capital. It has citizens, but they're not collected all together in cities. The only way to reduce and hopefully someday remove the threat of terror is by removing the motivation to attack us. In other words, we need to turn enemies into friends instead of destroying them. It's been proven pretty effectively that trying to destroy our enemies is inefficient.

However, if we somehow prove to the Islamic world that we are not their enemies, if we help build up their nations, educate their people, and make them more comfortable, they will have less reason to hate us. And accepting a mosque right next to ground zero, and seeing and learning about Muslims honestly and face to face is an excellent start to that.

BP's Options

2010-06-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

I feel like talking about some current events right now, mostly because the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is such a big deal. Talking about it months from now may or may not make sense, so might as well do it now.

I'm going to come right out and say it: I think this is going to be bad. Really bad. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the oil gushing out right now ends up on the shores of Europe or Africa. BP's CEO made a rather silly statement early on to the effect of "this spill is ok, because the ocean is really really big." I don't have to explain the silliness of that, but I do think that fact matters: it's the reason this isn't going to threaten our survival on the Earth.

So far, every attempt to plug the leak has failed. It's been somewhere around 50 days since the explosion; at this point the specific number of days loses significance. It's pretty clear that they can't stop it with anything other than the slow solution, though we don't know if that'll work either. The amount of oil that has spilled out is a subject of debate over estimates, but by now it's easy to assume it's more than anything in U.S history, and likely will be the worst in world history before it's done.

There are two things I hope will come of this. One is that hopefully this will become a major impetus for alternative energy. That's the easy one. The other probably won't happen, but would be nice, and very interesting: BP needs to change. The way this is going, they are in the running to become... well... "reviled" is a good world. They probably have a chance at surviving this as a company, but I think they'd have a better chance if they change their entire paradigm of operation.

How? By becoming a "do-gooder" company. Currently, BP's purpose in the world is to supply people with petroleum. That mission needs to change to supplying the world with energy, and repairing the damage done. I'd propose that instead of fining them out of business, we should give them a directive that they spend a portion of their time money and manpower to clean up the gulf oil spill, until it is cleaned up.

I remember reading something about that sort of concept of business in the book What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis. The idea is that instead of doing everything you can as a business to extract as much money as possible from the world, you instead extract as little as you can and stay in business. This has two purposes: one, it makes you look better, and two, it makes it almost impossible for some new company to show up and undercut your prices. A company's purpose (morally, logically, philosophically) is to create value, not to extract value. Most oil companies have been in the business of extracting value. Now if BP is to survive, and perhaps even flourish, it needs to start over with a new philosophy of creating value, through clean energy and through cleaning the mess it has made. If it's smart and energetic about it, it can survive and come out of this disaster and in 5-10 years be better off than it was before.

Do I think any of that will happen? No, I avoid having high expectations. Hopes, yes. Expectations, no.

Reward vs. Punishment and Success vs. Failure

2010-05-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start out with a lot of generalities here, and then work my way down to a more manageable level. By the end, I'm going to make some points about the games industry, especially MMO games.

First off, most of life is about success and failure. For most animals, and for early humans, it was survival vs extinction. Now for a lot of humanity, success and failure are defined more by profit and loss than life and death. As a side note, I'd say that's a basic and logical argument for us being at least slightly more civilized on an absolute scale than we used to be.

Obviously, we all want to succeed, and we don't want to fail. Ever. However, success and failure can not exist without each other. Our society - in a way - uses failure and loss to inform people that they are making bad decisions. And in order to get people to change their behavior, we punish them for failure, and reward them for success. However, when you take these methods to an extreme, or simply use them a lot, people react differently.

Some may stop trying anything, forgoing rewards in order to avoid punishments. In terms of games, this has shown up in recent years by players only wanting to play games where they are rewarded more and punished less, until you get some games that feel like one long sugar high; constant rewards, no punishments. Unfortunately for the players demanding for and playing those games, they feel less of a reward the more of it they get.

And that is the problem: players want only success and reward, and don't want failure and punishment.

The second topic I'd like to tie in is the little thing called a Skinner Box. Basically, it's a container housing a rat, that has various ways of rewarding and punishing said rat. Using it, Skinner could train various behaviors in rats.

Various parts of the world we live in can be described in ways linked to the Skinner Box. We all respond to stimuli, and when we learn that a certain behavior is linked to a certain reward or punishment, we either do that behavior more or less depending on the stimulus.

MMOs have been described as Skinner Boxes as well. In fact, they're probably a little better at that function than most people realized initially. To the point that a large portion of the player base has now been trained to have certain behaviors in games. For instance, most players are extremely risk-averse. If they don't have an obvious advantage, there's a good chance they won't do anything. They also tend to quit if they lose.

However, I think there's an opportunity here. We have these players who only want to succeed and be rewarded, and don't ever want to fail and be punished, and we have them playing in a Skinner Box that has been doing just that. Then we have a few people who came up with games that were Skinner Boxes that had more chances to fail and be punished. Obviously, that's not going to work if we want some more interesting action.

So how about disconnecting reward from success and punishment from failure? Expose players to a game that specifically rewards risk-taking, does have failure as a potential outcome, but doesn't simply punish that failure. I'm not saying "give a big new sword to anyone who dies". I'm saying "If someone just lost a battle, don't have them die, give them multiple interesting ways out."

Planescape: Torment is my idol here. Another game I've heard about that might go the more interesting route is Heavy Rain, though I don't know a lot about it beyond the standard description. In 90+% of games, MMO or otherwise, if you fail at a task, you die. Game over. Insert coin. Try again. Punishment. Many games over the years have worked to dilute this outcome, by making the game easier, or failure less costly. Some RPGs have some way of respawning with minimal penalty so that you don't have to reload from a saved game. But aside from the two titles above, they haven't made failure and death into a part of the narrative of the game itself.

