[MUD-Dev2] Downtime & SWG (Was: Importance of emoting)

[Raph Koster]

Sean Howard wrote:
> "Raph Koster" <raph at areae.net> wrote:
>
> > 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'm not so sure that's how it works. I don't think you can make those
> kind of generalizations about how people work. For instance, most
> people have a circadian clock which helps decide a person's 24 hour
> cycle - but there's plenty of people who have it reversed (awake at
> night) and some with 25 hour cycles (constantly pushing their schedule
> forward).

Exactly -- it'll be wrong to some degree for every given individual, and
right for the group. :) That's how just about ANY large-scale public
project works, however. Most businesses cater to the typical cycle, and
there's a few that cater to the folks whose clocks are offset.

> I absolutely do not think you can say there is a natural cycle to how
> players want to play. You can find specific unnatural cycles - select
> groups of people that flock in a similar manner - but a blanket
> statement about the nature of man or play is bound to fail sooner than
> later.

I think there are entire giant fields about blanket statements about the
nature of man. Are you discarding the fields of psychology,
anthropology, economics?

> Some people have nothing but down time, some prefer no down time at
> all, some like it about 50/50, some 20/80, whatever. Any effort to
> affect something like that is going to end up pissing off a lot of people.

Just as the daytime business hours must doubtlessly piss off a lot of
people.

> Even if you get 90% of the players, when you are talking about 150,000
> people, that's just not enough.

What exactly is? Perfection?

> It's the same thing with forced group and forced socialization. If you
> are making a MUD with about 30 simultaneous players, you can choose
> what kind of behaviors to support and reward. But when dealing with
> thousands upon thousands of players, any assumption you make will end
> up festering among one minority group or another until something
> happens and they are given the chance to explode. To purposely design
> a sweater with a bunch of loose threads is just asking to walk around
> naked.

You ALWAYS have to choose what sort of behaviors to support and reward.
You choose by not making choices, too. And there is no one product that
will ever fit everyone. I don't understand what you are getting at here.

> > 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.
>
> We are talking about degrees here.

Of course. Here's a paraphrase of how the numbers went:

When people didn't have to do entertainer unless they wanted to, we had
something like 10-15% of the userbase try it out and stick with it to
some degree. The overall happiness of the people doing it was, let's
say, middling; people griped about lack of songs, about being stuck in
one place too much, and so on. Some macroed, but they macroed in order
to be MORE of an entertainer.

When people had to do entertainer to get to Jedi, we had something like
3/4 of the userbase try it out -- everyone who wanted to be a Jedi. A
small percentage of these discovered they liked it after all, but the
rest disliked it because it wasn't the way they wanted to play. They
macroed in order to STOP being an entertainer.

In addition, the folks who *did* want to be there had their satisfaction
drop significantly because many of the things they enjoyed were damaged:
their sense of being special and important and having people come to
them, their advancement rate, their roleplay, their ability to perform
in groups, and so on.

The overall happiness with entertainer fell dramatically; most people
who were entertainers at any given time were people who didn't want to
do it, and therefore were unhappy. And their presence made the ones who
DID want to do it unhappy as well.

> There are a lot of things in MMORPGs and other games that players will
> power their way through because they want the cookie at the end. It
> reminds me of the book "Punished By Rewards", in which the author
> Alfie Kohn suggests that the best way to make sure a child fails to
> retain knowledge is to give him rewards for success in school. The
> idea is that when the reward becomes a factor, children will take on
> less challenging projects, study only the material they will be tested
> on, or even cheat to get that reward.

Yes. This is something that is deeply embedded in games in general,
though, and very difficult to avoid.

> Game design seems to be entire based around the concept that you need
> carrots to heard players around one way or another - I don't believe
> that to be a case.

Given a lack of carrots, people self-examine to see if they have their
own internal carrot. They then work towards that. If they do not find a
carrot either from the game or from themselves, they quit, usually
terming the game "directionless."

