Today’s rumblings are inspired by a post made by Gav Thorpe on his blog about criticism. He’s specifically talking about criticism of his work as a writer and how he reacts to that but a lot of what he says is applicable to other fields and especially the field of community management.

In case you don’t know, Gav is a former Games Workshop games developer who is now a freelance author. While he was at GW he wrote Codex: Chaos Space Marines (an army supplement for one of the popular Warhammer 40,000 factions) which launched to mixed reactions amongst the notoriously passionate fans of Warhammer 40k. Nowadays he earns a crust by writing fiction for GW’s publishing imprint Black Library as well as for more mainstream publishers. His post on criticism is clearly a result of the huge amount of feedback readers of his blog decided to give him about the Chaos Space Marines.

So, what does this all have to do with computer games?

Well, firstly criticism is criticism. The kind of things that are useful for an author to hear about his work are also useful to a games designer. Collecting and analysing criticism is also a large part of the job of a community manager (a hat I wore for several years). Generally people are pretty bad at providing criticism for a variety of reasons, many people are also bad at receiving it for entirely different reasons. We’ll address those people later.

Giving criticism is something that a lot of people are not comfortable with. While they may have deeply held opinions, it can be hard to express those opinions without sounding hostile or rude, thus many people prefer to stay silent and keep what would otherwise be useful feedback to themselves. Not all opinions are negative of course, but the ones you hear almost always will be. This is because things that meet your expectations tend not to incite you to write about them. If things are simply ‘ok’ then we smile and move on, things have to be significantly outside of our expectation zone before we are moved to comment on them. This is usually manifested in gaming circles as a rule where, for every person posting in a 200 page threadnaught on your game forums, there are several hundred people playing the game quite happily oblivious to this apparently all consuming issue.

Another problem with criticism is that people are always right when they say what they do or don’t like but are usually almost always wrong when they try to describe it. This is because it’s easy to get hung up on symptoms without thinking through the issues to identify the actual problem causing them. A large part of being a successful community manager is listening to problems that are described by the players and trying to determine what it is that they are actually complaining about rather than what it is that they are saying.

Taking feedback can be difficult for other reasons. Gav mentions confirmation bias and that’s certainly a problem that needs to be confronted. It’s not always so much of a problem in games where a team is responsible rather than an individual but it certainly still exists. A bigger problem is enabling useful feedback at all. Most games companies run forums for fans to discuss the product, most have a community team to filter the useful nuggets from the vast seas of noise and most have some kind of feedback form or CS ticketing system for more direct contact. All of that by itself doesn’t make people want to tell you the things you need them to be saying though. Companies should be training their customers to give feedback effectively, the tools to do so should be seamless and it should be regularly solicited. If spamming customers sounds bad then incentivise it instead, reward those who tell you what they think and encourage quality over quantity. Ask people to think about your product and give you those thoughts, help them to frame them and give them the tools to do so easily.

In all the projects I’ve worked on, getting quality commentary has always been the hardest part of my job. I wish people would express their opinions more.

This isn’t a new thing in Germany, some years ago (after a similar incident in Emsdetten) the topic was raised but quietly dropped again after many German developers advised that they would leave Germany if this law came to pass. Now we are in an election year, the Winnenden massacre has created a lot of media frenzy over the issue of violence in culture and there are strong calls from many quarters to be seen to do something. And so now the German Congress is considering a law that would make it illegal to develop or distribute these games in Germany. There’s a good chance that nothing will come of it, but the fact that it’s even being discussed in such terms should be worrying.

To be clear, these aren’t simply media soundbites from off-the-cuff interviews with fringe politicians, these are serious policies put forward by senior state ministers.

In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I work for a German developer working on what would be classified as a ‘killerspiel’.

The argument that’s being used is that the people who do these horrific acts often play violent games and so there is an unspoken causality made between the two events. The assumption is that playing violent video games either makes ‘normal’ people into violent killers or it makes disturbed people more likely to externalise their feelings and become violent. Additionally some of the more… excitable… elements of the press are performing he usual hand-wringing ceremony and asking ‘but what about the children?’ as if Counterstrike (which is the most often referenced game in this debate) has the power to turn rosy faced cherubs into remorseless psychopaths.

