Vague300 We Wont Speak Like This Again 1 Hour

I'm already worried about Crowfall. Not because of personal experiences, listen y'all; I oasis't yet played it or annihilation, and all I have to go by are Andrew's anecdotal experiences in the game. Just those anecdotal experiences reminded me of a thing that happens an atrocious lot with new MMOs, and that's when the designers kickoff by developing around a sure critical mass of players materializing in the game who all happily desire to perform the roles that need performing within the game'southward overarching economy.

Not that this is unique to Crowfall, exactly, or whatsoever MMO. Merely in that location'southward a certain problem of assuming certain playerbases that persistently shows up in a lot of new MMOs. You see it any time a game boasts about having, say, 100v100 PvP modes, or 40-player raids, or… you know, a lot of size-based things. And then today we should talk nigh this and what I like to telephone call the janitor trouble. They're all continued.

Whatever time I come across a game boasting near the size of the PvP matches it can support, my center immediately gets a lilliputian twitch.

Size is a metric that gets used a lot for these things. It's impressive to say that, say, your game is capable of fielding 200 players in the same area at whatsoever given time. Bold that your game tin really do that and manage things then that information technology doesn't get a laggy nightmare, hey, great work! You did something that I have absolutely no doubt was technically very hard to practise.

Quick question, though – what happens when only xxx people bear witness up? Because that's going to happen sometimes. Does that mode only not happen? Is there no manner to scale information technology upwardly or downwardly? If and so, people are going to stop trying to participate in that mode pretty rapidly. That, in turn, makes information technology less likely that people will evidence up for it once again. Pretty before long you're looking at a game that was designed around a 200-person match no 1 ever really gets to play.

Or a game that's shut downwards entirely because you put all of your eggs in that massive player count on the same battlefield. And that'due south not an platonic situation for anyone considering clearly some technical skill went into the game in the commencement place. And "fewer games" is a bad situation, total stop.

Every MMO has to deal with some degree of population imbalance. In some games, this is an inconvenient thing and a notable problem, but not devastating. While you're definitely going to have a harder fourth dimension finding progression raid groups correct now in Earth of Warcraft as an Alliance player rather than a Horde player, the game doesn't need that to be equal. It's not a requirement for everyone.

But sometimes, it becomes a problem. That'south where we run into the janitor trouble, which is simply understood by a genre exercise: In a superhero universe, there are far more than janitors than superheroes.

We know that intellectually, of course. Bold the story takes identify in something resembling the real earth, most of the time y'all need more of the former than the latter. But the trouble is that if you give people the choice, far more of them are going to pick "superhero" over "janitor." And this is also pretty understandable. Fighting off hordes of androids looks way cooler than refilling newspaper towels in the 2nd floor bathroom.

Now, what happens when you get to pick what you want to be only you notwithstanding accept a globe structured around needing more janitors than it does superheroes?

Obviously, the example here is intentionally lopsided. If the game is structured then that yous need, say, one crafter for every five people who have no interest in ever crafting anything, that'due south not actually an insane ratio, and information technology'due south not like asking people to choose betwixt fighting supervillains or refilling paper towels. But it is very possible for that ratio to become skewed in either direction. You might wind up attracting so many crafters that, well, there are mostly people who craft things and a minority of people who want to fight. Or maybe you have fewer crafters attracted to the title than you need to keep the economy running.

The janitor problem, at its heart, is needing people to do sure things in guild to make the game's blueprint work. And sometimes the things you lot need those players to do is actively at odds with their master goals.

Let me become back to WoW for a moment: One of its big goals with Shadowlands was to make crafting more relevant once more past forcing crafters to churn out base items for Legendary items. But that ran into bug because at that place were far fewer dedicated crafters than expected, the resource requirements were steep, and the game has a long tradition of doing everything possible to drive away gamers who played MMOs for crafting. Every bit a result, on many servers the price of the base items is insane, simply because the supply and demand setup is intensely lopsided.

Or, well… await at Crowfall. At that place'due south a certain percentage of people who are just non going to touch a heavy PvP game, no matter what. What percentage of that audience are exactly the sorts of crafters that the game needs in order to office properly?

The respond to that question is, realistically, that I don't know. I haven't done marketplace inquiry, and I would like to assume that the people actively running the game actually take crunched these numbers. (If not, uh… well, let'southward just say that I now have many boosted concerns.) Merely from my admittedly limited perspective, it feels a lot like the game has designed itself right into the janitor problem and hoping that at present that doesn't actually manifest the mode it has so many times before.

And make no error, the basis is littered with games that fabricated assumptions almost the size of its playerbase and how many people would flock to certain things. WildStar fabricated egregious bets well-nigh how many people it could attract to its ultra-hardcore raids for 40 people. That went so well that the game had to quickly trim downward the requirements to even get to those raids, and so trim downwardly player counts, and… well, now there's a reason we talk about that game in the past tense.

I get a certain amount of deja vu when looking at how designers choose to structure their games for exactly this reason.

Am I saying that, say, 100v100 modes of PvP are inherently bad? Heck no. Bringing in lots of players for something is a lot of fun. What I'm saying is that realistically, yous take to design around what happens if these histrion counts don't materialize. You lot tin't just assume 200 people will show up on fourth dimension for this manner, and if it doesn't work with less, the near impressive fashion in the world will substantially become empty air you lot devoted a lot of time and resources to programming into the game.

Size is great. Only plan around not having that critical mass so that the game will all the same work even when things go wrong with the size. Otherwise… well, you're in for a rude awakening when that critical mass fails to happen, and by so information technology's too tardily.

Sometimes yous know exactly what'south going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you lot have are Vague Patch Notes informing you lot that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and too vague elements of the genre equally a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adapted under sure circumstances.

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Source: https://massivelyop.com/2021/07/08/vague-patch-notes-size-isnt-everything-in-mmos-unless-its-designed-that-way/

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