This topic has been incubating in my head for awhile now.  Basically I feel we have reached a point where we have strayed so far from how cool factions used to be, and arrived at something that feels very much like busywork to keep us all pacified.  I thought I would take a bit today to go into where we are currently with faction systems in modern MMOs, preface where we came from and propose some thoughts on where we should be moving towards.

State of the Grind

I will be the first to admit that I like earning faction.  There is something gratifying about seeing those little numbers after you have pulled your mace out of the skull of a monster telling you that you just got a little friendlier with a cool group of NPCs.  The concept of faction has been in place since the early MMOs, and has expanded to levels I would have never imagined back then.

Right now it feels like as a player there is a faction hidden behind almost everything, even when it doesn’t necessarily make sense.  There is an inherit need for some of us, to max out all those little bars and unlock everything we can get by doing so.  Where we currently are in the way this system works has become extremely formulaic.

The Company Store

Basically as a player you complete quests and or kill baddies for a specific NPC faction in the world.  As you do more, you gain more of their currency known as “faction”.  The faction system is traditionally divided into multiple tiers that have fuzzy little names, denoting how much these characters adore you.  The reward at the end of the tunnel is access to the company store of sorts.

Usually in an NPC faction area there will be a special NPC called generally a Quartermaster.  They have a treasure trove of items that can be purchased for currency, but each requires a certain level of standing with the NPCs.  As you go up in faction the rewards get more and more tasty until usually at the very end there are some spiffy pre-raid epics glistening there for you to take.

The problem is, currently this is about all faction is worth.  We complete these grinds, in order to get some baubles that we will ultimately outgrow far more quickly than we would hope.  As a result, once you have finally achieved the pinnacle of this crawl the rewards often seem rather lackluster.  The number of these faction grinds has increased exponentially in games, but instead of giving us more interesting things to do, they seem to all be stalled out in this formulaic model.

The Curious Case of Kael Drakkel

Thing is, the faction system used to mean a good deal more to the players.  Over time we have regressed from a very vibrant and world changing model to the very simplistic formula of the quartermaster system that exists today.  Ironically the game that had this very imaginative system was the grandfather of the current MMO genre, Everquest.  I can give you numerous examples of imaginative and compelling uses of faction in this game, but without a doubt the one that stands out most in my mind is that of Kael.

Kael Drakkel was a mythic city on the continent of Velious, the second expansion.  The entire city was populated by frost and storm giants, and as a result was scaled massively to fit their proportions.  It was located smack dab in the middle of the land, situated between the Wakening Lands and Eastern Wastes sitting as the gateway to the higher level content. 

To most players, this was a great raid zone, and killing giants here gave you faction with frost dwarves  of Thurgadin.  Killing the various giants also gave you the ability to get rare quest drops, that could be turned in with other items to produce a full set of raid worthy armor.  As a result we spent many an hour hunting here, but every now and then I would see other player characters walking around freely inside the city.  The fact that players could walk freely among these same giants that wanted to grind me to bits was a great puzzle.

I found out later that if a player so chose, they could abandon the normal faction path and choose to hunt the Dwarves of Thurgadin and several factions of Dragons, instead raising their faction with Kael Drakkel itself  As a reward for this epic task, they gained access to similar armor quests, but even more important a friendly foothold in the middle of this dangerous continent.  This gave them quick access to all the highest end content in the expansion while providing a safe haven to bank and shop.

There were many such examples of this, while I never ventured down the Kael path, I did complete a similar faction grind.  Through killing the Kobolds of the Warrens I managed to raise my faction with the evil Shadowknights and Necromancers of Paineel, giving me access to venture in and out of the city like a full fledged citizen.  My friend completed a similar path, that allowed his evil Iksar Monk to trade freely with the halflings of Rivervale.  In both cases our hard work gave us access to content our races never would have allowed.

