To ignore the theorycrafting is to retain the skills of a newbie forever. That's basically saying, other people can get better at the game, but I won't. That people wouldn't want to group with someone who doesn't know how to play and wishes not to learn shouldn't be surprising.
Even though I don't want this debate to become one where we discuss the benefits of theorycrafting versus the downsides. Extreme theorycrafting, what most people do, goes way beyond just being able to play your class. This is just the parse people on my server did to determine stun power of augments: http://giline.versus.jp/shiden/stun_e.htm This isn't just gameplay anymore, this is truely making mathematics out of a game and analyse thousands of data points.
Anyway, I hope that MMO will start to consider and look at where this is going and find ways to minimize it's impact. Preventing players from gathering these data points might be a way and was just an idea I had.
I'm not adequately familiar with EQ2 to pick apart what that is saying. Perhaps I should approach the question from the other end. Has anyone ever done anything comparable to that with Solitaire? That's a much older, better known, and more widely played game than EQ2.
The answer is that no, people don't do extensive analyses of Solitaire because they can't. It's simply too complicated of a game. If you were to offer a $1 billion prize to anyone who could provably find the optimal strategy to Solitaire, your prize would probably go unclaimed, even decades later.
The reason that people can do things like that in a lot of MMORPGs is sloppy game design. Companies throw hundreds of skills into a game, and try to derive any gameplay depth from players not knowing which ones are better than others, rather than from properly balancing the skills. That is what makes the worst of the theorycrafting possible, and that is what needs to be stopped.
YOu limit the amount of data that comes through a client and the theorycrafter will become consiracy crafters. They will flood the forums with purposfully false and outrageos statements/rumors in order to make a game developer come clean and release the forumulas
Does have data points in the game include having them say it in the description of the combat ability? So like Lightning causes 14-36 damage and stuns the target.
No, that would be fine I think. Descriptions don't really do that much harm I think, since this is info that's available to everyone and doesn't require you to parse fights. There has to be some way for players to see which items are preferred.
Of course, that's just my idea, anyone is free to change on it.
Like I said, look at what happened with CoH. CoH didnt even give you damage ranges for any attacks but people still figured them out.
There really is no point in trying to hide the information because people will go to great lengths to figure it out. All you would accomplish in the end is delaying it.
Actually the best example of obsessive theory crafting ever is probably Diablo 2. Im still amazed at the numbers people came up with in D2.
I think we can agree that numbers aren't the fuel behind theorycrafting. Sure, having exact numbers certainly scales up the extent to which character builds/equip/skill rotations can be fleshed out in someone's spreadsheet, but by our very nature we (and by we, I mean diehard theorycrafters) will run tests and determine results based on whatever information we can glean from the client program, even if damage numbers are hidden. This includes animations, health/mana bars, time spent doing x action, and whatever else is deemed useful in proving or disproving their hypothesis.
In short, hiding numbers will not stop the practice of theorycrafting. If anything, I can see such a thing hampering your average player by not allowing him to see how his avatar is enhanced or debilitated by potential equipment upgrades, certain "buff" spells, etc.
Now, let me be very clear in that I only support theorycrafting for endgame content. By this, I mean when someone tells me "you need X armor, Y talent points in this tree, and Z user interface mod before we can use you in our raiding party to defeat W boss" I can agree with this because at that point every little bit helps. Before that level, however, entry to parties should be base moreso upon "Do you know how to play your class? Do you have pretty current gear for your level?", which should become obvious after playing with them for a short amount of time; none of this "You don't have X epic weapon, you can't come along to defeat twinkle-toed gnoll". That kind of attitude is just ridiculous, and THAT is the kind of thing MMO designers, IMO, should remember as a tertiary consideration to avoid when designing their game.
The only model of theory crafting in any game that I've played that I found to be diverse enough to be an actual element of the game beyond simple "cloning" of the perfect build was in Anarchy Online. The process of actually implementing the theory crafting relied on so many factors and granted such huge rewards for successfully accomplishing it that "twinking" became an artform.
If theory crafting must remain in the game or WILL remain in the game no mater what due to the simple fact that everything can be boiled down to a mathematical equation, then I wish it could be similar in scope to "twinking" in AO. Unfortunately the biggest thing that absolutely kills TC for me in many games now is the ability to do it with real cash instead of real brains, real luck and real determination. I agree that TC is almost completely unavoidable. I just wish if we have to tolerate it then it should become a more diverse and difficult aspect of the games rather than an unavoidable, mundane pitfall that we must fall into or utterly fail in being competitive.