When you fail at something in real life, what do you do? You might complain a little bit, say it wasn't your fault, blame somebody or something else, but at some point you have to do something different. Sometimes you can try again, other times you can't. When you can't, you simply move on. The story of life continues.

Say that forces are fighting for control of a town. One currently controls it while the other invades. If the invader is repulsed, he tries again. If he fails to much, he has to try something different, or retreat for a time to lick his wounds before trying again. Then, he succeeds, and captures the town. What about the defenders? Well, once it was clear they were losing, they made their own retreat. Where do they go? Into the countryside, where the invaders had previously been. The former defenders now become a guerrilla force, striking from a hideout, and gathering their strength and waiting for the opportunity to take back the town.

Basically, what we need is to start creating games that act as Skinner Boxes, but not to reinforce the obvious formulas. Instead, we need to teach players new behaviors, and new values. We need to teach them to value risk taking, not by removing punishments, but by making the standard failure-state lead to new and unseen opportunities.

Imagine fighting a monster in a cave, and if you beat it, you get some treasure, but if you fail to beat it, while fleeing for your lives, it knocks down a wall leading to a never-before-seen cavern leading to perhaps different creatures and treasure.

If you treat the player to enough unusual and inconsistent outcomes instead of "game over", you will begin to teach them to value risk and the potential for failure.

Ready... Go.

2010-04-16T22:08:00.001-07:00

How hard is it to learn something on your own? The few things I've taught myself on my own don't even deserve mention. To be fair, I haven't had any real reason to learn something on my own before; I figured that time would come after I had got into my main career. However, one of my classes this semester made me feel just a little bit like I was teaching myself something new. Now obviously, it wasn't entirely on my own, but our excellent professor was very good at forcing us into situations where we had to work very hard to figure things out, and it paid off in buckets. I now have a decent grasp of the Verilog language, and a better feel for how to learn on my own.

So today will mark the beginning of a mild experiment. I don't have much time right now due to term papers, projects, and finals coming up, but we'll still consider today to be the start. I have no idea how far I'll get, or even how well I'll maintain interest, but I think I've found a pretty good source to get started from. Let's see what happens.

Whatever happened to Demos?

2010-03-01T13:07:00.000-08:00

I remember about... 10+ years ago, almost every game that came out had a demo you could play as well. What happened to that little policy? Nowadays it seems the only way to find out what a game is like is either to look at the ridiculously funded ads or to ask someone who's already played the game. And that doesn't solve the problem I just ran into.

Last fall my computer died. I lost a lot of files, and some money replacing it, but the important thing is that my new computer is substantially more powerful. However, it's not bleeding edge powerful, and has an integrated graphics card. So I'm finding myself able to play some games that I previously was unable to. But at the same time, I'm finding that it's very hard to determine what games I can play when I have a great processor and plenty of memory, but crap for a video card.

This is where the lack of game demos comes in. If I could obtain a demo of some of the games I'm interested in playing, I could be very sure that my computer can run them or not. Instead, right now I'm stuck trying to decide whether I want to risk $60 on a game that may end up being useless to me. So what options to I have available to me? Risk buying the game, which with my limited income right now is a bad idea. Or pirate the game and test it that way, which has obvious legal and moral issues, and frankly takes a long time these days due to the gigabyte size of recent games. Or just save my money for the day when I can afford a computer that can definitely play the games I want, which is the best decision both financially and academically. Plus, there are lots of games out there I've found that don't have tough system requirements, and are way cheaper to boot.

Listening in, game industry? You just lost a customer because you can't prove your games will work for him. =P

The Gathering Storm

2009-11-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty busy with stuff lately, but managed to find the time to read through the latest book in the Wheel of Time series, The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. To put it simply, it was awesome. I'll write some more about it later, when I have more time. Probably in mid December. For now, I'll try to write a few thoughts without including major spoilers.

The big question for this book was whether it was going to feel like WoT with a new writer, since Robert Jordan died before he could complete the saga. I'm glad to say that Sanderson lived up to my expectations at least. While there are parts that don't quite feel the way I would expect RJ to write, (simple exampe: the descriptions are not quite as long-winded usually) in general the story itself felt right, and the characters felt right. As well they should, since RJ set up very extensive notes so that the story could be completed. He supposedly even wrote out a few of the major scenes himself ahead of time, most notably the final scene (or climax scene, it's not entirely clear to me).

So I think the very minor complaints I have about the book probably should be directed more at RJ than at Sanderson, and that's something I can accept.

Fair Distribution of Profits

2009-10-16T02:16:00.001-07:00

Tobold decided to branch out a little the other day, and wrote a nice post about some general economic thoughts. His metaphor is pretty good, but the really interesting stuff is the discussion running in the comments.

Mistakes and the Economy

2009-10-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Gevlon has a post over on his blog about the common concept often referred to as "Mistakes were made (but not by me)". Usually, I'm not a big fan of his positions, though his thoughts can be very illuminating in attempts to understand different points of view. However, I think he has some interesting points, even he was a bit undiplomatic.

To summarize, when a human is presented with a contradiction, they generally have to solve it in some way. True, sometimes they simply avoid it, but that's not always possible. One of the most typical contradictions is the concept of being wrong. We're generally programmed to be confident; in fact, I would argue that it's a survival instinct. Few people get stuff done by doing it half-heartedly, so when we do something, we need to be confident that we are doing the "right" thing. However, if it turns out that it was the "wrong" thing to do, we're faced with this contradiction.

There are many ways that people deal with it. Generally, they either change their paradigm in some way, or they don't. If they do change, it could lead to a lowering of confidence, perhaps depression as an extreme example, or it could lead to them simply changing their behavior and knowledge, and moving on. However, some people don't change their paradigm when confronted with a problem. The most common instance of this is avoiding responsibility. If they can claim that it wasn't their fault, then their view of themself, their self-esteem, is preserved.

