The pure "hard working" MMO raiding

In the previous posts I described that only those games can last long that challenge and hone one of the skills of the player. These skills are strength, dexterity, thinking and "hard working". I also pointed out that for the MMO model where you play the same match for years (opposed to thousands of short matches), only "hard working" skill fits. All the other skills are better honed and challenged by short matches with new opponents who fits your current skill. Also the "hard working" skill contains usage of previously gained resources, so you have to carry them over, while no such item is carried in dexterity-related games.

Yesterday I pointed out that WoW deviated far from this model, changing the endgame a totally dexterity one. The project undergeared proved that working on your gear is near worthless to do the endgame and you must work on your "skill". Unfortunately I did not realize that the "skill" is dexterity based, because the WotLK level of dexterity was trivial to me.

At first we have to answer why we need raiding at all? Why can't the game just be an endless leveling? I mean it's just rewriting a number to make WoW leveling 10000 hours long. The answer is not that leveling is boring (if it is, it's a design failure, it could be easily fixed by giving bonus for doing orange mobs/quests). The answer is that it's a solo activity. To evaluate your skills you must compare it to other people. This is the edge MMOs have over solo games.

Now let's see what raiding should not be: it should be not challenging in terms of dexterity or thinking. It should be testing your skill in hard working, the theme the whole game have. It should test your gear (your ability to get it) and your rotation (your ability to do your homework). Also, it should not challenge your social skills. The raids were downsized in WoW because of the organizational nightmare.

To create a such raiding the task should be obvious and the performance should be perfectly monitored. The job of the DD is to deal damage, the job of the healer is to heal, the job of the tank is to mitigate damage. Their performance can be evaluated by a single number: DPS, HPS and mitigation % over a successful bossfight.

Dance have no place in a "hard working" themed game raiding, mobs must only do damage to the tank (Marrowgar-cleave is adviced to allow more than 1 tank in a raid), and unavoidable raid damage. They can have adds that must be tanked, burned, or CC-ed but no jumping, LoSing, interrupting, using vehicles and anything like that. The boss is just a strong mob, but not fundamentally different from the kobolds in Elwyn, besides his hard or soft enrage mechanism. This way the performance can be evaluated by a single number.

Since performance is a single number, raids can be epic 40 men again without any organization or guilding. It can be simple LFR. You queue up selecting the target raid and "progress" or "farm". Each of the raids have pre-set performance values. For example "T1 progress" raid needs 860 DPS, 750 HPS, 45% mitigation. "T1 farm" needs 1000 DPS, 900 HPS, 50% mitigation. To queue up, you must have this value. The value is coming from your previous raids, for example the average value of the last 10 bosskills, excluding the best and the worst 2. For newbies it can be calculated from 5-mans, scaled up with raid buffs. The game obviously has built-in damage, healing and mitigation meter, and after a try (successful or not), the raid can replace those who don't hit the pre-set limit with a simple majority vote of thouse who hit the mark, no cooldown. This prevents the 5500 GS for Naxx nonsense, the values are developer-set. There is no need to know each other as your job is simply hit your performance limit. If you are doing 861 DPS, you are good enough for "T1 progress". If everyone else sucks, you simply vote them out until you get a good team. If you suck, you will be kicked. If you are kicked from two different raids in the same day, you are done for that day.

To allow friends to play together this performance demand can be tricked: you can queue up to be linked in performance. So if you do 1200 DPS and your friend does 800, the official damage meter gives 1000 DPS for both of you, so if you can carry your friend, he is immune to kicks.

Obviously there would be no gear resets in this game, the level cap is never elevated either. Every raid is gradually harder. For example T1 raid is doable if you do 50% of perfect rotation in full dungeon gear, so you can start a bit undergeared a few missing enchants and unpolished rotation. T2 needs 70% of the perfect rotation in T1 gear, and so on. Higher tiers need higher and higher perfection and gear.

How can newbies catch up? There are slots where gear comes from crafting, BoE, valor points, so someone who start playing when T5 is out can get T5 level gear into these slots, so his average gear is better than the gear of those who started early. Of course it applies only to a few slots and for most slots you can only get gear from raids.

Loot rolls shall also be modified by performance. If you do exactly 100% of the performance limit, your roll is unchanged. For every % you outperform the limit, you get +1 for a roll, for every % you are below the limit, you get -1. So if you do 120% of the limit, and roll 45, the guy who did 80% of the limit must roll 86 to win the loot. Of course you can only roll on items that belongs to your armor type and the spec you performed in the raid.

This kind of raiding would reward the "hard working" skill and also provide epic encounters where 40 people defeat some baddie and some of them get loot.

