On "Cheating"

There are a myriad ways of form to cheat in any game but what can the designer do about it?

Sure, he can curse and scream and ban offending players from the game. That's always an option. Granted, identifying cheaters and banning them could be a prohibitively hard thing to enforce. This is especially prevalent in online multiplayer games since interactions between players can intensify any possible motivations to cheat in the first place.

A clever designer will be able to add enough disincentives to cheating that their numbers can be curbed to the extent where cursing, screaming and banning players becomes a tractable solution for taking care of the rest.

Cheating #1: Illegal duplication of rare items

Duplication of rare items typically occurs when there is a powerful or highly desire-able item and supply cannot meet demand. This is usually the case for almost all powerful items since everyone wants the "best" items and weapons and armors.

In this case, common disincentives to this is..

Break the market/Soulbinding

Make extremely powerful items only usable by the account or person who found it. Then you can make a second tier of less powerful and less desirable items and have those trade-able and "common' removing the incentive to cheat/duplicate items.

Infinite Supply

Simply make extremely powerful items common so that everyone can have "the best" gear. Then you can focus on the rest of the game

Cheating #2: Automated Play

Automated playing or "botting" is a way where clickers and automated tools play the game for the character instead of players themselves. This is a form of cheating where the time investment by players who do use automated tools can be several times greater than the actual players themselves.

Allow Automated Play using In-Game tools / Or automated gains while offline.

You can, in effect, cancel a large portion of 3rd party automated tools by simply allow automated play in-game. Give the players a bot system in game or a way of acquiring experience and resources by being offline.  In this manner, automated play becomes less of a chore.

Make Automated Play suck

That is, a large portion of the incentive to do automated play stems from the fact that the most rewarding thing to do in the game is also the most boring. Kill the same monsters 99,000 times. If you take away the benefit from the boring same monster stuff and put the benefits somewhere else (like say, completing quests with random objectives or complicated movement puzzles/questions), then there is essentially no gain in using automated play tools.

Cheating #3: Maphack

If your game has some sort of random generation feature, a maphack tool can be extremely powerful. Consider the most famous example, Diablo 2, where maphack was used by a huge portion of the player base. Usually maphack usage arises due to the frustration between horribly designed random levels, the neccessity to get to one place from another with speed and the incentive to go somewhere fast.

Re-evaluate your network protocol

You can make maphack impossible by checking your network protocol very carefully and ensuring that the player can't have access to more of the map than he is allowed. 

Re-evaluate your random generation

Part of the reasons map hacks are used are because your random levels don't make any sense. Why should the player bother stumbling through a thousand dead ends? Having clear signals and paths for players who want to get to one place from another instead of stumbling through random garbage is a great disincentive to maphack because you don't need it.

Re-evaluate why players keep going from one place to another.

If players are constantly trying to go to one place from another, you might want to ask yourself why they won't explore the immediate surroundings. If players are in such a rush, perhaps demotivating the players from getting there (lowering the benefits of being in that area) or increasing the benefits from carefully exploring is a better fit.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Part 2: Solutions

"Frustrating" to "Interesting"
 
There are common methods to making a frustrating fight more interesting. The key in many of these is interaction. One of the most important principles is interaction between the game and the player. We aren't watching a movie here. The player has to be actively engaged in the experience. Many signs of frustration are simply the fact that they are artifical barriers that the player can't do anything about. The enemies have a little more health and so the fight simply takes longer.  These barriers are non-interactive and only serve as pure impediments.

In a racing game, you could make the automatic car non-responsive as all hell. That would be "difficult" because now the player will have a harder time getting first place. Compare that kind of difficulty versus a racing game where the only cars you can drive are manual. That would be more difficult but the player actually has an avenue to interact with.

1. Clear cause and effect - "Oh, the dragon roars before he does his flame breath. 

A clear cause and effect relationship lets the player learn the patterns in the encounter. If the causes are unclear and the effects devestating, then the player might be confused as to what he is actually going to see. If a player doesn't know what hit him, there's very little he can do to actually learn.


Subtle hints can be a good idea but remember not to go overboard. The more likely a player is to miss a hint, the less he should be punished for missing it.

2. Directness - "The dragon isn't just a walking sack of hit points."

Directness is critical to ensuring player interaction. Players don't want a longer fight. They want a more intense fight. A boss encounter that lasts an hour and a half with the player being in no real danger for 89 minutes is not fun. Once the player has perfected his strategy and his actions, the encounter should end relatively quickly.


A corollary to this is that there should be some path to victory that is within the player's grasp. If you set out to design your encounters with no real solution, your players will bend almost every rule and probably break your game/fight in order to overcome your encoutner.


3. High Player Interaction - "If I block, the flame breath does much less, and if I hit his leg he limps a little!"

Make all actions, even the ones that aren't optimal, do something for the player. If the player can't dodge the thousands of shards sent his way, at least make his block action mitigate damage. If the player can't hit the monster at exactly the right time, at least reward him with a little bit of damage. Nothing is worse than demanding flawlessness in your player.

