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General: The Fallacy of MMO Fairness
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In a new column sure to generate some buzz, MMORPG.com's Phil Bickle argues that there is no such thing as a balanced MMOor an argument against so-called "pay to win" that actually matters. See why Phil feels this way and then leave your thoughts in the comments.
The MMO genre is different from others in that it is separated into tiers. To get to the end game you must first pass through all the other tiers. (Or you could buy your character, but that might be better for another article.) Through each tier you learn new things about the game world, the class you chose, and how different mechanics interact with each other. That is except for the middle tiers where all you do is grind to reach the Endgame doing the same stuff you've already done a thousand times. Once you finally reach the Endgame, it doesn't end there. Now it’s time to gear up so you can do more challenging encounters to (wait for it) gear up more. It’s a vicious cycle that has devoured many who would not have it any other way; myself included.
Read more of Phil Bickle's The Fallacy of MMO Fairness.
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Comments
well life anit fair...so why should MMOs be so.
End-Game these days is nothing more than playing Unreal Tournament's Deck16][, Quake Live's Campgrounds, and Couter-Strike's DE-Dust over and over and over and over again.
Instanced 5v5 or 8v8 PvP is today's end-game. It's the sole reason why I despise such games. I'f I'm to be forced into the same redundant bullshit over and over, I'd rather not pay the monthy fee - I'd rather do it for free via BF3 or MW3.
Phil speaks a lot about 'end game' there. My bet is that he wrote his story with WoW (RIFT, whatever fast-leveling Western game) in mind. Perhaps he should give Lineage II, EVE or one of the other (semi) sandbox games a try and rethink about this article. ;-)
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There. Now that I've got that out of my system.
I think WoW handles the whole PvE balance thing fairly well. They keep releasing new content, so everyone has to start over on new content on a fairly regular basis. They also make the older content easier for people to get through so people can 'catch up'. I find raiding a little nauseating and don't do it, but it's one way to handle that end game balance scenario.
I don't think the problem with 'pay to win' is in balance though. Not for PvE content. For PvE, it's about the effort. If I put in the effort to grind all the garbage to get into a raid, everyone else should have to grind through the garbage to do it. If someone else can just buy their way to the end, it cheapens the effort I put into it. It's like someone buying a college degree instead of actually taking all the classes.
I think Balance Issues happen when you're talking about PvP. People who buy better gear get to win, while the people who don't buy the gear get to lose. It's just a goad to get people to buy stuff from the game developer.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I do NOT care about class inbalance. They can be unbalanced.
I do NOT care about time & effort inbalance. Actually time & effort spent in game should give you some advantage.
I DO care about pay-to-win inbalance. I refuse to pay games that sell ANY advantage in cash shops and I do VERY have strict category of that. Actually I even hate selling vanity items in cash shops.
I DO care about cheats inbalance. I leave game if game developers don't fight botting and exploiting enough.
Still most current mmorpg's - provide PvP in arenas / battlegrounds where teams in same amount of players do some sort of deathmatch.
PvE - is 'on rails' and is "do this instance x100 to get enough medallions to barter for armor then you can do next tier instance x100 again to get next armor to get raiding". <-- boring and I don't plan to play games like that anymore.
I played games like that for years and I will not play them again.
For instanced PvP - Battlefield 3 or other multiplayer games are much better.
For PvE on rails - single player games are better.
There is nothing that convince me to pay for that anymore tbh.
If developers want me to pay monthly for a mmorpg again better make a unique game experience I won't find in mutliplayer / lobby or singleplayer games.
Create me a world and then I will subscribe.
Bottom line about fairness?
$ should not give any advantage or / and feel of 'beign better'. Guess my views are totally opposite to what industry is trying to do atm, and I will have to resort to some very few titles in next years or even don't play mmorpg at all.
Fine with me.
If developers want my money then they will have to provide me a product I want or they won't get them.
{mod edit- removed extra spacing}
"Oh, you want a balanced MMO? Too bad! It's never going to happen."
Totally agree! In fact the whole balance issues that kill most games stems from PvP & the crying players that can't kill this or that because of x,y, & z.
When a Knight on horseback charged into a group of Archers in any medieval war the Archers didn't (ok, couldn't) cry about balance.
Things aren't meant to be balanced, MMOs are becoming a clonefest.
The players crying are killing more games that comes out... and all in the name of balance! It's really sad!
I don't care about balance and money shouldn't buy power.
That's pretty much it for me.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
As someone who falls somewhere in the middle of the money/time balance, I appreciate efforts by gaming companies to give options to both sides of the equation. I think the original point was that MMO's are imbalanced by design. If viewed outside the narrow viewpoint of the in-game world only, adding different payment options actually makes the games more balanced, IMO. I'm sure these mystical "pay-to-win" games exist out there, but I've never played one, and people who characterizing "f2p" games as such are transparent and easily dismissed .
