There is no such thing as one-way shaping. Reflexivity is the feel of the brakes on the evolution train.

Then there is Raph’s comment on “My Tiny Life”:

“…the best book written about what it is like to live immersed in a virtual world.”

He’s right. Spooky stuff.

Emotional investment doesn’t equal social commitment. One may consider cheating in a game just another way to experience it, but if one didn’t place so much value on the experience for whatever reason one does, cheating wouldn’t matter. Most confidence games and all psy-ops rely on that fact.

You may have already discussed these two topics I’m about to bring up. If you have done so, I’d greatly appreciate some links; if not, I hope to hear your thoughts on them.

1) @ Raph #127:

Ah, this may merit a post in and of itself.

Feedback is to make people feel good about themselves when they succeed. They also have to know when they fail.

A lot of games these days are about making you feel good about yourself by not letting you fail. This isn’t always good design.

As I read your post and the ensuing comments, the thought that kept coming up in my head was, “What does the incredible amount of cheating say about the design of failure?” If learning is to be emphasized as a valuable process in a game, what should designers do (and what are they currently doing) to convey this message?

For example, if I die in a combat situation, I expect my failure to teach me how to survive better next time… but there are venerable classics that don’t provide even hints at such information. [That's one big reason I steer clear of 1v1 fighting games: when I'm KO'd, I get no indication as to what kind of move will prevent my future defeat or how to execute that move -- two missing links in the informational chain that prevent in-game learning!] Likewise, many game narratives are designed so that upon success there’s the reward of plot advancement and upon defeat… nothing. I’m fine with plot progress being the carrot for players to pursue, but perfunctorily terminating the game upon critical failure, without any sort of closure, sucks. In my opinion, that’s tantamount to reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book in which any page that’s a non-preferred terminal state simply reads “THE END”. Not only is it not fun, it’s not worthwhile from a learning / enjoying-the-experience perspective. In some ways, the rate of cheating doesn’t surprise me, because so many games (inadvertently?) construe failure as a waste of time rather than a learning opportunity.

2) Another topic that came to mind from reading this exchange was how the ultimate reward, for some players (and to a limited extent, I include myself in this category), has shifted from reaching the planned in-game conclusion to deducing the hidden mechanics that govern the game. It’s not enough to finally be in the presence of the Wizard; we are compelled to look for the man behind the curtain.

Because total understanding is usually accomplished through a community spading effort, rather than each player working independently, this re-definition of victory ends up awfully close to your perception of cheating. Should game designers embrace this re-definition of victory? If so, how? If not, why?

You can’t learn everything. Information is not inherently social. Learning is an individual pursuit. Hypothetical fallacies do not make for effective arguments.

Basically so far you actually don’t want to argue, you just one-liner and then claim that others don’t provide proper argument against your simple claims.

And you keep missing the point made.

On last dissection before I leave this game of zero content:

* You can’t learn everything. -> trivially true.
* Information is not inherently social. -> empty statement. This neither comfirms nor denies the possibility that information can be social. No claim was made that information is inherently social so this doesn’t respond to anything.
* Learning is an individual pursuit. -> this is a personal creed. No evidence or argument provided, no context provided. I’m not sure if you actually care to learn anything yourself or question anything critically that has to do with your own beliefs but if you do, try this as an easy example.
* Hypothetical fallacies do not make for effective arguments. -> This is kind of funny for someone who hardly makes any arguments at all, at least in our very barren dialogue. And it’s a rerun too!

Now tell me what I can learn from you that has value? I mean something that isn’t trivial, nor a personal belief nor a flowery but clumsy attempt to invalidate another persons attempt to argue a point?

We can agree to not argue at all, because idle banter like this certainly isn’t for me. I’d rather learn something.

Well maybe but not really. See he didn’t take anything away from anybody. There was no PVP so he didn’t kick anybodies ass. Everybody got to kill mobs and do quests. He just did some alone which others did together. Everybody did get to play and level their character and experience level cap. Often he helped others etc. Basically he played it like two people and both would participate in RP.

If you categorically deny that as possibly legit, then so be it. I can see very little harm done to anyone in what he did, actually basically none. So what’s the punishable offense?

I can see that him playing two characters in a different setting has a different meaning. But in our setting it was rather neutral. Noone complained about it, nor was it a secret. He didn’t brag about it either or wanted to grief or pwn anyone. It was just one way to play the game in a setting where it hardly could cause problems.

I do see multi-boxing in WoW PVP as something different, it has a different context etc and it may not be fun for people who get pwnd by Xzin. But at the same time there is something cool to that and it can create a new game, namely 9 people teaming up and trying to take down Xzin 8+1 and check if 9 intelligent brains can beat one with the same number of characters. Or would it be cheating that Xzin only gets to use one brain?

Sorry for that jab, anyway. I can fully understand if someone dislikes multiboxing in WoW PVP. I don’t care too much about PVP so it doesn’t bother me too much. Actual griefing bothers me more than knowing if someone multiboxes.

And yes you completely missed my point in case you hadn’t noticed

If there was a bug it was the devs fault, not the gamers. That’s why we didn’t punish but of course we didn’t even think about punishing but it was natural to us that bugs were Dev’s responsibility. More self-reflective attitude to the problem I think than thinking people do wrong by doing what is possible.

Thought experiment: Your favorite online game, you accidentally find a bug. You don’t immediately notice it’s a bug and use it a few times. When you discover what’s going on you stop. Next day your account is banned for repeatedly exploiting a known bug. Good? Or should the game company fix their darn bugs first and foremost and think a good long while before considering bans?

Self-reflection and accountability by whoever creates the system are a very good thing.

And the other point you miss is that it isn’t my position I describe here. I describe what for many people was the natural setup on our MUD. Hence I describe what many people naturally perceived. It’s not I who didn’t see “cheats as cheating” as you claim, it was everybody around me. So no I don’t see it as part of culture, I see it as the reality we had. Raph claims that the reality is that this stuff was widely bannable. That’s not accurate.

Multiboxing in WoW is still possible because Blizzard thinks it’s cool. In fact Blizz has explicitly allowed multiboxing and the type of challenges that I discussed above. Question is do people play the game by the rules or do they want to force and punish? If you don’t like that don’t take it to me. Take it to Blizz.

My point is neither whether activity X is neutral or not, it’s that the claim that everybody considered checking strategies in the early 90s cheating is just not really accurate. Nor is the claim that everybody thought that multiboxing is obviously a bannable offense.

These statement have the same accuracy as someone claiming that all MUDs in the mid 90s had PK. It’s a factual thing and nothing else.

And yes in hindsight we were progressive because evidently only now do major game companies endorse multiboxing when we kind of did it without any thought or quarrel in the early 90s.

I said this a few times earlier in this discussion, cheating isn’t neutral. If he had written a program to hack himself to immortality by altering the server code before he was implementor, that would be cheating and we’d done something about it. But nothing of that sort ever happened.

Hey Raph,

FYI…we discussed this on the latest SUWT. Turned out to be a great discussion with some other bloggers.

Enjoy,
D

Tonyp5, it doesn’t matter. If the guys running the game say something is cheating, it’s cheating. It doesn’t matter if players don’t want to follow the rules, and for any reason, the rules are made by the guys making/running the game.

Moroagh, in your scout leader example, who put the money out? Who designed the journey? If that person/designer wants to make rules for this little quest, shouldn’t he be allowed to do that? The rules were clearly stated, and the scouts who broke the rules did in fact cheat. It doesn’t matter if they should be or can be expected to cheat. They did cheat.

But one thing this whole things makes very clear. Quests as they are in games are badly broken.

I simply do not agree with you that sharing information learned about a game is cheating, though I do agree that it is a mechanic.

Cheating is in the eyes of the beholder. I’m sure the developers intend for certain information to be hidden from the player. So, from their point of view, the players sharing information to help overcome planned obstacles may be viewed as cheating. The problem is that it is impossible to keep that information hidden for long.

Is the player cheating when they do the quest a second time, maybe on a different character, but now they know all the hidden quest information? What should they do – pretend they don’t know?

What about when a player who has not done a certain group quest, groups with players that have done it before? Should they all pretend they don’t know how to do it for the newbie’s sake?

Good luck getting friends to NOT discuss the details of any game mechanic, and share information in the process.

The spread of information may be a rule of nature, at least it’s a rule of human nature. It should be EXPECTED by developers. Expected behavior can’t be viewed as cheating. Sharing information is what people DO. Our ability and drive to share information is probably a big part of what makes our species as successful as it is.

Raph said:
I really have to point back at this – where at the time, most people took the opposite position!

Hehehe

Frankly, I think there’s too many game designers (with all due respect, including you, Raph) who’ve likened themselves to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when at best, they’ve got more in common with Betty Crocker.

I think that’s unfair to pin that on one guy. The end products do seem to fall into that for the most part. But from playing a few games and actually spending most of my time looking for the Doyle in them, I also have to blame the players to some degree. I don’t know how many times I tried something only to hear from another player that “they don’t do things like that”.

One time I think I proved that there was at least the design for a “Doyle” kind of thing, and I had a few players actually argue that it wasn’t there anymore (since I had shown proof that it was there at one point). How the hell would they know for sure?

Raph basically I’ve been responding to what you are saying. It isn’t all that bizarre I think if you follow the arguments.

For example, a basic premise of mine is that all games are didactic, all the time. They cannot help it.

I know this Raph, I just differ or rather I agree but in a way that doesn’t do the agreement justice. Because the idea that everything teaches something is too obviously right to question. But I just don’t have an issue with having the inadvertent lesson be that the gamer can actually make certain decisions and that the designer may not be the teacher or even able to do the teaching he set out to do.

BTW, I am guessing that the muds you played didn’t have many quests?

If you mean did we have very intricate deep puzzles that were very hard to crack? No. We did have riddles and stuff but it was comparable to the depth that some text adventures had at the time, clue-based with some deduction and trying. We certainly didn’t think or care to make it very riddle centric. We did have many quests though and each zone had at least one main objective (usually finding a way to get to and kill a lore mob, though some were about finding a treasure without combat).

Though none of the MUDs I tried at the time had deep riddles. I never played LegendMUD.

But there was no plan or direction, it was just a bunch of folks hacking stuff together. I can’t remember us ever worrying about what we wanted to control, in fact we had very little discussion about most things. Just lots of trying of ideas and adding things. We did react to some stuff (i.e. a rogue realizing that you could indefinitely pickpocket the NPC storekeepers , while other mobs had a limited wallet – a bug that we inherited from the standard Diku source ), and we’d just patch it up after that. The reaction was “oh, that’s a bug” and it’s was changed and that was it. The border between developers/immortals/players was very blurry because in old Diku tradition top level players became immortals. The content creators and coder types became implementors and the rest drove story lines. Often immortals had player alts. Certainly we were creating a game for ourselves.

The basic profile of the MUD was quests, riddles and combat, no PVP/PK, I don’t remember there being any player to player trade culture. People just gave away loot they didn’t need anymore or vendored it. Our player base didn’t care to play an economic game. However I have to emphasize too that a big thing was that our immortals loved to run immortal driven quests/campaigns. Usually immortals would prepare and prescript them and lead and oversee those events (and roleplay NPCs). Some were regular events with same or similar stories, some were unique. The similar story lines were typically not riddle based though, and rather had a teaching/guiding/introductory character (i.e. introduce players to the game in an RP fashion). Immortal driven quests were very popular even if they offered no reward beside interactive story telling. The static scripted quest lines were usually a blend of map-learning (navigate this unknown zone, with death-traps and clues), adventure-like story based riddles (find unknown flask, discover ways to identify flask, discover owner, guess from partial clues (broken signs) and such etc etc), some quests were actually related to loot drops, i.e. one had to discover which mobs owned certain things. Certainly in terms of learning challenge the backbone was exploring the maps and finding clues of death traps and heeding them and avoiding dead ends or cycles. We did have a few non-euclidean mazes too actually (these were very easy to do in Diku as the neighborhood link map didn’t enforce correctness) but I wouldn’t call finding your way through them very hard. We did emphasize group combat in multiple stages of a quest tour. Many weren’t meant to be done alone though we did have solo content, because the bosses/mobs weren’t really beatable alone or of you could don’t not get meaningful xp. The combat system emphasized group coordination and mutual support, specifically in the tanking behavior, with “chain” tanking (that is tanks rescuing each other to prolong longevity. There was also healing of course.)

But a lot of this we did inherit, it was a Diku derivative, which did allow a lot of this but as was customary at the time we did heavy coding/extending on the base and by the end of it a lot wasn’t really standard Diku. I think a handful of later MUDs ended up using our code as base (and I just checked that we are even listed in the Diku family tree, how odd).

We were blessed with a very active zone creator group so new content was frequent and people had new stuff to explore on a regular basis. We developed a lot of code to help content creation.

Post hoc and in the context of our discussion I can tell you that we didn’t worry about content getting stale at all. We didn’t even think there may be an issue with people sharing how to get through a maze and which death trap to avoid. Doing so was just natural and it was typical to do so. But in hindsight we did have no problem providing new content either so stale content didn’t mean there was nothing new to do. But content never really was stale. And even if the maze was solved the mob combat remained challenging so stuff had decent replay value. And if someone knew how to get to the treasure chest, that was just fine. There was no competitive attitude, in that noone ever even thought about bragging of having explored a zone first, having been the first to actually make it through that swamp or killed a mob first, but this too may have been mediated by the fact that the real popular thing was the GM driven events. Some of these were competitive, like who solves the riddle first gets the loot. But it never had a lasting meaning the next day people just went on with whatever. The kind of loot pride one sees nowadays wasn’t there either. Loot had use value, i.e. you wanted it to be better equipt for the next harder encounter.

