Lack of feedback and progression

I think I figured out why there are no successful PvP MMOs. I mean I can prove that such game not only have not been made, but theoretically cannot be made. PvP MMOs will always be a small niche.

No it's not a success post of great scientific breakthrough. While I believe it is an important result, it's also a personal failure. My ganking project, that I built with great enthusiasm and effort have failed and hereby terminated. While it had many successes and many of its parts are salvageable and reusable for other projects, its failure was inevitable and with knowing the contents of this post it would have been avoided. However if it stops the wasting of dozens or even hundredths of millions of real world dollars on PvP MMOs and millions of blogger/commenter hours planning the "good" PvP game, this failure was not without point.

Activity decreased recently but that could be attributed to the soccer championship, exams or simply summer. However Sunday's last WG proven without doubt that it's the project itself that is dying. 8 people were present from the guild. Only 3 bothered to fly to WG in time, 3-5 mins before the battle and get into the proper positions. The others just queued up at the battlemaster and spawned at the start GY, therefore couldn't make any effect of the outcome. You can guess the success chances of a 3-man "zerg". Still we broke 2 walls before the inevitable failure, showing that it could be an easy victory if people would care to spend 3 damn minutes to fly in. 1-2 weeks ago the whole online population was in a pre-made raid, in the same position, discussing strategy, buffing instantly after battle start and move as a team. The raid was smaller and smaller every time, but I did not (want to) notice that it's not simply not being online, it's begin online and not caring to do it right. Something took away the motivation of the people.

Earlier Sunday we properly destroyed the cannons and players on one side, promoted and went for sieges. Could build 2, because the other tank spots were taken by catapults. Of course I congratulated to the catapult-building retards. Soon one of them, with a familiar name answered in a defensive manner, urging me to not call him retard. The one thing I hate more than M&S is an M&S with pride, so I stressed that if he is riding a catapult, he is indeed a retard. This line was followed by "X has left the guild". The cata-riding retard was our member. I couldn't imagine how can someone in the guild so bad player. I mean the project was meant to be (and for a week it was) the pinnacle of World PvP. Imagine that Kungen would find a 0/0/71 spellpower/spirit geared hunter in the Ensidia firstkill-attempting raid. That's how I felt when I figured out that such person could get into our guild.

The two events are signals of systemic failure, irreparable inability for the system to provide flow to the people. Flow is the "proper" way of fun. It is "the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity." Note: the "improper" way of fun is social, when someone feels immersed in a positive-emotion providing (accepting/respecting) social group. The flow needs, among other factors:

• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

In a single-person activity, simply the outcome of the activity provides feedback, and the person can control the outcome by changing his behavior. If I quest alone, the completion or failure of the quest if directly the result of my actions. By changing my actions (for example getting a better solo spec) the outcome changes.

However in group activity, the outcome itself is the product of the behaviors of many people. The raid boss is either dead or alive. While my actions contributed to the kill (or the wipe), one can easily wipe without making mistakes if the others did, or experience success, despite he was lying on the ground 10 seconds after pull. This assumes that no MMO can provide flow, therefore only very primitive MMOs like Farmville can be successful since they attract social-fun seeking people. However it's not true as WoW is very successful and - as Karazhan proved - people want to raid.

The solution is personalized feedback via game mechanics and player-made addons. For example a healer can experience flow and feel successful in a terrible wipe if he kept all his assignments alive, saved several emergencies and the wipe happened only because they reached enrage due to the below-tank DPS. Similarly, a good DPS can experience challenge and control by avoiding damage that can be avoided and still doing very good DPS (shown on recount). While the mentioned players can be pissed because of others who failed, they can feel satisfied about themselves.

In a PvE encounter, the roles are set so personal goals can be set. It can be easily measured how good one was in attaining these goals. By looking at the recount or log parser, a DPS can see if he was good or bad. He can compare himself both to objective standards and peers. A tank and the healer get immediate feedback from the mechanics itself, in dubious situations the log parser helps.

Theoretically the same can be done in PvP. After all, the difference is only in the actor behind the opponent. Is it a player or an NPC? A good arena player can easily notice mistakes of a worse player, can say: "you could win by LoSing at this point, interrupting in that, using trinket on this and not that" and so on. However, exactly because the player enemy can make many moves, calculating the "perfect" move is not straightforward, therefore very hard for a program to evaluate. Writing a damage meter or a program that signals if you fail in void zone is simple. Writing a program that evaluates a PvP situation is in the complexity range of the Deep Blue. This means, to get a feedback for PvP you need another intelligent and experienced person. Being that person is not fun, and cannot be one. Watching someone else play and finding mistakes is a job, not a game. If we add that if someone is social even a tiny bit, his gut reaction to such evaluation is "being defensive", trying to reject the criticism or even attacking the person doing it (while people don't get defensive against their own recount addon). So, as a commenter said, the project needed "an altruist or other idiot", so it was doomed to fail.