But this is not unique to games. We have long known, for example, that
internal self-generated carrots are more conducive to productivity in
the workplace, for example. But that doesn't mean that we stop doing
things like employee of the month or higher salaries or other such
things.

> I pose this question: How would SWG have been different if every
> player automatically started, from square one, with EVERY skill
> box filled. Every skill, every abilities, every possibility available
> from the start. How would the world and community suffer?

Players who came to the game with no internal carrot would have bounced
off immediately. Players who had an internal carrot would have been
fine. The net result would be a smaller audience.

What's more, I'll tell you that in the opinion of most people, *this is
what actually happened*, because SWG had a very very shallow "carrot
tree" compared to most MMOs. You could fill every skill box in very
little time -- and you could master just the thing you were interested
in with just a few days of effort. We're not talking the hundreds of
hours played that other games demand.

When SWG and UO saw churn, the "running out of carrots" factor was
always a huge huge portion of the reason why people left. Call it "lack
of content" or "lack of depth" or "short advancement ladder," it's all
the same thing.

> How are buffbots bottom feeding? Within the confines of the game
> world, game system, and game rules, they are breaking no law. Even
> morally, they aren't offensive. If your hot dog stand goes out of
> business due to a nearby vending machine, its because you aren't
> providing anything the vending machine isn't, and charging high
> prices.

The term bottomfeeding means "engaging in a low-to-zero risk activity
for low but steady return on investment." In the real world, this is a
good thing. In a game, it's by nature un-fun (because fun entails risk,
operating at the margin of challenge, and so on).

By nature, a bot is engaging in this practice (and by nature, any game
where you can select which challenge to undertake is vulnerable to
bottomfeeding).

> It wasn't the fact that these people didn't want to "roleplay" doctors
> or entertainers - it's the fact that they could do just as good a job
> or better (cheaper) without giving a crap.

Actually, they didn't do a "better" job for themselves -- they didn't
maximize their revenue or their advancement, for example. A player
actually at the keyboard working at it would do better for the time
spent. The bots do their job "just well enough." The big difference is
that they do a rote job so they can do it 24/7.

ALL game activities can be automated in this fashion. The question is
how long you will be successful at it.

In an RPG with no significant failure state, the answer is "forever."
You could automate most of WoW without too much of an effort, too, and
people have.

The issue here is actually the lack of failure state. And the lack of
failure state in something like entertaining comes about because the
task wasn't designed to be thought of that way in the first place. The
reward was designed for an internal carrot, a sense of self-satisfaction
-- not for points. You didn't get *any better at entertaining from
leveling up* because the good entertainers were using real world skill,
not RPG skills. Levelling up gave you more tools, but you could be a
great entertainer with just chat.

> For instance, let's say that an entertainer supports himself through
> tips. Obviously, the guy who gives the same service for free is going
> to have superior business.

You are making the mistake of equating the healing as the service. That
isn't really the core service that entertainers offered and it isn't why
they play that role, and misunderstanding that is why continued to
tweaks to entertainers have continued to just drive them away. Healing
was the McGuffin to get people to show up. Entertaining was about
entertaining people, not healing.

> > Players are going to have arbitrary barriers to what they want to
> > do.
>
> Ah-hah! I disagree completely!

I don't see how. By its very nature, a given game may not even offer
what they want to do. That's an arbitrary barrier right there. The
player may want to change a rule, and cannot. That's an arbitrary
barrier. Just a moment ago, you were arguing that everyone was
different. Therefore, by definition no given game will be without some
sort of barrier that said player will regard as arbitrary.

> > 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.
>
> This goes back to the rewards thing. Is the purpose of a school child
> to learn or to succeed?

Heh, as a parent of school age kds, the answer is "neither." School is
an arbitrary barrier put there by society, between them and their play
time.

>  Likewise, is the goal of a game player to do X or to succeed? A vast
> majority of game designers believe that games are entirely built
> around success - that it's about rewards, competition, and obstacles.
> It certainly can be. But what if it wasn't?

Oof. There are so many assumptions packed in there that I am unsure how
to even begin.

- First, the goal of the player isn't binary.

