MMOG Creators On The Levelling Treadmill

Thanks to RPGVault for their article discussing the problems of repetitive gameplay in MMORPGs. The article defines the issue as "...the so-called "levelling treadmill" that involves repetitive play, often combat against NPCs that present little real challenge, in order to advance [the player's] characters" Representatives from NCSoft, Microsoft, and Auran offer their opinions, which range from "...levelling in and of itself is not evil" to "...levelling has to become dull or the level-up reward would lack value."

Comments

"Levelling must become dull"

[deemah]

I don't understand why levelling must be a dull process for the reward to mean anything. The main problem with the majority of MMO*s is that combat is the main focus of levelling. The game then devolves into a "who can get to the spawn point fastest" competition.

Star Wars Galaxies has gone some way to remedy this with experience granted for other skill use but in doing this they've neglected the section of their playerbase who want to fight hordes of creatures.

What's needed is a balance between the two - have the tunnels of orcs or caves of tuskan raiders for players who want to go all out hack'n'slash to haunt but also have experience/level points awarded for other actions. Neverwinter Nights is one that balances these very nicely but then it's just a translation of the D&D rule set.

Re:"Levelling must become dull"

[MrResistor]

I don't understand why levelling must be a dull process for the reward to mean anything.

I think the guy who said that has it exactly backwards. Levelling in my pen-and-paper D&D game certainly isn't dull, and even then the main focus is often (though not always) combat. Then again, we generally are fighting opponents that are actually appropriate to our power level.

Star Wars Galaxies has gone some way to remedy this with experience granted for other skill use but in doing this they've neglected the section of their playerbase who want to fight hordes of creatures.

What's needed is a balance between the two - have the tunnels of orcs or caves of tuskan raiders for players who want to go all out hack'n'slash to haunt but also have experience/level points awarded for other actions. Neverwinter Nights is one that balances these very nicely but then it's just a translation of the D&D rule set.

Morrowind has an excellent system, I think. You raise level by increasing your skills, which you can do either by using them in "real world" situations or by paying for training. The important thing is that EVERYTHING is governed by a skill (or more than one in some cases): Your ability to hit with a weapon and the amount of damage you do are effected by your skill with that type of weapon, your movement rate and endurance are effected by your skill with the type of armor you're wearing, etc.

Anybody can learn any skill, and that gets balanced by having class skills be worth more in terms of gaining levels, so you can have a fighter that casts spells but he won't gain levels as fast as a fighter who just focused on his weapon and armor skills.

And again, even the fighter who just focuses on weapons doesn't have to just go out and kill stuff to level up. If he manages to get ahold of a good sum of money somehow, he could get a bunch of training and level up that way. Note that a trainer can only train you up to a certain ability level, which varies from trainer to trainer.

game based on FUDGE?

[Tirel]

I found the role-playing system called FUDGE (the docs can be downloaded for free here wondefull. It has no concept of levelling at all, but a skill based system and is far more realistic than say, ADND. The only problem is that is relies on the GM more than other systems, but that could be changed. If they're trying to remove levelling (to an extent) they should definately check fudge out.

If you found levelling evil, boring, whatever

[jsse]

you can pay people to level for you. In Taiwan you can pay less than 2 bucks per days to hire someone who happens to hang around in Internet shop all day. Those kids are so willingly to do what they love to do while earning a little wage and staying in shop for free. It's becoming popular as those 'power gamers' you hire can level much better than you. :D

You don't approach those 'power gamers' directly rather you pay the Internet shop owers to hire them for you. The shop owner bascially charge no commission in this deal but he'll charge you internet access fee for the gamer(s) you hire.

It has already become a social problem in Taiwan as that actually encourage kids skipping classes and social life. Besides, this is an awful sweatshop practise, though the employees seem to be very happy about it, but not their parents. :)

I've been told similar business has been found in Korea. Anyone knows?

Re:If there is no levelling

[KDan]

With many no-levels systems, you still get points for achieving stuff (so there is a levelling system, but it's hidden). So for instance if you've been playing for a long time and you've put a lot of points in various skills, you might be a lot more likely to dodge that backstab and respond in kind than if you just started.

And these systems are simply more realistic. Hitpoints that increase so drastically as in AD&D are a fun but stupid concept - no matter how great you are, if someone slashes at you with a big sword or a huge mace and hits you hard, you're out, if not dead.

It's interesting to consider how a system would work without levels at all (neither hidden nor visible), but there we're getting into real role-playing rather than hack'n'slash, which is what most computer rpg's are about. And we start needing an intelligent DM, which no program is yet close to (and many humans don't achieve either!!).

