Why do people PvP in a MMORPG? If you ask the fans, you will end up with one variation of the answer that fighting against another human is intrinsically more interesting than fighting a scripted AI mob. Which is pretty much the reason why I keep enjoying World of Tanks after over 3,000 battles. But if we observe what people actually do in a MMORPG, does this answer hold up?
It is known that given the chance PvP players in a MMORPG will engage in win trading. Recent examples are a rift PvP exploit in Rift or Tol Barad in World of Warcraft. And then there are countless stories from pretty much every PvP MMORPG in existence about how players went to extreme lengths to win PvP by means which have nothing whatsoever to do with actually playing the game: Denial of Service attacks on the enemy alliance's Teamspeak servers in EVE. Attacking the enemy keep at 3 am in the morning when all possible defenders are logged off in WAR or DAoC. And the list goes on and on. If people were actually interested in fighting a more intelligent opponent, then why would they trade wins or attack when only a token AI defending force is present?
I think the answer is that in a MMORPG the ultimate purpose of any activity (PvP or PvE) is always character advancement. And that character advancement purpose has the unfortunate habit to trump every other possible purpose. Frequently to the point where people choose advancement over fun. "Yeah, it would be more fun to actually battle the other faction over that PvP rift, but lets just trade wins to get more prestige per hour." Unless game developers succeed in the impossible task of every activity giving exactly the same amount of reward for the same effort, players will always look for shortcuts to faster advancement, regardless of whether that shortcut is actually fun to play.
The solution is to rather do PvP games which aren't strictly MMORPGs, and where the fun of the battle against an intelligent opponent beats out the draw of the character advancement. I've found mine with World of Tanks. I hear League of Legends also works that way. And Trion goes from Rift to End of Nations. I think we will see a lot more successful PvP in the future that aren't MMORPGs.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Is Darkfall vaporware, again?
With most MMOs you have to deal with a lot of hype pre-release. Ideas looking amazing on paper, fans letting their imagination run wild on what could be, all of that.
Is Darkfall the only MMO to ever repeat this cycle? I mean look, stuff like this sounds amazing right? Momentum mattering in combat (Mount and Blade?), how itemization will work this time around, the character power/options stuff, all the graphical updates, better new player experience, etc. It all sounds great. On paper.
And on the one hand, Aventurine did deliver something pretty amazing with Darkfall. It still has the best MMO combat ever (fact not opinion), and name me a better PvP MMO that stayed true to it’s design for 2+ years not named EVE?
On the other hand, updates to DF of late have been… um… sparse to be kind. And DF1 had a lot of ideas on paper pre-release that never really made it either. So it’s not like we can say that AV always delivers.
Aventurine, breaking new ground, even in areas you never suspected (or wanted).
Is Darkfall the only MMO to ever repeat this cycle? I mean look, stuff like this sounds amazing right? Momentum mattering in combat (Mount and Blade?), how itemization will work this time around, the character power/options stuff, all the graphical updates, better new player experience, etc. It all sounds great. On paper.
And on the one hand, Aventurine did deliver something pretty amazing with Darkfall. It still has the best MMO combat ever (fact not opinion), and name me a better PvP MMO that stayed true to it’s design for 2+ years not named EVE?
On the other hand, updates to DF of late have been… um… sparse to be kind. And DF1 had a lot of ideas on paper pre-release that never really made it either. So it’s not like we can say that AV always delivers.
Aventurine, breaking new ground, even in areas you never suspected (or wanted).
Friday, August 12, 2011
THE NEW MMO BUSINESS MODEL
Not to bank on financial writers for solid reporting related to MMOs or anything, but this little blurb I found interesting for one reason: how important are initial sales for an MMO?
Of course they are important, after all if no one buys your game at launch, who cares how great your retention is, right? But five years after release, would you rather be WAR or EVE? EVE sold something like 50k copies at release, WAR sold close to (or over?) a million. We all know how each game is doing right now, and how things are likely to continue. Factor in development costs and all that, and the picture is pretty clear.