I do know that MUDs had very different feels and people kinda shopped for the MUD that tickled their fancy at the time. We ended up getting the crowd that liked RP and our lore but didn’t like PK. Lag was also a huge issue though we still had a fairly international crowd and the server actually moved to another continent as the main admin changed.

Anyway, this certainly was way more than you ever cared to know, sorry

Recent games that got spoilered for me: BioShock, Portal. In both cases the narrative endings were absolutely everywhere and discussed by everyone. It was impossible to read anything related to gaming culture and not see references.

Ah I get it. I think you are indeed a victim of a professional hazard. I don’t absolutely have to keep up with gaming trends, so I can chose to not read cursory spoilers. Certainly neither BioShock nor Portal was spoiled for me and in fact had I known more about BioShock’s story-line idea I probably would have bought it faster. I tend to read a lot about games after I got them not before.

I think what is a minefield for you is actually quite safe for the rest of us. We don’t have to go there

Morgan: You said: “You’d have to dig in and search”. Well if there was discussion how to handle the real money impact that drives cyber crimes it’d be interested to read up on it. Pointers appreciated.

Raph, before I leave RMT again, I just want to say that I simple do oberate with a different and likely wider definition of RMT hence I cannot agree with you there but that’s fine.

It is still a pity that big swaths of game mechanics become useless, but that is how it is.

See I just don’t agree with that. But it’s fine. It’s useless if you absolutely wanna please the type of personality I discussed. Frankly I wish that less games would cater to that personality. Virtually all game mechanisms I have seen 15 years ago are life and well today, and I just simply don’t share your fatalism about it. But the core of our difference here is simple: For me someone checking a strategy site does not destroy the game at all, while you insist that it does. So it’s nor surprising that you are fatalistic about it. I do think it’s best if we just agree to disagree on this.

I don’t think that things changed as radically as you claim, certainly not in my perview. But clearly I frequented a very different MUD culture among other things. In my perview the acceptability of strategy guides hasn’t changed at all. It was perfectly acceptable to use strategy guides in the MUDs I played 15+ years ago. It was always acceptable to consult walkthroughs for anything in the gamer culture I was in. That in your world that’s different just means that there isn’t just one gaming culture. For me that mostly means that what you claim is change is more likely change for your gaming culture and maybe other cultures never suffered from specific problems that your culture created for itself (like needing to ban and shame people). So in a sense you are right about the culture thing there.

The shock tactics you applied fell on wrong ears for me because plainly it doesn’t match my experience. Noone ever in many years of gaming has seriously suggested to me that strategy guides are a problem. It isn’t a new thing or a change that they are no problem. But I understand your point about RMT being a new phenomenon. I do disagree though that all have to learn and embrace it as a needed cultural shift if I understand you correctly as claiming that. Just as much as not everybody has to accept to be shamed and banned for gaming practices. I do believe that the way real money works in online gaming is very much in flux and we haven’t even seen what all will happen there but it doesn’t seem to me that’s the claim.

But you see, the “cheating” example is a bad one because many people never went to that supposed paradigm shift that your circles evidentally went through. For me it was a very stunning thing to read that the UO crew was so vigorously against strategy guides as you posted. This is how different perspectives can be, and I can see that you perceive a radical shift coming out of that perview. But you may consider that many people who had odd reactions to your shock treatment had it not because they are youngsters, but because they lived in a different (maybe less adverserial and competitive) gaming culture.

Feedback is to make people feel good about themselves when they succeed.

No. I understand that that’s your belief but I disagree. That is only a subset of personalities that this covers (clearly you are included in it or you’d see it as limited).

In RPG MMOs for example people get constantly rewarded by eye-candy for doing nothing. WoW has repeated 0-effort rewards and feel-good aspects to the game.

The reason is simple: Not everybody who games wants to be educated and only rewarded for achievement. Some people simply just want to have a good time.

Not everybody is the achiever type and if the game only rewards achievement (what you claim) you limit the fun for only those. And some personalities are not good at failing. They will play a game on easy mode to play it through and feel good about themselves. The absolutely avoid your “They also have to know when they fail.”

Success and failure is only one pattern that can relate to fun and it’s the pattern of the achiever type.

A lot of games these days are about making you feel good about yourself by not letting you fail. This isn’t always good design. It is if the learning ramp really is that gradual. But usually it isn’t that — instead, it’s that the games often just give you a bye.

Exactly. But again of course I don’t see the problem at all but given that you promote the achiever type I see how you have a problem. But there is a difference between designing ill-tuned games and designing games that are well-tuned but work for different personality types. I don’t think that games having an easy-mode is any problem at all! Yes if you want to write an achiever-only game go ahead and make it hard to succeed to ramp up the reward for succeeding, but this won’t cover all types of having fun with a game. And yes you gotta hate strategy guides because people “cheated” themselves out of achieving… again that’s just one personality type.

even though you may have been terrible at it.

Again highlighting our difference in attitude here. For me that’s no problem at all. Not everybody has to try to achieve excellency. If they have a good time it’s alright. Yes you can emphasize skill while leveling and turn that scale widely. I think very skill based leveling games are also very limited games because they only meet the needs of those that want constant challenge.

This is a feel-good experience, and very addictive, but it isn’t necessarily healthy for the player. As Jon Blow says, it’s kind of “empty calories.”

Sounds to me like the “TV is bad for you” argument. I really don’t buy this. It’s like feature movies, we have a whole array of movies from braindead comedies and cookie-cutter romances to deep social criticisms and bizzare arthouse movies. I don’t believe that everybody needs to watch Kaurismäki or Eisenstein or stomach through the full lenght of the original Solaris. While I don’t enjoy many of the trash comedies I don’t care at all to tell people not to watch them. Yeah so police academy has 0 intellectual value. So what? People clearly don’t go to see it for the wittily picked Nitsche quotes anyway. They go to meet a different need.

But as said I understand that you want to service the achiever type and in addition apparently want that everybody places themselves in at least some sort of achieving frame of mind. I don’t share that view. I think mindless relaxing and a fun social experience or exploring without learning anything but scenary are perfectly fine and acceptable if someone chooses such.

Mindless bantering of silly jokes is perfectly good for people and in the same way playing games that are accessible and not permanently didactic is just as fine.

But I know already that we will continue to disagree on that so we can leave it there no problem

If games are training for real world problems of various sorts (something I firmly believe) then it is a bad thing that you can “cop out” so to speak. Empty calories.

As said I don’t agree that games are always didactic. They can be but they don’t have to be. Just as reading a book doesn’t have to be intellectual training but it can be relaxation (reading light stuff or deep stuff).

But if reading a book is always with the the father behind you ready to smack you if you haven’t gotten that extra learning out of the book you basically for-short other values, like unwinding after a day of work, like dealing with non-competition and socializing, and like being allowed to take care of ones needs (whether they are achieving or relaxing).

But don’t get me wrong I do like didactic value in games and I wouldn’t let my children just play anything. However to be frank I actually think a lot of achiever type games teach bad stuff. Take your MUD example. By telling people that they cannot discuss a riddle they learn a number of lesson: Don’t ask for help. Don’t discuss your problem. Don’t seek sources of information. I do understand that there is a conflict here between needs. But the reason why my MUD never thought of every doing anything like this is because we inherently valued the social quality and people solving situations together in our setup. Both are didactic but the lessons you teach are different. The first requires to limit communication and information to teach individual strive and achievement, the latter needs to foster and support information flow and communication to foster social skills, collaboration and social ties.

Can you see how what in your setting is necessarily “cheating” is in my setting no problem at all, in fact is rather encouraged? And it was like that 15 years ago when I admin’ed my MUD just as much as now.

A lot of socializing has nothing to do with achievement, it has to do with rapport, sympathy etc. Shaming and banning aren’t exactly the things that fit in the kind of setup that I thought interesting to teach (which may explain to you why I have a negative reaction to these punishing type social pressure things that you embrace).

I never saw value in feeding the “I am better than you” attitude that is part of the social standing achiever reward structure that requires one to suck so the other wins. But many games encourage, teach and reward it. It’s a somewhat narcissistic and mildly (or given the degree of it more strongly) anti-social personality that is fed here but yes that can be coupled with strongly driven achievement. I rather have it if achievement is fostered based on awards that do not require others to be excluded.

For me the most striking thing in MMO culture is exactly this attitude that some though certainly only a subsection of the player personalities have:

* You cannot have it because it devalues that I got it.

It’s spite, envy and narcisissm that makes this attitude. “I’m only good if I can see someone else fail”. Or on a milder scale “If you don’t hack it you don’t deserve it”

It’s devalues helping and sharing, and allowing people access. It’s it’s certainly not compassionate or empathetic.

That games could try to teach that one can achieve and be cordial as well might be a different approach. One could teach that if you have abilities and knowledge you share it (that sharing you call “cheating”). Then again of course you could try to teach how to share knowledge without cutting out learning. I.e. how to guide rather than give away etc.

It’s a fine line between teaching achievement and teaching competitive nastiness (even our political leaders need to eat better food in that regard). And it’s certainly a fine line between teaching that one will not always succeed and that one has to fail so that others can feel good about themselves. And there are things that one has to decide how to teach in an achievement context. So would one want to teach that one supports and helps less able and gifted? Or should one teach that it’s “tough luck for you bro, I’ll win that turtle race thank you very much”.

For me the anti-social is worse than the 0-calories.

Sharing information may be spoilers in your view. In my view nasty people are spoilers. I think both make sense given a specific goal/motivation/personality structure and in each way both are “right”.But I actually believe that there isn’t a conflict between achieving and being social. But of course it is still as bad as trying to get a Myer-Briggs ESTP to happily coexist with an INFP personality.

But as said it’s different cultures, different player types, and different needs and motives that are met or denied. And I do believe that we have very different views on these, which is fine.

As far as spoilers — they’re simply everywhere.

I really can’t follow this. Can you actually give me examples of a recent game that got spoiled for you and how?

Because in my many years of gaming the only games that got “spoiled” for me I spoiled for myself by my own choosing.

I don’t know where the two quotes about mechanistic segregation came from originally

I got it from Morgan’s post. The comments don’t have very visible separators so I accidentally thought it was yours. Sorry for misquoting this. Glad we agree here.

And I believe that lots of things that players do (like check strategy sites) is absolutely benign.

Go back to my example with the maze. For solving that quest (it was on the Worlds of Carnage mud, btw) I got a kickass reward, plus a lot of game fame. Very few people ever solved it.

See I get it. What you are saying is that the reward structure is damaged (loot, fame) if it’s public. And I disagree that certain reward structures can change but funny enough in this example the reward structures are completely external to the game. Your pride in having exclusive loot and standing. I do think that games can and do design for these things and in fact games succeed doing so despite hidden information. Take your example: Track whoever first beat a puzzle and you advertise an exclusive standing reward structure that is safe to revealed information.

But yes, I agree that certain things you simply cannot do. If you insist that not the first but the first n feel good about something but the achievement is perceived to be too fragile to draw the later achievements into question there is a problem.

But that isn’t a generic problem and the second part is, that it tries to cater to a psychology that is hard to satify.

Really, noone got cheated out of playing the game and noone got cheated out of the callenge to beat that puzzle and reap it’s reward. What has changed is the context and reward psychology that’s hard to control. I.e. that the player feels special in his social context.

But that’s exactly why I don’t see a problem there. If your intended goal is to design a game that is about solving hard puzzles and at the same time encourage a sense of social standing and competitive achievement you’d indeed have to protect the relative standing of people. How can you do that? Do not use static information. Design puzzles that only are solvable if you understand them and are not repetitive.

Yes that is a design limitation. And yes it may be harder for the designer, but it’s like any design process, you have to work with the constraints. It doesn’t make sense for a car designer in Norway to complain that they have to design cars around mountainous terrain.

But real competitiveness is very tricky if that’s what you seriously want to design for, especially if it contains any kind of tangible information that goes into the competitive measure and knowing that information will bias the measure.

Take competitive bridge. This is a highly regulated game with extremely strict rules what has to be known (it actually demands that all information that is communicated is public, and it demands that nothing out of a very tight context and code is ever communicated). It also regulates against hidden communication via body signals by blocking the view of playing partners etc and the games are heavily supervised.

But real world competitive bridge is designed to solve the problem of information flow. By having supervision, by controlling communication and by being in a setting where you can.

There are three things to this:
* Normal bridge isn’t really all that hurt by competitive bridge. People can and do play with far less stringent setup and the game is fine.
* Competitive bridge doesn’t work online because you cannot supervise communication.

But that’s just the nature of real competitive settings. They need to be tightly supervised to guarantee integrity of the information.

And I personally don’t have a problem there because simply
* If you don’t have that you never really knew if there was integrity. The player may be under the impression that it’s fine but it cannot be guaranteed. For example take a puzzle like you mentioned, there is no guarantee that none of the few people who solved it solved it legit. If you demand integrity despite that yes you set yourself up for yelling cheater and banning in a rather sub-perfect attempt to socially protect the integrity. My argument all along is that you are fine to try that but it just cannot work. Hence calling it “bad design”. The game wasn’t designed to protect what you want from it inherently so you need inaccurate social measures to try to cover for it.

Our difference is as I understand it that you think that’s “good design” the problem are people “who cheated the setup”.

But really, they only cheat because you demand the competitive standing reward structure. If you remove that demand they didn’t cheat anything but the puzzle is there and everybody who wants to solve it and get the rewards legit can do that. Because they are not out there to feel special about it afterwards it’s fine and the thing is indeed perfectly benign as I said.

