I still seem to be hooked on the topic of risk and reward in MMOs. This article continues along that vein, but instead of the harsh, cold realities of item loss, we are going to think in terms of the spirit of the Olympic Games and talk about the sport of Competitive Dungeoneering.

Betting – In this system, some instances are only accessible to teams willing to pay the ante. Depending on the instance, this ante can be in the form of gold, experience, or interesting items. A low level dungeon might require 50 coins, or a green weapon to enter. A high level instance might require 1000s of coins and an epic piece of equipment. Any items bet cannot be used until the team has completed their mission.

Very simply, if your team completes the mission, they get their bet back plus an appropriate reward. However, if they fail the instance, they lose the bet and their stuff is lost. The definition of failure would vary each instance. A party wipe could mean failure, or the mission might require that a certain player or NPC never die, or the mission might be timed.

One variation is to allow players to up their ante, thus increasing their reward if they win… and possibly the power of the enemies in the instance. This is a pretty direct way to climb the risk vs. reward curve.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is contrived, and requires a lot of meta-gaming on the part of the players… but MMO players ought to be used to meta-gaming, right?

Item World?– One interesting variation steals from console RPGs like the Disgaea series. Instead of betting gold or experience, players put up items to enter dungeons. Groups that succeed in conquering the instance find their items returned to them, but with significant upgrades in their stats and powers.

Competitive Dungeoneering — The next step in this idea requires that we devise a system by which we can score a team’s performance in our dungeon. Missions could be timed, or we could score based on monsters killed, or treasure found. Deaths would likely count against a team’s score and a party wipe could mean the team is disqualified.

Similar to the betting system, teams would enter the dungeon only after putting up a decent amount of cash. Once the team completes the run, their score is calculated and recorded on a leader board. At the end of the week, the best teams split a hefty portion of the bets placed by all the groups that week.

Variant Dungeons– This system lends itself to tons of variations. Instances could be created with the competitive dungeoneering concept in mind. You could have dungeons where teams faced wave after wave of monsters with little time to rest in between. The team is scored based on how long they can last. Some instances could consist of long hallways filled with platforms and obstacles and teams could engage in a timed race to the finish… with monsters thrown in to slow them down.

Last month, I posted a bit about the concept of risk in MMOs and the conclusion I came up with is that most modern themepark MMOs have sanitized their gameplay such that risk is no longer a factor. I feel that risk is an intriguing design element and that without it, our MMOs are less than they could be. In this article, I am going to talk about a traditional MMO death penalty that has been abandoned in most modern games, Losing Your Cool Stuff.

Of course, the most extreme example of this penalty is the Full Loot/Corpse Run — you die and everything you own is left on your corpse. You might have a window where only you can loot your corpse, or if the game is “full loot”, then your corpse is fair game. This is the death penalty of old-school, “hardcore” games like Ultima Online, Everquest and more recently, Vanguard and Darkfall. I understand why people don’t like corpse runs. You play through dozens of quests and instances to get great gear, only to die in the middle of a lava pit and have to sit naked and forlorn, staring at your unreachable corpse as the timer runs down and your precious items vanish. Full loot is even worse because almost every death brings with it the loss of your good stuff — and most players hate losing their stuff.

The Drop Chance System

This is a simple tweak to the full loot idea. When you die, instead of dropping all of your items on your corpse, each item has a small percentage chance that it drops — say between 2 and 5 percent. When an item drops, it will either stay on your corpse, to be possibly looted by players, or it will appear in the inventory of the monster that killed you. Most of the time, players will be able to shrug off death, having lost nothing, or only trivial items. However, every so often, death will mean the loss of a powerful weapon or armor and the player will have to decide whether it is worth the effort to get it back.

One of the problems you see in full-loot games is that items lose a lot of their value. You might own a powerful sword, but because the chance of losing it is so high, you never take it out of the bank. At this point, though the sword might be worth quite a bit of in-game currency, it isn’t in play and thus becomes pointless. If you want a game with lots of important, powerful gear, full-loot probably isn’t the way to go. Darkfall is a good example of this. Gear is important in the sense that it makes a difference in combat, but it is all expendable (and consumable) and so no specific piece of gear is interesting.

By making item loss possible, we add an element of risk. By making item loss rare, we increase the expected return of a player equipping his best gear. If there is only a 2% chance of losing the Greatsword of Doom and it increases your combat abilities by 20%, that is a pretty good bet that most players will be willing to make. We get our element of risk, but still get more gear, and more interesting gear, into the game.

Let’s take a look at some other ramifications and possibilities of this system.

Spicing Up Loot Tables: If you die to a mob, any items lost will be found on the inventory of that creature when you kill it. This gives players a chance to get their gear back, if they are so inclined, but also means that any mob kill has a chance to turn up some unexpected gear dropped by another hapless player. I like the idea of killing a wandering goblin and finding he just killed an unfortunate adventurer to the tune of a couple hundred gold and a nice sword.

Spicing Up the Monsters: Take that one step further and actually give the creature the benefits of any items he takes from players. I would mark these creatures in some way (ideally by putting the armor/weapon model on them) to show players these creatures are enhanced, but carry more loot than usual. You would have to limit this to humanoids, or just accept that this is a little goofy — how would a raging boar wield a sword? Still, imagine coming across a goblin in the wilderness and jumping him, only to find that he is wielding a wand of fire, or going up against a giant ogre boss when you know he just wiped the previous group and snatched a particularly powerful mace… but man do you want that mace!

Unique Items: One possibility I find very intriguing is that this system would allow the inclusion of powerful unique items in the game. These artifacts would be more powerful than similar items of their level, or have unique effects, but would have much larger drop chances. They are worth seeking out and owning, but you know that you won’t keep them for very long. Sooner or later, you will die and the item will pass on to the next owner.

