The new Scout Update has brought Crowd Control (or CC as it is known in MMO land) to my favorite online shooter.

This was rightly feared by players as perhaps being overpowered at worst and annoying at best.

Well after a quick lunchtime session I can confirm that right now I don’t think the stun effect is Overpowered at all. The difficulty of actually pulling it off versus the lost utility by carrying the Sandman has pretty much balanced it out.

It is however Annoying.

One of the cornerstones of multiplayer game design (well one of MY cornerstones anyway) is to never take away the all of a players abilities all at once.

If you’re going to stop a player attacking then you don’t stop them being able to move. If you want to stop them moving then let them attack.

Left 4 Dead does this very well when you get incapcitated (and I expect this to get ripped off by more games please). You can’t move but you can still shoot (albeit at a reduced rate with horrible accuracy). 

If I was making a war game with multiplayer then I would ensure that a “Dead” player can choose to either stay still and shoot with reduced accuracy OR they can try and crawl around to try and pull themselves into cover.

To remove all capability of interaction results in players essentially waiting to Die.

So how should Valve fix this mild annoyance from an otherwise fairly balanced ability?

1. Allow Stunned players to wander around very slowly in cartoon fashion. 
2. Do not force the camera into third person. 
3. Play some birds circling the Players vision and some Tweeting sound effects.

None of the changes above will change how the Stun affects gameplay. The Stunned player is still largely helpless and unable to defend themselves but they are still interacting with the game.

They are no longer waiting to Die.

As I covered recently the most important thing to recognise is that your players will leave you. There are too many things competing for your customers attention to rely on a hardcore of long-term subscribers for revenue. These players make up a tiny fraction of your earnings compared to the casual players who may only subscribe for 2-3 months (obviously if your game is awesome you’re more likely to convert casuals into Hardcores but that’s a different blog post).

So knowing that your players will leave you it’s important that you replace them. Constantly.

How do you replace these players? Advertising. Marketting. Special Offers. Anything. You need to keep your game constantly at the front of the media.

Lets look at some graphs from Google Trends:

The above is a chart showing World of Warcraft and Runescape. Two of the most successful MMO’s in the west right now. Note how both lines stay relatively level with fairly regular spikes.

This chart shows that both WoW and Runescape have managed to keep themselves at the forefront of the internets attention. Both games advertise heavily year round as well as having a strong element of word of mouth.

This chart shows Age of Conan and GTA4. Note the similarity in the curves. A small ramp up with a very distinct spike around their launch/release followed by a sharp decline. This is a completely traditional shape for a regular boxed videogame (try putting any recent console game into Google Trends and you’ll get a similar shape, I chose GTA4 because of their proximity on the graph).

GTA4 has actually managed to regain some mindshare with the PC release and the new DLC.

Age of Conan however has languished in complete obscurity since it was released.

On a hunch I decided to look up the following chart:

Warhammer Online has been following a similar pattern to Age of Conan. There was a huge amount of publicity around it’s launch (the pre-order numbers grabbed alot of headlines) but then that momentum completely dropped off once the game was running.

Now we discover that those 1.5million pre-orders have translated into maybe 300k paying subscribers and the game has been forced to merge servers due to a dropping average population.

Looking at these charts it’s very easy to draw the conclusion that using traditional videogames marketting techniques just doesn’t work well for a subscription based business model.

In order to maintain consistent subscriber numbers (nevermind growing them year on year like Runescape or Eve Online) you must market your product outside of your existing customer base every day from the moment you launch without taking a break.

However research papers are often very dull and you ussually need to have a dictionary on hand to make sense of them. So here are ten books that aren’t about Games Design but will make you a better Games Designer…

Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is something of a Bible among games designers and is always the first book I reccommend to people. While it’s marketted as a feel-good self help type book it really isn’t so don’t let the subtitle fool you.

The book is very easy to read and explains the concept of “Flow” – A state of conciousness where a person loses the concept of self and becomes entirely involved in what they are doing.

The Design of Everyday Things – Donald Norman

Ever wonder why you sometimes try to push a pull door? Or why some TV remotes are easier to use than others? Don is here to explain all of this and more.