I think you are fine to grief the trouble of protecting social standing rewards around static information, but from my perspective it has limited impact on play and can be mitigated or achieved by different in-game designs. So yeah in that sense the post you made about static information answering that it is indeed history is dead. I just disagree because it covers only one very specific reward type and not gaming as a whole.

Seriously 9 million people play WoW and it has no information driven social standing rewards. It does have competitive standing rewards (world, server first, PVP ranking, loot acquired). So while it doesn’t protect the specific nitch of the information based case it does definitely cover the specific reward need of people to feel special. Clearly only a small subset of the population cares about this kind of reward structure given the size of the population and the number who can be classified as actually having achieved visible competitive achievements.

It ISN’T necessarily a flaw in the puzzle design that you got stuck. It can very easily be a flaw in YOU, the player. It is legitimate for one puzzle to be too hard for a given player. It does not mean that it is a bad puzzle. You might just not be ready for it. And you are certainly cheating yourself of the “aha!” moment when you solve it. A good puzzle is teaching you ways to think, ways to problem-solve. The solution does not necessarily teach you that.

The reason for the reward structure that we just discussed above is rather simple: Make people feel good about themselves.

Independent of how specifically people will feel good about themselvs (socializing, achieving, exploring etc etc) I think that is actually a very frequent goal (otherwise we talk about depressed or masorchistic personalities, which I don’t expect to be typical).

The real think about what you say above is: What message do you send the player.

Design A:
* If you are stuck at a puzzle you are stuck.
Design B:
* If you are stuck at a puzzle you can ask for gradually inreasing hints. (To protect competitiveness that could be recorded if one so desires)
Design C:
* If you are stuck you can ask to skip the puzzle for now and revisit it later.
(To protect competitiveness that could be recorded if one so desires)

Design A takes the player out of control. And sends the message “So you are stuck here you just aren’t good enough to go on” or the player may thing “this sucks there is no way to go anywhere now”. It locks down and excludes content.
Design B gives the player degrees of help and some degree of control. It sends the message that’s it’s OK to solve a situation with some assistance. It may turn of puzzle purists.
Design C gives the player control over the state of being stuck. It sends the message that “you the player desides what aspects of the game are managable for you and the game gives you the choice to explore”. It makes content available.

I think all three designs are in principle thinkable. But Design A is the least player friendly and sends the most negative message to players.

I’ll be quite blunt about myself. A game whose message is “you are stuck and deserve to not progress” is a “bad game” in my book and I won’t buy the sequel and I won’t praise the designer. If we want to be funny I’d just say that the game failed at social skills, it failed to work with me rather choose to work against me. But that’s the match of the design to my personality. Some people like it, let them have it.

It fails to achieve the “make me feel good about myself and happy” within the context of my personality. I.e. it fails at properly tapping into some personality-type’s motivation.

I do believe though that game designs that treat people with guidance and sympathy have been exceedingly successful in the past. So many people may share my sentiment as to how games ought to operate with respect to players.

But I do understand if indeed your goal is very competitive reward structure you have to tell people they suck so someone else can feel good about themselves.

I think just design those games and players decide if they are the competitive type or the type that actually likes the game to work with them to some degree.

About the “aha” moment. Players may not get it. But that’s fine. Those that want that can try for it. A game designer cannot force any gamer to do the specific work to get a specific type of achievement. If a player doesn’t have the inclination or drive to seek out aha moments that’s it and it’s fine.

There simply is a mismatch in reward expectations. Players who don’t seek the “aha” moment can still enjoy a game design that includes heavy puzzles. By designing to demand that players pass the “aha” moment excludes player types. I think that’s a legitimate design choice but there isn’t any damage at all. The game never was designed for people who got stuck. And the designer chose that those folks thrown their game box into the trash and never return.

But I do see a trend that lots of games do not do this. They support multiple, often as many as possible playing types and there is no problem there. Some get “aha”s and brag about their reward, some follow the story line. I personally think that these kind of multiple-personality designs are good (they manage to keep many personality types “happy”) but that’s a preference thing and we are good to disagree on that.

But I know it’s impossible to keep everybody happy. Especially competitive social standing demands making some unhappy because “being better than that other” is what triggers the reward. I think (and see games) that even work with this. Rather than tell players loudly they suck, tell those that achieve how much they achieved. This minimizes that player feel they suck but maximizes that those who achieved think that the others did suck.

Once the info it out there, it is very hard not to hit the spoiler.

I’m just smiling at that one because it took me half a minute to decode what BSG even was (and the last one I have any knowledge about is from the late 70s). And yeah you got that wrong. You failed to control yourself more than anything else here. Tell me: How does one beat Kael’Thas in WoW? Answer: You very very likely have no clue so nothing got spoiled for you. The information is public if you want it. So you want a no-strategy raid group? No problem, start a guild with that premise. You’ll be pretty well protected.

… and by construction avoids mechanistic segregation of people!

I don’t think that’s possible, if only because our brains are wired to identify and distinguish between patterns.

But Raph that wasn’t the context. The context was level gap in EQ2. If you actually cared you absolutely could be creative to design a game that doesn’t cause level gaps or if it does, doesn’t cause the symptom of segregation because of it.

Ideas:
* Design without levels!
* Design where buddies can choose to level as a social entity and share levels.
* Design content that works across wide level brackets (maybe is adaptive to individual levels of the players within a group) and keeps appeal for all participants
* Design character levels so that higher levels can temporarily “downgrade” to their buddies
* Design where people can bridge the level gap but get it for free
* Design where people can bridge the level gap by spending money at Station Exchange or some RMT mechanism

and one could brainstorm many more and some of these have been tried as you surely know.

I think it’s a lack of willingness and creativity to not think about how to design games that don’t segregate social groups. Some existing game designs actually don’t segregate social groups btw, but I really feel that there is no real debate and concience of social group relevant design in MMOs when clearly the added social component and it’s relation to existing social ties is so big here.

Other ideas that have floated the WoW sphere:
* Guild keying instead of individual keying to avoid having guildies excluded from content and prevent social play

A simple mechanics change that shifts from segregating individuals, to ensuring joint access of groups. Perfectly feasible and very little of the individuals identity was touched here, they still have their individual loot, their quest history and their guild label etc etc.

There is loads one can do against segregation of people in games if one cares. It’s a design decision to segregate people.

Social gaming is one of the hurting parts of many MMO designs because they don’t worry enough about how to keep social groups together and not split them by content mechanics. For me the next big thing isn’t RMT, it’s better design of games that actually inherently honor and support real life and virtual social ties.

And as a side-note, allowing people to play together doesn’t mean that everybody is the same… or feels the same. It just means that content access and reward structures aren’t tied too tightly to gaming practices that happen between different people of a RL social group (e.g.
difference in available gaming time for a husband and spouse setup).

Think Nick Yee’s work on how people play WoW alone way more than what one might naively expect. Isn’t it kind of designed to do that? I think absolutely. One can have two reactions here: one is “oh we can’t do anything, it’s destroy our sense of identity” or one can have the reaction that “it should be possible to support social structures and support identities in that context as well, lets find ways to achieve that”.

Now I’m just waiting for designers to smarten up about the issue

Thanks Raph, interesting stuff. We keep kind of misunderstanding each points but it’s good. And we do agree on stuff even if it doesn’t shine through too much.

“anything players do that they find fun is appropriate”

I’m actually not saying this at all. For example griefing isn’t OK in my book i.e. one player intentionally spoiling fun for another.

I am saying though that game designers have to be careful in defining for players what is appropriate.

And I believe that lots of things that players do (like check strategy sites) is absolutely benign.

On WoW you write:

They do it right for your playstyle. For someone who loves questing and puzzle solving, WoW is incredibly tedious.

That’s fine. I agree that WoW’s questing structure isn’t deep but I wasn’t discussing that. I was discussing the impact of strategy guides. I love adventure games and play them as well and I full well appreciate intricate story lines with unexpected twists and turns (best in my book in recent history is Witcher) and challenging well-made puzzles (Portal). But despite that I do not consider anyone who does use a strategy guide even for those games cheaters. Seriously, if I want to pick my brain and solve a puzzle I’ll do that, if I get stuck and still want to see what comes after I will check a guide. Call it a design flaw. The puzzle game doesn’t have enough hint, or unstuck features. If the idea of the game design is that one ought to get stuck then I’m sorry for not appreciating that design philosophy.

I was going to go through and quote large bunches of your post, but it comes down to this: you and I have a fundamental disagreement:

* I see hidden static info as a valuable tool in the designer’s toolkit.

See in an odd way I’m saying the same. But of course with different intent. And also with a different caveat. I say that hidden static information is good game design and that it can enrich the gaming experience (meta-game). But I also say that the designer simply cannot control what people do outside the game. So if your design in order not to break relies on people respecting information as taboo I’m basically just saying that I don’t see how that can work.

* You are saying that using it is always bad design:

Yep exactly in this context. If you insist that people behave in a certain way to information that is revealable, how are you going to control them? Shame them by calling them cheaters? Ban them from the game? I don’t see any positive fun reinforcements here at all that work to protect the secret that you plan to keep respected.

But one can protect some aspects of design by construction and not needing to control people. I do hate to bring the WoW example but I do thing they are very good at that.

Fog of war. Logic puzzles. Any PvP situation. Lack of full info is a very very common mechanic.

I don’t have any problem with any of these. And there is a lot of this lacking information that you cannot get even if you go to web-sites.

That isn’t my argument. My argument is that if information is available to players in some way. I.e. if the map has been revealed and posted on a web-site, you cannot be mad at gamers for it. Some games have an inherent toggle in game as a normal option (Warcraft series I think) where you can decide as gamer if you want fog of war in-game or not.

Allowing people to chose how to engage isn’t all that bad.

As I tried to say right at the beginning, removing it throws away huge amounts of sorts of games — and they are NOT bad sorts of games. Adventure games, quests worthy of the name, puzzles of all sorts.

I never said to remove any of these. I said it’s no big deal if people have the map or breeze through the puzzle. This does by no means negate the game at all! If a person buys an adventure game and plays it through end following a walthrough to get the full story line and they enjoyed the experience, it’s a win. Nothing got lost. Another player plays it for the puzzles and each player type is satisfied. I don’t think there is any reason for fatalism just because not every player may play a game exactly to the designers intent.

These games do well (at least in my personal enjoyment scale), even if there are strategy guides around. In fact it’d be interesting to see how many games actually get more enjoyment because rather than deleting it from the hard-drive because one got stuck in the adventure and is frustrated out of your mind, they did get to see the end of it.

I am also unwilling to concede that “nobody wants that” because if that were so, there wouldn’t be adventure games on the endcaps in Wal-Mart.

And I never said that nobody wants that. A disproportionate amount of games I buy are adventures and it hurts me that this segment is sorely starved for quality material. It’s a gross misunderstanding that I think that nobody wants that, I think that I and lots of other games don’t think they are cheats for checking a walkthrough, completely independent of what the designer thinks. (Basically the designer has to get of his high horse if he has an issue there, and that’s all).

In particular, btw, the thing that is badly damaged by strategy guides is any use of unlocking narrative. They call them “spoilers” for a reason. Following your logic, I end up at a place where “having anything spoiler-worthy is not sensible.” And that’s a painful place to be, I think, for games as a whole.

I don’t believe in the fatalism here. The fact that spoilers exist doesn’t mean that everything gets spoiled or everyone wants the spoilers. My reasoning isn’t that games shouldn’t have surprises at all. My reasoning is that players can chose spoilers if they want to. But I’ll be clear that neither means that everybody should do that or that it invalidates the game design or a reason for doing it. If people buy it, write great reviews and buy a similar game again, you have won. Games are fine. I played BioShock on one ending and have no time for another. I have no clue still about the other ending. Till today nothing was spoiled for me because I simply chose not to have it spoiled. Yeah I could go and find the info that’s unlocked if you make different decisions. But I haven’t. I think you can trust gamers to actually play.

A WoW quest has more in common with a signpost than an adventure game, but that is not where quests came from.

As said I agree that WoW’s quest structure is simplistic. For me the main misunderstanding of WoW is exactly the reward structure and why people the heck do play for 3 years (or play Sims that long etc). Clearly quests have limited intellectual appeal, and so does a lot of other MMO (or general game) content. I don’t think the reason are strategy guides though. I rather think the reason is ease of designing this content at the pace that’s needed but you are inside and you can confirm or deny this hunch.
There is a lot of content in WoW, I’m not surprised that they look for simple recipes to put out content and the quests that bug out are exactly the complex script ones.

Another good reason could well be that people don’t want to be constantly intellectually challenged. Yes WoW can be seen as bland food, but there is nothing wrong with mindlessly spending time at the mall when that meets ones needs (of say unwinding). If one wants to be puzzle master one can boot that up.

And as you said, each game doesn’t have to be for everybody. If one doesn’t like WoW, there hopefully is something else.

Actually, the exact same logic applies. There’s a network stream that is fundamentally unprotectible being sent to the client. By your logic, it is not sensible to try to protect it, and it is bad design to hide anything in it. This is exactly the logic behind “never ever trust the client.”

Not at all, I said technical limitations are fine. I said it’s impossible to protect information that you do put out to be visible. (Like revealed fog of war maps or walkthroughs). One can do a whole lot to protect the integrity of the network and the client. It’s bad design to neglect I agree with you, but you completely misread me. Didn’t I just say above that hacking isn’t OK?

But there ARE games which are better with no minimap (minimaps being the fundamental hack that an open network stream gets you). It is not always “bad design” to not have a minimap. We then start getting into the realm of what is technically possible and how you conceal that info, and so on.