Daniel

Re:The problem lies in AI

[KDan]

Another option is to play a less popular game. MUDs, being so cheap to run, had the advantage of being so numerous that even the most popular of MUDs didn't have a lot of information available on the net. The only pages with such information were private clan pages, on a MUD I played.

Another trick is to make that information *very* costly (and not in monopoly money, but in ingenuity, time, etc), so that people who do discover it will not be so quickly inclined to put it on a webpage so that joe newbie can make use of it and swamp the spawn point. This goes very well along with making the objective of the quest very scarce and valuable - because then advanced players will not share the secret very simply because they want the items for themselves, so the fewer ppl know about it, the better.

Finally, keeping the world updated helps a lot, for instance by changing things around so that the previous way to solve the quest becomes the way to die. Someone who discovered the hard-to-figure trick themselves will likely be well aware if something has changed and will be cautious, whereas joe faq-reader will just happily stumble into the trap and learn to be a lot more cautious of advice gleaned on the net, and that advice will get more complex (do this, but if you see this do that, and if you see this do that instead, and if you see this and that together then don't go there) so that figuring out the faq becomes as much work as figuring out the quest itself.

Daniel

Quests can be as bad as the Treadmill

[Golias]

A lot of game designers look at the ruts that EQ and AC players complain about, and think "monster camping is no fun... what we need are more quests/missions!"

The problem with that is, if monster farming is a treadmill, most single-player quests (and their MMORPG equivalents) are monorails.

Sure, there are some people who really get off on reading all that carefully-scripted NPC chatter, paragraph after paragraph of it, like you find in a lot of NWN modules, but most of us don't fire up a High Fantasy Adventure game so we can read pre-generated text. If we wanted that, we could re-read our LOTR books, including all of Tom Bombadil's meandering poetry, a copy of which is probably sitting in the immediate vicinity of each of our computers.

Here's a little secret for you "let's make lots of missions" guys: Everquest if chock full of quests, but the vast majority of players find it less boring to "kite" wandering guards, "farm" bandits, or "camp" the minotaur caves than to perform them. The only popular quests are the ones which drop some coveted piece of l00t that you could not get any other way. In other words, most of the players don't find the quests all that much fun, and only bother with them for the rewards, so that they really just end up being an even-more tedious form of The Treadmill. Plus, questing limits both the options of behavior and possibilities of outcome.

When I talk to people who continued to play EQ long after the Level Treadmill got boring for them, they almost always say the same thing: They continued to play for the social aspect of the game. That's right, those "EQ Weddings" we all snickered at when they first started happening, along with silly player-organized events (such as the infamous Naked Troll Run) are what keep people paying their subscription fees for a game that it now very long in the tooth.

Why not develop a game which throws the D&D/MUD convention of levelling out the window entirely? A sort of Tolkein-esque version of The Sims Online, if you will. Create a world that's full of fun things for your avatar to do... really fun things, not just reward-driven things. Interesting game-within-the-game diversions that players can get involved in while making small-talk. Give out meaningless medals or something to show off to others when difficult challenges are met, rather than ramping up character powers in ways that can actually interfere with the social interaction which is the true drive behind the game.

Before somebody has a cow about my suggestion being less appealing than good ol' hack-n-slash RPG's, those games will still be out there. Go play EQ and see how fast you can level that Iksar Necromancer, and be sure to use the EQVault and Caster's Realm web sites to find the phattest quests, so you don't waste your time actually talking to NPC's.

All I'm talking about is the possibility of just one MMO game out there for those of us that just don't care about that sort of bullshit anymore.

Re:Quests can be as bad as the Treadmill

[Allen Varney]

Sure, there are some people who really get off on reading all that carefully-scripted NPC chatter, paragraph after paragraph of it, like you find in a lot of NWN modules, but most of us don't fire up a High Fantasy Adventure game so we can read pre-generated text.

I recently finished a six-month contract on a high-profile MMORPG, scripting missions and writing NPC dialogue of exactly the type you disdain. The company's polls show that about 5% of the player base enjoys reading the dialogue. With that figure, text is certainly not a priority for any design team -- but if you've got the resources, why not include the text? A MMORPG tries to be all things to all players, or at least as many things as possible to as many players as you can get. The text entertains the 5%, and the other 95% ignore it.

From the company's viewpoint it's just an incidental nicety. Because -- believe me! -- compared to artists and coders, writers are cheap.