To start, I'll say that I don't care much about balance in a PvE game. PvP however, is an entirely different story. P2W doesn't matter to me in a non-competitive environment, but it means EVERYTHING in a competitive one.
Using the same attitude as the article, we could ask why we go after athletes who do steroids?
If we played Tekken in an arcade with a stranger, and they put an extra quarter in to get double life bars, would anyone really accept this? Sure, we allow handicapping in the home game, but it's at the consent of both players. In P2W MMO's, there is no consent.
Outside of P2W, I have no opinion about fairness. There's no point in a game which involves advancement. You advance to become more powerful, and many people advance to go gank LL players. They may be douches, but that's the way the game plays.
Balance is for kids that think everyone has an equal chance (they'll learn when they grow up that this is not the case in real life
)
To me, balance is one of the least issues of an MMORPG. IMO, a pure healer SHOULD NOT be able to kill a knight in full plate. IMO, a mage should be able to kill anyone from a distance, but when the target is close bym the mage should DIE. Not things like the WoW crap where any class has the sam chances to kill any other class. Whatever happened to the ld 'rock-paper-siccors' (mage-warrior-rogue for MMOs) principle?
Oh I see. The currency doled out equally to all but holds more value (time) is ok to keep regulated by the very games we play but woe is me if we unregulate in game the the currency earned through the sacrifice and holds less value than time to maybe buy some back.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
There is definately a big difference between pay2win and F2P with balanced cash shop, lumping everything together seems like the simple approach. I know its not purely an MMO, but LoL has probably accomplished the best balance of free and money. And it all boils down to a simple formula... time = money. Either you play for absurd amounts of time (like one might while in College) or you pay the occasional fee to skip the time investment (money = time here so does it matter?) skipping perhaps a weeks worth of playtime.
Now the problems with pay2win are this, the time = money scale is so tilted towards the money end of things that those with time cannot compete with those with money. You can almost say its more like time^2 = money, where the amount of time it takes to get stuff done is much greater than the amount of time spent working would be to earn the money to obtain the item/boost/whatever.
Of course this brings up a 3rd equation where time * i = money. i being the imaginary square root of -1. It is an impossibility that only exists in the equation. The items in the cash shop are not obtainable outside of the cash shop. You might be able to obtain something with enough time that may theoretical be greater than the item bought with money, but it will never be equal.
tldr:
Three types of cash shops that shouldn't be lumped together in the discussion of "MMO Fairness"
1. F2P: time = money (Example LoL)
2. Time Inbalanced F2P: time^2 = money (Example Allods Online - I remember looking up the stones needed for upgrades, but never played the game more than a few hours)
3. Pay2Win: time*i = money (Example ?)
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
The ultimate problem is that PvE, as its currently designed in most MMORPGs, is really competitive PvE. You're competeing with the other players in the world for mobs, nodes, gear, etc.
People like to win competitive games more than they like to lose them. So they conciously or subconsciously gravitate towards those games that are highly dependant on skills that they are good at. The wierd thing about MMORPGs in particular is that one of the "skills" that it is most dependent on is simply Time to burn. Character skills are artifically simiulated so that level 10 characters are drastically better than level 5 characters and this is has nothing to do with actual player behind the character. The only real practical factor is level advancement is "time". Thats it. You put in the time and you get the level.
The result being that "winning" in a MMORPG is almost completely a factor of how much time you have on a daily basis to commit and nothing else. Not your knowledge of the game (this helps but it pales in comparison to time), not your personal skill (also helps but agian pales in comparison to time) and not your innate skills as a human are needed just your time.
Now if you are someone who has copious amounts of time to burn. Of course you don't like Pay to Win. It side steps a major advantage you have over your competition. It completely changes the competitve game core requirement. As now time can be exchanged for money. This does break the competitive game, there is no doubt about it.
If you are one that was gimped for lack of time from the outset than of course this is no big deal. Or even a great change, as it makes you more competitve. It may in some ways make innate player skill more of a core requirement. But Honestly likely it won't.
Competitve PvE will likely always be a contest of either how much time or money you have in the real world. You have simply bought into an illusion if you think it tests something other than that.
Because Life is not controlled by humans? unseen forces are always at work so it is impossible to have any fairnes in life. MMOS on other hands are product of human being and can easily be controlled. I am not saying that MMOS have to be fair but i had to comment on rel life comparison which people often bring when it comes to MMORPGS.
Isn't investing time in learning the nuances of a raid or the game's mechanics or whatever simply called... practice?
