Grinding: The Grindinging, Part 2: The Action Audience

Notes: Ahead are hypothetical untested claims about improving MMORPG's for an action audience. You may also need to understand how the "series of tubes" works (the internet).

1. WASD Movement.

For a audience who likes action games, there is nothing more mind-numbingly boring then moving with clicking the mouse. We're used to moving with a button, not telling our character where to go.

That's the realm of those guys who like those weird CRPG's.

If it's such a good idea, why don't more people do it?

Client-Server synchronization is slightly harder for WASD movement to keep track of. Essentially, to have smooth WASD movement, the server has to assume certain things about the position of the player. The players position is less of an exact point, and more of a diffused cloud.

You see, we are so used to being able to move swiftly as human beings, that the slightest non-responsiveness feels clunky. WASD must be a client-side thing, with the server attempting to synchronize as much as possible.

2. Left click to swing your weapon / fire your gun.

None of this auto-attack stuff. If I swing and it hits something on my screen, I want that to be counted as an attempt to attack something. Every click of a button should correspond to an action that my character attempts to perform.

The problem with auto-attack and the like, is the abstraction. It removes me from the game. I realize that MMORPG's are supposed to be slower paced and more thought oriented, but there's no reason to have the pace be several thousand times slower than normal.

Emergent Gameplay: As soon as I have to aim at my opponent in order to target him, player opponents have to attempt to dodge my targets in order to avoid taking damage.

3. Mouse-Aim to target opponents (None of this Tab-Selection / Auto-targetting)

Let player aim matter. If I am casting a fireball, I want to cast it at what I am actually looking at. This brings an element of skill into the game, where aiming and dodging matters. When two players circle each other in battle, movement matters.

This also brings about emergent game-play. If the monsters were flying, or could move and skitter very fast, then the monsters would effectively dodge my shots if I targeted the wrong spot. This also leads to very natural obstructions and positioning requirements on the player. To target correctly, the player must avoid natural obstacles and the obstruction of other monsters with ranged attacks.

4. Some form of Defensive Maneuver or Active Dodging. (We'll accept that we can't dodge every hit, but at least make our dodging attempts *do* something)

A 'block' button would be nice that gives us some sort of defensive move. Most action games have a defensive reaction concept that gives you time to do something once you see that something bad will about happen. I admit it's unreasonable to expect that we can dodge every attack in an MMORPG battle sense, but at least let my dodge attempts have an effect of the gameplay.

A simple bonus to avoiding ranged attacks while moving would be good. A larger bonus to avoiding attacks while 'dashing' would be great. A block button that reduces damage taken by some percent while blocking would be terrific.

5. AI that does something other than hit us repeatedly or use generic damage skill #37. Or perhaps having fewer mobs and have them be more challenging.

For example, AI that dodges intelligently might be nice. Or perhaps AI that refuse to be herded into tight little packs to be AoE'ed. I admit, this is quite a strain on the server and could be quite computationally expensive to execute and synchronize.

On the other hand, a monster that keeps you on your toes by intelligently dodging (that has an effect) and forcing you to pay attention to your fight rather than your skill rotation might also be a welcome change of pace.

7. Knockback / Altering the Position of enemies.

This is born out of the desire to be able to use our surroundings to our advantage. Knocking the enemy into deadly areas or out of the way of our friends is the kind of positional advantage that makes each potential fight different and engaging.

8. Being able to take cover to avoid enemy fire, Crouching.

This is a natural follow up to #3. If we have to aim at opponents to target them, they should also be unable to hit us when we take cover behind natural obstacles. The most natural form of defensive cover is the crouch.

9. Greater rewards for harder difficulties.

A game is most fun when the enemy you face is roughly as challenging or a little more challenging than enemies you can barely kill. That said, each player has a different skill level in this case. By having greater rewards for harder difficulties, you give an incentive for players to improve their skills and reward players who have great skills in your game, allowing them to skip boring content in favor of ones that are more challenging to them.

Grinding: the.. Grindinging.

Or hereby known as 'the black fathomless time sink into which all MMORPG's must dwell in.'

It occurs to me that I should probably start by explaining what the Grind is: MMORPG's are essentially large time-sinks with rewards separated out by individual requirements, such as experience costs, number of monsters defeated, or number of menial tasks performed.

For each arbitrary goal, the player is rewarded with some increased ability or the ability to perform some new action in the game, ensuring the player spends a pre-set amount of time in the game world exploring some aspect of it to ensure he takes the time to appreciate that portion of the world or does not prematurely exhaust his interest in the game.

