Carrots and Sticks

The behavior of other players is a huge influence on your experience of the virtual world of a MMORPG. The places that are over-crowded or deserted, and where you have to go to find a group, often plays a big role in what you decide to do in the game. Over the years the game developers have become better in directing people to where they should go by using carrots and sticks, rewards and punishment.

How rewards and punishment had a strong effect on where people would go in a virtual world was very visible in the first Everquest. EQ has a relatively harsh death penalty system, in which the character that died has to run naked to his corpse to recover his equipment. It quickly became obvious that dying deep in a dungeon meant having much greater problems getting back to his corpse than dying outside. As a result the dungeons of EQ are often either totally deserted, or only populated by people much higher in level than the monsters, people who are busy "farming" the dungeon's treasures. SOE tried to counter that by increasing the experience point reward for dungeons, but that was only marginally successful. Making a game hard and putting in penalties only encourages people to play it safe, which is not much fun in a game of heroic fantasy.

Another example from the old days of MMORPG was the split of the world of Ultima Online into two identical mirror copies: The PvP-enabled Felucca, and the non-PvP Trammel. The rewards for playing on one side or the other were identical, but Felucca carried a much higher risk, namely to be attacked and killed by another player. Unsurprisingly about 90% of the population chose to play on the Trammel side, to the great chagrin of the players who loved the PvP part of the game. It would have been better to have PvP servers and non-PvP servers, as then the number of servers of each type could have balanced the demand.

Fast-forward a couple of years and the carrots are going out of favor. Death doesn't have much sting any more, there is less and less punishment for dying. This affects the willingness of people to take risks. The dungeons in World of Warcraft are very popular because even if your whole group dies, you just run from the graveyard to the dungeon entrance and only pay a minimal repair cost as penalty for dying. But people are still being influenced by the presence or absence of rewards. Often in ways that aren't easily predictable.

In Final Fantasy XI, the rewards for killing a monster in a group are strongly dependent on the level of the highest player in that group. This leads to players wanting to group only with people very close to their own level. More than 2 levels higher would kill the group xp, while more than 2 levels lower would often be ineffective against the monsters you plan to fight unless the lower level group member is a healer. But this group level restriction has a secondary effect on where people go to adventure. Since setting up a group becomes more difficult when you have to limit yourself to a narrow level range, your only realistic chance to find a group of your level is by going to the place where most of the players of your level hang out. Players become more and more concentrated in the popular places like the Valkurm Dunes, leaving other zones with monsters of the same level, like the Buburimu Peninsula, nearly deserted. The final result is a very boring and repetitive game in which every time you level up you play through the same succession of zones.

World of Warcraft manages to distribute players all over the world very well by giving out good rewards for quests which lead the players to every possible corner of the world. WoW also offers a good example of the effect of giving out rewards for something: The rewards for PvP that were added in the last big patch. Simply by offering rewards for killing other players, the PvP activity on both PvP and normal servers has increased dramatically. Before the rewards, PvP raids were rare. Since the rewards were introduced, PvP battles in places like Hillsbrad Foothills, between Tarren Mill and Southshore, are raging practically 24/7. Of course that can be considered to be giving rewards that encourage bad behavior. On PvP servers the honor system has increased problems of player killers "ganking" people, keeping them from hunting and doing quests.

Being able to influence your players with carrots and sticks is both a danger and an opportunity for the developers. If you hand out rewards and punishment without careful consideration of the effects, bad things like unused dungeons can happen. But it also enables you to leave your players a lot of freedom and persuade them to do what you think they should do in more subtle ways. A typical example would be the developers wanting players to group, but some players preferring to solo. It would be much better if instead of the current model of creating content which a solo player is unable to beat, the developers could simply balance the experience point reward for grouping. Encouraging people to group, without giving them the feeling that without a group they can achieve nothing should make all play styles possible.

This post has also been published on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 9:06 AM Permanent Link