As I said, hacking has an absolute and companies will not condone hacking programs. If it wasn’t clear I actually agree to this, especially in a multi-player context.

The reason for me being however, not to protect the designers intend, but rather to protect the other gamer’s experience.

Lets take the minimap example in an MMO setting. I do believe that you can make an MMO that is hard to automatically map if you so chose. However if the goal of the game is to constantly challange players with static maps that they can draw (say even by hand) to later reproduce it and your game concept falls apart because of that, then it’s bad design. If stuff needs to be not tracable it needs to be ramdonized. So people cannot actually draw maps of their surroundings.

Mazes would be the canonical example. One of my favorite online gaming experiences ever was solving a particularly complex non-Euclidean maze on Worlds of Carnage, which had plnety of combat along the way, but which was fundamentally a difficult logic puzzle. This maze is the sort of thing that by your standard should just get cut forever and ever because it’s “bad design.”

No, you completely extremize and misunderstand my position.

I’m not saying cut those mazes. I say relax if someone else but you wants to bypass the maze and not engage in the puzzle. That’s a completely different thing.

It’s “bad design” if you yell at people for revealing the maze. It’s not bad design if people enjoy the game. I don’t get how you can think that one person using extra information spoils everything for everyone. It really doesn’t. Didn’t you yourself say that somewhere on here?

A thought experiement: Lets assume I have played that maze and I actually bypassed the mental exercise of solving the maze and I never met you or told you. What difference would that make to your experience of the game? None. There isn’t any design issue at all despite strategy guides being present.

It would be “bad design” if the game itself ceased to function if people had that information. And that’s the only legitimate reason I can think off for yelling at anybody for using available info.

Let me clarify: If your game has a threat mechanism, and players by engaging in normal gameplay can measure out the threat mechanism and you didn’t want that to happen it’s not the gamers fault but the design’s fault.

That doesn’t meant that threat or any hidden mechanism is inherently bad design, it just means that you failed at protecting it. How could you have protected it? Randomization? Not giving in-game comparative measures or numerical outputs? There are lots of very concrete ways how for example WoW could have hidden Threat’s mechanism if they wanted to (they didn’t want to but that’s not the point here).

This is a very narrow take on the motivations players have. Have you read Nick Yee’s stuff?

Sure, you’ll find some of his stuff linked on my blog. I love Nick’s work but I do think that the theory of MMO motivation is still very shallow and there is a lot more to for example my motivation than what Nick has unearthed so far.

What I wrote re motivation was not to give a full explication how I feel about motivation but to give some notion of impact of strategy guides vs RMT. It’s kind of hard to write a whole dissertation about game design to get a simple point across, like “don’t yell at people for using strategy guides because there isn’t an actual problem there”.

Now, on RMT, I think the sort of RMT everyone was discussing is specifically player to player transactions, which generally do bypass stuff.

Well I don’t really talk about RMT in those terms. For me RMT is any real money economy that becomes involved in game mechanics.

I said:

A character leveling on a level strategy guide will see and learn character abilities (again if the game is well designed). A character bought at level cap misses this. The impact on the intended design (i.e. that people learn to play their class gradually while leveling) is not broken by the strategy guide, but it’s absolutely broken by character buying.

to which you responded:

And basically, I disagree with this. I believe that there are things that someone using a strategy guide or walkthrough simply does not learn how to do. They end up less capable in the end. *shrug* “Character” abilities are not the game and not where the learning happens. The learning happens in players.

I find this weird, simply because I didn’t make that argument out of vacuum. It’s specifically around the WoW leveling experience. But lets take any abstract notion of a game. I understand that you insist that the player has to learn what you put in front of them, and every of it. They have to be fully capable in the end. I say, to heck with that. What matters is if people had fun. But because I was thinking WoW, even with quest guides typical players will spend 2 weeks with the game mechanics and get gradually introduced to abilites etc. The guide in no way bypasses that. It serves to speed up the process somewhat. But I agree with you that in some gaming designs a strategy guide can absolutely remove aspects of the game. I just disagree that there is a problem with that if the gamer so chooses.
In some sense it’s “their loss” if you wanna see it like that. I just basically don’t think that game designers have the control to mandate how a player approaches the game that is put before them. The designer is good to try, but clearly given that there are strategies for every single game out there it fails. And that’s not a downfall to the game at all, it’s mostly a reflection of the game designer and how he copes with a gamer seeing the game differently than what the designer wanted.

I would bet money that WoW raids are macroable. Macros can absolutely adapt.

You can win or lose that bet mostly on your definition of macro. If it is that you can write a reactive script that would allow a computer to beat the encounter, I absolutely agree. But most games on the market fall under this category. Even those where supposedly you need to be smart about stuff. Macros I think may well do better than people, not having reaction time, attention, concentration or neighbours to worry about.

It’s still a problem though because the point remains that the learning and achievement (i.e. of not being a perfect macro and still pulling it all together) is minimally impacted in WoWs design through strategy guides. And that people enjoy the experience despite strategy sites abound.

I do believe you’ll have to raid to actually understand this from a not so theoretical point of view.

And yes a macro will win DDR. I think it’s a neat thought experiement actually. People enjoy DDR despite the fact that a macro can do it flawlessly, and despite there not being a puzzle to it. And people enjoy chess even though now computers reliably can whoop their behinds.

The whole road how we got to raiding and the macro question was that you claimed that strategy guides significantly impact the raiding game. That’s just not true and I invite you to raid and test my claim yourself. And people did not actually cheat themselves out of a rich experience at all by looking at the strategy sites. Rather they engaged with the problems and tried to figure out how to make things managable inside and out of the game.

The raiding game design is “good” in the sense that it’s practically impossible to cheat it. I.e. it’s rather stable despite information abundance. Of course one could design games where revealed strategies absolutely destroys all enjoyment. I think this is self-regulatory though. If a game becomes distinctly unfun with extra information why would people keep playing it?

E.g. there is lot of online card games. It is extremely easy to cheat because you could just have a chat program to exchange information. I haven’t seen any amount of this kind of cheating in online card games and my assumption is that even if folks try this it gets really old really fast. It may be cool to win 20 hands in a row but what then? Another 20 hands?

And at the end of the day if you ask the raider if they had fun, that should matter, not if you ask the game designer if he is satisfied that that everybody learned exactly all lessons he wanted the gamers to learn.

It’s the old Sid Meier thing about designing games for players and not for designers or computers (or macros). If the designer is happy isn’t the interesting category. If the player is, that’s what matters.

To put what you say simply as I understand it:

You say there is market pressure from customers for RMT. I kind of already gave my position to this:

“As a game developer just pick the business model that you think will work and the customer will let you know in due time if you were right.”

I don’t see any problem there at all. If you think that makes me pro-RMT that’s a misunderstanding because I simply don’t think the word is in yet or also it’s simply not a category I care strongly about. And I personally haven’t yet enjoyed any game that had a heavy RMT model nor do my closer friends enjoy these games. Basically on a personal level I can not give an affirmative example of a RMT heavy game I enjoy. That neither means it will not happen or does it mean that it will happen. Neither of the options is actually a concern for me.

I do care strongly about the very negative effect real money can have on gaming experience but the RMT debate never seems to get out of the dichotomies to ever really go there. Those things spoil fun and that’s why I care about them.

RMT or not isn’t my concern. It’s whether games are fun. If they happen to be RMT or not is a coincidental to that. Because I find it so coincidental is why I find the constant push of this topic over more interesting matters, like now much players get to control their own enjoyment gets clowded by these kind of more mundane coincidental topics of how game companies ought to chose their business models, when the real answer is simply: They should chose them and economy decides. There simply isn’t fun game design in that topic unless people would dare to try to talk specifics how RMT actually embeds in the game and how that actually is a fun part of the design.

Or how RMT related phenomenon (or back to the discussion of cheating and strategy sites) reveal shortcoming in the actual gaming design.

Wasn’t it stunning that the SOE Whitepaper actually said that people wanted to play together and level gaps was the economic driver. One could rather than embrace RMT equally well ask the question: How can a game be designed that inherently lets people play together and have fun and by construction avoids mechanistic segregation of people! But RMT is such a political topic that I have limited hope that one can bring the debate in this, what I’d find a more interesting direction. Social play is much more interesting for me as gamers than whether SOE can make money because people want to be social.

OK, we need to start leaving Blizzard out of it.

The reason why I keep blizz as an example is simply (a) they do this right, (b) their success isn’t in question and (c) raiding was brought as an example. I gave other examples that are not Blizzard too.

Any given game can say “this is against the rules or not,” and plenty of games have gone one way or the other.

Yes so this is the funny thing about us not really talking to each other. I have been saying since the beginning that games cannot actually fully do this. Or at least they can’t do this and not at the same time turn it into a bad design. The decision isn’t neutral. Just like Prince’s decision to sue fan web-sites isn’t neutral.

WoW in particular PUBLISHES a lot of the info, which by definition means that it’s info granted by the game, which removes it from what I was saying altogether.

Not at all. I have given examples of Threat as information that Blizz to date never has given away. Also Blizz has never published how mitigation really works even though it’s needed to succeed at raiding.

But Blizz understand that people unearthing these mechanisms is a meta-game and they embrace it. They are smart to remove what you are saying.

WoW is an excellent example on how to handle strategy and info flow in a social game. Games need to “design” this rather than making up rules “you can’t do that”. As said WoW understands the meta-game.

The logic is very simple: IF the game says “this is hidden/unlockable info” AND then the players bypass the hiding/unlocking. Your examples are not meeting those criteria.

Yes, and as said we don’t talk to each other exactly about this point. It’s this “IF” and it’s meaningfulness that I have been questioning since the beginning. It simply makes no sense for a game to say player cannot find info X if there is actually ways to get and share that information.

The argument is exactly that trying to do so is not sensible.

On top of that, you still come to this with the assumption that my use of the word “cheating” means “bad.” I have to say this very bluntly: quit being defensive about it. I am not making any value judgement on it whatsoever. The whole thread started because I said cheating was relative in the first place! We’re not on opposing sides on that.

Hehe, well I’d say quit being offense and use a word that has a clear negative meaning per it’s dictionary definition But i’m not at all hung about about cheating I just think you are wrong about that game designers can and should try to control information flow. I cannot think of a situation where that reflects good design. Instead they should design the game with the free information flow around it in mind.

And I disagree about cheating being relative, there are situations where cheating is quite an absolute category.

Just because people do write hacking programs for MMOs doesn’t mean that game companies will ever condone them or support what they do in-game.

I’m not endorsing RMT OR strategy guides, I am saying “devs don’t want it, players do it anyway, and because of that, probably it’ll be legal and devs will make it legal and that will be that, because the definitions of cheating evolve. And along the way, the nature of the games will change, and that’s just how it is.”

Yep, and I’ve been saying that game devs should maybe start being more observant and answer the whys rather than insisting on what they want…

That devs don’t want strategy guides is devs’ personal problem and not a game problem. That some MUD admins considered strategy info cheating was their personal problem and/or a problem with their quest/reward design so they felt forced to control people outside the game because they failed to properly do it inside. It’s like saying noone should write a bridge book or a book about solving rubik’s cube. If your game design doesn’t have appeal when people learn more about it it’s a game design issue.

Sharing information about computer games is about as old as I can think, the oldest games magazines I know had strategy tips and walkthroughs in them.

That connection is the starting premise of the thread, as summarized above. They are exactly the same thing, done by players in different ways. To use your lingo, they are both cases where players decide they want to take a game and play it their way. And I even think you agree with that. So I am unsure why you think making the connection is bad.

Take raiding and the existence of strategy guides and take gear catch-up and RMT bought gold to achieve that.

* Strategy guides are user driven for the most part and help mediate difficulty across different skill and time commitment levels. There is some real money component to strategy sites, but it seems to be rather mild and benign. The content is instances and no gameplay of another was impacted.

The reason for RMT are diverse
* They are a simple funding model. You furnish your chat room. They have nothing to do with cheating or bypassing game mechanism but simply are how the business model is brought into the game.
* When they are related to speeding game mechanics RMT are driven by users _and_ deep commercial interests. They exist because of limited ways that MMOs offer to catch up without that investment. There are real money related very negative impacts on both the game companies and players like account hacking, channel spamming, spawn camping that are rather specific to the real commercial interests that are involved here.

These are but two examples, the spectrum of possible RMT can be more diverse (and yes you darn suckered me into discussing RMT bleh).

The only negative impact strategy guides have are insulted egos of devs.
The negative impact of real money interests in MMOs can be totally unproblematic to very disruptive.

The argument that strategy guides and RMT both are mechanisms to bypass content is shallow, for the very simple reason what the specifics in which that happens and how that relates to what motivates people in the game is different. No strategy guide gets you to level cap instantly. No strategy guide (if the game is well designed) will have you bypass all content but only milden certain things or allow for adapting playing styles (i.e. riddle solvers vs story followers). RMT can in the worst case have much more impact. What the whole discussion completely misses is diversity in RMT, in impact on game design of these mechanisms etc.

Strategy guides do not modify the prime motivator that drives people, i.e. see content and shiney loot.
RMT can make people bypass game mechanisms in a way that makes them consume and burn out on content too fast or get the loot and lose the motivator instantly. I.e. buying a level cap character in best possible gear leaves less to explore in the game and has the potential of removing more of the game.

A character leveling on a level strategy guide will see and learn character abilities (again if the game is well designed). A character bought at level cap misses this. The impact on the intended design (i.e. that people learn to play their class gradually while leveling) is not broken by the strategy guide, but it’s absolutely broken by character buying.