Spicing Up the Economy: Part of the game’s economy could be focused around drop chance. Because the drop chance is low, I think people will be more willing to use (and lose) cooler stuff. However, because the chance to lose your good gear is there, most people will have backup sets. These sets will have to be looted, bought or crafted and I think a viable economy would exist for “second-tier” items. Crafted “second-tier” items would be even more in demand if you made the drop chance for crafted gear lower than that of looted gear.

A possible variation of this system is that drop chances could start low, but then increase as the player died. Certain classes or crafters could have access to enchants or buffs that lowered the drop chance. An economy would certainly spring up around these enchants as people tried to protect their best pieces of equipment.

Tying Risk to Reward: You could make certain areas of the game increase the base drop chance of the items of anyone who dies there. Increasing the drop chance increases the risk, because players who die have a higher chance of losing items. However, the rewards in that reason would be increased, either because the designers put the best stuff there, or just because all the monsters you are facing are likely to be carrying player gear. Dungeons could have the absolute best rewards, but only if you were willing to brave a greatly increased chance of dropping your best items.

So that’s the idea… If I were to be creating an MMO, I would consider a drop chance system as a compromise between a hardcore risk system like full loot and a no risk system like durability loss. Still, there are other ways to inject risk into a traditional themepark game and we will explore another one of those next post. Until then, I hope you have some questions, comments or ideas of your own. I would love to hear them.

I am currently working on a post that talks about ways to create risk in MMOs and how designers might make that risk palatable to an otherwise risk-averse themepark gaming population. In the meantime, Callan S. made a comment I felt was interesting enough to discuss. In response to the idea that Eve Online is a game that incorporates risk correctly, he says:

As far as I’m aware, in terms of risk Eve suffers or fails in that in more dangerous space you have no idea of the risk (you have some idea in poker, for example) since people who will kill you aren’t regulated in any way. Is it thrilling when there was a zero change of being ganked, cause all the local gankers were on bio break?

I think there are a couple of points in this small quote. First, I think core to the idea of risk is that of uncertainty, the idea that you are not sure of what is going to happen beforehand. If you are certain that you will easily defeat any enemies you might meet, or that you will reach your destination without meeting any enemies, then there is no risk. Likewise, if you know you are going to die when you leave your base, there is no risk. The concept of risk implies that you are betting on an unsure outcome.

On the other hand, if you take your character on a spin through your favorite MMO world and are suddenly struck down and then told your character has been perma-killed, that isn’t risk either because it is arbitrary. For our purposes, risk also implies that you know you are betting and you know what you are betting.

Given that explanation, I think Eve works because as you move from highsec space to lowsec space, you know there is an increasing chance that someone will ambush you. When I take my ship out in Eve and make a trade run through lowsec space, I am betting my ship, cargo, implants and skill gain that I can make it through without incident. It does not matter if, on a particular run, “all the local gankers were on bio break” because the point of risk is NOT to ensure that I face challenge, but to present the possibility of danger and then force me to bet accordingly.

Well I guess that raises the question that if you don’t know you couldn’t die, but you felt as if you could and that was exciting, whether it the truth of the situation or the feeling of the situation that matters. Personally I’d go with the truth.

If there is a chance I could be presented with failure and lose something, regardless of whether that situation occurs or not, I would say yes, that is the essence of risk in an MMO. Say you are playing poker and your opponent makes a $1000 bet. You have a good hand, but not an unbeatable one, and this is a sudden, large bet. Is it a risk to call? Sure it is. Once you call and find out that your opponent was bluffing, was it less of a risk? No, because when you made the bet, the outcome of the hand was uncertain.

I think what Callan is talking about here goes back to the difference between risk and challenge. I am deliberately separating the two because I think there is value in doing so. When Callan says, “Personally, I’d go with the truth” he is saying that he wants there to be a real chance of death or failure and that is how we defined challenge. Risk on the other hand, is what you lose because of that failure — your bet. My trip through lowsec space wasn’t challenging at all, but it was still risky…

Alright, enough of this; I didn’t mean to beat the dead horse further into the ground, but that comment made me think and I figured it was worth discussing. Next post, let’s talk about systems that will put some of the risk back into the themepark.

I’ve had these Selentine Keys in my bank for quite a while now and have never seen a Selentine Chest (the lowest level “cool” chest) in which to use them. Recently, I found a nice spot, with an easily accessible chest and nothing more than Dire Zombies guarding it. Dire Zombies can still give me headaches, but if I play smart, I can handle three at a time without too much trouble. So, early one morning, I grabbed three keys and headed to the chest, hoping for my first taste of phat Darkfall loot.

The fighting at the chest location went pretty well. I killed the first wave of zombies and cleared the area as new ones spawned. The danger in a situation like this isn’t the mobs, it is the fact that lots of other players know a chest is out here too and thus you are very likely to be ambushed by a player-killer. Every 6-8 minutes, I would check the chest to see if it had refilled, fight a couple zombies, hide, heal, scan the horizon. About a half-hour of this and I had about 1000 gold in my backpack, an enchanted leather chest piece and two enchanted scale chest pieces.

This is good stuff… not great, but good (I have never owned scale armor, let alone enchanted scale), and the money alone was about 1/3 of my current bank balance. I decided to back off and recall to home, which was the nearby hamlet of Skarnibben. Unfortunately, as I sat there helpless, waiting for the recall spell to complete, a zombie wandered back to my hiding place and zapped me, cancelling the recall. I killed the zombie, but the damage was done. I would either have to wait for recall to become available again, or walk back to the town.

I am impatient, so I start the run back to Skarnibben. About 1/2 way there, clan chat lights up. There are reds at Skar killing the various harvesters there. I come over the hill and in the distance, I can see a blooming ball of fire and some other glows that indicate magic is being tossed around. I could charge in and fight… and most likely die and lose my precious new scale armor pieces. I could charge in and try to get to the bank, but I would likely be killed before getting everything banked. Ugh.

