Players and options
Hello the the two remaining people still reading this after a month of technical issues! I hope people eventually start coming back....
Anyway, I'm back from the GLS conference. I've got a few thoughts brewing based on the talks there, but I want to read up on the papers more before I comment.
So, let's discuss some game design: How do players in online RPGs respond to choices?
It's generally recognized that if you give players choices in the game they will eventually agree on what is the "correct" choice and take it. Even if this isn't necessarily the best choice, the "conventional wisdom" accumulated by the players will dictate that it is.
For example, in Meridian 59 we originally had 2 political factions which gave players bonuses. The Princess affected magic and learning, whereas the Duke affected combat and strength. The Princess was good for people trying to build characters, and the Duke was good for characters near the peak of their power. There was a political game where you returned tokens to councilors and they would favor your faction more in response.
What happened was that all the powerful characters felt that the Duke was the better choice and thus put all the power into Duke. So, you had the established characters in one faction and they could kill anyone that disrupted things. The result was that the Princess almost never saw any power, so there really wasn't much of a choice.
During one of the expansions we decided to disrupt this situation in order to give the players more choices. The change was four-fold:
- We added a third faction to the game, a rebel faction. In the original faction scenario the Duke and Princess were supposed to be trying to gain enough power to ascend to the throne and rule everyone. (Given the Duke's fairly unwavering support, he should have been King long ago....) The third faction was a bunch of Rebels that believed that neither side really represented the "common folk".
- We redistributed the powers and added more. We made sure that all factions had good bonuses for both developing and established characters.
- We changed how faction power was calculated. Faction membership now affected faction power (more people in the faction weakens the overall power), and we put in diminishing returns. At equilibrium where all factions have equal power, everyone gets a fair set of bonuses. If one faction takes a small amount of power from another, they get a good increase in power. However, as they take more and more power from others the amount of power they gain decreases until it is almost negligible. If one faction held most of the power, another faction could take a small amount of their power and get a large boost to their own. This system encouraged a dynamic equilibrium of balance between the factions.
- We put in a new system called "faction loss". It was a very logical change: if you attack an innocent from your own faction, you will get booted out of the faction. This was to discourage people from all joining one faction, because it would cause the avid PvPers to lose faction if they attacked other people. It should be noted that this was the most controversial change to the system.
In the end, the changes did a lot of good. People spread out between the factions and the game became more interesting. People fought for their factions and some even came up with agreements for distribution of power between the factions to try to keep things good for everyone.
I think that this demonstrates one of the major features of a "balanced" game: A game is balanced when the player has multiple choices within the game and any of the choices are about as appealing as any other. Note that I didn't say all choices are equally as appealing; the choices could depend on the player's playstyle or some other external factors, but the player feels that the choices are meaningful. And, this goes along with the quote, "A good game is a series of interesting decisions. The decisions must be both frequent and meaningful," by Sid Meier.
I also think there's no hard and fast rule about choices you can make. There's no certain number that seems any better than the others; you can't just say "give the players three choices" in every situation. Some situations require more choices, some require less. I do think there would be some problems in having too many choices; if we had, say 15 factions I think players would start weeding through some of the "less desirable" ones and ignoring them in favor of the few that everyone agrees are more powerful. This not only creates a bit of unbalance, it also wasted part of the development time that it took to create that content which isn't going to be used.
There's my thoughts. What do my last few readers think? (If any still exist, that is! :P)
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Well I'm still here if it's any consolation. ;)
I like having a lot of choices because I like making a lot of alts (paradoxically I don't like leveling heh). From a player's point of view the problem I see with having too many choices is that sometimes one choice looks like another dressed up a bit different, or it seems obvious (in terms of power or just cool factor) which ideas were more thought out.
