Last week in the wee hours of a starlit Azeroth morning the Dark Iron Dwarves attacked the Brewfest revelry outside of Ironforge. Since there were only a few half-awake adventurers slinging mugs of ale at the endless waves of preordained interlopers, all of the precious brew was eventually stolen and we were defeated.
A similar thing happened last year during a visit from the fiendish Headless Horseman during Hallow’s End; not enough people showed up in Goldshire to put out the fires and all was lost.
In both cases the players who were there performed their tasks perfectly but were defeated. Why? It was because the developers failed to scale the encounter to the number of people that were engaged in the event. The players who participated were doomed from the outset because not enough of their fellow players showed up.
Instead of giving players a chance to demonstrate skill and bravery the designers at Blizzard took the easy way out and turned the event into an crude numbers game. So what is Blizzard’s magic scripting formula for such an event?
Enough people = success
Not enough people = failure
Surely the most successful MMO company in history can do better than this? Is is not patently unfair to penalize players who play a MMO in off-peak times with primitive scripting that doesn’t take into account the number of players involved in the event?
The solution is simple: it’s time to start scaling encounters in MMOs.
Introduction
Let me start my proposal by posing a question: what are the most important numbers in the cosmos of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft? The answer is: 1, 5, 10 and 25. These are the de facto pseudo prime numbers by which players are allowed to congregate. The number 1 represents the solo player, 5 the group, and 10 and 25 are the size of raids which are multiples of 5.
Everything in WoW is designed around these arbitrary numbers. Millions of dollars of development resources go into designing, creating and testing content for these 4 special player denominations.
Given the tremendous popularity of WoW, doesn’t it seem overly restrictive that a massively multi-player RPG should be forcing players to assemble in such arbitrary and regimented groupings?
The fact is that people in the real world do not willingly assemble in preordained groupings — it’s unnatural and contrary to the human yearning for freedom and self-determination. Why then must people who inhabit virtual worlds be subject to the whim of some developer’s notion of a “group”? What of those unlucky players who can’t assemble in those numbers?
The Root of the Problem: Attendance Caps and Instancing
The current MMO design mindset is one of complete control over the player’s gaming experience. MMO designers masquerading as Hollywood directors have created encounters that are so tightly scripted that they end up making Riverdance’s Michael Flatley look like a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. Unfortunately this mentality has metastasized to all areas of MMO scripting — even the innocuous holiday events like Brewfest and others.
As MMOs and virtual worlds have evolved we’ve seen an incremental loss of player freedom in exchange for the security of polished content courtesy of the developer. This has been achieved by the well-intentioned technology called instancing.
Once hailed as an innovation solution to “camping” and shortage of content, instancing has brought with it many problems. The biggest problem is that it’s a stealth tool of social engineering where the devs have removed the ability of players to freely assemble by controlling who can enter by virtue of artificial attendance caps. Once you are in the instance and under their control, content must be experience as intended.
In outdoor non-instanced spaces in a MMO like WoW players enjoy partial freedom to assemble. However, in indoor spaces players must enter instanced dungeons where no such freedom exists and a sort of soft totalitarianism prevails. The hapless player has entered the domain of the game designer — the true dungeon boss — as players are told how many people they can group with.
First let’s look directly into the face of the problem: artificial attendance caps.
Here’s a brief graphical look at the pros and cons of this system:
Next, let’s take a closer more detailed look at some of the problems that is caused by the typical MMO that requires the players form fixed size groups and raids.
The Grouping Problem
One of the biggest problems in MMOs today that keeps rearing its ugly head invariably occurs when the devs require people to muster a group in order to defeat monsters for experience, loot and quests.
The fact is that a significant percentage of the player base has trouble finding people to fill their groups. This happens for various reasons. According to Damion Schubert some players are loners and are shy. Some may be afraid of failure. Some may be playing a class that is too popular (hunters in WoW) and are not needed in a group. It may just be as simple as it’s late and not many people are online. Or it could be that the people online have already completed the quest or don’t need the rewards.
