14Sep09 Making PvP Scale
Zerg Rush via Sirlin.net

Image via Sirlin.net

When PvP in computer games was first introduced, I’d have to assume that participant scaling wasn’t even on the radar. After all, it’s a bit hard to envision a “zerg” in Pong. As games have grown in both complexity and scale, however, the problem of how to make PvP fun regardless of how many people are involved in it is a real and complicated one.

As it currently stands, most player combat systems in multiplayer games consist of two elements, which I’ll refer to as technique and strategy:

  • “Technique” refers to technical skill: generally a quality of individual players or small groups, this category would include things like twitch aiming, bunny jumping, interrupting enemy actions, coordinating spikes on a target, and so on. FPS games tend to be heavy on technique.
  • “Strategy” (in the context which I’m using for this article) refers to a wider view of the battle: where resources are relative to one another on the battlefield, elements of surprise, class compositions, and reinforcements are examples. Many MMORPGs currently focus on this aspect in battlefield-style PvP.

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7Sep09 Preventing Cheating in Online Games

If I were forced to guess, I’d probably be safe with the assumption that cheating has been an issue for nearly as long as online multiplayer games have existed. As more and more games move into the realm of internet play, the question of how to deal with those who choose not to play by the “rules” of game mechanics has become a very important one in the realm of game design.

If you don't know the origin of this image, you're missing out.

If you don't know the origin of this image then you are definitely missing out.

Initially, it was enough to just have the powers that be dealing with miscreants – back in the days of MUDs, typically a few admins/arches or whatever the game masters of the particular server in question happened to call themselves.

As online games became more popular and evolved, so did methods to cheat in them. It became far harder to tell what was actually cheating, and what was just someone with really good aim. Thus, other solutions to the cheating problem were invented: “cheater detection” programs like Punk Buster came into vogue as a way of deterring attempted cheaters. Unfortunately, as anyone with experience will tell you, such programs are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the developers of cheats, and the game is one that they tend to be losing – after all, the cheat developers have the advantage of initiative: they force the anti-cheat programs to react to their new inventions.

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1Sep09 The MMO Social Tug-of-War

A recent post over at Frank Sanchez’s Overly Positive blog got me thinking on this particular topic. Frank stated that “ultimately more MMOs is a good thing, not a bad thing” when discussing fans of various games obsessing over competition in the MMO market. While I shared Frank’s sentiments regarding people needing to chill out in general over whether whatever MMO is currently the media darling is going to be a “WoW-killer,” I’m not so sure that I could agree that having more MMOs around is necessary beneficial – but for completely different reasons than anything Frank is really discussing.

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31Aug09 Player Factions – Why 3 is the Magic Number for MMOs

Since this weekend and the coming week has been/will be a bit busy, this latest post from me is something I’ve previously written, but it was sort of hidden away on a different site. I’ve reposted it here for your reading pleasure.

There are basically 3 types of endgame elements most modern MMOs have available: PvE, instanced PvP, and open-field PvP. The rest of this article assumes we’re discussing the last, open-field PvP.

Many MMOs have opted to have two player factions: World of Warcraft is probably the largest, but many others have also used a similar model, including Warhammer Online. A two-faction system has certain advantages in its simplicity – it’s always clear who the enemy is, it’s the simplest to write separate story lines for, and it has the least redundancy for level areas (if you choose to have faction-specific quests or areas, which are a near-necessity for any kind of immersion factor).

But a three-faction system has one key advantage that almost single-handedly makes it far more attractive for any game looking to create an environment for meaningful world PvP: it’s self-balancing. Whenever any individual faction gains the upper hand, they automatically become the outnumbered, which means that overall control will almost assuredly continue to change hands over time. No single faction is likely to become so much larger than the others that it maintains constant dominance, simply because it would have to attract players at something along the lines of a 2:1 ratio of any other faction to be able to maintain population superiority over the other factions combined.

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24Aug09 Effective Beta Testing

I’ve participated in a number of alpha/beta tests for various games over the past few years, both open and closed in nature. Though I don’t think I could pick out one particular test that I found the most productive or most enjoyable, there are some elements that I can definitely identify as being conducive to good testing results. I’m not going to name specific games here, since some of the experiences I’m referencing are technically still under NDA, even if some of the corresponding games have already been publicly released (and others definitely haven’t).

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20Aug09 Guild Wars 2 Trailer Released

I don’t really intend this blog to be a “gaming news” blog, nor do I expect to usually blatantly advertise a particular game like this – but I’m so completely looking forward to Guild Wars 2 (and there’s been so little information about it for such a long time) that with the release of the trailer just a couple of hours ago, I’m entirely giddy.