Going back to SW, the fact that the game is ‘trending’ high for pre-orders means next to nothing for me as a fan (I’m sure the suits are happy). A monkey could hype and sell SW right now. It’s SW, it’s BioWare, it cost a billion dollars to develop, and EA is throwing another billion to market it. It also helps that the vast majority of people who pre-ordered the game have not played it, and even those who have are playing in the “best case scenario” land of beta. But even if SW sells, say, 1-2 million copies at release, if its retention rate mirrors that of WAR (and I think it will), won’t the game still end up costing EA in the end?
WoW makes Blizzard truckloads of cash not because it sold a ton of copies at release, but because it has had millions paying $15 a month for years, easily recouping all those development costs and sitting pretty in almost (they do still have an intern updating the game occasionally I believe) pure profit land. That’s always been the model for an MMO: high initial cost, ability to make some of it back one day one, then hopefully make it all back and profit after X amount of time has passed. If the vast majority of your players are gone before you hit X, the plan kinda falls apart.
Or is the new MMO model to super-hype a release, get a million or so suckers, err sorry, fans, to buy it at release (for $150 preferably), and consider it a job well done a day/week/month after release? Because from an MMO fans perspective, that’s not what I’m here for, and I have sRPG’s that do a much better job of deliver that kind of content.
I also think biggest enemy of the world is HARDCORE CASUAL BLOG : Bringing back the carebears stare. Because it doesn't make sense. Carebears already rule the world. So why "bringing back"?
Of course they are important, after all if no one buys your game at launch, who cares how great your retention is, right? But five years after release, would you rather be WAR or EVE? EVE sold something like 50k copies at release, WAR sold close to (or over?) a million. We all know how each game is doing right now, and how things are likely to continue. Factor in development costs and all that, and the picture is pretty clear.
Going back to SW, the fact that the game is ‘trending’ high for pre-orders means next to nothing for me as a fan (I’m sure the suits are happy). A monkey could hype and sell SW right now. It’s SW, it’s BioWare, it cost a billion dollars to develop, and EA is throwing another billion to market it. It also helps that the vast majority of people who pre-ordered the game have not played it, and even those who have are playing in the “best case scenario” land of beta. But even if SW sells, say, 1-2 million copies at release, if its retention rate mirrors that of WAR (and I think it will), won’t the game still end up costing EA in the end?
WoW makes Blizzard truckloads of cash not because it sold a ton of copies at release, but because it has had millions paying $15 a month for years, easily recouping all those development costs and sitting pretty in almost (they do still have an intern updating the game occasionally I believe) pure profit land. That’s always been the model for an MMO: high initial cost, ability to make some of it back one day one, then hopefully make it all back and profit after X amount of time has passed. If the vast majority of your players are gone before you hit X, the plan kinda falls apart.
Or is the new MMO model to super-hype a release, get a million or so suckers, err sorry, fans, to buy it at release (for $150 preferably), and consider it a job well done a day/week/month after release? Because from an MMO fans perspective, that’s not what I’m here for, and I have sRPG’s that do a much better job of deliver that kind of content.
I also think biggest enemy of the world is HARDCORE CASUAL BLOG : Bringing back the carebears stare. Because it doesn't make sense. Carebears already rule the world. So why "bringing back"?
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Diablo 3 TAX QUESTION
There are obvious dangers in getting your tax advice from a gaming blog instead from an expert, but Stabs has good advice on your tax liabilities from Diablo III RMT AH sales. He is completely right in stating that your taxes are your personal responsibility, not Blizzard's, and you should inform yourself whether you need to pay taxes on the money you make from selling Diablo III items for real money in the AH. It is quite likely that if you make serious money from this activity, you'll need to pay taxes on that.
The far more interesting question is whether you would have to pay taxes if you don't make any real money from Diablo III auction house sales. Basically it could be argued that if a virtual item is worth real money, gathering those virtual items is an income, and thus taxable. The horror scenario is that the legendary Sword of Uberness which is worth $1,000 on the AH drops for you, and you'd have to pay taxes on those $1,000 even if you never sold the sword.
