[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Removing the almighty experience point...

[John Buehler]

Damion Schubert writes:

I fixed one or two quotes.  And I've GOTTA get a better email client.
Outlook is terrible with wrapping Usenet-style quotes.

> On 8/27/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> >
> > Damion Schubert writes:

> One of my big problems with this train of thought (and what follows) is
> that it makes an errant assumption, which is that players who are
> explorers and/or socializers have no interest in playing the
> achievement game at all.

The assumption that I make is that explorers and/or socializers are more
interested in exploring and/or socializing than they are in achieving.  Thus
their being labeled as they are.


> All of Bartle's stuff, and most of the discussion I've
> seen since then, has strongly suggested that most people are a blend
> of at least 2 or 3 of these archetypes.  Strong games tend to be ones
> that blend these types of gameplay together.

I would agree that people have a variety of motivations.  I believe that
people vary their motivations over time, being more strongly
achievement-centered at one time and more strongly socialization-centered at
another.

> Everything in level games becomes a level game.It's nearly impossible
> > to have non-achievement entertainment in level games.  Explorers
> can't
> > explore because the monsters are far too dangerous in most of the
> world.
> 
> Most explorers would hate a world where anyone can go anywhere.  It
> cheapens their own accomplishment of going to strange, exotic and
> dangerous places.  If any noob can stumble into Mordor, it's no longer
> the home of all evil, it's a Disneyland Ride.

Perhaps I have an obscure notion of what it is to explore, but I like to
think instead that I have a distilled notion.  An explorer is someone who
likes to look in every nook and cranny of the world, just to see what's out
there.  That means the gaming systems, the behaviors of the NPCs, the
places, the experiences to be savored and enjoyed simply because they are
new.  It is newness that draws an explorer.

When an explorer is faced with a challenge before they can explore, then it
comes to whether or not that explorer is also an achiever.  Either at that
moment or by nature.  But the presence of a challenge doesn't make
exploration sweeter - unless the player is also an achiever.

What this means is that achievement is not fundamental to exploration.  For
a pure explorer, putting a challenge before them is an annoyance.  It slows
down the rate at which they can experience something new.

> > Socializers can't socialize because their friends are the wrong level.
> 
> Socializing-questers (i.e. guildmasters and instance runners)
> appreciate
> levels, because they communicate to those players a relative level of
> mastery with that player's character abilities.  Level 70 in WoW, for
> example, means that you have hopefully developed some level of
> mastery and experience with all of your class's abilities.
> 
> I realize this sounds stupid, but the most rewarding social experience
> in
> most MMOs is taking on extremely large challenges (such as raids in WoW
> and EQ, relic runs in DAoC, city sieges in Shadowbane) that require a
> large degree of tactical coordination and cooperation.  The hardest
> part
> of being the guildmaster is actually building a team that is ready for
> the
> challenges ahead.  Classes and levels make it easy for these players to
> advertise their needs, find each other, and determine when they are
> ready
> to become a contributing part of the team.

As with exploration, there is a distillation of socialization that has
nothing to do with achievement.  That's why chat rooms are viable
entertainment.  Or telephone calls, visits and such.  Just as achievements
in a game can comingle with exploration, they can also be intertwined with
socialization.  But both exploration and socialization (and other
motivations) have their own potential, completely independent of achievement
and levels.

> Socializing non-questers (i.e. roleplayers) don't care, as the dozens
> of
> people roleplaying lesbian Blood Elves in Silvermoon on my RP server
> can attest to.  Most of these players never get above level 20.  These
> players are also the minority.

There are socializers other than those who roleplay lesbian Blood Elves.
They don't come to level-based games because they are forced to achieve
things in order to be able to socialize.

> > Crafters never actually craft because they are bound by the same rules
> > of 'power' as the levelers.
> 
> Levels are very good to crafters - they create a market for low-level
> items, so that more inexperienced crafters have a market to sell their
> goods.  In games without an item gate such as levels, entry level crafters
> frequently find themselves squeezed out of business by more experienced
> players, because experienced players only need to make a small subset of
> their goods (the best ones), and can engage in monopolistic practices to
> force smaller crafters out of business. In a gated scheme, there is a
> much larger variety of valid and useful goods to craft, and the materials
> for doing so takes valuable space, which results in the high level crafter
> leaving space on the market for the low level crafter.

You could sell snowballs to Eskimos.

The above sounds exactly like the explanation of why criminals are such a
valuable resource to a community.  They provide a huge number of
security-related jobs, require constant improvements to technology with
regard to security systems, aid us in training our citizenry for the day
when terrorists enter our communities, rally us together against a common
foe.  Criminals are really a wonderful thing.