"You have to hit this boss at this exact instant or nothing happens."

However small, the player should feel the effects of his actions. Have the boss bleed, or bellow taunts or scream in agony. Have a health bar or numbers pop up with damage. You want to avoid the scenario where the player has hit the boss 1000 times, only to die before the 1001th hit which would've killed the boss but the player gave up because he had no idea how many hits left he had to go.

4. Guidance IF the player needs it - "That flame blast looked like it hurt. Pay attention to his roar and prepare to defend yourself!"

On one hand, you don't want to give all the boss strategies away. On the other hand, it is highly important that if the player keeps failing, that the game realizes this and tosses him a hint or a clue to help him progress. If all else fails, remember to give the player guidance and suggestions if he's clearly doing it wrong or struggling to succeed.


"A clever example in the game Eternal Darkness was the Guardian boss. The player can only defeat this boss with magic. If the player insists on using guns to fight him, the Guardian boss simply laughs after 1-2 minutes with the phrase 'No human weaponry can defeat me, mortal', giving the player a subtle hint as to what he's supposed to be doing."


5. Options - "Man. I just can't defeat this dragon. Maybe I should look for some gear that increases my fire resistance?"

Options make more sense in RPGs where wearing the correct gear makes certain scenarios a lot easier. Being able to find/collect fire absorbing gear against bosses that primarily use fire makes the fight trivial. Essentially, if the players can't find a strategic way out, they should feel like they have enough tools/items at their disposal to "try."  Whether that be armors that mitigate specific types of damage or just a wide range of spells/tools designed for niche purposes, options exist to give players hope that perhaps they can find some tool that will make their encounter a lot easier.

Without options available, the player can only continually bang his head on the same roadblock that's been bugging him continuously. 

Afterword, my rule of thumb on attacks:


Here's my rule of thumb for toning down difficult encounters to interesting ones. For every single move/encounter/attack pattern the  player might face, you get to choose 2 out of the 3...

1. Highly Damaging/Effective
2. Hard to Dodge
3. Hard to Predict

If something is hard to dodge and hard to predict, then it shouldn't punish the player too badly because there's very little he could do about it. If something is hard to dodge and highly damaging or effective, then the player must be able to predict that it's coming. If something is hard to predict and highly damaging, then the player must be able to dodge the effect once it occurs. If something is highly damaging, hard to predict and hard to dodge then you might as well just kill the player outright because you're not giving him very many opportunities to interact.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Interest, Part 2

"Interesting" Hard Signs

It's hard to define what is both "interesting" and hard and yet not "frustrating" for the player. The idea is that the difficulty should not feel artificial in any way shape or form. If the player has been doing well up to this point, he should continue to do well.

"The player is doing well taking a hit every once in a while. Then suddenly, the next enemy (who acts the same as all the other enemies) instantly kills him because it does 3 times the damage of an ordinary enemy. This is not an interesting way to make things difficult. Making that next enemy say.. a ninja who moves 3 times as fast is *more* interesting than simply making him do 3 times the damage."

Exciting / Ambiance / Tone - "A DRAGON ate me... Aliens came up out of the vents and melted my face."

In some cases, you can make frustrating difficulty "feel" interesting by giving it the correct ambiance. The guy with that dagger deals 3 damage to me. But that guy over there with the BIG ass hammer over there dealing 30 damage to me "feels" intuitively correct. Even if the two don't differ meaningfully, it feels right and is more likely to be interesting than frustrating.

I mean, getting killed by ninjas is almost always a fun experience the first couple times around. No shame in that.

Eventual player success - "You know, I think I've almost got it... I just need one more try."

The player should not feel that this new difficulty is a giant roadblock. That leads to people quitting games. This is perhaps the hardest of the factors to nail down as it involves identifying potential roadblocks before you know about them and designing mechanisms to aid the player in succeeding. After all, one can exactly deduce if a player might improve on a section.

Things like artificially reducing difficulty if the player is doing badly might be a good idea but eventually may lead to players feeling coddled. Games have tried scaling difficulty systems based on how well the player is doing. The core here is that the players must always feel they are able to improve to the point where they can overcome this difficulty. Therefore, in the design of the game, the player must have options open available to them to improve.

If a boss relies on a player expertly sniping something from across the way and that is the only way to defeat the boss, there is a kind of hopelessness if the player doesn't feel his accuracy can improve to the extent that the boss demands.  If there were more avenues to defeat the boss, this feeling would be discouraged.

High degree of control over the situation - "The player can do whatever and they all contribute to success."

The core of any game is that the player must feel competent, or at least, capable of performing the tasks asked to them. Their actions should feel meaningful. If the majority of the players actions result in him being damaged or not being effective at all then the player will not have a motivation to actually fight or think. There's no motivation there.  Since all actions taken are meaningless, why bother attempting to figure out new actions?

The players actions should have some effect over the situation. Otherwise, why is he the player?