Regardless, the failure to provide scalable challenge has had the effect of locking out players with reasonable from the opportunity to complete content that they have paid to be able to experience.
How Guilds Are Impacted
Consider the small guild that doesn’t have enough players to fill up a 1o or 25 person raid. What chance do they have to succeed at content and encounters that were tuned with a full complement of 10 or 25 players if they bring fewer players with them?
Then consider the opposite problem: what if a guild has filled a 10 or 25 person raid but has extra members that would like to attend and help out? Why should guild members be forced to sit out and keep the bench warm while only a select few are able to attend? What kind of MMO segregates guild members and prohibits them from fully participating together by vanquishing foes in dungeons? The kind that Blizzard produces apparently.
Some questions need to be asked:
- Why do MMO players continue to accept this sacred cow of artificial attendance caps?
- Why have developers failed to properly scale encounters so that everyone can participate?
- Why has the player community just accepted this form of control and coercion without even a whimper?
Establishing Some Design Principles
Before I explore my solution which is to scale content, it may be useful to identify two applicable design principles that I believe make for a healthy MMO:
- Social Interaction – The ultimate play style destination of a MMO should be one that promotes and fosters social interaction. Social interaction is what differentiates a MMO from a single-player game. The highest form of social interaction is grouping and raiding. Other forms of social interaction like chat, trade and just plain being online are primitive compared to the depth of social communion that is possible via grouping and raiding. Ergo grouping and raiding should be incentivized.
- Players Have A Legitimate Expectation To Experience Content – As I touched on briefly earlier, it’s sound and just policy to try to empower and encourage reasonably skilled players to experience all of the appropriate content available in your MMO. After all players are paying the same monthly subscription fee to experience your content. I can’t think of any other form of entertainment that purposely segregates access to parts of content other then the MMO industry. It’s unacceptable to purposely leave players sitting on the sidelines because of artificial attendance caps.
Solution 1: Down Scaling Challenge
The first kind of scaling that could be implemented would benefit the examples I gave above where a group can’t get enough members or a guild or raid can’t field enough players to fill a 10 or 25 person raid. In each case the hit points and damage of the enemies could be scaled down to compensate using a simple formula.
For example, if the optimum group size is 5 members then the damage being done by NPCs and the NPC hit points could be reduced by 20% for each member in the group below the optimum size. To prevent players from abusing this system other reductions would be seen in the number of coin and loot dropped to compensate for the lower number of group members. The quality of the loot would also be reduced to compensate.
This kind of system would incentivize players to avoid such loot penalties by offering an alternative by giving them better quality loot if they find more group members which has the added benefit of encouraging socialization and group interaction.
Solution 2: Up Scaling Challenge
The second kind of scaling ramps up the challenge for every extra member added. For every group or raid member that you add to the optimum size (i.e. 5 member group, 10 and 25 member raid) you ramp up the challenge by increasing the hit points and damage of the NPC enemies. More NPC enemies could also be added to increase the challenge for crowd control classes.
Players who add more members to their group and raid are performing a beneficial function and would be rewarded with higher loot drop rates and better quality loot. No longer would players and guild members be forced to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the guild is having fun killing monsters in a dungeon.
Various Pitfalls
Of course this system would have some potential problems that need to be addressed. I realize that some players would try to “game” this system by trying to find the sweet spot and expend the least amount of effort for the maximum gain. As long as you put enough disincentives toward small groups and incentivize large groups then this problem would be solved. The problem with quest rewards would have to be addressed by again providing extra benefits for completing the quest with the optimum size or larger.
At some point the devs would have to ensure that the quality of loot would have to hit a threshold that does not intrude on the next level of loot in a high level dungeon; there could be a slight amount of overlap though.
