 | More on ‘flation and the futureJanuary 20th, 2007 |
This post starts out being about very gamey things like damage per second, and ends up on a speculative note. So if you’re the sort who comes here for stuff about social virtual worlds, read on, because this is relevant to you too. 
Over at The Cesspit, Abalieno argues that “the mudflation from the perspective of those who build these kinds of games isn’t THE PROBLEM. The mudflation is THE SOLUTION.” The logic is simple:
- it’s inherent in the model
- consumed content leads to shared experiences, and being able to go back and see something that was once powerful and is now trivial helps that, and both of these feelings are core to the value offered by this style of game
- by rendering older content “useless” from a game point of view you re-establish the horizon for players, making the game have fresh goals
All of this is true. But…
Mudflation really is a problem. It has a few side effects that aren’t desirable:
- It makes the games less accessible to new players. This happens for a few reasons.
- Static content gets scaled off of the original values of things. In a mudflated scenario, it doesn’t get updated, typically. This means that your starting cash remains the same even as the value of a gold coin goes down; it means that the ideal level 5 weapon is something nicer than it used to be, because it’s now a level 10 weapon that has been discarded by a ;evel 15 player, rather than being the weapon that designers specced for level 5.
- New users now have less “buying power” so to speak. Yes, it’s overall easier for them to kill things. But the net effect is that it’s harder for them to reach the “new standard of living” because successful players accelerate faster off the intended difficulty curve. The game was specced for level 5 players tackling level 5 monsters with level 5 swords. But one guy gets a level 10 sword, and he cuts through the level 5 mobs like butter. Quickly he’s level 10 with a level 15 sword. The rest of the level 5 guys who want a level 10 sword have to try to obtain it based on friendship or based on the currency value. But the currency is deflated, and they only earn currency at the old-school level 5 rate. The result is more grinding for cash or XP.
- Social contacts get harder early in the game, because users accelerate out of the shared low level experience quickly. Your odds of making friends in that newbie experience are lower because people are just there for less time. It pushes towards coming in with friends, basically.
- It shortens the overall player lifespan in a game.
- Everything in the game gets easier, so people max out faster. That much is obvious.
- You end up in a high-level rat race, as a developer. All the content that is there gets deflated, meaning it’s faster to get through. Since the bulk of your users are rushing to high level, you logically spend your time making more high level content. You can add more on the end, basically laying more track in front of an onrushing train. Going back to make the base levels less deflated is hard, when you spend all your time working on new endgame material.
- But you can’t make content as fast as it is consumed, especially since the rate of consumption continues to rise. Each expansion you make must be scaled to the new competence level of players — not just their actual level, but the new reality of how fast they can chew through it. This means that when you make five level 60 expansions in a row, the last of them is MUCH harder than the first, even though they are nominally all the same.
- This means that as you seek greater challenges, you are more at risk of altering the fundamental gameplay. You switch to gameplay involving new challenges altogether: large-scale group coordination being the most popular (raids, politics, guilds, etc). This then alienates those players who aren’t after this different game, but want more of the same old game mechanic.
Remember, all of this happens even without expansions. A better way to put it might be that expansions are a solution to mudflation. Or some of mudflation, anyway.
Now, there’s something to what Abalieno says when he comments that in many ways this lifecycle is the lifeblood of the subgenre.
The mudflation isn’t a side effect, it’s exactly what the devs WANT. It’s the lifeblood of this model. Fighting it from the design perspective not only doesn’t work quite well, but it’s even counterproductive. The mudflation here is the *goal* and justification…
So the recipe is: we exploit it till we can. When it breaks we make another.
Basically, the logic here is that you milk it while you can. It presumes that the train does catch up to you eventually, and that therefore you should embrace the decay, so to speak. The goal then shifts to playing a game of timing: can you lay the last track just as your audience finally gets bored and is ready to move on to the next thing? (Which you presumably have sitting ready in the form of a sequel).
This timing trick is of course fiendishly difficult. But more importantly in terms of responding to Abalieno, it’s not at all “embracing” mudflation, which he suggests is what Blizzard is doing.
Mudflation is a side effect. It has some negative consequences, yes, but there are also positive effects to mudflation. For example — a repeat player will find the game easier to rush through to get to what they want to play again, so they aren’t quite as bored silly by grinding levels over again. A new player who is given lots of cool stuff feels prized and welcomed, and the older player giving it feels like a mentor. Older players can go back and see a dragon they once battled endlessly and barely beat, and now crush it like a bug, and feel like gods.