- Second, the goal of the game player may be neither.

- Third, you left out the goal of the game designer.

- Fourth, you left out the goal of the game itself (which may not be
what the designer intended).

- Fifth, you left out the goal of games in general.

If what you are saying is that you want games (of any sort) that do not
involve obstacles, competition, and rewards, then I suggest to you that
what you want is not a game. It may not even be a toy. I am unsure what
exactly it is.

> I expected you of all people, a huge proponent of virtual worlds and
> systematic gameplay, to appreciate that a reward doesn't have to be
> something that is given or "earned". The journey itself can be
> rewarding. Creativity can be rewarding.

It can be rewarding, of course. But you are greatly mistaken if you
think that this isn't something that we engineer into the system. Take
the example you cite:

> Let's go back to Star Wars Galaxies. Have you seen some of the amazing
> homes people have designed? There was one where somebody took a bunch
> of boxes and built an enormouse scale model of a star destroyer,
> complete with mid-air combat between x-wings and tie fighters.
> This creativity was allowed by the game, not enforced and not
> prevented.

I think you underestimate the amount of design that goes into enabling
that. It certainly was a non-trivial amount of work.

- Free form object placement.
- A building system that did not require a high level of technical
skill.
- Library of objects designed to be used in this manner.
- Crafting infrastructure for making tintable objects.
- Economic chain so that house decorating involved social networking and
economic success.
- Public/private permissions system so that stuff could be showed off.
- Waypoint system for bookmarking locations.
- Ability to trade waypoints for viral spread of pointers to locations.
- Player cities that could collect points of interest and provide rapid
travel to them.

There are a lot of moving parts to this, and they all mattered. Lacking
any of them would make it a vastly different proposition. Compare to
something like Second Life, where there are some very cool builds, but
much of the infrastructure above is missing. Or more, compare to
AlphaWorld, which was missing all of that infrastructure.

It's a mistake to say "this creativity was allowed, not enforced and not
prevented." It was ENABLED, consciously and with great effort.

> Something as simple as allowing objects to exist in mid-air
> (unlike Everquest 2) and overlap has created a huge potential for
> creativity - with no tangible reward given or acknowledged by the
> game proper.

There ARE reward systems in place:

- the fact that your house can be seen publicly and shared enables a
wide array of social feedback to occur that would not otherwise.
Contrast to EQ2's housing system, which lacked this and therefore did
not see the same sort of activities.

- Social rewards were encouraged by having community features on
well-made homes ("Garva's Home Show").

- Again, the waypoint system.

The rewards happen to have been designed to be social feedback rather
than game feedback -- that's because the quality of a given piece of
creative work cannot be assessed by the server farm. That doesn't mean
that there aren't aspects that are assessed: number of visits, money
earned at the shop or whatever, etc. There are parallel ladders to
climb, but the core rewards for those who engaged in the activity were
social.

Entertainers actually work the same way. To the true entertainer, the XP
was not the reward. The applause was. That's why the bots were so
damaging to their way of playing and why they resented it so much.

> Likewise, if you look at massively multiplayer online games like Club
> Caribe or Second Life - games with no overarching purpose - you can
> see people doing the most amazing things.

And limited audiences. The number one gripes against Second Life?

- "Confusing" -- which is a code word for "no carrot."
- "Too hard," which is a code word for "the carrot is not worth it in my
mind."
- and "Can't find anything cool," which is a code word for "where is the
carrot? I am not getting any rewards for this work."

>  When I hear stories from World of Warcraft, it's about the
> interesting things the people did above and beyond what the gameplay
> provided. Leeroy Jenkins wasn't funny because he made a stupid
> gameplay decision. He was funny because of the context
> under what that situation happened - under the repercussions. But
> mostly, it's because he yelled LEEERROOOOYY! through a voice over ip
> system completely separate from WoW itself.

No WoW game, no Leroy.

> I don't seeing gaming, especially online gaming, as moving between
> various barriers of different tolerability. Nearly every post I've
> written to this mailing list has been, why doesn't game X allow me to
> do Y? I've never once written that I thought barrier Z was 
> particularly thrilling.