Let’s deal with the first point. People who find violence attractive are attracted to violent entertainment. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. If you like hurting people, you are likely to enjoy games or films where people get hurt a lot in graphic ways. Somehow this fairly self evident piece of analysis gets turned around by magic logical leaps to ‘violent entertainment is enjoyed by violent people therefore anyone who enjoys violent entertanment is a psychopath.’ This is clearly false but it is at the heart of the argument being used against our games.

To be clear, I think that there is truth in the claim that constant portrayals of graphic violence have a desensitising influence, but how much that is has been a topic of several studies with no clear answers as yet. In any case the base assumption that bad people won’t go on shooting sprees if they never get to play GTA or Counterstrike is clearly absurd.

Secondly the ‘why are our children being exposed to this’ argument. Short answer, ‘Because you are a terrible parent’. I look forward to the day when the generation in charge have grown up with video games their whole lives. At that point we’ll finally bury this pervasive misunderstanding about games in general. Politicians assume that computer games (because they are games after all) are targeted at children and so when they are confronted with a game that is very much unsuitable for children they naturally question why this is allowed to happen. To them it is like putting a chainsaw rape scene in a Disney movie; it’s a fundamental paradigm clash.

Games are entertainment (or art if you must), and like all entertainment choices they are tailored for different demographics. The sooner that this is absorbed the better.

So what is to be done? Well, firstly consumers (especially parents and politicians) need to become more aware of the various ratings systems and how to use them to make informed decisions. PEGI in Europe and the ESRB in the US both provide clear and unambiguous guidance on any rated title. People need to pay attention to these. Retailers need to be better at restricting sales to underage customers and in helping parents make an informed choice. Yes I appreciate that this is unlikely to happen without at least some state coercion. Finally, people who need help need to be identified and treated before they become a problem. This means better resources for parents, teachers, colleagues and friends to spot the signals and provide assistance. There have always been crazy people who did terrible things well before we had computer games or movies or heavy metal music or books or whatever. The sooner that we can help these people, the less often we’ll be having this debate.

So, what do we have for you today?

I’ve been following (and sticking my oar into) a debate on Broken Toys about the rights of players ingame. It didn’t start out that way but somehow the to-ing and fro-ing over Blizzard’s new mod policy devolved into an argument about how much control players should have over the game they play.

Now I’d be the first to argue that players should have as much control as possible over the environment they play in but here we are talking about not just the ingame and meta game experience but the way that the game is operated.  And the answer to that is somewhere close to ‘none at all’.

Oh, sure you can have robust community feedback that informs design and production, you can give the players a platform to make their case and that’s all fine and laudable however the operator needs to have the casting vote. Sometimes it’s necessary to do things that your players won’t like for reasons that you can’t adequately explain in public. Sometimes your players are simply wrong and you need to give them what the game needs not what the players say they want.

MMOs foster a strong sense of investment in players by their very nature. Not just the ‘I pay you 15$ a month so you’d better listen to me’ type of stuff but also a deeper level of belonging that comes from fostering a strong community. People feel attached to the game and the communitythey play with and that sense of attachment leads naturally to a sense of obligation regarding the same. Between this investment and sense of belonging, perspectives are often lost. Worse, the situation can devolve to the point where the players feel the game owes them something.

The reality is one that companies are usually unwilling to point out. For the player it’s a game, for the operator it’s a livelihood. No matter how invested the player believes himself to be, ultimately he can walk away whenever he chooses and be no worse off. So, when a developer makes a decision, the only party that can really win or lose is the company itself.

Very often I’ve had to be the person who had to front bad news to a community. For a lot of those times there were very good reasons as to why that bad news had to happen. In almost none of those instances was it possible to properly explain the situation. Many times the decision was better for the game but worse in the short term for the players. You can’t ask people to lay aside their self-interest and do what’s right because 90% of the time they’ll pick the wrong option (the other 10% of the time is when they pick the right path entirely by accident).

I’ve said it before but people are generally bad at expressing what they want. They will point at a symptom and ask for that to be fixed without thinking about the underlying cause. Or they’ll work backwards from a premise to reach a faulty basis and insist on that. Or they’ll simply assume that their own short term self-interest is in the long-term interest of everyone.

This is why you should never listen to what people are suggesting but instead look closely at what they are actually saying.