Another issue is that the difficulty of encounters should increase slightly faster than combined strength of the bigger raid sizes. Combine this with the added difficulty in managing larger raid sizes it would have the effect of making the best loot drops rarer and creating more replayability of the dungeon.
The biggest problem is that having a system of scaled encounters would increase the design, programming and testing costs — at least during the initial development phase of this kind of system.
The Epic Villain Problem
Another potential pitfall is that raid encounters could lose their epic quality. Epic is a term that has lost all meaning in MMOs lately due to misguided designers trying to dole out undeserved “heroism” to the masses on the cheap. I would suggest that only bona fide epic raid encounters have a suggested minimum but be designed for optimum number of players with NPC powers that scale either up or down depending how many players show up.
To further illustrate the epic villain problem I present to you Arthas. When the dastardly Lich King is defeated by the first guild sometime in 2010, only 25 players will be required. Just think about how preposterous that reality will be: a mere 25 players will be able to vanquish the Lich King — up till now the most powerful being in the Warcraft universe.
If anything this is truly an encounter that would benefit from scaling up. Why shouldn’t 80 players or more be able to take down Arthas if they so wish?
The greatest and most memorable event in all of MMO history happened back in November of 2003 when 200 players vanquished Kerafyrm the Sleeper — a uber-dragon designed to be unkillable in EverQuest. There has been no achievement since that will ever come even close to equating what transpired that day. That was truly an epic event that the designers at Blizzard will always remain woefully incapable of allowing due to their insatiable need to play Hollywood director as they seek to control every aspect of an encounter.
Notwithstanding all of Blizzard’s typical bells & whistles, the upcoming preordained “defeat” of Arthas will seem like a cardboard tube sword fight in comparison.
Conclusion
It’s perplexing that ten years into the MMO revolution that most players must conform to arbitrary and inflexible attendance caps. The right to associate, play and dungeon crawl with as many of your fellow players that you wish is not something that should be restricted in a genre that proclaims itself as massively multi-player. True community is only developed, nurtured and realized when we play together not apart.
Strangely enough, one of the few MMOs that has embraced scaling is SOE’s Free Realms where mobs seem to always provide a fairly consistent level of challenge no matter what level you are. While Free Realms is not perfect I think at least it’s a good start.
Regrettably for most of the 11.5 million WoW players, the tyranny of artificial attendance caps is all they will ever know. Why? Because it’s a system that only benefits a handful of complacent developers bereft of vision, imagination and respect for the virtue of community.
No one should ever be left behind or forced to sit out all because the group or raid is full. No player should ever be prevented from completing a dungeon crawl because not enough players are online. Scalable content could be the solution that makes MMOs more accessible and keeps everyone happy.
-Wolfshead
This article has been created with a genuine desire to address a gaping deficiency in the big picture of current MMO design. I believe it’s a discussion that needs to be started. Often design ideas look good on paper but need to be changed or modified during actual testing. I welcome any comments, feedback, suggestions and links that would help further refine these ideas.
I remember thinking instancing was the coolest technology ever when it was first introduced. My first experience with an instance was in Asheron’s Call 2, and it was amazing. When WoW did it to keep camping down, I was excited.
Time has passed, and now I feel limited by the fact that I can’t go run a dungeon or do anything without, as you point out, having an arbitrary number of people with me–whether I know them or not!
I wish more MMOs would go toward a sandbox model, or, at the very least, an open world which allows for organic growth and community.
This is a great idea. Guild Wars tackled the same issue in a different way: They added NPC-henchmen to “fill up” parties, but the upper limit (party max for the mission) remained.
You basically want a “Dungeon Master” function for MMOs, which is a great idea: No human Dungeon Master would say to the 11th person “sorry, the adventure is made for 10 players. bye!”, and he would also take in account if only 8 people enter this dungeon. He would even adjust much more depending on the class composition of the group.
You are absolutely right, players always will find and exploit the flaws in an automated scaling system to the maximum.