You probably haven't realized how carefully you were shepherded through
the barriers. Most everything you enjoyed was driven by barriers and the
sense of barriers falling, most likely.

> > Quite a lot of combat folks disliked the buffbot experience more
> > than they disliked the wait involved in the entertainer experience.
>
> I preferred the vending machine.

This is driven by the fact that you had a different goal in mind at the
time (and possibly always). If you were there for the combat game, then
you would prefer the vending machine, because it made the barrier to
continuing the combat game as low as it could be given the game system.
You would have preferred no barrier at all even more.

People who either shifted off the combat game for a while or were there
for a sense of overall immersion would prefer the actual human
entertainer.

And this is what I mean by timing the arc for the player. Most people do
not focus exclusively on one activity for endless hours. They shift from
activity to activity. In the case of games, a hugely popular shift is to
go from the game, to gathering to talk about the game.

> I'm never in the mood to socialize with strangers. I like monologues,
> not dialogues. Does that make me broken? Unusual, sure, but should I
> be forced to be like everybody else for the purpose of something so
> simple as reducing a few numbers to zero? That's absurd. There were
> no other options, and I for one, was glad when the vending machine
> entertainers showed up.

Yeah, there's no space there for you in that case. Too bad. Can't make
everyone happy.

To make you happy, we'd basically have to say "we are not going to have
entertainers." Which is the default position. Chat has always been
present in these games. And the number of entertainers, social spaces,
etc has always been vanishingly small even when plenty of infrastructure
(taverns, etc) was in place. Why? Because there's no incentive for
people to stop and check out the entertainers.

Again, look at Second Life. The dedicated social spaces are *disasters*.
They actually pay people real money just to show up and sit on the
property. What drives traffic? Reward structures: cybersex, monetary
rewards from gambling, and games.

> > 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.
>
> I remember it being pretty busy at launch, when people started in all
> sorts of crazy towns, but some time before vehicles were introduced,
> the population had already fixated around a single major city per
> planet. Some places like Doaba Guerfell or Vreni Island were always
> barren.

I would not expect an even distribution, certainly.

> > 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.
>
> If you don't mind my asking, what was this desired scale? The world
> always seemed too large for the players, even when it was fully.

Conversely, it was also too small -- players all wanted houses, and they
took up all the wilderness. ;)

> Are we talking a few thousand or tens or thousands even? I certainly
> think that if you took, for example, the overflowing population of
> Theed, it could support several towns - but because of the regional
> requirements of starports, bazaar terminals, and the pain of travel
> at the time, what incentive would they have to disperse? If there
> were a few thousand more people playing, I think it would still just
> make the three main cities more busy.

There is a natural curve to how people distribute themselves across
locations -- classic power law actually. If Theed grew more popular, so
would other places. And Theed's infrastructure would cap out, leading to
a truncation at the top end of the curve.

> Why 250 skill points?

It was enough to fully master two professions and dabble in a third.
Allowing simultaneous mastery of everything would have meant less social
interdependence. The game already demanded few "strong tie" social
connections, because of the blurred roles per individual. But it had,
IMHO, great infrastructure for "weak tie" connections.

Were I doing it now, I'd probably let you master everything, but have
some "switch delay" involved, and only let you have a few masteries
active at one time. But basically, you want people to need each other
even if only at a distance, and you want there to be different kinds of
people. Because people optimize, if you could master everything, players
would choose to do things themselves (even if they did not enjoy the
process) rather than outsourcing it to another.

> And why were novice boxes an absurdly high 15
> points while elite classes were 6? The novice classes were so novice
> that you could master every one of them and have basic functionality
> like being able to fight, heal yourself, harvest, craft, and entertain
> without it being overwhelming or detrimental to elite specializations.

> In every other mmorpg, every class can do all of these things (ie
> crafting is parallel to combat so you can do both, clerics can sorta
> fight and fighters can sorta heal).