This also applies to defensive abilities. If all the attacks that the player faces are undodgeable then why should the player bother learning to dodge? If the enemy has a continuously streaming beam that never lets up, why should the player bother learning to hide? There's no incentive to perform defensive maneuvers because there's no point. It doesn't help.The players attempts at being defensive should be meaningful. The arrows should be dodgeable with clever movement. The sweeping gatling gun should let up its barrage of bullets to give the opportunity for the player to strike. Dodging the attack should present the player with a possible openings.

Clear signals and a clear path for the player to take - "Obviously, I'm supposed to aim for those glowing spots on his chest that the boss is trying to shield with his arms."

If the player doesn't know how to progress this usually leads to frustration. If the player doesn't know what to do against a monster's attacks, it might as well be unblockable for all intents and purposes. If the player doesn't know what he is supposed to do because there's no clear signals.. he will give up or, if he is especially dedicated, suspect there is a trick.

Nothing is more frustrating than not knowing what the hell you're supposed to do. You begin to suspect if the designers even had an idea in mind when they designed the encounter.

"Natural" difficulty - "Oooh, this guy is tough to hit because he's fast. I'm going to have to aim a little better."

A fairly decent way of making difficult encounters feel interesting is to make the difficulty based on the environment or the context. Aliens that storm up to you point-blank aren't very interesting or difficult. Now, imagine if that fight took place in a pitch black room with only your flash light with the aliens crawling on the walls, *that* fight is more difficult *and* more interesting even though they might not be any faster or any more damaging. Making the player fear and panic can be a interesting way to add difficulty, especially if the enemies encountered don't move in a normal pattern.

A second way of adding "natural" difficulty is simply making the monsters behaviors more complex. Enemies that are highly unpredictable aren't difficult but enemies that are just outside of the player's skill level to affect can be intensely difficult. For example, if a guy carries a heavy shield and can only be hurt by hitting the areas where the shield doesn't cover. That's a form of adding health and endurance without actually doing so.  A monster may be weak and fragile but incredibly hard to hit, pouncing from wall to wall. That's a form of difficulty that has nothing to do with simply increasing damage or numbers.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Frustration Part 1

 "Frustrating" Hard Signs


When a game is difficult but unfairly difficult, it can often be frustrating to the player. Many signs of frustration can be attributed to a sense of powerlessness from the player's side as if he has no choice but to accept the punishment the game is doling out for him.

As a designer, one of the main questions you have to ask yourself is "How can the player overcome this difficulty?" If there's no answer besides "Suck it up" you might want to question your design a bit more.

Let's go over the points in the recap:


Unavoidibility - "I just can't dodge that one attack." 

Unavoidable problems are almost always a mistake in design because the player can't do anything about it. These kinds of problems, especially if they lead to death or boredom, can become death knells in your game simply because the player has no choice in the matter. If he dies due to an unavoidable attack, he's always going to die. He just has to pray he never runs into the problem in the first place because there's no solution.

If you do have unavoidable problems in design, make sure that they do not directly lead to death or boredom. Unavoidable problems in this case should mean putting additional penalties or constraints rather than punishing the player because he did nothing wrong. These are good to some limited degree.

Note that unavoidable attacks due to the player doing something bad aren't truly unavoidable because the player has the option of not doing that horrible mistake in the first place and therefore don't fall in this category.

Round-aboutness - "So first, make your way uphill in the snow 6 miles. And then uphill back"

Nothing is more annoying in frustrating difficulty when you simply give no option for the player to efficiently plan his goals.  When you make a problem difficult by giving the player a convuluted method to achieve something, this is a difficulty that the player has no way of getting around.

For example, let's say that our challenge for the player is to collect 6 golden mushrooms. Now, if the player was allowed to collect them in any order, it would be wise for the player to efficiently collect mushrooms that were close to each other. But if we had the arbitrary restriction of picking them in a set order (especially a set order that made no sense, tediously making the player go back and forth in the longest path possible) the player no longer has the option to plan his route.

Thus, this level of "increased difficulty" is only frustrating.

Arbitrary methods - "You have to wait for the gold button to be depressed, then you shoot somewhere else."

This problem is often due to the designer trying to be far far too clever by half. Instead of making the player's abilities do something, they want the player to solve some specific puzzle that they have in their heads. The problem is when that puzzle follows the designer's internal logic without actually paying attention to whether or not it makes sense.

It might be a terrific puzzle that they have to shoot the gold button and then a weak spot. The problem is, is this any kind of game at all? Why would a game has something so outside the normal realm of thinking? What kind of difficulty is encouraged by this behavior?

Lack of signals/instruction/hints and/or Lack of time to gather information - "The bosses weak point is not glowing, marked or even hinted at anywhere. And then he kills you if you shoot the wrong part."

This usually goes hand in hand with the above problem. If you tell the player there's a weak spot or a set of instructions they have to follow, it's "too easy." Or is it? If you tell the player absolutely nothing at all, more often or not, the first sign something is wrong is confusion. Frustration quickly follows.