Now I am not a lawyer, nor a tax accountant, but I find that scenario somewhat unlikely. For example there are Olympic medals for sale on EBay (I checked and saw a gold medal for sale for $15,000). Thus Olympic medals clearly have a monetary value if you'd chose to sell them. Nevertheless winners of Olympic medals aren't taxed on those medals as a form of income. They'd be taxed on the sales if they sold the medal, but not as long as the monetary value was hypothetical before any sale took place. Basically the question is at which point in time you actually made a taxable income, at the point where you gained the item you could sell, or at the point where you actually sold it. I'm pretty certain it is the latter. If you create a vase out of clay, you'd be taxed on selling it, not the moment you take the finished vase out of the oven.
Blizzard getting you in trouble by sending the list of the items and gold that dropped for you in Diablo III to the IRS is not going to happen. Blizzard getting you in trouble by sending a list of your real-money AH sales to the IRS is far more likely. And even there the trouble might only start the moment you cash out that real money. You might want to reconsider your plans of quitting your job and becoming a Diablo III item farmer. Or as Benjamin Franklin said: "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes".
The far more interesting question is whether you would have to pay taxes if you don't make any real money from Diablo III auction house sales. Basically it could be argued that if a virtual item is worth real money, gathering those virtual items is an income, and thus taxable. The horror scenario is that the legendary Sword of Uberness which is worth $1,000 on the AH drops for you, and you'd have to pay taxes on those $1,000 even if you never sold the sword.
Now I am not a lawyer, nor a tax accountant, but I find that scenario somewhat unlikely. For example there are Olympic medals for sale on EBay (I checked and saw a gold medal for sale for $15,000). Thus Olympic medals clearly have a monetary value if you'd chose to sell them. Nevertheless winners of Olympic medals aren't taxed on those medals as a form of income. They'd be taxed on the sales if they sold the medal, but not as long as the monetary value was hypothetical before any sale took place. Basically the question is at which point in time you actually made a taxable income, at the point where you gained the item you could sell, or at the point where you actually sold it. I'm pretty certain it is the latter. If you create a vase out of clay, you'd be taxed on selling it, not the moment you take the finished vase out of the oven.
Blizzard getting you in trouble by sending the list of the items and gold that dropped for you in Diablo III to the IRS is not going to happen. Blizzard getting you in trouble by sending a list of your real-money AH sales to the IRS is far more likely. And even there the trouble might only start the moment you cash out that real money. You might want to reconsider your plans of quitting your job and becoming a Diablo III item farmer. Or as Benjamin Franklin said: "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes".
THE SKILL PARADOX
A little while ago I came across a comment on a blog which claimed that “as we know, most MMO players are bad”. I did – and do – find it curious, because this indeed does get passed around as a universal truth: most people we meet online are terrible players. Naturally and curiously except for those we’re having these discussions with, we’re all just fine. This, to hit where it hurts right from the start, is basically the same reasoning that constitutes racism: “all black people are savages, except for Joe, who’s a member in my Country Club”. We can even admit the popular argument that the blogging community in a way self-selects the better, because obviously more invested, players – and who doesn’t like to attribute themselves to a self-proclaimed elite; us bloggers, we’re awesome, aren’t we – and it still plays on the same lawn as racism, after all, the Country Club is also obviously a selective environment, but those other black people, the ones outside, they’re obviously savages. It is the hypocrisy that makes every representative of a group one knows by name and face an exception, while at the same time maintaining blanket judgements about the large anonymous group as a whole. That’s not what this post is about though. Instead, I’d like to consider how we arrive at the perception.
First of all, the claim itself that “most players are terrible” is inevitably wrong. As I casually remarked recently, we all live in the Gaussian Curve, and what it really means is that most players are average, as this is how most natural averages form, with only few cases when the data points are crowded near the extremes and the average is a mostly virtual value. An example of the latter could be the life expectation during the European Middle Ages, which was mathematically around 35, but if you look at the numbers closer, you realise that it doesn’t mean that “most people died around age 35″, but that the horrifyingly high infant mortality skewed the statistic and what it rather means is “if you survived past the age of 1, you were probably going to run for the 70″. But this is unnatural, an anomaly. Usually distributions follow the Gaussian Curve, which is why it’s called the Normal Distribution.