All the lessons in this book are easily transferred to Videogames and may change the way you look at the things you use everyday.

How to Lead – Jo Owen

A common mistake new Designers make is thinking that the most important part of being a Designer is “Designing”. It isn’t.

The most improtant part of a being a Designer is being a good Leader. 

Designers are required to interact with everybody else on the team all the time. We are the people who have ideas and are then responsibile for convincing everybody else to follow us in developing them into a reality.

Every Designer has to be a Leader so better make sure you’re a good one.

Writers’s Journey – Christopher Vogler

I choose this version of the classic Heroes Journey because for me it was the easier one to read. It’s stuffed full of modern film references so you don’t need to know anything about mythology.

The Heroes Journey as a concept is important not just for story writing but story telling. Understanding what makes a good story helps you design a game that will give the player good stories of their own whether you’re making a narative heavy adventure game or a hardcore online shooter.

Universal Principles of Design

This is something of a guilty secret of mine. Every so often somebody would trot out a phrase like “Ockhams Razor” or “Hick’s Law” and I didn’t actually know what they meant.

This book includes 100 of the most basic Design Principles and concepts that every Designer should be aware of (but probably isn’t). 

If you want to find ways to improve your documentation then this book is for you.

The Laws of Simplicity – J Maeda

As a Designer you can quickly get caught up in details and end up in a spiral of constantly adding to something.

At only 127 pages the book itself follows it’s own rules and keeps the topic of Simplicity… simple.

If you ever felt overwhelmed by the complexity of your own creations then you can learn to deal with it from this book.

Freakonomics – Levitt & Dubner

Learn to look at the world differently and find the true cause of something rather than the obvious one.

How did Legalising Abortion reduce the Crime Rate? Why is your boss more likely to steal a Bagel than you?

In a time when focus tests and usability studies are more and more common in games it’s important that you learn to look at Statistics from all angles.

Emotional Design – Donald Norman

Back with another great book Emotional Design examines how we relate to things emotionally.

Being able to identify the Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective elements of a Design and understanding the relationship between the box something came in and how people treat that thing can change how you think about your game.

More up to date than Everyday Things this book actually has an entire chapter on Videogames.

Creativity – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Creativity is a fairly nebulous concept. In the game industry you can be an artist without being remotely Creative.

Understanding what Creativity is and how to idenitify and nurture it is the difference between resigning yourself to working on boring licensed crud and celebrating the opportunities an established license gives you to revolutionise a genre.

In a Creative atmosphere with Creative people whatever you do will be Creative.

Hows and Whys of Level Design – Sjoerd De Jong

OK I lied. The tenth book is actually about Game Design.

However I have good reasons. There is very little printed on the art of Level Design and Hourence has managed to distill alot of concepts into a very easy to read PDF.

There is far more to Level Design than alot of people think and I feel that alot of the knowledge of Level Designers has been trivialised in the name of “making shit look cool”.

Level Design does not stop at Sketch-Up.  It is merely the start.

Firstly I think it’s amazing that this research is being done at all. The sheer amount of data that has to be processed to reach any conclusions is huge: 60TB for 4 years worth of gaming. Secondly I think it’s great that Sony let them have access to this data; many wouldn’t have.

However this post isn’t about the technical challenges they faced. While reading I picked up on a few points in the piece that I think are much more significant than they first appear and decided to elaborate on them.

“The average age of players turned out to be 31. “These aren’t just pasty white teenage boys in a basement—to be sure, they’re there, but they’re not typical,” he said. The older players tended to play more than the kids and, although the total hours played seem large, he said that the time mostly displaced either TV watching or movie going. And the surveys showed that those who viewed TV news in the first place continued to do so, suggesting that gamers really slotted EQ2 into their entertainment time.”

Emphasis mine.

While developing your game it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you aren’t just competing with World of Warcraft for your players subscriptions. You’re actually competing against everything else they could be doing instead of playing your game.

This isn’t something you have to worry about in the singleplayer games market normally as you aren’t reliant on players returning to your game night after night for your revenue. If you buy Gears of War then Epics bottom line isn’t going to be affected by you deciding to watch the football instead.

