The role of punishment in reward systems

This is a major issue in MMORPGs. In the glory days of Everquest, dying was BAD -- you lost experience, dropping a level and losing abilities if you lost enough, and you had to run back to your corpse to retrieve your gear. People would stash an entire extra set of gear in the bank just for corpse run, and high level characters could make a hefty profit getting corpses back for lower level players who wandered into a bad area. PvP combat was cutthroat and brutal -- you could have items taken off of your corpse if you died. Death was most definitely something to be avoided. But of course, there were inevitable complaints about it being too hard and too dangerous, and things were toned down.

Flash foward to today, and people are using dying as a quick way of traveling in Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, as the penalty for it is almost negligible -- a timed debuff to your skills (that can easily be healed in Warhammer for a few silve pieces) versus getting back quickly to the nearest friendly location. People rush blindly into PvP because there's no penalty outside of a few minutes of inconvenience in getting back to the battle.

So the newer MMORPGs have to pile more and more rewards on, because with there being so little risk in dying, the current rewards are so easily attainable. And that leads to players who wonder what's in it for them instead of just playing because it's fun. Players who race to the level cap a week after the game launches and want to know where their content is.

Vanguard interested me because it planned on making player death meaningful. I'm not asking for the character to be permanently wiped upon dying, but I want death something I want to consciously avoid, not something that I just shrug of as I charge right back into the same situation that got me killed in the first place.

Richard said what I wanted to say. As someone who still plays 'Age of Conan', I'll add that they've done away with the ability to die and rez at the point of your choosing; you now rez at the closest rez point.

It certainly is interesting to be in WoW and to look at a quest or a request for help from someone and say to yourself "What do I get out of this?" I'm constantly asking myself that question while playing.

Extreme or tedious punishment for failure in a game seems to be on the outs, and a lot of complaints are made by "hardcore" gamers. I don't want to argue the definition of hardcore gamer, but seeing as how I've been a gamer since Atari 2600 I think a qualify on some level. I also think that the reason for the lack of extreme difficulty or punishment is because so many gamers were in fact Atari 2600 players.

I saw a study a while back that pegged the majority of gamers in the mid 20-40 year old bracket. Which makes sense, seeing as how we've grown up with games, and now we have the disposable income to play more games now than we did when we had to beg for that one weekend rental. So a lot of game designers are designing around the fact that most gamers are adults, and don't have the time (patience?) to replay something over and over in order to get the most from the game.

We understand that we will die in a game, we all got killed by plenty of mushroom men in Mario, but we don't want to attempt one mission start to finish 5-10-15 times in order to defeat it. We have to get to bed early in order to be at work early, we've got to go grocery shopping, we need to get our kids into bed, we need to balance our checkbook. There's a lot more on the current prime game target's plate than there was in 1985. Or 1995.

Just yesterday there was a patch released to soften the AI for Midnight Club: LA. This is a game that I've wanted to play since release, but the reviews citing its heightened difficulty turned me off. I don't want to play something that will just piss me off. Same reason I never beat Dead Rising. Recently in WoW people have been up in arms how easy the first tier of raiding is, even though there is the promise of higher difficulty raids with future patches. Gamers are bitching about the sidekick in Prince of Persia "preventing" you from dying, but it sounds to me like it's just a better mechanic for the game than a lengthy death scene, reload, start over. Maybe things seem easier because design is better, and we're used to more difficult games. Then Ikaruga comes out and buttfucks us.

Game companies want more people to play their games, and making games irritating will not help their sales figures. Now, I am definitely worried about the (made up word incoming) over-casualization of gaming, because I don't want to have nothing but mini-game collections in 10 years. I still want a challenge like I got from Assassin's Creed. It was easy to pick up and play, but I knew I had to play smart, lest I get my ass handed to me. That's a fair compromise.

I think what Billy is saying is right. I believe (And this is someone who just got back into gaming after effectively 10 years) that the game's focus should be on the content not be on how much of a screaming bitch it is. I think this also is seen by the developers as the amount of investment into games is far higher than what it was. Which would explain the reduction of just horrendous and utterly unplayable crap out there.