There are of course special situations, like, say, Wrath of the Lich King creating a particular expectation about content difficulty and the subsequent Cataclysm taking things in a somewhat different direction. But the aforementioned sentiments gets stated sweepingly, not in some differentiated “in early 2011, large parts of the WoW player base were not prepared for the content difficulty presented to them”, and gets accepted sweepingly. In fact, I can be reasonably sure that someone will actually comment on this very post that “no-no, really, everyone is terrible”. Well, maybe not after I wrote this, kind of falsifying the experiment. Or maybe not, because there are, like, 5 people commenting on my posts, so this isn’t exactly a relevant sample size of anything.
Still, the whole WotLK/Cata thing also highlights that, of course, skill is not an abstract concept, it is relative to difficulty of the task in question. So, yes, if we’re talking about reciting randomly selected works of Shakespeare while running a marathon in Antarctica, most people would be pretty terrible at it. Shopping for groceries on the other hand is something most would find pretty easy, catering to the casuals, almost. Here’s the thing though: in the context of a game, i.e. voluntary entertainment activity, people gravitate towards and away from activities such that in the long term, you are left with your normal distribution again – those for whom it’s too hard or too easy mostly leave. Even now, I think the Cata-difficulty issue is pretty much settling itself (Nils has some great recent posts on why having just one difficulty for everyone is bad design), because the averages are adjusting themselves, people are settling in their new relative positions and the content is self-nerfing.
Then there is always the possible explanation that there are, at any time, many new and inexperienced players. But frankly, this is not what the statement quoted at the outset states. “Most players are new” is not the same as “most players are bad”, even though it’s similarly unlikely. More importantly, catering to new players is by far not the same as catering to bad players. In fact, catering to new players is very important, as the expectation we have is that new players are going to learn, while bad players are not. Conversely, if you don’t let your players learn (cater to new players), you raise incompetent players (well hello, trivialised levelling game).
Last and least, because it’s mostly an exercise in being a smartass, the statement doesn’t even make sense on a logical-linguistic level. If “most players are terrible”, then terrible is the average, thus most players are average. If you’re the brilliant exception, then it’s you who is in the wrong place and probably should go back to the South Pole Stadium-slash-Theatre.
So far, we have a brief outline of why “most players are terrible” should be considered to be wrong. Yet there are lots of people who will tell you that and be genuinely surprised that anyone should think otherwise (remember the bit with the potential comment on this post? Wait for it, still may happen!). Why is this? After thinking about it for a bit, I realised that the solution is The Blub Paradox. It’s a fairly long and technical essay, rich on self-praise, but well worth reading if one is interested in the matter. I will proceed to adopt the part relevant to describe The Skill Paradox.
Imagine the Skill Continuum. No, it’s not the point in space-time a gamer occupies at 13:37. It’s the line on which all skill levels are laid out in increasing order, from a hopeless failure to the greatest winner. Now imagine a player A, whose skill places somewhere on the continuum, a safe distance from both extremes. As long as A is looking down the skill continuum, he recognises that he’s looking down. He can see all the things these players are doing wrong, all the mistakes they’re making, all the potentials for optimisation. If he’s looking up, however, he doesn’t realise that he’s looking up. All he can see are players who are basically just as good as him, only some of them tend to do things in weirdly esoteric ways. A may even consider some of them his inferiors, because, seriously, what sensible person would ever do those esoteric things. This is the Skill Paradox, meaning that we possess very pronounced abilities in recognising all the ways in which other players are worse than us, but are comparatively bad in perceiving the ways in which other players are better than us. The direct consequence is that we tend to think of ourselves as “very close to the top” regardless of where we actually place in the skill continuum, which in turn, especially if you’re not necessarily the self-scrutinising type, lends itself to the “most people are terrible” fallacy.
At this point I originally intended to write down personally experienced cases of when despite the apparently obvious presence of empirical evidence I wasn’t as good as I thought I were, and only got better after embracing details I previously had dismissed as irrelevant, ranging from my most newbish online gaming beginnings in the year 2000 to more recent experiences. In fact I even wrote down those examples, read through them, and they felt so full of unintended self-adulation that they made me sick. And, you know, as much as there is to say about how awesome I am (for example: how awesome I am), I ultimately decided that it would rather distract from than support the point.
