28 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
Barm said:
One of the things I'm doing in my project is to give each character guild a set of scaled values that control how effective they are at various things. For instance, a warrior might have a heavy armor skill of 1.0 and mage 0.01. The mage can put on armor if he likes, but it will do him less good than wearing a burlap sack

The TES games do this. Your skill in light/medium/heavy armor affects how good you are with it. If you have very high 'light armor' and very low 'heavy armor' then you are indeed much better off wearing leather armor than plate mail (or the game's equiv. of plate mail, e.g. Daedric armor, whatever).

Barm said:
If you want to control items, I strongly suggest avoiding hard-coded restrictions because they suck the air out of the immersion factor.

I don't think this was a level restriction, by the way.
28 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Yeah, that sounds like a loot restriction because some player died there. I also disagree with unlootable corpses, because… well… if you don't want people to steal other people's stuff, don't leave a corpse at all. Why make them run back for it, if it will just be there, safe and sound, anyways?

One could imagine a mage who has trained as a warrior (multi-class, used to be a warrior and gave it up, etc), donning some heavy armour for the adventure that takes place in the anti-magic zone. :)
28 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Barm said:
If you want to control items, I strongly suggest avoiding hard-coded restrictions because they suck the air out of the immersion factor.

I don't think this was a level restriction, by the way.


If you're referring to the sword glued to the pavement, you are correct. I was just using it as an example of the unnatural feel of forced behavior. I much prefer systems that let me accidentally swing at a city guard and get disemboweled for being stupid than ones that say, 'You may not attack that target'. Just to be inconsistent, I wouldn't say the same thing about PvP, but I think the difference is having to suffer my own stupidity vs. that of someone else.
28 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
One could imagine a mage who has trained as a warrior (multi-class, used to be a warrior and gave it up, etc), donning some heavy armour for the adventure that takes place in the anti-magic zone. :)


That would be pretty easy under my system as long as I permitted existing character skills to be higher than their current guild * level. You wouldn't lose anything but you'd never increase either. I'm more tempted to create hybrid guilds with skills derived and hand-tweaked from two (or more) parent guilds.
28 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
The only possible issue with the item scaling approach is that it can decrease the likelihood of a player ever buying new items. Basically, from a combat mechanics perspective, having the high-level item scale down to the player's level avoids breakage. From an economy perspective, though, a low-level player getting his hands on a high-level item means that he's no longer part of the purchase upgrade treadmill, nor is he likely to quest for mid-level items. That may or may not be a real problem depending on the design of your game (is it even possible to buy high level items? do quests even have item rewards? is there any economy around creating and selling items?), but for the vast majority of RPG designs it will definitely be undesirable. The level/skill restrictions basically require that the player still work with the economy and quest system at least until they're able to use the high level item. If the player has limited carrying capacity and no unlimited bank/locker space, he might even find that collecting a bunch of high-level equipment he won't be able to use for a long time is just not worth it. Item degradation will allow a character who gets a high-level item to temporarily break the combat system, but it will rebalance the system soon enough when the item is used up and also forces all characters to continue interacting with the economy, especially if players can't hoard items and thus collect a large number of throw-away high-level items.

Item binding and level restrictions mostly just make sure that the combat mechanics are unbreakable. They are only a partial solution to characters getting their hands on high level items, basically. However, some players REALLY hate the idea of an item ever being lost or destroyed. And I mean hate it the same way Jews hate Hitler. (Many gamers get way too worked up over their virtual crap, and really need to just be kicked off the Internet, but alas, no such laws are in place.) I have had people literally scream at me for even suggesting the idea of items that can be damaged. If you are going for a large market appeal, you might end up sticking with level caps. The immersionists are small in number and the gamists are high in number, and level caps tend to appeal to the latter. You're obviously never going to get a MUD to the size of WoW, but if you're hoping to be one of those rare MUDs that has 100+ active logged-in players at any give moment, you might need to lean towards appealing to gamists.