That tactic pisses me off. My beliefs stem from the omnipotence of knowledge, and to see someone willfully avoid knowledge in order avoid risk to their self-esteem is beyond frustrating. However, there is a caviat to that: a politician saying "mistakes were made (but not by me)" is a special case of this to me. In other words, in the current climate of politics, it's virtually impossible for a politician to admit having made a mistake, and not be harmed politically by it. In that case, even if they say it, it is possible that they are still admitting to themselves that they made a mistake, they're simply not allowed to admit it publicly. So in that case, my ire is not directed at the individuals, but at the system that forces that sort of behavior.

Which segues somewhat to the next connection I made (with some help from the end of Gevlon's post), which was to the economy. Milton Friedman once said (as I'm sure a lot of economists have said too) that the economy is not just a profit system, it's a profit and loss system. He implied that the two functions are equally important to the economy; I'd like to argue that they're not, loss is more important.

Another way of putting it is this: there are lots of things being done in the world today that make it a better place. Some of them are for profit, some are not. It is possible to get people to do things for the good of all without encouraging them with money. Price and money is a useful tool to encourage activity, but it is not strictly necessary. However, if someone makes a mistake, it's often difficult for them to admit, even to themselves, that they made a mistake (we're talking about large scale stuff here, like building a bridge for a town in the developing world, and it collapses). What makes it worse is that it's not usually considered a morally wrong act, or at least it isn't by the one who does it. If I steal from someone, unless I'm seriously messed up in the head, I know it's a morally wrong thing to do. However, if I convince myself that something wasn't my fault, that I didn't make a mistake, I don't usually have my conscience frowning at me.

That's where money comes back into the picture. No matter how well I've convinced myself that my idea/company/investment is a good idea, if I'm losing money, it doesn't matter. Because profit is (at least in this respect) a completely objective measure of success. And that's what makes it effective even in the face of mistakes, blame games, and self-delusion.

Day/Night Cycles

2009-09-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

I have two points to address here. The first is a proposal or hypothetical idea, and the second is a question about one detail of that proposal.

First: what if day/night cycles mattered in an MMO game world? What could you do with that goal? How might you make them matter? Part of the line of thinking that I'm following here is the idea that disruptions to a simplistic static stability are a good thing. This doesn't mean the world is inherently unpredictable; the basic mechanics are still there, players just have to learn and adapt to a world that is in motion, rather than standing still.

In fact, having various things like the time of day and weather affect things like combat could make it easier to do away with simple random number generators for things like dice rolls. In other words, if there are a host of conditions in the world around you that could modify the outcome of various things such as a spell, is there as much need for relying on simple randomness? Instead of throwing a virtual die, and deciding what happens when that mage throws a fireball, how about looking at the sky, seeing that it's raining, and deciding that his fireball fizzles down to half it's starting size by the time it hits the target?

We can discuss weather another time; this is about day night cycles. I came up with a list of some basic things that could be modified by whether it's day or night out.
- Stealth
- Dodging (can't see it coming, can't dodge)
- Aim (can't see the target, can't hit as easily, especially if they're far away)
- Animal movement (nocturnal creatures come out, such as wolves hunting)
- People sleep
- Guards become more alert (more dangerous, and attacks are more common at night)
- Magic (light-based magic stronger during day, weaker at night)
- Movement (slower at night, faster during day)

I'm sure there are more creative effects out there, but those are some simple things off the top of my head.

Now for the question: How long should a day/night cycle be? My thought is that it shouldn't follow the real world's time. True, it's a nice feel to see it night outside for real when its night game, but if the world is going to change based on this simple cycle, I think it'd be better to shorten the cycle so that someone playing at the same time each day could experience different times.

To this effect, I determined that a multiple of 5 hours per cycle would be a pretty good number. Why? Because multiples of 5 do not divide evenly into 12 hours. In fact, it's a regular unevenness. If you're curious, just go look at the remainder, add that into the next division, and see the remainder after that. If you keep going, you get every remainder possible from 0 to 4 hours if you divide by 5 hours. Different multiples have different remainders, but they all have the same pattern: the same time in RL each day will be a different time of day in the game world, and the pattern won't repeat until at least 5 days later.

Note, a 5 hour day/night cycle would mean 2.5 hours for a day, and 2.5 hours for a night, while a 10 hour cycle would be 5 and 5. I nearly confused myself while writing this, and ended up having to replace a bunch of 2.5s with 5s, since I definitely don't think having 1.25 hours each for a day and night would be a good idea. An hour just seems a bit too short. I could be wrong though.

The downside to this shortened cycle is that it makes coordinating times between players a bit harder. You could have a "game time" and "server time" to make it easier, or just let players figure out their time zones on their own. The other potential problem I can think of is that 5 hours is so short that players could get disoriented, or upset at the fact that the world is changing so quickly on them. This could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing. I think it is a potentially useful mechanic to force players to vary their playing, and keep them on their toes.

That aim can be viewed as a negative thing if players don't like the implied hostility directed at them. I'd rather this wasn't a mechanic that was only popular in Darkfall-style games. However, I think forcing players to adjust regularly could be a good way to help keep them engaged in the game. Plus, if you have 2.5 hours for a day, a large battle might last for a whole (or large part of a) game day. This would create certain potential imperatives to finish fights before factors change in a way that might put the initiator at a disadvantage.

Perhaps 5 hour cycles could do that, but perhaps 10 hour cycles would be better.

Quests as a tool to encourage interaction

2009-09-29T10:21:00.001-07:00

My experience with quests, and indeed most people's experience with quests in MMOs to date, was pretty bland for the most part. Sure, some incremental progress has been made beyond "kill ten rats", though those quests are still around, since they make killing ten rats feel slightly more productive. There's the occasional quest that's actually enjoyable; sometimes it's the unique mechanics, like driving around in a siege engine; sometimes it's the story, like the Wrathgate questline in WoW.

However, quests are all game stories, without exception I believe. They were all stories that are built into the game, were written by someone else, who tried to make them in such a way that you wanted to know them.

