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.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Sunday, April 19, 2015
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.
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.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)