Wiz-War Simulator Part 1

I decided to revive an old project in a new medium with all the free time the recent pandemic created. Wiz-War is one of my favorite games and the pre-8th editions of it have a distinctly different feel from the modern 8th edition. While I know that the utter chaos isn't for everyone, I believe that the older edition needs to be preserved as a part of gaming history as it impacted many modern games like Magic: the Gathering.

As part of this preservation, I decided to recreate the game in Tabletop Simulator. It was surprisingly easy to import everything and have a working game. I simply had to breakdown the images I had of the 5th edition pieces into individual images file and they imported directly into the game. I don't currently have images of all the 5th edition cards, so I used the images from Illya's Magic Stone redesign instead. In the following posts I'll detail exactly what I did and how I solved some of the speed bumps I encountered.

Hearthstone: Above the Curve

Hearthstone just released a new expansion this week. This expansion brought many changes, including a new format and balance changes to Classic and Basic cards. But I am not going to talk about any of that as there is already plenty of analysis on how it will shake up the meta. Instead, I am going to talk about a new card back Hearthstone released.

Card backs are simply a vanity item. They have no impact on how your deck preforms, just on how it looks. For the most part, card backs are just a way to show your individuality. Some of them provide a psychological advantage because of what they represent. For example, the Legendary card back is earned by reaching the legend rank on the ladder. This means that if you are playing someone with the Legendary card back they are quite skilled which can be intimidating to newer players. Other backs with similar implications are the card backs from beating the adventures on Heroic as these show a lot of time and dedication.

The pre-order for the new expansion came with an interesting card back. Unlike all the other card backs in Hearthstone which have a gentle repeating pattern, the pre-order card back moves randomly and has a jerky motion. This captures the unsettling feel of the ancient gods. Unfortunately, this card back is actually distracting. People focus on sudden motions, which this card back has. Hence this back randomly draws focus to it throughout matches. No other card back really does this as they have a gentle repeating pattern that is easy to ignore. Hence this card back could cause the opponent to play worse due to distraction them.

So do I think this card back is a problem? Probably not, as the distraction effect is minor and probably only relevant on close games. It would be interesting to look at people's win rates when they are using the back verses not. This could actually be done as the card back came out nearly 2 months before the rotation. Hence it would be easy to compare games using the same deck and the pre-order card back with games that did not use it. I would expect a small increase in win rate from using the new card back. Though I don't know if it would be in the measurable range or not. It is worth pondering from a game design standpoint whether vanity items should be allowed to affect gameplay and if the difference between how the pre-order back affects things verses card backs like the Legendary back is important.

Disposable vs. Durable: The Depth of a Video Game Economy

One thing that Destiny players continue to ask for is the ability to trade items in game, or really any sort of player economy. Since launch, the only economic interactions players have is with NPCs. This doe snot feel like the open and immersive world Destiny promises, as the real world has a deep economy. Unfortunately, Destiny cannot shift to any sort of exchange without a complete overhaul of the items and equipment in game. The reason comes down to the features these items have as goods.

A big thing to notice about the items in Destiny is most are durable goods. The weapons never wear out and the armor never breaks forcing you to replace it. In addition, the majority of the rest of the items are for upgrading weapons and armor. While there are a few disposable item, like those that increase the glimmer (in game currency) drops or ammo refills, they are not that important in the grand scheme of things. It is this fact that leads Destiny to be unsuitable for player trade in its current state.

Because all items are durable, there is little need to acquire more once you have the best gear. It is true that while progressing to the highest level, a player replaces weapons. But this is because the higher tier weapons are strictly better than lower tier weapons. And even among the highest tier gear, there are a few "right" choices. Hence the only objective of a player in the economy is to assemble these "right" choices. Once a player has them, there is no reason to acquire more. At this point, the player would have shifted from a buyer and seller in the economy, to strictly a seller, if Destiny had a player marketplace. Given enough time, every player will be in this position and trade would cease. Granted, new content releasing higher tiers of gear would add some activity to the market as players assembled the new optimal set. Unfortunately, this does not lead to a deep, player-driven market, as designers must constantly be breathing new life into it.

This is in contract to an economy like EVE: Online where every item is disposable. In EVE, one of the first pieces of advice new players are given is "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose." The expectation is that your ship will get blown up at some point and you will have to replace it. Even the most expensive capital ships and starbases are destructible in EVE. This constant destruction means that every player will have to be in constant interaction with the market, replacing their latest loss. Because every item is disposable, EVE would have a functioning and vibrant market without the developers adding new things to it.