In short: the 0/0/71 spellpower hunter gets several feedbacks from the game or simple addons telling him he must improve. Someone riding catapults can get no other than human feedback. Since in a game, most people are focused on their own activities, this feedback is missing, until the point when the mistake damages others directly, causing harass criticism.

Because of lack of feedback, the PvP quickly becomes dull. The most common problem of a PvP-er is "I'm stuck at 1800 rating and have no idea how could I improve". Similarly, our project could not provide flow, its initial successes are due to the third fun, the "fun from exploring". The people did something very new and the lust for new experiences filled them with enthusiasm. The initial successes can also be explained by the "lack of bad". WoW is full of lolling M&S, so getting in a guild with very little bad exposure can be a relief (a tank once exclaimed on guild chat after a full-guild 5-man: "It's the first time in my WoW play that all DPS were above me!"). However one quickly adapt to a higher standard, and soon the lack of idiots become obvious.


The other problem with PvP is the lack of progress. It's connected to the "the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult" point of the flow. Everyone starts as newbie and the non-retards improve over time. The same activity can be too difficult to a beginner and "boring grind" to an expert. In a PvE game the player can adjust difficulty by selecting different content. "Progress" is a buzzword for selecting harder and harder content. In a PvE game it's easy to provide several pieces of content with varying difficulty. On the other hand a PvP encounter's difficulty is pre-set by the skill of the enemy players and can't be adjusted. There is one WG match on a server and everyone must come there if want to play, the expert who knows every trick, therefore will be bored (or annoyed if others fail) and the newbie who is lost and everyone yells at him. Theoretically progress can be created by creating a ladder and matching players against players with similar strength. However it's still just an average strength and in a multi-class MMO it still generates lot of problems. Simply: a mage-druid team can easily win against a rogue-paladin team of equal rating an easily loses against a mage-shaman team. Neither match feels challenging, one is easy, one is annoying. A PvP game where you could win every match (challenging and outcome is under your control) cannot have classes (Unreal Tournament), must force equal classes on both sides (America's Army) or allow instant changes of classes (HL team fortress). All of these solutions are directly against either the "character progression" philosophy of an MMO or the "bring the player not the class" philosophy of a non-hardcore game.

After all these only one question remains: who play PvP games at all? No, I'm not talking about those who come down to a BG to farm honor to increase their gearscore by wearing ilvl264 PvP gear. I'm talking about those who really want PvP. They are in 3 small minorities, that allow PvP MMOs games to linger, but not to challenge PvE games:

• Casuals. They play rarely, therefore they experience "fun from exploring", doing something new. Please note that an MMO requiring character leveling does not really support casual play. Such players have more fun in FPS or RTS games where they just log in and can play "the game" instantly instead of leveling up and getting gear first. Also, while casuals are a large group, their "exploring" activity means short attention span. They may buy a PvP MMO, play it for a few months and move on, not because they hated it, but because they played it and it's no longer new. The people in the guild were casuals. We loved this play - for a week or two.
  
• Killers. They want to defeat a fellow human. They are ready to make any grind, do any research just to be better in direct combat. They are the core audience of PvP games. Strangely, they are the only people who can provide the much needed feedback in a PvP game, simply because if they point out someone's error, they feel they "bested" him and it's fun for them. A world full of "killers" could support a PvP MMO, but they are rare. Also, there always be losers in a PvP game, and "killers" are the worst losers. They shout "cheater" or stop playing if they are not the top-dogs.
• Challenge seeking elite: they simply recognized that no PvE encounter can challenge them, only a similarly skilled human opponent can put up any fight. By definition they are a very small group.

Other factors contributing to the demise of the project: WG being unbalanced favoring defense terribly, delay in the patch that would stop the horde outnumbering us 3-6:1, the random alliance idiots joining the fight causing much more trouble than I initially believed (promoting horde by repeated deaths) and in the last week terrible server instability. Yet the real reason was the lack of feedback and progression causing boredom and annoyment in the guild, making them not showing up at all or showing up late.

Tomorrow's post will be about the good things that worked in the ganking project and worth reusing in an upcoming PvE project. Some of them are pretty nonstandard and deserve further elaboration.


PS: no need to comment "you did not lead it right", as I know it. The leader is the person who is giving the much needed feedback to the others, allowing them to have fun at the expense of his own. I obviously refuse to do this huge work in my free time. I would also point out that the Undergeared project needs no such leader and still running amazingly.

PS2: yesterday thenoisyrogue suggested a new kind of PvE where players don't take damage if they interrupt/CC the boss(es), so no healer or tank needed. This holds the same problem: if 10 could interrupt and none did, all failed. But if 1 did and 9 didn't no one failed, yet 9 people did the same in the two situation. The "success" and "failure" must be clearly defined on the personal level to provide fun.