If you are an MMO player and bother to follow MMOs enough, then you likely have heard the term “Risk versus Reward” thrown around. For those of you who thought you were going to the home page of an investment firm or Hasbro, Risk versus Reward is a term MMO developers use to describe the concept that as you deal with more dangerous situations in the game (usually that means fighting more and bigger monsters), you should be rewarded with better stuff — more money and cooler more powerful items.
So, if I kill a lone level 1 goblin, I might find he carries 3 gold and a piece of lightly used chewing gum. If however, I manage to down a level 900 Swack Iron Dragon, I might be the new owner of a brand new piece of +10 Holy Avenger Chewing Gum of Slaying and seven gazillion gold pieces. It sounds straightforward and every game has some aspect of Risk v. Reward inherent in its design.
Yet somehow, it seems that the vast majority of MMOs get it wrong.
The inspiration for this post was a blurb in my last post in which I fawned over Darkfall’s PvE. I found myself asking why my high level WoW warlock and my max level CoX characters sat idle and why I can’t even be bothered to put in the night or two it would take to max out my Champions Online character. Certainly, all of these characters are on the top end of that risk/reward curve and in theory, should be very exciting to play — offering top tier payoffs for my exploits. So why are all of these characters trumped by my three-week old Darkfall noob who can barely take on two trolls at once and for whom a PvP encounter means almost certain ganking?
Some of it is novelty, of course. A new game is new and shiny and the old ones… not so much. I get that and admit that some of my excitement about Darkfall comes from its newness. However, by that respect, Champions Online is a relatively new game as well. It has a lot of shiny parts that I have not yet experienced and still, the excitement is not there — even with the promise of epic, superpowered battles and high-end gear.
Where do these games, and in fact, most other themepark games, go wrong?
One of the big problems is that most themepark games are linear in their progression. You start with a level 1 character in Noob Village, do the obligatory starter/tutorial quests which will take you to level 6 by doing such scintillating tasks such as “Open Your Backpack”, “Bring a Pie to the Weapon Vendor”, and finally “Kill 10 Randy Badgers”. Killing the badgers is the big risk, which isn’t really a risk because by design, the badgers are easy to kill at your level.
Once you hit level 6, you get a quest that takes you to a new area, where you are asked to kill 10 Feral Wolves. Now the wolves are tougher… more risk right? Well, not really. See, like the badgers you fought in Noob Village, these wolves are designed for you to kill easily at your new level. The wolves have powered up, but so have you and so while the wolves are objectively tougher, relative to your new power level, they are the same as the badgers. Risk is relative.
This trend continues as you progress to max level. Each new area you enter brings you new “challenges”, but each challenge is specifically designed for characters of your power level. What this means is that while you do fight different creatures as you progress, their level of difficulty stays the same. You are essentially funneled by the game designers into encounters with low-risk.
The situation gets even worse when you realize that as you progress through the game, the rewards you obtain are carefully measured to be appropriate for a character of your level. Sure you are getting more experience per kill, but the experience you need to level has increased as well. You are getting more gold, but the costs to upkeep your gear, buys skills and crafting materials has gone up as well. You are getting cooler gear, but it is the same gear that all the other level 10 characters have — having it is no big deal, but not having it puts you behind your peers. Rewards are relative.
Ok, but what if you decide to game the system and instead of doing quests designed for your level, you do quests that are a few levels above yours? If you are a level 10 character and manage to complete a level 15 quest, it is very likely that your character exposed himself to a fair bit of risk and would expect a high reward. You might certainly get such a reward in the form of a level 15 item. This is exciting until you realize the item has a hard level requirement and so you can’t use it.
Of course, you can wait for your level 15 item, but then you are wasting time and inventory slots that you should be using to acquire items you could actually use. And by the time you reach level 15 and are able to use your spiffy item, it isn’t that great anymore relative to the other items you have access to and you are powerful enough to have gotten it easily. You’ve wasted time and inventory slots on an item that is, by the time you can use it, the same as everyone else’s — the return on your extra risk investment is negative.
Now this isn’t the whole story. Many themepark games have implemented mechanics that deal with some of the problems listed above. I would argue that instances such as WoW’s dungeons help counter the linearity of the quest lines as they offer an optional “high-risk” way to get some of the best rewards in the game. You don’t have to do them, but if you do, you will get cool stuff. The Champions Online developers understood that people were routinely doing quests above their level and so they removed the level requirements on quest rewards to encourage the practice. City of Heroes has difficulty sliders on its instanced missions with better experience and influence for taking on the higher levels.