Jeremy’s post is mostly a critique of some points that Ryan Schwayder made on the pros and cons of official forums, but amongst all of that she makes some very interesting points on community scalability.  Communities, it is very clear work best when they are small. How small? Jeremy brings up Dunbar’s Number as a possible limit but in reality I think the answer is mutable. For a game community, a single server is probably too big to be considered a single community, an alliance or a guild is a better basic unit of community and those tend not to exceed a few hundred. If your alliance exceeds that number then the chances are you have several communities within that umbrella that can be said to be independant of each other as discrete communities. For all that we might talk about ‘the community’ on a particular server, the reality on the ground is a lot grainier than that. Just because we might end up fighting the same battle, we aren’t necessarily part of the same community. It isn’t necessarily limited to the number of simultaneous relationships any one member can sustain – hence why I don’t think Dunbar’s Number applies – but once you start going beyond second degree associations then I think you can start to define a boundary. The smaller a community is (above a certain sustainability threshold) the more tightly knit it tends to be,  this is something we see in every aspect of life from geographic location through to international associations.

The basic point of Ms Dalberg’s post is correct. However we are measuring the cohesiveness of a community, 5 million is way too many to be considered as a single entity. That’s crazy talk and is akin to assuming that putting the entire population of Belgium in a room to chat to each other and then trying to manage that would be in some way productive.

So how do you manage a 5 million member community? You don’t. You chop it up and manage a few hundred smaller ones.

Basically there are people who aren’t us in our game. Sometimes they’re annoying and we want to smack them. Sometimes they’re awesome and we laugh and laugh until our eyes are red, there’s bizarre white goo coming out of our nose and the wife has wandered in to make sure we aren’t having some kind of seizure. Mostly though they’re background, they are an ever changing tapestry of additional content that we can sample and pick through as we like.

Still though we increasingly tend to play by ourselves.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone. In all the MMOs I play (3 currently) I have a fun and supportive guild or corp, I have plenty of virtual friends and a network of people I can tap up for help, advice or just a chat. I don’t mind sharing my toys, I have no funny ideas about the purity of solo play, I don’t care too much if I put my advancement on hold to go and help out my friends but still I end up logging in and running around pretty much solo the whole time. It’s like playing a slot machine, you pull the lever, see how the reels fall, collect the shinies and then reach for the lever again. It’s safe, it’s mostly predictable, you get something at the end of it but it’s still pretty much the least fun you can have in the house.

I’ve been in terrible groups to be sure where I was convinced the other players were friends in disguise playing some elaborate prank on me. I’ve been in groups where every member appeared to be actively hostile to every other member. I’m aware that a decent percentage of other players suck and that people will tend to do crappy things at bad moments for no readily discernable reason. However in all my time in MMOs, across every game I’ve played, I can’t remember one truly awesome moment that I had when I wasn’t in a group. Every defining experience I’ve had has been when I was with other people.

Playing with other people is hard work. You need to put a little bit more effort into it than just logging in and getting on with whatever you were doing. It’s often frustrating, people have different priorities and you often stand around doing nothing at all because someone else thinks feeding the dog is more important than being your healer. It’s totally worth it though.

Games in the current market need to cater for the solo player, there will always be people who can’t or won’t make friends, there will always be times when you just don’t want to have to deal with other people but you still want to play for a bit. That’s all fine, I’m not suggesting that solo play is necessarily bad all the time. Some games seem to actively discourage you from grouping – at least in some gameplay aspects. EvE online missions for example are horrible to run as a gang. Low level quests in most MMOs are often faster and easier to run solo than they are in groups too. Exploring is hard if all the other guys want to do is set up next to a big spawn and farm all night. The game should never put itself in the way of players however. Games with a stronger co-operative element form stronger and more durable communities. Stronger communities bring better retention and better word of mouth.

How do you play? Do you find that your reality is more massively single player these days?

I asked ten questions about the way that people prioritised information about games and where they tended to go for trustworthy news.

Here are the questions with the collected results.

1: Which of the following types of game related websites do you read (please delete all that do not apply)

• News sites (for example TenTonHammer, IGN, Gamespot etc) - 50/64 (78%)
  
• Community forums (for example a guild or clan forum, or general computer game discussion forums such as VN boards, F13 etc) – 58/64 (91%)
  
• Official game sites (sites operated by the developers or publishers of a game) – 47/64 (73%)

So clearly the average respondent is pretty widely read on the world of video games. It’s interesting though that many people who read community forums never read regular games news sites or the official sites of games.

