Achieving Goals

The average MMORPG gamer plays his favorite game for over 20 hours per week, a small minority even playing over 50 hours per week. But at the same time, players often complain that the gameplay is repetitive, feels like work, or is even a treadmill. What motivates people to play a game consisting of repetitive tasks for so many hours, long after the fun has stopped? For many it is the achievement of goals: "Hey, I don't enjoy killing orcs, but if I kill 100 of them, I will go up a level, and learn a cool new combat skill." This article looks at goals in MMORPGs, where they work, where they fail to motivate, and how games could be improved by using them better.

Goals? What Goals?

MMORPGs being open-ended, goals are not provided by a story line, but are usually set by the players for themselves. Goals are what a player hopes to achieve when he starts the playing session. A goal could be to reach the next level, or to get a new skill or spell in some other way. It could be recovering a special item from some monster, or making enough virtual money to buy that item from somebody else. It could be finishing a difficult quest, or gathering a certain amount of faction / reputation points with the non-player characters. For the purpose of this article, I will limit myself to goals that are measurable, and leave out goals like "impressing my fellow players".

To be a source of motivation, the goal has to be achievable within some medium-term timeframe, such as a single play session. Anything that takes just a few minutes and no skill does not lead to much satisfaction. But if the goal is too far away on the horizon, like for example reaching the highest level possible in that game, the player easily loses sight of it. The best goals are in the middle ground, require some effort to reach, but can be achieved within a couple of hours, or a few days at most.

Goals should also be accompanied by some sort of reward. Players respond positively to rewards, even just some sort of medal which does not actually make his character stronger. One can be satisfied by reaching a goal without reward, just from the knowledge of having done something difficult, but something more than bragging rights surely helps.

Character Levels

The biggest success in motivating the players with goals, and perhaps the greatest legacy of 30 years of Dungeons and Dragons, was the invention of character levels. Having your character get stronger in easily measurable chunks is a driving force few players can resist. Level-based advancement is far more motivating than skill-based systems where you progress in tiny steps; "You have become better at axe wielding (37)", is easily ignored, unless you know you need axe wielding (40) skill to equip your new battle axe.

Unfortunately something went wrong in the translation from D&D to modern MMORPGs. Looking at a D&D rulebook, one can see that the experience points needed to go up a level progress exponentially. What isn't that obvious is that the experience points gained each level in D&D also go up by the same rate, and so the time needed to gain one level remains more or less constant. In MMORPGs, you gain the lower levels much more quickly than the higher levels. Often the low levels seem to rush by far too quickly, allowing you to gain 10 levels on your first day, while at the high levels it can take weeks to progress.

The high level slowdown of advancement is one of the prime sources of people complaining that a game feels like a treadmill and quitting. Different people have different tolerance to treadmills, reflected in how long they are willing to toil to reach a goal. By making each level harder to reach than the last one, you push your players one by one over that patience limit. A goal that does not seam to be reachable in a reasonable amount of time is not a source of motivation, but of frustration.

Especially damaging are strong increases in the experience point curve at certain levels. If every level is just a little bit harder than the last, people get used to this. But if one level is much harder than the previous, frustration strikes with full force. A good example for this are the "hell levels" of Everquest, where due to the experience point curve having steps, levels 30, 35, 40, 45, etc. are much harder than their preceding levels to reach.

The underlying theory behind this experience point curve in MMORPGs is that players have to be prevented from actually reaching the highest level, as they would then have nothing to do, and would quit. Instead you now get most people quitting before reaching the highest level, which is not an improvement. It would be better to have the time to advance from one level to the next more evenly distributed, and hope that people have so much fun leveling that once they reach the highest level, they will start over with a different character.

Quests as Goals

Knowing that players like goals that can be achieved in one play session, the big trend in recent and upcoming MMORPGs is to present the player with ready-made goals in bite-sized portions, in the form of missions and quests. Quests have moved from being the icing on the MMORPG cake to becoming the very backbone of the game.

But if you are practically always on a quest, these quests stop being goals, but fade into the background of basic game mechanics, just like combat did. The goal is then more likely getting the known quest reward, and not pursuing the quest in itself. In some games, quests also give some sort of reputation points; people will then often repeat the same quest over and over, to reach the goal of a certain reputation level. Needless to say that the plot of the quest itself becomes totally unimportant at that point.

Nevertheless these quests are a useful help for the undecided. The more powerful motivation comes from the goals you set yourself, but if you happen to have none of those, a quest with a ready-made goal is better than random monster killing.

Other Goals

The best thing a game can do is to offer many different ways of advancement, each with different rewards. Players can then chose what goals they want to accomplish for themselves. One player just wants to level up as quickly as possible, another wishes to become rich with virtual gold, while the third is striving for reputation with the non-player characters.

One relatively common goal is to try to get some piece of equipment such as rare items. Obtaining such items drives players as much as leveling does. By offering better and better equipment with advancing levels, the player always has either the next level or the equipment for his new level to chase after. The difficulty lies in balancing the power of the equipment versus the power of the character in such a way that good equipment is desirable, but you are not excluded from groups for not having the very best of it.