When aiming towards a gamist solution, you're best off aiming for a simpler system and simpler economy that is unbreakable by way of having no loopholes than you are by building more complex and organic systems that heal themselves over time. If you're aiming for a more immersive environment, simpler systems feel artificial and restrictive and make it harder to maintain suspension of disbelief while organic systems flow with the players and just work out the kinks if and when they arise.
28 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
The only possible issue with the item scaling approach is that it can decrease the likelihood of a player ever buying new items.

I did also mention that problem in post #1, but Runter provided a possible solution in post #8: "Perhaps if the decay of usefulness was exponential you could solve this problem. I.e., vastly higher level restricted items end up being less valuable to wear at low levels than items you could find closer to said level."

Combine that with the equipment repair and maintenance costs I mentioned in post #9, with the costs based on the level of the item as shasarak suggested in post #12, and players should have a pretty strong incentive to use equipment of their own level, without the need for an enforced restriction.
28 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
When aiming towards a gamist solution, you're best off aiming for a simpler system and simpler economy that is unbreakable by way of having no loopholes than you are by building more complex and organic systems that heal themselves over time.

Nothing you can ever design is unbreakable. Organic systems understand this, and try to naturally correct the inevitable breaks.
28 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis is spot on with regards to knowing your target audience. There are indeed "hardcore" players who enjoy the challenges of item decay, rent, and even perma-death. Those people also tend to hate level restrictions or other "unnatural" rules, because they can often min/max their way into better gear than they're supposed to have. The unwashed masses, however, treat every item as a direct gift from on high, and the idea that something they endured dozens of instance raids to get might go poof, makes them melt in terror.

Of course, it's ironic in a way. WoW does have item decay (but not destruction or PvP looting), and every expansion renders their gear worthless, since the new quest rewards are always better than the former top-tier gear was.
28 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
WoW does have item decay (but not destruction or PvP looting), and every expansion renders their gear worthless, since the new quest rewards are always better than the former top-tier gear was.


It's actually a brilliant system (for Blizzard). All the content of a new expansion is equally accessible to all players regardless of whether they worked hard during the previous one. A few hours of solo questing and you're completely re-geared in tune with the first elite instance – instant balance. Of course, it annoys the @^&#* out of players who spend hundreds of hours grinding out every possible upgrade and enhancement.
28 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I did also mention that problem in post #1, but Runter provided a possible solution in post #8: "Perhaps if the decay of usefulness was exponential you could solve this problem. I.e., vastly higher level restricted items end up being less valuable to wear at low levels than items you could find closer to said level."


Every problem has a solution. :) I'm not personally fond of either of those solutions, but that's me. My roommate had the suggestion of using scaling at fixed intervals. The level 1 guy with a level 100 sword can only use it as a level 1 item, and it stays as a level 1 item until he hits level 20 at which point it is then a level 20 item, until he hits the next step. Maybe there is only one step, maybe many. It basically still forces the character to worry about finding new items during most of his adventuring career, since at level 10 that level 100 item being treated as a level 1 item is not nearly as helpful as finding a level-appropriate item.

I'm personally still just fond of intrinsic ability systems versus extrinsic/equipment based systems. The idea that one sword cuts 20 times better or is 20 times faster or is 20 times more "balanced" is just silly, and I don't like magic item proliferation. That is just personal preference and taste. It is entirely a world/setting choice which is reflected through the mechanics, not a mechanics choice in and of itself (that is, it's a mechanics choice based primarily on the feel of the setting I prefer). Which goes back into the concept of setting and mechanics being tied together and wholly inseparable, despite how hard some self-proclaimed "generic systems" try to pretend that mechanics are independent of setting. The mechanics will always have consequences in the stories you can and can't tell and the stories you want to tell will always place obligations on the mechanics to allow or disallow various actions. e.g., a setting that is supposed to be immersive and somewhat realistic doesn't mesh well with item binding, while a system that requires a lot of attention on the minutae of item management detracts and dillutes from stories that are about epic heroes slaying legions of demon kings.

