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October 2001
Fighting
Player Burnout in Massively Multiplayer Games
by Damion Schubert
When creating a
roleplaying game, most design teams try to aim towards
providing 40 hours of gameplay. More expansive visions,
such as Ultima Ascension or Baldur’s Gate,
easily surpass that, offering 80, 120 or even 200 hours
of gameplay, depending on who you ask. The costs of
providing this additional content are substantial – both
games cost millions of dollars and had schedules that
surpassed two years – and in the end, all but the most
hardcore of fan had a hard time completing every quest
and exploring every area in these two games.
However, in the arena
of Massively Multiplayer Games, 200 hours can be one-tenth
of the time that a player spends online. Indeed,
there have been numerous reports of players who surpass
the 200 mark in a month – every month. And as a result,
MMP designers feel compelled to extend the playability
of the game well beyond what is healthy for either the
game – or the player.
The exponential curve
of death
The designer’s first
impulse is to create long term play with extreme
exponential character progression – one where it gets
harder to advance as the game progresses. This is
nothing new to gaming, but we MMP designers often take
this to an absurd level, sometimes going so far as to
double the number of experience points needed to level
for each level. Given that the actual work that a player
has to do to gain experience haven’t changed much, this
can get real old real fast.
Typically, when
designing the curve, designers say something like "It’s
so steep that I guarantee it will take 6 months to reach
level 100!" Also typically, this is often initially
compounded by extreme penalties for failure, such as
steep death penalties that can undo hours or even days
of work.
The problem then, of
course, is that your game starts to feel a lot more like
work than fun. The results of this are stark:
>
Players come to resent your game and your staff.
The tedium of doing
the same action over and over again eventually wears on
the players. It doesn’t matter how fun that particular
activity is either – once you’ve done it 8 hours a day
for a week to get to your next milestone, it’s just not
that thrilling anymore.
>
Hardcore gamers devour your game faster – and demand
more. To your
hardcore gamers, the whole concept of needing 6 months
to get to your highest level is a joke – they figured
out how to get there in 3 months with their first
character, and can now do it with 1 with their new
characters.
>
Casual gamers feel they cannot compete.
Seeing another player display remarkable power can
actually inspire you to try to reach that plateau
yourself – unless of course you realize that it would
take you 6 months to get halfway there. At that point,
casual gamers and weekend warriors decide whether or not
it’s worth it to even try.
>
Your game narrows.
Because it takes so much
time and effort in order to make a tiny gain, it begins
to feel as if every moment of your life where you are
not doing that activity is wasted time. As a result,
other features of your game fall away. These features
typically offer no reward or that aren’t very efficient
ways of reaching that reward. The best example is when
players say that they "can’t roleplay" in your gamespace.
You can roleplay anywhere, even in a parking lot with a
broken broom handle. What players are saying is that
roleplaying takes too much time away from the daily
grind, which they feel compelled to do every single
moment online.
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Bandwidth costs go through the roof.
Finally, the reason your bosses will care. Bandwidth is
one of the largest costs of running an online game. If
your gameplay is encouraging players to log on for eight
hours at a time, you are reducing the amount of money
you can spend on other things, including additional
content, better support, or even development on other
games.
The end result of this
is player fatigue, a situation where the player
is sick to death of the game, but unwilling to leave.
And why shouldn’t they be sick of the game? After all,
they’ve played the game five to ten times as much as we
would expect anyone to enjoy a single-player game.
However, the connections they have to their friends, and
the blood, sweat and tears they’ve devoted to building
their character, at that point prevent them from
leaving. Yes, you then have a whole bunch of paying
subscribers, but are they happy? Are they having fun? Or
have they become poisonous enemies of the state?
More Content?
When one thinks about
how to expand the life of the game, the first thought on
a designer’s mind might be to identify ways to give the
player more content for relatively little dollar.
The addition of more
content (dungeons, quests, etc) at runtime and/or the
running of periodic in-game events is one commonly cited
strategy for keeping players involved. While these are
considered expected by the player base, and can have
many other benefits inside of the game space, additional
content and quests often don’t help the problem. First
off, players can devour in an hour content that takes a
designer a month to create. There is simply no way to
keep up. Secondly, content invariably has to be aimed at
one portion of the player base. An example is creating a
dungeon that only high-level players can enter. Putting
in content like this can really exacerbate feelings of
frustrations and fatigue that other players (in this
case, low level players) might be having.