2: Do you actively seek out news and information about upcoming games that may interest you?

• I follow games I’m interested in very closely – 29/64 (45%)
  
• I check out upcoming games I’m interested in every so often to see what’s happening – 29/64 (45%)
• I actively avoid finding out information about games I may be interested in – 0
  
• I don’t actively look for information on games I’m interested in but if a friend sends me a link then I’ll check it out. – 0

The totals are less than 100% due to some people not understanding the question or answering in a non-committal manner. In general though we can see that the respondents keep reasonably up to date with upcoming games with almost half of them following development very closely.

3: Are you an MMO player?

• Yes I play multiple MMOs currently -16/64 (25%)
  
• Yes I play one MMO currently – 28/64 (43%)
  
• Yes although I am not currently playing any MMO – 18/64 (28%)
  
• I have never played an MMO nor am I planning to do so. – 1/64(2%)

A fairly even split with a pretty much expected bell curve. Single MMO players form the bulk with lapsed and multi-game players forming an roughly equal curve on either side. Given that an MMO can be a significant time investment, it’s not hard to see why this is.

4: How many MMOs have you played for more than the trial period/beta?

• One – 3/64 (5%)
  
• Two – 7/64 (11%)
  
• Three – 11/64 (17%)
  
• Four – 8/64 (13%)
  
• Five or more – 32/64 (50%)
  
• None – 1/64 (2%)

Only a very small number of respondents had only played one MMO in their lives (or none for that matter). Half have played at least 5 and 80% have played at least 3. This makes them veterans of the genre for the most part (I hesitate the use the word hardcore, as it everyone loads it up with their own definition baggage).

5: Which would you say is your main source of information about games that interest you?

• Official game sites – 17/64 (27%)
  
• Community sites or word of mouth from friends – 45/64 (70%)
  
• News sites – 8/64 (13%)
  
• I don’t know or I don’t look for information like this – 0

This one cemented what I felt instinctively and also reaffirmed my own experiences. People learn about games from other people or communities, not from marketing outlets for the main part. In otherwords, the best marketing vector is the friends of the target.

6: Which of the following would you be most likely to trust?

• A news article on a professional game news site – 15/64 (23%)
  
• A news article on the game’s official website – 17/64 (27%)
• A news article written and researched by a fan on a community site – 25/64 (39%)

A reasonably even split here with a bias towards information from sources that are perceived as being closer to the community. I didn’t frame this question very well, I should have said opinion piece rather than news as the intent was to find which source people assumed would be least biased or most fair.

7: Please indicate how trustworthy you generally find each of the following (rate from 1-5 where 1 is barely credible and 5 is an unshakeable faith).

• A news article on a news site that you do not generally read – Average 2.19
  
• A news article on a news site that you read regularly – Average 3.5
• A news article on the game’s official website – Average 3.42
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you know personally – Average 3.9
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you do not know personally – Average 2.44

Again I intended this to be an indicator of how unbiased a source was but still the results are interesting. People trust news sites of unknown provenance less than they trust random fans on a message board. Of course they trust fans that they know more than any other channel.

8: Roughly how many of the following types of website do you read regularly (at least once a week)?

• Game forums (official or otherwise)
• News sites aimed at gamers
• News sites aimed at computer industry professionals
• Official game sites (operated by a developer or publisher)
• Blogs by gamers
• Blogs by game developers or other industry professionals

I didn’t collect the stats for this question as many people didn’t understand how to answer it. When going through however forums were by far the most popular followed closely by news sites aimed at gamers. Blogs were the least read of all with industry news sites and official sites forming a rough median.

9: Please rate the following factors in your choice of game to play. Provide a rating for each of 1-5 where 1 is not a factor at all and 5 is an overwhelming factor in a game’s favour.

• Many of your friends are already playing the game or intending to do so- Average 3.65
• Information from the official website – Average 2.82
• Good previews/reviews in the gaming press – Average 2.85
• Good reviews from friends - Average 3.94
• Developer’s track record (your experiences with their previous games) - Average 3.65
• A friendly community on fan forums - Average 2.48

Interestingly the expectations of a developer were equally important to players as the desire to play alongside their friends. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting that and I fully expected the first response to be the runaway favourite. Again though personal recommendation and word of mouth counts for more than press reviews.