But don’t get me wrong. All this very much depends on the game design. A game can be designed so that a strategy guide can bypass crucial game aspects, but that would be a game design flaw. And same a game can be designed to be more or less prone to negative impact of RMT. For example if in WoW epic mounts were a quest chain rather than a money purchase, one of the prime motivators for gold buying would be greatly diminished.

That’s why I find it silly to categorically discuss RMT outside the specific game design.

Take Hobbo hotel, here buying furniture is tied into the actual game of socializing in personalized spaces. The RMT-like virtual item buying is tied into the design inherently.

In Dungeon Runner you cannot get very far because you need to buy rights to buy items. Here RMT is a blocker to content for everybody.

In WoW’s design RMT is for: Purchase tradable items for real money, purchase a top level character. Main money items being mounts. Blizzard has changed the game design to give a more structured gameplay route to mount money (dailies) but they haven’t addressed the need to allow people to get to level cap very quickly (they have increased the leveling speed by 30% though).

RMT here serves 3 different functions, some not “cheating” at all, some bypassing in-game time investment for real money.

I know of no real money related cyber crimes in Hobbo, yet I can tell from my personal surroundings that cyber-crimes (specifically character hacking&stripping) is a very real and troubling phenomenon in WoW.

Comparing all this to the existence of strategy sites doesn’t do the topic justice I think. That’s why I disagree to equating those things.

Really comparing these things completely hides the diversity that is in the label RMT. We talk everything from Hobbo Hotel to organised account hackers stripping and selling off innocent players effort and wasting man-hours and real money on the MMO company to handle it. And all the diverse interplay of wanted and uncontrolled commercial interested impacting on the experience. Problems around RMT are more related to a pub owner deciding if he tolerates flower sellers in his place (or offers that service himself) or if he wants third party ad banners up or not (or wants to profit of advertisement himself) or how he handles pickpockets harassing his customers. It’s also more related to whether the pub owner makes money via club memberships, via selling goods or other mechanisms. It’s also closer related to whether the specific types of customers will accept whatever he decided. This is a very very different world than whether or not people share information how to play a game or read a book called “How to solve rubics cube in 30 seconds”.

As far as your WoW example — we’ll just have to agree to disagree here. I am glad you find the execution part so challenging, and the strategy development so trivial. My bar is this, basically: if a macro can do it, it’s “just typing.” The hard part — and more importantly, the interesting part — is knowing what to type and when. There’s great fun to be had in flawlessly reciting pi, but it’s rote learning. Executing a raid is rote learning. Rote learning is hard. But it’s not universally applicable, and what games do is teach you universally applicable skills.

Sorry Raph you are basically outing yourself as someone who has no or very limited idea about how raiding functions in WoW. Not a single raid encounter can be beat with a macro in WoW. And if you actually raided you’d know that.

You cannot script a strategy and 25 people walking in and guaranteeing success by everybody following a cookbook. It’s a serious misconception how the game works. A strategy is more like a cheat-sheet in Jazz than a full annotated classical piece. Why? Because you can only prescribe so much in a design that uses randomness and short adaptive reactions times.

That is why WoW is really in a way like DDR. In DDR it’s a cololored arrow, in WoW it’s a randomly triggered ability that needs responding and isn’t fully scriptable because you do not know when exactly it happens. You only know which colors you can get in some have predictable timing while some don’t. You can learn which positions and actions maximize your chances but some things are random enough that you will have to adapt.

The view that WoW Raiding is macro-scriptable is very far from what it is. And that’s good because people are smarter than that. And it’s good because it’s an interactive challange and not just solving a puzzle.

You can wipe to an encounter that you have already beaten and not be braindead. In fact some of the most hardcore groups admit to rewiping on raid encounters after beating them quite openly (read Elitist Jerks forum if you care).

You cannot really beat a WoW raid encounter without understanding it, guide or not.

So people do need to learn to play Jazz even though they got the standard placed in front of their nose, to use your piano analogy. So there isn’t all that much to belittle about the whole process really. If you like learning try learn to raid in WoW

Again I know you don’t want me to bring up WoW but WoW design is good because strategy guides did not break their raiding game. It might be a good idea to try to understand that

Raph thanks for the elaboration. Let me highlight our disagreements, but I think we get more clarity here:

However, knowingly going outside the bounds of designer-imposed constraints is cheating the rules of the game. It’s peeking in solitaire, etc.

This is an important but subtle point. Checking web sites is not like peeking in solitaire. I said it many times, Blizz never said that it’s against the rules to check these sites. Again, the MUD I was part of running had 0 anxiety of people getting outside information. We didn’t define that as cheating.

The WoW equivalent of peaking at solitaire is of someone manages to reverse-engineer and then publish the encounter scripts with all hard numbers or manages to eavesdrop on the voice chat of arena opponents. That’s peeking. WoW strategy sites are like someone posting how to win against a computer solitaire program or how to solve rubic’s cube. They are no different than the guide books you can buy in the game store with full company endorsements. I.e. as I have been claiming all along noone is cheating the rule of the game as you are allowed to look!

there is no significant difference between RMT and strategy guides

I am not particularly interested in RMT arguments so I’ll stay away from this. I do disagree though and I have expressed this earlier with specific examples.

How is saying that noone ever got his account hacked to improve raid strategy but people often get their account hacked for real money reasons an endorsement for RMT? It really isn’t. And equating people who use legitimate, company-endorsed or tolerated information source to people who against company policy bring real life economies into the game is completely different. Because one didn’t break the rules while the others did. Calling both cheaters is rather unfair to the first group.

Every argument I have given is a pro-gamer argument, not a pro-RMT argument. As said I don’t care for the RMT debate and I think it kinda misses the real point, which is if people enjoy the experience. If a setup has very limited RMT and people enjoy it immensely, great. If people have an extensive RMT setup and buy virtual furniture by the bucket. Great too. For me RMT is really close to a non-topic that is really hot and loud. As a game developer just pick the business model that you think will work and the customer will let you know in due time if you were right.

However I don’t think you can tell everybody that you “should like” or “should dislike” RMT. And I think the core reason why I find the RMT debate so pointless is because most of what I read seems to fall in this oddly useless pro/contra-RMT bantering.

Just like it makes no sense if someone told me “you absolutely have to read the quest guide from this site to play WoW” and “noone can ever communicate anything about quests” doesn’t make any sense to me as choices.

But that’s pretty much how the debate feels to me.

I do however understand that you hardfast want to make that connection between strategy guides and RMT, and it’s not helping the debate at all I think.

I don’t like the universalising trends in those arguments just like there were MUDs who did not scream murder over strategy guides in the 90s (mine and many others) and just like right now people actually participate in heavily RMT-based games, while some don’t.

Finally, as far as difficulty of raiding:

Yes, raiding is very hard. On a scale of 1-100 it’s like a 50.

However, raiding with no strategy and no information is like a 500. Raiding is “just typing” relative to the actual hard work of determining the pattern. This is why the first people to beat a raid have to work so damn hard, and why older raids are much much easier than they used to be.

Let’s make carve out this hypothetical a little more. My raid group, knowing everything about strategy there is to know, wipes on WoW boss for over a month of 2 evenings a week trying. Lets take your ratio as actual just as a thought experiment: We’d be looking at almost a year of figuring out strategy and wiping for one encounter.

Luckily your ratio is wrong, as I extensively argued, figuring out WoW strategy is counter to what you claim the easier part.

But lets stick with the hypothetical for a moment longer. This long for a raid encounter is way bad design, sure will people reduce the load because clearly the execution part is hard enough. So as I said, that would be bad design and people’s reaction of trying to cut 500 (totally unreasonable) to 50 (still hard) is perfectly natural. In this hypothetical setup rather than calling players cheaters you should call the designers bad designers!

But lets remove the hypothetical. As said I have extensively done strategy in WoW. I do not dread entering any encounter fresh and have done so multiple times. We will have sensible strategies faster than learning to execute the fight. In fact strategies we used often contained aspects of the game that online strategies overlooked even if we used those.

If I use your number scale and fix the 50 of execution, strategy for most encounters is 0-20 (0 for encounters you 1-shot upon entering, like Attumen), typing it up and dealing with the logistics of refinement and communication is another 10 but this you have even if you use strategy guides for the most part. But noone ever cheated about the 10-20 difficulty here because the rule of the game never forbade communication about strategies. So no cheating. If in competitive bridge you table-talk, you are cheating. It’s against explicit rules in a well-designed game that is fun with this rule in place. The rule makes the game.

This may be another point to consider: If you make game play rules as designers and the rule doesn’t make the game and people are inclined to break it, there is something wrong with your rule.

But you wanted to drive the point hard that online strategies hurt the raiding game badly. Frankly it’s just not true. WoW raiding is well in spite and or even more because of strategy sites (it would be too hard without because for many it’s too hard and time consuming already, if a strategy guide saves you 1-2 nights of learning the abilities that’s already great help).

As for the difficulty of figuring out the strategies from scratch: Virtually all boss fights (except 4H) have literally been beaten within days of being first seen. That includes finding the strategy and execution!

Execution is not the least important part from a player perspective if that’s the thing that wipes you for weeks. And this is for players who have learned team coordination for 2+ years now!

People die to dark glare at C’Thun not because it’s hard to figure out the strategy: Run away. But because execution components like attention, distractions and the short time frame from the beam forming and actually hitting play a way bigger role than finding the strategy.

I think you really were just pile-driving a little hard how “cheaty” strategy sites are. They aren’t. And their impact isn’t that huge in fact their impact is positive and adds to the meta-game. And it was never cheaty to begin with anyway because WoW’s design never had the “tough shalt not share strategy” rule printed in the manual, thank goodness. Blizzard is good at nurturing the meta-game. That was a good design decision.

So, Moroagh, usually “playing the game in a way the designer did not intend” is somewhere between “harmless playing around” and “breaking the rules.” I am comfortable calling the stuff that breaks the designer’s intent to that latter degree “cheating.” What else would you call it?

The player, if they choose to engage with a game outside of the designer’s bounds, is perfectly free to do so. I have said many times that how players play the game is outside of the control of the designer. So we’re in total agreement there. However, knowingly going outside the bounds of designer-imposed constraints is cheating the rules of the game. It’s peeking in solitaire, etc.

With trepidation, I think I have to agree with Moroagh here…I think Raph [understandably] gives too much weight to the designers intentions and notr enough to the intentions of players.

A long time ago I bought an el-cheapo chess set for one of my sons. To the best of my knowledge neither of my sons ever actually played chess. Instead they had great fun for years having little miniature battles using rules of their own creation. As far as I’m concerned they weren’t cheating at chess, the rules of chess were irrelevant.

You missed my point Raph. The critical part is that (a) you cannot control information even if you intend to, that includes if you in your own mind make up what a game is intended to be, you cannot actually fully define that intend.

Let me take this out of the computer game context: People buy and play a board game, they decide they don’t like a design aspect of the game but there is a way to reappropriate it so they enjoy it more. They do so. And play and enjoy the game.

In this as in the computer game case is it cheating? The relevant Webster definition of cheating here is “b: to violate rules dishonestly”. Well. Yes, the game designer in both cases can feel cheated because they may feel that it’s their “right” that their game design be honored (even if it was a bad design from the player’s perspective). However from a player perspective there is no cheating at all. They quite honestly just define for themselves what the rules are. They are not mistaken. The game designer never had control how the pieces they release for used are actually used. So if they are upset it’s really their personal problem of misunderstood control in the context.

The fallacy is that game designers do not have full control over information. Hence if you insist that people broke rules and the rules are about information, then I agree that you can be upset and feel cheated, but to be honest that’s your personal problem and not a global problem because you never had the control over information in the first place.

And you are partly right about the suing. I was bemused when I heard prince suing some of his fan sites to take off some pictures. But that’s not my argument either. The point is that Pardo and crew knew that Thottbot would come up (in fact their interface allows for rather convenient and powerful tooltip scanning by design!), after all comparable sites existed for EQ etc before. If you search the web you will find Pardo and other senior designers of WoW discuss these sites in positive terms, i.e. as where raiders would go and brag about loot (i.e. they would exactly the discuss the meta-game and its benefit, can’t find the link right now, it was an interview of roughly March 2007 at Blizzard by a game magazine).

Blizz is smart here, because they understand they cannot control information and go with it rather than against it. I don’t think Blizz made Armory because they carved. They made it because they always wanted it but only eventually got around creating it. These sites are part of the game design. But you can ask Pardo at the next game convention.

No game fits all; therefore you are setting the designer an impossible task there. A better question is whether the intended target audience abandons the game or resorts to cheating.

I’m not setting the designer any task except to let go of of being a control freak and calling gamers cheaters for it when they are just acting sensibly. Sorry for that.

Also I nowhere said that every game has to fit everybody. But yes if people want to play the game but don’t act as the designer intended, the designer ought to take a hard look at their design and their attitude. But the design may be fine, the fact that people go to fan sites may actually be a benefit not a detriment to the game. It’s serves the same function as trading gold to a friend: helping (your own argument basically). Helping is only cheating if it’s against the rules and dishonest.

Alright even with the qualification of an intended audience I’d argue that the vast majority of WoW players “cheat” by your definition because they frequent web sites.

But they don’t. Cheating is breaking rules dishonestly. Blizz never stated that visiting these sites is against the rules so nothing ever gets broken.

Of course if you have the mandate to define the rules for every game then yes in your definition people cheat here, but it’s just a stretch and in my mind at best something to keep a discussion prolonged. I don’t particularly see any value in calling these sites cheating because it doesn’t fit what meaning the definition of cheating has in an appropriate context (i.e. other than you claiming it).

I think you’ll have to accept that you can’t control information flow and you’ll realize that people don’t cheat. Currently you make them into cheaters in your mind because you claim control you don’t really have.

