How to Nerf Search Engines

Fingz

Back in EQ days before search engines like thottbot, alakazham, wohead, etc, existed, EQ was a lot harder.  People would pay guides to guide them from zone to zone because they didn't know the way, it was easy to die and dying was painful in that game.

Not long after, maps appeared on the Internet.  Now instead of hiring a guide, you downloaded a detailed map of the zone.

If you don't like solving puzzles, that's fine, just ask in an online forum and someone will tell you how to solve the puzzle.

And now with Google, you just type in a few words, no second party involved and you can find maps or solutions to almost anything.

All this makes puzzles pointless.  Everyone will find the solution online in seconds.  There's no sense making complex class customization because a quick search on google will give you the best spec.  You can hide an easter egg quest in a tiny shell on a beach in a deserted land thinking no one will find it only to have a dozen blogs and youtube channels giving out detail info on how to find the shell and complete the quest.

So how do you nerf search engines?

 

 

centkin

Well, you can put the maps in the game that are not quite as good as what you would find online but are good enough that people do not invest the time getting the more detailed version.

 

As for quests, you can have new quests each month that are coded to show up on specific dates.  This keeps things fresh.  Other quests could retire...  300 people saved the house from orcs...  The orcs gave up and moved on elsewhere.

CrazKanuk

Quick answer? Procedurally-generated MMOs!!!! 

 

I think that could be the next big thing, actually. It seems very buzz-wordy lately. I don't think it's a bad idea, either. Obviously, for the sake of story, there will be pre-defined points along the way, but the road taken to get there could be vastly different. 

klerken

I guess you don't and you can't.

 

best thing to do imo is hope that developeres make quests completly random for each player, random lvl, random start, random objective random turn in point, but thats not likely to happen.

 

or pay people to surf the web and remove all those kinda thing, but thats not likely to happen

 

DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

doodphace

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

Exactly.

Take for example becoming a Jedi in SWG pre NGE. It wasnt hard "skillwise", but it took forever, and you needed to have quite a bit of luck on your side. Compare that to killing Heroic Rags in WoW CATA. We "knew the fight" from watching videos etc, but it was still a pain in the ass, and to this day is still one of the hardest raid bosses in any game ever relased. I did both, and I can unequivocly say that I had more of a euphoricly "I've accomplished something great" feeling downing heroic LK and Rags in WoW, than i did eventually becoming a Jedi pre NGE. IMO there is something special about completing a skillfully hard task, as opposed to a tediusly hard task.

If the content is skillfully hard, no amount of guides can "hold your hand" through it.

thunberg123

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

 

but come on.  We are afterall all humans.  If there is a very simple way to do something.., you wont do it the hard way even though u would liked it puzzled or more advanced.    . :- We want to try to make the hard simpler. And NOT to make the simple even more simple, or as you propose to TS = "try making the simple more hard  " 

 

Just look at todays  single player games, there are like 6 different diffulity options but most people choose 2 step behind what they could make if they just tried to push their limits a little bit.    And the same thing with me. I ALWAYS choose medium and finish the game almost flawless -> Then im done "HURRAY"... NOT!...  not very proud, but i saw the content and now i can go on to the next  paper-plastic-use1time type of game

 

But back to topic, because i agree with you TS that this is very fundamental in these types of games.  

 

I guess the only way is to make the gameobjects moveable contained in very large worlds.

You also want to reduce the NPC and replace it with real players as mush as possible. For instance if players need to drink water to stay alive they will tend to defende this spot against other players -> but since since the world is a bit moveable, the water might turn to ice and you have to leave that spot and challenge other players in differerent areas in order to stay alive -> and since this new area of water you just found is conatined with superpowers from those drinking it, you will have a hard time competing those defent it -> so you have to cooperate in order to drink a bit in THAT area.... 

 

Fingz

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

I hear what you are saying.  Look at the other side though.  If there were no search engines you'd have to turn to people in game, your guild etc.  This would help build community.

Also, there's really no point putting puzzle like content in game because any puzzle can be solved in an instant with a google search.  If search engines could be blocked, that would open up a whole new set of content to the devs.

 

doodphace

Originally posted by Fingz

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

I hear what you are saying.  Look at the other side though.  If there were no search engines you'd have to turn to people in game, your guild etc.  This would help build community.

Also, there's really no point putting puzzle like content in game because any puzzle can be solved in an instant with a google search.  If search engines could be blocked, that would open up a whole new set of content to the devs.

 

Thats not really accurate. There are certain puzzles that are essentially random each attempt. The most any guide will tell you, are the mechanics behind the puzzle, but you still have to decypher them in real time based on your skill and knowledge of the how the puzzle works, not a guide walking you though it. A perfect example of this is the Heavy Fabricator fight in SWTOR`s Karagga's palace. If only devs would incorporate more of that into MMOs/boss fights.