10: Finally, which of following games is the one that you are most likely to try? (delete the one that does not apply)

• A game which has received bad reviews but that is enjoyed by your friends – 56/64 (88%)
  
• A game that your friends did not enjoy but has received glowing reviews  in the press – 8/64 (13%)
  
• I don’t read game websites – 0
  

No surprise at all here and it strongly reinforces the previous points about where people are most influenced in their buying decision. I would have been shocked if the disparity was smaller to be honest.

So there you have it. Veteran MMO players, mostly get their impressions of games and make up their mind to try or not based on what their friends think and what the scuttlebutt is on the various community forums. News sites and official sites play an important part of course but mostly they are feeding the vast meta-community gossip machine.

Firstly I think we need to determine what a PvP MMO is, or at least what a marketable PvP MMO is. WoW apparently isn’t a PvP MMO despite the fact that the main end game activity is fighting other players in ranked arenas. EvE might be a PvP MMO but it has carebear areas so the jury is still out on that one.

If you ask a veteran PvPer what they want then their eyes will mist over and they’ll go back to glory days of shivving noobs on pre-Trammel UO, Shadowbane, Mordred/Camlann or whatever. What these players are looking for is an open world, free for all environment in which might makes right and the devil take the hindmost.

Games like that existed five years ago (practically an epoch in computer game terms) but generally don’t any longer. People who played them and clamour for something similar again claim that mostly this is due to those games launching in a hideously broken state. Probably this is mostly true but not entirely.

The real reason as to why those sort of environments don’t last long is because making games like that which work is hard. Along with the multitude of pitfalls waiting to trip up unwary designers in PvE centric MMOs are a whole new bunch of evils that lurk beneath the surface ready to pounce. Mostly these are community problems and are to do with the way that people play games like this. Additionally they are to do with the reasons that people stop playing games like this too.

I’ve said it before but when you are pitching an MMO to your audience, you aren’t so much offering people a game but a community. You’re asking them if they fancy spending four nights a week and the occasional weekend at your place for the next 18 months or so. Early adopters are impressed by shinies and game design, latecomers go where their friends are. So anything that kills your community will also kill your game. Bad development can assuredly do that, only masochists stick around to play broken games, bad design or bad management however can do it just as well. Anything that kills your community will also kill your game, and the problem with most free for all PvP games is that they aren’t conducive to strong communities.

So, before you start figuring out how much damage a fireball should do or whether stealth as a mechanic is fundamentally broken, you need to answer a few questions

• “What will keep people who get their arses kicked, playing my game?”
• “How do I foster a strong sense of community while not allowing unbeatable hegemonies to arise?”
• “How do I reward people for fighting each other without making the loser quit and the winner invincible?”
• “How do I give new people in this game a fighting chance against a mature population without trivialising the achievements of veterans?”
• “Why are there thousands of Darkfall fans camping my forums, telling me how to design an MMO?”

Actually that last point can mostly be solved by employing a suitably gnarly crew of moderators, but I digress. In FFA PvP games the design needs to work against large scale community and co-operation, you want people to fight each other not to hold hands. If people are too chummy then you get some snowballing powerblocs and pretty soon the endgame can become irrelevant for anyone who hasn’t jumped on board with the cool kids. So you split people up and as a result people feel distanced from all the stuff that makes for healthy subscriber numbers.

Churn is an important point too. The early adopters will race to max level and form the primordial power structures, some people will quit for all the usual reasons and hopefully new players will join to take their place. These new players will also quit pretty sharpish if their experience consists of being repeatedly violated by the early adopters and their friends. At this point you are entering a recursive loop where people are leaving because they don’t enjoy getting owned and the people doing the owning are leaving because there’s no-one to wtfomgbbq.

FFA players want to be able to create their own societies and their own factional communities but in reality this is too important a point to be left up to players. Half of them won’t bother and then quit because the game doesn’t cater to soloers or casual players or players with wildly erratic playtimes, the other half will bother and get it wrong. Because it’s not their job to balance your game.

If the players can’t be entrusted with this then it has to come from development – and core development at that. It’s not enough to tack on a guild system or an alliance chat channel, there have to be pre-existing affiliations that will support players who don’t want to or are unable to create their own and which are capable of replacing player systems for any given player. These can run parallel to player structures (as in EvE’s NPC corporations) or vertically (as in the RvR systems of EA Mythic).

So what have we learned?