EVE does have more supporting the market than just ever ship simply being an explosion waiting to happen, like massive production chains for many items; but the disposable-durable difference is the most important reason why trade would not benefit Destiny. In particular, you would see something like the problems of the Diablo III auction house. Here players were able to buy the best gear for their level, trivializing the grind and destroying the Skinner Box that is core engagement of Diablo. Hence Bungie is making the correct decision in not allowing player trade in Destiny, because to do so would either break the game or require a complete overhaul in how items work.

Balance in Complex & Changing Systems

Balance is a key feature in games. Players saying that a game is unbalanced is one way of them stating that a game is currently not good, though in a fixable way. The core idea of balance is every player has the same chance of winning, conditional on skill. There shouldn't be a best choice or best starting position in a game. A game that is unbalanced can usually be fixed by tweaking statistics or abilities without having to change the entire rule set. For example, in Puerto Rico it is well documented that players who start with Corn have a higher win chance than those with Indigo. A fix that evens out the win chances of a position is to take once coin from each player that starts with corn.

Balance in static games like Chess, Go, or Puerto Rico is achievable. The high number of plays of these games generates lots of data on where things might be skewed. Hence through constant small tweaks we have arrived at the scale like balance that is these games today. A big question for modern games is how can one balance games that are in constant flux like Magic: the Gathering or EVE Online? These games change quite rapidly with upwards of 4 releases of new content every year. How can one achieve balance in a world like these that is constantly evolving? Moreover, given the plethora of options in Magic and EVE can all of them be useful?

The answer to the last question is no, not all options can always be useful. Given the size of these games, it is impossible to have all the options viable. Only if everything is identical could the game be perfectly balanced. This solution is both uninteresting and denies players any choice, which is fundamental to these games. So how do these type of games achieve balance? In the strictest sense they don't. There are always some options that are just inferior. Though these games use two strategies to mitigate balance concern. First, each component is specialized so has some situation where it is top tier. Second, these games constantly shift the game pieces so that what is weak today will be strong in the future.

A big advantage MMOs or TGCs have over smaller games is there are almost as many ways to play the game as there are players. Magic lists 21 different official formats in its rules section. In addition to these, each play group has its own rules and customs. This means that every player can find a way to play. On the topic of balance, the plethora of formats gives Wizards the flexibility to design different cards for different formats. Hence a card that seems worthless to a tournament player might be just what a multiplayer deck needs. Magic achieves balance, through giving each card a particular format to shine in.1

This also happens in MMOs like EVE Online. There are many different activities in EVE, each requiring a different approach. Depending on how you want to play, different ships will appeal to your niche. This specialization in activities enables more of the content to be utilized. In addition, it means that not every ship needs to be usable in ever situation, just that there is some situation where it is a viable choice. In this way, specialization enables large games to have more meaningful choices.

While specialization implies that there are many niches in a game for its components to shine, it does not imply that each niche has more than one viable choice. This is where the constant tweaking or pendulum balance comes in. Even with small individual niches, it is an herculean task to achieve balance. Not only is each niche almost its own game and more content comes out regularly to integrate, but also changes to one niche will affect others as there is a lot of overlap in components. Here TCGs and MMOs diverge in how they preform pendulum balance.

TGCs tend to have a rotation schedule. There most popular and most supported formats consist of only the most recently released cards. In Magic, Limited only uses the most recent block and Standard is the past 2 years worth of cards. This gives the designers flexibility as they know that many of their creations will cease to have an impact after a few years. Hence they are not bound by past decisions for lone. This gives the designers flexibility to push different portions of the game at different times as they know these power spikes will not last long. In addition, the designers have a fair amount of control on where the current power spikes are, so they can pick a handful to focus on this cycle and ensure there are a few viable strategies.

TCGs have moved toward a rotation schedule to help with balance due to their physical nature. It is hard to errata a card once it is printed. Either a new version needs to come out or there needs to be extensive documentation on which cards have changed. Some TGCs have gone this route, like Legend of the Five Rings, but this leads to clunkier play and requires more player knowledge as everything the need to know is not written on the cards. Further, designers are constantly learning about their games as they create new components. It is common for them to completely miss the mark on what is powerful and what isn't. Take the introduction of Equiptment in Magic during the Mirrodin and Kamigawa blocks. The most powerful pieces of equipment, like Skullclamp and Umezawa's Jitte, were printed during those blocks because the designers had no idea on how to balance equipment. Hence, cycling older cards out of the more popular formats is useful for designers as they refine their craft so they are not bound by the power level mistakes of the past.

MMOs take the opposite tack because they are a digital medium. It is easy to change the statistics on a sword or spaceship by editing a few entries in a database. But it is much harder to remove items as players expect to keep what they earn. And yes TCGs, do suffer somewhat by forcing player to buy new cards. But players never physically lose the old cards, unlike an item being deleted from an MMO's database. In MMOs, there is constant tweaking of statistics. Usually something is dominate, like drone boats in EVE right now, but it doesn't often stay dominate for long, it used to be that Drakes were the ship of choice.