I decided to turn east and head for the nearest NPC town. Hopefully, I could get there without running into anyone. So, I sprint and keep to the mountains, rushing to get back to the safety of a guard tower. About 2/3 of the way back, I clamor down a mountainside and fall a bit, taking some damage. I pull my staff and fire a heal as a reflex, but as I look around, I sure wish I hadn’t, because there, no more than 25 yards from me, are the two gankers who were wiping people in Skar. One is on a drake and the other is off, heading for a nearby chaos chest. I hesitate and start to back away, hoping they hadn’t seen me…

But they heard the heal and I don’t get out of sight quickly enough. I run, but there is no chance and I am bitten to death by the drake. Very disappointing.

Mistakes & Lessons Learned

There was no excuse for my recall being interrupted by a zombie– This was my first mistake. If I am going to “back off an recall to home”, then I should have backed off. I just ducked around a corner and thought I was safe to recall, but I could easily have backed off an additional 50 yards and ensured the completion of the spell. Had I recalled, I would have been involved in the fight at Skarnibben, but I would have had ample time to bank all of the goods I wanted to keep.

Use all the information the game has for you – At some point, I should have known the bad guys were headed out of Skarnibben, because the ClanKills tab went quiet. If the bad guys are killing and re-killing everyone at the bindstone, a steady stream of kill messages will appear on that tab and when that stopped, I should have known that Skarnibben was safe. Had I turned around and walked to Skar, or recalled again, I would have been counting my noob loot at the bank.

Stop rushing every so often — Had I not been in such a hurry to get to town, I might not have sprinted down the hill and I might have been able to see the reds before they saw me. Instead of sprinting down the hillside, perhaps a few moments of crouch walking was in order. Slowing down and being aware of my surroundings would have allowed me to avoid the reds.

When in doubt, be aggressive — Finally, when I saw that I had landed on top of these two player-killers, I should not have hesitated. I was not going to outrun them, and the chance of them not spotting me was small. I played scared and thus had no chance of surviving. Had I been a little more on the ball, I should have charged. One of the reds was off his mount heading for a chaos chest. Had I charged past him, I might have stolen his mount which would have given me a much better chance to escape to the safety of the watchtowers… and would have made for a much better story.

After roaming the world of Agon for a bit and having a lot of fun doing it, I thought it would be a good idea to answer the question: How far can a noob get in a month? So, here is an overview of my Darkfall character after four weeks for play.

Play Time

In terms of video gaming, I never know what to call myself anymore. I think the disturbingly large array of jewel cases and dusty game boxes will attest to the fact that I am not a casual gamer. On the other hand, I don’t fit the hardcore PvP or raider mode either. I play between 2-4 nights a week, 3-4 hours a night.

Activities

I spend a lot of time teamed with one or two people hunting relatively easy spawns — trolls, hags and mercians. I rarely harvest during my prime-time, but on the weekends, or if I am home during the day (rarely), I try to get some semi-afk mining in. I don’t PvP much, as my chances 1v1 are slim. However, I do try to help my clan during city defenses and on the one siege in which they have been involved since I joined. As a rule, I don’t macro skills, or use a bloodwall. I certainly want my skills to increase, but I want to do so by experiencing the game.

Skills and Stats

I have tried to focus on raising my magic skills as quickly as possible. I have had mixed success. At the beginning of your career, your magic is pathetically weak and you can blast a full bar of mana at a goblin and not kill him. This is great for skilling up, but bad for winning the combat. As your skill increases, you get access to better magic, but that magic starts to require reagents. Reagents are pretty costly and are one of the first things taken from your corpse when you are killed, so you never seem to have enough.

Nonetheless, I am pretty happy with where my skills are at this stage in the game. I feel I am making steady progress and starting to turn the corner to where I can be useful in a fight. My main goal is to get Fire Magic up as quickly as possible. Once I got Greater Magic to 25, I took a quick detour into Witchcraft, but decided that Witches’ Brew could wait because I needed to melt someone. Once I got GM 45 or so… my progress seemed to slow to a crawl, mostly because I could not go anywhere with reagents in my backpack without getting killed. Anyways, here are my notable magic skills.

• Lesser Magic: 85 (Mana Missile: 54, Heal Self: 49)
• Greater Magic: 51
• Fire Magic: 25 (Firebolt: 25)
• Witchcraft: 28 (Needles: 34)

I also do a fair bit of melee focused (as it seems almost everyone is) on Greatswords.

• Greatswords 54 (Power Attack 35)
• Rigor 30
• Parry 6
• Gank 1 (As you can see, I’ve never had the chance)

I also gather, but it is not a main focus for me most nights. Most of my gathering is done on the weekends, or on a weekday when I am off work. I then do some semi-afk gathering while dealing with the kiddies, or some chores. I am mostly crafting swords with weaponsmith, and I just bought alchemy to make staffs.

• Mining 70
• Logging 49
• Skinning 45
• Weaponsmith 25
• Alchemy 3

As far as stats go, most of my stats are 25-27 except for Dexterity… which is a disappointing 21 after one month. I assume that archery is the best way to increase Dex because nothing else seems to do so. Unfortunately, my archery has suffered due to my focus on skilling up magic. My hit points also seem a bit slow to move. I have a whopping 212 hit points.

Gear

I still use crap gear most of the time. I wear a mix of studded and banded on most sorties and carry r10 swords and r0 staffs. Not very impressive, I know. I am slowly working up some crafting skills to make better swords and staffs, but my progression has slowed somewhat because I have limited time to gather materials. I am loathe to ask my guild for help because frankly, I am not that useful a guild member at the moment, and it is likely that any items I get will get stolen in a day or two. For the most part, I will continue with whatever I can salvage or create and things will slowly get better.

PvP

My PvP record is a blazing 1 win and 50 losses. Oddly enough, I think I am doing pretty well because I know others who started about the same time I did with double the number of deaths. I am still at the stage where most small-scale PvP encounters end in my demise (and the loss of all my reagents). Still, in my last 1v1, I got my assailant down to about 1/3 of his health before dying and the last duel I was in both of us stopped when we were at 25% hits. I feel that my skill is increasing and I am getting better at surviving in the frantic dance that is 1v1 PvP.