• Whatever you do is wrong
• Anything you get wrong will break your game
• Making players run the game is bad
• Making a PvP MMO in the traditional DIKU mould will probably fail
• If it doesn’t fail then it probably wasn’t a PvP MMO to the people who care about such things
• You will be by default attracting the type of players that other MMOs would pay to give you
• Those players will work against your efforts to win over the type of players that you really do want
• When your community dies it is your fault, notwithstanding the above point
• Community is hard and you have to design around it from the beginning.

 First let’s have a picture:

That’s a lot of purple.

Let’s start by expanding the question. MMORPGs are essentially another form of RPG and those have always been dominated by fantasy titles, whether we’re talking pen and paper, single player computer games, MUDs or MMOs – any game where you are encouraged to identify with and develop a character is more likely than not to have a fantasy theme.

If we go back to the dark ages of gaming where we had polyhedral dice as RNGs, an eraser as a character editing tool and Citadel miniatures for eyecandy, nearly all of the games we played were a fantasy theme. In fact all of the big ones were. The various flavours of D&D, Rolemaster, MERP, WHFRP, Supernatural Creature: The Verbening, Palladium etc etc. Yes I know, you are old like me and you can remember Traveller, Cyberpunk and Star Wars the RPG but frankly they were the exceptions to the rule. Mostly we were concerned about our THAC0 rather than our skill ranks in Blaster Pistols.

Then we got computers. Rubbish ones by todays standards but they were full of win and awesome at the time. We played RPGs on those and they too were mostly fantasy themed – Zelda and the deluge of JRPGs, Gold Box D&D games, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Elder Scrolls, HoMM, Ultima and so on.

So why do we prefer to roleplay in a fantasy environment? Some people have said that it’s easier to script a fantasy world than a sci-fi setting. That may be true for computer games but it makes no sense at all for pen and paper games where a live GM can interpret what’s going on. It’s not even genre conditioning, decent sci-fi movies and TV series massively outnumber their fantasy counterparts. Something within us prefers to play Gandalf over Obi-Wan, we like to explore Orc filled dungeons rather than sprawling megapolis’s or the galactic wilds.

 I think it’s a perception of freedom. We like to be able to break the laws of physics, we like to have a potential that is untrammelled by ‘real world’ constraints, in a fantasy universe we can believe that a humble warrior can become the equal to the Lich King whereas in a sci fi universe we expect that a direct hit from the Lichdroid’s plasma cannon will annihilate any one regardless of heroic status. Our future frontiers are grounded in reality, we can add toys and wonder to it but, ultimately, we want it to look and feel real. Our fantasy filters are much less demanding, we can accept that magic changes the rules and thus what we expect is not informed by what we know. We are artificially creating an environment in which we will prefer one made up setting over another based on lop-sided criteria of our own design.

Do you think mmo’s nowadays put to much emphasis on Item collection and progression through that next “Phat Lewt” or can a game that has replacable low cost items with high wear or player lootable corpses live in this day and age thanks to the EQ style game. Surely someone can supply a better “end game” than that next 7 hour raid for chance at getting the Sword of uberpwn instead of his current sword of pwn.

So, here I am, 60 seconds on the clock to talk about itemisation in games…

A lot (read: most) MMOs are based on oldskool computer RPGs which in turn are often (read: nearly always) based on oldskool pen and paper RPGs. The overarching meta mechanic is you fight stuff to get more powerful and bag phat lewt. Sometimes this mechanic is disguised in some way but generally if you strip away all the fluff and fancy design sidesteps, your game of choice can be summed up as Munchkin.

There are two major reasons for this and they both boil down to ‘because it works’. The first one is a tried and tested mechanic that offers a lot of design benefits (easy scalability, control of player power levels and a transparent reward system that will hopefully hook your players and keep them playing long after the game play ceased being any challenge to them).
The second is player expectations. People are familiar with this system from countless other games they already played, in balancing reward vs risk, players expect that if they risk more and defeat a more powerful enemy, they willget a commensurately higher reward. XP alone doesn’t cut it, players are smart enough that they won’t have one difficult fight if it’s possible to have two easy fights in the same amount of time for the same reward, so designers dangle shiny things in front of the players as an incentive to seek out the tougher mobs.