Same with the old MUD thing. Checking strategy sites for some MUDs was cheating because their relevant opinion-makers defined it as such. This however never was a universal principle. The MUD I was involved in never broke a sweat how people handled information about the game outside the game. In fact it never even occured to us to worry about that or that it could be “cheating”. Frankly only now, some 15 years later I read that apparently some MUDs did consider it cheating. So yes you can call people cheaters but that doesn’t make that a universal truism, or something that has value for everybody.

Btw the “intended audience” idea is again the designer’s intent fallacy. Game designer may intent to reach an audience, but what matters is the audience that they actually reach, even if that happens through reinterpretation and reappropriation of the game.

WoW for example has the audience it has, independent of whether they fully intended to have this audience. So I think it’s a little tricky to set up arguments around “intended audiences” because it’s a designer centric look at what’s going on again. It’s more sensible to worry about the audience you have and how to attract more.

That really isn’t what I said.

You said:

The actual killing of the raid mob is, as our programmers like to say, “just typing.”

and in response to comments for DarranL:

No, it just does the hard part, which is figuring out HOW to kill the boss. The actual killing is the easy part.

I’d say I paraphrased sensibly what you said by writing:

Finally, if programmers think that if you have a full strategy to a WoW raid boss that means you just type as you enter and everything is done, those game programmers have no idea.

Yes it’s turning “easy” into “done” but you aren’t the last to take slightly extreme positions to make a point (like it’s “cheating” if you didn’t break any rule the game designer stated).

Let me milden this:

“Finally, if programmers think that if you have a full strategy to a WoW raid boss that means you just type as you enter and everything is easy, those game programmers have no idea.”

Doesn’t change anything of the substance here though.

Anywho based on what you wrote I gave detailed argument why your complaint that strategy guides trivialize raiding at least in a WoW context isn’t actual. (Wowjutsu actually gives hard numbers about this, certainly the number of raiders beating Illidan since the full strategy was released by no means indicate it’s easy to get there, quite evidently it’s hard despite information being available in abundance). Heck my raid group is wiping despite knowing all the information we ever will have. You telling us that we spend weeks (which often is longer than we want to spend) on the “easy” part is from our perspective at best silly and a lack of understanding how this actually works and what the actual challange is.

Seriously, if your programmers consider raiding to be just typing and if you think the execution part is easy, you set yourself up for designing a really bad raiding game. You fail to focus and design the execution part.

I think your raid argument wasn’t the best basically and it misunderstands what makes WoW raiding difficult.

DDR is “easy” (your definition) because you know what’s coming. The game gives you the information beforehand (luckily people can play that game without being cheaters ). Yet it’s still hard because you have to execute it. The main learning here as in raiding is execution. You can design raid games where the struggle is figuring out the strategy, but if that’s your design philosophy you will design bad raid encounters because you cannot control information. You can control difficulty of execution.

And if your raiding game forgets the value of the meta-game of people spending mental attention to it while away from the game, that’s likely not good design either.

For me the main two flaws in the argument is what I’d call the “designer’s intent fallacy” and the idea that “information is game mechanics”.

The first fallacy is that players have to play a game (online or offline) at the terms that the designers originally intended.

For example, a game gets designed to have tricky riddles with an estimation that exploring clues for the riddles will take X hours. The player however doesn’t actually care to play the game for the riddles, they want to see the story unfold. Hence the player bypasses the riddle to progress the story faster than the designer intended. This isn’t “cheating”. It’s having different intent and possibly a different idea what “fun” is. (i.e. the player may not find it fun to keep dying in the same situation too often in a row, even if the game designer thought that the fun here is overcoming the challenge.)

Basically the reason why I use offline strategy guides is because of exactly this. I actually don’t like some game design decisions, and rather than play the game on the designers terms I ease the situation to be able to play it on mine.

One could actually take this as one measure of good game design: Are gamers likely or less likely to seek external help or relief. Rather than putting this on the gamer and calling them cheaters one could well put this on the designer and question if they made a game that matched what gamers wanted or provided mechanism that was tedium and not fun and people want to bypass them.

But for MMOs it’s even different. Thottbot and Alakhazam is not more cheating than a guild forum or a guild channel or even an ingame channel with people asking for help. Yes Thottbot offers extra information on top of it but there again it’s actually blizzard’s decision that they accept this. Given their ToS/EULA they could actually sue data-miners but they don’t. Thottbot and other sites are the “meta” game that goes with WoW and is very much part of the design. How great is it for a game that people send time exploring what to do next, what treasures to hunt, how to solve a difficult encounter _while not even in the game_. By having people engrossed in the meta-game, MMO designs win. Cheating is something that’s against the rules. Per Blizz’s rules at least, those web-sites are not cheating because they aren’t sued. After all everything that’s in WoW is Blizzard’s property and they certainly could if they wanted to.

And even if they wanted to, people can and will discuss strategies. It’s a social game and one cannot control communication. Asking for help on a quest and actually getting tips is not cheating at all. It’s supported by chat channels and guild structures.

Finally, if programmers think that if you have a full strategy to a WoW raid boss that means you just type as you enter and everything is done, those game programmers have no idea. Seriously. And I say this as someone who extensively researched and implemented raid strategies for raid groups.

Let me put it like this: Just because you know the theory of 10-finger typing and the basic rules of patterns in the 10-finger layout to get to words, doesn’t mean that under pressure you will type without mistakes.

That raid encounter programmer (as you seem to claim) don’t understand this is intriguing to say the least. By your argument most of WoW’s raid encounters should be downed by all raid groups who try, because after most use strategy guides extensively and they are available in abundance. Funny enough raid groups still learn on encounters that are reduced to typing for them at this point.

I actually also disagree that finding the strategy is the hard part. At least in WoW raiding finding the strategy is a matter of staring at the combat log and seeing what killed you. In virtually all cases it’s rather obvious what the counter is. In fact good boss designs will gently teach you what the counter is. Take tranq book dropping off the first MC boss and the second MC boss going into a frenzied state. In that design it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to give you the answer: Tranq the frenzy. If your tank gets feared, use abilities that control fear etc. The only raid encounter in WoW that took very long to get a strategy for was four horsemen. Why? Because the encounter design drastically broke expectations, by actually requiring raid groups to stack tanks (8 instead of the typical 5) and the generic assumption was that Blizzard would never design encounters that would force classes to be benched. They did and it took long for people to learn that lesson. Other than that implementing strategy is harder than learning it in most WoW encounters.

Heck everyone knows that you need to click the cubes at Magtheridon (and the encounter design pretty much gives that away as being the solution) and they still wipe to it.

The challenge to raiding is (a) finding a strategy and (b) implementing it. And in good raid design (b) is non-trivial and this is true for WoW raiding at least. If (a) and (b) takes too long combined, then the game designers failed not the raiders who read strategies others posted. I.e. back to the “designer’s intent fallacy”.

I’ll stay away from the RMT polemic though. I don’t find it very helpful to equate those things simply because noone ever broke into an MMO account and stripped a character to improve their raid strategy. But people certainly do just that to make some real money. No RMT is not like strategy web-sites for sure… The real question is if something is wanted or unwanted. A level 1 character spamming the say channel with RL commercials is not wanted on an RP server, yet economic drive makes it happen. This is a completely different thing than people asking in the same channel if someone can give a hint on a quest they have trouble with (that one is wanted). People do write hacking programs, but funny enough the majority do consider those cheating, because they are breaking game mechanics. You claim that information is game mechanics but that’s a mistake, because you cannot control information hence you never designed it. If you design a game assuming that no guide book can ever be published it’s a designer flaw not a gamer flaw.

And if an offline game really drives people to use trainer programs, it’s again very likely a design flaw. If players wanted a managable fast mode and the designer didn’t offer one the design is flawed and not the reaction to the design.

Let me give another example: Threat in WoW. This mechanics is originally hidden, but started to play a crucial role in the ability to beat encounters (non-taunting tank rotations, like needed for Vaelastrasz or Huhuran) to beat the encounter players have to learn threat. The design of the game literally encouraged people to research how threat works and they did. Today we have fairly accurate Threat meters that tremendously help at threat based encounter designs. What is Blizzards reaction? Not banning threat meters or calling them bad. Rather they announce that their own interface will give more visual cues related to threat. They could have made the threat mechanism more hidden by adding more randomness, but they chose not to do so and the mechanisms was revealable, and it’s allowed to be such. In fact the meta-game of understanding game mechanisms is a crucial part of WoW. High-end raiding is literally impossible without some level of understanding _unpublished_ game mechanics. No manual by blizz ever informs the gamer how to reach crit immunity, yet boss encounters are unbeatable if the boss crits a tank. The whole game is to allow the community to unearth the mechanism and that is very allowable and I’d argue intended.

But had threat never played a crucial part in beating encounters I’d argue that threatmeters probably wouldn’t have developed. Their appearance was “designed”. And yes, some designs are unintentional but the game designer did pick the selective pressures even if not forseeing the reactions.

There are things that Blizz does not like, which is in-game bypassing of paced content. But here again it’s design flaws that reveal this possibility. Currently warlock summoning is disabled in Zul’Aman because in conjuction with terrain exploits people could bypass content that wasn’t intended to be bypassable. Real problem is that the terrain wasn’t safely designed. Typically Blizz here too takes the right approach and rather than calling people cheaters and leaving things be, they fix their design mechanisms to prevent the unintended bypass. In a sense this is exactly the point: The thing they do have control over is the actual game mechanics and not the information. Blizz controls in-game mechanics but not information flow. Rather information flow is encouraged and allowed. Hence information is not game mechanics in the same sense as game mechanics is. Information is a separate meta-game that the designer doesn’t have full control over (and will fail if he tries).

I really believe that WoW at least is already in a way a socially designed game, exactly through the meta-game discussion it induces. If we want to be funny we can call that social meta-game “cheating”.

Day late, dollar short. I know.

I’ve always put it like this:

RMT:Achievement::strategy guides:Exploration

Most online RPGs are developed with an Achiever focus, therefore, anything that short-circuits that is seen as “cheating”. However, allowing people to avoid the “Exploration” aspects is not really seen as cheating.

I tend to avoid strategy guides, myself, if I really want to enjoy the game. However, I have a lot less time to game now than I did when I was a kid, so I sometimes go hit GameFAQs in order to get info that would have taken me a long time to explore myself. As someone mentioned above, the whole “missable items” or “good ending” things are big on my list, too.

My thoughts.

RE: (various ‘generation’ comments)

Raph, The Common Sense Gamer is the nearly same age as you. Don’t get too caught up in dismissing ‘the youngsters’ in the blog community because most of them seem to be pretty close to the same age as you. We Zorked, we Apshai’d, be BardsTale’d, and we wizzed on Muds just like you.

We understand that you’ve been studying this closer than most for the last ten years, but let’s not get dismissive in your ‘old age’ of 35-ish.

What if any given bit of information could be held in a game object of sorts such that those bits of information could be traded between players using the in-game economy? The problem with game sites and guides is that they are obsolete in days from their release as far as MMOs are concerned. Web sites improved the effeciency of the cheating by being more up to date. The bottom line is that 99.999% of quest designs do not meet the information needs of the player and that leads the player to want to ask for more. The NPCs can’t answer more than they were programmed to so the player asks a guide be it a book, web site or another player.

Players should be able to broker information between themselves in-game. Make information valuable. Make it a collection game and it will quickly become a collection that has no end and an explorer’s treasure. Want knowledge of a spawn point, we trade and I give it to you, now there’s a minimap point on your map that I just sold to you in-game. You’re free to sell it or hold it for your own. Sure it takes much much more storage on the backend but wouldn’t the brokering of information in-game sorta make the game guides useless? I’m assuming the search interface and trade mechanisms are well designed in this thought.

Think of all the things you could do with something like that. As you walk by a spawn point, the game tells you that you collected information on this two months ago and it’s as if you remembered something. Strats, map points, item information could all be included. You might even be able to design an interface where even player names/identities were traded as part of this information object. Some given freely, others paid for from a trusted player. The misinformation, disinformation and information games could be fun if designed properly and the social ramifications could be fantastic. All by screwing with the way information is presented and shared in a MMO. Then guides are not cheating.

Seems to me that players are more easily motivated by competition than cooperation with each other on a large scale – when they do cooperate, it’s often to compete with another group of players (e.g. raiding guilds).

People need challenges. Cooperation happens when a group of people all agree that a challenge needs their powers combined to tackle. Competition happens when no such challenge presents itself, or when people feel others are more of a challenge than the bigger goal, or when people feel that cooperation will cause them to lose something in the long run (which raises the challenge profile to “Change how the cooperation occurs”, better known as “politics”).

See world peace/hunger.

I suggest that then, we start designing these games so that the puzzles and quests and stats are actually designed as massively multiplayer social problems to solve, rather than scaled for the difficulty of one player. Thoughts?

A Tale in the Desert does this beautifully, in that it would be almost impossible to progress in the game unless there are a thousand other people subscribed. In fact, unless there are at least 255 active players at the end, then the playerbase loses the game. (And those 255 active players would have to be very busy indeed.)

Fortunately, the stakes aren’t that high, so losing the game doesn’t have much of an impact on the players when the world ends and the sequel begins. It’s more of an ego blow than anything else.

Raph Koster wrote: I suggest that then, we start designing these games so that the puzzles and quests and stats are actually designed as massively multiplayer social problems to solve, rather than scaled for the difficulty of one player. Thoughts?