What is worse is that designers usually feel like punishing the player for not picking up our their subtle hints. However, this just exacerbates the original problem. When players are trying to figure out a problem, they shouldn't continually punished because they're trying to figure it out. That's like whipping someone for taking too long on a convuluted riddle that you asked them in the first place without giving them any hints.

You can either be subtle or you can aggressively punish mistakes. You can't have both.


Artificial difficulty - "Oh, that gun we just gave you? Doesn't work. Oh, by the way, if you don't have *this* level of gear, you're dead no matter what you do."

Artificial difficulty is the recourse of a lazy designer trying to make his game harder. Instead of thinking of interesting challenges he just gives the boss more health or makes him do three times the damage. Giving monsters arbitrary immunities or invincibilities to "cheap" attack by the player. The problem with this type of difficulty is that it really doesn't encourage the player to do anything. They can't do anything about the problem's magnitude.

There really isn't anything interesting about an artifically difficult boss. He just takes longer and he's just not as fun to fight. This may be a tough problem to identify because it's very subjective as to what makes a proper encounter. The key question here is "What makes this problem difficult?" If the answer to that is simply a sheer matter of "the enemy has high statistics and better gear" and not "the enemy fights in an interesting way" you might want to look into making your enemies more complex.

Low interactivity - "The boss kills me because he ensnares me 99% of the time."

One of the ways to frustrate players is simply take away their ability to interact with the problem. What could be more difficult right? Take away their swords and give them a toothpick. Take away their horse and make them walk through mud. That's difficult. Now they can't use their most powerful abilities and their ability to control the character is weakened.

Except for the tiny fact that, if we didn't want any control over what was happening in a game, we wouldn't be playing a game in the first place.  Nothing is more frustrating than an encounter where you spend 90% of the time watching yourself get beat on while you can do nothing about it. Sure, it may be a difficult encounter but if the majority of the time is spent fighting the fact that we can't control our own character, it's not much of a game anymore.

Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Overview

One of the easiest things to be confused about when designing enemy encounters in any game is the notion that somehow, the players are your enemy. This is most common in Dungeons and Dragons but any beginning game designer should be aware of this confusion.

It's all too easy to think that the player is on one side and you're on the other. It's you or him. If he wins, you lose. Thus it's easy to design encounters that are borderline impossible. Be aware that the purpose of your game is not to beat the player senseless until he gives up. There is an insignificant amount of players willing to put up with the masochism of being beat up continually while playing your game.

That's not to say that game should not be hard. Difficulty is what keeps the game fun in the first place and not a mindless grind to the next area. Game design is about delivering a fun experience and difficulty is a key part of that.

There is, however, quite a significant difference between an "interesting" hard and "frustrating" hard.


"Frustrating" Hard Signs

In this category are all the things that could be deemed unfairly difficult. There is a certain level of challenge to them but none of them are particularly the type of difficulty that makes a game fun.

1. Unavoidibility - "I just can't dodge that one attack."
   
2. Round-aboutness - "So first, make your way uphill in the snow 6 miles. And then uphill back"
   
3. Arbitrary methods - "You have to wait for the gold button to be depressed, then you shoot somewhere else."
   
4. Lack of signals/instruction/hints and/or Lack of time to gather information - "The bosses weak point is not glowing, marked or even hinted at anywhere. And then he kills you if you shoot the wrong part."
   
5. Artificial difficulty - "Oh, that gun we just gave you? Doesn't work. Oh, by the way, if you don't have *this* level of gear, you're dead no matter what you do."
6. Low interactivity - "The boss kills me because he ensnares me 99% of the time."
   

"Interesting" Hard Signs

 It's hard to come up with a difficulty that is "interestingly" hard but the key here would be, if the player is losing, would he still be having fun? If the player is having a difficult time in the game, is it a fun time in the game?

1. Exciting / Ambiance / Tone - "A DRAGON ate me... Aliens came up out of the vents and melted my face."
   
2. Eventual player success - "You know, I think I've almost got it... I just need one more try."
   
3. High degree of control over the situation - "The player can do whatever and they all contribute to success."
   
4. Clear signals and a clear path for the player to take - "Obviously, I'm supposed to aim for those glowing spots on his chest that the boss is trying to shield with his arms."
   
5. "Natural" difficulty - "Oooh, this guy is tough to hit because he's fast. I'm going to have to aim a little better." 
   

"Frustrating"to "Interesting"
 
There are common methods to making a frustrating fight more interesting. The key in many of these is interaction. Even if a battle is particularly hard, you want the players to feel like they have control of the environment and their character.

1. Clear cause and effect - "Oh, the dragon roars before he does his flame breath. 
2. Directness - "The dragon isn't just a walking sack of hit points."
   
3. High Player Interaction - "If I block, the flame breath does much less, and if I hit his leg he limps a little!"
4. Guidance IF the player needs it - "That flame blast looked like it hurt. Pay attention to his roar and prepare to defend yourself!"
5. Options - "Man. I just can't defeat this dragon. Maybe I should look for some gear that increases my fire resistance?"
   

Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 3: Restriction Variants

Restrictions: To deny the usage of a skill in certain scenarios.

Restrictions on a spell or ability don't show up in RPGs as often as they do in card games. This is generally due to the fact that the complex interplay in cardgames must be distilled into a faster quicker paced game.

However, restrictions can be another way to provide a powerful ability and force the player to solve mini-problems.


Let us take the following skill


Impale
2000 mana
Deals half the target's health in damage.

Variants

Type Restrictions: Limiting the target selection of the skill for balance.

In Magic, many spells simply cannot affect a certain subclass of targets. Many black spells cannot affect black spells due to the fact that unholy magics tend not to be so effective against unholy people.

In an RPG, this would be similar to something like the warrior not being able to use Impale on people wearing hevy armor (most likely other warriors.) This is an interesting balance as people wearing heavier armors tend to have higher hit points overall and thus limits the possible abuse of the skill.

Timing Restrictions: Limiting the time in which a skill can be cast.

In  Magic, the basic difference between an instant and a sorcery is that you may only cast a sorcery when it is your turn. Therefore, you cannot wait to react to an opponent with a sorcery. You must decide to cast it now or never.

In an RPG, this would be similar to the warrior not being able to use the ability after taking damage for a second or two. He must either immediately lead off with the attack as soon as he can or else wait until the opponent is defensive and recovering to unleash his attack.

Conditional Restrictions: Limiting the circumstances in a which a skill can be cast.

In magic, there are quite a few spells that say you can only play a card X when some condition Y has been met. For example, a card that deals 10 damage to a player if the player has exactly 10 life.

In an RPG, this would be similar to spells that could only be used while the opponent is under some sort of effect. For example, perhaps the warrior can only impale his targets when they are stunned or dizzy. In this manner, the player must decide the best way to get his target to be stunned or dizzy before being able to use impale.

Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 2: Cost Variants

Cost is the essential part of a skill that controls how many resources a skill will consume.

A resource could be represented by health or mana.
A resource could also be represented by time, as in the casting time of a skill.

For today, let us take this example:

Strike
200 mana
Deal 200 damage to target.

This is a very simple ability that deals direct damage.


Variants

Echo: Exchanging a time cost for a resource cost.

Echo is an ability in magic that allows you to cast a spell cheaply, but for the cost that you must pay an additional cost next turn. It essentially allows you to break up a spells cost over two turns.

In an RPG, this would most likely translate to a spell taking either more or less time to cast in exchange for costing more or less mana as an alternate mode.  For example, the longer the warrior holds down the strike button, the less mana it will take. A quick strike takes a lot of mana while a long strike consumes none.


APC: Exchanging a resource cost for a cooldown cost.

Alternate Playing Cost is a mechanic from magic that allows you to discard a card in return for paying no mana for it.

In an RPG, this would translate to a spell taking less mana or casting time cost, in exchange for putting itself or some spells on a timed cooldown. Let us say that the strike spell costs no mana at all, but leaves the warrior in a awkward position and therefore unable to use any other attacks for a few seconds.

Trap: Situational costlessness.

Traps are a mechanic in most magic that allows you to play a card for no resources if some condition is met by the opponent's actions.

In an RPG, this would translate to "reactionary" spells. Let us say that strike spell costs no mana and is instant when the warrior encoutners an enemy who can dodge his attacks.

Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 1: Cooldown Variants

Cooldown: A period of time in which, after the usage of a skill, the skill cannot be used.

Cooldown is an important concept in balancing skills. The 3 main things cooldowns attempt to achieve in skill mechanics are...

1. Powerful.
2. Situational.
3. Limited.

For example, let us take this spell as our base example.

Prayer
1000 Mana.
5 minute cooldown.

Prevents all damage for 5 seconds.

This is an extremely powerful ability to become invulnerable for 5 seconds. However, one can see where this would be too powerful if there was no cooldown period (the ability to become immortal as long as your mana sustains you) and too useless if it was balanced strictly by cost (Imagine you had the ability to become immortal for 5 seconds but leaving you powerless by draining all your mana.)

Hence, the cooldown allows you to make a skill available to the player with the knowledge that it has a sufficient time and resource cost and remain balanced.


Variant Mechancis:

Flashback: The ability to use a skill while it is cooling down.

Flashback, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to "re-cast" a card after it has been cast for the slight cost of removing it from the game.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to use a skill while it is cooling down, exchanging a small cooldown. For example, our prayer spell above. Let us say that while the skill is "cooling down", we were able to cast it again while it is cooling down, in exhange for not being able to use again the skill for 30 minutes or an hour.

Buyback: Trading mana for cooldown

Buyback, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to recover a card after you have cast it for some extra mana.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to cancel a cooldown for a specific skill by paying an additional mana cost.  For example, for our prayer spell above, let us say that the cost to cancel the cooldown of prayer is 1000 mana. The player could then cast back-to-back prayer spells at the cost of 3000 mana, giving the spell additional flexibility if the player can pay for it.