However this is something that has really been evident to those playing the games. Real world events impact how many people log in to your game. During the World Cup there was noticeably less people online than normal and even the release of a Single Player game in a genre entirely unrelated to your game can affect your subscriber numbers.

In the wake of a period like last November where there was a big title being released each week for 4 weeks how many people will have felt compelled to return to their MMO after spending that long away from it playing something else?

During the recent (and still ongoing) Planetside Blog-o-War between Rock Paper Shotgun, Boing Boing and The Escapist the Dawn of War 2 beta was released. That very night I logged into the game to discover that over half of the outfit that would normally be on at that time were playing the DoW2 demo rather than Planetside. Probably only half of those people actually returned to Planetside after the demos appeal had worn off.

This brings me to the topic of churn…

“…Srivastava described how he could explore the phenomenon of customer churn, something that’s significant for any sort of subscription-based service, like cell phones or cable TV. With the full dataset, the team can now track how individual customers dropping out of the game influenced others who they typically played or interacted with. Using this data, the spreading rate and influence factor could then be calculated, providing hard measures to work with.”

Anybody who has been a member of a social group of any kind (real or virtual) understands that sometimes when people leave the group that group will start to fall apart.

This is a completely natural phenomena and one that once begun will tend to run it’s course. This is well understood by the large guilds and clans who know that if your group stays too small or doesn’t have a frequent turnover of new members then the group will become too familiar and if a popular member of the group leaves it can cause a spiral that brings the entire group down.

This is often why the largest guilds sometimes feel the least personal. If the relationships between the members gets too strong then if one of them leaves the entire structure is weakened (a little similar to a tantrum spiral in Dwarf Fortress).

What developers should be taking away from this though is that keeping individual players happy is incredibly important. Their community managers should be identifying who the “leaders” among the community are and trying to ensure that these people keep playing the game.

A well known member of the community bad-mouthing your game because of game imbalance (for example) can affect the morale of the entire community causing players to stop playing (maybe just temporarily) and dropping out of the social network they formed in your game. This can lead to other players who never visit the forums but know somebody who does stopping their play because the people they play with aren’t playing anymore. Repeat this enough times and you start to lose subscriptions.

WoW and Eve (which in my book are the most successful MMOs of recent years albeit on different scales) have clearly understood this. Churn is inevitable as many reasons why players stop playing are completely beyond the control of Developers however it’s important to identify the causes that are under your control and address them quickly (rarely quick enough).

Additionally like the large guilds maintaining a constant stream of new players is important in preventing the community stagnating and refreshing the bonds between established members. WoW and Eve have never stopped marketing themselves, always pushing to get people who have never played (or used to play but have lapsed) into the game. The number of MMO launches each year is always increasing but very rarely do you actually hear anything about them after their launch.

However I think Twitter is destined for much greater things than it is currently being used for.

Right now Twitter is largely a device for spreading memes around the Internet. It’s larger scale than IM and more immediate than email. It is the perfect platform for viral marketing.

However I was thinking about how Twitter is going to fit into other forms of media. This mostly relates to how Twitter is going to completely revolutionise the ARG (if it isn’t already) and potentially change the face of Television.

ARGs have been fairly slow moving things in the past. Where updates are carefully staged (often according to coincide with specific marketing pushes) and planned out months in advance. I imagine a future (and it may already be here) where instead of elaborate puzzles to be solved over several days or weeks we’re dealing with rapidly unfolding story-lines with many virtual actors facilitated by services like Twitter.

Updates to the story-line can happen in real-time. The sensation of being involved in something as it happens will be far greater and be capable of generating a sense of urgency in what has typically been a fairly sedate form of media.

Members of the public could be dragged into the story as well. If run well enough genuine actors could be hired to follow up on Tweets like “Am going to Starbucks, I need a coffee while I get my head around what just happened.” If the general location of the character is known to those following the story people nearby might actually be able to spot the character at a Starbucks and engage with them, take photos of them and Tweet about it themselves perpetuating the story even more.

Granted this assumes a lot on the part of the participants, that they are capable of Role-playing sufficiently that they don’t break the universe of the game (I remember the ARG surrounding the Transformers movie where you could read the inbox of one of the characters and everybody on the Internet had spammed it into oblivion with “Zomg Optimus Primelol” ).