Re:Quests can be as bad as the Treadmill

[Golias]

Well, I'm not calling for RPG story-text writers like you to be fired off. I'm just saying that not every frikken game has to take the exact same approach to making their content richer.

Also, forcing the other 95% of players to follow the path of that 5% is not the way to make your MMORPG a richer experience. The reason why most people don't bother with it when it's "optional" is because most people don't find it all that much fun.

Remember how flipped out we all were when Quake added 360 movement to the FPS? When EverQuest added graphics and movement to the concept of a MUD? When Descent divorced flight-sim physics from space combat gaming? When Warcraft liberated computer strategy games from "waiting for the other players to go," in favor or RTS? The mid-90's were chock full of interesting new ways to play games on a computer. I miss that. I just can't get excited about SWG, because there really isn't anything new there. There hasn't been a FPS that turned my head since Jedi Knight.

I even miss the failed experiments from those days. "Die by the Sword" was a combat game in which you swung your weapon by using a complex set of key strokes to specifically "move the sword from upper-right to middle-left, while extending the arm."

Now days, it seems like PC game developers would rather chase after duplicating past successes than come out with anything new. All the really interesting gambles are happening in the console gaming world, which has it's share of stagnant "me too" games, but also seems to have plenty of room for new ideas. "Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball," for the X-Box, as an example, is a delightfully weird hybrid of Japanese dating sims, a simple sports game, cartoon pin-ups, and cut-out dolls. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but it's certainly a lot more interesting to discuss than the whatever next iteration of "Left vs. RIght fighting" will be.

Anyway, I'm starting to stray way off-topic. My original point was that, before I spend my hard-earned money on yet another MMORPG, I want to see some real innovation from somebody. The current favored approach to making them more interesting ("let's slap some 'missions' content on that thing!") is not going to cut it with me. Nor, I suspect, with a lot of other people.

Players Create Their Own Leveling Treadmill

[truffle]

Interesting article, but I think they're kind of missing the point. People aren't forced on the leveling treadmill, they jump on voluntarily. People hop on the leveling treadmill because they want more power, for its own sake or for the social status that comes with leveling.

It's possible to level by constantly facing new opponents, taking on the most challenging opponents available, and trying new things.

It's generally more efficient to go to a place that is "good" for your character to level. It's often more efficient to face weaker opponents, because it adds consistency to your hunting experience. Consistency is what allows you to play for eight hours straight, with a group of less than competant adventuring mates, while watching TV. It's less fun, it's less challenging, it's slower, but at the end of the day you're higher level and that's what counts, not whether you "had fun" along the way.

People complain about the leveling treadmill because they find it boring (it's still fun because leveling is constantly reaching goals, and every goal reached is fun). Sometimes people don't know what they really want though. It's easy to go completely off track in responding to these complaints. Lets look at what people really want:

- They want to be able to gain power consistently, constantly reaching short term goals
- They want to be able to come home from work, tired, play for a few hours, and reach some goals
- They want this entire experience to be easy

You can make this process as interactive, and fun, and mission based, and private dungeoned as you want, but it will still end up being a leveling treadmill of some sort. People are going to skip and ignore your NPC text, power through your dungeon to save the princess to go on to the next quest, do whatever they can to 'ding' as soon as possible. The fundamental goal is to gain power, over their peers, more quickly, and everything else is gravy.

That is fine though, I think we can make better MMORPGs with less repetitive leveling treadmills. Make people experience different content to level, literally force them. They may not care, they may not appreciate, they may even complain (don't fall into the trap of making this new content "hard" they still want "easy"), but at the end of the day they may have more fun.

FAQ off

[truffle]

FAQs are primarly useful in static quests, quests where you need to find 11 items in 7 zones dropped by 14 creatures. You can follow them like an instruction manual, bam.

This isn't necessarily a problem, the original questers have fun solving the quest before it's spoiled. Many people (myself included) enjoy completing quests without the slightest application of ingenuity. At that point the quest becomes a simple timesink with a rewards, but the reward is still fun.

You can make quests more dynamic by having more variable quest components. Instead of needing Harpy's Feathers and Eye of Newt for the quest potion, why not pick one item from quest item group A, and one item from quest item group B. At this point we're getting more into the area of automagically generated quests, which are cool.

I think there is also value in fixed rewards for variable quests though. Quests can become part of community understanding, which increases their value. For example, the epic quests in Everquest, for cool class specific items. Take one of those quests, make 25% of the content more dynamic, you'll have more interesting quests.