I have told stories about playing WoW many times (though usually to other people who play WoW), and I'm sure most people have a few good stories from playing an MMO. However, I'm willing to bet that none of those stories are a quest story. Oh, they might be a story that happened while doing a quest, but they won't be the quest itself. Why retell something that's been told to literally thousands of other players in exactly the same way? My favorite stories are all of times when I did something cool with other players. The time my guildies and I ran Stratholm deadside in 45 minutes in blue gear. The time myself and 14 other PvP-focused players running a premade defeated the strongest guild on our server in a hotly contested AB battle that ended 2000-1990 (vanilla WoW; the guild was in T2.5 and we were in PvP blues and epics).

You know what I conclude from that? The best quests are the ones that make you interact with other players, then get out of the way. I have virtually no memory of the story behind the quest to run Strath deadside in 45 minutes, but I remember many details of the run itself. I may not remember many of the details of the 2000-1990 AB fight, but I do remember the desperation and then excitement upon realizing we might be able to come back from a deficit and win.

I'd like to propose an example quest that could do this. Imagine a quest in town to escort an NPC to the next town, perhaps a 15-20 minute journey. The quest is only offered once, and when someone accepts, no one else is allowed to sign up, similar to some escort quests in WoW. However, imagine it's an open quest; you can optionally share it with as many people as you like. However, sharing it may reduce the reward slightly, the idea that the payment would be divided among several players.

Imagine, next, a corresponding quest in the nearby enemy faction hideout. At the same time that the escort quest is accepted in the nearby town, the hideout has an NPC start offering this quest to any single person interested to assassinate the NPC who is being escorted. This player can choose to share the quest with others, with the same sort of minor penalty. Alternatively, maybe a standard Wanted poster is up with a reward for any player who turns in his head.

The point here is to create a situation where players have a reason to attack each other beyond simple "ganking". With a structural reason in place, preparation can come into play. A player escorting an NPC with a bounty on it's head knows that there's a high chance they'll be attacked. This creates a more equal ambush situation, because the player is expecting it, though he still might be taken by surprise. Also, there is the interesting decision of whether or not to bring along help. The escort player may opt to not bring anyone, on account of the zone being under his faction's control. However, he knows that an enemy in his own zone might be able to kill the NPC before he can stop them. Similarly, the enemy player has to decide whether to bring along friends and increase the risk of detection by random players, or go it alone and risk simple failure, or risk being outnumbered by the escort.

I'm sure there are other many ways to vary this sort of a quest, including ways to make it more attractive to pursue. However, I think the general theme of structuring quests in a way designed to throw players together and at each other needs to be put to more extensive use.

A Game Built on Contingency

2009-09-27T18:06:00.000-07:00

What if you had a game world that had a sort of structured dynamism? Sort of a mix between WoW, Eve, and D&D. I've been working on a sort of sketchup of an MMO, but I finally figured out how to put into words one of the main themes I'm thinking hard about for it: contingency.

In D&D, the Dungeon Master, the guy running the game, often has a primary quest for the players to do. However, often the players don't do what he expects. At this point, DMs do different things. Some improvise a new storyline, some find a clever way to coax the players back on the planned path. And some have several potential - contingent - storylines planned out that the players could follow, depending on their choices. This is the idea I would like look at: the idea of planning multiple outcomes in a game world, each one different, but all equally meaningful and interesting, and then letting the players on each server decide through their collective actions which outcome will take place.

~*~

Imagine a game world; a relatively small game world, say half the size of one of WoW's continents (and we'll base the general game mechanics off WoW to keep things simple). Maybe it only holds 1-2 thousand players; that's fine. Now, this world has several zones like WoW, but its focus is on PvP. The Horde and Alliance each have a single capital city, maybe 3 or 4 major towns, and a dozen outposts. All towns are potentially conquerable, including the capital cities; maybe the outposts can be too, but they're less strategically and economically important.

I'm told this is similar to WAR, except it's Order vs Chaos, or some such.

Now we'll put the economic system into a little perspective. Imagine that among the various resources, several are only accessible in certain zones and locations, and that each faction has control of some of those resources. Both players and NPCs can take advantage of these resources to various effect. However, there are no flightpaths, and the only mail that can be sent is text, no items. This means that resources have to be actually transported from site to site.

Some of you may be thinking of Eve right now.

Now, on top of this nice little conglomeration of features, lets add a little basic "dynamic content": natural disasters. Imagine landslides happening sometimes in mountain passes, blocking the road. Fortunately, there are other passes, though perhaps they only opened up when the landslide blocked the main one. In the forests, one day the road gets swallowed by the undergrowth or is blocked by a gigantic fallen tree, forcing players to find new ways through. Maybe a blizzard blows through from time to time, or a hurricane or tornado during a battle.

Sure, some of this may have been thought of before, but the point is to have these things happen often enough that players recognize that the world can change any time, often in inconvienent, but interesting ways. And most of all, these events affect things; they're not like WoW's weather. Another example: fire magic works less well in a downpour, while frost magic is amplified during the winter (to balance, seasons could last for a week or two; a game year might take a month in RL).

~*~

Now lets go back to that PvP stuff. Say the horde conquer some alliance town, cutting off access to a number of outposts, and putting that zone in the hands of the horde. That means the alliance is now excluded from that part of the world, right? Wrong. While the horde are busy rebuilding the burnt-down town with their own architecture, the alliance NPCs escaped during the battle, and hastily construct a hideout in a nearby forest or ravine. Now instead of offering quests to deal with local wildlife and attack horde towns, they offer quests to assassinate horde peons working and transporting supplies, and steal supplies. Meanwhile, the horde moves in some NPCs, some of whom give the horde players missions to escort various NPCs that the alliance has a mission to assassinate.