Random content
generation is one interesting arena that has not been
explored much, although the challenges in adding new
content without oversight has some interesting
ramifications for a persistent state world. However, one
can make a good argument that the random content (both
the magic weapons as well as the dungeon layouts) has
contributed mightily to the success of Diablo.
And of course the final
course to consider is the possibility of allowing
players to create and add content to the world. However,
this has a number of challenges regarding quality
control, hardware costs and exploit-proofing that
implementation of this in a full-scale MMP is unlikely
in the near future.
Play Less, Please
When examined under
these circumstances, one wonders if it is worthwhile to
examine the problem from another angle. It becomes clear
that the goal of designers may well be to design a game
that hardcore players feel compelled to play less
– admittedly a stance that most designers are unprepared
to take.
Ultima Online
was the first major MMP to recognize that and to
experiment with changing the paradigm of player
advancement dramatically. In Ultima Online, a
player advances significantly faster during the first
hour after he logs on. The results were starkly
positive: players would still log in daily, but they
would spend only an hour advancing their character.
During that time, they were guaranteed to see meaningful
advancement of their character, and therefore were
ensured a taste of success. After they had done their
daily advancement, players would either log off, feeling
good about their success, or they would engage in the
more fun and less work-like aspects of the game’s
design: roleplaying, socializing, and exploring the
world, for example. Both of these possible outcomes are
better than the days of the endless treadmill.
This is not to say that
UO’s implementation of power hour didn’t have
problems. Most notably:
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It was introduced late.
Since power hour was
introduced well after the launch of the game, players
who had gotten their characters up in levels ‘the hard
way’ felt that power hour had made their hard work
suddenly meaningless. Most of the player criticism of
power hour centered on this point.
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It discouraged party adventuring.
The clock for power hour
kicks off the moment you enter the game. Given that it
can take a significant amount of time to get to your
friends to join a party, and get that adventure rolling,
most players would choose to adventure alone for power
hour to maximize benefits.
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It was unrealistic.
Fans of realism can be
starkly offended that the game rules can change so
arbitrarily for no apparent good reason, but the
designer has to do ultimately what is best for the
health of the game. At any rate, any good designer
should realize that game fiction is the most flexible
tool in the designer's toolbox, and should use the
backstory when possible to describe and rationalize the
limitations of the game.
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It reduced player attachment to their characters.
Because players had
spent less time developing their characters, those
characters theoretically would be less powerful
‘anchors’, keeping the player in the game. One could
argue, however, that casual players might have more
attachment to their characters, as they could get them
up to a higher level.
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The parameters aren’t quite right.
Some have argued that
power hour still creates a gulf, only now between the
player who can play daily, and the weekend warrior.
Others have argued that players can push their stats up
too high during power hour, making it too easy to create
a new character. Both are certainly arguable, and both
points are also certainly tunable in a new system with
the same principles.
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It only affected stat advancement.
Power hour did not affect gold gain, and as a result,
power gamers would switch to this as a goal to endlessly
acquire. However, some designers have actually argued
that that is optimal, as you have then given casual
gamers goals they can meet, while still providing
hardcore gamers with a separate track that they could
run on.
Despite these
negatives, power hour was perceived to be a strong
success among the team that was supporting Ultima
Online, as it was extremely effective in empowering
casual players and reducing the overall tedium of the
game. This was despite a huge amount of skepticism about
the feature among many designers at Origin (myself
included) before the feature was actually implemented.
However, the lesson
from power hour is simple: if there is a particular play
pattern that you feel is ideal for your game, then don’t
just hope players don’t act that way – enforce the
behavior in code. If you don’t want players to advance
too quickly, cap them. If you don’t want players to
spend all day online macroing, then limit the
effectiveness of such tactics. If you feel it’s
important to have control of these aspects of the game,
then take control of them.
Conclusion
When players perform
any game function for a significant length of time, the
game ceases to be fun. The addictive nature of these
online games is strong enough without forcing endless
hours on the treadmill on the player. Quite the
opposite, if you can reduce the number of hours that a
player spends online, and increase the number of those
hours that a player can spend having fun, socializing,
roleplaying and exploring, then the good feelings that
your player base will have towards your game and your
service will increase dramatically.
Damion
Schubert is the former lead designer of Meridian 59 and
Ultima Online 2. He is currently the Creative Director
at Ninjaneering, and can be reached at
damion@ninjaneering.com.
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