The only model of theory crafting in any game that I've played that I found to be diverse enough to be an actual element of the game beyond simple "cloning" of the perfect build was in Anarchy Online. The process of actually implementing the theory crafting relied on so many factors and granted such huge rewards for successfully accomplishing it that "twinking" became an artform. If theory crafting must remain in the game or WILL remain in the game no mater what due to the simple fact that everything can be boiled down to a mathematical equation, then I wish it could be similar in scope to "twinking" in AO. Unfortunately the biggest thing that absolutely kills TC for me in many games now is the ability to do it with real cash instead of real brains, real luck and real determination. I agree that TC is almost completely unavoidable. I just wish if we have to tolerate it then it should become a more diverse and difficult aspect of the games rather than an unavoidable, mundane pitfall that we must fall into or utterly fail in being competitive.
Nod I agree.
I don't know if it's completely avoidable, but I know you can somehow restrain it though. If players have to jump through a lot of hoops to get their data points I'm sure some will be discouraged enough to try it. The way the actual game handles stats matters too I think, the more your stats start to matter, the more benefit you can get out of theorycrafting usually.
Nod I agree. I don't know if it's completely avoidable, but I know you can somehow restrain it though. If players have to jump through a lot of hoops to get their data points I'm sure some will be discouraged enough to try it. The way the actual game handles stats matters too I think, the more your stats start to matter, the more benefit you can get out of theorycrafting usually.
In order to prevent those inclined to reverse engineer formulas from doing so, you have to give little enough feedback that even after a battle is over, an average player hasn't the slightest clue why he won or lost. If you're going to do that, you might as well make winning purely luck-based, in which case that's not much of a game.
Originally posted by Quizzical In order to prevent those inclined to reverse engineer formulas from doing so, you have to give little enough feedback that even after a battle is over, an average player hasn't the slightest clue why he won or lost. If you're going to do that, you might as well make winning purely luck-based, in which case that's not much of a game.
There's other ways though. Every server does tic/toc updates, meaning that an update gets a Tic and the Toc updates the client. It happens every X seconds.
Assume you don't show actual DPS numbers. And say you are in a raid, normally each member gets to see their individual data on a Toc. But it's probably easy to combine the data of the whole raid's DPS and release it on a Toc by showing the difference in health on the health bar of the monster. That way you can't distinguish the DPS from one person to the next. There's a lot more way you could start hiding data I think.
What if you start hiding combat numbers to the client? Only health bars will be shown. What if MMO start hiding your combat numbers and the damage numbers are just simply not shown? The reverse could also be done with incoming mob DPS.
It could potentially stop a good amount of DPS theorycrafting and you would still see the impact of your DPS by the mob's health bar, you would just be enable to parse DPS numbers. How would you feel about not being able to see the actual numbers? Would you be ok with that if it stopped DPS theocrafting? Would there be any downsides I didn't think about? Thanks.
////theorycrafting: mathematically analyse or parse gameplay or data points///// //// disclaimer: I'm very opposed to theorycrafting and the impact it has on gaming, especially MMO. Even though I did a ton of theorycrafting myself it wasn't until I realised what benefits it gave our guild that it started to become less fun because you know certain things you shouldn't know. Now you know my motive. //// Anyway, this isn't a discussion about right or wrong, this is just an idea I had, simple.
I understand the motivation. Howver, IMO the only thing you accomplish by hiding numbers from players is making the majority more frustrated. I don't think this approach can ever successfully ad fun to the game.
First, theorcrafting != there is always one best build. Take WOW mage as an example. Both arcane & Frostfire builds can be on top of DPS but it depends on the length of the fight (because of CD use and mana issues).
And in fact, I enjoy theorcrafting. It helps to make my char better and i like to be on top of DPS charts (well you can't even have DPS charts without the numbers). Theocrafting can be interesting in its own right. It is basically a multidimensional optimization problem wth multiple scenarios.
The beauty is that you can have a diff solution for a diff scenario. So if you raid with one kind of class mix, one solution is better. If you raid with another class mix, another solution is better. It also depends on the fight, and PvE and PvP are completley different.
Oh, hide the numbers won't help as mentioned before. It is easy to have add-ons, or reverse engineer the informaiton. You just add statistical noise which people will defeat by repeated experimentation.