In group PvP I fare a little better. I have fought through one siege and several smaller town defenses. I fare ok in these combats, mostly because there is lots of room to hide and I tend to stay back and either play support, or follow my betters into combat. As I stated earlier, I am hoping that as my Fire Magic increases, my value in these situations will increase.

Overview

After one month, I consider myself reasonably successful for the time I have put into the game. I could stand to practice my sword fighting a little more, both from a character and player skill perspective, because I am still not competitive in a small PvP situation. I am happy with my magic progression though. Even with the cost (and infinite steal-ability) of reagents, I am closing in on the bigger hitting fire AoEs.

As far as PvE, I still find hunting monster spawns fun and have finally reached a point where easy spawns are actually easy for me to solo. I would love to have more time to gather and craft because that would help my overall gear situation… but smacking monsters is way more fun.

My last post about Risk versus Reward started a couple interesting conversations both here and offline. Those conversations brought a couple of interesting points to light.

The main thing I have discovered is that most players and game devs tend to jam the concepts of challenge and risk together and call that “risk”. If an encounter is hard, a player is likely to die and they want to avoid dying and so that constitutes a high degree of risk. I think challenge and risk are two separate concepts that might be coupled, but are certainly not the same. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to define these terms like this:

Challenge = The chance you have to fail at a task or encounter. This could mean dying, party wiping, not meeting your goals or quest requirements depending on the situation.

Risk = The consequences you suffer as a result of failing at a task or encounter. This might be item loss, having to make a corpse run, a loss of experience or the accrual of “debt”.

These two ideas aren’t the same. I could design an encounter in which a boss NPC takes only 10% of the damage dealt to him and two-shots most players and this would be a challenging encounter. However, if there are no consequences for failure, then there is no risk. If you lose, you just get back up and try again, or head off and do something else. Likewise, I could have a creature that was fairly easy to defeat (let’s say 90% of all groups that encounter this creature can beat it with no losses), but if he did manage to kill a group member, that player’s items would be sucked into the void and lost forever. This encounter is very low challenge, but has a pretty terrible risk associated with it.

I think it is interesting to note that there are times when the concepts of challenge and risk are coupled. For instance, in the extreme case of an encounter where you simply cannot die (let’s say you have managed to gain full resistance to the creature’s elemental attacks), then it does not matter what the death penalty in your game is, the chance of failure is zero and so the risk is zero.

Similarly, if we crank the risk in an encounter to zero, we see that the challenge of that encounter approaches zero. I think a good example of this would be Champions Online where some of the boss battles are tough (the boss is a bag of hit points that can two shot many characters), but because the only risk is being sent back to the respawn point, the battle devolves into a “graveyard zerg” and the challenge drops considerably.

Another interesting dynamic is that risk affects our behavior and thus, affects the level of challenge in our encounters. In games with no risk, there is no incentive to hold back any resources that could help you win a fight. So in World of Warcraft, you always bring your best gear to a battle because there is no chance of losing it. If dying in WoW meant a risk of item loss, players would be forced to decide how much they were willing to bet on the success of the mission. Generally, this would mean they would bring gear they were willing to lose — presumably a less valuable set. Consequently, this would make them less powerful and thus increase the challenge of the encounter.

One last thing I noticed is that in my small sample of people with which I discussed this topic, those most averse to the risk of loss almost always mentioned how they would hate to have to grind to get their lost stuff (items, experience) back. I got the impression that for these players, MMOs were not about “doing cool stuff”, but were about “getting cool stuff.”  New items, new powers and unlocking new areas were the main point of the game… in some cases even at the expense of enjoying the game play. A couple of my CoX buddies are like this. They don’t mind if a particular mission is boring; they will farm it as long as it is easy xp or drops.

In any case, I am working on a post about adding risk back into the themepark equation and I thought I would post to clear up confusion with the two terms. Happy Hunting!

If you are an MMO player and bother to follow MMOs enough, then you likely have heard the term “Risk versus Reward” thrown around. For those of you who thought you were going to the home page of an investment firm or Hasbro, Risk versus Reward is a term MMO developers use to describe the concept that as you deal with more dangerous situations in the game (usually that means fighting more and bigger monsters), you should be rewarded with better stuff — more money and cooler more powerful items.

So, if I kill a lone level 1 goblin, I might find he carries 3 gold and a piece of lightly used chewing gum. If however, I manage to down a level 900 Swack Iron Dragon, I might be the new owner of a brand new piece of +10 Holy Avenger Chewing Gum of Slaying and seven gazillion gold pieces. It sounds straightforward and every game has some aspect of Risk v. Reward inherent in its design.

Yet somehow, it seems that the vast majority of MMOs get it wrong.

The inspiration for this post was a blurb in my last post in which I fawned over Darkfall’s PvE. I found myself asking why my high level WoW warlock and my max level CoX characters sat idle and why I can’t even be bothered to put in the night or two it would take to max out my Champions Online character. Certainly, all of these characters are on the top end of that risk/reward curve and in theory, should be very exciting to play — offering top tier payoffs for my exploits. So why are all of these characters trumped by my three-week old Darkfall noob who can barely take on two trolls at once and for whom a PvP encounter means almost certain ganking?

Some of it is novelty, of course. A new game is new and shiny and the old ones… not so much. I get that and admit that some of my excitement about Darkfall comes from its newness. However, by that respect, Champions Online is a relatively new game as well. It has a lot of shiny parts that I have not yet experienced and still, the excitement is not there — even with the promise of epic, superpowered battles and high-end gear.

Where do these games, and in fact, most other themepark games, go wrong?