So it’s a side effect. As a side effect, you can either embrace it, or fight it.
The main reason why most everyone fights it (and WoW is BUILT on fighting it — soulbinding, bind on pickup, level restrictions, moving people from zone to zone so that they don’t revisit older dead content, tiered equipment, extremely limited economy with virtually no trade, etc) is because embracing it is too damn expensive.
To embrace mudflation, you have to instead say, “OK, we’re going to constantly render our content obsolete” and keep adding stuff. You would encourage hand-me-downs to players rather than restricting trade. You’d literally destroy old areas rather than keep them around. And you’d go ahead and change what newbies start at to compensate — let them start at higher levels, basically.
This is what pen and paper gaming does to handle the situation in long-running campaigns.
But building a pen and paper module is far cheaper than making an expansion. So even if you fully expect to use “exploit it till we can. When it breaks we make another” as your model, you are caught in a horrible trap: you aren’t able to make the stuff fast enough. So what you do is fight a rearguard action, expecting to lose. This is what Blizzard is doing, what EQ is doing, and so on.
If mudflation were the desired effect, then Blizzard would make all items tradeable, because that would speed up mudflation. They don’t do so, because they actually want to regulate mudflation, to stretch out the milking period as long as possible.
The question is whether there are alternative models altogether, which offer the good qualities without the bad. Honestly, I am not sure there are. Even user-content-creation worlds suffer from something analogous to mudflation. There, it’s called “progress” instead, and really, that’s what mudflation is: a society of players mastering their environment, “discovering” new technologies (OK, so these are actually handed them in dollops by the content creators), and applying them to render what was once a challenging environment into something tame.
In the end, the reason why we fight mudflation is because games are predicated on solving challenges; tame environments aren’t as fun. If you break down the list of approaches to managing mudflation that I listed in the other post, you arrive at the conclusion that they represent the following:
- restrict players from helping each other (limit trading, twinking, use soulbinding, etc)
- prevent players from actually improving (limit DPS increases, distract them with cosmetic enhancements, etc)
- beat them down when they do improve (decay, drains, etc)
- force them to do something else (alternate advancement, elder games, etc)
- occasionally make them start over altogether (wipes)
We can turn this around to speculate on what a model not vulnerable to mudflation might look like:
- It would encourage cooperation, twinking, mentoring, and trading.
- It would want players to actually grow much more powerful than the initial game state assumed
- It would allow the gains of the past to be preserved
- It would let you pursue a given path infinitely, rather than making you “switch careers,” because it keeps adding fractal detail
- It would never make the barrier to entry higher because of all this stuff — in fact, ideally, it makes it lower
- It wouldn’t spend all its time adding content at the high end
- It would not assume that the experience has a finite lifespan
It’s rather hard to conceive of a game that can offer this, but it’s easy to see that user-driven worlds might. (Cue someone bringing up Second Life in three, two, one…) The trick for the gaming audience would be to make that act of creation into a game somehow, so that they feel like they are actually being entertained.
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01/21 06:15 links for 2007-01-20 (Feedster on: second life) 01/21 06:15 links for 2007-01-20 (Feedster on: secondlife) 01/21 05:39 More on ¡Æflation and the future (Feedster on: second life) 01/21 05:21 Briefing: Code for ‘Second Life’ opened to public (Paintball layouts for myspace) (Feedster on: second life) 01/21 05:20 Virtual world used to raise awareness of real world social issues
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[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/01/20/more-on-flation-and-the-future/This post starts out being about very gamey things like damage per second, and ends up on a speculative note. So if you’re the sort who comes here for stuff about social virtual worlds, read on, because this is relevant to you too. [...]
[...] Home · About · News · Podcast · Blog · Forum · Login · Register Raph’s Website – More on ‘Flation http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/01/20/more-on-flation-and-the-future/ "This post starts out being about very gamey things like damage per second, and ends up on a speculative note. So if you’re the sort who comes here for stuff about social virtual worlds, read on, because this is relevant to you too." Submitted by brent on Jan 21, 2007 09:44:12 CST (more) (comments) karma: 0 / clicks: 6 / comments: 0 Comments: To post comments, please login. VirginWorlds MMORPG News [Jan 21] Nerfbat – That Epic Feeling [...]