Irony is we whine if an MMO doesn't offer a big variety of items for "customisation" or "uniqueness" but we gladly boil down to a certain set + weapon and vendor all the rest and occasionally flaming people/gkicking them or just call them names if they go outside the box and use them
... So I don't understand why the game shouldnt just have 10 weapons being tiered 1 to 10 in order of performance
So why should a WoW raid have 5 different weapons a rogue can use? Let's say swords are the most efficient spec and the rotation requires a 2.6 main hand and a 1.40 offhand just put those 2 weapons in the raid, no daggers, or maces.
If you have 5 raids then you should have 10 swords in the whole level 80 endgame
(my example could be outdated, i retired from WoW )
Don't know what you guys think but that sucks and is depressing. However, it's what it boils down due to theorycrafting. The rest of the weapons are there for database listing and vendoring I guess...
The dilemna is that it can actually be rather frustrating if you don't receive enough information to make informed decisions about your character but if you give players enough information it is inevitable that some will take theorycrafting to it's extreme, a nerdquest to solve the game. And no game really benefits from being solved.
I guess I don't really see restricting information as an good solution because I can't see how you can prevent extreme theorycrafting without also affecting a player's ability to improve his character. Its just one of those situations where the cure is as bad as the disease.
I think a possible answer, if there is one, is a fresh approach to AI and encounter scripts so that there is less emphasis on TPS/DPS and greater importance placed on more esoteric skills such as survivability, versatility, awareness of surroundings, ability to react to unforeseen circumstances etc etc.
Some of the most enjoyable fights i've had in MMOs have been the result of things not going to plan, eg a bad pull, an unexpected patrol or the main tank dying during the fight. The ability of a group to freestyle it's way through these kinds of situations is, perhaps, a truer test of skill than simply sheeping the Star and nuking the Skull with an immaculately theorycrafted damage rotation.
In WoW, I guess Archimonde is a reasonable example of the kind of encounter I am talking about. The DPS requirements for that fight are actually quite modest but its a nightmare if you don't have players who are aware of their surroundings and can anticipate danger. No amount of theorycrafting will prevent them from wiping you.
Originally posted by Quizzical In order to prevent those inclined to reverse engineer formulas from doing so, you have to give little enough feedback that even after a battle is over, an average player hasn't the slightest clue why he won or lost. If you're going to do that, you might as well make winning purely luck-based, in which case that's not much of a game.
There's other ways though. Every server does tic/toc updates, meaning that an update gets a Tic and the Toc updates the client. It happens every X seconds.
Assume you don't show actual DPS numbers. And say you are in a raid, normally each member gets to see their individual data on a Toc. But it's probably easy to combine the data of the whole raid's DPS and release it on a Toc by showing the difference in health on the health bar of the monster. That way you can't distinguish the DPS from one person to the next. There's a lot more way you could start hiding data I think.
Want to see how much DPS player X does? Have him attack one mob by himself, with adequate healing backing him up to be able to kill it. Get a stopwatch and time how long it takes for the mob to die. In order to prevent that from working, you need to avoid telling players when a mob is dead.
Originally posted by Quizzical Originally posted by Waterlily Originally posted by Quizzical In order to prevent those inclined to reverse engineer formulas from doing so, you have to give little enough feedback that even after a battle is over, an average player hasn't the slightest clue why he won or lost. If you're going to do that, you might as well make winning purely luck-based, in which case that's not much of a game.
There's other ways though. Every server does tic/toc updates, meaning that an update gets a Tic and the Toc updates the client. It happens every X seconds. Assume you don't show actual DPS numbers. And say you are in a raid, normally each member gets to see their individual data on a Toc. But it's probably easy to combine the data of the whole raid's DPS and release it on a Toc by showing the difference in health on the health bar of the monster. That way you can't distinguish the DPS from one person to the next. There's a lot more way you could start hiding data I think.
Want to see how much DPS player X does? Have him attack one mob by himself, with adequate healing backing him up to be able to kill it. Get a stopwatch and time how long it takes for the mob to die. In order to prevent that from working, you need to avoid telling players when a mob is dead.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. There really isn't anyway to remove theory crafting without making the game very frustrating for everyone. There needs to be a way to measure how you are doing anyway or else you are just pushing buttons and looking at pictures.
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1) Building on what quiz has said, maybe one solution is to make the game sufficiently complex that it can not be mathematically solved, but not so complex that it appears totally arbitrary. It must played "intuitively." Winning the game becomes more of an art, and less of a science.
