1996 was the year that saw Diablo I (D1). 2001 witnessed the sequel, Diablo II (D2). These computer games in (arguably) most ways were polished but unoriginal (RPG-hack-slash, "gee, I have seen this before", etc). Given this view, why the splash? D1 especially, seemed to have been a preoccupation for many (including yours truly) back then. The difference, I think, was the internet play service Blizzard provided - Battlenet.
Cooperative and high-adrenalin dungeon crawling was never so easy.
Fast forward a bit to 2007. D2 on Battlenet is still here. I still jump in on rare occasions for a bit of nostalgia. Yes, MMORPGs are much more sophisticated places than Diablo/Battlenet ever pretended to be. Yet the world of D2, I think is a lot more nuanced than one might at first think. The funny thing about networked environments, even simple ones, is that some will find a way to flourish. Consider the Battlenet ladder system.
The Wikipedia describes the Diablo/Battlenet in this way:
The main highlight of Diablo II as it relates to Battle.net was that the game was completely client-server based. The game was no longer simulated on each player's computer, but instead was run on Blizzard's server (as it was in Diablo I). This also meant that all of the character data for the game was stored on the Battle.net servers. This effectively put an end to cheating as it had been known during the period of the original Diablo. The game also had an open character feature on Battle.net which stored the player's character on the client. This allowed players to play characters locally or on a LAN, and then use those same characters on Battle.net. However, any open games played on Battle.net were not protected from cheating by other players since they could have modified their characters locally... There was also expanded ladder support including a "Hardcore" ladder which listed players whose characters would be removed permanently if they died in-game.
One detail to note about the ladders is that they are periodically "reset", meaning that every ladder ends at some time and a new one is restarted with fresh characters (to date, there have been 3 resets) . The old characters can be retired back into the pool of non-ladder player characters - this is the route that the gear earned in ladders finds its way back into the rest of game. Teemu Mäntylä recently looked at the effect of ladder resets on the Diablo II economy in "Diablo II economy in chaos as Ladder season ends."
A virtue of the reset in the D2/Battlenet universe is that it appears to have kept a relatively simple ladder ecosystem robust enough to navigate a number of tough hurdles that more sophisticated and resource-endowed virtual worlds have a hard time confronting:
1.) Hacking (cloning game artifacts).
2.) Recycling a static pool of content to the benefit of new and old players alike.
3.) Preventing player disparities (in stuff they have acquired, etc.) from becoming permanently enshrined in the world.
4.) Managing play-balance to compensate for (then compensate for the over-compensation, etc.) of (3.).
Perhaps it is simpler to just pull the plug once in a while rather than trying to build-in clever (but never clever enough) design and mechanisms to get around these problems in long-lived virtual worlds. The KISS principle, indeed.
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P.S. "Ground hog day" arguments, and the various flavors of world resets are certainly not a new idea - e.g. see Richard's "In this instance."
Probably the most significant modern example of world resets is A Tale in the Desert, wherein the players play through a story arc which has a definite ending, then the game shuts down and a new version comes up with a new story arc.
Somewhat more advanced than resetting a ladder, but it has a similar invigorating effect on the fans, I suppose . . .
Posted by: Chris Proctor | Jul 15, 2007 at 20:10
Nate said, "Perhaps it is simpler to just pull the plug once in a while rather than trying to build-in clever (but never clever enough) design and mechanisms to get around these problems in long-lived virtual worlds. "
Amen. But to pull the plug is to reinsert powerful forces of the grind which inevitably lead to addiction, boredom, and frustration. The reset button may have the power to restore playful aspects to the game by lessening their percieved importance, but there is a simultaneous danger lurking. The danger being the grind itself as players at that point (under the current MMO structure other things being equal) would either have to invest a great deal more time in the game (great for subscriptions) or perhaps realizing this cumbersome nature quit the game all together for one that provides more persistent effects. It is interesting to consider the new arena PVP mode and seasons in WoW. Seems to eliminate the grind of PVP if only momentarily upon season end, giving players a chance to sit out. But my question: what role does “balance” play? One system or the other may not be the answer...