Television can also use Twitter to grow beyond it’s episodic boundaries. Characters from TV shows are already getting Facebook pages but these are often fan pages and not genuine attempts at creating a virtual persona for the characters in a TV show that actually appears to be living in that world.

My current favourite show is The Big Bang Theory (wonder why…) and it is incredibly easy to imagine the characters of that show adopting a service like Twitter as part of their everyday lives (references to Facebook are common in the show already). Extending these characters lives beyond the weekly episodes on to the Internet through social networking services should really be a no-brainer. There are thousands of people out there who would want to be privy to the Tweets of characters like Sheldon Cooper so long as those Tweets were entirely in character (so no references to the existence of the show).

However I actually believe that if this happens it will be more likely to occur for kids shows like Hannah Montana as the goal for these shows is to create characters that kids will want to relate to and be friends with (and lets not get into the reasons for this here) and that the audience is far less cynical and more likely to believe that the person writing messages on Twitter is actually the character in the show (and not some intern on minimum wage).

Other things that might happen in Twitter:

Role-playing Games played over the Internet in public (the short message length will impact the rules used in such games in a way that I think could be very interesting and help keep momentum going).

Tweet Aggregators becoming more common place. We’re already seeing these in Cursebird which is a fairly base use of the service but it will make commentary on events (sports matches, current affairs etc) interesting. You will be able to follow the opinion of the Internet by filtering tweets based on a few keywords in real-time.

So as I said at the start: I think we’re only just scratching the surface of Twitter. This service is going to head in directions that will surprise us all (both for good and bad I suspect). I’m reminded of the War of the Worlds radio play which convinced listeners that it was a news report. I look forwards to the day when mistrust of the media is our base state due to our perceptions of reality being completely eroded.

First some context: I was previously using XP Pro as my main OS on two machines (my Gaming PC and my Netbook). I never looked at Vista because I didn’t want to spend any money on a new OS and had heard that the performance wasn’t as good as XP.

However I had heard that Windows 7 was proving to be faster and use less memory than Vista and since I was wanting to reinstall my machine anyway as it had started to slow down I decided to give the Beta a go. Worst case scenario I end up reinstalling XP which was the original plan in any case.

Find out what I thought below…

First off I’ll start by saying that Windows 7 has been the easiest to install version of Windows I’ve ever used. Aside from having to select my keyboard layout and language the installer was completely autonomous. This is largely because Windows 7 installs everything. If you want to add or remove certain parts you can do so without having to put the disc in the drive. This makes a lot of sense to me.

PERFORMANCE

First thing I checked was the memory use. I only have 2Gig in my gaming rig (Which will at some point go up to 4) and with XP I was sitting at an idle memory use of about 35–40% and using about 10% cpu.

After a fresh boot Windows 7 would sit at around 35% memory (usually a little less) but after 30 minutes or so this grows to about 50%. This is most likely because of a feature where it keeps the files used by frequently used applications in memory so every time I open an application that I’ve had open before it opens much faster.

CPU usage when idle sits at under 1% (and I include playing music on iTunes as “Idle”) and everything seems much faster in general (file operations like move and copy seem to be faster and applications install quicker). I’m not sure how much of this is due to running a 64bit OS as opposed to 32bit though.

Overall performance though is definitely better than XP. Here I probably differ from hard-core tech web sites because I quantify performance as how quickly I perceive something to run and not how few processor cycles or how little memory it used to achieve it. The OS may be using more memory than XP but that memory was just sitting there not doing anything.

I’m yet to notice any adverse effects on gaming but I’ve not been playing cutting-edge super-graphics/memory intensive games recently.

THE TASKBAR

There is no longer an option to have the “Classic” Start Menu anymore so I finally had to face the future and get used to something new.

For me however new things were good. I had recently taken to using RocketDock extensively because I realised I was only using the same half-dozen programs frequently and Quick Launch just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

The new “Pin-To-Taskbar” functionality turns the Taskbar into a Dock which is awesome. The fact that the Taskbar is still a Taskbar is a good thing too and makes it better than a pure Dock. The amount of effort that has been put into revamping this age-old concept is huge and has been very much worthwhile. It took some getting used to; as any new feature does, but it quickly became second-nature.

