The week has been an interesting one with RPS linking to my Level Design piece on Sunday which made a complete mess of my my stats graph by putting a big spike in the middle.

However this is a link round-up so here is some reading:

• Soren Johnson posted a piece he wrote for Game Developer Magazine on the challenges faced by Games Designers working on Free-To-Play MMOG’s. It’s an excellent summary of the current state of micro-payments and the various other forms of non-subscription funded Online Games.
• Here is an interesting piece at Cognitive Daily about how your working memory capacity might affect how easily you get distracted.
• I discovered the blog of Wai Yen Tang: Video game research review from a person with a B.A. psychology.
• 1-Up have a video of the latest finalists from Phase 2 of the make Something Unreal Contest. There is a distinct lack of the fun games that made the last MSUC so interesting.  UT2D is probably the most interesting of the bunch.

Oh and of course The Demo of Wheelman is on Xbox Live. Download it and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a good weekend!

So when I tell you that games are at their most fun when your skills are in equilibrium with the Challenge you face you’ll scoff and claim that it’s just Common Sense.

Well that is the basics behind what is known as “Flow” in Psychology; the state of mind where you are no longer aware of your concious self and become entirely absorbed in what you are doing. Being aware of the concept alone changes how you think about Games Design.

Game Designers are ussually locked into a battle of trying to obtain “Balance” within their game. This is typically a game of tuning numbers, spreadsheets, damage-per-second, damage mitigation and long complex formulas.

Flow changes that. Being focussed on maximising a Players “Optimal Experience” (The other term for Flow) is about moment-to-moment interactions not just raw numbers. It’s all very good if your game is Balanced by the numbers but it doesn’t count for anything if your players are Bored or Frustrated.

Boredom and Frustration tend to occur when Challenge and Skill are greatly out of balance for a considerable period of time. From my own personal experience I find it takes longer to become bored than it does to become Frustrated. This is largely down to the fact that when your skill outweighs the challenge significantly you are being rewarded more frequently and these extrinsic rewards delay the on-set of boredom. However when the Challenge exceeds your Skill you are often only ever punished and as such lack the sugar coating.

One of the problems with trying to balance a Players experience is that it’s incredibly difficult to accurately and objectively grade player skill. It’s not something that is particularly easy to plot on a graph and is generally most useful for abstract thinking. It’s easy to sketch a Flow graph on a whiteboard but very difficult to quantify in a spreadsheet.

One of the things you can plot with at least a semblance of accuracy is how your game is modifying the Players skill.

Above we have an overly simplified example of an MMO’s challenge as the Player progresses through the levels. At each Level the players skill is artifically increased by receiving new abilities or increases in statistics. When you factor in how the Players Skill is increased over time relative to the change in the Challenges faced you might end up with a graph a little bit like the one below…

After each new Level is achieved the Difficulty faced by the Player is actually reduced. This is good for a few reasons:

• It gives the Player an opportunity to learn how to use their new abilities which is itself a Challenge.
• It gives the Player a rewarding period where they feel much more powerful.
• It gives the Player a break within which to reflect on their achievement.

All of these factors are not specifically related to theories on Flow but result from other elements of Psychology and are proven to all improve a Persons experience so it is worthwhile building these into your game.

As the Player progresses through the Level towards their next jump in Skill the Challenges are increased so the Player has to push themselves harder and they become more engaged and re-enter the Flow state.

The above example is drastically simplyfied compared to a real-mmo and is only intended to deomonstrate how Skill and Challenge relate.

Crowd Control in MMO’s is often the most frustrating experience to a Player. I commented on the effect of “Waiting to Die” last week in regard to the effects of The Sandman on Team Fortress 2. Lets look at how removing a Players ability to interact with your game looks on a Flow Graph.

The above graph represents 5 seconds of gameplay. The player is enjoying themselves and the difficulty is shifting around as the game changes. Then at 2 seconds in they get Disabled removing their ability to interact and artificially reducing their Skill to 0. The result? A massive difficulty spike and an associated increase in Frustration knocking the Player out of the Flow state and into reality (Where they throw their mouse accross the room).

Originally I had a theory that reducing the Players Skill to 0 effectively increases the Difficulty to Infinity as it is impossible for them to respond to the game. This sounded good in my head (it makes a good soundbite) but when I plotted the graph I realised that it’s not strictly true. A model that fits better with my own experiences is that if the Difficulty faced is very low (IE your skill exceeds the Challenge significantly) then being Disabled is not quite as frustrating. If however you are in a Flow State (IE The Challenge is roughly equal to your own Skill) the Frustration is significantly greater.

You may be wondering why I’ve taken the time to point out something that appears so obvious and Common Sense. I ask you this in return…

If it’s so Obvious why do Games Designers still do it?

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.

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.

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.