Another challenge will be that the system does not only scale, but that it scales well to deliver a compelling experience for the players. Basically, not too hard, not too easy. Which is already hard to do with fixed party size instances, but this does not mean it should not be tried.
Loot or the contemporary loot obsession is another problem. So if I can solo this instance for the same reward, why should I group. On the other hand, grouping with 40 other guys gives so much better items… no point in doing this in a small group. I wonder how this issue can be solved!
I think low level/stat/power caps are needed, otherwise you end up with small parties producing “useless” gear for gear-centered players, ergo nobody would play in a small group. The reward incentive probably also needs to change, for example that it opens the way to the next higher tier dungeon and vanity gear/titles, and does not focus so much on the next better item.
Maybe it is easier to design dungeons for “5-10 players”, or “10-25”. This is how many classic pen & paper games are set up, a la “an adventure for x to y players of levels a-b”.
I suggest a RANDOM stat system on drops, FIXED stat gear should be quest rewards, which are in the 80-90% stat range of “perfect” items that are got in the instances.
If you run with 40 people, MORE and HIGHER quality items would drop, they would basically start in the “90-100%” max stat quality.
Solo Instances? “75-95%” item quality. Small group maybe “85-100%” stat quality.
Guild Wars had a very low item stat cap. 15-22 was max damage for Swords, 6-28 for Axes. But there was the most wanted +15% damage if you are over 50% health modifier, that was quite rare.
The difference between a 12^50, 14^50 and a 15^50 weapon with a 15-22 damage range is between 20,72 and 21,275 damage, before other factors come into play. But a 13^50 weapon sold for nothing, nobody would buy it, while players paid 100.000s of Gold for a 15^50 weapon with a nice weapon skin. Rare skins are also an alternative to stat progression. Again: Grouping with people should increase the loot table to include a rare skin, from say 1% to 5%?
It is a difficult thing to implement all this for sure, given how weak (or piss poor) the itemization in many MMOs is. But I absolutely agree to your train of thought that fixed group size designs are not only harmful in the ways you described, but also limiting the player experience.
As many games, like LOTRO, aim to provide more “random” instance content, your idea would be the ideal thing to explore for them and make these random instances probably much better.
This is why I doubt it will happen soon. The genre is so stagnant that I cannot help but hope and wait for the evolutionary leap of the genre that is so long overdue.
The real silver bullet here is generating instanced content for any number of players at any time. Not just scaling existent static content through the use of some predictable mob number scaling, but actually creating new adventures that are specifically suited for the characters that enter the instance. The dynamic adventures can be themed a certain way–there can be broad templates that define the monster types that primarily comprise the enemies and the loot that those enemies should drop at some point–so you can make instances suited for where they’re located in the world. Once you have a working adventure generation system, you can tie the results of instanced encounters together in world state and have the results of one run effect what’s going on in the next wave of instances that are generated, creating a dynamic world where player actions have far-reaching consequences.
You need procedural content. Hand crafting everything will never outpace players. That was true even in the D&D tabletop early days. (Shameless plug for my latest article.) It’s not only key for keeping content generation ahead of the locust swarms, but also for letting player action make a difference. (Cue the “simulation” articles over at Evizaer’s place.)
The trick is making procedural content interesting and fun. (And, perhaps, finding players who can accept that it *can* be fun.) It takes a different breed of players and devs. That may not necessarily be the mainstream.
As for the scaling itself, I’ve long wanted scaling encounters. (Another procedure, go figure.) Of course, I want them as a solo player, so I can go in and tackle Onyxia when she would “normally” fit into the storyline.
Solo.
I completely accept that I’d get poorer loot and rewards (if anything at all, really). I’m perfectly OK with that, so long as I can actually *play the damn game*. See, to me, the “game” isn’t the endless hunt for better crap that I’ll throw out in a week, or going through that hunt to get past the arbitrary gear/level gates, it’s seeing content and experimenting with it. You know, PLAYING. (Which I addressed a bit in my Game Tourism article.)
