Game Design for the Masses

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I'm going to share some video links from a web series I watch on game design as I've seen some relevant episodes lately on card games as I was getting into Hearthstone. Some of these are relevant to Warcraft though. For anyone interested these are fairly informative and enlightening.

Collectible Card Games (Hearthstone's game genre)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Quest Design

Part 1
Part 2

One-Shot Topics

Skinner Box (The ugly side of MMO game design)
Games as Difficult Vs Punishing
Differences in Scale vs. Differences in Kind (understanding the design philosophy behind Warlord's stat changes and Mist's talent changes))
Game Motivation (why quest, why raid etc. A guide to help you better understand what you enjoy about game and what you're wasting your time on)
Incomparables (More on understanding some of the design philosophy behind Mist's revised talent trees)
Power Creep (The reason for the coming item squish)
Analysis of MMORPG Market (meta-discussion on the genre and it's business practices)

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Net Neutrality (What it is and why you should care)

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For our League of Legends players. While the things explained are very elementary, it gives insights into how this taken for granted information creates game flow and opportunities for decisions. Level Design in LoL.

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How to Manage Inflation in an MMO - a look at mmo economics

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This one needs some recirculating, an essay on player types in MMOs. Written by Richard Bartle, one of the pioneers in MUDs, the pre-cursors to MMOs. It's a fairly scholarly essay, so it can read a bit dry, but I found a fascinating read. It'll go far beyond a basic discussion of the player types, but discuss their behaviors and how game devs can attract or deter these players in a game

Secondly, a video discussion on what makes for good villains in video games. This one struck me only because it puts into words what I didn't like about Cataclysm, a much maligned expansion that I largely enjoyed yet somehow found boring. The updated zones were amazing, I loved the improvement to writing for quests, things felt a bit less grindy, the class mechanics overhaul was desperately needed. Yet still I wasn't really engaged, and my answer comes down to, Deathwing was not an interesting antagonist (especially compared to characters like Arthas or Illidan) or a good way to drive the story. All that was clear was that he crazy and pissed, and trying to destroy the world though I'm not entirely sure why or how...which made little sense if he was corrupted by the Old Gods who would want to be free of their imprisonment, not have said prison destroyed.

Part 1
Part 2

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A bit of discussion on some of the things we're seeing in game regarding the free flow of loot, lfr etc.

Game Design largely boils down to having a goal of what experience you want to create for the player and designing a system of incentives to encourage it or punishments/prohibitions to prevent straying. Blizz's design goals vary with each patch and expansion and are quite reactionary to how players are responding to current ideas. Outside of this, they like to experiment and try out new ideas to see what flies and what flops.

Awhile back Blizz released a few part essay detailing the evolution of raid design, what their objectives were. While many of us regard LFR as a wasteland with colorful acronyms to depict this, this opened raiding to the masses. It is estimated that no more then 15% of players got to raid prior to its creation, and now it's around 55%. From a design perspective, this is an amazing success in inclusivity, allowing more of a paying player base to experience the epic resolution of the game's stories.

However, LFR is a wasteland with most players never escaping it. Moreover, it is an impersonal experience dealing with unforgiving strangers and that isn't fun. So, Flex raiding was created to address this problem. Create a tier of raiding that was easier to access and break the rules of fixed size raid teams so more people can go. From there flexible raiding expanded to the current heroic tier for the purposes of inclusivity once more. Mythic needed to be kept at a fixed rate only because it was too difficult to create a precise level of difficulty that scaled.

Blizz wants people to move out of LFR, out of the wasteland where we're stuck with strangers. They want us playing with our friends, that was a core experience for anyone who was in a guild in Vanilla and BC, before the advent of dungeon finder. Its that sense of community that many people complain is missing from the game, and this is the closest Blizz has come to addressing this. Think, even the guild perk system was designed to bring people into guilds and away from solo play. But that had the issue of people only wanted to be in max level guilds, so for Mists they made it easier to level a guild and then simply did away with the level system all together.

When you run LFR or a heroic random dungeon with someone you queued with, you get bonus gold. Blizz is incentivizing that behavior...play with your friends. For a heroic, this is an extra 75 gold...it's 300 gold in LFR. That's a nice chunk of gold.