These are all good ideas and they help the situation a little bit. Still, the whole concept of Risk versus Reward is predicated on the idea that the player is risking something in the hopes of gaining something more in return. Ultimately, this is the biggest flaw in today’s themepark MMOs: Nothing is ever risked!
When you die in WoW, you take a hit to the durability of your gear, but even if a piece of gear breaks it is easily repaired with some gold. CoX gives you experience debt when you die, but the amount of that debt has been reduced over time to the point where you can often be out of debt by just letting your teammates finish off the spawn that killed you. The only penalty for dying in Champions is having to fly back to the battle. So… all this talk about risk and reward and we end up realizing the sad fact that The Risk Is A Lie. (And don’t even ask me about the cake.)
But if the risk is a lie, then the reward is a lie as well, isn’t it? If we are playing a linear game with no penalty for failure and no setbacks, aren’t we just playing a slightly more interactive version of ProgressQuest? Yeah, I know… 1300 words later and you ended up with a curmudgeon post… “blah, blah, blah, kids nowadays and their dumbed-down MMOs. When I played, pre-Trammel Asheron’s Call before the NGE…”
That’s not exactly where I am going with this. See, I like many of the MMOs in question. I enjoy WoW. I played CoX for years and Champs Online, while sporting some ugly flaws, is still a fun game. But I do think we need to consider the fact that something is lost when game designers completely remove risk from the equation.
Consider the game of poker. Theoretically, playing a friendly game with your kids “just for chips”, penny poker with your family, dollar poker with your buddies and no-limit poker at a casino are all the same. The value of the hands are the same, the mechanics of the game are the same… and yet, the games are vastly different. Bluffing in penny poker is often silly, because the cost to call you is trivial. I’ll glady pay 50 cents to watch you lay down a king-high against my pair of threes. Now, let’s make the same call when the bet is $1000, or $10000. *gulp*
Now I have something to lose and whether I call or not is going to depend on the game situation, how much I stand to win (if I win), what I know about you, the strength of my hand, what I know about the possible strength of your hand, and how you’ve bet previously. Turns out, poker has just a tiny bit to do with mechanics and a whole heck of a lot to do with betting and if you aren’t playing with risk, then you are essentially playing a different game, and in fact, an inferior game. (Or at least a much less complex game.)
Do MMOs have a lot to do with betting? I think Darkfall does. Every time I leave my bank, I am making a bet as to the success or failure of my mission. If I bring a lot of magical reagents, or high rank equipment with me, I can now take on bigger challenges and thus, make my trip more lucrative. However, I am taking the risk that if I die, I will lose the costly materials. WoW, CoX and CO don’t have this element of risk and reward.
Imagine a game mechanically identical to World of Warcraft in every way except that the death penalty included the real risk of item loss. Suddenly, the game dynamics change. Who you party with matters… especially if they can loot your corpse. How you get to a quest location is now important because you won’t want to chance running through high-level spawns, or to places where you could be ganked by the enemy. Choosing what equipment to wear into a dungeon would invole trying to be as effective as possible while still mitigating the risk of death. Dungeon tactics would have to be more meticulous and better executed as a party wipe could truly be disastrous. Rare items would indeed be rare because they would only be attained by people who were willing to make a that high-stakes bet.
Would that be a better game? Well, I am pretty sure I am on the wrong side of history here, but I am going to say that yes, World of DeathpenaltyCraft would be a better game. But my guess is that it would be a less popular game. Humans are risk-averse and a lot more people play penny poker than high-stakes poker (myself included). Appealing to a mass-market (a good thing) means taking the risk out of the game (a bad thing).
To me, the next interesting question is this: Is there a way to add elements of risk into themepark games without ruining their mass appeal? Free-for-all PvP with full loot is probably not the way to go, but are there other things we can do to add that exciting element of risk back into our designs? I’ll tackle that in a post or two. For now, happy hunting!
Yes, just one of the many reasons MMOs can never beat single-player RPGs(at least in my opinion) – they are linear. By the way – Shaiya has a hardcore mode where if you die, you loose your character for good. I think that can be considered a risk.
I couldn’t agree with you more. There really isn’t enough risk in most of today MMOs. Aside from death traveling (dying on purpose to get back to a spawn point), I’ve sacrificed my character many times just to complete a mission. Sure I died doing it, but since theres no penalty, why not.
Boy that was pretty long winded to just say mmos need to have more fear of loss. :)
I’ve never been a fan of xp loss, I think taking away from a character in that aspect is bad idea. But I think item destruction is a great way to add real fear of loss and create a more revolving economy. Every time you die a item is destroyed and all your other items take a take a durability hit and maybe even a max durability hit.