Dredge: Randomly trading one cooldown for another

Dredge, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to recover the use of a spell by giving up the possibility of several spells in the game as a whole. 

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to cancel a cooldown by giving a random skill the same cooldown as it has. For example, let us say that our player has two spells, Prayer and Heal. If he chooses to cancel Prayer with this mechanic, then some other random skill would acquire the cooldown that Prayer had. In this case, if he had 3 minutes left on the cooldown of Prayer, cancelling it would move that 3 minute cooldown to Heal.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 4

Again, the intro recap:

Part 4: Solutions and various money controlling mechanisms.

1. Hyperscaling - Making whatever money the player has obselete by scaling the prices.
   
2. Money Sinks - Making available convienient ways to get rid of cash like gambling.
   
3. Nickel and Dimes - By making boring processes of acquiring money have penalties to acquisition.
4. Supply Control - By slowly expanding the shop selection.

In Part 3, I described various problems of dealing with the player which stemmed from either poor price control, poor fiscal policies (monsters drop too much gold) and poor inventory control. Let's talk about a few common methods people use to fix that.

1. Hyperscaling

Let's say that in the beginning, you could buy a powerful set of armor for 100 gold. When the player moves on to the next area, however, you don't want someone who has saved up 1000 gold to be instantly able to buy everything in the next area.  However, you can't take away his hard-earned gold either.

What do you do? You hyperscale the prices.  If a piece of armor costs 100 gold in the first area then a common way to both reward and control players who have saved cash is to make that next piece of armor cost 1000 gold.

You see, the player could've saved up more than enough money to buy 10 pieces of armor from the first area. That's great and the player should be rewarded for his effort. So he is rewarded by being able to buy the next armor quicker... but at the same time you've quite covertly changed the spending power he has. He was infinitely rich before in the first area by being able to buy his armor 10 times over. Now he's essentially broke again.

And the cycle continues: The player gets rich in one area or zone and then he moves on the next zone. He finds that the prices are high compared to the previous zone and now, instead of being rich, he's only of average wealth.

You haven't taken any money away from the player but you can make sure that no amount of farming in an early zone can make farming in a later zone easy.

2. Money Sinks

A money sink is essentially a non-essential fun thing that is designed to bleed money away from the player.

Money sinks also make the players feel their money is more valuable as there are more things to spend it on.

There's a plethora of ways to do this, here's just a short list of the possibilities:

1. Cosmetic Goods: Dresses, Nice boots, etc.
2. Gambling for Random Items: A sick thrill in which you might get a really good item.. or not.
3. Temporary Bonuses: Teleporters, fast movement or just the ability to use something really powerful for a short while (Like strength potions or potions that increase speed)
   
4. Access to secrets like unlockable characters, new combinations to try out or bonus and optional areas.
   

3. Nickel and Dimes


This is a method where the most popular method of gaining money also comes with a cost. For example, if the player fights monsters to gain money then by making his armor and equipment slowly wear away so they can't be used forever is nickle and diming the player's money away.

The trick is to set up some sort of drain on the player's money if he is spending an excess amount of time acquiring money. By making weapons cost ammo to fire or by making potions and necessary mundane things cost a lot, the player's primary resource for acquiring money also has it's own costs attached to it and you can slowly bleed a player out.

Note that this should only be a serious drain if the player is hellbent on acquiring lots and lots of money. Players probably don't need to repair their armor if they are moving through the game at a quick pace as he's doing what we want them to do. By making weapons and armor wear out only if the player spends an excessive time slaying monsters, you can do a targeted bleed on the farmers. This would mean that durability should be a three mode model.

There's 'Good', which most weapons and armor should be in. 'Wearing out' which should happen after the weapons and armor has been used for a while and 'Broken' which should happen if the player refuses to repair his equipment.

4. Supply Control

There's more than one path to take in this instance. You can either give the player a very limited view of what he can buy in the game and thus cut off any motivation to go out and acquire a ton of money...

...or...

You can limit the amount of times the player can buy mundane things like healing potions and neccessary goods like ammo forcing the player to move from area to area because he can't find the neccessary items he needs to survive without progressing thruogh the game.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 3

Let's recap from the intro:

Part 3: Then what are the common pitfalls of not balancing money correctly?

1. Making money do nothing - The "I am a millionaire, but no one sells anything useful."
2. Excess of money trivializing money - The "I have enough money to do whatever I want. No limits!"
3. Paucity/Unevenness of reward - The "Why do I bother doing quests for 3 pennies when I can kill a sheep for 12,000?"
   
4. Making money overpower the player - The "I just bought my level 99 weapon at level 3 and now the game is EZ-mode." 

1. "I am a millionaire, but no one sells anything useful"

Some designers, out of a misguided sense of balance, limits all conceivably useful things to quest rewards and rewards for doing deeds and actions. Generally, this is an okay move...