The point being: as soon as you acquire even marginal competence in a field (note how we gently drifted away from being gaming-specific), you will find it easy to recognise the shortcomings of those below your level of competence – that’s why you’re better than them, you moved past making their mistakes. Your observations will objectively suggest that you’re “one of the best”, because everyone else you observe is “bad”, with the exception of those whose superiority you cannot fully comprehend as such, for the very same reason they are superior – they realised potentials you have yet to discover.
Shall you live in eternal self-doubt? No, not at all. If you feel you’re good, you probably are. No one is born a master. Just know there’s always a “better” as much as there’s a “worse”. This is also why I don’t like evaluating my own performance based on doing something others (supposedly) can’t do – it’s much more intriguing to consider what can be done than what can’t. Otherwise you’re going for that old trap where “anyone who has accomplished more than you has no life, and anyone who has accomplished less is a noob“.
There is another consequence to all of this, one that won’t sound particularly surprising: your ability to look up the Skill Continuum and realise that you are looking up is directly related to your ability to become better yourself. This is what teachers, trainers and guides do, they explain to their students how those esoteric things can make them better. The good ones do, the bad ones simply state what to do – and sadly there’s a huge demand just for that, seen in the MMORPG world where a lot more people blindly follow the cookie-cutter spec and rotation than actually understand why and under which conditions it is superior. Whenever you convince yourself that “this is as good as it gets”, you stop improving. A truism, really.
And just as I was about to finally post this (it’s the third rework or so), xkcd came out almost on cue: Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
First of all, the claim itself that “most players are terrible” is inevitably wrong. As I casually remarked recently, we all live in the Gaussian Curve, and what it really means is that most players are average, as this is how most natural averages form, with only few cases when the data points are crowded near the extremes and the average is a mostly virtual value. An example of the latter could be the life expectation during the European Middle Ages, which was mathematically around 35, but if you look at the numbers closer, you realise that it doesn’t mean that “most people died around age 35″, but that the horrifyingly high infant mortality skewed the statistic and what it rather means is “if you survived past the age of 1, you were probably going to run for the 70″. But this is unnatural, an anomaly. Usually distributions follow the Gaussian Curve, which is why it’s called the Normal Distribution.
There are of course special situations, like, say, Wrath of the Lich King creating a particular expectation about content difficulty and the subsequent Cataclysm taking things in a somewhat different direction. But the aforementioned sentiments gets stated sweepingly, not in some differentiated “in early 2011, large parts of the WoW player base were not prepared for the content difficulty presented to them”, and gets accepted sweepingly. In fact, I can be reasonably sure that someone will actually comment on this very post that “no-no, really, everyone is terrible”. Well, maybe not after I wrote this, kind of falsifying the experiment. Or maybe not, because there are, like, 5 people commenting on my posts, so this isn’t exactly a relevant sample size of anything.
Still, the whole WotLK/Cata thing also highlights that, of course, skill is not an abstract concept, it is relative to difficulty of the task in question. So, yes, if we’re talking about reciting randomly selected works of Shakespeare while running a marathon in Antarctica, most people would be pretty terrible at it. Shopping for groceries on the other hand is something most would find pretty easy, catering to the casuals, almost. Here’s the thing though: in the context of a game, i.e. voluntary entertainment activity, people gravitate towards and away from activities such that in the long term, you are left with your normal distribution again – those for whom it’s too hard or too easy mostly leave. Even now, I think the Cata-difficulty issue is pretty much settling itself (Nils has some great recent posts on why having just one difficulty for everyone is bad design), because the averages are adjusting themselves, people are settling in their new relative positions and the content is self-nerfing.
Then there is always the possible explanation that there are, at any time, many new and inexperienced players. But frankly, this is not what the statement quoted at the outset states. “Most players are new” is not the same as “most players are bad”, even though it’s similarly unlikely. More importantly, catering to new players is by far not the same as catering to bad players. In fact, catering to new players is very important, as the expectation we have is that new players are going to learn, while bad players are not. Conversely, if you don’t let your players learn (cater to new players), you raise incompetent players (well hello, trivialised levelling game).