But I am a select few that want to see items mean a lot less then they do know.
I’d love to give DF a try but I can not get past the ffa pvp (I’ve already did UO pre-trammel and don’t have a desire to go back) or the company it’s self.
I agree that more risk would certainly make mmos more fun, but you have to be careful about what risk you introduce. I agree with you that full loot makes sense for a game like darkfall where you go looking for that. I don’t think that casual players would be able to tolerate item loss as well as hardcore players. Afterall WoW and most other MMO’s are just giant slot machines that drop rare items.
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I think this is what you were getting at, but games need to find alternative punishments for failure. CoX started down that path with Jail missions, where if you die you respawn as a captive, but a captive still fully capable of busting out of jail and murdering all his captors. Unfortunately they never revisited the idea. What about if a you fail a dungeon it spawns a bunch of mobs in the area around the dungeon looking for revenge. Of say in Champs after so many Hero deaths, the villians plan goes off, preventing the hero chaining you see now. Or failing represents a decrease in the interest rate you are getting on your bank.
I’d say the introduction of limited attempts into the last two dungeons has added a healthy dose of risk-v-reward into the raiding game. If you don’t complete the encounter in so many attempts, you don’t get that loot for the week. Expanding further, if you risk and spend too many attempts trying a hard mode you could be left with no attempts to finish the dungeon on normal.
It’s late, and minor, but it’s there.
definitely agree with you. as you say though, fact is, most people are going to run scared with their tail between their legs at the thought of such a system. i can count on one hand the people i know (personally) that think that dropping even a single item is acceptable, or any real risk for that matter. i think that such systems will always be relegated to games like darkfall, neocron, or earthrise, niche games with smaller populations from smaller studios. smaller studios invest less into their games and as such they have less risk exposure and can afford to have a system that is going to attract a small niche of the mmo community. personally i don’t imagine that we’ll ever see a triple a game with a quality risk reward system.
I agree! And I think the mmo mechanics try and foster the illusion of risk, that’s why it takes awhile to describe that there is none. You have to pierce the illusion and that takes more than a few words.
Now onto risk and reward, keep in mind that risking $100 to win $1 sucks utterly. That’s why perma death isn’t actually fun – it’s risking 100 levels (or whatever) to gain a bit of loot here and there.
So only a good potential payoff for the risk is fun – and good potential payoffs screw up the subscription model because they want people sticking around for X amount of time/as long as possible and that’s traditionally been done with tiny little rewards spread over time. There’s probably a way around that, though.
Finally also risk for blind reward sucks. If your risking something for…who knows what reward, it pretty much sucks as bad as risking $100 for $1. There needs to be some direct communication about what the reward is. Though again, this can be gotten around (and quite easily too)
But yeah, it really needs a shift of design model to get real risk in.
To Borsk,
Yeah, that limited tries per week is a good one I think.
So the cake is a lie?
I agree with you on this post cmag, but there are a few games I played out there that had higher death penalties. Not as severe as DF, where winner does take all. But usually it came down to time lost. Whether in straight out lost exp that you had to recover, with a chance to delevel. This made it uncomfortable because some of the gap was level dependent, as you described early in the article.
Second was experience debt that you had to grind off, this would slow down your rate of gaining experience. They actually lowered the amount of debt because the community was QQ’ing about it too much on the forums. Yes, we are risk averse.
It’s because people don’t have 10000 hours a day to re-grind what they lost if a game has a step death penalty.
I simply refuse to play MMO’s with death penalty’s that can permanently destroy your items or cause you to lose a level. Why?
I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR SUCH SHIT.
Not to mention in a PvP game it would just open room for griefing and allow people to make a group/guild that could permanently shut down a whole area and disable leveling/questing in it.
Stuff like limited attempts in WoW on a hard raid are fine, stuff like loosing ALL your items if anything kills you is ridiculous and just a forced grind to get it all back.
There is a big difference between HARD and FRUSTRATING, losing all your items and or levels is FRUSTRATING.
Geez Xan, you only described stuff you don’t like. People can’t make things by only hearing what you dislike.
Cmag, I forgot to mention EVE’s death penalties. The cost usually is getting your ship blown up, which can cost millions (or billions) of ISK to replace.
Yes, insurance does cover some of the loss but doesn’t cover the fittings. These can cost sometimes more than the ship itself.
Not to mention getting podkilled (death) and losing your clone that can cost millions to replace considering your level of skill points. Now if you are lax and don’t upgrade you clone you can lose skillpoints permanently and that’s a time penalty.
Finally, if you get podkilled you will lose all of your cybernetic augmentations. Some sets costs billions of ISK to replace.