Posted by: Lavant | Jul 15, 2007 at 20:13
The primary issue with resets from the commercial POV is that it completely breaks any sense of immersion and gives people an excellent reason to stop playing rather than trying just one more time.
Now, given that arcade games in an earlier time ate quarters like crazy for repeated attempts, there's probably a sweet spot where you can reset and still keep people coming back -- this is what those interested in "episodic gaming" are going for, I think. This is doable on a small scale as ATitD shows, but it's difficult to see how it would work with a hundred thousand or a million players.
Someone will probably crack this though, and then as usual it'll be completely obvious to the rest of us. :)
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jul 16, 2007 at 11:30
Battlenet was always free to play. Once you bought Diablo or D2, you were done. So if a ladder reset pissed you off, hey, no big deal to them; they already got all the revenue they were going to. Furthermore, the free-to-play nature of it meant that even with players leaving due to a "grind-reset-grind" feeling, there were still plenty of people to populate the ladders.
Subscription MMOs could not survive the spike in churn that resets would engender. Yes, the world would be fresh and new for that segment of the player base that didn't mind losing all their previous work. That wouldn't make up for all the players lost due to frustration at the loss of their hundreds of invested hours.
One approach to resets in a subscription environment that might work: veteran benefits that survive the reset. If there were benefits for players who have been through multiple resets, ideally benefits that are better and better the more powerful you were at the time of reset, then you could offset any negative feelings of loss.
SWG approached this with the Jedi model, where players essentially self-reset multiple times, developing multiple characters in order to qualify for Jedi status. Not saying this was great; just using it as an example of what a veteran benefit might look like: a "members only" class or set of features earned by being a big shot at the time of a reset.
Posted by: Kyle Brink | Jul 16, 2007 at 15:18
"Remorting" is what you're referring to with the Jedi example, I believe. Quite a few text MUDs have used that to stretch out their content and it's well-received by a certain group of fans in that niche, at least.
I think that's a pretty limited version of what the OP means though.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jul 16, 2007 at 16:27
Just to clarify -- I was proposing a method by which the full reset of game content, as proposed by the OP, could be made palatable to a larger portion of the player base by rewarding longtime players with some form of advantage that would survive the reset.
I did not mean to propose remorting as an alternative to the full reset.
Rather, I was using the Jedi model as an example of the type of veteran reward one might design to survive the reset.
So, the entire world resets, and players whose characters were at or beyond a certain threshold of accomplisment or veterancy at the time of the reset would, after the rebirth of the world, have access to a class of character that others do not.
Again, this is just an illustrative example to fuel the thought experiment. It is not the whole of the solution set.
Posted by: Kyle Brink | Jul 16, 2007 at 20:00
The "veterans rewards" thing is reasonably common in Betas.
e.g. in Dark and Light only beta testers could get early access to dragon mounts, and in Lord of the Rings Online beta players who preordered the game got to keep their characters and got some unique items (or something).
Personally, I like the idea of a large scale MMO with resets frequent enough to encourage experimenting with playstyles, more along the lines of a breaktime game than something you devote 2 years to.
There would still need to be some form of persistence though, and veteran rewards are one way to do it.
Posted by: Chris Proctor | Jul 17, 2007 at 00:27
If I recall correctly they are going to be making some new updates to the functionality of Blizzard's Battle.net system before Starcraft II launches. However, I don't know if any changes would address your "reset" suggestions though. On a side note Blizzard did mention a team working on a new game. I bring it since Diablo 3 is an obvious possibility. ;)
Posted by: neonangel | Jul 17, 2007 at 01:45
All this emphasis on just Character/attributes(equipment) with so little talk about political clan/guild competition and interaction.