2) alternatively, the real problem is a social one. The community expects you to conform to the "solutions" to the game, and failure will result in you being ostrasized, with noone to play with. Solution? Make more robust community building tools so that people who hate theorycraft can escape the general population and find and play with each other.
hmm two thoughts: 1) Building on what quiz has said, maybe one solution is to make the game sufficiently complex that it can not be mathematically solved, but not so complex that it appears totally arbitrary. It must played "intuitively." Winning the game becomes more of an art, and less of a science. 2) alternatively, the real problem is a social one. The community expects you to conform to the "solutions" to the game, and failure will result in you being ostrasized, with noone to play with. Solution? Make more robust community building tools so that people who hate theorycraft can escape the general population and find and play with each other.
Could you translate taht into game mechanics? It sounds like you said "make it really good". How?
It's not necessarily make it better, per se, just less trivial, more dynamic. More need to adapt to changing environment.
well a couple small examples off the top of my head:
1. In Wizard101 (and other card deck based games), you have to adapt to whatever actual hand you have drawn. You can't have one static strategy you take to every single fight, because you don't draw the same cards every time. Now, wizard101 overall was too simple for me, but this is a step in the right direction of adding more complexity.
2. In mabinogi, you gain triple mana regeneration at night. So magic-heavy strategies are favored at night, while magic-light strategies are favored in the day. By itself this is not enough to make a game terribly complex, but little things like this encourage one to adapt to circumstances.
3. In puzzle pirates, they use time honored puzzles that have a good long learning curve (moment to learn, lifetime to master)
4. Games that give a heavy bonus to having a partner, but don't have excessively hard-coded class requirements. These can help encourage you to grab a random partner to help you do things, but you might need to adapt to your partner's strange build or even crummy gameplay. The soft classes restrictions allow any partner to do, and give you a variety of tools to adapt to what your partner brings to the table. Class examples for me are CoH radiation or dark defenders (built a certain way) and LOTRO loremasters and burglars. These classes are kinda omni jack-of-all-trades characters. If partner needs healing, you can heal. If they need DPS, you can DPS, if a tank, you render the monsters helpless so you can both tank. If they use a wierd strategy, you have a long list of various powers to chose from. If your partner kinda sucks, you can play conservatively. If you partner is 1337, you can try for tricky high-payoff strategies.
Could you translate taht into game mechanics? It sounds like you said "make it really good". How?
Have players do actions where the problem of finding the optimal approach is NP complete. There are a thousand or so known NP complete problems to pick from. Gameplay couldn't consist merely of solving a particular problem, of course, but you could build structure on top of it while still leaving it such that finding the single best solution would require solving the problem.
Perhaps the most famous NP complete problem is the travelling salesman problem. A salesman wants to visit a bunch of cities once each, and then return home. He knows how long it takes him to travel between any possible pair of cities. He wants to spend as little time travelling as possible. In what order should he visit the cities?
Pathfinding problems of that sort tend to be things that players are better at than computers, because players can use intuition and computers can't--and there's no known good way to do it without intuition. Do the travelling salesman problem with a hundred cities and a human can pick out a pretty good route just by going from one city to another that is near it each time, and doing one area of the map entirely before moving on to another. For a computer to pick out the best approach would be all but impossible, and I'm not sure if the algorithms to even pick a pretty good approach work all that well.
I think its stupid, and places like elitist jerks really stupid. I mean why waste that much time on a game. Why do numbers matter that much and the whole min/max thing imo ruins mmos.
Hold on Snow Leopard, imma let you finish, but Windows had one of the best operating systems of all time.
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I hate min/maxing it totally ruins a game when you stop thinking about playing the game and start thinking about the perfect "build".
If there was a way to explain that weapon X was better than weapon Y without it leading to min/maxing it'd be wonderful. I can't see how though. People would probably pull out a stopwatch and say "monster Z died in 14 seconds with weapon X, but 14.7 seconds with weapon P"
There is one thing I really don't get. The developers have all the internal numbers. So, why is theorycrafting so worthwhile in so many games? If game design is properly balanced, then the benefits of theorycrafting should be minimal, right?
I've never done hard core theorycrafting, but I've been shocked at how imbalanced the numbers are in so many games. Decreasing the rewards for theorycrafting by ensuring proper internal balance seems the best solution to me. When you have games where theorycrafting can produce significant benefits, of course it's going to be a problem.