Remembering the Past

While I love the influx of quartermasters, and the goodies they offer, faction grinding should have far reaching effects than just unlocking trinkets.  In the Everquest system, the players gained game changing effects allowing them access to new cities, new quests, and new game experiences.  The current faction grind system just seems so lifeless and meaningless in comparison.

One of my biggest frustrations has been that when you gain faction, it has no real effect on your gameplay.  I can remember being supremely frustrated in WoW upon encountering Alexstraza in Twilight Highlands, that she seemed to have no recollection of all the work your character performed helping her and the red dragonflight in Dragonblight.  Instead of getting a nice bit of lore and flavor recounting all the help you had provided, I was “rewarded” with another lifeless set of quests.

Another big issue is that factions get created for no real reason.  I can remember being frustrated when Burning Crusade was released, and all the work we had done for the Cenarion Circle meant nothing, because instead of using the same faction and rewarding players for past work we were handed yet another meaningless grind by calling the Outland faction the Cenarion Expedition.  The same goes for the frustration of having both the Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade, but no real reason for them.

A Better Future

I think we have lost too much of the nuance that we mmo players used to have in the switch to the quartermaster model.  What I want to see is in the future, our decisions as players have actual compelling results.  Earning a purple bauble that you will replace all too soon is a boring use of faction, giving players access to entirely new areas of the game is an extremely exciting one. 

One of the most interesting things I have seen in years was with the release of Everquest II.  Players chose a race, which often times forced them into a factional path.  Iksar and Dark Elves for example, will never be seen as “good races”.  However if a player so wished, they could go through an interesting series of quests and very epically “betray” their home faction, essentially switching sides in the battle.

While fun, and offering more flexibility than many games gave the players I still feel it was tied down to a very artificial black and white factional wall.  I realize the us versus them system, is in place for the most part to facilitate clean player versus player lines.  However I believe faction systems would be far more enjoyable for the players if the lines were allowed to grey a bit. 

As a traditional “light side” race, you might have in your travels managed to broker a trade route with the trolls for needed supplies.  If you were a particularly noble dark elf, you might abandon the path of hatred and take up the path of justice as such befriending the “good” races.  The players that play these games are made up of complex goals and ideals, so why shouldn’t the faction boundaries and alliances be equally complex.

I feel that by switching to this formula model we have arrived at over the years, and that each new game adopts a copy of, we have abandoned a rich tradition.  My hope is that even the current game set can start to adopt a little more flavor and spread out a bit further from the cookie cutter us or them model.  I am not expecting to get freeform factions for awhile, but it would be nice to have my actions unlock new game play options rather than just more grind.  Only time will tell, but I feel that the current model needs to change.

David Sirlin has an oft-mentioned book called Playing to Win, available in its entirety for free online. It’s a fascinating read from the perspective of a highly competitive gamer. His disclaimer at the beginning is entirely apt—most people who don’t already have a handle on playing competitively probably won’t believe that he’s right, or will get angry at his writing. Some of it seems calculated to enrage; he doesn’t really pull any punches, and throws a few that may not be strictly necessary.

I was initially enraged upon reading it. Sirlin starts by calling any player who doesn’t play to win a “scrub”, a choice of term that seems hyper-elitist and calculated to alienate, and I’m still not convinced that it isn’t. The fact that he’s largely not wrong in the rest of the book only furthered my anger, because I was left without a lot to rail against.

In retrospect, some time later, Playing to Win put me in mind of one of my college professors, who taught game design and was absolutely crucial in me getting into the games industry. His first lecture was brutal, especially for a roomful of aspiring game developers who were still wide-eyed and optimistic. It went something like this:

“Alright, let’s get started. Who here has a game idea that they want to share, or better yet, make?”

<Pretty much everyone emphatically raises a hand.>

“Good. Forget that idea; it’s worthless. Come up with a new one. You have until the end of the class period.”