I’m reminded a bit by that massive decryption mini-game added to SWG at some point. I can’t remember why it was in, but it was a bunch of items with parts of a large code in them. People figured that part out and started a few 300+ page threads on the forums about decoding it. Err, if I recall correct, you actually designed it

I think that can work because it does offer an array of methods to be involved with it, from the folks who are getting items with codes through folks who want to talk about it on forums to folks who have the interest in figuring it out to folks who actually lead the effort. Sorta Player Pyramid in action (belated thanks for outlining something I’ve referenced quite often Mike!)

As long as the activities at various levels can be engaging to those various levels. For example, the starting point of items, if it’s fun to get those items and/or they’re the result of quests that can be soloed (which iirc they were), this is a good way to grab the masses without expecting them to hit the forums (which most won’t).

This really is a funny discussion. Raph is completely, 100% right. Guides are still considered, flat-out, to be cheating in some text MUDs. In our own, we gave up the ghost on that awhile ago but sharing quest information in-game, at least, is still highly frowned upon. Further, twinking gets you banned as it’s a violation of the magic circle that’s not permitted.

In other words, twinking, guides, etc as cheating are not a historical curiosity. They are considered cheating RIGHT NOW, TODAY but truly old-school, hardcore gamers.

–matt
P.S. Myself, I don’t care one way or another, but it’s what our playerbase wants.

I suggest that then, we start designing these games so that the puzzles and quests and stats are actually designed as massively multiplayer social problems to solve, rather than scaled for the difficulty of one player. Thoughts?

The ‘massively multiplayer social’ part makes me a bit nervous…it brings back [to my taste] bad memories of games where you had to be in a group of size X with composition Y to do anything. I spend the bulk of my gaming time duoing with my wife and the rest of it ‘soloing with others’. I already skip the ‘group required’ portion of games I play. My initial thought is that it’s a design I’d probabably skip.

On a less selfish note, how do you design a quest as a massive social problem to solve? Something like getting the Griffon Towers built in EQ II?

You’re fuckin stupid.

Morgan Ramsay said:

Building aircraft isn’t a game…

Wasn’t my example… however, my wife’s estranged father builds aircrafts for fun, it is his hobby, and to him it is a game. I wouldn’t want hobbyist aircraft builders working for any commercial airline though.

Interesting post Raph, I agree and all, even though I am a cheater in some games. Once I cheated checking Discworld walkthroughs, and found out I had actually somehow corrupted/confused my game and although I knew what to do and how, it wasn’t possible!

The other major time was Sam & Max, I feel horrible for doing so, but after the major frustrating puzzles, I said I’d see the end even if I cheated.

I’ve cheated other times with cheat-codes and suchlike, usually after completing the game or when modding/checking the design out. Bit more obvious these are cheats though

Online play; I’d agree, it is cheating to know everything beforehand, although how it comes across can be interesting. Being taught tricks, strategy and other things from other players (in any kind of multiplayer game, from Chess to anything else) could be part of the learning, and certainly being told your mistakes by other players, especially if you play against them, can be helpful and is nearly impossible to avoid anyway (be it a screaming teenager shouting to you over some voicechat that “Take the flag the other way, stupid!” or similar ).

Reading guides though? No more then cheating, really, since as you say information is the mechanic. You might as well type “No Fog Of War” in a realtime strategy game, or use a wallhack in a FPS. I’m surprised it needed stating really!

The comments are interesting too, although most are entirely off topic I guess, revolving around if it is right, fair, or under what circumstances the “rule” applies, hehe.

Brask Mumei:

“When I play Monopoly with friends and we give out $500 to anyone who lands on Free Parking, we’re violating the explicit rules written by the “Game Designer”. We are not, however, cheating, as we have agreed to explicitly rewrite the author’s rules for our game.”

There is one fundamental thing you are missing here. When playing a MMORPG you are playing in the developers house (their server) and must play by their rules. Just as they would do if they came over to play Monopoly at your house. Think of it like this. If you wanted to play in a sanctioned Monopoly tournament, you would not get very far when trying to implement your own rules. In all cases, people ply according to the “house” rules. Just like Poker tournaments. You pay for a right to be at the table, not to rewrite the rules.

Brask Mumei:

“When I went dungeon crawling in Ultima Online, my group refused to use boxes to block in creatures that we were fighting. This was standard practice according to most players, yet within my loose group during these crawls it was classified as against the rules of fair play. Now, if I were, outside of this group, to travel with another group to the same dungeon, and this time use boxes to block in the creatures, would I be cheating? If this second group approves of box-blocking, I would say not.”

Again, you are talking about personal choice here. You are not changing anything in the way of “house rules”. It is no different than someone saying that they will adventure for everything and not use the auction house at all. You are only createing a personal subset of rules that you want to abide by.

@ Yeebo comment #40…You’re explanation is spot on! I don’t look up information for a quest unless the information given is extremely vague and I don’t see a reasonable way of completing the quest unless I seek additional information. Significant frustration in completing poorly designed quests impacted by decision to only quest in limited amounts in most MMOs. I create my own adventures and opportunities to level without being sent in ridiculous circles for little gain.

I attribute a lot of RMT purchases in games where it isn’t allowed to the same fact. Too many time/gold sinks built into the game that players don’t find any enjoyment in completing. It’s a game and it’s supposed to be fun. If large amounts of our audience is electing to by pass content or experience certain “growth” paths and are instead buying their way there, I’d say revisit the content and mechanics. I don’t think the average person sets out to pay for a game, pay a subscription for the opportunity to play the game and then pay (RMT) or cheat not to experience it.

I would say RMT is cheating when the game is not designed to support or work well with RMT. On the other hand, I´m fairly certain that for example WoW was designed with guides and strats and info sites (read: community) in mind. Raph, you can say that´s lazy (or bad) design, but I firmly believe that this kind of community content (information about the game) is one factor in the game’s popularity, and it was taken into account in Blizzard’s design choices, thus making it a valid “part of the game”. Of course, that’s just my impression.

vajuras: other players RMTíng in your game do not affect you until you have to compete with them: compete for spawns, for spots in groups, for items in trade, in PVP, etc. The impact of RMT in player competition can easily force other players to step up and use RMT thmeselves, or be left behind. However, when RMT is not designed into the game, players who use it devalue their experience; often, they skip content they should enjoy, and limit their gameplay options. It’s not about morality, it’s about ensuring that the game is and remains interesting for as much of its target audience as possible.

Depends… are you reading a book about the rules of chess? or are you reading a book on strategies used by other players?

To me, this makes it sound like education itself is cheating.

Is it cheating for an aeronautical engineer to learn about aircraft before building one? Does he have to rediscover the Bernoulli Effect to be a “real” aeronautical engineer? Should he make his mistakes and learn the hard way? Are you going to fly on an airline that purchases his planes?

In general, the only “competition” in a PvE MMORPG is self-invented. You’re not competing over getting to a level faster. You’re not competing for spawn points (there are supposed to be enough for everyone). Alas, because this aspect of psychology is also so prevalent, gamemakers have started to put ranking ladders and stuff in, which is kind of a bad idea because we know from the get-go that it’s all exploitable. But the core of an RPG is a non-competitive game

This is exactly how I feel. I am always baffled by bloggers that try to use the argument the RMTers are somehow, mysteriously, ruining the game for other players because they used real money to purchase their rewards. It’s utter complete nonsense really. When I played Neverwinter Nights 2 coop campaign with other players many times I knew the players hacked their avatars (gave them best equipment) but as long as they did their job the bottom line is that was all that mattered too me

I am amazed watching the people justify their usage of spoilers saying the exact same thing as the people who are buying gold and still arguing that it’s a different short-cut. I don’t see it.

Jane takes 5 days to work out all the puzzles and find all the mobs and finish the quest. John uses a walk-through and completes it in one hour. There is no question that John has an advantage over Jane: he spent less time and effort to get to the same point.

However, has John in any way interfered with Jane’s gameplay? Not directly, no. Jane did the quest and still has her quest reward. Regardless of John’s method of completing the quest, Jane’s experience is unaltered.

That holds true even if John bought the quest reward and didn’t do the quest at all.

Now, why did Jane do the quest and why did John spend his cash? They both did it for the reward, a Cloak of Never-Ending Discussion. Meanwhile, the cloak is being farmed like mad to sell to people like John. Jane was very proud of her Cloak until she realised that lots of people had them. When it was a symbol of having achieved the quest, it meant something. Now that the rarity value is much less, she’s less excited about it.

John argues that he doesn’t have the time! There’s other issues there, the quest details aren’t specific enough, the puzzle is too hard. He just wants the cloak, so he used a spoiler. Or even simpler, he bought it. Developers expect it, he tells Jane. They know that it’s a huge time-sink. They set it up that way.

What’s the solution? Jane is just as frustrated when the encounter is made easier, she still feels her reward has been devalued. It’s not interesting if anyone can do it. The sense of achievement has been lessened. She focuses her attention on new releases: games and expansions. The way to prove that she managed the game without the spoilers is to write the spoilers. Jane is happy again and playing hard.

At some point, she realised that her desire to be first actually has a real-game value. She wrote a print strategy guide for a game: the kind of thing that sells for cash. Lets assume for the moment that the guide was wonderful and every purchaser felt he got real value from it. Now, is that RMT? She’s trading in-game information for cash. John can get that Cloak of Never-Ending Discussion easily now because she’s solved the puzzle.

That line between “John bought the cloak” and “John is using a spoiler” starts to get fuzzy, doesn’t it?

I wonder about RMT causing inflation. Got data? Seems like it would be easy to prove given WoW gold is much much cheaper on EU servers. Therefore, by that theory, the auction house sale prices would be much larger on EU realms. Though that’s also assuming the RMT isn’t exclusively for the sinks or avatars, in BoPLand.

I remember reading an Eve GM that simultaneously complained about RMT causing deflation and inflation in the same post. Seems like you can’t have it both ways, if the net effect is small and null.

Maybe people confuse RMT with dupe hax?

So is reading a book about chess cheating?

Incidentally, I have run short-lived campaigns for pen and paper RPGs, so I do know how hard it is for me to come up with adventures that make sense within the game system/universe I’m running.

It once took me three months to come up with a 20k word adventure for FASA’s Shadowrun system.

So those designers that manage to write up, set up the dialog paths, design the challenges and puzzles, get the art set up for, test and debug, and then finally release several new quests every two months… they have my respect, they really do.

If the argument is “acquiring the information which the game witholds from you is cheating”, then it fails when it comes to MMOs — as these are, by Raph’s own words from the RMT argument on this very site, social games, where the players are expected and supposed to support each other.

In this sense, the MMO is not witholding information from the player about location of any particular spawn, raid strategy etc. This information is made readily available, through the chat box which allows to pull that information from other players participating in the game. This acquired information can be of course vague, incomplete or plain misleading at times… but it is there. And since it is there, obtaining it cannot be called cheating, can it?

Once you accept it, the sites with collected information available on the web are not different. It’s after all information provided by other players of what’s supposed to be social game. When it comes to games like EVE-Online this line is blurred even further as the game has its own web browser which can be used to access such information never leaving the game world.

It’s not even that different from the poker game given as example — while you are not outright shown the hand other player has, this information can be deduced from actions and behaviour of the people you play against. And it’s not considered cheating when you manage to do it.

tl;dr: information is not a mechanic, but obtaining the information is.

Raph wrote: In the case of something like WoW’s Armory, they simply threw up their hands, and instead said “this isn’t cheating anymore” by providing it themselves.

The Armory is not nearly inclusive enough. A better analogy is WoWhead, or any other place like Allakhazam, Thott, etc. Not only is this cheating, the players themselves entered the information. So even the first people who did discover a thing cheated by putting it out there

It’s only cheating because of the rules of the game. And the rules of the game have followed the same formula since D&D. Create character, explore, find, defeat, get, grow. The only thing that’s really changed is that the obstacles have become static as DMs were replaced by AI. And choice has been removed for fear of having people make the wrong one and stop paying.

But it’s even deeper than that.

Rote itself is still used at a time when just about any fact is a Google|wikipedia|KartOO away. Yes, this is not a global-spanning privilege. And yes one EM-based doomsday weapon can wipe that out. But it still remains that the tech of today is fundamentally changing how people think.

So apply that back to the “go here for X and there for Y” element of most modern RPGs. Why should players waste time doing things the old way when the rewards can come faster with the silly stuff removed? And why should they care about doing things the “right” way when the devs themselves didn’t seem to care enough to wrap objectives in compelling story arcs (takes too much time), add elements of choice (too many branches to manage, too hard, see above), and were too concerned their crafted expensive content wouldn’t be used enough to justify the work that went into it (spend time in this zone doing kill x/collect y quests so we send you to all corners).

Games themselves need to change to stop the wonton “cheating”, because cheating itself is anachronistic as defined.

PS. If the game itself was the only rules that should be followed, then a) they can’t change; and, b) they’d have to go back to useful manuals

The game theory you linked to is a branch of applied maths used in economics started before computer games were invented. The term Perfect Information applies suitably though. I’m just wondering if as you said, you “sometimes knock” game theory the applied maths, or game theory as in the emerging – game media studies / game design theory?

I respect how Raph “feels” on this issue even though he tries to butter my muffin by calling me “influential” and then becomes a turncoat by writing that he wants to “condescendingly pat me on the head”, but the fact is that anyone who buys gold or characters has an unfair advantage. Raph believes that they don’t, but the fact is that they do. Here is one example of why this is the case.

I’m level 20. You are level 20. We both want to get into guild ABC because they are a proactive raiding guild filled with superb players. They take into account, as any good progression guild does, what level we are. We are both currently level 20. That is important.