And my feeling is that retrogamers are the hipsters of the video game world.

One of the main debates with Warhammer Online right now is why should people bother to do realm vs. realm combat, since it's perceived that the rewards -- both in XP and in loot -- aren't enough incentive. Anyone who dares suggest people do it because it's fun get shouted down pretty harshly.

Same thing in WoW over PVP. They took away free purples from doing a bit of Arena, and some regular battleground PVP. Battlegrounds queues have been much longer (though not as many max level people yet, obviously) and a big part of that is people aren't getting the return on investment they could get by getting mats for epic items. Blizzard put in a more skill based and more difficult system, and people are going to run from it. Kind of sad.

An additional thought/note on MMORPGs: Considering that these are essentially time sinks, it's probably to the game designer's benefit to make the death penalties pretty minor. They don't want to turn off the gamer who gets frustrated easily and will cancel their $15 a month subscription over the fact that they keep getting heavy penalties. Most of the heavy penalties only happen in the higher raiding levels, and by this point a player has already committed a serious investment of time into the game and will be more willing to endure higher levels of punishment to experience a greater challenge.

Difficulty is not "Punishment". I figure difficulty for challenge.

Another point towards why there's not as much crap out there anymore is that game developers and coders and designers all have a couple games under their belts. Employees have been from company to company and established companies tend to have folks now who know how to do their jobs and do it well.

There's a difference between a game being difficult for reasons beyond your control (any game where you can get knocked down a second after you've gotten back on your feet), and a game that capitalizes on the player's mistakes, and hard. That's what I would call punishing difficulty.

Ninja Gaiden's an excellent example of this. Most people just assume the difficulty as inherent, but really, most of the things that will fuck you up the hardest in that game will only do so if you try to be a turtle, blocking in one spot, and waiting for an opening. None of the enemies in that game (save NGII's easy as hell bosses) stand for that shit, and teaching yourself to break that habit borne of so many of the last two gen's far-too-forgiving actioners is the only way to win.

Justin, don't be that person. You know, the Ninja Gaiden apologist (see otis). Screw that game. It is evil and must be destroyed.

There's a difference between avoiding punishing players and eliminating tension altogether. The current PoP sidekick is an example of the latter. Look instead to the dagger in Sands of Time. You had a certain number of reloadable free passes, which could by and large carry you through the most difficult parts of the game. That was an ideal mechanic for a game like PoP. You had the thrill of possible death while exploring, but you had to fuck up pretty seriously to actually see death come to pass.

The instant, inevitable save by the sidekick is more problematic in the handful of combat scenes in the current game. I can take not dying at all while exploring, but the inability to die makes the current battle system entirely flat and tedious. It's way out of balance, all in the interest of not punishing the player.

Russ, what do you think of the buddy system in Far Cry 2? I haven't had a chance to play PoP yet (dying to), but the system there sounds almost identical to Far Cry 2's system. You "fail" (fall off a platform, bullets raining down on you) and a friend shows up and basically does a really quick "reload" and you're back in the game.

I personally loved the Far Cry 2 buddy system, and hoped the PoP system was as similar as it sounds in writing.

Far Cry 2 system is more flexible because your buddies can die and/or you can choose not to use them. The options there keep the game feeling more like a story. The main rescue buddy will save you the first time, which you'll probably need as the game is a lot harder at the outset when you have lousy weapons and no idea how everything is laid out, but after that you need to talk to him to 'reload' his save ability. If you decide you don't want him to pull your ass out of danger, you don't have to have him ready to do it. That's a much more interesting way to organize the game.

Getting your ass shot is a reward in Far Cry 2, if only to see your dude pop bullets out of his arm horribly.

Well this definitely changes PoP for me. I was under the impression that you were protecting your buddy in PoP, and there was a chance of her dying and you failing. She's just there, all mystical and immortal? That's a bit much.

Pardon my ignorance, but if she's mystical and immortal, why isn't she the one jumping and fighting and scaling walls? Might as well cut out the middle man there.

I loved the ever loving fuck out of Fable 2. I only died one time in the entire game though, in the first hour or two of the game, and never again. No time for scars on my pretty son of a bitch.