In other words, the destruction of the alliance town doesn't mean the alliance players can no longer play in that zone. On the contrary, they're encouraged to go to that zone and play more there than elsewhere. On top of that, they're given certain things to deal with the dominance of the horde in that zone. Perhaps they get a cloak that can be used to shadowmeld anywhere in that zone, to reduce the advantage of the winning faction.

What's that? The fact that the alliance didn't lose anything means that destroying the town was meaningless? Let's look at that in more detail. The horde now have access to more resources, more NPC support, and can act more openly in that zone. And what exactly is "meaningful" anyway? Excluding or killing the other faction? That's a rather 1-dimensional point of view. This is meaningful because the world changed. The town changed hands, the horde got new quests, and the alliance got different quests. Instead of being simply forced out, alliance players got new and different challenges, but also new tools to deal with them. And by PvPing, and winning, the horde literally changed the world; that's pretty meaningful.

Then if the alliance takes back the town, the horde retreat to their own hideout to formulate a counterattack of their own.

This is what I mean by contingency. From what I've heard of WAR, if you take a keep, it's taken, and the other side has to take it back. That's pretty simplistic. Heck, in WoW, if you destroy all the NPCs in an enemy town, aside from the fact that they'll respawn eventually, what you're doing is "denying service" for the other faction. Imagine instead that another nearby town immediately sends out an expendition of NPCs to clear you out of the town, and rez all the NPCs. Then you have the option of running away, or trying to defeat this focused and more dangerous challenge.

In other words, when the players act - in sufficient numbers - they force the game world to change. However, it doesn't have to change in simplistic or even predictable ways. Imagine setting up potential events where a powerful wizard happens to be traveling through the town at the time and summons a literal thunderstorm to repel your attempted invasion.

That may be a bit out there for now, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work. Or make the town guards more alert and ready for a fight during the night, to discourage attacking a town when few players are online. But the important thing is to allow for one side or the other to win, and then change things based on that. And continue changing them.

Rather than building the world around static stories of quests and epic raids, build the world around a set of comprehensive ways for it to be changed. Create a structure for this to happen, automate it to a high degree (perhaps allowing for some minor intervention in extremely imbalanced cases), then after release, spend your development time on expanding the different possible contingencies of conquering and reconquering zones, on expanding the variety of quests pitting players against each other, on expanding the ways that travel paths change, on creating new random events to change the world on its own, in a natural way. In other words, continue expanding the potential contingencies and outcomes, to reduce the chances of the players encountering simplistic repetabove his headme. If the world is constantly changing in little ways all the time, it doesn't become boring. If I don't know what quest I'm going to get when I talk to that NPC the fourth time, if there's a chance it might be brand new, I will feel a small bit of excitement everytime I see a new exclamation mark above his head.

Procedure, Representation and Extendability

2009-09-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

I realized something a couple days ago: the computer industry is built on "extendability". This is an oversimplification, but I find those are useful for talking about stuff. =)

First off, a commenter on Nils' blog posted a very interesting link to The Escapist about the future of gaming being procedural. The article also had a link to an interesting youtube video of a "pixel city" the author created using procedural algorithms. This got me started thinking, on a couple of fronts. Today, I figured I'd just stick to the philosophical part of it.

Computers are based on transistors; basically digital switches, though they can also be used for amplification purposes. Engineers started out linking those transistors together with other components to create various electrical devices, most of them analog. Then they used them to come up with logic gates, the basic unit used for building digital devices. They then linked those logic gates together to create various simple logic units; an example might be a simple circuit for adding two binary digits together. Then they linked those units together to create larger units, like a circuit that adds two large binary numbers together. Then they linked those together with other units to create basic processing units. Then they worked on making those processing units bigger (figuratively speaking), by putting more of those subunits together, and allowing them to make more calculations and more quickly, resulting in today's CPUs.

Putting CPUs into computers lead to it being the programmers' turn. Starting out with simple instructions, they created a machine language that was standardized for working with the computer devices and CPU at the lowest level. Then using that language, they created more complex languages, such as Basic. Then using some of the simple units of those languages, and machine language, they created more complex languages, eventually reaching today's level of compexity, which C++ is a good representative of. Then programmers used the basic units of C++, things like ints, floats, chars, and arrays, to create classes, such as strings, lists, stacks, queues, and trees. Using these various data types, they created more complex data types and functions. Now, using all those subroutines and data structures, programmers create complex programs that fulfill all sorts of functions. And they set up ways for different programs to communicate with each other, with their operating system, and with other computers across networks.

Every step along this entire description is a case of people taking smaller pieces and making something of them. Not only that, but then making it so that their creation can then be used as a piece in still larger creations. This is called extendability.

Ultimately, everything in computers is a representation of reality. And everything is extendable. No single person understands all the details of every step listed above. That's like knowing the job and duties of every single individual in the US. However, that segues nicely into a common function of computers: representing the real world. Everything from simple arithmetic, on up to simulations, info search (read: Google), and virtual worlds; they're all representations of the world in various forms.

However, the world itself is "extendable". Collections of atoms form molecules, which then form proteins, which then form organic cells. Those cells group together to form organs, which then work together to make our bodies. Individuals form friendships and families. They also form companies, and teams and organizations, and institutions. Institutions form the basis of state and provincial governments which combined make up countries and nations. Finally, those nations (try to) work together as the United Nations, while also trading across boundaries and forming extra-national institutions, and dealing with multi-national corporations.

No one understands all of this, and there's no way to represent it all. That's why any discipline that focuses on understanding the world around us works at focusing on only parts of the whole in order to simplify and make things understandable for an individual. However, we should always keep in mind that no matter what our understanding is, it is always partial, incomplete, and imperfect. In other words, the world is BIG, and there's no way to get it all - but we'll keep trying.

Crafting in MMOs

2009-09-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

...is really boring. Or at least it is in WoW. I haven't really experienced it in any other MMO, though I've read around a bit about it. I know it felt pretty lame in NWN and Dungeon Siege II, though part of that I blame on other things, such as an overdose of possible ingredients, making the only challenge finding them.

