Raph Koster's Laws of Online World Design (and how ED meets/fails his rules)

[SentineI]

I came across Raph Koster's Laws of Online World Design, and it makes a very interesting read when comparing it to Elite Dangerous:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/laws.shtml

There's far too much for me to quote in it's entirety, so I'll just quote some of the most relevant parts.

The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal

have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but making them ladders is better)
make it easy to switch between paths of advancement (ideally, without having to start over)
make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn't help)
ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite)

I have advocated that gaining ranks in the Empire should negatively affect your rank in the Federation (and vice versa), because it would force people to make meaningful decisions in the game world... However, this would break his rules "have multiple paths of advancement" & "make it easy to switch between paths of advancement". So maybe FD got this right after all?

Initially FD completely broke the rule "make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant", as there were no indications how far you were progressing in your combat/trade/exploration rankings, and there were no indications that you were climbing Major Faction reputation, except for when you made a major jump to a new rank/reputation name. But FD have gradually & grudgingly changed this, so that now we have nice progress bars for our combat/trade/exploration rankings, and they added arrows to show if you are going up/down Major Faction reputation. But given this rule, it seems that FD still have more work to do on this front. Also, PowerPlay (PP from now on) fails to provide a path of advancement, because that advancement decays as soon as you stop doing PP for a week or so - a weekly grind to stay in the same spot does NOT count as "advancement".

Regarding the rule "ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones", I'm of mixed feelings. One the one hand each rank/reputation milestone gets exponentially harder to achieve, so it's about as "unlimited" as you can reasonably achieve in a game. On the other hand this exponential grind can eventually feel (to players with limited time) to be effectively unachievable, so although there may be theoretical milestones still waiting to be achieved, in practice they might as well not exist, and thus this effectively breaks the rule. Cash suffers the same problem - there are exponentially more expensive things (ships/etc) you can spend your cash on, but at some point they become unreachable for people without unlimited play time.

No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.

Looking at what parts of your game players tend to automate is a good way to determine which parts of the game are tedious and/or not fun.

There are several websites with tools that automatic certain aspects like Trading, and finding where you can buy certain ships or parts. FD should seriously examine if they can add things to ED which would remove the desire for these tools. (They don't necessarily need to implement those tools in-game, if instead they fix the underlying problem those tools try to deal with. For example, if ships & their parts were easier to find, then there would be less demand for a search facility. I'm not saying ships SHOULD be easier to find (they are already pretty easy), rather just giving an example.)

No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statictic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.

FD have been (and are) extremely secretive about how many things work under-the-hood of the ED. Whether that's how Minor Factions & the Background Sim work, or how you progress Naval ranks, or how effective different Shields Boosters are, or whatever. I actually think FD are right to leave many of these things secret, as part of the game is arguably suppose to be working out these things yourself... but it's also unavoidable that all these things will be worked-out & end-up on a wiki somewhere, so FD need to somehow plan for how they deal with this.

It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target.
A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there's also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.

also

"Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?" We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don't yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.

(In place of "stamp collecting" put "PvP".)
Both of these quotes speak to the whole PvE versus PvP dilemma of Elite Dangerous. It doesn't actually provide any answers to the dilemma, as it merely points out it's an unavoidable problem that devs should plan to deal with. So far FD seem to have tried to avoid the issue, and please everyone, which I don't think has been terribly successful.

It is very hard to attract players of different gaming styles after the playerbase has been established. Any changes to promote different styles of play almost always conflict with the established desires of the current playerbase.

Unfortunately FD seem intent on doing exactly this, by (a) marketing the game to a wider "pew pew" audience, and (b) releasing the game on consoles (for which even FD admit that CQC perfectly fits console expectations - even though it adds nothing to the main game). So it should come as no surprise that these forums are filled with "old timers" who want ED to basically be an enhanced version of classic Elite, as well as people who'd never heard of Elite before & from the marketing were expecting a more action or MMO guild or PvP orientated game. There is definitely a group of players who would validly benefit from guilds, but this would also be to the major detriment of many "old timers" (for which the Kickstarter specifically sold a vision of a game without guilds). Basically FD is trying to make ED appeal to too many people.

Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.

Did someone say P2P networking? Ooops! Sadly this isn't going to change, as it would basically require (1) complete rewrite of the networking code of both client & server (too expensive to consider), and (2) subscriptions to finance the massive increase in server load (the forums would literally melt down if this ever happened, and there would be sufficient disgruntled players for some to do Denial Of Service attacks on the game servers themselves).

A roleplay-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.

I see the (so far missing-in-action) Ironman Mode as almost-enforced roleplay, and as such not for everyone. Luckily it would be an optional mode, so this wouldn't be a problem.

Online game economies are hard
A faucet->drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the "sink" that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.

This is something which, on balance, FD have probably got more right than wrong. While you CAN accumulate infinite wealth, it's also pretty easy to find ways of spending that wealth... especially if you play PP!

Ownership is key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership.

This is something which is sorely lacking from ED, mainly because you personally have almost no permanent effect on the gaming world. Tier 2 NPCs would be one (partial) solution, as they'd be providing specialised missions "specifically for you". PP could be a (partial) solution, but merit decay ensures you become unimportant too quickly (if you happen to stop play the game or PP for a couple of weeks). I made another thread where I list some ideas how ED could easily have "(Semi) Permanent effects on the world".

Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.

This is basically another way of expressing the "mile wide but an inch deep" problem of ED, where individual mechanics are quite shallow & repetitive, so even the coolest mechanics become stale after a while. Basically players run out of novelty. Arguably FD are doing the solutions it advocates, because PP is a "completely different subgames embedded in the actual game", while Horizons certainly provides "new additions".

Baron's Design Dichotomy
According to Jonathan Baron, there are two kinds of online games: Achievement Oriented, and Cumulative Character. In the former, the players who "win" do so because they they are the best at whatever the game offers. Their glory is achieved by shaming other players. In the latter, anyone can reach the pinnacle of achievement by mere persistence; the game is driven by sheer unadulterated capitalism.

I suspect that ED tries to appeal to both kinds of players, and therefore fails to do a good job for either kind.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Laws? No. Opinion. And this is basically a criminally verbose way of saying "Make your game a WoW clone."

The guy knows what he's talking about but spends so much time talking in circles he fails to define anything clearly, and your perspectives on what is being done right/wrong is highly opinionated with a lot of misinterpretation.

Both his and your perspective are why American MMO games have been in a steady, almost rapid decline over the last few years. This is why games like Wildstar flop while hundreds of thousands of people use VPN's to get past region locks and play Japanese, Korean and Chinese MMO's, which mostly stick to the same mold but do a couple things different, varying from each game. People want that something different because this model doesn't work anymore.

 

[SentineI]

Laws? No. Opinion.

Well DUH.

The guy knows what he's talking about but spends so much time talking in circles he fails to define anything clearly, and your perspectives on what is being done right/wrong is highly opinionated with a lot of misinterpretation.

You really take things far too seriously. I thought it would make for an interesting discussion...

... but instead you make a lot of extremely vague claims about me/him being wrong, without actually making a single concrete point. Your entire post could be summed up as "You are wrong... but I'm not going to say where you are wrong, or why you are wrong." Congratulations on making one of the worst replies I have ever seen on a forum, as it contributes absolutely nothing useful.