Skill gains work best as goals if they are not part of the normal combat routine. If you have to do something special, like crafting, to improve your tradeskill, this becomes an independent path of advancement. You "level up" your skills instead of your character level. Reaching a higher skill is rewarded by being able to craft better items. Many people enjoy this parallel career. In comparison, a combat skill that goes up automatically during fighting does not add much to the primary motivation of fighting for experience points and levels.

Examples

Let's look at some games and see how they manage to motivate their players with goals. We'll look at where these games succeed, and where they fail.

In City of Heroes, leveling up is practically the only goal, but is strongly rewarded. Every two levels you get a new power, and during the first twenty levels or so progress is relatively quick. Furthermore the powers you gain have a big impact, compared with the skills you gain in other games. Beyond level 20 the powers often offer nothing fundamentally new, and are achieved increasingly slowly. This results in most players having many low level characters, as those are simply more fun to play than advancing one single character into the high levels. Money and equipment is not a separate goal in City of Heroes, it is practically impossible to gain those without leveling up at the same time. In the end, you are likely to have more fun leveling in CoH than in most other games, but you burn out quicker, because there is nothing else to do.

In Everquest, leveling up is toughest, and often not fun beyond the mid-levels. But EQ makes up for that by offering more rewards for reaching the high levels, opening up much more content to you. The game is full of "epic" battles and treasures, for which getting to the high level is just seen as a necessary requirement. Many people never get there. But fortunately Everquest also has a very wide range of alternative activities, each with their own goals and rewards. You can hunt for thousands of different treasures, advance in tradeskills, try to become rich in a tough economy, or collect "faction points" to improve your standing with many different non-player groups.

Final Fantasy XI is very similar to Everquest in goals, but with some extra twists. Advancing in levels not only makes your character stronger and able to reach new zones, but it also opens up additional game mechanics. For example, at the start you can only walk, but at a certain level you are allowed to do a quest that enables you to ride chocobos, making travel much faster and safer. At even higher levels you will be able to take flying ships that transport you from one city to another. Another example is that at level 18 you can do a quest enabling you to take a sub-job, and at level 30 you can do quests which open the advanced jobs to you. Thus FFXI creates "key" levels, which exercise an even stronger pull than normal leveling. On the items and equipment side FFXI does less well. Equipment is too important, and too hard to get, as money is not easy to earn. Instead of a second source of motivating goals, FFXI creates a second treadmill, forcing players to repetitively mass-slaughter harmless monsters for cash, just to be able to afford the most necessary spells and items.

A Tale in the Desert suffers a bit from not having levels, and from making your ascent of the tech tree difficult to measure. It is more a game of collective achievements than of individual goals. That can be very motivating, but usually appeals to a different kind of people than those who like leveling up. The big plus regarding goals of ATITD is that there are hundreds of different goals, each requiring a different activity to get there.

Star Wars Galaxies suffers even worse from the lack of levels, because your total advancement is capped at an relatively early level. From then on, to advance in one skill, you need to unlearn another one. Giving up previously achieved goals does hurt, and you sometimes feel more like regressing than progressing. (Ultima Online had a similar system with the same problem). SWG is also very badly balanced in many respects. Some careers are much easier than others, and some are so boring that people macro them. The economy is often crazy, making it very hard to earn your first money, but then suddenly tipping, ending you up with huge amounts of money and nothing to spend it on. On the positive side, the different careers are varied enough, with not all of them requiring you to kill monsters to advance. But not all careers in SWG are equally rewarding.

Room For Improvement

Goals and achievements are driving forces that motivate players to spend their time in an MMORPG. The best approach is to offer the players a variety of activities, each with its own rewards, and let them chose their goals for themselves. The job of the developers is to make sure that the player at all times has the opportunity to pursue some goal which is not too far away, and is attractive because of a meaningful reward attached to it.

The most difficult part in this is to get the difficulty level right. With quests or treasure hunts, there is some room for variety, allowing players to choose between easier and harder goals. But with levels and skill trees, the requirements are the same for all players, until somebody invents the MMORPG with variable difficulty levels. The concept of making each level harder to achieve than the last one only works if there is enough low and mid-level content, so that players don't burn out before they reach the fun part of the game. But a better concept for leveling up would be to make it easy enough for the average 20-hour-per-week gamer to reach the highest level in a couple of months, while giving the power gamers some alternative advancement methods, so they don't "finish" the game in a few weeks.

In the end everybody has to remember that MMORPGs are just games, a form of entertainment. Players like to "win", so a MMORPG has to be slanted towards letting the players win, just like a single-player games do. Frustrating the players with goals that seem impossible to achieve, and then only carry a meager reward, is not helping anybody.

This article has also been published on Grimwell
- posted by Tobold @ 8:24 PM Permanent Link