One of the big problems is that most themepark games are linear in their progression. You start with a level 1 character in Noob Village, do the obligatory starter/tutorial quests which will take you to level 6 by doing such scintillating tasks such as “Open Your Backpack”, “Bring a Pie to the Weapon Vendor”, and finally “Kill 10 Randy Badgers”. Killing the badgers is the big risk, which isn’t really a risk because by design, the badgers are easy to kill at your level.

Once you hit level 6, you get a quest that takes you to a new area, where you are asked to kill 10 Feral Wolves. Now the wolves are tougher… more risk right? Well, not really. See, like the badgers you fought in Noob Village, these wolves are designed for you to kill easily at your new level. The wolves have powered up, but so have you and so while the wolves are objectively tougher, relative to your new power level, they are the same as the badgers. Risk is relative.

This trend continues as you progress to max level. Each new area you enter brings you new “challenges”, but each challenge is specifically designed for characters of your power level. What this means is that while you do fight different creatures as you progress, their level of difficulty stays the same. You are essentially funneled by the game designers into encounters with low-risk.

The situation gets even worse when you realize that as you progress through the game, the rewards you obtain are carefully measured to be appropriate for a character of your level. Sure you are getting more experience per kill, but the experience you need to level has increased as well. You are getting more gold, but the costs to upkeep your gear, buys skills and crafting materials has gone up as well. You are getting cooler gear, but it is the same gear that all the other level 10 characters have — having it is no big deal, but not having it puts you behind your peers. Rewards are relative.

Ok, but what if you decide to game the system and instead of doing quests designed for your level, you do quests that are a few levels above yours? If you are a level 10 character and manage to complete a level 15 quest, it is very likely that your character exposed himself to a fair bit of risk and would expect a high reward. You might certainly get such a reward in the form of a level 15 item. This is exciting until you realize the item has a hard level requirement and so you can’t use it.

Of course, you can wait for your level 15 item, but then you are wasting time and inventory slots that you should be using to acquire items you could actually use. And by the time you reach level 15 and are able to use your spiffy item, it isn’t that great anymore relative to the other items you have access to and you are powerful enough to have gotten it easily. You’ve wasted time and inventory slots on an item that is, by the time you can use it, the same as everyone else’s — the return on your extra risk investment is negative.

Now this isn’t the whole story. Many themepark games have implemented mechanics that deal with some of the problems listed above. I would argue that instances such as WoW’s dungeons help counter the linearity of the quest lines as they offer an optional “high-risk” way to get some of the best rewards in the game. You don’t have to do them, but if you do, you will get cool stuff. The Champions Online developers understood that people were routinely doing quests above their level and so they removed the level requirements on quest rewards to encourage the practice. City of Heroes has difficulty sliders on its instanced missions with better experience and influence for taking on the higher levels.

These are all good ideas and they help the situation a little bit. Still, the whole concept of Risk versus Reward is predicated on the idea that the player is risking something in the hopes of gaining something more in return. Ultimately, this is the biggest flaw in today’s themepark MMOs: Nothing is ever risked!

When you die in WoW, you take a hit to the durability of your gear, but even if a piece of gear breaks it is easily repaired with some gold. CoX gives you experience debt when you die, but the amount of that debt has been reduced over time to the point where you can often be out of debt by just letting your teammates finish off the spawn that killed you. The only penalty for dying in Champions is having to fly back to the battle. So… all this talk about risk and reward and we end up realizing the sad fact that The Risk Is A Lie. (And don’t even ask me about the cake.)

But if the risk is a lie, then the reward is a lie as well, isn’t it? If we are playing a linear game with no penalty for failure and no setbacks, aren’t we just playing a slightly more interactive version of ProgressQuest? Yeah, I know… 1300 words later and you ended up with a curmudgeon post… “blah, blah, blah, kids nowadays and their dumbed-down MMOs. When I played, pre-Trammel Asheron’s Call before the NGE…”

That’s not exactly where I am going with this. See, I like many of the MMOs in question. I enjoy WoW. I played CoX for years and Champs Online, while sporting some ugly flaws, is still a fun game. But I do think we need to consider the fact that something is lost when game designers completely remove risk from the equation.

Consider the game of poker. Theoretically, playing a friendly game with your kids “just for chips”, penny poker with your family, dollar poker with your buddies and no-limit poker at a casino are all the same. The value of the hands are the same, the mechanics of the game are the same… and yet, the games are vastly different. Bluffing in penny poker is often silly, because the cost to call you is trivial. I’ll glady pay 50 cents to watch you lay down a king-high against my pair of threes. Now, let’s make the same call when the bet is $1000, or $10000. *gulp*

Now I have something to lose and whether I call or not is going to depend on the game situation, how much I stand to win (if I win), what I know about you, the strength of my hand, what I know about the possible strength of your hand, and how you’ve bet previously. Turns out, poker has just a tiny bit to do with mechanics and a whole heck of a lot to do with betting and if you aren’t playing with risk, then you are essentially playing a different game, and in fact, an inferior game. (Or at least a much less complex game.)

Do MMOs have a lot to do with betting? I think Darkfall does. Every time I leave my bank, I am making a bet as to the success or failure of my mission. If I bring a lot of magical reagents, or high rank equipment with me, I can now take on bigger challenges and thus, make my trip more lucrative. However, I am taking the risk that if I die, I will lose the costly materials. WoW, CoX and CO don’t have this element of risk and reward.

Imagine a game mechanically identical to World of Warcraft in every way except that the death penalty included the real risk of item loss. Suddenly, the game dynamics change. Who you party with matters… especially if they can loot your corpse. How you get to a quest location is now important because you won’t want to chance running through high-level spawns, or to places where you could be ganked by the enemy. Choosing what equipment to wear into a dungeon would invole trying to be as effective as possible while still mitigating the risk of death. Dungeon tactics would have to be more meticulous and better executed as a party wipe could truly be disastrous. Rare items would indeed be rare because they would only be attained by people who were willing to make a that high-stakes bet.