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Nothing you can ever design is unbreakable.


Not true at all. The simpler systems that are unbreakable are usually just considered very boring by most people. :) Chess is an example of an unbreakable game, as there is no guaranteed win strategy of any kind. There are strategies that are better than others, but the purpose of the game is to learn and use those strategies, and using a superior strategy is not at all a "loophole."

RPGs are many orders of magnitude more complex than chess, and even the simplest of RPG has enough variables that there usually is a loophole of some kind. The question then is just whether that flaw is big enough to really worry about, and whether or not it can be "patched out." If the player finds that farming some particular common low-level enemy's loot results in better wealth gain than level-appropriate encounters, it's an easy fix. A proper formulaic approach to the game design (and its related world/setting elements) can actually eliminate a LOT of those loopholes. I cannot stress enough that fact – every game is just a series of rules and numbers, and hence is a set of algorithms, and hence can be mathematically analyzed and balanced. It is not a matter of whether it's possible, only a matter of whether the designer is willing to put in the effort, and how much effort any particular design requires. D&D has a lot of variables, for example, but it can and has been mathematically broken down, and the vast majority of the imbalances in the game design that have been found and exploited by players over the years can be easily identified as a point where the rules broke away from their own formula (monsters that don't follow proper stat progression, items that do more than their relative value/level should allow, custom items that break from the rules about which equip slots allow which bonuses, and so on). Of course, some gamers might feel that locking the game into the formula makes it less interesting and less organic, which may or may not be true; I believe some gamers just _like_ breaking game systems, to the point where they feel that finding and exploiting loopholes is the actually entertaining part of gaming. There's no pleasing everybody. :)

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and every expansion renders their gear worthless


Which is why I can name of a very large number of people who quit when the first expansion came out. They actually felt cheated and pissed off. A few of my friends kept playing until the second expansion, and then quit in anger. I only know a tiny handful of people who still play, and they're either the addicts or the people who just play to socialize with Interwebz friends. :)

The entire game is built around powering up your character and striving to be Most Badass, so any change that instantly knocks you down to average-man ranks is frustrating. If the game were designed such that being max level was rare and merely a perk instead of the only logical goal of play, ramping up the max power level might not have had as much of a negative effect on many players. I think the real beef a lot of players had was that the top-tier equipment they got in endless raids was not just invalidated by the new equipment available in the new raid instances, but the fact that the loot they had "worked" so hard to obtain was invalidated by the common drops of "trash mobs" in the new zones that everybody and his brother could go out and kill.

Quote
It's actually a brilliant system (for Blizzard).


Yes and no. It's a brilliant system given how the original system was built. The game design still intrinsically invalidates old content through character progression, so any new expansion must include new content that is the next level of progression after all previous content. A design that allows (and even emphasizes) re-exploration of old-content would not require a constant increase in enemy and loot power, and would allow the top-tier players to have new top-tier areas to grind in (assuming you even want to keep that element; I wouldn't include endless repeated raids for equipment farming in my design) while allowing the casual and semi-casual players to get new content and equipment as well.

That's pretty much the crux of my breadth-vs-depth argument to MMO/MUD design. If your game is nothing but a small set of numbers that only globally increase, you have a treadmill game. If your game instead focuses on situational modifiers and bonuses to the core numbers along with new abilities and features, you allow the player to unlock new content through progression without invalidating old content. He can still go back to that early-game dungeon he passed up and have fun playing it instead of going back and finding it to be a boring slaughterfest with no worthwhile rewards.
28 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
The unwashed masses, however, treat every item as a direct gift from on high, and the idea that something they endured dozens of instance raids to get might go poof, makes them melt in terror.