DamonVile

Originally posted by Fingz

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

I hear what you are saying.  Look at the other side though.  If there were no search engines you'd have to turn to people in game, your guild etc.  This would help build community.

Also, there's really no point putting puzzle like content in game because any puzzle can be solved in an instant with a google search.  If search engines could be blocked, that would open up a whole new set of content to the devs.

 

You can build community just by talking to people. You have to go through all the ones that just think you'e a glorified npc there to get them loot but the same ppl that played eq, UO, SWG are all still in the games and new people like them are there wanting that same experience.

As for puzzles...I don't look them up when I play SPG unless I'm really really stuck ( like for days ) same goes for mmos. If I actual come to something that requires thinking it through I do. The people I play with choose not to just look it up and spoil it.

I think some of the problems people have with mmos is they've never taken the time to make lasting friendships that go beyond just the group your with and they're always faced with just random people that hope for the best. Playing with like minded people always makes mmos better. Not having to search them out every new game is a bonus....but like you said it take effort and that's something people never want to put into these games

Pepeq

Well, lets see... so long as there are people that can post on the web, there's no way to stop it.

 

Look at it this way, the people who look up such information on the web are looking for a short cut.  Instead of figuring it out on their own, which is really the objective of these types of games... to discover stuff about your character, it's abilities, the world, et al... they use a cheat sheet.  Yes, it's a cheat sheet.  Everything contained therein could have been discovered in game had you bothered to discover it.  You know, like what happens if I combine these two abilities back to back... or it said to find the red glowing crystal, to the east of the village... all these things can be done without add-ons, the web, et al... it just takes a little time.

 

Over time, people scrapped the exploration part of the game (you know *cough* quests *cough*) in favor of instant gratification.  That's why a world so large as even WoW really seems no larger than a quest hub... you spend so little time in it that it loses it's sense of being massive.  Doesn't help that the developers have GPS locators on the quest objectives.  They themselves have killed the open world along side the players.

 

So in a nutshell... back in the day is just back in the day... it's not today, nor will it be tomorrow.  For good or bad, we're stuck with fast forward auto-enabled.  Kind of like a roller coaster ride... it lasts a minute or two, but you waited in line a good hour or two to get on it.

Quizzical

As I see it, there are three separate issues raised in the original post:

1)  Internet builds make character customization pointless,

2)  Internet maps make exploration pointless, and

3)  Internet solutions make puzzles pointless.

Some people reply with, if you don't like it, don't use it.  But that completely misses the point.  This isn't at all similar to, say, asking if a game should have fast travel or not.  Developers can make travel as fast or as slow as they please with only potentially irate players stopping them.  But developers who want to implement some game mechanics that were done 20 years ago simply can't do so today because Internet lookups destroy the entire mechanic.

A closer analogy is to cheat programs, which like Internet lookups, do things not sanctioned by the game's developers.  There, if you don't like it, don't use it, obviously doesn't work.  Having a game that you would have liked destroyed by cheaters is no fun; simply declining to use the cheats yourself doesn't fix the problem.  Having entire genres disappear because Internet lookups made them trivial is a problem to people who liked such games.  (I'm not actually claiming that using the Internet is cheating here; my point is subtle enough that people who want to miss it will miss it no matter how I explain it.)

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Ultimately, if you want the Internet not to make the three things pointless, what to do about it is very different.  The first point about character customization is actually very solvable today.  What you do is to make it so that strengths of skills aren't hard-coded, but fluctuate based on how commonly the skills are used globally--not just by a particular player.  If there's a build that everyone and his neighbor's dog uses, the skills in it will get nerfed hard and fast and the build will quickly become terrible--without any need for the game designers to manually patch things and before they're even aware that the build was popular.

There are some drawbacks to this, however.  One is that you need developers willing to trust formulas that they write more than insisting on hand-tuning play-balance.  There are good reasons not to trust your formulas to work as intended, too:  bugs can be catastrophic, far more so than a skill just being a little overpowered until the next patch.  Relying on formulas rather than hard-coded skill strengths also makes your code more complicated and harder to understand--which makes it more likely that such bugs will show up.

Another problem is that you may pick a build, and then the build is similar enough to what others commonly that it gets nerfed hard and you have to switch out of it.  In a game with unlimited free respecs along the lines of Guild Wars 1, this isn't so bad.  But if you want to charge players a hefty fee for respecs, this can be a big, big problem.

Still, I think that an awful lot of game developers could pull this off if so inclined.  It's not as radical as you might think:  the crafting material vendors in Guild Wars 1 basically do exactly this, though as a way to determine item prices, not skill strengths.

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The third problem of Internet solutions making puzzles pointless can also be partially worked around by making puzzles whose "solution" is impossible to look up.  Consider, for example, a puzzle that asks you to beat an NPC at a game of chess.  You could, of course, find and download a chess AI and use that to win.  But chess is a widely known game; what if it's a new game that the game made up?  Now you can't just go find a bot to beat that game unless someone writes it for that particular game.