Would that be a better game? Well, I am pretty sure I am on the wrong side of history here, but I am going to say that yes, World of DeathpenaltyCraft would be a better game. But my guess is that it would be a less popular game. Humans are risk-averse and a lot more people play penny poker than high-stakes poker (myself included). Appealing to a mass-market (a good thing) means taking the risk out of the game (a bad thing).

To me, the next interesting question is this: Is there a way to add elements of risk into themepark games without ruining their mass appeal? Free-for-all PvP with full loot is probably not the way to go, but are there other things we can do to add that exciting element of risk back into our designs? I’ll tackle that in a post or two. For now, happy hunting!

I am about 2 weeks into Darkfall and even though my skills are crap, my gear is crap and I have barely explored further than the newbie areas, I have to say it is a lot of fun. I am actually quite surprised as to how fun a game it is. Remember, at launch this game produced enough bile that every subscription came with a pack of antiacids. Folks on this very site dismissed the game after wrestling with its arcane user interface. Every forum (Darkfall’s included) was filled with wailing over how bad this game was. It scored a 2/10 in an early review… and then that review was hotly argued… by the developers and the review site’s editors nonetheless.

It was the biggest trainwreck since Age of Conan — The Trainwreck of All Trainwrecks — which is a cornucopia for hobbyist internet vultures such as myself, but did not bode well for the health of the game. And yet, here we are nearly a year after launch and through several patches and expansions, Darkfall is still around and it has become a good game.

Say it with me, “Darkfall is a good game.”

I am having a great time. The two friends I sort of dragged along with me are having a great time. Talking to a few vets, I find that they are having a great time. The Darkfall forums are generally positive and for every “I quit” post (can’t have a game forum without them) there is one “I am thinking of coming back” post. Membership in NEW (a guild that caters to easing newbies into the otherwise harsh game) is trending up over the last few weeks. Development is continuing with more features being added, more bugs being fixed and more exploits being closed. It seems the Internet’s Most Maligned Game (this week) has hit a stride.

One thing that I think has helped attract and keep new players, and currently the best part of Darkfall for me, has been the game’s PvE. That is likely to surprise people who’ve never played and is certain to annoy the game’s vets who are gnashing their teeth, screaming “Carebear!” and queuing up their Gank skill as we speak. But it’s true. Darkfall has been touted as the PvPer’s paradise — a hardcore, free-for-all, full loot gankfest where player skill trumps gear and giant 100 v. 100 sieges are commonplace. It may actually be all of that, but it is also a game with some of the most engaging and exciting PvE I’ve seen in a long while.

Saying that PvE is the best part of Darkfall is a bit of a stretch. As a new player, there are huge aspects of the game I haven’t seen. I am sure that most veterans of Agon would claim that PvP of one stripe or another is Darkfall’s forte. For me, PvP mostly consists of getting smacked down by meth-amphetamine enhanced circle-strafers with stats macroed well into the thousands all wearing depleted uranium armor and wielding two handed plasma cannons… at least that’s what I’ll say when I cry on the forums.

Seriously though, Darkfall is a game with a pretty steep character progression curve. Stats matter, skills matter and though it matters less than in most games, gear does still matter. As a new player, I am seriously lacking all of those things and so it will take quite a bit of time to close that gap. Closing that gap for most means grinding PvE and fortunately, Darkfall’s PvE is a pleasant surprise.

Great Environments — Darkfall’s world of Agon is filled with ancient ruins, caves, villages, goblin huts, statues, bandit forts and abandoned keeps. The environments look good, are well-designed and are fun to explore. It has been a long time since I have experienced an MMO with more “Let’s check that out!” moments as Darkfall has. And there is a good reason to check out these sites. Many of them hold magician’s boxes, chests and crates of food and resources. Others have lucrative monster spawns. Of course, some sites have nothing, or spawn monsters that will rip the unwary newbie in two. Not knowing is a lot of the fun.

Terrain Matters– The first cool moment I had playing Darkfall was when I realized that hiding behind a boulder allowed me to draw a lone goblin into striking distance, and that a tree would allow me to kill one goblin while protecting me from an other’s spells. All games have trees, boulders, hills and shrubs, but Darkfall is the first game where they matter… a lot. Having the high ground is useful in melee and archery, but being up against a wall exposes you to splash damage from spells. Also, many mobs in DF have ranged attacks and will start shooting as soon as they spot you… none of this pansy 25 ft. aggro radius. Stealth in Darkfall means crouching in shrubs, or behind rocks and trees and how you approach a battle has a lot to do with winning it.

Skill Matters — Two times in my life have I been sleeping while doing something that theoretically requires human intervention. The first time I was a student working the night-shift in a motel and I had an early morning appointment in a nearby city. About half way through the drive, I realized I wasn’t going to make it and so I turned around to head back home. Half an hour later, I woke with a start at a red light about a mile from my house, seemingly having driven 25 miles while sleeping.

The second time, I was playing City of Heroes. I hear I did pretty well actually, firing off buffs, holds and attacks without missing a beat. I guess controllers are easy mode after all!

That’s not to say that tab-and-click MMOs take no skill. They do, but much of that skill comes from knowing the game mechanics, knowing your build and your combat options and constructing proper skill chains to react to various in-game events. Once you perfect your build, a lot of the minute-to-minute gameplay is rote. Start fight, press 1, then 2, then 3, then 2 again, then 5, then 1… spawn is dead. Move to next spawn, rinse and repeat.

Darkfall’s FPS gameplay keeps me engaged, even when fighting spawn after spawn of mobs. You have to aim. You have to dodge. You have to keep an eye out for new mobs and enemy players looking to capitalize on you making a mistake. Falling asleep during Darkfall would be a little like dozing off playing Modern Warfare…

Decent AI– Though no computer game has great AI, the mobs in Darkfall do a good job of making combat interesting. I have seen DF mobs lure me into their friends, circle strafe me, flank me, find their way up two flights of stairs to ambush me while resting in a supposedly safe place and pelt me with arrows from an unreachable position on a nearby cliff. Mobs are difficult right from your first quest to kill four goblins. Ask 100 DF vets and I bet 99 of them have a story about underestimating a mob and ending up dead.