A Punch in the Face

It’s almost like a physical blow to deal with that sort of thing. I was reeling after his comment and I could tell that a lot of other people were as well, with different reactions. A lot of people got defensive, others looked like they might cry, other people were clearly gearing up to drop the course. It didn’t help that the crux of the first lecture was about implementation over theory, with quotes like “Ideas are a dime a dozen; they don’t mean anything unless you can build them,” and other things that make a budding designer’s stomach tighten with emotion.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I started to get perspective. We were introduced to the “tyrannosaurus in our minds”, described as a construct that attacks any new ideas that enter the mind, and destroys ones that are too weak to survive. It became part of a larger lesson about being your own harshest critic and not getting too attached to an idea. At the time, I’d spent several years on a lengthy game design doc, a sprawling magnum opus that I’d put almost three hundred pages of text into. I had been convinced that I was going to one day make it into a full-fledged game. The professor’s tyrannosaurus analogy had an interesting embedded lesson:

“I often have people describe their game ideas to me, and I can separate the good designers from the bad almost immediately, just by how well-fed their tyrannosaurus is. A bad designer’s tyrannosaurus will be lazy, or too weak to feed, and ideas that would never see the light of day end up in their mind, wasting their time. A lot of really bad ideas get made because someone’s tyrannosaurus wasn’t trained well enough to cull it before hundreds or thousands of hours had been spent on development, and by the time someone realized the idea really was simply terrible, too much money had been spent to abandon the project.”

“The first thing any responsible producer or publisher is going to do is try to poke holes in an idea. It has to be done, because when millions of dollars are on the line you need to nip bad ideas in the bud quickly. Good designers will have thought of this already, and have answers ready.”

Picking up the Pieces

A lot of people will rail against things like the above, saying things like “this is why games are all clones of one another nowadays” and “that kind of mentality means that there’s no innovation!”

It’s not true. The very best games are a product of this kind of mentality. It’s easy to lose sight of it, but there are shining examples all over the place. Team Fortress 2 is a game that really looked deeply at other games and culled even the best of those. Team-based shooters used to release with tons of guns and as many maps as they could build. Team Fortress 2 had a bare handful of weapons by comparison and released with only two maps, but those two maps had been extensively play-tested and polished until they shone.

Pokémon has an incredibly straightforward system, one that’s gone pretty much unchanged through fifteen years of releases, and is still incredibly popular. Worth noting is that nearly every mechanical addition they’ve made to the game has felt tacked-on and extraneous, from odd baking games to playing dress-up.

Building a Better Designer

The very first thing I was tasked with doing when I started working in the games industry was building a small section of map. I was excited and inspired and, even though I’d been given a week to do it, I turned it around in a day and a half. My lead looked at it and told me it was too complicated and that I should rebuild it from scratch. Around the third or fourth iteration it finally passed muster, and I’d taken the whole week doing it. It would have been devastating, except I quickly realized that I wasn’t culling ideas as well as I should. The end result was a tight, fun experience, something that the original, heavily-overdesigned version was not.

The whole thing has stuck with me, and I’m always on the lookout for how games implement their ideas, and which ideas shouldn’t have passed by the tyrannosaurus somewhere along the way.

I still have the two-hundred-and-eighty page game design concept I’d been working on, and I was too attached to it for a long time to turn the dinosaur on it. I finally did, and mentally shredded 99% of it.

Those three pages that are left, though? There’s a solid core for a game there, one that I might make eventually.

Next: What Players Want (Ugly Truths in Gaming, Part 2)

I really don’t have a great post for today, but rather go without a post I am cobbling something together.  Last few days I haven’t really followed much of the goings on in either the blogosphere or gaming press.  Basically all of this is due to the fact that I have continued to get sicker.  Finally get into a doctor and sequence of events goes a little something like this. 

My allergies were mean, and took over my zone thanks to the cottonwood invasion.  Then they managed to accidentally open a sinus infection rift.  Over time according to the doctor this started a zone wide pneumonia invasion.  Rather than letting it overtake my zone, she summoned a guild known as Levaquin to help fight it back.  So end result is…  I am still feeling horrible but hopefully on the mend.

