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New Technique To Help Develop MMORPG Content?
ShipLives writes "Researchers have developed a new method that can predict MMORPG player behavior. The tool could be used by the game industry to develop new game content, or to help steer players to the parts of a game they will enjoy most. I don't think it should replace user feedback, but it's a pretty cool data-driven approach. Ideally, it could help developers make good decisions about new games/expansions."
To determine that people tend to do things in order, and that achievements generally build on one another? What sense would it make to run around doing achievements at random? Apparently 20% people do, but....as for the rest of us, apparently we think methodically, this is news?
Asking users what they think is generally a bad approach to game development. People don't really know what they want. Your questions are likely to be leading (you are not a professional pollster). They might lie about what they found to be difficult if they're embarrassed about losing, or alternatively they might demand that everything get simplified because they want to win, not realizing that it wouldn't be fun if it were too easy. And in competitive games, forget about it. Every class/weapon/tactic that kills them must be nerfed, whatever they like to use must be buffed.
It's far more effective to simply watch them play the game, without speaking to them at all, and see what frustrates them, what confuses them, what they enjoy, and so on.
Unfortunately, the method in TFA(bstract) seems to just evaluate player behavior based on what achievements they have. That will, apparently, tell you what aspects of the game they like best, but it's not going to help much with the small stuff. I suspect Blizzard is already gathering that data anyway.
How long 'til what I wanted yesterday no longer represent an interest today?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
...determining the next quest in the chain? Okay yes, I RTFA. Their research dealt with correlating achievements, not quest. They used an unarmed combat achievement that can no longer be acquired in WoW as an example. So I refuse to retract my snarkiness.
Anyone else find tfa stupid?
“For example,” Roberts says, “you could develop a program to steer players to relevant content. Because it is a data-driven modeling approach, it could be done on a grand scale with minimum input from game designers.”
They are saying this as if game designers regularly sit on servers telling users where to go, they are also implying the game will suggest where the players will 'go'. I dont see how this is related in anyway to developing new mmo content.
One interesting element of these findings is that the achievements that are highly correlated – or part of the same clique – do not necessarily have any obvious connection. For example, an achievement dealing with a character’s prowess in unarmed combat is highly correlated to the achievement badge associated with world travel – even though there is no clear link between the two badges to the outside observer.
Here they admit some correlations dont make sense so all they are saying is these achievements seem to be done by users together. Is this what passes for a 'new technique' and 'research' now? it looks like something from steam stats could do pretty much all of this
'congrats boss, we just figured out a way to eliminate another bunch of labor costs'
"great! if only henry ford could see me"
'actually, i think henry ford raised all of his people, even the janitors, to something like 5 times the going wage'
"oh. i never liked him anyway, he was a nazi."
"For example, an achievement dealing with a character’s prowess in unarmed combat is highly correlated to the achievement badge associated with world travel – even though there is no clear link between the two badges to the outside observer."
Am I the only one who sees a really clear link between those two things? I did both back when I played wow -- for the same reason. I was achievement farming, for no real reason except it was something to pass the time doing waiting for a raid or PVP queue to pop.
Neither are things I ever even would have thought to bother with, except suddenly they presented a checklist of Things To Do, so I went and mindlessly did them.
I don't play WoW anymore, but back when I was -- I have a pretty clear memory of my guildies, and I swear, everyone who would have gone and gotten one of those were the people who I bet went and got the other, later. They weren't, of course, the sane* people who mostly ignored ToDo List of Boredom (except the raid ones, because you got a kickass mount out of it).
* no I wasn't sane.
Nobody has been listening to what gamers want for awhile now.
It's just all "OOOooOooHhh LOOK SHINY GRAPHICS!"
And on the mm side... It's "OH LOOK MICROSTRANSACTIONS! PAY US MORE NOW!"
So i really doubt they'll be giving us anything we actually want. No matter what the technique says. Since they won't even LISTEN TO PEOPLE.
wtf?
Really, no clear link? Did they even ask one player? These are both low-hanging fruit for the solo completionist. In particular, I suspect that north of 90% of players with the 400 unarmed weapon skill achievement will have World Explorer, although the relationship will be lower in the reverse direction — the former is a bit more of a time investment, and much more boring and tedious (Blizzard removed weapon skills for a reason), whereas World Explorer is something that can be knocked out by an hour-a-day casual player in two weeks with no problem. Since World Explorer can easily be teamed up with book collecting, critter /love-ing, the zone and continent quest completions, and Loremaster, I suspect those all form a single clique of solo completionist achievements, with some sub-cliques that are a bit more accessible to the casual player.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Really, the most annoying part of a mumorpuger is the "community" that forms like an accretion disk around the game itself, usually a bunch of pushy whining kids who won't ever be satisfied, will always feel underpowered with their favourite in-game character, and threaten to leave to other games for years instead of packing up and leaving.