Ultimately, I think that’s the core desire, to play and have fun with the game (that we’re paying for, imagine that)… it’s just that people want to do it in group sizes they pick. I pick the group of one, others may want a group of 13. Tastes may shift over time, too. The game should allow and embrace all sizes, just as it should embrace all sorts of gameplay styles and goals.
And while we’re talking about incentivizing grouping, loot doesn’t do it for me. Loot can’t possibly be powerful enough, with the exception of a Martin Fury shirt, to get me to play with idiots if I just want to solo. On the flipside, the worst gear in the world doesn’t bother me if I’m having a blast with friends. I run into that in Puzzle Pirates all the time; we have fun pulling off a close victory when someone does something spectacular. The reward isn’t the loot or the gear, it’s PLAYING.
I know, weird attitude in the game industry. I’m such an anarchist.
I just came across your blog and really enjoy it! Thanks for the great reads. This topic really hits home as I raid lead a circle of real life friends, unfortunately there are 12 of us. We have been doing great and clearing 10 man ToC but it would so nice if I could just fudge 2 more spots in there so everyone could come in and have fun. Blizzard has basically made it to where I have to choose which of my friends to bring and it sucks. There is nothing worse than having to bench your friends. :/
DDO features scalable content and, in my opinion, it is the best path to take.
The one problem with this is that all content then becomes an instance and that pretty much means the end of the open world many are enamored of (personally, I am not and even like the absence of travel tedium) unless you go with an hybrid where you have scalable instances but also have quests in an open world which do not scale.
By the way, I don’t think raid should scale. As you said, it takes away from the epicness of the encounter but that is not all. Rather than making the challenge equal to the number of players in the quest, we should increase the reward for the less players there are in the group. This would allow players to challenge themselves and make the content more fresh as players attempts the raid with less and less players over time. (This is not perfect and has flaws but I like the general idea.)
There are actually a number of games that scale content. City of Heroes scales instances and Wizard 101 scales individual encounters. Scaling worked pretty well in both games, although people did game the system in CoH by, for example, adding new party members after the instance had been set.
I think the main problem with scaling is exactly what Borroro mentioned: it implies that the game will mostly be instanced. I’d prefer games to reduce the amount of instancing, which would have the side benefit of eliminating the artificial restrictions on numbers (as well as making the game feel more worldy and less contrived).
I see two problems with this (neither of which are insurmountable):
1) No matter how you do it, there will be some threshold at which the numbers balance out such that there’s an optimum number of players per instance. Whether it’s “above 10 players we need a 3rd tank, so we can’t take an 11th person unless he’s a tank” or “it’s dumb to take 24 people, because the best loot drops only for groups of 25 and up”, even in the best case, there will be local minima and maxima, because you can’t spawn 3.25 adds or shoot at 1.9 DPSers and you can’t drop 4.1 pieces of loot.
2) It actually makes the raid leader’s job harder. Right now, if you’re person #26 in the guild, it’s a simple “sorry man, you’re on standby because we can only fit 25 in here”. Whereas if it scaled, you’d have everyone with an 80 wanting to raid Coliseum with you, and you’ve got to draw a much tougher line. Sure, #26-#30 might be qualified, but then you’ve got to literally saw to #31, “you can’t come because you’re so bad you’re more of a burden than a help”.
Excellent article and I couldn’t agree more. I think developers just need to put in the effort to develop the content and technology but unfortunately it seems that no one wants to take the risk of doing it as, like we see all the time with queues etc, it’s plain better for them to make the consumer suffer.
I’ve absolutely love to see some proper scaling technology in new MMOs.
I just wanted to add this article found on MMORPG.com about scaling WoW instances via an article I just read via Ryan Schwayder’s Nerfbat. I had not read it prior to writing my own article. I find it interesting that in the MMO blogosphere that many of us are coming to similar conclusions independently. 🙂
For admin run events (of which there are basically none), or even for triggered special events like this, I definitely think scaling is important. But it is tough to figure out scaling, since players vary WILDLY in skill level.