Comment by Raguel — 26 June, 2005 @ 9:15 PM
Choices can give the feeling of control. Provides for the chance to be unique and individual. Since the combinations of what you decide to do with the charactor and the people you associate with seems endless. It only works if there is some sense of balance though. We no longer have just two political parties. There is the two main and usually balanced, the power shifts a little every year based on what we think out here in the real world. On all levels it works like that. Balance is everything, some sense or order and control. Who is really in control? you changed it because of the imbalance you saw. was it a flaw in the way things were designed? Was it a bug that people were taking advantage of? Was it something that you considered to be an unfair advantage to the people that were either undecided or on the side of the princess? was it an unexpected/unprdicited result or other changes you have made to the world and the people in it? Everyone is trying to find the advantage the thing that will give them the edge over everyone else. As one of the gods you just made the world a little more realistic, a little more like the world we have out here.
Comment by Quanta — 27 June, 2005 @ 5:46 PM
I wrote some thoughts up in:
http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/Choice.htm
http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/Choice2.htm
(Edited to fix that, Mike. -B)
Comment by Mike Rozak — 27 June, 2005 @ 7:50 PM
Designing Player Choices
Psychochild has a new blog entry on how his team went about play balancing their Online RPG Meridian 59. It’s interesting to read about how a successful game developer constantly tweaks their game in order to keep it interesting for their playe...
Trackback by Make Mac Games — 28 June, 2005 @ 5:13 AM
One of the reasons you don't see 15 options very often is that it muddies the distinction between black and white. It's easy to convert my idea of a character into light side or dark side, for instance. It's harder to define his exact position on a continuum of 15 shades of gray.
If any given choice presents enough options, my choice will seem less important. At some point, say near a thousand options to a multiple choice, I may even pick at random. Cognitive Psych would probably suggest keeping the choices under 8, max. Better yet, sort the choices into subchoices, in a tree. But don't put to many on the plate at once.
Comment by justin willcox — 1 July, 2005 @ 4:32 PM
Motivation can change ones interpretation of a given choice, so it is very important in game design to think out not just the choices you provide but the motivations that your players will bring to making them.
What does it mean to choose the dark side? If it means my character will shout "I hate you!" every time he loses a fight, maybe that's not quite what the player will have in mind.
WWII Online is a game of simple choice, it is essentially rock, paper, scissors. You choose a tank, he chooses a troop, you [probably] win. A really key part of gameplay is which side you choose to play. Unfortunately, if you choose one side, you will also get a choice of country.
In a game aiming to deliver a lovingly crafted and authentic battlefield experience as a saleable entertainment product, it's important that you deliver a lot of ... battlefield experience. I'm sure there are people who take a vacation solely for the 20 hours flying there and back. I'm pretty sure the travel industry doesn't plans its finances around them. Gameplayers generally want some game to play. An occasional, protracted, immersion experience is appreciated but not a staple of the diet.
Delivering a battlefield experience means putting players together. And delivering an enjoyable battlefield experience really means trying to put similar numbers of players together.
What occured was a delivery of choice without a delivery of motivation. We call it the Darth Vader effect -- players who like being the overdog, having the cool gear and fast equipment tend to choose German, and the people who choose German/Axis tend to be more accepting of people dictating orders. They plan to be that guy soon.
Conversely players who enjoy the challenge of gaining dominance from an underdog starting position or consider themselves historical masterminds of the war tend to choose Allied. The equipment presented there is less often modelled because it doesn't have the cool-factor of the Germans or of the later-day American equipment.
This has tended to cause problematic trends in populations and gameplay styles of both sides, generally leading to combat avoidance. Great military tactics, but lousy gameplayig experience - for both sides.
After choosing a side players were presented another choice; pick a city on a map of Europe. Then pick a vehicle or maybe a mission and a vehicle, and then spawn into the game world.
In a singularly PvP game, you *can't* choose to fight in an empty town, the choice gets you an entirely different experience.
Lastly the way the choice is delivered and the way the player gets to express their decision are as important as the decision itself. I hope we show that we've learned that in our upcoming "Beyond" expansion. For our players it's very much about playing with your buddies and I hope we've made that an integral part of the choices and means of making choices as we're going to be delivering them.
-k
Comment by Oliver Smith — 2 July, 2005 @ 12:13 AM