You can still have equipment repair and maintenance costs without the equipment literally vanishing - for example, perhaps a sword just gets blunted if never sharpened, but can still be used at 50% of its normal effectiveness no matter how badly damaged it gets. Even if you want equipment to eventually become totally broken, there's no reason why it couldn't just become worthless (or perhaps just much weaker, such as a broken longsword functioning a bit like a rubbish dagger) until fixed.
28 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
Chess is an example of an unbreakable game, as there is no guaranteed win strategy of any kind.

Not to be overly picky, but we do not know this statement to be true as of this time. It's an area of ongoing AI research, actually, although one that is somewhat uninteresting as far as the answer is concerned; it's all the stuff that is developed to seek the answer that is interesting. (Such as very good heuristics, learning, etc.)

And while I'm being nitpicky, it's not the case either that every problem has a solution; some questions are indeed formally unanswerable. :smile:

It's kind of interesting that you equate a game's brokenness with strong winnability (a player being able to force a win). I guess this definition isn't such a bad one, in the sense that there's not much point playing a game where one player can force an outcome – unless it's so hard to figure out how to force the outcome that we (as humans) can't really figure it out anyhow.

OK, I'll take off the CS hat now.
28 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
@elanthis (too lazy to quote)

I'm not sure the chess analogy is even relevent, but chess is still breakable.

For example, the game has no intrinsic way of correcting invalid moves that have already taken place. If someone cheats or accidentally does an invalid move and ends up with two bishops on black squares, the game can't correct that. If you've been logging moves, you could undo it, but as far as I'm aware, logging moves isn't part of the game rules, nor does the game have rules for that situation.

Furthermore, even if what I just mentioned doesn't count as a "break", and there are no guaranteed win strategies, all that indicates is that one has not been found yet. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Furthermore loopholes are rarely intentional, so the goal of designing systems without loopholes is akin to the goal of writing bugfree/exploitfree software. It's a good goal to have, but it's wholly unrealistic.
28 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
If someone cheats or accidentally does an invalid move and ends up with two bishops on black squares, the game can't correct that.

That's kind of like saying that if somebody hax0rs the WoW server to do all kinds of stuff, the game has no means of correcting that. Err. Ok…

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that all game rules will indeed be performed within the confines of game-allowed actions.

Tonitrus said:
Furthermore loopholes are rarely intentional, so the goal of designing systems without loopholes is akin to the goal of writing bugfree/exploitfree software. It's a good goal to have, but it's wholly unrealistic.

Speak for yourself. :tongue:
28 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
I'm personally still just fond of intrinsic ability systems versus extrinsic/equipment based systems. The idea that one sword cuts 20 times better or is 20 times faster or is 20 times more "balanced" is just silly, and I don't like magic item proliferation.

Like most things, there are ways to justify it within the theme so that it's not silly (and of course describing the items as "magic" is the most common).

But equipment can provide players with an excellent source of short-term goals (particularly if they're constantly on the lookout for something better). It can provide the basis for an economy, encouraging greater player interaction and opening the way for trade features. It can add a whole new element to character customisation (assuming you don't make the mistake of having a "best" set of eq). It can add strategic options by allowing players to more easily adjust and adapt their character builds (rearranging equipment on the fly is usually easier to justify thematically than rearranging skills on the fly).

Of course, magical equipment isn't the only way to do those things, but it's a very neat and easy way to open a lot of design doors. I do also support non-eq gameplay (as I like to cater to different playing styles, plus sometimes it doesn't make sense for certain characters to use equipment), but I do find it quite a bit more difficult to make such character builds interesting.
28 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
That's kind of like saying that if somebody hax0rs the WoW server to do all kinds of stuff, the game has no means of correcting that. Err. Ok…

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that all game rules will indeed be performed within the confines of game-allowed actions.

We could consider illegal moves as bugs or even loopholes. Chess doesn't give me a lot of material to come up with a good counterexample, so I had to stretch it a bit.

At any rate, consider this:

You set up your game design so that a level 23 item can never have more than +23 damage. It's in your design specs, and so on. One day, you typo, and you make a +32 damage item at level 23. You don't notice this initially because you were too busy cheating at chess, and your players amass a bunch of them. This is, strictly speaking, within the confines of game-allowed actions, you just typoed your builder command. It's also quite clearly against your design intentions and documents, and your game has no way of correcting this.