This has drawbacks of its own, of course.  For starters, you're taking up a lot of developer time to code AI to solve the problem themselves.  As soon as a player who is a comparably skilled programmer puts in the same work and posts his solution online, the problem is "solved" and again trivial.  If the game doesn't know what the solution is--or worse, doesn't know for certain that there is a solution--how do you know if the player has solved it?  This does make "solving" the puzzle much harder than an ordinary player posting some tidbit on a wiki, so such puzzles may well last longer.  But it's not a complete solution.

And there are again reasons why maybe you shouldn't.  Let's take the chess example above, and suppose that you couldn't just download some chess bot.  What if you're simply bad at chess?  Do you get stuck there forever, unable to progress?  That's the classic problem with puzzle games.  Indeed, it's a reason why Zelda 3 came with a sealed piece of paper with the solution to several of the game's hardest puzzles.

And there are also serious security issues.  If players have to download software from random other people in order to progress, that's an easy place to hide malware.  How do you know which random players to trust and which are just trying to get malware on your system?  When I posted a paint program in A Tale in the Desert, I posted the source code with it, and said, if you don't trust me, here's the source code and you can compile it yourself.  But reading and understanding source code and then compiling it yourself is far beyond the capability of most players.

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The second problem of the Internet killing exploration is the hardest.  There are really only two ways around it:  having a playerbase so small that no one bothers to post solutions or a very, very heavy emphasis on randomly generated maps.  The former is obviously a problem if the game is trying to make money.

There have been a number of games with random instanced maps, but those aren't really persistent worlds.  Furthermore, I'd argue that the random maps aren't really that random, as the only approach to it that I've seen is to have a handful of tiles or rooms or whatever and piece them together randomly.

If you want a persistent world rather than a lobby game, then what you have to do is to make an enormous number of random maps, so much so as to have an inexhaustible supply.  And then you have to make it so that maps get "used up" so that, even if they're not destroyed, rewards are decreased so that players are discouraged from cherry-picking the map with the best rewards and farming it endlessly.

Still, this comes with drawbacks.  Random maps are never going to be as good as hand-done maps, even if quantity does have a quality all its own.

Furthermore, fast travel is going to be absolutely mandatory.  It's one thing to have to run across three zones to get to the one you want.  It's quite another to have to run across three hundred zones to get one that isn't already claimed and played through.

There's also the issue that, by encouraging players to spread out so much, the game is going to seem pretty much dead, even if avidly played by millions.  You'll typically be the only one in your zone unless you purposely grouped with particular other people.

Cephus404

Originally posted by Fingz

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

I hear what you are saying.  Look at the other side though.  If there were no search engines you'd have to turn to people in game, your guild etc.  This would help build community.

Also, there's really no point putting puzzle like content in game because any puzzle can be solved in an instant with a google search.  If search engines could be blocked, that would open up a whole new set of content to the devs.

 

But you're still trying to force people to do what you want.  What difference does it make if 99% of everyone goes and looks at a website for solutions to puzzles?  That has no bearing on what *YOU* do.  If *YOU* want to solve the puzzles the hard way, go ahead.  What anyone else does doesn't affect you.

And no, there are no more communities, there will be no more communities, that's a thing of the past.  Stop pretending it's ever coming back.

Quizzical

Originally posted by Cephus404

Originally posted by Fingz

Originally posted by DamonVile

So is the hidden question you're asking " how do we force people to play like I want" because you could easily just not look any of that up and do it " the old way"

If people really wanted to be lost in the woods for hours doing corps run after corps run those features would never have been removed. There's something to be said about learning to do things yourself and you do get more satisfaction from the accomplishment but games often went too far and the frustration level of the task far outweighed the reward of actually doing it.

So I don't think the answer is find ways to outsmart the search for easy answers, but to make the tasks more fun so people actually want to figure them out.

I hear what you are saying.  Look at the other side though.  If there were no search engines you'd have to turn to people in game, your guild etc.  This would help build community.

Also, there's really no point putting puzzle like content in game because any puzzle can be solved in an instant with a google search.  If search engines could be blocked, that would open up a whole new set of content to the devs.

 

But you're still trying to force people to do what you want.  What difference does it make if 99% of everyone goes and looks at a website for solutions to puzzles?  That has no bearing on what *YOU* do.  If *YOU* want to solve the puzzles the hard way, go ahead.  What anyone else does doesn't affect you.

And no, there are no more communities, there will be no more communities, that's a thing of the past.  Stop pretending it's ever coming back.

if 99% of players will go look at a web site to "solve" puzzles, then developers won't put them in in the first place.  It's harder to enjoy games that don't exist.