Guild Wars 2

First of all, the trailer is amazingly beautiful. You can find it on the official Guild Wars 2 site. Nor is the trailer the only thing you can find there – the FAQ also has answers to some nagging questions that I’m quite glad how they turned out. For starters, Guild Wars 2 will be like the original in that it will not have a subscription fee. I think this was a great factor in the original’s success, and I think that it’ll give Guild Wars 2 a leg up on any potential competition as well – not that it seems like it will need any, if the trailer is any indication. Other things confirmed by the FAQ include a full 3D world (no fake z-axis this time – in fact, some of the environments are even underwater!) and also that unlike the original, Guild Wars 2 will not be limited to instanced areas only – some portions of the world will be non-instanced (but there will still be many instanced portions as well to help drive the storyline).

I’ve added a lot of screenshots from the trailer to this post – click past the jump to see them all. Continue Reading »

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19Aug09 Online Co-Op? Where Is It?

Two things that seem to be becoming common in games are (1) online play, and (2) co-op, though the latter seems to show up more on console games than PC titles. What surprises me though is the apparent dearth of games which combine the two – what’s the last non-MMO-and/or-RPG game you heard of that had more than just token co-op gameplay? (No, the Invasion game type on Unreal Tournament 2k4 doesn’t count.) The only one that immediately comes to mind is Left 4 Dead – yet it’s been a smash hit, so it’s odd that more games aren’t following in its footsteps.

MMORPGs (and MMOs in general) have been all the rage lately, but sometimes you don’t want to muck around on an entire realm full of other people – sometimes, you just want to hang out with your friends in a private game and play. Of course, plenty of non-MMO games offer competitive modes for networked play, but it seems that very few offer the ability to play cooperatively with friends over the internet.

Maybe this is just a matter of impressions – it’s quite possible that you all might point out plenty of examples of how I’m wrong. Honestly, I hope you will, because co-op play is something that I miss dearly at times.

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18Aug09 When Will We See REAL Crafting?

Crafting in MMORPGs has always seemed lackluster to me. Even though it varies in exact nature from game to game, it can almost always be summed up as the following:

  1. Look up recipe.
  2. Get ingredients for said recipe.
  3. Press button.
  4. Receive finished product.

While this process has its benefits (it’s straightforward, for starters), it doesn’t really seem all that interesting. In fact, the only excitement to be had (aside from any endeavors to gather the ingredients) tends to stem from elements of randomness – apprehension of random failures, or excitement about the possibility of random bonuses. This seems hollow at best, since there’s no real player involvement – the “excitement” is a completely passive reaction to events beyond the player’s control.

Mass production at it's finest: crafting in World of Warcraft (with addon help).

Mass production at its finest: crafting in World of Warcraft (with addon help).

What happened to the idea of master artisans, the idea of spending real time, real effort in creating masterpieces? Masterpieces that would be valued not simply because they only had a 0.0001% drop rate off the mob that spawns once a year, instead because it took the dedication and vision of a skilled crafter to produce it? Right now, the closest one could get to being a “master crafter” in MMOs would be mastering the art of mass production, because there’s no real artistic depth to crafting. It’s one of the relatively untouched frontiers of MMORPG design, a pristine wilderness that’s waiting to be explored – and the potential results could open up a whole new sense of depth in a genre that many consider struggling for new ideas.

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17Aug09 The UI is a Tool

I witnessed an interesting conversation tonight in the regional chat of one of the MMORPGs I currently play. Most of the conversation was centered around one particular individual and those responding to him, regarding the matter of unit frames. (For those of you not familiar with the term, “unit frames” are the portions of an MMORPG interface that display status info for players – a.k.a. “health/mana bars,” et cetera.)

This particular gentleman was arguing that unit frames (in particular, a certain grid-layout unit frame addon) are bad for healers because they distract them from the battlefield, thus reducing their awareness of the happenings around them. Thus, the player argued, healers “playing whack-a-mole on unit frames” would wind up being sub-par healers because they’d spend more time trying to figure out who was within line of sight and range than they would healing, not to mention having no preemptive knowledge of who might soon be needing heals. While it is true that battlefield awareness is a key trait in a good healer, and while it is also true that the best way to gain battlefield awareness is to look around and see what’s actually going on, I feel that the player arguing that unit frames are bad may have missed a crucial point:

The UI is a tool.

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16Aug09 The Visual Element of MMO Interfaces

Games have to be the ultimate user-driven application: they don’t actually provide any useful service beyond what the player perceives (well, unless you’re in the RMT industry). You’d think that because of this, games would have some of the most well-designed user interfaces out there – but it seems like a lot of the time, this is nowhere near the case.

Unless moused-over, the background of the Aion chat window is always completely transparent.

Unless moused-over, the background of the Aion chat window is always completely transparent.

I’m going to take Aion as an example, mostly because it’s game I’ve most recently had irk me in the UI department. Specifically, the chat box. Why is there no way to customize the opacity of the box? And even worse, why is there no way to make it stay opaque? MMOs are social games, and the chat system is a key aspect of that – yet trying to read multicolored text rendered through a transparent window with the vibrant colors of Aion’s world behind it is probably going to give me eye strain if I attempt to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.

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