This pendulum balance is not the clockwork precision that is Chess or Go, but it is a type of balance. The constant shifting from one thing being powerful to anther keeps the games fresh. Players are forced to adapt and learn as the game changes. This rewards those who search out new and untested strategies as it is not always clear what the latest set or patch has brought to the forefront. Any large game that constantly adds content will adopt this approach as it encourages new experiences which tends to be a drawing factor in such games anyway.

There is delicate line such design walks though. It is possible to make it too obvious what is the best and simply careen wildly from one extremely over powered strategy to another. This completely removes the interesting components of experimentation and discovery. Any game practicing pendulum balance needs to be subtle in its tweaks and make it at least reasonable to try all the options. Any design where it is obvious to a beginner what the dominate strategy is will not keep players interested for long.

Godel's Incomplete Game

Godel's Incompleteness Theorems are a pair of deep and disconcerting results in Mathematics. The main thrust of the results is any logical system will have one of two flaws: incompleteness or inconsistency. Both of these cases have disturbing implications for Math. If our construction of Math is incomplete, then there are statements we can make which are neither true nor false given our starting assumptions. If Math is inconsistent, then all statements are both true and false. The hope is that we have selected axioms such that Math is incomplete as that is the lesser of the two evils. It is worth noting that there is still a lot we can do in this case. The implication of the theorem is there is always a boundary on what we can prove, no matter how many axioms we have.

Why am I discussing a Mathematical results that is rarely used in a blog about games? If you think about it the rules of a game are like the axioms of a logical system. This means that Godel's Incompleteness Theorems apply to every game in existence! This means that there are either situations we can describe which the rules don't cover or the rules contradict themselves somewhere. Examining help forums for games, it is clear that many games suffer from one of these problems. Though this is usually chocked up to insufficient playtesting. So is Godel telling us that there is no amount of playtesting that can resolve this issue and we should just always expect such problems from our games?

Looking carefully at what incompleteness is, we see that this actually not a problem for most games. A game suffering from incompleteness just has some situation which the rules cannot decide. There is nothing that states that this situation can occur during gameplay or even that the components of the game that would cause issues even exist. The best game to explore this idea with is Magic: the Gathering. Magic being incomplete implies that there is a card or combination of cards which the rules cannot handle. This is like the double Opalescence and Humility problem before the introduction of layers. The thing about Godel is the cards that cause a rules issue might not even have been created yet. There could be a card or cards that we can write up that are perfectly valid Magic cards, but have something undecidable in the rules. So Magic escapes the Godel's problems by simply not having all possible cards existing.

This leads us to the main release valve in games for Godel's results, games are (usually) finite. Just like Magic avoids the problem by only having a tiny portion of all the infinite possible cards actually existing, other games can avoid being incomplete by bounding what can happen in game. So any game with a bounded scope can avoid the paradox of Godel's Theorems by being playtested to the point that the inevitable undecidable situation exists outside the boundary of the game.

Hence any single game can avoid rules confusion. Though there are two special cases worth thinking about more: expansions and RPGs. Expansions should be just like the base game, with enough playtesting one can push the inevitable incompleteness outsidethe scope of the game. This is usually done by adding rules to resolve situations. Under Godel's Theorem, adding new axioms does not resolve incompleteness as even with an additional axiom, there will still be some other case not covered. It is literally impossible to cover all the cases in an infinite game without contradicting yourself. We see that expansions always add rules. Sometimes they even completely rework the base rules because the new rules came in direct conflict with how new situations were handled.

This rewriting of the basic axioms is more common than one would expect. It happens with paradigm shifts in the sciences, like classical Newtonian physics to General Relativity. Or the many attempts at axiomatizing set theory in the 20th century. This has also happened in Magic with the big 6th Edition rules change. Through this we see than even expansions can avoid Godel, though they might require a complete rewrite of the rules to do so.

Tabletop RPGs are the most complex games to design. Unlike essentially all other games, they are infinite in scope. Any situation the players can imagine is possible and people are constantly pushing the limit all the time. In an environment where so many people are applying their collective creativity, it is inevitable that someone will try something that is impossible to decide with the rules. Unlike most other games, RPGs have an ultimate authority who is technically above the rules, the Game Master. It is because there is a person empowered to unilaterally resolve situations that these games function. When a situation the rules deem undecidable arises, the Game Master has the power to resolve it.

Hence, one should expect people to have game worlds run by different Game Masters function differently. One last implication of Godel's Theorems is that any undecidable statement can be determined to be either true or false and still form a consistent system. For example, see the continuum hypothesis. This means that in any RPG there will always be legitimate rules disagreements. Moreover, neither person will be wrong!