Rift Commercials

As I sit at home, not really feeling like playing, not really feeling like doing much I have been watching a lot of the Syfy channel.  As a result I have seen a good number of the new rift commercials.  Honestly it is a damned clever idea.

Commercial #1

Commercial #2

Time to End Quests?

Wolfshead Online posted an interesting piece entitled “Why It’s Time to Get Rid of Quests in MMORPGs”.  While I don’t 100% agree with the premise that quests need to be removed, since I have played a game before that might as well have not had quests… Everquest.  However it is a well thought out and rather lengthy case for their removal.

I think in the grand scheme of things, I am longing for a game that is a little more sandbox and a little less golden path.  I like having quests, for when I want to quest… but ultimately I think there needs to be a type of gameplay supported that favors free exploration.  I think a game that had a questing system similar to that of Oblivion would be the perfect blend.

In that game you are never beaten over the head with the need to run quests, but they are there and extremely compelling if you choose to seek them out.  I think there has to be a way to bridge the gap between Everquest, where the quests themselves were near impossible to find and confusing to complete, and the world we live in now where no game dare launch without a shimmering path of breadcrumbs for the players to follow.

Earlier in this week I posted about the new Rift Ascend a Friend program.  While I still think this program is by far the best I have seen implemented by a game company, the more I thought about it the more frustrated I got.  It feels like all of these recruitment programs are fundamentally flawed.

Why Recruitment Programs Suck

The fundamental flaw in all of these programs is simple.  When a game starts to drop in population after its initial release boost, the first tool in the bag of mmo publishers to to break out a recruitment program.  Where better to draw in new people than from their loyal player base.  If you have friends playing a game, you are more likely to adapt to it yourself.  I find no flaw with this logic at all.

Where the breakdown happens is the fact that most “alpha geeks” have already drawn deeply from their friends at the release of the game.  I know personally I have been responsible for the sale of at least a dozen copies of rift.  At this point, everyone that would make a solid player is either in game, has tried the game and left, or is a wow-loyalist and bordering on ignoring me for my constant pro-rift banter.  While recruiting three more people doesn’t seem like much, for someone like me who had already drawn deeply onto the friend pile, it definitely is.

In theory, by creating a recruit a friend program, you are slapping your most loyal players in the face.  Those are the folks who have already brought everyone they could into a new game.  For example, I sold probably 30 copies of WoW over the years, but it took me 5 years to finally earn one of the recruit a friend mounts.  In this scenario however, the mount is the least important part.

It is extremely frustrating that all of these friends who I have brought into the game, can never be linked to my account like any new people I recruit will be.  Since some of my closest friends are already playing, I wish there was a way to somehow retroactively tag them as folks I brought in.  How handy would it be to be able to join your friends in doing whatever they are doing by teleporting to them?

How to Fix Them

The thing publishers need to understand is that from the day the game launches, their most loyal players are going to be actively recruiting.  So even if there are no rewards for it from the beginning, you need to give your players a way of flagging which players they have recruited into the game.  This is not something that can really be rolled out a couple of months after the game launches, this is something that needs to be in place prior to release.

Bioware seems to be getting this, at least in a small way.  With The Old Republic they have given us the ability to form guilds, recruit players, and create the social structure for the game well before launch.  However I think all publishers really need to look at this as the new norm.  The key difference between an MMO gamer and your standard console or pc gamer is that they crave the social interaction that these games gives them.  As a result it is impossible to divorce the community from the gameplay.

More than likely I will eventually get my pony.  However as a beta rift player, that managed to bring a good share of his friends into this game, it is frustrating that I will need to go into hardcore recruiter mode to earn it.  While this is not a massive deal, but recruitment programs have been a constant of MMOs for years.  Knowing this, I think it is something that publishers have to think of from day one.  Capturing this user loyalty from the start, only serves to give your player base the message that they really do matter after all.