If you want more details on the changes to the Taskbar then have a look here.

I still have RocketDock installed however. The Taskbar treats all Folders pinned to it as a single Explorer Icon which is a bit crap. RocketDock now sits hidden on the left of my screen and holds shortcuts to my drives, Networks and Libraries.

LIBRARIES

Ah Libraries. Libraries for those not aware, are abstract locations which represent many different locations. You have 4 (Documents, Music, Videos, Pictures) out of the box. By default these will point to both your own “My n” Folder and the machines Public version. This makes it easier to share files between users as you can drop the file into the Public folder and anybody on that machine who opens up their Videos library will be able to access both their own Videos and Public videos.

Some people are unconvinced about these but I have to say they are growing on me a lot. I have a media server at home that stores all my music and films as I use my Xbox as a Media Centre and I often like to watch movies on my Netbook. With the Libraries I just add the remote drive to the respective libraries and I can browse through my files as if they were on my local machine.

GENERAL OTHER STUFF

I did a lot of file-copying and moving at the weekend as a result of the reformat of my main PC. This was a pain on XP but a joy on Windows 7.

The reason for this is that on Windows 7 you can just drag a window (any window) to the left or right sides of the screen and it will dock it to the side, resizing it to take up exactly half the width of your desktop. This made moving files between drives much easier as I can hit Windows+E twice to open two file explorers, drag one to each side of the screen and then just drag files between the two.

For those people who used an Amiga extensively in the past it’s a bit like using Dopus. This is a good thing. That the docking works for any windows based app is incredibly useful so you can compare two websites side-by side or drag files from an Explorer into FileZilla easily. This is all stuff you could do before but this just makes it much easier to do it.

Windows Messenger is not built-in. This is great news as I have always disabled it on every machine I use.

UAC I disabled after about ten minutes use. This meant that Gadgets wouldn’t work (no great loss really) but they can be re-enabled with a little registry poking.

The System Tray no longer annoys you. The default behaviour of an icon is to not show up but still display balloon notifications. Given the new taskbar pinning this makes sense as anything you may have wanted to open from the System Tray you probably wanted to pin anyway.

Being able to search inside the start menu is more useful than I thought it would be and I often find myself hitting the windows key and typing in “Calc” to get to the Calculator rather than navigating the programs list.

THE NETBOOK

I have an Advent 4211 (a re-badged MSI Wind) with 1 Gig of ram and the 80gig hard drive. Windows 7 installed very easily onto the machine from a USB hard drive and detected almost every piece of hardware straight away. The only drivers it didn’t have were for the WiFi but with a wired network connection it managed to pull them off Windows Update in a few seconds.

The Wireless networking is much nicer than XP and is incredibly easy to setup (and has a useful signal strength indicator on the system tray). Battery life seems to be about the same as XP but again the charge indicator on the system tray is now much easier to read.

Overall I’m quite impressed with the performance on this low-power machine especially considering the beta is the “Ultimate” edition and MS are making an OEM edition that should run faster on Netbook type machines.

CONCLUSION

So far I’m very impressed with Windows 7. In terms of usability it is a step up from XP and appears to perform better in day to day use. There are a few little niggles but they are just that: niggles. XP is full of problems that have been solved in 7 and while 7 has a few new ones they are tiny in comparison.

We’ll see how it fares over the long-term as I plan to use it as my main OS at least until August when the Beta expires. For now though the new-user experience is looking pretty good.

However there was also more serious attempt: Escape from Woomera which was… well it wasn’t actually that fun. That may have been the point of course.

Well now we have Harpooned. A satirical look at Japanese Whaling via the medium of the Vertically scrolling Shmup.

Harpooned 2009 update from Conor O’Kane on Vimeo.

Regardless of the how true the previous statement might be I’ve recently discovered a service called Evernote.

To use it you just sign-up to the service and can then either enter notes (text, pictures, html whatever) through the web interface or download the desktop client and use that. It even has clients for mobile phones as well although I’ve not tried those.