I sent Tobold a request to talk about his ideals for a crafting system in MMOs. He promptly obliged. He also included a link to another post by Ixobelle about his own ideas for a better crafting system. I like some of Ixobelle's ideas, though I worry that they could go to far. He mentions A Tale in the Desert having guilds creating 800 billion adobe bricks one by one to build a pyramid, which sounds absolutely insane to me, though I suppose if you're going to build something on that scale, the cost should be on the same scale.

I'd like to list a couple of thoughts and ideas I've gotten from their posts on crafting. It's an interesting topic, since I have such limited knowledge about it. Most of what I'm trying to figure out comes through imagining what the outside effects of various things could be. Forgive me in advance for using WoW references, since it's the game I know the best, and one that most people know well enough as well.

Crafting:
The act of crafting something should definitely be non-trivial. This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be explained. Basically, this aspect of the game should be treated as an opportunity to build a different way to play for people. I'm thinking of the minor stir that was produced when Popcap Games made a Peggle mod for WoW. Clearly, even implementing a simple but engaging minigame would have a better return than implementing a button and progress bar. At the very least, this would give players something enjoyable to do in game that isn't the same as the normal way of playing, and doesn't bore them.

The other part to this is the whole leveling thing. In WoW, I think the current skill max is 450. When you think about that, doesn't it seem a little ridiculous? 80 levels is quite a ways to level in the game as is. Why do you need to do 6 times that in crafting skills? Because the activity is trivial. If you remove the triviality, it becomes less necessary to repeat the activity so many times. Imagine, instead, only 20 levels to crafting in WoW. For the first level or two, you make practice junk. Then the skill levels from 3-10 involve making increasingly valuable consumables. Things like armor patches, bullets, wizard oils, and better ingrediants for higher-level items. Then for skill levels from 11-15, you make increasingly more useful uncommon, then rare items around 15 or so. Finally, 16-20 lets you make rares and even epics, with 20 perhaps allowing the creation of a legendary.

Along with this shorter leveling curve, it gets actually harder to craft the upper-level items. Making an epic weapon might require 5-10 minutes, or even a half hour of actual engaged play. Remember, this isn't a half hour of watching a progress bar; it's a halfhour long puzzle or something similar. Perhaps it requires a lot of work on making the high level ingrediants required, and you might need to have an excess of ingrediants standing by in case you lose an ingot to a mistake. Imagine a puzzle where each failed attempt at a certain point results in the loss of a single ingrediant. And of course, you can only increase your level by crafting an exceptionally hard item at your level.

Recipes:
Progression in crafting shouldn't require progression in another part of the game. You shouldn't have to raid or pvp to get the best recipes. However, that doesn't mean some recipes can't be acquired through those and other means. But make them tradeable. By making the challenge of crafting meaningful, you no longer need to make the barrier to making high-level items attendance in a raid.

Resources:
This is difficult to me. First off, how many do you really need? Where's a good balance between realism and enjoyment? Remember that while we want crafting to be a meaningful challenge, we don't want it to be an "elitist" challenge. I'm of the opinion that having a huge number of items and ingrediants and resources to keep track of is similar to having a huge set of stats and mechanics to keep track of and theorycraft about for raiding; it may work, but it also has the potential to be unnecessary fake complexity designed to make things opaque. The more transparency you can have (and still have a fun and challenging game), the better.

Resources are tied into trade and exploration. I'll be focusing on exploration in depth in another post, so I'll address this very briefly. The world needs to be dynamic in it's shape. If roads are sometimes destroyed, and mountain passes change, and forests randomly generated, this will make the search for resources and trade paths more interesting than "will we or won't we be ambushed during this trip?"

Back to numbers, I think it'll partly depend on how many professions are in the game. There'll be progression in resource quality in the type, but I don't like making old things like copper and iron useless after finding adamantium. Certainly we can find uses for them. And even if that seems realistically hard for metals, what about herbs? It's reasonable for some compounds and ingrediants to be useful in all sorts of potions, not just simple ones.

Quality differences are useful though... though a higher quality resource shouldn't simply be available in a higher level zone; that's a fake rarity. Make it actually rare. Then when it's used only for epic items, the price is justified, and part of the challenge in the crafting is in obtaining sufficient ingredients.

Consumables:
One person commented with an interesting point, I think in Tobold's post: make everything consumable to avoid flooding the market with items. I agree that flooding the market is a serious danger. I'm reluctant to make even epic armors and weapons actually disappear after some time, or worse, after some amount of use. That starts impacting the combat game negatively. If it costs me enough to have to replace my epic weapon, I'm not going to use it.

On the other hand, it might keep down gear inflation, which I like. It might make a meaningful decision out of deciding whether to use that giant +20 Sword of Godsmiting when ambushing a simple caravan, or rather using some more common weapon. Still, I worry it could make PvP into a negative-sum game.

So perhaps a time-related degradation in one's gear? And maybe repairing and maintaining epic gear could be a task that doesn't require a master crafter to carry out, nor require as many ingredients. Plus, remember that if you only have to level up 20 times to become a master, you're not going to have to flood the market with items anyway. And most of your economically-beneficial crafting may only involve things that require skill levels around 10.

Trading:
One last note on this, sort of. Having crafting take a sizable length of time means transactions between players will feel more risky. It's one thing to give ingredients to a player and watch him craft the item on the spot; it's another thing entirely to give them to him and watch him walk away with the expectation of getting the item in a half hour, or even the next day. That takes more trust. This can be addressed two ways that I see: one, you can ignore it, causing advanced crafting to be confined to trusted guildmates more often, and maybe allow players to build reputations. Two, you can implement some sort of contract system that allows you to keep possession of the items even while they're being crafted with, and force the crafter to give you the item or ingredients back somehow. Well, you could create some tools to allow players to check on each other's reputations when it comes to trustworthiness.