However, one can imagine that for a game, the amount of content is necessarily limited. Therefore, the only way to stretch gaming hours is to enforce restrictions on pacing to such a degree that advancement takes an exponential increase in magnitude or risk the danger of the player burning through the game too fast. (And thus, not remaining committed to the game.)

The grind can be many things, but generally equates to the repetition of a certain amount of actions for a long duration of time for the sole purpose of advancement.

The fundamental problem with grinding is...

It isn't fun. It's work. No one ever wants to grind. They want the results from grinding. Much in the same way that a lot of people don't want to work, but getting paid possibly overrides their desire to not work.

I've heard of a lot of solutions to grinding, make it less extreme, have 'bonus xp' days, make it quest/story oriented... etc.

Example One: Fix the 'Grind' by reducing the amount of experience needed to level.

Okay, here's the problem. The amount of experience you need to advance in most games follows an exponential curve. That is, the amount of time invested will always grow way beyond control in relatively few levels.

For example:

Let's say that each level, you need to slay a mere 10% more monsters than you did at the previous level to level.

So at level 1, if you need to slay 10 monsters, at level 2, you need to slay 11.

At level 20, you need to slay 67 monsters.
At level 40, you need to slay 452 monsters.
At level 60, you will now need to slay 3,400 monsters.

To go from level 60 to 61, requires three hundred and forty times the investment as to go from level 1 to 2.

Anything involving exponential growth balloons quite rapidly, no matter how gently the growth starts at first, the compound effects soon make the requirements enormous.

But, surely that's expected! The more you progress, the more time you need to invest. You can't expect to go from master to grandmaster in the same time you go from novice to apprentice! That would remove all the thrill of accomplishment from the game.

Ah, yes. Of course. It's somehow 'justified' that such enormous time investments be part of the game. Even if that were the case, you have to consider the actual return on time spent. Let's say I paid you a thousand dollars every time you leveled. This will represent the 'thrill of accomplishment.'

So going from level 1 to 2, you made 100 dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 20 to 21, you made roughly 15 dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 40 to 41, you made roughly 2 and a half dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 60 to 61, you made roughly 33 cents per monster you slew.

The rewards don't match the time invested.

Ah! But that's unfair! The rush of going from level 60 to 61 is far greater than going from level 1 to 2.

That is absolutely accurate.

Now ask yourself this, does it feel exponentially greater to go from level 60 to 61, than level 1 to 2?

Would you feel three hundred times more satisfied going from level 60 to 61 than level 1 to 2?

No, chances are, most people feel about the same level of happiness or even less. Going from level 1 to 2 in a new game is a novel experience. Going from level 60 to 61, we'll have the 'been there, done that' scenario where we've seen it all and all we want is some new skill, piece of equipment or a minor increase on the numbers we see on screen.

Example Two: Supplementing the Grind with alternative forms of experience.

This is an idea that most often takes the form of Quests.

Unfortunately, the most tried and true forms of quests are (Now, we can all say it together..)
Kill X monsters... Which.. is exactly the same as above.

And then comes the second one... which is...
Deliver package X to guy Y... Which involves lots of tedious travel.

The main problem with these kinds of Quests, is that it's overdone, and essentially replaces the main grinding of the game with an entirely new beast: The Quest Grind, where all grinding is forsaken to do even more mind numbingly boring quests. Kill 30 rabid squirrel badger weasel... orcs.

And hot on the heels of these quests are: Repeatable Quest Grinding!

Which makes sure players always have a quest to do by simply giving them the same quest to do over and over again... but make sure they have to do it more and more...

...which just makes it grinding again... doesn't it?

How could you ever argue that quests are bad? Would you really prefer pure grinding?

Nay! You misunderstand my point, fair citizen.

It is simply that most Quests are a different form of grinding. It does nothing to solve the main problem of the grind, it simply presents it in an alternative light. Instead of slaying 3400 monsters to get to your next level, you simply have to slay 30 of them, 10 times over.

It has some benefits: You achieve a mini-rush of satisfaction from completing the quests.

It has some costs: The amount of work required to implement quests could be quite costly to the game.

Cutting the grind up into little mini boxes and wrapping them in bow ties, doesn't actually change the grind in some dramatic way.

That and the effort of implementing a sustainable quest grind is literally massive. Think of how many quests you would have to implement to ensure that the player never runs out of quests to do and hits your behemoth grind... masked by the pretty quests that have kept him on his merry way.