I buy gold OR have my character powerleveled. In a week I’m level 50. You have worked hard, leveled like mad and you are level 30. The perception that I am better than you, even if we have the same skill (again this is important) is screaming out at guild ABC like 10,000 PETA protesters at a greased pig catching competition. If we have the same skill and my purchase of gold (I could afford better armour/weapons/etc.) pushed me to higher levels (in this case that is important) than you then my cheating benefited me and harmed you.

Another example: I play by the rules and do not buy gold. I grind and grind and grind to make my virtual bank account soar, but no matter how much I grind I can’t afford that fancy sword that I want because prices are inflated by people who buy gold and spend it in the auction house. It is easier to buy the gold and spend it than to play (earning) the gold and spend it.

Cheating (buying gold and levels) is an unfair advantage. It DOES affect the “honest” gamer.

As for information being a mechanic. This is not Battleship or Stratego or Poker. The game does not change the information in a quest from hand to hand or session to session. Once the information is “in the wild” it’s out there. Any developer who doesn’t think that his quest information is going to be all over the Internet is deluded. If you aren’t building the quests with that in mind, well, you failed the players. Your company is selling strategy guides for Pete’s sake. You are charging players for the information!

To claim that killing the raid mob is “just typing” while finding NPC 123 who was described as being “Somewhere yonder in the Boogalooga plains” as a mechanic is, well, wrong. Sorry Raph. I respect you, but in this case, you’re wrong. Nobody can be right all the time. It reminds me of a quote I happened upon, “I’m never wrong. I thought I was once, but I wasn’t.”

When I wrote “In a single player game, nobody cares” I was in reference to other players. Do you think that I care if Raph or anyone else cheats at a single player game? I don’t. Why would I? It doesn’t affect me or anyone but the cheater. In a MMOG that is not the case.

Do I really and truly deep down in my heart care about cheaters? It certainly doesn’t keep me up at night, but perhaps that is because as a veteran in this industry I’ve seen most of the patterns thrown against me before. I don’t need to cheat, though sometimes I like to read a good MMOG guide, especially if one of my comrades at Ten Ton Hammer wrote it. I like to see how other people think that a class should be played or how others would go about attacking a raid problem. It’s interesting to me. I enjoy it, no I love it! I have a passion for this industry that goes beyond writing about it. I’d be part of this even if I didn’t get paid to do it.

So, thanks Raph for the 15 minutes of fame on your site and thanks for reading what I wrote. We can agree to disagree and leave it at that. That’s what makes the industry so great. We can both pick a side of the fence and be happy on it.

Raph said:

“As it stands, strategy guides aren’t cheating, they’re a PLAY MECHANIC, because that is the only way in the entire game where you find out that you need to jump in place 200 times to get a given item, or talk to the same NPC 50 times to unlock a quest.”
A) you play bad games B) that sounds like a case where the game developers themselves put out the strategy guide C) I don’t know any MMOs like that.

You don’t know one of your own MMOs? How often did you have to repeatedly use skills to improve them in Ultima Online? UO skills taking FOREVER to develop is the reason a lot of macrobots got written. UO was the avatar of boring, repetitive activity, and things that could only be understood by painfully long analysis which you’d then share with others. It was massively improved in game fun by the cheat sites, and by software to hack the game.

For that matter, almost all MMOs, certainly all the Diku-likes, are based on something equivalent to clicking on a box 200 times (The Grind).

Whether that box is obviously related to the possible benefit is irrelevant; it’s still noxious anti-fun gameplay.

On the “fish versus fishing lessons” analogy: What if I care about cooking the fish instead of catching it?

In other words, I’m only cheating myself if what I’m giving up has more value for me than what I’m getting. This has to be viewed with the caveat that I probably don’t know (or understand) the acutal values, or the long-term values, and in the context of the rules and norms of the environment. Looking in a book for the answers to a test is only cheating if it’s not an open-book exam.

The abundance of strategy guides, and their implicit and sometimes explicit acceptance by the game company (links to guides from the official WoW website, anyone?), have made those guides less of a cheat than otherwise. I think that gives more weight than Raph allows to the argument that the guides aren’t *really* cheating.

Finally, in case you think I’m nitpicking – yeah, I am, kinda sorta. I’m happy to have found this blog (via links from WoW Insider and Massively), and find myself mostly in agreement with our host, and find his posts to be interesting and thought provoking. And Crystal Quest FTW!

Great conversation, everyone I’ve always taken a huge “anti-anything external to the game” attitude towards these kinds of discussions, and continuing to see the companies create sites like WoW’s Armory is really disheartening to me.

I tend to annoy my guild-mates with my most frequently uttered phrase, “Play the game, not the system!” yet it seems to be more and more of a losing battle because most people I come across are more worried about getting the next big thing than enjoying the experience and the journey. Ladders and rankings just exacerbate the problem in my eyes and makes parts of games that aren’t intended to be competitive to lose their focus.

There is a further point. If a player, without tampering with the game coding or employing any kind of programme hack or exploiting a technical bug, does ‘cheat’ – eg. by using ‘out of game’ information resources – should they be penalised? And, if so, how?

Good points Nabil, especially regarding the the trust issue…that’s something I haven’t thought about. Although I would argue that these guides are part of a person’s gameplay, not a game or play mechanic.

I agree with Raph again. But I also agree that it *seems* that a lot of fault lies with the game design. I never looked at or bought a strategy guide for an RPG game until WoW but a large portion of their quest system is clearly designed to be an annoying time sink (for example, the quest chains that have you repeatedly returning to the same camp to kill the next level of mobs) so that I feel I need that extra help sometimes to actually have fun.

On a slight tangent, I’m kind of old school on the whole overly informative stats issue and long for the days when you had to use a special skill just to find out that the player in front of you was ‘Amazingly Strong’. It seems as if number-crunching has become the focus of MMOs rather than immersive escapism.

1. Achievers vs. RMTers and Power-Levelers and Farming Bots
2. Socializers vs. Griefers
3. Explorers vs. Guides & Hints
4. Killers vs. Bots & other Unauthorized Play Aids

That’s very perceptive, Steven, and that explains a lot.

I’m an explorer, and my attitude towards RMT is that it lets me bypass the boring levelling stuff and get to more content. This attitude of course bugs the crap out of achievers who think their self-worth is measured by how much longer than me they can level-grind, and griefers who get their jollies by harassing low-level underequipped explorers and keeping them from getting anywhere. When these people try to prevent me from using RMT, they’re making me deal with the most boring, banal, horrid part of MMOs: the grind. I’ll just leave instead, go somewhere interesting.

However, I don’t object to guides, because I would simply never use them in a case where they’d damage my gameplay, and I don’t care how anyone else plays, as long as they let me play my way. I think the ideal of the explorer is to personally see new stuff, so there’s no competitive instinct to prevent anyone else from seeing it, too.

“Griefing” is just another term for the “gameplay” of killers. There’s no distinction between a killer and a griefer, and they are all sociopaths. The anti-griefer/killer “cheat” is to channel them into PvP instead of annoying decent, honest people, or ban them.

I realized I went on a bit of tangent :p

To respond to darrenl, a boss guide from any reputable source usually contains enough information to complete the boss challenge. Note the word, complete, as in finish. The only work left resides in the ability of your fingers to follow the pre-written code in order to beat him. In old style Game Genie cheating, you typed a code to get access to new items. If you did not know where those items were, but you got them just by knowing a code I’d consider that cheating. However, as previously stated, the game developers forgot about how much information we are supposed to be keeping track of, and fail to give us any other choice than to rely on standard sets of websites and guides in order to ‘complete’ their games.

Raph -

Boy, you are having “fun” over the holidays!

So, we should be able to create co-categories of “Cheaters” for each Bartle type:

1. Achievers vs. RMTers and Power-Levelers and Farming Bots
2. Socializers vs. Griefers
3. Explorers vs. Guides & Hints
4. Killers vs. Bots & other Unauthorized Play Aids

Thus, the types of cheating we object to reflect our own game play biases. Most MMO game developers tend towards being Achievers and so are more obsessed with RMT-type abuses than other problems. Griefing & Guides are problems that are often “written off” in MMOs.

Oh, and there is another quest reward that comes from ‘cheating’ – or at least circumventing consensus quest-resolution paths – and that is the emotional climacteric that comes with doing something easily that others find hard. How to rate this particular pay-off is a question for the individual conscience.

There are rewards for completion of a raid or a quest that go beyond the puzzle dynamic and the rewards for solving that puzzle – the physical pay-off and the emotional pay-off, I mean. I am thinking now of ‘soft’ rewards that game designers sometimes forget in their eagerness to complete the perfect puzzle – like the positive emotions that come from safely traversing dangerous space or the opportunity to view/interact with rare elements, characters and landscapes or the peer status that comes with fast raid/quest completion. These, I submit, are not formal ‘puzzle solving’ rewards and yet they are rewards nonetheless. I would say that one of the reasons that WoW is so successful, for example, is that their instances are decorated so vividly.

Ah, well, yes but no. Obviously I withdraw my question then with urbane grace trusting that you will have the good taste never to mention it again. Damn, I wish I hadn’t wasted my question now. I would have asked whether you were prepared to speculate (ha!) on Bioware’s super-secret upcoming MMO partnership with Lucas Arts. No we’ll never know.

Games could themselves bring the players back if they remembered things and gave them a LOT better history of past events. I suffer from an EXTREMELY bad memory, I have trouble remembering what I yesterday much less last week. All those stats of monsters that I might have figured out through repetitive testing of weaknesses could be gone for me in an instant. If games want to keep me from “cheating” they will have to build a custom guide book detailing all past events I’ve had so that I can keep track of everything.

Keeping track of things back in the day wasn’t so hard, where there were no guidebooks (or they were very small or compilations) because there were only a few nigh impassable or very important points. Take Mega Man; there were only eight bosses (plus a big guy) they each had a single weakness and there was only one or two parts per level that was considered hard. Back then I could keep track of EVERYTHING I needed about all the games I played in a single 80 page spiral bound notebook. These days, an 80 page spiral bound notebook won’t even account for the first “chapter” of most games. If I wrote in the smallest print I could. And squeezed multiple lines into every last white space on each page.

During the SNES age things expanded rather quickly and by the time the N64 rolled out and the PS1 you would have SIGNIFICANT loses of gameplay (read: value) if you did not pick up a guide book or spend ridiculous amounts of time building a library of scrap books with notes. Not only this, but most gameplay mechanics aren’t revealed in the first few passes anymore. In old games like Final Fantasy 1 there wasn’t three dozen different types of damage, sixteen regular stats, eight types of resists, twelve body slots and 1400 different pieces of equipment. There was maybe one or two new spells and items in each new town you visited, your characters could hold a weapon, armor and maybe an item.

I think it’s a fact game designers no longer design for the explorer, because in order to find all the items, stats, weak points WITHOUT a guide (built in or store bought) you would most likely be spending upwards of a year or more on each game you bought if you only played that game for at least 4 hours every day. In summary, what I’m trying to say is I think strategy guides are far more of a game mechanic in themselves (not to mention extra revenue).

In general, the only “competition” in a PvE MMORPG is self-invented. You’re not competing over getting to a level faster. You’re not competing for spawn points (there are supposed to be enough for everyone).

This is a fine principle, but, in reality, there rarely are enough spawn points. This is sometimes deliberate – e.g. the developers want to limit the rate at which a high-demand drop enters the world for economic reasons. But regardless of the why, competition for spawns is something that affects player time-reward ratios in most non-instanced online worlds that I’ve seen.

The point about hidden information is a valid one, but I’m not sure what a developer can do about it. Is there a brain-wipe station to erase my memories of my first time through the game, so that my second character isn’t guilty of cheating? (Then again, I occasionally find myself repeating previous characters’ mistakes, so perhaps the advantage of memory is tempered by the disadvantage of imprecise memory? )

It’s a problem with you, because it means you picked the wrong game.

It’s a problem with the zone, because it wasn’t designed to make the process of finding the mob interesting.

It’s a problem with the quest, because it isn’t a well-designed quest — “find the mob” should be an interesting puzzle.

Ya beat me to it, and I agree. The problem in a nutshell is that TheAmazin’s time is worth more than the game’s play. So, really, it’s got more to do with the game design than with his/her game play choices. But still, playing such a game in the first place seems like a bad call.

And people play these games by the billions, and cheat by the billions. What’s that say? Should we look yet for the competition?
(Frankly, it’s obvious on many message boards that players are doing just that.)

I cheat because I’m lazy and my time is too important to run around a zone for 2 hours to look for one single mob. Is that a problem with me, the zone, or the quest?

Speaking of cheaters, people who work behind the system, people who have a secret ‘in’ or with influence behind the scenes or with s interest vested in things about which the ordinary player has not an inkling, is it true – apropos of nothing in particular – that you are married to a Sony or a SOE executive? I heard that in quite ordinary cocktail chit-chat this Christmas and for a moment felt like the little boy who was told by his parents not only that Santa Claus did not exist but in the Christmas movie showing on the TV in front of him, Viktor Lazlo was actually married to Major Strasser.

I agree with you as someone working in the game industry. I do wish more people would spend time exploring games and learning about them themselves. But as a person who has very little time to devote to any one game, I can’t imagine trying to play without strategy guides and websites like Thottbot.

It’s not fun for me to spend all my play time wandering around accomplishing nothing because the quest description says “south of here” and that area is huge. Granted, most MMOs are subscriptions and the whole business idea is to spend time in-game, but without that key “accomplishing something” factor I most likely wouldn’t log in again.

It seems like so much of “Game Design” these days is making things obtuse and ambiguous. I want to cut through that chaff and just play the freakin’ game, and that’s what having that information available allows me to do.