Important facts:
1. Free to Play games are poorly made.
2. Casuals are not all idiots, but idiots call themselves casuals.
3. Great solo and group content are not mutually exclusive, but they suffer when one is shoved into the mold of the other. The same is true of PvP and PvE.
4. Community is more important than you think.
Article just shows how flawed the mentioned endgame design is. Except for people who would do good as hamster because they like running hamster wheels.
Actually if you look at a game as WoW, you cant even speak from an endgame at max lvl anymore. How can you call it endgame, if you just arrived somewhere in the middle of character progression? Because the progress curve for raid gear becomes almost as long as the lvling curve.
This article is bad...
Balance is mainly a PvP issue (competition against another player), and the guy pretends he does not think "balanced MMO" should exist in PvE (what exactly he means by balance, we will never know... How yes, sorry: "societal balance"... Hmm ok).
Yet, I am sure the author is happy that his PvE character does roughly as much damage as the other players' characters, or is roughly as useful (in its own way) as the other players' characters (and thus care about a certain form of balance, which is probably not the so called "societal balance" nobody cares about...).
It would be more interesting to look at by what amount things become imbalanced, because an imbalance of 1-5%, nobody cares about. The problem with P2W is that to make it worth your while (or money rather), greedy game developers will normally make the items/objects attractive by providing a huge bonus (e.g. 10-15%), which causes imbalance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJWeWMKfa3g
funniest WoW video I ever seen and it was true a long time ago
More experimentation using different ways of balancing FROM real cash/time at the one end TO ffa, one-bullet--through-the-brain-as-good-as-another at the other extreme of competiveness.
More of a range of solutions from different mmos, offered would be nice?
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Try to play a "little schrink" game on someone else please. You cannot possibly know anything about someone's motives based on forum post.
As for everything else.
I am stating my opinion, and this opinion is well throught out.
I don't have as much free time as I used to have when I was going to school /university. I am adult already and also have certain responsibilities which eat up my time.
Still I do NOT want $ buying anything in-game. You may think I have some diffrent motives.
Up to you I don't really care.
'Center of the world"
Erm? what? I am simply stating my opinion. I do not want to play a game / server when you can use item shops. Simple. If I won't get product I want I will simply not buy it.
Same as I don't buy book I don't feel like reading or music I don't like to listen or chair that seem uncomfortable.
Simple.
If you have problem with someone not sharing your view on the matter. Sorry. Tough luck.
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This is why i like GW. You dont have have to raid for week so u can play PVP. Everybody have same gear, now its all about skills.
I find it very hypocritical of folks with lots of free time to tout their method of gaining advantages over all others MMOers (including those that pay real money for in game "adavantrages"). Protecting their version of "fair" is what I call it... and they have said free time to scream it at the top of there lungs, early and often, in any related forum disscussion.
How is playing ingame wack-a-mole better than spending that same abount of time slugging it out in the real world to earn the money that pays for those exact same gains? None, in my book, and I am not defending the purchase of in game items either... for too long everyone seems to think it is one vs the other, but the reality is they are both bad for the genre as a whole.... as niether brings in a significant amount of new customers.
New custromer gereation is what the REAL failing of every MMO developer, to date. If I had the venture-capital, I would wager it all on my hypothesis that the majority of potential MMO new customers will not accept a system were some person can play online wack-a-mole to gain an advantage over them any more than they wil accept someone paying real world money to gain an advantage over them, PERIOD.
The problem is that MMO developers are their own worst enemys in this endevor. Fanatical gamers making games they think will attract in folks, outside of their niche form of entertainment, can't see the foreest through the pixelaed trees, and keep developing content meant for their own consumption.
At the end of an on-line MMO session, the thrill of the experience should be the only thing gained over any other non-particpant, and nothing more... and anyone who thinks this model can't give an equal amount of varity and entertainment is just another part of the problem.
You should not be able to P2W, in terms of that, meaning that a F2P player should have access to the same things a p2p player might have. That being said, how its addressed can vary and its case by case. So long as benefits that can be bought with cash can be sold to players in game, I don't tend to find it bad. The big issue is just balancing it the right way. How? Who knows. Sure DDO does a good job with it, but its still able to be argued with that you still 'pay 2 play' with content needing to be unlocked, and the process of earning points for free being rather tedious.
Cash shop aside, we all know that balance is near impossible. Lets not kid ourselves, you can limit a game to 2 classes, and imbalance will still exist. The movement to less classes for more 'balance' has just been rather lack luster. We won't ever get more balance, I'd much rather prefere a diverse class choice over being limited and still experiencing the pains of not being able to keep full balance. I'd willingly give up my lifes savings if someone managed to create a perfectly balanced MMO with classes and RPG elements. I'm that confident that it won't be done without having the game dumbed down to the level of Joust.