For other static content, I don’t think you need to scale as long as you don’t cap the number of players that can participate. Let good people beat something with 2 or 3, other players beat it with 5 or 6, and call it a success.
By the way, LOTRO’s skirmishes might be the scaling dungeon we are asking for: http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/484-developer-diary-som-skirmishes-overview
If you add more people to the party, some more extras might become available, like a special boss, harder mobs, all that. This might be the evolution of the solo-instances of Moria that are mostly daily loot pinatas.
I also cannot resist to add a link to Spinks’s thoughts about progression in MMOs, as she is in an especially analytic phase at the moment: http://spinksville.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/losing-gear-progression-in-wow/
While I agree in part with the general idea of scaling instances, I don’t think it is something an (especially WoW) should adopt fully.
Firstly, practicality. Now I wasn’t there at the Everquest 200 player dragon kill event, but I know for sure, in WoW I (and most others) would dc, freeze, of have lag so bad that the most you could hope for is to auto-attack until it’s dead. That’s not my idea of fun.
Secondly, choosing a set number of people for an event has been happening for centuries. Most sports (football, tennis, hockey), games, board games, quizzes.
I’m not trashing the idea and it’s obviously already being tested in other games and in different ways but I think it should be used for events or for a bit of variety rather than an entirely new raiding system.
I’d like to see Blizzard at least experiment with the notion. If Blizzard doesn’t at least attempt it then it might be a way for an up and coming MMO to distinguish itself from the pack of WoW clones.
We seem to be moving from a MMO design paradigm of open-ended freedom to heavily scripted encounters that are designed and tuned for a set amount of players. I find that trend troubling.
I think it’s good every once in a while to question sacred cows like group and raid sizes. Why does a WoW group only allow a maximum of 5 players? Why are raid sizes the way they are?
The true strength of MMOs is that they are really about community but having rigid and artificial limits on participation works against that ethos. We need more inclusiveness in our virtual worlds, not less.
This is not a new idea, it’s actually a very old idea that pretty much every studio’s designers toss around early on and usually decide to throw out because of various complications and design flaws.
I might be late to get on the bandwagon but I’d like to mention that I’m one of those who think blizzard is doing it right by implementing artificial caps to the raiding.
Imo scaling difficulty by increasing damage/hitpoints doesn’t solve the difficulty issue at all, rather is just a loose solution and doesn’t address the difference in group dynamic as a group scales. In my book that’s just lazy design philosophy. “More people, more enemies. Problem solved.”
By having an artificial cap, they get to at least tailor the experience to the right crowd, granted there are some sacrifices such as having to bench members of the crowd, but isn’t that the case with say… foot ball or a theme park ride for example? The participants are still capped and anyone else will just have to sit out or fill in at a later point.
Perhaps this is something that future devs can look into, having replacements mid-instants or a benching system that lets more players join, but only a certain amount play and fill in when someone is down or out.
Rather I think a better way to solve the scaling problem is to have a proper paradigm for the various group mechanics. A bigger group shouldn’t be doing the exactly same thing a small group does. There’d be too much redundancy as well as a lack of proper challenge addressed to their increased versatility. Which is why, having set an optimum case, it’ll allow the designers to plan a more efficient raid experience for the player numbers.
As for the last point on being epic, i think that’s just a matter of context vs accessibility. they could very well satisfy the context by only allowing an 80 man raid take on the lich king for example or keeping in line that a 25 man would probably fight say one of arthas’ henches, but again an 80 man raid is hard to achieve, and they probably want more players having the opportunity to raid the lich king.
sure, we’re seeing the days of epic 100 man raids fade, but at least, a majority of the total playerbase gets to experience the content now instead of just that 100 men.
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