Diablo III vs WoW

There is a new post on my blog every workday for 3 years, excluding maybe holidays. No one pays me for blogging. I do it because of internal motivation. I guess it proves pretty well that I take pride of my work and consider effective working internally rewarding (you can use the term "fun" if you want to, I don't really like it). Such motivation makes me a perfect customer for the MMO market. Yet I'm considering leaving WoW. I won't leave  yet and will definitely wait for the next expansion. However staying is based on my hopes and not my experience. If Ghostcrawler would say "we are pretty satisfied with Cataclysm and the next expansion will be new content played the same way", I'd unsubscribe today. WoW endgame is a dexterity game and I don't like them.

Actually current WoW is a bad game because it starts with boring grind and continues with a dexterity endgame. The dexterity players (who could be the target audience) quit before 85, most "hard working" player quit at 85. 

I have high expectation to Diablo III. I played Diablo II a lot, despite it's called "grinding" game. "Grinding" is not the same as "hard working". Grinding is a series of trivially easy steps continuing forever. In WoW leveling my effectivity is capped by external factors like mob distance and disengage distance. I could kill more mobs if I could pull more, but I can't, so I'm forced to kill them one by one slowly despite they provide no challenge. I could go to attack orange mobs (who are challenging), but such activity is not rewarded by the game, I get less XP/hour fighting them.

Diablo II (and according to the beta videos Diablo III) is a "hard working" game. I can effectively pull more monsters increasing both my challenge and my XP and loot/hour ratio. From the first fallen to Hell Baal trash I felt that my skill is challenged, as I dictated the pace, and via that the difficulty, just like in a work. A more skilled worker finishes the same job faster while doing good effort. In a good "hard working" game, the more skilled player finishes the level faster while doing his best, while a less skilled finishes it slower, doing his best. They both have fun. In a bad grinding game (that is tuned to newbies), the more skilled player finishes the level in the same time as the newbie while being terribly bored.

What Diablo II lacked is the endgame. Hell Baal dies, game over. Of course there are players who keep on killing him for more gear, but what the gear is good for? I seriously hope that Inferno difficulty Diablo III won't be "for everyone" and will be very hard, giving me lot of time of entertainment beating it. I would love to spend 1000+ hours finishing Diablo III.

Diablo III (assuming that it can't be facerolled on Inferno) will be a perfect "hard working" game as progress depends on the quantity and quality of your play, everyone finds the perfect difficulty automatically by breezing trough the easy content to the point when it's not easy anymore. A newbie may have to slow down and pull carefully at the end of Act 1, I might have to do it at Nightmare difficulty or even later, but after a short period (which is masked by exploring the new world),  everyone will battle challenging monsters. Everyone will progress on the same content, no one will feel that latecomers or losers get all the rewards for free. Yet late newbies can catch up in a way that rewards the veterans: by buying gear from them in the AH.

If Diablo turns out to be a long-standing game, I will change the blog focus to it, giving gold (and therefore $) making tips once again.

"The skill" and games

Yesterday's point was that permanent games must derive their fun value from challenging and honing "the skill". One time games can exploration based. Of course all games can be spice up with other sources of fun, but the main source must be honing a skill. We expect the players to play thousands of hours with their game and exploring won't last that long, other sources are simply beaten by competing non-games (like Facebook for social fun).

Now let's list the skills and see what kind of games can focus them. All skills can be sources of good games, but of different types:

• Physical strength and endurace: these skills were obviously useful for our prehistoric ancestors and for a lesser extent to us too. The genes that rewarded challenging these skills obviously increased survival chance, therefore spread. Animal cubs, long before the humans played wrestling to prepare for the hunt that will get them food as adults. Playing games challenging strength and endurace are obviously fun, that's why the countless sports exist. Unfortunately computer games have little place here with the current hardware.
• Dexterity, reaction time, hand-eye coordination: the usefulness of these skills are also straightforward, and genes that rewarded these activities with fun spread. There are countless computer games with limited content that exist for decades and still considered fun, pac-man is the most ancient example. Starcraft, HL Counterstrike are much more "recent" games, but still decades old. Yet they show no sign of "burning out".
• Thinking: I wouldn't separate intelligence from knowledge here, since we use while thinking about a problem. The fun from figuring something out, the "Euréka!" feeling, is well known. Chess, majong, go and similar games with very limited content are played for centuries because they reward using and honing the thinking skill.
• Social skills: the ability to get information from others and get them to cooperate with you, help you (and don't harm you). Obviously useful and gives the good feeling of power. Don't mix it with being social, the fun coming from friendship. EVE online, which is mostly about politics, spying, manipulation and such is running constantly, despite the computer games limit the social skills greatly by allowing only text or voice at best.
• "Work ethic", "hamstering", "completionalism": I don't have a good name for this skill, but I'm completely sure it exists. The lack of it provides the lazy bum, and we all know the good feeling of  "Well done!". The ancient hunter who went out hunting when he wasn't hungry had better chance of survival than the guy who started hunting when he was starving. The guy who felt fun from watching his pot filling up with beans had much better chances during winter than the guy who foraged just for today. We are descendants of hard working people and we inherited the genes that give the fun feeling when we see our stockpiles filling. The traditional MMO use this form of fun.
• "children skills": these skills are developed by children and every healthy adult has capped them. Hide and seek practices spatial awareness. Figuring out that Johnny can be behind a tree, but can't be behind a brick (as the brick is smaller than him) is a challenge for a small kid, but not for an adult. Obviously mainstream games can't aim on children skills.