[...] MMO Mudflation Thoughts First off you need to go read the post and comments on Raph Koster’s site in this mudflation thread to understand why I think the comments there can’t see the forest from the trees. There’s a bigger picture to solving or curbing the problem of mudflation. The problem with traditional approaches to solving mudflation is that they typically cause tangential effects in other game systems. In order to truly reign in mudflation, traditional MMO game design needs to be rethought. Short anecdote that I’ll return to later before I get started. Four or five years ago, I had a chance to sit down with a couple of the old Kesmai guys at GDC. At the time we were discussing EQ, Asheron’s Call and DAoC. One of them remarked that MMOs do very little for the newbie experience and over time as mudflation sets in their new users were at a disadvantage. An example from the old game Air Warrior, which I’ve never had the pleasure of trying, struck a chord with me. Air Warrior required squadrons to continually recruit new members. Apparently there was a mechanic in the game that made veterans seek out new members. The thought here was that this might be a way to help solve mudflation. The thought stewed a while and has since been added to the design of Ages of Athiria. From the beginning Ages of Athiria has been designed to ward off the idea of mudflation. Solving mudflation is not only impossible but its not even desirable. A healthy economy should see inflation as time goes on. What it shouldn’t see is double digit inflation, the likes of which happens yearly in every mainstream MMO on the market. So with that in mind, how do we build a world where mudflation is controlled and tangential effects to other game systems are minimized? You start by revolving game systems around the economy instead of wrapping an economy around a combat sim/leveling treadmill. When you think about it, its more natural this way. Money plays a much more central role in our lives than it does in these virtual worlds. The first thing we addressed was player ownership of stuff in the world. Our design team loved the Shadowbane city ownership. It’s the only game we’ve played where political boundaries really meant something. Eve Online might also be like this but I’ve never played it so I can’t say. We had to have player ownership of buildings and other major items. (boats, houses, caravans, shops, forges, …) What we didn’t like was that something that was carefully constructed in four months of teamwork was torn down at 4 AM in two hours one morning. This made us arrive at analyzing the game play surrounding protecting what you own, including oneself, PvP. First we thought PvP was something that no-one wanted but that thought never truly seemed right. It’s PvE servers that are the aberration in the landscape of MMOs but they exist because people do not want to be forced into PvP without their consent. Players tend to take their possessions and achievements seriously and when another player griefs them, they leave the game because retaliation is not permanent. It’s funny that we let griefers inconvenience our players time but when the griefed ask us to step in and inconvenience the griefer’s time, we step back or implement half-assed bounty hunting code. We do this because game moderators stepping in to enforce play doesn’t scale and gives off the appearance of favoritism. Why not put code in place to allow the players to enact a limited form of permanent justice on griefers? We did that with our permadeath system for criminal behavior. The permadeath penalty is one of the punishments a player city can dish out for crimes against its citizens. A lot more information can be found here because this design topic is too big to include in this post about MMO mudflation. Trust me I am going somewhere with all this background so stick with me. At this point, we’d given the player something to own in buildings and items, told them it would be made part of the world history and everyday game play situations would involve their cities. We’d given the player run cities a way to protect their citizens against griefing making ownership something much harder to take away. Now we needed to give all these players something to do. Adventuring had to be there. Every MMO needs a combat game in my opinion. Our combat system started with the idea that a player never has more hit points than they start the game with. This freezes one aspect of the mudflation game in place taking it out of the equation. It limits the top end of our itemization as well but that should not be a problem for us because we’ll have more than just adventuring in the game as end-game game play. The only thing I am unsure about in our design is if players that have been trained through past MMOs to hit harder, crit harder and heal more will be able to find fun in a game where defending your hit points is more important than rolling huge crit numbers. Will the occasional hit be just as fun as the 75% hit ratios we see today? I’m not sure. Anyway, back on topic; Our combat system uses a system of insurance for items. If you can afford to insure it, then on death your items will not be left on your corpse. Loss from death has to be real because it makes ownership more real. Our death penalty will likely only be loss of items as that has the potential for the most dramatic impact on the economy. This also opens up the idea of artifact items which cannot be insured. Sure you can own the Sword of a Thousand Truths but you’ll be hunted for it. Bet you’re glad you belong to a player run city that can enact justice on the person that just ganked you for your sword. The thing to take away from this is that the adventuring game is intricately tied to the player run city game. This interdependency is the primary way Ages of Athiria fights mudflation. You’re thinking that none of this has to do with mudflation and I’ll immediately beg to differ. Fixing the hit points of a character affects itemization which in turn affects player power and more importantly player power bands. It reduces the bands of player power from dozens to a number far