Constant Reinforcement– The skill system in Darkfall is a lot like those you find in Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion in the sense that your skills increase as you use them. So, as you are slogging through goblins, you are rewarded with a steady stream of messages about how your sword skill is increasing, or your defense skill has improved. As you craft and gather, you are increasing your skills, but also your stats which will eventually make you a combat machine. Everything you do in the game improves your character.

Risk v. Reward– A lot of game developers talk about risk versus reward and very few of them get the equation correct. The main reason for this is that there really is never any risk in a typical MMO. If you die in WoW, you have to repair your gear at the cost of some gold, or possibly sit a few minutes as your rez sickness wears off. In City of Heroes, you accrue some debt which slows your rate of xp gain a little. It used to sting, but over the years, the devs have reduced the debt so much that death effectively has no penalty. In Champions Online… there is no death penalty to the point where “graveyard zerging” (alternating deaths and making sure at least one character in a battle survives long enough to allow the others to return, thus you heal to full while the enemy is slowly worn down) is the main strategy to beat a few of the bosses.

Darkfall’s risk comes from the fact that combat is inherently dangerous for much of the game. There are no levels and no “conning” in the game, so you only know how hard something is going to be by hitting it and getting hit by it. Of course, at some point, you learn what you can handle. Even so, most mob spawns contain mutiple mobs, that will work together to kill you and respawn fairly quickly. It is easy to get in over your head if you aren’t careful. And if you aren’t careful, you can end up winning a fight, only to end up with a quarter of your health and out of stamina and at that point, you are a prime target for a PvPer looking for an easy score.

At best, death means running back to your unmolested corpse and having to fight your way back to reclaim your gear. At worst, you lose everything you brought with you and everything you gained this trip. Every time you grab gear out of the bank, you are taking a risk.

On the other hand, by adding the risk into the game, the developers have made the rewards that much sweeter. Every time I find a chest and get a free infusion of cash, I am elated… and paranoid. A good hunting or mining trip where I make it back home to bank a pack full of cash and goods makes me happier than looting yet another blue item off yet another boss mob who happened to be sitting around waiting for me to kill him and even if I managed to die in the battle, I could just return in five minutes to try again. And spotting that player corpse on the horizon when no one’s around is quite a rush. Who knows what you might find? Or could that player be storming back to retrieve his stuff? Could it be a trap?

Welcome to Darkfall.

Even though I have been put off by MMOs recently, I am still plugging away at Champions Online every so often and so I figured I would post another build I am currently enjoying. Unluminous Man is a “copy” of one of my favorite City of Heroes characters. In CoH, Unluminous is a powerful Dark/Dark/Dark Defender with a ton of dark, cold, slimy, tenticular tools with which to defeat evil doers. (By the way, if tenticular is a word, be very afraid.)  Since Cryptic saw fit to put a darkness set into CO, I figured it would be an interesting experiment to see how the same character concept worked out in the new game.

Unluminous Man is something of an experimental build. Most of my other builds have focused on having tons of layered defense and/or killing enemies quickly. For Unluminous, I wanted to see if I could create a character who could heal and/or drain himself out of trouble. This means drains, heals and yes, Regeneration. I have gotten this character to level 21 and so far, it is working fairly well, even though I am missing some important powers.

Powers

Shadow Bolt (Rank 1) — Nothing more than your simple energy builder here. There is a chance to cause fear, which gives a small overall reduction to incoming damage, but I have not noticed it much.

Shadow Embrace (Rank 2)– I find the darkness Shadow Blast to be a slow, lackluster power. So, I respecced out of it and went straight for the cone AoE Shadow Embrace. This power has a good area of effect and ticks damage fairly quickly. It isn’t the greatest damage power, but it cuts henchmen down in large numbers easily. It is a little clunky to use against master villains and higher because of its energy cost.

Also, this power has a great visual effect, with writhing black tentacles eminating from the character’s hands. My big disappointment is the fact that you cannot change the emanation point to the character’s head. I think the look of this black-clad figure with tentacles snaking out from under his hood would be the BEST. POWER. EVAR.

Regeneration (Rank 2)  — By far, the best passive defense for low-level characters is Regeneration. On Unluminous, the goal is stacking heals of various types as the primary means of defense and regen is one of the best. So, though I generally avoid Regeneration in my builds, Unluminous has it.

Lifedrain (Rank 2)  — Another mainstay of the character, Lifedrain allows me to heal while doing damage. Coupled with Regeneration, I can heal very quickly when the battle goes sour.

Crippling Coils (Rank 1)  — Darkness has a hold that takes a 2 second charge and up to 100 energy. Crippling Coils has no charge and costs 30 energy. Now, there are a few advantages to the darkness hold, but in practice I have found these advantages to be outweighed by the charge time and energy cost. Crippling Coils is a nice, quick-firing hold that takes one target out of the combat for several seconds — enough time to finish off someone else, or to charge a more lasting attack.

Ebon Void (Rank 1) – The darkness block enhancement is… ok. It has a standard damage reduction and a chance to reflect some damage back at the attacker. In practice, this damage is negligible on all but the biggest attacks; no one is going to kill themselves on your shield. There are better shields out there, but this one is good enough.

Force Eruption (Rank 1 & Gravitational Polarity)  — This power acts as a momentary “Get Out of Jail Free” card when I am overwhelmed. It knocks everyone down, allowing me to set up a Shadow Embrace, or Lifedrain. The Gravitational Polarity advantage is a damage buff, and has become standard on many of my characters.

Illumination (Rank 1) – This is an experimental power purchase from the new Celestial power set. It is a debuff you place on a foe that causes anyone attacking the target to get a small heal-over-time effect — another stacked heal for my build.