The crafting ethic that I understand is one of using my skills to build
things in the game world that other players will want to use.  I don't want
money, I don't want to spent time pushing buttons before I can push the
button that dispenses a useful item, and I don't want to be told the most
efficient way to get through all that button-pushing.  I just want to
fiddle, tweak and twiddle some virtual items until I get them so that other
players can use them.

> > My summary means of saying all that was that level games are too great
> > a departure from reality.
> 
> 
> And my summary is that levels, while definitely being an artificial and
> arbitrary game mechanic, definitely have wide-ranging benefits to a
> game design that are frequently glossed over.  The myth is that levels
> are a hardcore achiever feature that has no benefits to other classes.
> In practicality, a good designer can use levels to support the needs of
> other play styles as well.

We're clearly at opposite ends of the spectrum on this one.

> Levels are not all about achievement.  In fact, in games like
> Shadowbane and WoW, levelling is so easy that hardcore achievers
> dismiss reaching max as a significant one.  Levels have many other
> functions, such as pacing content, ordering story content, creating
> means for players to advertise their power level, creating a fully
> fledged crafting market, etc.  Do you need levels to do these things?
> Nope, but the alternatives you should consider will need to
> factor these losses into their design.  Most alternatives that I have
> seen end up being woefully complex, buggy, unintuitive, exploitative as
> well as being a coding and QA nightmare.  Not all, mind you, but enough
> to be scary.

If you define the problems in terms of traits of level games, then I'm
indeed going to have a hard time coming up with a replacement.  The key is
in looking to other ways of entertaining people such that they aren't
running pell mell to get through the content as fast as possible.  That they
aren't feeling compelled to advertise their power level.  And so on.

> In contrast, consider a game that doesn't use levels as they are
> > employed today.  So you have a human character that does things.  How
> > can achievement be entertainment in such a game?  Well, how about
> king
> > of the mountain in duels between characters?  How about the best time
> to
> > reach the top of Mt. Foobar?  How about most orc kills?  Richest
> > character?  Having a complete set of Gorbil stones?  Highest
> political
> > position?  Largest land owner? Fastest ship?
> 
> 
> Of these rewards you cited, most of them are utterly lousy because most
> of
> them can only be won by one person, and are therefore by definition
> exclusionary.  Having server firsts as a core concept has social value
> that
> appeals to hardcore achievers, but for most of the players, these are
> flat out unobtainable, and if these are the primary achievements of
> your
> game, leave 99% of your players destined for mediocrity.

I guess I'm running out of steam.  We don't speak the same language at all.

I made no mention of server-wide accomplishments.  I made mention of
accomplishments that suggest "best in an achievement".  Best among whom?
Why stop at server-wide?  Why not create a single list across all servers?
That way, only one player ever can be at the top of the heap.

I was thinking of going the other way, reminded as I am by my experiences of
dueling in Dark Age of Camelot.  There was no formal ladder.  Duels simply
happened.  In a given player community, people knew people.  Word got
around.  The ladder you were on was the ad hoc ladder that formed of its own
accord.

So it could be for any of the achievement scenarios that I mentioned.  In
truth, I'd claim that achieving in the context of peers creates less a sense
of mediocrity than achieving level 60 along with 100,000 other players who
took the time to push the requisite buttons.

> > I can only disagree.  You see power fantasy and I see a spectrum of
> > other motivations.
> 
> 
> That's fine.  The rest of your spectrum is a tiny tail on a very large
> bell curve.

I read that as I might read someone saying that the Earth is flat.  We
clearly aren't going to find a middle ground on this puppy  :)

> Players who want to roleplay a blacksmith want to roleplay an
> exceptional one.

'Exceptional' has nothing to do with levels.

> Players who want to kill things want to kill bigger things than a
> deer, which is their likely upper limit in the real world.

I flatly disagree.  I'm sure that a sufficiently-good treatment of deer
hunting would have the hunters out in droves.

> Players play these games to feel heroic, or barring that, at least
> heroic and important.  Any world where only 5% of the player base
> can feel significant or important is doomed to become a ghost town
> when the other 95% realize that, if they really wanted to feel average
> and adequate, they can get that in real life.

The reason that people play these games to feel heroic is because that's
what these games focus on.  Taking out levels doesn't mean that people can't
develop a sense of importance or feel heroic.  People had been accomplishing
that for a long time before level games came along.  It was just done
differently.  Without levels.
 
JB