If there was a technology to eliminate actual players from those games, it would improve the communities a lot. We are finally getting closer to a point where it becomes possible. Exciting times.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Time for /. to allow those with Excellent Karma to report spam-dudes like this.
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This platform is flawed. MMO companies care more that you stay subscribed than anything else, and it does ugly things to gameplay.
MMORPG usually concentrate on the random reward with increasing time between them for a good reason, and not on player feedback. Player feedback , except for the really obvious problem, will always be to try to make their own reward easier while making the other's harder. Witness for example the PVP discussions on which class are OP, or even the early player calling for some part of the game to be made harder because the reward are tooe asy(after they have done it naturally). WOW did good because it ignored the whiner and concentrated on making it easier for everybody. Maybe too easy some will contend. But they so far mostly ignroed player feedback, just tuned the skinner box , and did much better than everybody else.
How about finally moving past the usual crap of "travel to location X, kill as many monsters of type Y until you've collected Z items of the specified type"???
Since a fair portion of all players are bots, what will the pattern show?
Players have a desire to perform repetitive tasks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Players seem to enjoy movement in a cross-stitch pattern, picking herbs, mining, and skinning hides
Players are more predictable than the predictive model predicts.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
When you design a game with stats and grinding as the key to keeping players going, that is when developers get locked into needing new content to keep the players interested. Many single player games have a fairly large world, but because everything is STATIC, and does not really change, other than introducing new NPCs or doing the occasional update, you end up with a pretty boring game WORLD, where expanding on the world is the source of keeping things interesting.
If the game world were more dynamic, with a true economy and world that evolves over time, where NPC thieves look around the game world for things to steal, or just to survive, and where all NPCs actually live their lives, with or without player involvement, THEN you get a more interesting environment. Humans that are monitoring the world so that players can't "game the system" would of course be needed, but AI needs to become the center of a solid MMO, and letting the world evolve.
If you play a character, and you travel to a town, every NPC would have a history and story that has evolved from interaction with other NPCs as well as interaction with the players. Once you get THAT sort of situation down, the game world itself provides the changes to content, and developers can focus on larger events, such as earthquakes, floods, or other natural disasters. Underground cave complexes could open up to add more monsters to the world, but in general, people should find entertainment just in wandering and exploring the world, because it SHOULD be large enough where it would take players a long time just to go from one end of the world to the others.
Incorporating feedback is the death of creativity. The uniqueness of the artist's perspective and expression is greatness. The ability to produce what other's want isn't art; it's business. This trend of monitoring user behavior is nothing more than marketing to maximize profit. The singularly amazing game experiences will always be the uncompromising vision of those with the courage to make a statement and public opinion be damned. Giving people what they want is foolish. Giving people what they need is wise. Knowing the difference is genius. I'd have to say Blizzard's work is the epitome of this problem. Deplorably average in every way and catering to the profit line without taking risks; watered down, derivative (a hodge-podge of cultural homages and recycled tripe--Warcraft I, II, III, etc.)
Fuck that.
This research focuses only on those that "go after" achievements.... in WoW. What percentage of the community is that? (I'm guessing it's a good number, but what research is there to show that.) What about people that don't care about achievements? Certainly there is a good chunk of people who could give a flip about cooking 10,000 WoW burgers or completing every task of the Pilgrim's quest line. It seems this research has looked into what achievement hunters are likely to do next. That's interesting. But to say WoW achievement hunter behavior generalizes to the mmo game world at large might be over emphasizing their own research.
Square Enix actually got this right with their older MMO, Final Fantasy XI. The NPCs are generally not only quest givers, but appear in cutscenes and have evolving lives and storylines of their own, from the smallest child to the kings and leaders of nations. Battlefield content is driven by the storylines, and once you have completed an expansion's overall story, most of the NPCs in the town treat you different (usually with more respect.)
The article's methodology also doesn't accurately differentiate between content players actually want to do, and content they feel forced to do in order to advance. There's nothing more any player hates than a "sticking point" that interrupts their plans, such as a mission that is hard to defeat without specific classes or a really tricky strategy, and yet these are exactly the sort of road blocks developers put in all the time, thinking they are being clever.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It's really subjective. For example, I consider all dungeons and monster spawns beyond what I need to hit level cap mostly a waste of effort; I'm much more interested in PvP against other people.
If you've played any amount of MMOs, you don't need an algorithm to tell you that players tend to take the path of least resistance in achieving their goals; often, its only the goals that differ, not the means to get there.