But keep in mind not everyone likes quests. You will soon have players complaing about "stupid quests" or "boring quests" or even "broken" (I can't solve it) "quests" if their real advancement is held up by a dynamic quest made just for them.

That's what a lot of gamers want

[johnkoer]

There are a lot of gamers out there that are looking for the easiest way to reach their goal, so even if there were plenty of ways of getting experience, many (not all) gamers would still stay with the camp and kill method. I have met plenty of players online that come from an FPS to an MMORPG, all they want to do is PVP. So they basically just keep camping different spots until they are powerful enough to go PVP. They have no interests in the quests, unless it will make their guy more UBER.

They are basically looking for a different market, more like a MMOFPS.

Re:If there is no levelling

[MrResistor]

It's interesting to consider how a system would work without levels at all (neither hidden nor visible)

It's been a while since I've played it, so I could have some details wrong, but IIRC the origional Call of Chthulhu game by Chaosium was pretty close to that. Basically, if you used a skill you put a mark by it and if your character survived the session you would then get to make a role to see if the marked skills went up (Make a skill roll and if you failed you got to add 1d6 to it I think). I don't remember there being any levels at all.

Then again, the game concept does NOT include the idea that the monsters the characters are facing should be in any way defeatable by them.

One aspect I miss

[Tragedy4u]

Is truely adventuring...thats what made D&D and other pen and paper RPG's fun. Getting out and exploring the realm, going into new area's, fighting new enemies, solving new puzzles and completing an adventure....one of the people in the article is right...its not about 'leveling' its the adventure that made RPG's fun and unfortuneately every MMORPG that I've played is nothing more than a hack n' slash repeditive game. Ultima Online was an exception for me for a short while, despite all its numerous faults it's the only game I've played that actually encompased the thrill of simply exploring the land and discovering new and hidden things....that lasted about a week until I was sick of being PK'd once an hour.

Perhaps the problem isn't gaining levels

[xenocide2]

but the mere existance of levels themselves. Personal enhancement can only affect your physical ability to a certain degree, and probably leaves other faculties lacking. Lifting weights all day doesn't make me signifcantly wiser, or smarter. In fact, I'm not sure what does make a person smarter. And practicing military drills all day might make me a better fighter, but the psychological impact is likely more profound. This sort of trait should be emulated by the Role Player, but the notion of RPGs as an acting exercise left long ago.

RPGs come with a buttload of predefined genre baggage. Designers are all too eager to accept them all. Numbers dictate actions, rather than the other way around. There needs be change, but god help us all should our Savior be The Sims Online!

MMORPGs and the Big Problem

[skyknytnowhere]

I used to play AO and now I play Planetside, so I like to think I've tried both sides of the equation.

The thing about AO was that you had a character to upgrade and advance in a multitude of (albeit tiny, almost meaningless) ways to get an overall better character. This persistent character can then go around and have fun in the world, killing monsters and gaining levels. There was permanence, my characters cool stuff stayed with him, and if you took over a section of Notum mining you kept it and the bonuses.

But you still had to play for hundreds of hours for all those tiny, meaningless improvements to mean anything, and to do anything really cool.

This is the same idea in EQ, you gain levels to use the burny swords and the glowy armor.

On the opposite side of the field, you've got Planetside. In just a few hours, a player can any equipment in the game, and blow up the people that have played the game since the beginning. This is the point, of course, and one of the reasons the game is so much fun.

But nothing ever CHANGES. You capture the same base night after night, fire the same guns, get killed by the same enemies guns, and get run over by the same vehicles, every day. It's not a level treadmill so much as it's building sand castles in front of the rising tide. No matter how much progress you make during the night, it will all evaporate guaranteed. Being a high level doesn't mean anything, save that you don't have to log out and log back in to play with different toys in-game.

Now, I don't think it'd be possible in the AO/EQ/DAOC style of gameplay to make lower level characters worthwhile, they are designed against it.

But I'd love to see higher level characters given new toys/a different paradigm of gameplay in Planetside, and the inevitable games like it. I think making even beginning players worthwhile to a conflict in an MMORPG is vital to making it fun, but at the same time, gaining levels should reward the player with more/better/different ways of playing.

Actually, after I wrote that, I realized that someone already wrote an article to that effect, though about a different era of online games. But his point remains the same: Gamers of all dedication/skill level/hours of free time available should have fun things to do, that at least they percieve as worthwhile.

yes, that email at the bottom is my 15 year old self.

skye