Now you can either lower its damage to +23, or raise its level to 32, both of which will make "gamists" cry their eyes out if you have hard level caps. You can also leave it as is, and ruin the balance of the game, which I think is the tendency of many muds that have gotten tired of listening to complaints. An organic system would correct this even if you never noticed it, which I think is the vastly better approach.

You could also hard-code your builder commands to disallow this, which is probably a good idea if you don't want an organic approach but still don't want to develop problems like the one I just mentioned. It doesn't allow later balance revisions to auto-correct, though.
28 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Elanthis: The game design still intrinsically invalidates old content through character progression, so any new expansion must include new content that is the next level of progression after all previous content.


Agreed – but that's handled by requiring them to be within a few levels of the old maximum level cap to start questing in the xpac.

Blizzard had a couple choices;

1) Make new content require good gear from the previous high-end zones. This is problematic because as time passes, guilds will no longer be raiding old content zones. Plus, the bulk of subscribers are very casual players perfectly content to do nothing more than stand on mailboxes and dance in their underwear – Alliance night elves, I'm looking at you here.
2) Target new content for mediocre gear. The ubers are going to burn through content crazy fast while whining that they're 1/4 through and haven't gotten any upgrades.
3) Start everyone fresh in much the same way they start fresh as level ones.

It's not perfect – but it IS an effective way to provide the same content and game experience to all players. Certainly better than something like Everquest's Planes of Power expansion which had nearly every inch locked under a brutal flagging system. I'd bet that the majority of people who bought it saw less than half the zones.
28 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
We could consider illegal moves as bugs or even loopholes.

I think it's also reasonable to assume that a bug due to putting in a typo is extremely different from a flaw in the design. The former is a bad implementation to specification and the latter is a bad specification. Fixing the former is easy, but won't help if you have problems with the spec itself.

In your case, it wasn't a bug in the code to put in +32 instead of +23. It was a problem with the specification to allow completely manual entries. If the specification already says that the limit is +23 for level 23 items, then allowing anything about 23 is indeed an error in your implementation.

Fixing screw-ups after the fact is a pretty different issue and can apply all over the place. I challenge you to provide a system that can always seamlessly fix any possible screw-up. (Hint: I predict that you will fail.)
29 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
I think it's also reasonable to assume that a bug due to putting in a typo is extremely different from a flaw in the design. The former is a bad implementation to specification and the latter is a bad specification. Fixing the former is easy, but won't help if you have problems with the spec itself.

It's not hard to come up with a flawed specification either. What is hard is trying to fix a flawed specification after the fact when you have correctly implemented your flawed specification. By simply considering deviations from the newly altered specs as "bugs" and "repairing" them, an "organic" system can handle the transition when specifications are altered an order of magnitude or more easier than reworking your entire game.

David Haley said:
I challenge you to provide a system that can always seamlessly fix any possible screw-up. (Hint: I predict that you will fail.)

I'm arguing against unbreakable designs, not for them. Organic systems can correct some of these mistakes automatically, as opposed to static ones, which can correct none of them.

I'm arguing that a system which can fix some of its own problems without you having to bother with it is preferable to a system where you try to prevent problems in the first place, then manually have to fix them all when they inevitably occur.
29 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 40th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
I challenge you to provide a system that can always seamlessly fix any possible screw-up.

This isn't such a system, but it's a related idea and on-topic for this thread, and your post just reminded me of it.

An approach I've seen discussed before for self-balancing is to have the power of equipment automatically adjust based on its current popularity - so if lots of people start using a particular item, it'll gradually become weaker and weaker. If it becomes too weak, people will start using something else instead. Players have an incentive to find rare items - and to prevent other players from finding those same items.

I'm not sure how I feel about such an approach, but I do find the idea itself rather intriguing.
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