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Today's blog is inspired by the Game Design Challenge about time-limited MMO design. The challenge focuses on the issue of MMO addictiveness and people spending too much time playing online games, challenging designers to create a game that limits the time users play.
However, the challenge presents, as an example of this sort of design, a link to a Final Fantasy XIV blog post about that game's XP limiting system. The shocking thing is that FFXIV's XP limiting scheme has NOTHING to do with limiting the hours people spend playing the game! So what's going on?
Before I take some time to talk about the issue in the design challenge, I need to step back and take a larger look at a relevant topic: how to measure player success in games. You might be thinking I'm going way off on a tangent, but it's actually quite relevant. How relevant? Well, take a look at Simon's Hirearchy of Success in Games:
Simon's Heirarchy of Success in Games
(most respected means to success)
Skill
Time
Luck
Money
Cheating
(least respected means to success)
My theory is simple: if you have to measure "success" among different players, you basically do it with one or more of these five measures. The higher up the list, the more other players respect that achivement of success.
To achieve success through skill, players must themselves be better than others. Skill is generally the measure of most competition-based success, such as the fastest runner or the best chess player. Players in most video games are also measured in skill, such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. Skill even plays an important role in MMOs, such as the best PVP teams or the top raiders. Players can generally improve their skill levels by practicing a game - that is, spending time on it without a strict in-game reward for that time (such as XP).
To achieve success through time, players must simply invest time in the game. In most games, this means putting real life time into a game by playing it. The more time a player spends playing, the more they succeed. There are alternatives, of course: accumulating skill points in EVE Online obfuscates time-based success as players don't have to be online to gain points; however, it does have time-based success in so far as the longer a player plays (and pays) the more skill points they accumulate.
Ultimately, the basic principle of "leveling up" is exemplified in Progress Quest. In PQ, you set up a character (much like in any traditional MMORPG) and... that's it. The "game" plays itself and you level up just by running it for a longer period of time. Ultimately, most MMOs have a strong time-based component: everyone can viably level up to the maximum level just by spending time playing the game.
Luck, Money, and Cheating are other ways to achieve success, but they aren't really relevant to my post, so I won't really pay any attention to them.
Playing Fair with Time
Anyways, this long tangent is meant to let me talk about Time as a measure of success. Time is a crucial measure in MMOs when it comes to leveling up. In order to balance the game and make it feel a bit more "fair" to all players, some games limit the amount of time you can spend progressing, or otherwise tweak the progression rate to give a bonus to players with less time to invest in the game.
And so we finally get back to the topic of the MMO Game Design Challenge: the examples of time-limited gameplay presented in the challenge are designed to level the time-based success playing field and have NOTHING to do with limiting people from playing the game itself. To think that players of FFXIV will stop playing just because they can't earn experience points anymore is ludicrous. Earning XP is only a small portion of the actual game: there's a ton more for players to do. Be it crafting, harvesting, looting, questing, socializing, or just meandering about, players who want to stay online won't log off.
I'm not going to stop at arguing that MMOs aren't limiting players play time, I'm going to argue that MMOs actually encourage spending more time playing. From a business standpoint, an MMO wants its players to spend as much time as possible playing.
Click Here to Keep Playing
MMOs are inherantly social games, and as has been argued previously, social bonds are far stronger at retaining players than anything designed in the game itself. The longer a player plays, the more likely they are to build stronger social bonds with other players in the game, especially if they aren't building social bonds outside the game. Likewise, the more a player spends in a game, the more likely they are to require out-of-game friends to have to play the game in order to spend time with their "addicted" friends.
I dropped in the a-word here in scare-quotes because it's not really a relevant issue to this particular discussion. A game that is designed to be consumed continuously - as most MMOs are - do not have to be addictive in order to feature players who spend every free moment playing the game. I won't argue that some players do become addicted to online games, however they seem to be very few and very far between and often affected by other psychological or social problems. The point, however, is that playing a game for many hours a day does not necessarily indicate addiction.
Seeing as most MMOs are designed by profit-seeking companies, they have to be designed with money-making in mind. Limiting the time that players can invest in becoming successful helps make money by pacing players and forcing them to spend a longer period of time in order to achieve success. Likewise, trying to enforce time-based fairness helps encourage more players to take part and play the game. However, trying to limit the time a player actually plays a game, as is suggested by the Game Design Challenge, is counter-productive to the goal of MMO design.