One of the cooler features is that it will recognise text (even some of the my illegible handwriting) and automatically index it for searching. So you can snap a picture of a whiteboard with your phone or scan in a post-it you drew a diagram on and once it’s in Evernote it acts just like any other text note.

I’ve been using it to jot down all the random thoughts I have during the day about videogame design as well as copy quotes from interesting websites for later reference. The most notable change to my life has been that when I get home I can look at Evernote and spot things to write about or remind myself of things I need to do which I would have normally forgotten about while working.

I imagine this will become an integral part of my Design process in future and as it’s free I can hardly reccommend it enough.

Our expedition set out without any tools or weapons but with a cart laden with seeds, wood and a handful of Iron and Copper.

Our Blacksmith Bjorne was confident that we could forge all that we would need once we found a suitable site and refused to spend any extra on bringing tools with us.

After months of searching I finnally settled upon a site that was rich in Dolomite and offered us a near vertical cliff to dig into. The River was rather far from our intended dig location but that wouldn’t matter in the short term. Later on we’d have to find a way to divert the water to the Fortress but for now we had enough alcohol to last us all year.

After unloading the cart we set up a small base camp of workshops so that Bjorne and Egon could get to work forging tools and building some furniture. Within a day the first of our Picks was forged and Giles immedietly set about digging out the nearby loam to form our first farm. 

However it didn’t take long for us to hit rock again and it seemed that farming would be tricky in this area. No matter we dug out some rooms from the stone so we had somewhere to sleep and eat in safety. Giles began planting Plump Helmets and Rock Nuts and we prepared for our first harvest.

Within a week we all had a Pick and Egon was sporting a new Iron Battle Axe which he used to mercilessly hunt down the poor trees around our camp.

With our new tools we set about preparing the cliff for our Fortress. Digging out a large flat area several stories high I could already see the grand entrance, fortifications and engravings in my mind. This was no doubt destined to be one of the greatest Fortresses ever built.

Morris led our Mining efforts as we began to dig out what would later become the Barracks and main Keep of the Fort. While our group was small we had no need of individual rooms and this floor would be the basis of our Fortresses defenses and eventual home to our standing army.

I’ve included a sketch of the proposed layout.

You can make out where the Barracks and Mess-Hall will go. A Pantry will connect to the Mess-Hall and then a Still, Kitchen and Butcher shop shallbe on the far side to minimise the amount of hauling required.

The Northern side of the Fort will be reserved for Archery Ranges, Ammunition stockpiles and anything else we may need to support a growing Military in the future.

What followed was an immense amount of digging and hauling. Spring turned into Summer and then into Autumn. However Morris; being a very experienced Miner, managed to save us alot of time with some controlled cave-ins. These saved an immense amount of time allowing us to have the Trade Depot built and operational in time for the first Dwarven Caravans arrival.

Unfortunately as all we had been concentrating on was digging all we had to trade was stone and a few piece of furniture. We didn’t need the stone so much but then neither did the trader. He left with an aggreement to bring back more Iron Anvils so long as we aggreed to supply Sceptres. I’m not too worried about Trade right now though as I feel we are well on our way to self-sufficiency. The Farms are producing food faster than we can eat and we are developing a good surplus of nearly everything.

With Winter came immigrants. Only a few though so we are still living quite comfortably out of the military barracks. They arrived just  in time to help haul what remained down at Base Camp into our newly dug Warehouses (and toss the resulting stone outside). Among them was a Hunter who has quickly start to supply us with a ready supply of meat which makes a change from living on Plump Helmets. I’m still getting to know the others as it’s been fairly hectic. I’ve barely been able to keep the Records up to date but now I don’t have to help dig I should get enough time to setup an office and get to grips with managing the new arrivals and planning our future projects (a Reservoir is on the cards as well as new living quarters and workshops as no doubt we will be seeing more immigrants soon)

I’ve included some sketches of the Fort as it is today. You can see just how much progress we’ve made in our first year…

Well it was inevitable really. If only so I could find out what they’d done to a game I technically spent 18 months of my life laying the foundations for (and by that I mean developing the failed Climax version which actually has nothing in common with the Mythic version other than the name and the creative director).