You can design a game to any of these. However you shall focus on one. On the one hand people have different priorities on the forms and any kind of mixture would now and then force people to do a different form of activity. This is the infamous "I won't play a bad game until max level just to have fun later" problem. The game that focus on one form of skill will always provide fun to the player who want to experience the fun of honing his skill. If he gets tired or want to focus on another skill, he will not play for some time. But he is never ever annoyed by the game. The game that mixes two skills will fail because it's too X for one player and too Y for another. You can never hear a chess player whining that chess is too "thinky". He want to play on a thinking game or he wouldn't play chess at all.

The other problem with mixture is difficulty: the game must be just in the right difficulty for every player. If it's too easy, it's boring, if it's too hard, you learn nothing. You experience flow when the task is on your limits, but still doable. You might noticed that most long-living games are PvP. It's simply because in ladder PvP the difficulty is auto-adjusting. Every time you win, you get higher and face stronger opponents, every time you lose you get weaker opponents, you always oscillate around your limits. A PvE game with one flat difficulty is good for very few players. It's too hard or too easy for the vast majority. The solution is either multiple difficulty settings or gradually harder levels. In Tetris, which is a dexterity game (you have to recognize shapes in 3D and move fast accordingly), players are "stuck" on one level (someone on #5, other on #15) and have to practice on that level to improve.

You can easily see that MMOs, where you play the same match for years can only work with the "hard working" skill. You gather more and more resources, progress. In a dexterity game there is nothing you carry over, besides the skill itself. Series of short matches serves that much better.

Now let's analyze the glorious rise and then the shameful stagnation and fall of WoW. Vanilla WoW was a pure "hard working" game. Your progress depended on how much and how effectively you worked. There were action in the game, but due to the GCD and cast times, it demanded dexterity that vast majority of people easily had. Of course you had to understand the game, but for non-retards it wasn't a challenge. So you could concentrate on one form of skill: "hard working".

People completely wrongfully assume that WoW beaten EverQuest because it was "less grindy" or because it had smaller death penalty. No. It won because EverQuest had forced grouping, making the game mixed "hard working"-"social skills". WoW was pure "hard working" until the endgame, where raid organization needed social skills which did not belong to the game. No wonder everyone referred it as "the organizational nightmare".

To reach "more casual" players WoW allowed new players to "catch up", devaluing the previous work of the players. Remember "working" skill is not mindless slaving. It's about effective creation of value. If the most effective way to get an item is to not log in for 2 months and then get it for free, players will not log in. Casual players existed and were happy in Vanilla: they did the same as the hardcores, just on a lower level: gathered resources, progressed. They did not mind about their less progressed state more than the local team soccer player for not reaching World Championship. The gear resets took away the "hamstering fun" of the casual just as much as the HC. He was happy with and proud of his dungeon set and it was devalued too.

To make it worse, to make raiding accessible, but avoid total faceroll, the dance was introduced, making the game a dexterity one. Most of the current raiders are dexterity skilled, and they openly hate the leveling (which is still "hard working"). Raiding should exists as the test and trophy provider for the game. The better "hard worker" got better gear, and was rewarded by bosskills and boss trophies.

The good MMO raiding fits into the "hard working" scheme of MMOs: the performance both depend on the previous "hard work", and the raid itself needs accuracy, carefulness and concentration (but not intelligence or dexterity).

"The skill" and fun

Yesterday I wrote about a game that hasn't received new content for 150 years yet hundreds of millions play it. There are lot of games with similar characteristics. Below I try to pinpoint the reason why such games exists.

Evolution has developed a simple system to motivate mindless beings to do what is bad and good for the survival of their genes: pain and pleasure. The dog doesn't know that standing on a hot plate is harmful for him, therefore decreases his chance of having offspring. Yet the dog jumps off the hot plate because it hurts him. The neural pattern that recognize hot as painful appeared randomly long time ago. Since it increased the survival chance of its owner, it multiplied. Alike the act of being with other dogs is "fun" for the dogs, they are clearly happy be with each other. This pattern rewards forming a pack that increased their survival chance greatly in the times when they were wolves.