In the end, I think the task of implementing crafting can be described as creating a fun and engaging game mechanic, then intertwining it with the rest of the game, without making it require participation in the rest of the game, or having an adverse effect on the rest of the game. It needs to be synergistic, beyond just making the world feel more alive; it needs to make the game easier for the populace, or at least break even in that respect.

Burnt out on Politics

2009-09-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to say that right now that I'm completely tired of talking about anything that has to do with politics, particularly health care reform. So I'm not even going to try. I'll probably "recover" in a few weeks or so, and then I'll write some posts about those things. But for the moment, I think I'll just stick to gaming topics.

Motivation and the Economy

2009-09-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation. A very interesting TED talk. For those of you who don't know, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It's a conference where people who know a lot of stuff make engaging presentations to each other about everything under the sun. There are a lot of videos on youtube and elsewhere floating around of various talks, and almost all of them are extremely interesting.

This one was especially interesting to me in that it provides some challenge to one of the basic assumptions behind my political belief in fiscal conservatism, and free market economics (well, not completely free, of course). That challenge is the assertion that rewarding someone with money works if they have simple labor to do, but when their job becomes much more creative, simple external incentives may not be as effective.

On second thought, however, I'm not too worried that this will shake the foundation of my beliefs to it's core. Basically, this is a direct challenge to the half of the market that is about profit. In other words, the idea that money is the best motivation to get people to work hard. It is very interesting to hear strong evidence opposing that belief. I will have to think on it some more, and will probably come up with some other connections, extrapolations, and ramifications it may have, but that's a discussion for another time.

The other part of the market is about loss. Profit and loss, and people often forget about the loss part. Milton Friedman put it rather effectively some decades ago: "If Chrysler loses money, they have to change what they're doing; if Amtrak loses money, they just go get a bigger government appropriation." It's a simplistic example, but those are often the best at getting the idea across.

This TED talk does nothing to contradict the effectiveness of loss on efficiency in the economy. And I would also add that running an experiment where you threaten people with taking away some of their money if they don't solve the candlestick problem would not contradict the effectiveness of it either. Because loss is less a motivation, and more of a... how would I put it? A barometer? If you are losing money, that means your solution isn't working. It might mean you're not working hard enough, but it might also simply mean that the way you're working isn't good enough.

The candlestick test is insufficient to prove that "loss" is an ineffective tool of the economy to improve overall efficiency of society. This is because the test is too simple. Money and price is the economy's way of on voting whether a particular product is wanted or not. If you don't get moeny for it, then no one wants it, and you know you need to do something different. If your business is losing money, that means that the economy does not value your work enough to justify you continuing to do it.

This isn't to say that what you're doing is bad or good, it simply means that want you're doing is insufficient. The closest the candlestick problem gets to representing that state would be the case of using the thumbtacks to attach the candle to the wall, or trying to glue it to the wall with it's own wax. Both methods do not work. Not earning enough money is the market's way of letting you know that your method did not work. And in that respect, it is not motivating, but it is useful.

Themepark vs Sandbox? How about DM?

2009-09-23T16:49:00.000-07:00

Raph Koster wrote about an interview that GameSetWatch had with some of the developers of Red 5 on their up and coming MMO, which I guess has the dubious aim of rivaling WoW (they've got something like $20M in venture capital backing them). The interview is mostly about Red 5's aim of creating a world that changes based on how the players act and behave. The popular metaphor they toss around was "save the village, and it'll stay saved". I think that's a rather bad metaphor for a good way of having a world where you can have an impact, but it does sort of get the idea across.

The feeling I get from Raph is that he's rather skeptical about just how far Red 5 is going to go, and about how effective they will be. And obviously the guys in the interview are extremely optimistic about what they're talking about.

I have to say, I like what they have to say, particularly the way they liken it to being DM in D&D rather than being a writer. Of course, Raph has his point in that at the end of the day, you have to find some way to actually implement your plan. He lists a couple of examples of attempts at creating processes that imitate dynamism:

"There’s a zillion things that have been tried along these lines.

Spawners that grow in power and overrun stuff.
Spawning spawners.
Player cities and housing, which are persistent elements affecting the landscape.
NPC factions with tilts based on user actions
Keystone quests that affect regions of the game, spawns, or large-scale events
Territory control games.

These things all create emergent narrative as users change things."

Some of those sound like some pretty interesting ideas. I wonder how many were really tried, and how successful they were. Being rather inexperienced with MMOs in general (I unfortunately, only played WoW, and have no intention of starting to play anything so time intensive right now), I really don't know what has been given a good chance at success. Especially since there are many games out there that have brilliant ideas, but poor execution, which often sentences those brilliant ideas to languish in purgatory until someone finds them.

The thing I'm noticing with these is that they seem... piecemeal. Maybe I'm being overcritical, but either way it's a good excuse to talk about it.

Several items on that list are simply slightly more abstract versions of processes that already exist. Spawning spawners, or growing spawners? More clever than simple spawners, but still predictable. NPC factions and territory control? Better, but basically just a tug-of-war, and king of the hill. Player housing is basically just player-generated content that no one else cares about.

Now, "keystone quests" that affect regions of the game, along with another example he gave of spawning complex quests that actually change the region around them. Those both sound more interesting, though they still have issues in my mind. One, quests that affect regions have the issue of not benefiting very many players. The spawning of more complex quests was not implemented; it sounds like that was because it was a bit too complex to implement on a reasonable budget. In other words, one doesn't have enough "payoff" in how many players get to play it, and the other has too much of a "cost" to implement.

But I still like those two better, because they try to combine more dynamic processes with narrative.

I would say that right now, WoW is probably the best at implementing narrative sorts of things in MMOs. Their quest system in WotLK is finely tuned, and combined with phasing, makes individual players feel special. And obviously their raiding game is top notch, also containing excellent "procedural" content.