less than that meaning that new players and old players can group together without the game play getting in the way too much. Our skill system further reduces the gap between bands of player power. There’s a reason for this and it begins to tie back into the anecdote above. Defending a city is difficult if only a small fraction of your citizens can participate. We recognized this early on and began to set in motion game play that would make a city significantly easier to defend. We deliberately wanted the cities to stay up. Our ongoing lore depends upon having player run cities large enough to have staying power so our game play design reflects this. With more of a population’s citizens able to help defend a city, cities should live longer and prosper. A prospering city is very currency hungry which leads me to my next point. The political game is all about your city’s circle of influence. Circle of influence is something akin to what we see in the Civilization games and other RTS games. It marks the economic/cultural border of your player run city. Within these borders, your city can more readily control resources such as mines and forests through which players or NPCs can be hired/commissioned to extract resources from. Our AI design for NPC merchants is such that they will seek out the best place to setup shop to sell their wares. Since our NPCs use player market pricing as their basis for offering goods and services, they factor in the political game when evaluating which player run city they would like to go to to setup shop. The bulk of the political game is played RTS style, managing incoming/outgoing NPC and PC business owners and steering your PRC toward a prosperous future. Taxes, justice, military, businesses, inns and all sorts of city needs are all part of this political game. All of this except taxes requires gold, lots of it. Taxes are the way currency is drained from the player economy and wars/public works maintenance are the way most of it is expended. The nice thing about wars and public works is that once the money is spent it’s gone from the game. Building a campaign to destroy another city is a huge monetary commitment and enough of a drain for a fairly large number of people to remain humble. Wars should keep money from being stagnant in the world. If player run cities require so much cash just to operate, then how does the player base actually provide that cash without it becoming a grind? That takes me to our last game play item, businesses. None of the MMOs out there today give you even the most rudimentary tools with which to conduct business. Balance sheets, income statements, inventory counts and the rest of the business 101 items are no where to be found in the default UI. As a trader in WoW I have no idea if I am profitable without take huge amounts of time tracking every click that results in a monetary transaction. Businesses are a form of our organization code. Guilds are too as are groups only businesses have the most features enabled. You can learn more about the basic concepts here. Businesses were designed with two things in mind, keeping the economy moving during lightly played hours and providing a player with a non-combat oriented fully designed game play mechanic. The basic premise that led us to formalized businesses is the implementation of mandatory taxation of citizens that can be put in place by a player run city. We were forced to answer all the questions of expenses and revenue and what was taxable and what was not. We had to answer the gifting problem as well and close up some loopholes in traditional MMO design that would sink a mandatory tax system from the onset. In the end, we have a robust design for running a business in our world. We’ve even taken to the idea that this part of the game should be real time enabled on the web so that the economy has many more participants during the daytime hours when the server is more lightly populated by adventuring players. After all of this, I think we’ve arrived at a world realized enough to keep mudflation at bay. Player run cities need taxes to wage wars and operate the political game that shapes the lore of our world. Businesses need the safe haven that player run cities provide; players need the security against griefing which ultimately could result in loss of their prized possessions. Community sized goals that require hoards of funding should create a scarcity issue between player wealth and city wealth, though businesses ease the burden of getting all that loot from adventurers into the city’s economy. Adventurers need businesses for equipment, supplies, repairs and places to stay. Cities need adventurers to keep the roads clear and the monsters at bay so that merchant caravans can be operated in formal trade networks. (The items are physically shipped with the player owned caravan as part of our dynamic questing system.) The only thing we haven’t done is incorporate the idea from the Kesmai employee into the game mechanic and that is easy to do. Businesses need new employees that will not cost them as much money to employ. Player run cities also need new players to bolster their population numbers. Population expands a city’s circle of influence making it stronger. Population also generates more taxes which can be used for funding a military and paying for maintenance and upkeep of public works. What I am hoping comes from all this interconnectedness is a stable, steady inflation effect. The newbie experience should never be degraded because newbies are extremely important to the end game. If only newbies were important to raiding level 60 content in WoW; imagine… Varied game play, real loss and consequence, community goals, interdependent game play mechanics and the ever thirsty money machine of government should give us what we want. There’s much more to this design that I lead on to in this post. Head over to http://my.agesofathiria,com to read more on our design and how we think it will seriously curb the mudflation effect. I can only hope that one day we’ll get the chance to show the world we know what we’re talking about. Filed under: Game Design, MMO [...]