I like it. It’s more fun than World of Warcraft to me and I put that down largely to it being Warhammer. I’ve never cared about Blizzard games overmuch but I (like many UK games developers) spent much of my teens painting lead figures when I should have been chasing girls.

That plus the fact you can dive into the fun stuff straight away and not have to grind 20-40 levels before it’s worthwhile. PvP is where it’s at for me.

However…

Warhammer is proving a theory of mine: Game balance has far less to do with stats and numbers and far more to do with art.

Allow me to run with this for a while:

Take a look at the current server queues for WAR. The majority of servers have queues on the side of Destruction but only a handful have Queues on the side of Order. Now unless Destruction have less slots assigned to them this means that there are far more people who want to play as the bad guys than good.

This is interesting because it goes against what happened in WoW where Alliance outnumbered Horde.

Back when I was designing an MMO for Climax (Not Warhammer Online but another one that never got signed) we chatted with some guys from NCSoft and we got around to the topic of the “Good guy bias”. The idea that on average players want to play as the “Good guys” more than the bad guys. At the time the anecdotal evidence was in favour of this theory with just about every MMO having a bias towards the obviously Good side.

Now I think this theory is flawed. My new theory is that players want to play on the side that looks “Coolest”. 

Currently as an Order player myself (and I chose Order on the basis that Witch Hunters looked cool) we are noticing some trends in the make-up of the Destruction vs Order playerbases. Destruction fields far more tanks (Chosen and Black Orcs) than the Order side who field far more Damage Dealing classes like Witch Hunters, Bright Wizards and Shadow Warriors. We are very lacking in frontline fighters meaning Destrcution tends to run straight into the softer ranged classes right past the few front-liners we have.

This may be leading Mythic to investigate why everybody is favouring Destruction and the Chosen and Black Orc classes in particular (I don’t hav enumbers to back any of this up but I see more of them than any other class in PvP). I can save some of their effort: It has nothing at all to do with numbers or combat balance.

There is no flavour of the month effect going on here. Chosen and Black Orcs aren’t any tougher or more dangerous individually than SowrdMasters or Ironbreakers. However what they are is “Cooler”. Faced with character creation and the choice between being an Elf in what appears to be a nightdress or a Huge guy with a beard in spikey plate mail armour you instantly think that the Spikey armour guy is “Better” than the Nightdress guy.

This is what I think of as “MetaBalance”. These two classes may be perfectly balanced numerically but because one of them has art that matches the stereotype closer it affects how players choose their character and even how they play them. I’ve seen Swordmasters complain that Elves have no tank class when Swordmasters ARE their Tank class. The problem is they don’t feel or look like a Tank class and this changes the psychology of the person playing making them believe themselves to be weaker than they actually are.

This theory is backed up by my experiences as a Destruction player fighting Order on another Server. I’ve seen Witch Hunters (Who carry a pistol in their off-hand) playing as if they are a ranged class and not a melee class. One of my friends who has done more Destruction PvP genuinely didn’t relise that Witch Hunters are supposed to be a Melee class until I told him.

This gets further backed up by Warrior Priests who try to stay out of combat and heal people when they are at their most effective upfront with the Sword Masters and Witch Hunters.

On the other hand we have Destruction. Where all of their classes play alot closer to how they look. Big guy wearing Spikey Platemail? yep he’s a Tank. Goblin with robes and a staff? yep ranged caster and healer. Elf with a dagger in each hand and no clothes? Damn right that’s a melee DPS character.

Classes being played alot and well on the side of Order however are: Bright Wizards (Ranged DPS and they look it), Arch mage (healer/Caster and again they look the part), Iron Breaker (Dwarf in lots of armour and a big axe yes he’s a tank), Shadow Warrior (Blatently Legolas).

So how much does Art affect population balance in an MMO? My answer would be “Alot more than people think”. Power Gamers are the only ones that will consider statistics when choosing their class while the rest of us go with the character we like the look of.

Warhammer is currently suffering a population imbalance because the Destruction side just look cooler and appeal to more people than the Order side and importantly more closely match the stereotypes of their class.

The net result means I’m sick of seeing bloody Bright Wizards everywhere and no bloody Iron Breakers.