Anyway, how to move people out of LFR. There's 2 things that would hold people back - 1, not access to a raid or room for you in your guild's team and 2, lack of skill. The first problem is addressed with the flex model. The second problem has to do with the way in which Blizz is tossing loot at us. Gear is free flowing right now. You are guaranteed 1 piece of loot in a dungeon and it's not rare to get 2-3 pieces, meaning you can gear up really fast. LFR's difficulty has been reduced drastically and loot drop rates are about 50%, so you can get 1-3 pieces of gear from a single run. This removes the need to farm LFR for months. You can buy gear from the apexis vendor doing dailies and bypass a lot of the extra gearing in dungeons and even LFR. Then you can craft epic quality gear on a scale we've never seen before in the game. Lastly, your followers get missions to get you gear of all levels.

In the game's history, only raiders had access to epic quality recipes because they all dropped from raids. Moreover, even if you bought this recipe off the AH, you really couldn't make the gear anyway. The mats had to be farmed from the same raid, often coming from disenchanted loot drops...which meant your raid team had to have the content on farm to afford to disenchant stuff. So, only a small percentage of the player base could access the recipes and an even smaller percentage could make them. Come 5.4 and now all crafters can make belts and legs with common craft materials that are 10-man raid level. Suddenly, everyone with the profession can make something worth having/buying, and in some cases these items were Best in Slot. But scarcity was needed for balance, so it took 21-28 days to make an item. And raiders still got their due with a disenchanted drop that got around the daily cd gating so you could make gear a few days faster then everyone else.

I've heard a few people bitching that WoD was going to destroy crafting - bullshit. What its done is remove the ability for individuals to corner a market for themselves. Now it's harder to be that alchemist being the main distributor of flasks or potions on the server. Your ability to craft the best flasks is limited, so you can't mass produce anymore...or at the very least its harder to. And it's harder to be that raiders who sells a piece of crafted raid gear for 35-100k because there's maybe one other item you're competing against. you'll note that excessively prived epic gear at the start of this expansion has quickly dropped in value because so much more of it is out there and the initial rush to gear for raids is blowing over.

Instead of being able to make only 2 pieces of raid level gear like in the past, you can make raid level gear for every possible item, giving you tons of variety in the market. Once more, all the materials come from basic goods and readily accessible to everyone. But it sucked waiting 21-28 days to get a single piece of gear in 5.4, or waiting to have a raid on farm prior. So, now you can produce an inferior quality item in a fraction of the time, about 5 days, then it takes 7-8 days to upgrade it and then 10 days more to upgrade one last time. That's a total of 23 days to make any piece of heroic gear...the same quality item took 21-28 days for only 2 options last expansion and no one minded. Now everyone thinks it takes too long to make stuff...it's faster then it was and not only that it's broken up so you can get mini-pay-offs more frequently instead of waiting weeks to get everything all at once. Do the math, it's an improvement over what we had, you've only convinced yourselves its not. Admittedly, the fact I've needed to say that several times to people only says this new craft system has a bad public image going on 'cause no one is seeing it and Blizz needs to do some pr on that before people complain this new system away.

Anyway, gear is raining down like mana from heaven with it so easily accessible. We have more ways then ever to get it, and it's faster to get it then ever before. Why? Well, gear is being used as a handicap for player skill. Proving Grounds was there to teach you your class or practice it with a sliding difficulty, but too many people couldn't be bothered to do it. So now it's required to proceed to ensure some baseline. After that, throw enough gear at someone and their numbers will improve. They won't be amazing since the person isn't using the gear efficiently, but it helps compensate, hopefully enough to move them out of LFR and into Normal mode. And that's the goal, LFR is great for giving people exposure to the game's culminating story, but it isn't as fun an experience as it should be. So, give people reasons not to farm it by letting them get the gear they want faster and then give them enough gear and slots to move into the next tier of raiding where they can play with friends.

In short, the theme for this is play with your friends to have fun. We'll give you gold to incentivize it and enough gear to be able to do it.