Design Blog

Sunday, August 16, 2009

The Problem With PvP

I've been a fan of fighting games (especially Guilty Gear) for a while and now that I'm working on Guild Wars I find that there are a lot of parallels in terms of how the players approach the games and how new players get into them. After a bit more analysis I found that the reason for this seems to be a core of understanding the nature of competitive play.

To put this idea simply, it's that "PvP, by its nature, is designed to reject potential new players."

An adendum to this is: "The rejection rate of new players will increase with the game's lifetime."

Now, by PvP in this case I'm refering to any game which has direct competition between players based on skill. Fighting games are the purest example of this, but MMOs that have battlegrounds and balanced tournaments as well as sports games. However this also extends to just about every other method of playful competition including real world sports. I think in general the idea that competative activities can be hard to get into is obvious, but games have an additional layer to them.

Here is the process as I see it:

Stage 1: The Level Playing Field

In any PvP game that is first introduced, all new players start at the same skill level. Any new player has just about any chance to win as any other player. Obviously some players will grasp the rules of the game better than others and perform better, but in general at this point there exist no high level strategy of techniques and players work with simply their normal understanding of the rule set.

In fighting games, this is the absolute beginner stage where players mash buttons in an attempt to win.

Stage 2: Complexities Emerge

After a certain amount of time in the game a portion of players start to break off as "skilled" and have mastered all of the low level ideas of the game (punching, jumping, dashing, etc), and move onto developing more complex strategies and techniques. For fighting games this takes the form of things like wakeup games, high/low mixups, and intentionally wiffed moves.

At this point players who have not grasped these aspects of the game begin to lose more often. This is the stage at which you start to see complex behaviors develop, as designers, I think this is something we need to design into our base mechanics so that the game can reach this next level.

Stage 3: The Metagame

The metagame refers to the game that exists outside of the game. Generally this refers to elements of competative play which become determined by players rather than the designers. If a certain strategy or combo is seen as effective then it will start to be duplicated. The differece between competative players and non-competative players is that competative players will actively seek out the most efficient method for winning, even if it is less fun to play and especially if it is easier to execute for its effectiveness.

This is when specialized player terms begin to develop in a game. Game specific elements such as Wave Dashing, Roll Canceling and Burst Baiting start to show up at this time as a result of player experimentation and drive for efficiency. Generally at this level the true level of balance that the designer has achieved will become apparent.

This stage is also the one at which a barrier to entry becomes apparent. While competative players who have been playing since the beginning have gotten to the point where the previous low level elements have become simple, new players now have an even higher skill and knowledge bar to attain to become competative. This is the level at which new players start to be detered, due to the difficulty of learning everything as well as the low chance of winning against players that understand the metagame well.

Stage 4: The Slippery Slope

The final stage of PvP games comes when the influx of new players trickles to a halt or at least a slow drip. At this point new players are generally turned off from attempting this game due to the high time commitment required to compete on an even level with veteran players. The conundrum is that you have designed your game to be balanced, then this is exactly what should happen. But the problem is that if new players lose 90% of their matches or more because the game is filled with veteran players then the game has sealed its own fate by locking out any new players.

Even well designed PvP style games begin to decline at this point, and to some extent that's okay. No game is meant to last forever, but for many companies who produce these games it's valuable to be able to keep selling copies as long as possible between releases.

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So what can be done to prevent this kind of thing? Looking at some real world examples we can see a few solutions. Real life sports such as basketball and baseball separated players into leagues of relative skill levels. Even though NBA players would easily crush junior high basketball teams there are systems set up so that they only play people at their own skill level. Similar to this games sometimes use a ranking system to make sure that new players are not matched up with players of a higher skill level. This is a great solution and works in a lot of situations for many games since it allows new players to start out the game in an environment where their chances to win are approximately 50/50, and the large barrier of time to develop skills can proceed at its own pace. Players in these kinds of systems can choose to quit whenever they feel like it if the competition becomes too difficult.

But skill discrepancies can still cause problems even in these kinds of systems. Skilled players can often have a difficult time getting their friends to join them due to the skill barrier. If you prevent skilled players from dropping down levels to play with their friends then the system itself becomes a barrier to players. Similarly the ability to measure a player's skill level becomes difficult in video games as well, since players can simply buy another account or throw matches in order to get a low rank again. If too many players engage in this behavior then the ranking system becomes irrelavent since it does not reflect the skill level of the players anymore.

At the moment, there really isn't an obvious catch-all solution for the problems, and to some extent the solutions need to be developed to the case at hand. This somewhat extends into my ideas about game design patterns, but that can wait for another day.

Labels: design philosophy, game mechanics, guild wars, guilty gear, PvP

posted by Saikyo at 6:06 PM