There is one thing I really don't get. The developers have all the internal numbers. So, why is theorycrafting so worthwhile in so many games? If game design is properly balanced, then the benefits of theorycrafting should be minimal, right? I've never done hard core theorycrafting, but I've been shocked at how imbalanced the numbers are in so many games. Decreasing the rewards for theorycrafting by ensuring proper internal balance seems the best solution to me. When you have games where theorycrafting can produce significant benefits, of course it's going to be a problem.
I think because if everything was perfectly balance it would remove the purpose of making a choice. Weapons should do different amounts of damage and have different benefits. The problem is someone somewhere isn't satisfied with that and tries to find someway to be the best possible and breaks out the sliderule. People see one guy dominating and then every one of them wants to do it. It happened in PnP D&D and it happens here.
There is one thing I really don't get. The developers have all the internal numbers. So, why is theorycrafting so worthwhile in so many games? If game design is properly balanced, then the benefits of theorycrafting should be minimal, right? I've never done hard core theorycrafting, but I've been shocked at how imbalanced the numbers are in so many games. Decreasing the rewards for theorycrafting by ensuring proper internal balance seems the best solution to me. When you have games where theorycrafting can produce significant benefits, of course it's going to be a problem.
There are two entirely different issues here. One is that some weapons really are stronger than others. The other is that some pairs of weapons are different, but not necessarily stronger than the other. (Or replace weapons by various armor pieces, spells, etc.)
On the former, some players like their characters to get stronger as they play. That requires having a cavalcade of increasingly powerful weapons for players to get, so that they can frequently upgrade their existing weapon to something stronger. In that case, the reasons why one weapon must be unambiguously better than another are pretty obvious.
The other issue is that there are sets of weapons that are not comparable to each other in strength. One weapon is better in one circumstance, and a different weapon is better in another circumstance. I like it when games take that approach, so that you have to actually think about what you're doing, rather than blindly charge ahead and do the same thing you've always done.
Does that create the opportunity for some theorycrafting? Yes, but it also adds depth to the game. Having some depth to your combat is a good thing. Otherwise you're basically a human trying to play the game like a bot.
I hate min/maxing it totally ruins a game when you stop thinking about playing the game and start thinking about the perfect "build". If there was a way to explain that weapon X was better than weapon Y without it leading to min/maxing it'd be wonderful. I can't see how though. People would probably pull out a stopwatch and say "monster Z died in 14 seconds with weapon X, but 14.7 seconds with weapon P"
Min/maxing does NOT ruin a game. It adds to the fun. We are problem solving animals and we find satisfaction of finding a good solution.
Comments
Even though I don't want this debate to become one where we discuss the benefits of theorycrafting versus the downsides. Extreme theorycrafting, what most people do, goes way beyond just being able to play your class. This is just the parse people on my server did to determine stun power of augments: http://giline.versus.jp/shiden/stun_e.htm This isn't just gameplay anymore, this is truely making mathematics out of a game and analyse thousands of data points.
Anyway, I hope that MMO will start to consider and look at where this is going and find ways to minimize it's impact. Preventing players from gathering these data points might be a way and was just an idea I had.
I'm not adequately familiar with EQ2 to pick apart what that is saying. Perhaps I should approach the question from the other end. Has anyone ever done anything comparable to that with Solitaire? That's a much older, better known, and more widely played game than EQ2.
The answer is that no, people don't do extensive analyses of Solitaire because they can't. It's simply too complicated of a game. If you were to offer a $1 billion prize to anyone who could provably find the optimal strategy to Solitaire, your prize would probably go unclaimed, even decades later.
The reason that people can do things like that in a lot of MMORPGs is sloppy game design. Companies throw hundreds of skills into a game, and try to derive any gameplay depth from players not knowing which ones are better than others, rather than from properly balancing the skills. That is what makes the worst of the theorycrafting possible, and that is what needs to be stopped.
YOu limit the amount of data that comes through a client and the theorycrafter will become consiracy crafters. They will flood the forums with purposfully false and outrageos statements/rumors in order to make a game developer come clean and release the forumulas
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
No, that would be fine I think. Descriptions don't really do that much harm I think, since this is info that's available to everyone and doesn't require you to parse fights. There has to be some way for players to see which items are preferred.
Of course, that's just my idea, anyone is free to change on it.
Like I said, look at what happened with CoH. CoH didnt even give you damage ranges for any attacks but people still figured them out.
There really is no point in trying to hide the information because people will go to great lengths to figure it out. All you would accomplish in the end is delaying it.