The way around this is to have an empty jumpclone do all the dirtywork for you. But you are still taking losses of money that boils down to loss of time to make the money back.
Don’t get it twisted. Time = Money in virtual and real life.
I don’t think eve’s model works out though – how did you get all that money? If it’s from mining or ratting, it’s pretty much gained at no risk.
It’s a matter of having to do a bunch of no risk stuff before you get to any risk.
@ Callan S,
Actualy they can, it’s called being human and using your brain.
And the type of risk I like is challenge, eg. don’t make too many easy mobs, add some harder ones that will kill you and force you to respawn over and over until you figured out how to properly kill them and maybe wih a bit of luck.
Group quests, etc.
2 Callan (because I don’t speak @ people)
To make money you can do: missioning, mining, crafting, trading (my forte), ratting and wormhole excavation (what I was currently doing before my l-EVE of absence).
These are all methods of making money in EVE that work really well. EVE has the best player driven economy IMO and I am currently sitting on 2 fleets of ships and 1 billion in cash, no sorry, a little less because I fitted another ship.
Now if I take that new ship to low-sec, zero or a W-hole I stand the chance of getting blown to bits and lose all that money I invested. Thats my risk. My reward is…well whatever I went int here for.
Xan: Yeah, I get it… you want essentially the single player style game with infinite continues. That’s fine. Lots of folks like that style game and it’s the dominant MMO paradigm right now.
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But there’s no risk. Challenge != Risk. Dying over and over and respawning until you figure out how to kill a boss might be challenging, but it isn’t risky unless you can lose something by failing. You don’t seem to enjoy risk. Some people do which is why games like Eve and Darkfall exist.
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Perhaps most MMO devs ought to stop talking about risk v. reward and start talking about challenge v. reward.
Callan: I think Eve is a fairly good example of a risky game. You can certainly mine in safe space and make money, but the good stuff is in 0.0 sec. You increase your risk by going to 0.0 and you up your reward. Eve gets it right… and does one better by offering the risk-averse a place to game as well.
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Eve is my favorite game I can’t stand to play.
As far as I’m aware, in terms of risk Eve suffers or fails in that in more dangerous space you have no idea of the risk (you have some idea in poker, for example) since people who will kill you aren’t regulated in any way. Is it thrilling when there was a zero change of being ganked, cause all the local gankers were on bio break?
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Well I guess that raises the question that if you don’t know you couldn’t die, but you felt as if you could and that was exciting, whether it the truth of the situation or the feeling of the situation that matters. Personally I’d go with the truth.
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Second is that as far as I understand it, it’s risking $100 to gain $1. For example, in more dangerous space, will one instance of mining pay twice the value of your ship and it’s mods/your guys mods? I’m thinking no, it’ll only pay a fraction.
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In poker you don’t risk $100 to gain $1. You usually risk a certain amount to win multiple times that amount.
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I think even if you like risking $100 to gain $1, it’ll make you risk adverse and when you do lose, it’ll really, really suck. Atleast in poker you can say “Well, I lost $10 but I could have won $100!” while here it’s “Well, I lost $100 but I could have won $1…AH CRAP!”
Unfortunately Hulkageddon 1 and 2 has made safe mining impossible even in empire space. Since Apocrypha and the introduction of wormhole space, you can get that 0.0 feel and profitablility without venturing past gatecamps getting to null or lowsec. They even have wormholes that lead to 0.0 and that enables the term: Stealth mining. But that requires a few hulks and an orca. HUGE RISK! But tremendous reward if you pull it off.
But EVE is not for everyone, but gets the risk/reward ratio right.
No, not a huge risk. It’s just the impression of a huge risk – what info do you have to prove it’s a risk?
For example, say someones in front of me, flips a coin and it’s my call, heads. They hand me hundreds of game coins and I go weee! Also I don’t lose my game coins.
Now imagine someone goes off into a black box, then comes back out and hands me a few hundred game coins?
Did I face a big risk? Did they flip a coin while they were in that black box? Or did they just decide to hand out game coins to me?
Should I go weeee! or would I just be fooling myself?
Without transparent risks or atleast some level of transparency, you don’t know.
Spectacular article. Good job.
I agree with you about 90%. If you are a level 10 character and manage to complete a level 15 quest, and then you realize the item has a higher level requirement and can’t be used, doesn’t necessary mean you get nothing out of the encounter. You forgot about the XP (experience).
Fighting a monster five levels above your character is considered a “risk” for me because my character could end up dead. I get experience out of it and a weapon I cannot yet use, but I can sell. Though I do agree with you 100% that risk is relative as you progress through areas.