Last and least, because it’s mostly an exercise in being a smartass, the statement doesn’t even make sense on a logical-linguistic level. If “most players are terrible”, then terrible is the average, thus most players are average. If you’re the brilliant exception, then it’s you who is in the wrong place and probably should go back to the South Pole Stadium-slash-Theatre.
So far, we have a brief outline of why “most players are terrible” should be considered to be wrong. Yet there are lots of people who will tell you that and be genuinely surprised that anyone should think otherwise (remember the bit with the potential comment on this post? Wait for it, still may happen!). Why is this? After thinking about it for a bit, I realised that the solution is The Blub Paradox. It’s a fairly long and technical essay, rich on self-praise, but well worth reading if one is interested in the matter. I will proceed to adopt the part relevant to describe The Skill Paradox.
Imagine the Skill Continuum. No, it’s not the point in space-time a gamer occupies at 13:37. It’s the line on which all skill levels are laid out in increasing order, from a hopeless failure to the greatest winner. Now imagine a player A, whose skill places somewhere on the continuum, a safe distance from both extremes. As long as A is looking down the skill continuum, he recognises that he’s looking down. He can see all the things these players are doing wrong, all the mistakes they’re making, all the potentials for optimisation. If he’s looking up, however, he doesn’t realise that he’s looking up. All he can see are players who are basically just as good as him, only some of them tend to do things in weirdly esoteric ways. A may even consider some of them his inferiors, because, seriously, what sensible person would ever do those esoteric things. This is the Skill Paradox, meaning that we possess very pronounced abilities in recognising all the ways in which other players are worse than us, but are comparatively bad in perceiving the ways in which other players are better than us. The direct consequence is that we tend to think of ourselves as “very close to the top” regardless of where we actually place in the skill continuum, which in turn, especially if you’re not necessarily the self-scrutinising type, lends itself to the “most people are terrible” fallacy.
At this point I originally intended to write down personally experienced cases of when despite the apparently obvious presence of empirical evidence I wasn’t as good as I thought I were, and only got better after embracing details I previously had dismissed as irrelevant, ranging from my most newbish online gaming beginnings in the year 2000 to more recent experiences. In fact I even wrote down those examples, read through them, and they felt so full of unintended self-adulation that they made me sick. And, you know, as much as there is to say about how awesome I am (for example: how awesome I am), I ultimately decided that it would rather distract from than support the point.
The point being: as soon as you acquire even marginal competence in a field (note how we gently drifted away from being gaming-specific), you will find it easy to recognise the shortcomings of those below your level of competence – that’s why you’re better than them, you moved past making their mistakes. Your observations will objectively suggest that you’re “one of the best”, because everyone else you observe is “bad”, with the exception of those whose superiority you cannot fully comprehend as such, for the very same reason they are superior – they realised potentials you have yet to discover.
Shall you live in eternal self-doubt? No, not at all. If you feel you’re good, you probably are. No one is born a master. Just know there’s always a “better” as much as there’s a “worse”. This is also why I don’t like evaluating my own performance based on doing something others (supposedly) can’t do – it’s much more intriguing to consider what can be done than what can’t. Otherwise you’re going for that old trap where “anyone who has accomplished more than you has no life, and anyone who has accomplished less is a noob“.
There is another consequence to all of this, one that won’t sound particularly surprising: your ability to look up the Skill Continuum and realise that you are looking up is directly related to your ability to become better yourself. This is what teachers, trainers and guides do, they explain to their students how those esoteric things can make them better. The good ones do, the bad ones simply state what to do – and sadly there’s a huge demand just for that, seen in the MMORPG world where a lot more people blindly follow the cookie-cutter spec and rotation than actually understand why and under which conditions it is superior. Whenever you convince yourself that “this is as good as it gets”, you stop improving. A truism, really.
And just as I was about to finally post this (it’s the third rework or so), xkcd came out almost on cue: Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
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