Listening to everyone is a good way to make your game suck. Listening to no one is a good way to make your game suck. What developers need to learn to do is develop an original vision, stick with it, and only make changes that fit in this vision. What tends to happen is they make changes to try to appease the whining minority, and this is the kind of thing that kills games. References: UO, Fury, Darkfall Online, arguably even WoW (Yes, I know, x million subscribers blah blah blah. If you played today you'd know the game is not what it once was in many ways.)
I see you want to play a game! Would you like to:
- Earn achievments?
- Kill some not-too-hard enemies?
- Enjoy a cutscene with scantily-clad ladies?
- Mine gold?
What type of gamer are you? It already figures out what sorts of gameplay people enjoy, and based on anecdotal feedback, most people seem to agree it's relatively accurate.
This doesn't actually work since its based of what a user has "previously done". So if the game forces me to do something, that just means its going to force us to do the same things over and over again. FAIL.
A game world doesn't have to be crushingly complicated and large. It just has to be large enough so that it can accommodate all of the social groups who want to play within it. The valuable thing about multiplayer games is the novelty of playing with and against other players. Each additional player offers another element of unpredictability, challenge unmatched by algorithms and an opportunity to socialize. Simply destroying or creating things or immersing in made-up worlds is not actually that compelling on a long-term basis. Games like WoW are essentially single-player experiences all run in parallel and with limited help or interference by other players. A ton of work is done to keep people from being able to interact too much, lest the assholes make things too hard on the naive. The story and the environment are only novel for so long and the need for subscriptions leads to insatiable need for new novelties.
Designers shouldn't try to fix lack of interesting "content" by making the AI parts of the world more engaging. It's a losing battle against complexity. There's already plenty of engagement to be had from other real players. Every step that is taken to limit the interaction between players is antithetical to the purpose of an MMO. Here's what players love to do:
1. Make unique contributions and lasting impacts
2. Grief other players
3. Make friends
4. Compete
5. Show-off what they've got
6. Use the game mechanics to in novel and surprising ways.
7. Make and collect unique things
The bottom line is that ALL of this should be allowed and most of it should be encouraged. Make the rules clear and allow a number of simple elements to be combined in complex ways and that's basically all you need. There's a lot of concern about game balance. It's always going to be a hard problem--especially with complex interactions. The solution is to acknowledge that challenge and assign teams to constantly monitor and tweak things to guide the majority of the game into being balanced. Build the tools so that it becomes a management problem, not a design or technical problem.
No one game has done all of the above things well. WoW is actually very far from accomplishing most of those things in a meaningful way. Right now, EVE seems to be closest to doing things right but it's got plenty of flaws. UO also did a good job on a lot of those items, but its owner gave up investing in it in meaningful ways after repeated development failures.
From the article it sounds like they figured out that people who liked getting achievements were more likely to get more achievements even if the achievements were not related to one another.... SHOCKER.
There are of course an endless variety of reasons why people play MMORPGs and what they are interested in doing while there. I know a lot of people who deliberately chose to rack up all the badges they could in various MMORPGs because they are completionist types when playing. Does it make any sense to me? Not at all, but that doesn't mean it doesn't appeal to a segment of the population. I think its a mistake to assume that no one enjoys that sort of thing just because you and your friends in the game do not.
Take PvP for instance. In every MMORPG I have played, the PvP oriented segment of the population was the most vocal, the most demanding and the least open to the suggestion that other players might not enjoy PvP. PvPers are usually a small segment of the overall population in most MMOs. Players who enjoy PvE are usually the vast majority, but they are also the least likely to speak up about the game on forums, etc. I do a bit of both, but tend to spend more time engaged in PvE activities.
Likewise, for some players MMOs are nothing more than a giant chat client with activities you can do while chatting.
A software driven approach to producing game expansions is doomed to failure though. The moment players figure out a game is employing that sort of mechanic, they will try to game it to direct the game in the way that *they* want, regardless of what might be good for the game.
The only approach that will work for an MMORPG in my opinion is one that is player driven directly - i.e. the players produce the content. EVE Online for instance seems to have the right idea. I haven't played it (I am not into spreadsheets that heavily) but it has a loyal following, seems to get people very involved, and seems to dynamically change based on the actions of the large corporations (guilds).
Any other approach means hours of developer work to produce X amount of gameplay that players will burn through in far less time than was invested in it. For instance, if you add a new class to any given MMO, how many hours will it take before someone with no life has leveled it to max? By comparison how many hours did it take to develop and test that class?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
It's time to embrace the somewhat shorter abbreviation MRPG. Massive Role Playing Game. If it is massive, it is multi. If it is massive, it is online. The second M and the O are redundant.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Does this research contibute something new to information theory? Isn't this just the same logic applied in a "20 Questions" game?