Actually the best example of obsessive theory crafting ever is probably Diablo 2. Im still amazed at the numbers people came up with in D2.
I think we can agree that numbers aren't the fuel behind theorycrafting. Sure, having exact numbers certainly scales up the extent to which character builds/equip/skill rotations can be fleshed out in someone's spreadsheet, but by our very nature we (and by we, I mean diehard theorycrafters) will run tests and determine results based on whatever information we can glean from the client program, even if damage numbers are hidden. This includes animations, health/mana bars, time spent doing x action, and whatever else is deemed useful in proving or disproving their hypothesis.
In short, hiding numbers will not stop the practice of theorycrafting. If anything, I can see such a thing hampering your average player by not allowing him to see how his avatar is enhanced or debilitated by potential equipment upgrades, certain "buff" spells, etc.
Now, let me be very clear in that I only support theorycrafting for endgame content. By this, I mean when someone tells me "you need X armor, Y talent points in this tree, and Z user interface mod before we can use you in our raiding party to defeat W boss" I can agree with this because at that point every little bit helps. Before that level, however, entry to parties should be base moreso upon "Do you know how to play your class? Do you have pretty current gear for your level?", which should become obvious after playing with them for a short amount of time; none of this "You don't have X epic weapon, you can't come along to defeat twinkle-toed gnoll". That kind of attitude is just ridiculous, and THAT is the kind of thing MMO designers, IMO, should remember as a tertiary consideration to avoid when designing their game.
^^my opinion.
If you don't want players to discriminate against those with inferior gear, then don't play games where some players have inferior gear.
The only model of theory crafting in any game that I've played that I found to be diverse enough to be an actual element of the game beyond simple "cloning" of the perfect build was in Anarchy Online. The process of actually implementing the theory crafting relied on so many factors and granted such huge rewards for successfully accomplishing it that "twinking" became an artform.
If theory crafting must remain in the game or WILL remain in the game no mater what due to the simple fact that everything can be boiled down to a mathematical equation, then I wish it could be similar in scope to "twinking" in AO. Unfortunately the biggest thing that absolutely kills TC for me in many games now is the ability to do it with real cash instead of real brains, real luck and real determination. I agree that TC is almost completely unavoidable. I just wish if we have to tolerate it then it should become a more diverse and difficult aspect of the games rather than an unavoidable, mundane pitfall that we must fall into or utterly fail in being competitive.
Nod I agree.
I don't know if it's completely avoidable, but I know you can somehow restrain it though. If players have to jump through a lot of hoops to get their data points I'm sure some will be discouraged enough to try it. The way the actual game handles stats matters too I think, the more your stats start to matter, the more benefit you can get out of theorycrafting usually.
In order to prevent those inclined to reverse engineer formulas from doing so, you have to give little enough feedback that even after a battle is over, an average player hasn't the slightest clue why he won or lost. If you're going to do that, you might as well make winning purely luck-based, in which case that's not much of a game.
There's other ways though. Every server does tic/toc updates, meaning that an update gets a Tic and the Toc updates the client. It happens every X seconds.
Assume you don't show actual DPS numbers. And say you are in a raid, normally each member gets to see their individual data on a Toc. But it's probably easy to combine the data of the whole raid's DPS and release it on a Toc by showing the difference in health on the health bar of the monster. That way you can't distinguish the DPS from one person to the next. There's a lot more way you could start hiding data I think.
I understand the motivation. Howver, IMO the only thing you accomplish by hiding numbers from players is making the majority more frustrated. I don't think this approach can ever successfully ad fun to the game.
First, theorcrafting != there is always one best build. Take WOW mage as an example. Both arcane & Frostfire builds can be on top of DPS but it depends on the length of the fight (because of CD use and mana issues).
And in fact, I enjoy theorcrafting. It helps to make my char better and i like to be on top of DPS charts (well you can't even have DPS charts without the numbers). Theocrafting can be interesting in its own right. It is basically a multidimensional optimization problem wth multiple scenarios.
The beauty is that you can have a diff solution for a diff scenario. So if you raid with one kind of class mix, one solution is better. If you raid with another class mix, another solution is better. It also depends on the fight, and PvE and PvP are completley different.
Oh, hide the numbers won't help as mentioned before. It is easy to have add-ons, or reverse engineer the informaiton. You just add statistical noise which people will defeat by repeated experimentation.
