[MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A rant againstVanguardreviews and rants)

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev2-bounces at lists.mud-dev.com [mailto:mud-dev2- 
> bounces at lists.mud-dev.com] On Behalf Of Sean Howard
> Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 8:33 PM
> To: mud-dev2 at lists.mud-dev.com
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A rant 
> againstVanguardreviews and rants)
> 
> 
> "Raph Koster" <rkoster at san.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > Once the Jedi system was revealed and started incentivizing people 
> > to macro professions they didn't like, that's when we started seeing

> > tons of macro entertainers. Prior to that, you didn't do 
> > entertainment skills unless you actually wanted to.
> 
> I really don't want to be rude, but that's not true. The way the 
> system was designed, you needed real people to remove your battle 
> fatigue, real people to heal your wounds, and real people to buff your

> character. It didn't take long for people to macro this behavior to 
> reduce absurdly extended (forced) down time.

I've written at some length on specifically the issue of the downtime. I
think you have probably even seen it:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/

IMHO, the biggest issue with the downtime was not that it was extended
-- it's that it was poorly timed. There's a natural cycle going from
adventuring to wanting to hang out, chill out, swap stories, and so on.
Being forced to the latter prematurely just makes you itchy -- you want
to PLAY more. And that's what was happening a lot.

But there were MANY "timing off" things surrounding combat and stats in
SWG. The rate of damage, the rate of wounds, the rate of healing, the
rate of incap -- none of those were really right, IMHO.

I stand by the statement that it was "working OK." Not well, just OK.
The cycle did in fact bring people back. Folks from PARC who analyzed
'third spaces' in SWG found that there were significant flaws in how
cantinas work, but they were addressable. The biggest flaw was in fact
the damn buffbots. :)

> Likewise, to master a profession, you needed apprentice points gained 
> from teaching people skills. It also didn't take long until the 
> starports were filled with people paying people if they allowed them 
> to teach them a skill - 1k per skillpoint or something - just because 
> the natural chance for the apprentice system required specific things 
> from other players that were not common (how many people hung around 
> with an empty skill box to be taught?) such that people had to bribe 
> them for the opportunity. If you make gameplay out of socialization, 
> people WILL min-max socialization - just like people minmax sexual 
> relations with prostitutes.

All of the above is true -- but I am still going to tell you that there
was a MASSIVE difference brought about by forcing players to play skill
trees they didn't want. A player who is playing entertainer macros
sometimes because they find stretches dull, but they also chose
entertainer because they wanted to do it. A player who is playing
entertainer because it is an obstacle on the way to Jedi macros ALL of
it. And that is what happened, and in droves.

This is pretty well documented, even by the entertainers in question:
the rise of bottomfeeding "buffbots," the proportional drop in number of
"real entertainers" and so on. It's very evident in the stats on the
proportions of users in each profession over time. And it's also, alas,
evident in sub numbers pre- and post-Holocron drops.

The apprentice system had this issue from the start, I agree. There are
several big differences. One, apprenticeship was intended as a gesture
towards mentoring, not towards socialization; not quite the same thing.
Obviously, the flaw is that apprenticeship was immediate, rather than
being an extended relationship. And honestly, I don't know that there
needs to be a system for mentoring. It happens quite naturally,
especially in systems without levels like SWG.

> Yes, I realize that some people liked these systems, but obviously, a 
> significant portion of the playerbase did not.

Yes, particularly the combat-centric types.

> And the way they were
> designed, it was always cheaper, quicker, and easier to go with a bot 
> than a person, thus destroying the market and opportunities for those 
> who played to the system. Everybody blames the bots, but the bots were

> just an extension of players not wanting arbitrary barriers preventing

> them from doing what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do it - 
> happens every time. This time, unfortunately, it involved screwing 
> over other players because, frankly, other players were the
fundamental problem to overcome.