Er, in every other MMORPG classes could NOT do all of these things when
we started. In fact, the conventional wisdom was "forced grouping" which
was caused by very tightly defined roles. A newbie in EQ could not heal
themselves unless they were a healing class, and so on. This is also why
class choice was such a big deal -- you had to make multiple characters
to try them all to see which playstyle you liked.

I suggest to you that this is something that has changed quite a lot
over the years, and is now a default assumption. The overall blurring of
roles is something that has entered as a result of increased
soloability. Until WoW, SWG was the most soloable game on the market and
also the one which afforded the broadest array of activities to newbies.
So I think you have this backwards.

> So why are players penalized heavily so early on for basic diversification?

>From a strict mathematical point of view, the basic diversification
early on was cheap; players had nothing else to spend the points on. The
high cost only mattered once you were high up in the skill trees and had
a limited budget. So again, I think you have this backwards. Basically,
the 15 point cost for the bottom skill drives high end users to
specialize. It is no barrier at all to newbies.

> I do not feel that entertainers are an innate flaw, but most of what I
> see are philosophical flaws on a very basic, fundamental level.
> Balancing skill trees would've been a good start, but the idea behind
> skill trees - the idea that you must do A to get B - is offensive.
> What if all the skills were available from the start, or if you didn't
> have to go through the tree in a specific order? What if the skill tree
> were like a collectable card game, such that you could "equip" skill
> boxes rather than having to constantly lose progress and grind it back
> again?

Plenty of what ifs there. The skill trees we got are not even the system
that I originally specced out. The description of what happened:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/#comment-10832

> I've never argued that entertained were bad because of battle fatigue.

Well, battle fatigue was the mechanism that forced players back, so you
are, sort of.

> I've argued that they are bad because they are forced upon the player
> irregardless, that they have a progression that requires needless
> grinding,

The progression, again, was only grinding if you saw the progression as
the reward. If you saw the social reward as the key, then it wasn't.

> that they never got to leave the one room,

Again, you could do that anytime you wanted. Just go do something else.

> that they can be replaced by vending machines,

Everything a player does in a game system can be replaced by a vending
machine. :) And indeed, in single-player games, they are!

> and so on. If you ask me, entertainers
> would be more worthwhile if they just dressed in funny hats and did a
> stand up routine - formalizing any of that into "gameplay" is a
> mistake.

So, you can go put on a funny hat in any game RIGHT NOW and do a stand
up routine. I will wager that there were more entertainers in pre-CU SWG
having fun and regularly engaging in this activity than there are in all
of WoW's enormous playerbase today. The incentive structure does matter.

> People have rewarding experiences in chatrooms. The graphics and theme
> are gravy. You don't have to add anything. You don't have to single
> them out and reward them - and you don't have to give them special
> powers. A rifleman could be just as entertaining as an entertainer,
> so why can't he dance and play drums too? Why must he give up shooting
> guns to spend every other day hanging out in an cantina helping
> others? Which is what I think was lost in SWG.

Ironically, I think of it as something that was GAINED in SWG. Because
before SWG you mostly couldn't dance and play drums in a cantina at all.
Apart from AC2, your choice instead was to play music as a combat buff.
Musicians were actually wizards with a different coat of paint. In SWG
we said that these things were valuable in their own right. And now here
you are saying that you wish they were considered so important that the
combat game itself just went away or was completely disconnected.

So in short, I think your response is in essence transitional. Today, we
see LOTRO with player-entered music jamming on the street. IMHO, no SWG
musician system, no WoW dances and no LORTO music -- well, maybe LOTRO
music since AC2 had music.

> In an effort to reward people, sight was lost of the true purpose of
> the experience. Too much attention was paid to the carrot, and life
> became a series of ScanTron multiple choice standardized tests.

I guess my bottom line response is

- most people felt not enough attention was paid to the carrot, but that
may be an artifact of the times -- that frankly, it was novel, so they
needed motivation to try it
- more attention was paid to the true purpose of the experience than
ever previous, but you wish there were more

-Raph