This ended up being a bit longer and more philosophical than I intended at the beginning. To sum up, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems do apply to games. Though due to their finite nature, it cannot be used as an excuse for games that needs more playtesting. The one exception are RPGs, where their unbounded nature means incompleteness will always be encountered. Luckily, there is a Game Master empowered to resolve problems as they occur.

Community in MMOs

Recently, I have been thinking about how communities form in MMOs. In truth, these are quite possibly the most important part of an MMO. Without a community, an MMO is simply a single player game where you can watch other players play the same game. With a community, you can take on far larger objective and even make friends online. The problem with communities is the game developers have no direct control over them. They can provide tools to foster their creation, but it is next to impossible to pre-create communities for a game.

I have been playing Bungie's recent title Destiny. There is a lot one can do without a community, but the highest level content requires that you find a group. The problem is Bungie greatly restricts in game communications. There are no public chat or voice channels. The closest thing would be using the Bungie forum. This seems far too much like posting an add on Craigslist. You have to get lucky in having the comparable people view your advert and you will still have to sort through a lot of crap first. There are also third party sites, like Destiny LFG, which look promising. Though it really depends on the power of their search and matching algorithms. So we will have to see.

The other method available is to send lots of messages to people in game hanging around certain spots. This is a very high variance activity. A group found me to help with the Raid on normal, and that went well. Though then a member of that group invited me to do the Raid again later and it was massive mess of cursing from a player who thought he knew more than he did. So I am not super optimistic about this tactic for finding a long term community.

My only other experience with MMO communities is EVE Online. And I started EVE after it had been running for nearly 10 years. This meant that there were many large, established communities to pick from. And all had nice websites and private voice comms. While a good part of the difference can be attributed to the difference between an established MMO and a new MMO, I think some of it comes down to the medium. It is much easier to run other programs in the background on a computer than a console. This means it is easier for communities to develop new tools to help their growth. On consoles this is much harder due to restrictions the console manufactures place on apps. This means that players have to rely more on support from both the console manufacturers and the game developers to give us tools for forming communities. In this sense, I am pessimistic for console MMO communities because no one knows the tools that we as players need better than the players. Not to mention we outnumber the developers by a huge factor meaning we have more time to develop the custom tools for our particular community instead of the one size fits all versions from the developers. I hope I am mistaken, and probably will be due to how creative players as a group are.

Alternative Methods

One topic that I have been musing about a lot recently but doesn't seem to get much discussion is that of Alts. An Alt, or alternative character, is a second or third or twentieth in game avatar, usually requiring multiple accounts. These are most common in MMOs as there are a few things that push players towards them. But it doesn't seem like developers always take into account the impact of Alt nor if they are healthy for the game.

Players start Alts for many reasons. Usually there is some limit on character abilities. Hence players need multiple characters to have full flexibility of activities in game. In games like World of Warcraft this takes the form of actual character classes which restrict your character so they are distinct from other classes. in other games like EVE it is simply more efficient to train many specialized characters than on generalist. This is mostly a function of the fact that to have multiple characters training in any game you have to pay for multiple accounts.

From the developer perspective, Having players train alts makes things easier on them. If pa player is training more than one character, they are clearly invested in the game and will probably stay for a longer period of time. In addition, the developer is making multiple subscription fees from one person instead of needing to find new subscribers. So for developers alts are useful in capturing more revenue from invested players.

Unfortunately Alts have at least 2 major downsides. First they decrease the impact of reputation. It is very easy to have an Alt for doing unscrupulous acts. Then once the penalties have built up, simply switch to another character and ignore the consequences. In games like EVE which emphasize that actions have consequences, Alts really damage this philosophy. The other downside is they decrease social interaction. There is no need to coordinate with other players if you have enough alts to run a production empire. Or why group up if you can play multiple characters at once and do group content by yourself? This seems counter to games called Massively Multiplayer Online.

One recent example of a game company thinking about alts and doing them well, in my opinion, is Bungie with Destiny. Each account gets 3 character slots, which is conveniently the number of classes in the game. So you only ever need one account to have access to all play options. In addition, individual characters do not have unique names like WOW. Instead the account has one name that is displayed no matter which character is used. This mitigates the reputation problem as the reputation is for the account instead of the character.

The other interesting feature of Bungie's implementation of Alts is they share storage space. So instead of having to do some convoluted process to get gear from your Warlock to your Titan, all you have to do is deposit the gear in the vault. Then any character on your account has access to it. So all your characters always have access to all of your best gear, so you can quickly swap to the one you want to play and go. Granted Destiny is no where near as complex as EVE, but it shows that when developers think about Alts and how players interact with them, you get a much better gaming experience.