Blizzard has done many things right, layering pvp, pve individual, pve guild progression, some effective player economics (balancing npc, drop and player fabbed goods in fairly ok ways)
They dont provide enough means for posturing in world and mis opportunities for persitent game play... if the name of a fishing tourney was plastered on a signe you couldnt help noticing on a throughfare in a city... if a news paper were available with a sports section where I could see who downed which bosses the last few night.
If i saw one guild where i had freinds in having finally got the curotor, I could send an in game tell.
I know this is seperate from R Bartles notion of "role play" but the notion of Immmersion in the social context of the world and its goals(working to get stuff and kill ever harder bosses for the mount everest of it((or alernatively top the pvp charts)...creating a richer interaction , friendship(and rivalship) relations makes the immersion multifacted.
It would be neet to be able to kick it playing hearts with characters in world in a public space, where people could wander in and observe the game and hear the conversation, in the middle of a WoW city.
It would be nice to have wars going on between npc's (and i've seen bliz experimenting a bit with npc mobs fighting each other) so a player or players tip the balance and be rewarded with some public temporary posturing rights.. (being able to write XXXX is a bozo ? would be just fine for me because that taunting would raise emotions a bit even if it was just W/E). If the winners always posted stupid things that you hated reading suddenly you have a real reason to compete in whatever that was to either pay back, or shape things your way.
Using the econonomic part of the game as a way for posturing awards and titles would get around the unbalncing pve and pvp issues based on grinding. Bidding for your name on a storefront for a year, or the services of a NPCs using gold, (and maybe being given petty dictactor privaleges like selecting rule variants on some minor event reseting every 5 minutes in a city) would give little roles to play that required some daily deeds of commerce or questing or thresholds of achievment to win the rights to.
People play the game for different ends, some see it as a glorius IRC, and if you can keep enough in world things to chat and gossip about then you are role playing without needing to say "ye" or "pretend" you have some in world history. You can just talk about 'can you believe xyz took down that" or "whered you catch those fish, whats the drop rate there" and be totally playing and immersed in a fun world , contrived in a way that a good summer camp would.
Summer camp... games and activities for all sorts...everyone could win some prize at the end of the week, some people did more than others...silly things happen...give us a managed realm like that.
Posted by: shander | Jul 17, 2007 at 01:54
The emphasis on characters and individual players is correct IMO. Solve resetting in that context and you have something that can win peoples hearts.
Most people spend a large portion of their time working on their own characters, a very small minority spends a large portion of its time working on their guilds.
Posted by: Chris Proctor | Jul 18, 2007 at 02:13
I think its important not to fall into the Either/or camp when parrell solutions are conceivable.
I am arguing for more layers of differing game play parrallel, not advocating one over another.
I think in general I agree with a premise that the competitive outfitting/talent build aspects beg for periodic resests (else new comers are increasingly different from old grinded players and content becomes stratified).
However, I brought up ways of "rewarding" through ego stroking and temporary public aknowledgement (as in other players could see something and and that something was known not to be grind achievable). That sort of thing does work in many persistent Muds where people find their engergies sucked into guild, city alliance issues in ways they find enjoyable in a competitive way (we get more turn based strategey overlaid ontop of the single person shooter).
Another way, and blizzard has been using it, is content that gets unlocked via quest lines and reputation requirments. While there is an element of "ever fatter loot" , loot is not the only reason people work hard to get to do the final raids. Now I have some issues with raids cause its not my idea of fun rounding up so many people and the reality that there will be lots of city around waiting when it takes a full group to perform and invetiably people need to be called away now and then, making for a high waiting/action quotient. And differences in tempo and desired lenght of play also take away from the fun for the raids stuff.
But, the idea that Unlocking Content, is its own reward IS another alternative to the Reset Issue. You can use the "heros journey" pull, rather than an accumlation pull. If someone bought a fully combat equpped but unquested lvl 70 WoW player on ebay, that person would still have a lot to see, and would need to do lots of stuff to unlock lots of content. (but of course if they bought the player they don't really like playing the game unless the bought it after having experienced all the content on anotehr server and just wanted for social reasons to play a different class with people on a different server).