Irony is we whine if an MMO doesn't offer a big variety of items for "customisation" or "uniqueness" but we gladly boil down to a certain set + weapon and vendor all the rest and occasionally flaming people/gkicking them or just call them names if they go outside the box and use them
... So I don't understand why the game shouldnt just have 10 weapons being tiered 1 to 10 in order of performance
So why should a WoW raid have 5 different weapons a rogue can use? Let's say swords are the most efficient spec and the rotation requires a 2.6 main hand and a 1.40 offhand just put those 2 weapons in the raid, no daggers, or maces.
If you have 5 raids then you should have 10 swords in the whole level 80 endgame
(my example could be outdated, i retired from WoW
)
Don't know what you guys think but that sucks and is depressing. However, it's what it boils down due to theorycrafting. The rest of the weapons are there for database listing and vendoring I guess...
The dilemna is that it can actually be rather frustrating if you don't receive enough information to make informed decisions about your character but if you give players enough information it is inevitable that some will take theorycrafting to it's extreme, a nerdquest to solve the game. And no game really benefits from being solved.
I guess I don't really see restricting information as an good solution because I can't see how you can prevent extreme theorycrafting without also affecting a player's ability to improve his character. Its just one of those situations where the cure is as bad as the disease.
I think a possible answer, if there is one, is a fresh approach to AI and encounter scripts so that there is less emphasis on TPS/DPS and greater importance placed on more esoteric skills such as survivability, versatility, awareness of surroundings, ability to react to unforeseen circumstances etc etc.
Some of the most enjoyable fights i've had in MMOs have been the result of things not going to plan, eg a bad pull, an unexpected patrol or the main tank dying during the fight. The ability of a group to freestyle it's way through these kinds of situations is, perhaps, a truer test of skill than simply sheeping the Star and nuking the Skull with an immaculately theorycrafted damage rotation.
In WoW, I guess Archimonde is a reasonable example of the kind of encounter I am talking about. The DPS requirements for that fight are actually quite modest but its a nightmare if you don't have players who are aware of their surroundings and can anticipate danger. No amount of theorycrafting will prevent them from wiping you.
There's other ways though. Every server does tic/toc updates, meaning that an update gets a Tic and the Toc updates the client. It happens every X seconds.
Assume you don't show actual DPS numbers. And say you are in a raid, normally each member gets to see their individual data on a Toc. But it's probably easy to combine the data of the whole raid's DPS and release it on a Toc by showing the difference in health on the health bar of the monster. That way you can't distinguish the DPS from one person to the next. There's a lot more way you could start hiding data I think.
Want to see how much DPS player X does? Have him attack one mob by himself, with adequate healing backing him up to be able to kill it. Get a stopwatch and time how long it takes for the mob to die. In order to prevent that from working, you need to avoid telling players when a mob is dead.
There's other ways though. Every server does tic/toc updates, meaning that an update gets a Tic and the Toc updates the client. It happens every X seconds.
Assume you don't show actual DPS numbers. And say you are in a raid, normally each member gets to see their individual data on a Toc. But it's probably easy to combine the data of the whole raid's DPS and release it on a Toc by showing the difference in health on the health bar of the monster. That way you can't distinguish the DPS from one person to the next. There's a lot more way you could start hiding data I think.
Want to see how much DPS player X does? Have him attack one mob by himself, with adequate healing backing him up to be able to kill it. Get a stopwatch and time how long it takes for the mob to die. In order to prevent that from working, you need to avoid telling players when a mob is dead.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. There really isn't anyway to remove theory crafting without making the game very frustrating for everyone. There needs to be a way to measure how you are doing anyway or else you are just pushing buttons and looking at pictures.
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hmm two thoughts:
1) Building on what quiz has said, maybe one solution is to make the game sufficiently complex that it can not be mathematically solved, but not so complex that it appears totally arbitrary. It must played "intuitively." Winning the game becomes more of an art, and less of a science.
2) alternatively, the real problem is a social one. The community expects you to conform to the "solutions" to the game, and failure will result in you being ostrasized, with noone to play with. Solution? Make more robust community building tools so that people who hate theorycraft can escape the general population and find and play with each other.
Could you translate taht into game mechanics? It sounds like you said "make it really good". How?
It's not necessarily make it better, per se, just less trivial, more dynamic. More need to adapt to changing environment.
well a couple small examples off the top of my head:
1. In Wizard101 (and other card deck based games), you have to adapt to whatever actual hand you have drawn. You can't have one static strategy you take to every single fight, because you don't draw the same cards every time. Now, wizard101 overall was too simple for me, but this is a step in the right direction of adding more complexity.