Case Study: World of Warcraft
Since I'm making bold statements about profitability in MMO, it seems worthwhile to examine the obvious example of a profitable MMO: World of Warcraft. The Game Design Challenge instructions do happen to mention WoW's rested-XP system, how it used to be a penalty (you start with 100% XP gain and it drops to 50% after a time) and got replaced with a bonus (you start with 200% XP gain and it drops to 100% after a time). Does this limit gameplay? Nope. Actually it doesn't really acomplish much of anything at all, because it only applies to the XP you get from killing monsters, which becomes irrelelvantly small at higher levels compared to the XP you get from completing quests.
There's another case of imposed limits in WoW: dungeon lockout timers. Players are prevented from doing the same heroic dungeon more than once per day, or the same raid more than once per week. Is this here to prevent players from being addicted to dungeons an raiding? Hardly. It's a mechanic designed to artificially slow down the rate of loot acquisition from dungeons and raids to keep players playing for a longer period of time, just like systems that slow down the rate of XP gain. It's also in place to gate player progress to make it feel fair, give everyone a chance to advance at the same pace. This was particularly noticible when Icecrown Citadel was added, as each wing (a set of 2-4 bosses) was unlocked after a few weeks, in the hope that every player would have a chance to see the new content at the same time.
So why isn't World of Warcraft blasted for being a horrific source of addiction, compared to many other MMOs (eg: Evercrack)? It's because of its strictly limited use of the luck-based success indicator. WoW certainly has a few luck-based successes (eg: is anyone lucky enough to get the phoenix mount from Kael'Thas?) but they are few and far between and generally limited by other long lockout timers (eg: the week-long raid timer). In contrast, many other MMOs employ a variable interval reward schedule and competition to compound the addictive variable ratio schedule found in WoW.
A Bit of Psychology to Wrap it Up
In Psychology, a reinforcement schedule is a description of the conditions that lead to the reward from performing some behavior. Basically, the variable ratio schedule, whereby some random amount of actions are required to recieve the reward, creates the most high rate of activity and the strongest reinforcement. Variable Ratio is the basis for gambling, where there is a random number of attempts between each win. This same principle is employed in WoW to determine loot drops from bosses. However, bosses themselves are on a fixed interval schedule: you can only fight them once per day or week. So it's like gambling, but you can only place a single bet once per day or week, just like playing the lottery: generally, not considered a harmful addiction because the fixed interval prevents the behavior from denying other behavior.
On the other hand, many other MMOs do not have the fixed interval between attempts. If you can keep killing the boss over and over again, you might keep thinking "I'll get it next time!" and keep playing to kill again and again until you get the item you want. This gets even more problematic when the boss is on a variable interval: a random respawn timer means you can't just log in once a day or hour or however long to kill it, but you have to stay online, watching, waiting for the boss to spawn. This is even further compounded by competition: if multiple players can kill the same boss on a variable interval spawn timer with a random chance of dropping loot, you've got one massive addictive brew (or, as FFXI has found, a massive problem for hacks, bots, and other issues).
Interestingly, the key to keeping addiction down is to keep fairness up: fixed intervals for attempts, non-competition for attempts, and other balancing design can let players feel "secure" that their efforts will be fairly rewarded without having to over-invest time and effort in the game to feel like they have a chance at success.
So! Moral of the Story? Keep your MMO fair and you won't have to worry about limiting the time your players spend playing it!
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very interesting article, maybe the MMO- structure we are accustomed to just needs to be re-balanced.
It revolves around this perspective:
"From a business standpoint, an MMO wants its players to spend as much time as possible playing."
While that seems intuitively obvious, I question whether it's actually true. In fact, I think what a MMO operator *really* wants is maximum revenue for minimum time spent online. After all, the more active users you have, the higher your server maintenance costs. The perfect MMO is one that people continuously pay for but never log in to play.
In a practical sense, the Perfect MMO is just good enough that people keep paying to play it, but not good enough that the majority of players *want* to play for hours at a time. I know that might sound a bit cynical on first reading, but is it really?
EVE Online actually comes pretty close to perfection with its fiendishly clever offline skill training feature. But it fails to be perfect since for some people it turns out to be fun to play while online. :) [Edit: Progress Quest fails as well since the Perfect MMO does need *some* online content that's enough fun for people to be willing to pay for it.]
You know, I think I might propose the Perfect MMO to the Game Design Challenge folks, just to see what happens....