Players are going to have arbitrary barriers to what they want to do.
Period. It's a truism. The combat ITSELF is an arbitrary barrier to many
folks -- all they want is the loot. Everyone has different tolerances
for these barriers, and everyone has a different take on what the actual
barrier is.

The question is whether the barriers are semi-tolerable, like the lines
at a supermarket checkout, as opposed to the lines at say, airport
security.

Quite a lot of combat folks disliked the buffbot experience more than
they disliked the wait involved in the entertainer experience. And they
were rather pissed when the buffbot experience crowded out the
entertainer experience. Good entertainers were *fun to watch and listen
to* and the wait didn't feel like an issue if you were in the mood. The
issue was the timing of being in the mood.

> However, I do find it interesting that you say it was there to 
> encourage people to return to towns. If I may ask, why then did you 
> make it so that the various functions only properly worked in exactly 
> two buildings? A town could be absolutely barren, but you walk into a 
> cantina and find a hundred people dancing in their underwear.

Campsites also had some of the functionality, and the idea was to add
things like public performance squares, etc. A lot of folks were setting
up in the towns as merchanting spaces too. Pre-Holocrons, I really
didn't see many barren towns.

> For the doctors, I'm sure the point was to centralize the services 
> provided, but with entertainers, it ended up far too centralized. By 
> this I mean that you had a single cantina with thirty or forty people 
> dancing around - it seems that with that kind of noise, it would be 
> very, very difficult for the entertainer class to play out in the 
> manner that was expected of them. It also concentrated people in the 
> major cities only, since people didn't want to search for a cantina.

Cantinas were always intended to be a player-buildable structure as well
(a lot of the inspiration actually came from places like Serpent's Cross
Tavern and Kazola's Tavern in UO). And, of course, campsites were also
supposed to serve as a viable location for this.

That said, the lack of segmentation within cantinas was in fact one of
the things that the PARC guys called out.

> If their current city
> didn't have one, they'd go to Theed where they knew absolutely there 
> would be people.

Every city should have had at least one if not more.

> So, in a way, that decision ended up making more ghost towns, not 
> less.

The ghost town thing can be largely attributed to a world that basically
demanded a population of a certain scale; without that population, whole
regions basically get abandoned. It relied on population density to get
people spread out as they went to avoid lag from crowded spaces.

> And I have to ask, did you not consider that Entertainers would be 
> forever damned to only one room for their entire existence in the 
> world?

I played an entertainer, and I never felt that way, honestly. For one,
you could be an entertainer AND a combatant (I was an musician/scout).
For another, there were things like going on tour and whatnot that
people started doing.

Again, once buffs got out of control (an early combat balancing mistake
in Live, driven IMHO by a lack of understanding how a levelless system
must work) and you started needing huge specialization in order to
engage in combat, then that all broke. But you could quite viably play
as a low-to-mid-level combatant and also an entertainer, and also a
creature handler (I had a pet) and so on. The game was designed for
multiclassing more than for specialization. I could go on a digression
here about how the skill trees did not end up the way they were
intended, but that's a lengthy side trip.

> I know I'm being critical here, but I do deeply respect SWG as a 
> flawed masterpiece, and I'm extremely curious about the thought 
> processes that went into these ideas.

Well, the fundamental answer there is "polish time." A lot of what you
are referencing is what I would consider to be finding balance points,
not errors in the fundamentals. Adding more performance spaces, making
the need for cantinas less frequent, or redoing skill trees to be
non-uniform, or making sure buffs didn't go crazy, etc.

As an example: A lot of hay was made about the notion that entertainers
should have been giving positive effects rather than healing negative
effects. But stuff like that ignores that *to players there is no
difference.* To them, there is "be at max power" and "not be at max
power." Making it a step you did before combat versus after was really
irrelevant. The fundamental principle is the same: another player is
needed to get you to fighting trim. So focusing on whether cantinas and
battle fatigue were a punishment or not misses the psychological point.
Being "forced to buff" feels exactly the same.

-Raph