2. In mabinogi, you gain triple mana regeneration at night. So magic-heavy strategies are favored at night, while magic-light strategies are favored in the day. By itself this is not enough to make a game terribly complex, but little things like this encourage one to adapt to circumstances.
3. In puzzle pirates, they use time honored puzzles that have a good long learning curve (moment to learn, lifetime to master)
4. Games that give a heavy bonus to having a partner, but don't have excessively hard-coded class requirements. These can help encourage you to grab a random partner to help you do things, but you might need to adapt to your partner's strange build or even crummy gameplay. The soft classes restrictions allow any partner to do, and give you a variety of tools to adapt to what your partner brings to the table. Class examples for me are CoH radiation or dark defenders (built a certain way) and LOTRO loremasters and burglars. These classes are kinda omni jack-of-all-trades characters. If partner needs healing, you can heal. If they need DPS, you can DPS, if a tank, you render the monsters helpless so you can both tank. If they use a wierd strategy, you have a long list of various powers to chose from. If your partner kinda sucks, you can play conservatively. If you partner is 1337, you can try for tricky high-payoff strategies.
Have players do actions where the problem of finding the optimal approach is NP complete. There are a thousand or so known NP complete problems to pick from. Gameplay couldn't consist merely of solving a particular problem, of course, but you could build structure on top of it while still leaving it such that finding the single best solution would require solving the problem.
Perhaps the most famous NP complete problem is the travelling salesman problem. A salesman wants to visit a bunch of cities once each, and then return home. He knows how long it takes him to travel between any possible pair of cities. He wants to spend as little time travelling as possible. In what order should he visit the cities?
Pathfinding problems of that sort tend to be things that players are better at than computers, because players can use intuition and computers can't--and there's no known good way to do it without intuition. Do the travelling salesman problem with a hundred cities and a human can pick out a pretty good route just by going from one city to another that is near it each time, and doing one area of the map entirely before moving on to another. For a computer to pick out the best approach would be all but impossible, and I'm not sure if the algorithms to even pick a pretty good approach work all that well.
I think its stupid, and places like elitist jerks really stupid. I mean why waste that much time on a game. Why do numbers matter that much and the whole min/max thing imo ruins mmos.
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I hate min/maxing it totally ruins a game when you stop thinking about playing the game and start thinking about the perfect "build".
If there was a way to explain that weapon X was better than weapon Y without it leading to min/maxing it'd be wonderful. I can't see how though. People would probably pull out a stopwatch and say "monster Z died in 14 seconds with weapon X, but 14.7 seconds with weapon P"
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There is one thing I really don't get. The developers have all the internal numbers. So, why is theorycrafting so worthwhile in so many games? If game design is properly balanced, then the benefits of theorycrafting should be minimal, right?
I've never done hard core theorycrafting, but I've been shocked at how imbalanced the numbers are in so many games. Decreasing the rewards for theorycrafting by ensuring proper internal balance seems the best solution to me. When you have games where theorycrafting can produce significant benefits, of course it's going to be a problem.
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I think because if everything was perfectly balance it would remove the purpose of making a choice. Weapons should do different amounts of damage and have different benefits. The problem is someone somewhere isn't satisfied with that and tries to find someway to be the best possible and breaks out the sliderule. People see one guy dominating and then every one of them wants to do it. It happened in PnP D&D and it happens here.
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There are two entirely different issues here. One is that some weapons really are stronger than others. The other is that some pairs of weapons are different, but not necessarily stronger than the other. (Or replace weapons by various armor pieces, spells, etc.)
On the former, some players like their characters to get stronger as they play. That requires having a cavalcade of increasingly powerful weapons for players to get, so that they can frequently upgrade their existing weapon to something stronger. In that case, the reasons why one weapon must be unambiguously better than another are pretty obvious.
The other issue is that there are sets of weapons that are not comparable to each other in strength. One weapon is better in one circumstance, and a different weapon is better in another circumstance. I like it when games take that approach, so that you have to actually think about what you're doing, rather than blindly charge ahead and do the same thing you've always done.
Does that create the opportunity for some theorycrafting? Yes, but it also adds depth to the game. Having some depth to your combat is a good thing. Otherwise you're basically a human trying to play the game like a bot.
Min/maxing does NOT ruin a game. It adds to the fun. We are problem solving animals and we find satisfaction of finding a good solution.
Min/Maxing is part of the game. Accept it.