So then what do you propose, if you think these are such 'bad' ideas?

I never said they were bad. They just don't change the innate nature of the problem.

Grinding isn't fun. There is too much time involvement for too little reward.

Then the obvious solution? Make the grind fun. Or at the very least, make the grind interesting.

Okay. Then how?

It really depends on who your target audience is... (to be continued..)

N-Modal Gameplay

Note: RPG talk up ahead.

Scenario One: Single Mode

Let's say that you have a spell called 'Heal.'
Once, every 30 seconds, you can heal someone.

You fight a monster, what do you do?

Obviously: You hit him, and once, every 30 seconds, you heal yourself.

Scenario Two: Single Bi-Modal Spell.

Now take the same spell, but give it the option to harm *or* heal. So now we have a spell called 'Harm or Heal.'
Once, every 30 seconds, you can heal someone, or harm someone, but not both.

Now you fight a monster, what do you do?
Do you heal yourself? Or do you harm him and hope he dies before he kills you?

Obviously: You harm him until you're almost dead and you heal yourself.

Scenario Three: Single Bi-Modal Spell + Single Mode Spell.

Now let us add a new spell to your list of spells. Let's call this one 'Ice.'
You can, once every 10 seconds, slow the movement of someone for 10 seconds and do a little damage.

Now you fight a monster, what do you do?

You could:

Slow down the monster's movement continually, and harm him with your spells, while staying out of the monster's attack range.

-Or-

If we're about to die, we can slow down the monster's movement continually, and heal yourself with your spell before going back to hit the monster some more.

Scenario Four: Two Bi-modal spells.

Now let's add something new to our 'Ice' spell. Let's say that instead of slowing the monster down, it can be used to block the next hit the monster does to us, giving us an 'Ice shield', or it can be used to attack the monster

Now we could:

Stay in combat with the monster forever, using our ice shield to negate damage and our heal spell to heal damage.
Stay in combat with the monster, using our ice shield to damage the monster and our harm skill to damage the monster.
Slow the monster down and use our harm skill to damage the monster, like before.
Slow the monster down and heal ourselves if we are about to die.

Scenario Five: 4 Individual Spells

However, if we had these 4 individual spells: Harm, Heal, Shield, Slow...
we would have a very different game plan.

It is true that we could do all of the options above, but the *optimal* solution would be:

Shield ourselves, and harm/slow the monster we're fighting. If we get low on health, Shield, Slow, run away and Heal.

There are no decisions to be made when we have all 4 spells. We don't have trade-offs. There are no difficult decisions to make. There will be no difference between individual play-styles. There will only be optimal players and non-optimal players.

The result -- Restrictions breed awesomeness.

The restriction of only being able to use one of two modes for your spells every once in a while gives you the freedom to choose a style of combat you like. If you had all the spells available to you, you do have the choice of choosing a style of combat you like, except that choice would be either optimal or obviously suboptimal.

If the optimal solution isn't clear, or is balanced between the modes, then players have the ability to express themselves and it creates depth in skill usage. Knowing what skills to use when and knowing how it will constrain you later adds skill into the game.

One of the most important things in gaming life...

...is death.

No, I'm serious.

Death is the ultimate consequence. The 'Game Over.' The point at which you understand that you have fundamentally failed in what you have set out to accomplish.

It can also be hilarious...
...or bitter...
...possibly frustrating...
...or infuriating...
...or nothing at all.

If Death in the game itself has no meaning, then defeat has no meaning and subsequently, the game loses meaning. Imagine space invaders without the penalty of death. There is no reward for doing well. No penalty for doing poorly. No incentive to improve. Pac-man without ghosts or infinite lives becomes a chore in dot-eating and maze following.

Death gives us those 'I can't believe I just did that' moments.
Death gives us the 'I can't believe they made a boss that ridiculous' moments.
Death gives us the momentary break away from monotony where we step back and evaluate our performance.

The design of death in games then.. should be taken seriously. Let's look at one extreme.

Nothing happened. It was all a dream. Continue play as normal.

Most recent offender: Bioshock

Bioshock is a descendant of System Shock, a game in which you wake up alone, in a hellish nightmare scenario, where roughly 17,000 things are trying to bash your brains in while apologizing for doing so. You might imagine that this makes playing System Shock, in the dark, at night, alone, with full environmental audio, the easiest way to be found dead the following morning from terror-induced panic attacks.