Humans are creations of evolution, so their pain and fun concept is the same. Feeling pain has a positive correlation with being harmed, while feeling fun has a positive correlation with increasing our chance to multiply. Of course correlation doesn't mean equality, my countless posts about "ape subroutines" were focusing to the exceptions. It's easy to find such exceptions: dentist is painful, yet helps the person, drinking alcohol is fun, yet harmful.

However today I focus on the rule, not the exceptions. It's clear that the correlation exists, most painful things do harm and most fun things are doing good to the person. I'd like to categorize the fun things into groups and there discuss where games can use it to provide fun:

• Sex. The sex itself and all actions that usually leads to it (like nudity). It's usefulness is obvious, it rewards making offspring. Games have little place here, since pornography does better.
• Social: being with people who are friendly with us. It rewarded staying with the clan and sharing with them. The clans were our close relatives, sharing our genes. It was clearly beneficial in the prehistoric age, much less nowadays, most of my blog is about how harmful it it to pursue social fun. However here I just note that games have little chance with the social fun seekers, as Facebook, chat rooms, forums and other social media does better. Facebook doesn't have to spend resources of designing a murloc. While games were serious social fun source, they were simply beaten by the purely social social media.
• Exploring: finding  new things that we haven't seen yet. This fun rewards finding new resources or early warning for dangers. The cavemen who explored their surroundings found food when they needed easier than those who started searching only when they were starving. Most games rely on this kind of fun. Such games can and will succeed, as "sell the box once" games. They are fun once, but has little replaying or endgame value. You saw the content once, explored it, had the fun, game over. Unless developers can create content faster than players consume it (they can't), exploring games won't last.
• Honing skills: the soccer, the chess, the basketball, the poker all demand "skill" from the players and playing it improves "the skill" (whatever it is). This activity is fun because it rewards preparation for upcoming challenges. The tribe that spent its time with wrestling and running competition was more likely to be successful hunters than those who spent their time idling.  The psychological name of the "fun coming from improving skill" is flow. I'm absolutely sure that this is the only kind of fun that permanent games can provide. Tomorrow I'll list the different skills and explain why Vanilla WoW was such a huge success, despite being grindy. I will also explain why there are no FPS MMOs and why don't adults play hide and seek.

Can you imagine playing the same game for 50 years?

People talk about burn-out. They consider it obvious and necessary. They explain the downfall of games with "people got bored of doing the same game". Tobold expresses his disbelief that a game where people never get bored can exist.

Let me introduce soccer. The "content" was published in 1848, more than 150 years ago. Since then, the game received no content patch, just bug fixes, balancing issues. It is played by more than 250 million players. The highest level championship is followed by over a billion spectators. There are no signs that the game would start to lose players.

My father started playing this game in his childhood. Was playing competitively in a semi-professional team associated to his workplace in his late twenties. He still plays with the "old boys". He is playing the same game for 50 years, with varying effort, but never-ending enthusiasm. Also, he is an avid spectator of high level matches.

How come that this simple game can live so long, despite limited content and no further development? Because the basic activity is fun to the players!
A good game is defined as playing it is fun indefinitely (in terms of years, not playing 24/7). Most games are not good. They are absolutely not fun to play. WoW leveling is a perfect example: you press any random button and the monster dies, giving rewards. Terrible. None of your abilities (thinking, reflexes, concentration, body control, body strength) are challenged and honed. The good question is not "why people get burned out on such games?". The good question is "why do players play such games at all?". The reasons:

• Exploring: the game world (where the terrible activity takes place) is interesting, beautiful, original, nice. It can be breathtaking graphics or immersive storyline. Exploring is naturally one-time activity.
• Playing with friends: the player has real life friends or "gaming friends" in the game, and being with friends is fun, despite the game itself is not. While it can keep a social person in the game for long time, the competition from Facebook is strong. Why bother subscribing if we just hang out and chat anyway? Also, most gaming friendship is shallow and meaningless, providing less and less fun.
• Being l33t: the player assumes that the items or achievements he gets draw respect and envy from fellow players. He keep grinding (as opposed to "playing") for more rewards, as leaving the game and starting a new one would put him to the "n00b" status again. Such player start to burn out either by the amount of grind he "must" do to "keep competitive" or when he sees "noobs" getting things "too easy", devaluing his "effort".
• Boredom: the player just want to waste time. He will play until the game becomes more boring than the alternatives.

Most of the games available are bad and designed only for one time consumption. Of course that one time can be entertaining. But this doesn't mean that games can't be good. Just have to look at the games that are here for 100+ years and learn from them. Surprise: they all have fixed ruleset, they all challenge and hone one skill, and moste of them are zero-sum PvP.