However, you must ensure that money still has a purpose. If the only purpose of money is to get 99 potions and 99 hi-potions and then you're done shopping then money essentially has no point in your game. Consider just not having money entirely or loosening your restrictions on what money can buy.  


In this case, if you fear that something might be too powerful that it shouldn't be available in stores, think again. What if it was extremely expensive? What if there were several different "tiers" of that item that grew more expensive as they scaled in power? Why shouldn't the player be able to purchase this with money?

Additionally, consider simply making more options available for the player to purchase. Different cosmetic effects or style choices can be rewarding by themselves even if they don't affect the overall power level of the game. Or consider making money a convienience fund for the player by allowing them to skip sometimes annoying and boring parts of your game with money.

2. "I have enough money to do whatever I want! No limits!"

In this case, the designer's prices are too low or money flows too freely. If the player has unlimited resources available to them early on without restriction then all attempted gameplay balance by scarcity flies straight out the window. Look over at the amount of money the player is acquiring and drastically cut it down. Or introduce lots and lots of money sinks so that money doesn't overflow the game economics.

Now, for the player, this isn't a problem. But for the designer, a player with infinite resources can throw the entire game out of whack. High prices and money sinks should be in the game to drain the player of resources.

Aside: However, it is not uncommon in the end-game of many games to give infinite resources to the player. This is generally fine and quite awesome to boot. This skips the tedious farming stage that a player might have to do before progressing to the final dungeons of doom.

Just make sure they can't become overpowered by having infinite resources to make that final dungeon anticlimatic.

3. "Why do I bother doing quests for 3 pennies when I can kill a sheep for 12,000 dollars?"

This is a case of disporportinate reward.  Money as a reward is a key motivator for players to do actions in your game. Take a look at the most famous example in Mario.  Certain jumps and paths that were fun to take were literally littered with coins in their path. Streams or arcs of coins designated paths that Mario could take.

In this manner, look at the money reward in the game and see which path player's are being pushed to. If the most boring aspects of your game give the most money reward, you might want to tune your rewards so that what you want the player to do should be the most rewarding path.

4. "I just bought my level 99 weapon at level 3 and now the game is EZ-mode!"

This is a case of availability. It's very nice and all that the player *can* acquire end-game items if they only saved up enough money to do so. However, it is not in the best interests of any game that the player sits there and farms away the early portion of the game. This leads to player burnout and boredom.

There should always be an incentive for the player to move on and progress through the game. This is why shops have limited availability. At the very most, dedicated players can be rewarded with items that are a tad bit more powerful than they should have at the moment but nothing like getting the masamune while you're beating up slimes.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 2

A quick recap from the intro:

The logical inverse of money in a video game is cost and prices in the game.

What is the role of prices in a single player game for the designer?

1. It provides a way for the designer to set player power growth by limiting availability of items.
2. Prices can be a subtle hint as to what "Power Range" the player should buy.
3. Controlled/Constant reward mechanism for doing certain actions.

1. Prices are a way to control the availability of items to guide or set player growth/power.

Some items are simply too powerful to have unlimited access to and yet they are too neccessary to the game's function to do without. You don't want players to lean on certain items like a crutch 99% of the time. The ubiquitous example is healing potions. If you don't want players to have infinite life but it is also crucial that the player has something to fall back on, consider making healing potions really expensive. They are too expensive to use 100% of the time, so hopefully players will play extra carefully to conserve their limited resources (money) so they don't have to buy so many healing potions every single time.


Another example would be fast travel mechanisms, such as instant teleportation, warps or checkpoints. If the player was able to use these constantly all the time, there would essentially be no need to have any normal based travel and thus a large part of the game would be negated. However, by providing limited teleportation with a high enough cost attached to it (Say, by making a quick portal of return to town cost 10,000 gold each time), you can ensure that players have access to the mechanism without completely negating all the detailed work you put in when the player is going the scenic route.


2. Prices are a subtle hint and a tantalizing gesture to what the players should have and what the players will have.


There's two parts to this. If you make solid baseline items cheap then the player will more likely buy that armor because it is what he can afford inexpensively. Let's say we make a suit of normal plate armor relatively cheap on the player's budget. That provides a subtle indicator that this is probably the armor that the designer intended him to wear at this level.

At the same time, we can provide the next tier of armor at a prohibitively expensive price that the player can't afford (or could only afford a tiny limited quantity of). In this instance we create excitement and expectation as the player was able to preview the next powerful item he can use and giving him an intermediate goal (acquire more loot) in order to obtain it. I mean, you can't afford this shiny platinum armor of spikes just yet but wait until after you've played a little more and it's yours!


3. High prices essentially make money rewards better. It lets you drive the player in one direction with the reward mechanism.


Let's say that you make an especially awesome prize or special mount 1000 gold. Now with the price that high, if the player really wants the prize, every single action he can take that would grant him gold looks more appealing than everything else. In fact, the questlines that reward money become secondary goals that the player sets for himself in order to achieve your primary prize (the special mount.)