This is where the game designers find out how good they really are at balancing their game. If the reward is too good then it will unbalance the game and make everything else irrelevant, if it isn’t good enough then players won’t bother to go through the difficulty of obtaining it and you’ve wasted a lot of design time on content which players don’t want to experience. While it is possible to get a rough approximation from previous experience, gut instinct and various internal algorithms, the acid test of whether you got it right or not only comes when there are actual players on your servers making the decisions that actual players make rather than the ones your QA team made because it was their job to make them. Stat inflation is as much of a design problem as inflation in your ingame economy. You have to start with the assumption that anything you put into your game is eventually going to be owned by all of your players. Rarity is not a balance tool. So your best item set will eventually become the benchmark against which everything else is measured. Any thing that’s measurably better than this will become the new baseline, anything worse will be ignored. As better kit percolates through, the balance decisions in your game become obsolete as old content is made much less challenging . As this old content is probably still dropping the old, less uber items, it becomes even less relevant to players.

How does all of this relate to your ‘end game’? Perhaps obviously it mostly depends on what your endgame is perceived to be. For many DAoC and WoW players, the end game is to reach max level, obtain a final equipment set and then grind PvP for as long as possible. These players don’t need (and actively dislike) an item carrot being dangled in front of them. In games without such a PvP end game experience or for games that have a fluid level cap then itemisation bonuses are probably the best way to retain players – after all these people are paying to lap up your PvE content so giving them more of what they seem to like makes a lot of sense. As ever EvE is something of an anomaly in the market, falling between several stools. Superficially the end game revolves around PvP, however the item-chase never truly ends even though there are well defined limits for items and little stat inflation. There are also very significant death penalties which can (if you are particularly unlucky) result in you losing years of character development.

A game that doesn’t offer an item chase as the end game needs to have another, strong hook to retain subscribers. Even DAoC had regular PvE content updates that brought in new things for players to lust after. Many players complained about them at the time but I’m not convinced that the game would have had such longevity, even amongst hardcore PvP players, if there had been no new things to shake up the mix. I’ve touched on this to a degree before, a player needs their time in game to feel worthwhile and to feel that they have achieved something – however that is measured. If the yardstick is not marked off in items then it must be calibrated in something equally valuable to the player. Realm points and honour are essentially ladder systems which give structure to the PvP endgames of DAoC and WoW but by themselves they probably aren’t enough to keep subscribers without being backed up by other advancement mechanisms – otherwise we’d all be paying ten bucks a month to play our Counterstrike-alike of choice.

MMOs have a unique issue that isn’t shared by other games. If you get bored of Assassin’s Creed or Bioshock for example, then it’s not a big deal, the publisher already has your money and has no particular investment in retaining your interest. For MMOs obviously, that isn’t the case. Bored players stop sending you money. Item chases work and have been proven to work so they are a pretty safe bet when you are trying to get someone to drop the kind of money required to float a new MMO these days. Any game without a strong mechanism for engaging and retaining players is going to have a hard time making it past the moneymen. Fun doesn’t cut it here, there are a lot of fun games out there and the majority don’t require a monthly sub to play, your game had better have some kickass way to keep people playing or it’s dead in the water.

So, what are the options if you don’t want to go with the tried and trusted item chase? As said there are ladder systems, but mostly these will only engage people over a short term. Once people realise they are grinding they normally stop. Without shaking up the playing field every so often, your game will stagnate into a status quo that will never be broken and players will become bored.

There’s fun. Good luck with that one.

If you can make a game that people will pay monthly for that includes no advancement of any kind but is purely played ‘for fun’ then you my friend have hit the jackpot. Even casual games portals like Pogo have to give you badges, points and prizes to keep you playing their ‘purely fun’ games. In a subscription based game the only thing that’s worth anything is time, your time has to net a reward or you won’t pay for it.

Your options then come from a very limited palette. I don’t see item grinding going away anytime soon

All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most “normal people” have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!”

“Nerds,” on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “They’re just saying those mean things because they’re jealous. They don’t really mean it.”

When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one’s feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one’s feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people’s feelings often get hurt because the nerds don’t apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can’t do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn’t be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.

Given that most games industry people definitely fit in the ‘nerds’ category, this has a lot of application to MMO community management. Especially if you are me and are somewhat autistic. Especially if you are me and a lot of your community don’t speak English as a first language. A different communication strategy is required, in fact a whole new mode and lexicon need to be employed because someone somewhere will take offence at what you just said.