Long and short, there are ways in terms of destributing temporary Kudos, ehancing player knowledge and interaction with each other, creation of enticing content to reward players in a persistent world in ways that dont' wipe out the worth of past achievements.
Personally I think the tying of equipment and skill rewards to pvp tends to perpetuate the grind kind of thinking And it doesnt need to.
Event the titles are grind oriented. Players shouldnt be given titles like ranks. (seargetn, captain). Better would be "top 10% 2007 first season" or 5 time winner of "pvper if the day".
Those could be as motivating for a player that enjoys pvp and.. if they dont enjoy pvp and are only doing it for the loot!? well that is telling to their fixation of the escapism of the grind...they may as well be piling up wins in minesweeper or tetris.
Posted by: shander | Jul 19, 2007 at 13:01
Well, since this thread is mostly about how to assuage players who are worried about a ladder reset, and how to make such resets work in the context of a game, I might as well spread what I've seen...
As far as we know, there are two extremes. The first is a game which completely and utterly resets every 'season', as per episodic content or chapters. These are close to some single-player games, and there are very few which can pull it off with panache: ATITD is the most well known one, with its various Tellings, and the parallel to real-world sports is evident in that a season's accomplishments don't carry over. They *can* provide some basis for what will happen in the next season, as players can be tracked stat-wise, but they don't necessarily hold.
The other extreme, and the most common one, is a game where *nothing* ever resets. A player makes a character, and that character will (barring certain events like permadeath) be around forever. Events might come and go, but the player will be on the same toon(s) until they decide to switch to another, or leave.
In between, you've got a number of factors - if the largest portion of the game itself isn't a ladder, surely there will be other portions which are. In WoW, Arena seasons are the best-known, and events come and go with various 'rankings' attached. In Diablo 2, even if your Ladder character completed a season at the top, they don't disappear: instead, they're kept on your account indefinitely, just not on the ladder. And in ATITD, even the 'completed' Telling isn't utterly without its reward: players can form a group and present a challenge for the next go-around.
I think a very large portion of what determines player satisfaction is how a reset is marketed. If the game is marketed to have a 'beginning and an end', as ATITD does, then it will attract players who are looking for that: accomplishments they don't have to worry about continuing, a technological system that can be run through again with better knowledge, and the like. For other games, persistence is the central aspect, and a lot of players look for that: ironically, they want to know that even when they get bored and quit in 3 months, their character will be around forever.
Another in-between state is the continuity of the world, but not the characters. Anarchy Online, purely as an example, deletes any characters who have been gone for three months or more; Ryzom does the same thing. In some ways, this keeps players active - in other ways, it discourages them from playing the game in the first place, as it's a somewhat 'sneaky' way of doing things. If I had to think of a 'worst possible way' to do things, I'd have to say this is one of them, because it's more harmful than helpful.
Finally, as mentioned above, most ladder systems and programmed discontinuities in characters have a reward of some sort for future incarnations. In sports, this could be a better signing bonus for those who performed well last season; in games, it's more likely to be a 'physical' benefit for those who completed the prior aspect. Hence, you'll see players rewarded with gear, or the ability to keep their avatar, or a nice shiny medal. And, for a lot of players, that's enough.
I guess there is one other option for those developers working in a resetting ladder system, and that's probably the most essential: the system has to CHANGE. It's not enough for a system to go back to the start time and time again, as players will grow bored and hemorrhage from the game itself. Instead, it has to include minor modifications to the world, not enough to be a complete shock, but sufficient to keep players coming back for more things to do and explore.
Phew. Took a long time getting to it, but I guess that's the extract: Ultimately, in my opinion at least, the success of a ladder system depends on marketing, continuity rewards, and a constantly changing game.
Posted by: Dennis Connolly | Jul 20, 2007 at 00:33