Stats

My super-stats are Endurance and Presence. Endurance gives me the energy I need to run full maintains of Lifedrain and Shadow Embrace. I am trying Presence as a  super-stat to give me big bonuses on my heals… hopefully. Currently, Lifedrain is the only power that benefits from the super Presence. The Illumination buff might benefit, but it is pretty small and so the effect is hard to see. I need to pick up some other heals to make the Presence pick worthwhile.

Tactics

Pretty simple actually — fly in, zap all the henchmen with Shadow Embrace. Any remaining henchmen and villains (or higher) can then be dealt with using another Shadow Embrace, or if I am in need of health, a combination of Illumination and Lifedrain.

If things go bad, I can use the Force Eruption to knock people down for a second while I drain some life, or I can turtle up with Ebon Void and hope that Regeneration can save me.

Thoughts

This is an experimental build and I am not yet sure how well it has worked out. Regeneration is very good at low levels and almost any situation where your health gets low can be handled with block turtling. I hate block turtling and so my goal is to build up enough layered healing so that I can stand in the middle of a pile of enemies and heal through their damage, blocking only the charged shots of the bosses. In this respect, Regeneration is good for probably 80% of the fights in the game. In the fights where the incoming damage is too heavy for Regen, I have Lifedrain which heals for 90-100 points each tick.

I took Illumination on a whim and unfortunately, it underperforms, providing a meager heal over time effect after you hit the affected target several times. The heal amount is in the low teens every couple of seconds and this just isn’t enough to notice under most conditions. If I could, I would drop this power for Bionic Shielding which has gotten a significant boost in the latest patch by having its recharge time cut in half.

I could still use one or two more stacked healing powers and I am wondering how Ego Sprites (with Slave Mentality) and Mindful Reinforcement would perform with a Presence of over 100. Alternately, I could just take a maintained healing power, but I like the idea of fire and forget heals that allow me to recover while fighting and so I will take a traditional heal only as a last resort.

Damage is another issue. The tentacles are adequate for most fights, but take a little too long to kill hard targets. Unluminous could use a big hitter. Still, the goal of this build isn’t powerful attacks, but having the capability of outlasting and outhealing opponents. I will have to see how the next 10 or so levels play out to determine if this is a viable strategy or not.

So let’s get this out of the way first thing: I promised screenshots, but can’t deliver. I obviously screwed something up with the configuration of my screenshot program and it is no longer behaving. Obviously, I will have to take some time out to fix that problem before getting too far along because I would really like to accompany some of these stories with a picture or two.

Last night was my second night with Vedis, trolling about the starter human lands. This time, my friend Steve, who decided to resub his account to team up with me, joined me and provided me with some armor he crafted. Add to that a quest reward or two and I am the owner of a sparkling new set of chain mail and a wicked looking rank 10 glaive. Time to stick me some goblins!!

And there in fact, were a lot of goblins killed last night… and some fish caught and cooked… and a package delivered. I am taking the advice of many Darkfall forum-goers and getting my basic quests done before heading out into the world, and it seems to be working for me. However, you’ve already heard about my adventures with goblins and I can’t stand to fish in real life, so I can’t imagine someone telling you about their fake fishing in an action game makes for a good read.

So instead, let’s talk about killing folks… well that and getting killed by folks.

My encounter occurred before my friend joined me. Having mastered goblins for the most part, I was hunting in the thick of a goblin spawn. Scouts and fighters were falling to my spells and blade (the spiffy 2-h sword I bought). Shamans were still rough, but I could take them. As I was finishing my latest kill, I noticed another player up on the nearby hill, fighting his own beasties. I recognized the name — on one of my runs to/from the town, I saw this guy die in combat to another player. I was wary, but figured that this guy was far enough away, injured and fighting his own goblins, so he was likely not a threat.

Yes, in retrospect, I know how dumb that sounds.

In the meantime, my goblin hunting was going well, but I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I had gotten surrounded by a fighter and a scout and though I killed them easily enough, I was down some hit points and some stamina. By itself, this was nothing to worry about, but I thought I probably ought to check on my nearby PvPer. Before I could spot him, there was a flash and damage. A shaman had spotted me, zapped me once and was casting again. I rushed him and started battling, dancing back and forth in an attempt to dodge his spells. I got the combat under control, but realized that I was horribly exposed, with only a fraction of my hit points.

My would-be PKer did not disappoint me. He charged down the hillside and started swiping at me. He was injured (though less so than I was) and had no equipment but his sword. I was not going to let this guy take me down. I took a swing and then moved past him, quickly switched to my staff and fired off a heal. Then it was back to the blade. A few hurried swings later and my assailant was down. Unfortunately, that left me with a handful of health and a shaman who was more than happy to finish me off. I tried to get another heal off and run, but it was no use. I killed my attacker, but he ultimately “killed” me as well.

Which left me in a rough position. My foe had almost nothing on him, but I had a weapon, some armor, a staff, and lots and lots of crappy goblin loot. Both of us died, but he died just a tiny bit ahead of me. If he were to respawn first, he could run back to the site of the battle and loot my corpse, “winning” even though he had lost the fight. I banged on my space bar thinking, “Why won’t I freakin’ DIE ALREADY?!?”  Finally, I respawned and instead of heading to the bank to get gear, I equipped my newbie staff and started immediately to the goblin spawn, zapping my self heal as I ran.

Fortunately, when I made it to the site of the carnage, my tombstone was still there and there were no goblins in sight. I quickly looted my corpse, rushing to drag everything into my pack before anyone else arrived on the scene. Then, without bothering to search for my assailant’s body, I turned back to town. There he was, no more than 100 yards away. He obviously had come to the same conclusion that I did and had charged straight back from town. For a moment, I thought he might engage me in battle again, but he didn’t… his hit points were only about 1/3 recovered whereas my spamming of self heal had given me close to 3/4 of my health back. He exercised the better part of valor and steered well clear of me as I headed back to town.

As I passed him and gave him a “Nice fight” in chat… the “because I pwnd you, Jackass” was implied