Or let's look back on our score analogy. Let's say that lives are rewarded every 100,000 points. Now if there's a safe low-scoring way to play and a risky but high-scoring way to play, the fact that the player only gets a bonus if he chooses the high scoring route makes that route look more appealing. It gives him the motivation to pursue the high scoring route knowing that a special bonus awaits.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 1

Let's recap from the intro:

Part 1: What is the role of money in a single player game for the player?

1. It provides a resource to replenish consumable resources.
2. It provides a resource to upgrade his character's power.
3. It provides a way to affect the game environment.
4. It can serve as part of the reward mechanism.

From the point of view of the player, money essentially does these four things for him. It is imperative that none of them are made impossible by the economics of the game itself.


1. It provides a resource to replenish consumable resources.

Here, consumable resources are things like potions, durability on fragile equipment, uses of spells or even extra lives. All these things are essentially power-ups that serve to extend the player's ability on a semi-permanent basis.

These are semi-permanent because often times, a player counts on being able to "refresh" his stores of consumable resources when there is a pause in the action. For example, in most RPGs, players often go back to town to repurchase the health recovery items that they need to survive long dungeon trips. For simulation games, like Civilization, money often provides a method to temporarily speed up the production of a unit or offset the temporary shift in focus from commerce to research.

It is interesting to note that the role of score is often like money in arcade games. Mario essentially always spends his 100 coins on an extra life, while many other games like Galaga, Space Invaders or Pac Man treat score as a running balance to purchase extra lives with.


2. It provides a resource to upgrade his character's power.

These are permanent bonuses a player can purchase. Things like weapons or equipment are typically more permanent. They also provide some degree of character customization where money (a reward) is used to buy clothes or items that uniquely express the player's sense of individuality or choice.

In simulation games, money can provide a pure power by purchasing whole building very quickly or the wholesale purchase of properties to expand growth. In Civilization "rushing" a fleet of tanks with a large money reserve would often prove fatal to an opponent, but you could also "rush" a fleet of defensive infantry men very quickly if you had the resources to spare.


3. It provides a way to interact with the environment.

There are many ways in which money provides a new novel way to interact with the environment: In many classic story telling games, the usage of money could serve to bribe a judge or a guard. You could donate to a beggar to improve your character's reputation. Above all, perhaps some scripted encounters could be bypassed with a significant portion of money. In more diplomatic games like strategy games, money can often be a resource in influencing decisions.

However, the promise of money also makes the player interact differently with the environment. Consider arcade or platforming games which subtly alter the ideal path for the player by the promise of shiny coins. Many "paths" in Mario were laid out in gold coins for the player to scoop up along the way. In Pac-Man, the presence of fruit at the center of the board might change your priorities on how to move.


And remember those Pots in Zelda? Once you knew you could find rupees in pots, you became a pot breaking maniac.


4. It can serve as part of the reward mechanism.



A key part of why we play games is we receive some tangible pyschological reward out of them. Money in many times is the ubiquitous reward for completing some portion of the game's tasks. If you are doing well, money tends to flow toward the player. It tends to be the smallest reward unit that players can easily understand. 'Yay! I did something good. I get shinies!'

Money is important for a player because it gives him a sense of accomplishment that is can expressly be quantified. It is, after all, a numeric representation of wealth.

Afterthought: There are very interesting parallels between Money and Score in games for players. They serve very similar purposes for most games across the board. However, they differ in the design pitfalls that may overwhelm them, as we will see later.

Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Intro

You've heard them under all different names: Gold. Zeny. Galders. GPs. Bronze. Silvers. Platinum.

Let's talk about the most basic reward you can give a player: MONEY.

Part 1: What is the role of money in a single player game for the player?

1. It provides a resource to replenish consumable resources.
2. It provides a resource to upgrade his character's power.
3. It provides a way to affect the game environment.
4. It can serve as part of the reward mechanism. 

Part 2: It is impossible to look at money without looking at it's logical inverse: prices in a single player game. What are the roles of prices in a single player game for the designer?

1. It provides a way for the designer to set player power growth by limiting availability of items.
2. Prices can be a subtle hint as to what "Power Range" the player should buy.
3. Controlled/Constant reward mechanism for doing certain actions.

Part 3: Then what are the common pitfalls of not balancing money correctly?

1. Making money do nothing - The "I am a millionaire, but no one sells anything useful."
2. Excess of money trivializing money - The "I have enough money to do whatever I want. No limits!"
3. Paucity/Unevenness of reward - The "Why do I bother doing quests for 3 pennies when I can kill a sheep for 12,000?"
   
4. Making money overpower the player - The "I just bought my level 99 weapon at level 3 and now the game is EZ-mode." 

Part 4: Solutions and various money controlling mechanisms.

1. Hyperscaling - Making whatever money the player has obselete by scaling the prices.
   
2. Money Sinks - Making available convienient ways to get rid of cash like gambling.
   
3. Nickel and Dimes - By making boring processes of acquiring money have penalties to acquisition.
4. Supply Control - By slowly expanding the shop selection.