Bioshock is roughly fifteen thousand times less scary than that. Pretend that you were alone. In an abandoned city. Filled with ghoulish minions of what used to be human beings. Dark. Terrifying. The only other human contact is through remote radio. And everywhere you can observe what used to be scraps of humanity and the decay of it all.

With only your wits and your guns to survive.

Terrifying, no? Except for the tiny fact that you're immortal.

IMMORTAL.

Every time you die, you pop-out of the neat little 'Ressurect-o-matic' locating conveniently every 15 feet. Free of charge. Slightly dis-oriented perhaps, but all in all, well jolly good and well rested.

...and not that scary at all. When death becomes a minor inconvenience, things fail to be scary. Things fail to be relevant.

You're Dead. Game Over. Restart?

Biggest Offender: Almost every game on the NES? Raiden / Ikaruga / Tohou 'Perfect Shooter' games.
To a lesser extent: 'Punish me' games, a la, Ninja Gaiden. Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, MMORPG's that penalize your exp when you die.

Then there's the flip side of the equation. If Death means you essentially restart from ground zero, or the first level, or perhaps at the beginning of the level you were on several hours ago because you kept dying to that ONE boss.

Death, in the first case, cost you nothing, and was essentially made gameplay irrelevant because there was no penalty or incentive for how well you did.

Death, in this case, costs you everything, and thus makes every single move relevant. Almost frustratingly relevant. We play games to have fun. While some of us do enjoy the Zen like qualities of playing the perfect game of space invaders, I would wager that most Timmy players out there are not out play the perfect game, or have every move carefully scrutinized for errors.
The removal of all progress, forcing the player to restart entirely from scratch, also doesn't work because the time commitment required for playing the game is magnified to an enormous amount. No one but Spikes have the time involved to actually restart the game over from that far back. What's the point?

Making death cost you progress is essentially demanding that the player perform to a certain level. Games simply don't have the right to do that unless the player himself requests it. Some hardcore gamers do desire to be challenged into performing at high levels. However, Timmy players just want to play and Johnny players just want to experiment. There's no need to force them to perform 'perfect games.'

But what other kinds of death could there possibly be?

Better known as the 'sliding scale.' It would appear that most games nowadays go from 'Death is a minor inconvenience' to 'Death sets you back for a few hours' to 'Death drives you completely insane and makes you snap your controller in rage.'

How exactly does one make death relevant but not set you back for a few hours or penalize you for game-play time? It seems to be impossible, when you first look at it. It's a sliding scale, no? How could you not penalize the player at all and still have death be relevant?

One only has to look at team based FPS games to realize that this is simply untrue.

When Death does not equal Defeat

Suppose you are in a game where death has no penalty. You come back to life somewhere else. You lose nothing. You didn't get shunted an hour away from where you were. You can get back to where you died in seconds.

What did you lose? Seconds of time. A minor inconvenience.

And ridiculously important when those seconds are precious. In a team-based multi-player game, where the coordinated actions of a team are magnified by the efforts of individual players, not having a key player in place might cost the players the entire match. And having a player who constantly takes stupid risks and gets himself killed 90% of the time is simply not an effective teammate.

And it might even cost your team the win. The key in this case, is that your individual death does not affect you directly, but it does affect your chance of success. Your individual death might not cost you anything at all or it might cost you the entire game.

Death is still a set-back and a penalty in this case. However, it is almost entirely virtual. If your team was doing well, your death might cost you nothing. If your team was doing poorly, your death still costs you nothing.

But what if... what if your team needed you at that crucial moment? Or what if your teams were evenly matched?

Death, in this case, doesn't really feel horrible and yet still has tremendous importance on the game.

Death in the online world...

In the world of massively multi-player online role playing games, the only 'fair' negative impetus that one can deliver players is death. If they mess up, death. If they are in an improper area, death. If they do something incredibly stupid, death. (Or to a lesser degree, damage, which is essentially, the threat of death.)

If you don't want the players to do something, the kindest (and possibly only) way to do it is to kill them, or threaten to kill them by harming them a lot. (One can do other things, such as taking away experience or items and such but in an online rpg, this essentially means setting them back potentially hundreds of hours of progress... and possibly sending the player into abject depression or keyboard-snapping frustration.)

However, in these games, death is a negative impetus strictly because it costs you time (either travel time), experience (which is time spent playing the game), or penalizes you with some sort of penalty that says you can't play the game for a while. These penalties are designed to make deaths relevant. Death is always a bad thing.

How could we possibly make almost certain death something that the player would want to do?

Without it being horribly abused...