So you're halfway there with your statement: really, the operator wants maximum revenue, period. I meant to suggest that time spent playing directly correlates to money spent on the game, either by continuing to pay a monthly fee to play or by making additional item-shop purchases in a free to play game. I'd argue that the more involved a player is in a game, the more time they spend playing it and the more money they invest in it. Limiting the time a player can spend on a game also limits how involved they can become in the game and, ultimately, limits the money that can be earned from that player.
Still, I'm drawn to the challenge of trying to deliberately design a game that maximizes subscribers while minimizing the amount of time they want to spend actually playing the game.
Isn't there something very "social game"-like about that setup?
Factors I figured should come into play:
1) Even playing ground: Basically, a limit on how much investment advantages a player over another. The optimal situation is to have social factors be the driver rather than in-game factors, both for balance reasons and to prevent situations where one player is invariably permanently ahead (or known as a permanent imbalance).
2) Planned obsolescence: To curb the need for newer players to invest more time to "catch up", investments should eventually go obsolete. The trick here is how to justify this. In social games, there are invariably two factors: that items don't have significant in-game value, but significant social value, and that said value are more dependent on monetary input than time input. However, since I despise the two factors, I'll just focus on the base requirement of planned obsolescence, and a single obvious factor crops up: evolution. Meaning that obstacles forces players to change tactics: the forerunners get the small advantage of figuring out the tactics first, while future players gain the advantage of not requiring to figure it all out.
3) Customization: This has been played around, but not significantly, other than in pay models. And in terms of pay models, it has been faring well: Since it doesn't affect game play, people don't feel the game to be unfair, yet are still encouraged to participate. The question then is, why not implement this into game play itself? Have the rewards serve as customization options.
4) Skill based: This is not really necessary (see current social "games"), but for purposes of designing a "game", it has to take precedence. How instance, I'm almost sure that TF2 can be converted into an MMO in the style of Planetside (another MMO which has rather minor RPG elements).
With cloud computing, you can actually pay by the CPU/hour, and so MMO
operators might actually pay less during off-times than they do during peak-times. Even without using the cloud, you might be able to dynamically underclock your CPU when fewer players are playing, and save money that way: One of Google's biggest expense is their electricity bill.
It's not too difficult to come up with a game design which tends towards Bart's "perfect MMO" metric: Reward the player for achieving in-game goals, but punish them for being online. Think, for example, of Sid Meier's Pirates. It's a fun game, but your character has an age, and after a while, your character will die of old age, forcing you to start from scratch. As such, I like playing the quests, but I absolutely want to minimize the time spent sailing around, since this is counting against my age. You could have a similar mechanic in your "perfect MMO" where being online drains your character in some way, and so players have to make a decision as to whether the gains of being online right now (either in terms of how much fun their having, or how much character progression they can achieve or whatever) outweights the "drain factor".
Perhaps creating a secondary experience with less maintenance cost could be a way as well. A lot of people play MMOs for the social aspect of it. With that said people spend an enormous amount of time at places like facebook/myspace. Perhaps a facebook app that integrates with the MMOs social interface could play a key roll in that. Being able to talk to people and check on things while your not in the "full game" could give players a way to tap into that gameworld while lowering overall maintenance costs for the "full game." You would have to make sure that both "experiences" cost less to operate then one "full experience".
Just a thought of course.
As far as getting old or other disincentives to play, these, I'd imagine, would be a death knell for a traditional MMO. If you could only ever play World of Warcraft for a set period of time, after which your character dies of old age and it's game over, people would never pay the monthly fee after the set time ends. MMOs, I think, have a strong basis in the sense of persistence: both persistent worlds and persistent characters. I think that's why perma-death, while an interesting concept that some players have supported (in theory) has never even been (to my knowledge) an option in any subscription-based commercial MMO: if a player permanently dies, that's a huge risk of losing the player and their subscription fee, even if they could make a new character and start over again.
@David, while an amusing thought, I can't imagine any possible scenario where that could be achieved, short of a game company hiring just as many GMs as they have players to stand around in the real world and hand out quest rewards. While you may save a bit of money on bandwidth, you'd certainly lose a lot more in salaries!
Incidentally, another friend brought up a good point that I had missed in the original article: not all MMOs are of the "traditional MMORPG" fare that came about with the golden trio. He pointed out that many popular browser-based MMOs are turn-based, strictly limiting how many actions each player can take in any given 24 hour period. Does anyone have any information about how well turn-based MMOs compare with traditional subscription-based or micro-transaction MMOs? I'd be curious to know if it's as financially viable, considering it limits player participation in that way.