The downside to their methods is that it's all based on illusion. The entire world is ultimately static. The least static part would probably be the Lake Wintergrasp zone, but the way it's set up is designed so that almost every battle that takes place there results in the attackers winning, creating a cycle of conquer-reconquer that results in an overall static situation.

The irony here is that against this procedurally static backdrop, there is the extremely dynamic social scene. Guilds forming and reforming, groups and raids running dungeons, friends being made and rivalries forming. In other words, the people playing this game are engaging in social activities that are largely unstable and very dynamic. Communities tend to spring up around every aspect of the game.

So, what if the game world only existed because of those dynamic communities? You'd probably get Eve. What if instead, the game world changed a little to reflect the activities of those dynamic communities?

Meaningful PvP

2009-09-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

I guess I'll be starting out with an MMO post. Ironic, considering my previous blog was supposed to be about games, and I switched to this because I wanted to write more diverse posts.

Tobold's thought of the day is "Meaningful PvP". His initial thought is that meaningful means it has to hurt someone, otherwise it doesn't matter to people. This led to an interesting discussion in the comments, and I found myself agreeing with a couple people, including Garumoo's blog post. I ended up writing a ridiculously long set of comments in response, but I decided I'd repost them here, since I like the thoughts so much. I'll be expanding on them more in the future.

Skat, Soccer, Badminton, ludo, chess, strategy games,

Sure, they reset, Tobold, but I think the complaints of some people is that they feel like they're in one giant game of chess, and that someone's reseting the game every time a single piece is taken. That might be a better metaphor for that point of view.

I'm with the commenters pointing out that meaningful pvp doesn't have to be "if you lose, it hurts a lot". Obviously you have to have some penalty for failing on a small scale in any game; you even lose some time in WoW if you die. A good example of one of the times when it hurt a lot to fail in WoW was the suppression rooms in BWL in vanilla WoW. Anyone remember that? Having to start over an hour-long aoe grind if you fail on the boss was very painful. Obviously, they don't do that any more.

However, I feel that the MMO community is stuck in this either/or idea: that you either have losing hurt, or your pvp is meaningless. You just have to get more creative - and more convincing - in making pvp have an impact that is different from simply forcing the other player to lose.

Now, I don't know if it's possible to do that on a 1v1 scale, and frankly, I think that'd be a waste of time to try, since this is about massively multiplayer games.

I think Garumoo's blog post is brilliant, and is rather close to what I've been thinking about the past few days. What about making a game world where two factions fight for dominance, and it quite possible for one side to win and take over a zone (and potentially the whole world), but when they take a city or town or mine, the other faction modifies it's tactics and moves it's base to more stealthy locales? For an easy example, imagine Undercity getting conquered by the humans, and the forsaken take to deeper tunnels in the sewers, staging sneak attacks on the now conquered territory.

Furthermore, when a zone changes hands, change the zone! Change the town to follow the other faction's visual theme; change the quest givers and their quests; change the layout of the town. Thanks to phasing, the technology is probably ready. Plus, if you can see the effects of doing quests, even repeatable ones become a bit more exciting. Take the whole set of quests for the buildup to war against AQ in WoW, and make it small enough scale to fit just a town, and you have people actually seeing the effects of their contributions.

And don't forget the "losers", since they're the ones we're most worried about, right? Give them a secret hideout in the woods next to town, perhaps some secret passages into town, or to out of the zone. Perhaps the hideout contains a vendor who sells magical camoflaging cloaks that allow the user to do something like Nelf shadowmeld only in that zone. Instead of the original quests, build quests around the npc's interrupted plans. Have quests to go out and assassinate enemy npcs, or kill a couple enemy players.

On top of that, perhaps have a quest to kill an enemy player and steal the payload they were carrying for a quest in their new town. Enemy player collecting wood for building new guard towers? Kill him, loot just the wood off his body, and turn it in to build your new hideout. And there's another way of making the losers lose in a meaningful way, without making it ridiculously painful. And if you object to assassinating players, remember that those are quests to assassinate players of the winning faction. Set the rewards right, and as soon as a zone falls, the losing faction will have lots of other players pour in to take advantage of the new quests.

This does have the danger of becoming a world of a dozen different Lake Wintergrasps. In other words, a system where both sides simply switch places regularly, because it's the most rewarding. So you'd probably want to try to strike a balance in rewarding the changing of hands. However, if you set things up in such a way that zones take at least a few days to change hands, I think it would be substantially better than wintergrasp.

Ultimately, this is about the players shaping the world. Not in its entirety, but it'd be a great compromise between WoW and Eve, so to speak. Imo, Eve has been good at letting players shape the game such that the game feels real and dynamic. WoW has been phenomenal at creating the illusion that the game is real and dynamic.

I remember questing in the Grizzly Hills in WotLK, and seeing a herd of horses running around, actually acting like a herd, running in a group. But now I think, if I could, for instance, attack that herd, perhaps with a group of teammates, and drive it through an enemy town to cause distraction and damage, that would be a step up.

I read about Cataclysm, and think that the changes are cool, but then I suspect that the change is ultimately going to be a static change, and eventually everyone will get used to it, and that's a problem. I think about the zombie plague that happened for about a week some time prior to the release of WotLK, and thinking it was really cool to see the world in the grip of actual chaos. It was annoying, and difficult to play my normal way, true, but it was also exciting and more immersive. And when I died to a zombie, I didn't feel like I was hurting from that, because then I got to be a zombie for a while, which was fun in its own right, partly because I was now playing a slightly different game.

Apologies for the long comment, and also for the predominantly WoW-related references, but I figured it was the most likely to be recognized by the most people.

Start

2009-09-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I think I have enough ideas and thoughts now to actually have something to blog about regularly. This shall be... I think my third attempt at starting a blog, and posting to it regularly. My first attempt was several years ago, and my second attempt was just a few months ago. I would've stuck to that one, except it was a bit too... specific. Maybe I'll link to it at some point, or just repost it's entries later.