I am currently working on a post that talks about ways to create risk in MMOs and how designers might make that risk palatable to an otherwise risk-averse themepark gaming population. In the meantime, Callan S. made a comment I felt was interesting enough to discuss. In response to the idea that Eve Online is a game that incorporates risk correctly, he says:
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?
I think there are a couple of points in this small quote. First, I think core to the idea of risk is that of uncertainty, the idea that you are not sure of what is going to happen beforehand. If you are certain that you will easily defeat any enemies you might meet, or that you will reach your destination without meeting any enemies, then there is no risk. Likewise, if you know you are going to die when you leave your base, there is no risk. The concept of risk implies that you are betting on an unsure outcome.
On the other hand, if you take your character on a spin through your favorite MMO world and are suddenly struck down and then told your character has been perma-killed, that isn’t risk either because it is arbitrary. For our purposes, risk also implies that you know you are betting and you know what you are betting.
Given that explanation, I think Eve works because as you move from highsec space to lowsec space, you know there is an increasing chance that someone will ambush you. When I take my ship out in Eve and make a trade run through lowsec space, I am betting my ship, cargo, implants and skill gain that I can make it through without incident. It does not matter if, on a particular run, “all the local gankers were on bio break” because the point of risk is NOT to ensure that I face challenge, but to present the possibility of danger and then force me to bet accordingly.
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.
If there is a chance I could be presented with failure and lose something, regardless of whether that situation occurs or not, I would say yes, that is the essence of risk in an MMO. Say you are playing poker and your opponent makes a $1000 bet. You have a good hand, but not an unbeatable one, and this is a sudden, large bet. Is it a risk to call? Sure it is. Once you call and find out that your opponent was bluffing, was it less of a risk? No, because when you made the bet, the outcome of the hand was uncertain.
I think what Callan is talking about here goes back to the difference between risk and challenge. I am deliberately separating the two because I think there is value in doing so. When Callan says, “Personally, I’d go with the truth” he is saying that he wants there to be a real chance of death or failure and that is how we defined challenge. Risk on the other hand, is what you lose because of that failure — your bet. My trip through lowsec space wasn’t challenging at all, but it was still risky…
Alright, enough of this; I didn’t mean to beat the dead horse further into the ground, but that comment made me think and I figured it was worth discussing. Next post, let’s talk about systems that will put some of the risk back into the themepark.
Love these posts. While I could never get past the difficulty cliff in Eve, I still follow it because I would love more games to be like it.
This is also EXACTLY why I get bored with most all MMO’s and move to something different. I really need to try out Darkfall or hope the Mortal Online beta downloads faster….
Hi,
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“It does not matter if, on a particular run, “all the local gankers were on bio break” because the point of risk is NOT to ensure that I face challenge, but to present the possibility of danger and then force me to bet accordingly.”
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But there’s the very break down point – the point of risk is to present you with a possibility of danger. And you aren’t being presented with a possiblity of danger; all the gankers are out on bio break.
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And if we replace ‘risk’ with ‘the game’ (since ‘risk’ is an abstract concept – the game is the real physical thing that can present you with something), then it’s the game that is not presenting you with a possiblity of danger.
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Look at it this way – if there was a PVE risk of going into a sector, but the PVE mobs were bugged and would not show up even if the RND odds determined they should, would you call that a risk? I would say not – the risk has been bugged right out of that situation. The game has failed to deliver risk.
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When the game relies on people to be the danger of risk, it’s relying on what is essentially buggy content. It’s not risky to take a chance on danger that may essentially be treated as bugged and wont show up. In sports if one side doesn’t turn up, it’s a forfet and no one treats it as a risk surmounted. Here if one side doesn’t turn up to the sector your in, is it a risk?
Callan: Of course you are being presented with the possibility of danger. First off, you have no way of knowing when the gankers are offline, so the possibility is always there. Second, even if you do start your run safe, it is very possible that someone comes online and happens upon you with the intention of killing you and taking your stuff. Possiblility does not equal certainty.
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Again, I am deliberately separating the chance of badness (which I am calling challenge) with the consequences of badness (which I am calling risk). I am doing this because I feel that game devs and players have muddled these two concepts and thus, you get discussions on the Champions Online boards about risk v. reward in a game where dying carries so little penalty that it is used as a tactic in some cases.
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Now, are risk and challenge totally orthogonal concepts? No, and I think I mentioned that in the original post; the two variables are coupled, especially at the extremes.
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This is where your examples ring true. If all the gankers are offline and aren’t coming back, and you know this, and the challenge of your trade run is essentially zero, then the risk drops to zero as well. You aren’t betting unless there is a chance, however small, that you can lose.
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Now, this brings up another interesting point, which is MITIGATION. Let’s say that you are doing a trade run in Eve through lowsec space. You know that there is a chance that you will be attacked and killed on the way (challenge), and if that happens, you lose millions of ISK (risk). However, I can use tools to reduce my chance of death, or my loss.
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For instance, I use the in-game maps to overlay the kills/hour for each system. I see that everything on my route seems quiet, I assume that the gankers are having a smoke, and so I head out. Or, I equip stealth technology, or I bring a friend along, or I buy insurance…
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That beauty of risk is that it encourages new strategies to mitigate that risk (by reducing either the chance of loss, or the loss). If players have nothing to lose, then the game ignores an important part of what makes games interesting in the first place.
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If I take the time to analyze the bathroom patterns of the pirates along my route and thus manage to ensure my safety, I haven’t broken the game. The fact that the trip was risky caused me to find ways to overcome the challenge and thus, mitigate the risk.
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From a game design perspective, I think that’s good stuff.
“This is where your examples ring true. If all the gankers are offline and aren’t coming back, and you know this, and the challenge of your trade run is essentially zero, then the risk drops to zero as well. You aren’t betting unless there is a chance, however small, that you can lose.”
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What I’ve been saying is that it doesn’t matter whether you know the gankers are offline or are completely ignorant of that.
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The risks don’t drop to zero because you know their on bio break. If you didn’t know that, the risks would still have dropped to zero. But because there’s this idea that gankers could be around, it’s feels like its taking a risk. But it clearly isn’t.
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To me making a bet isn’t about me thinking there is a risk when actually there isn’t one at all. To me making a bet is about there actually being a chance of danger physically present. If there wasn’t, then I wasn’t making a bet – I would just be kidding myself.
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The risk doesn’t drop to zero because you know all the gankers are on bio break. The risk drops to zero because they are all on bio break, whether you know that or don’t and simply feel there’s a risk involved.
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Thinking gankers are out there is simply not enough – because what you think or feel could be absolutely wrong. That’s not making a bet, that’s just being wrong.
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Or atleast for me it’s simply not enough.
So yeah, I think eve suffers or fails in that regard, as do any other mmorpgs with a similar ‘if a guy turns up’ method of danger (WOW, runes of magic, I’m sure many more).
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I could never enjoy any sense of risk, because I could never be sure if there was one actually present, or I was just fooling myself into thinking there was one.
Sorry to post again, but I’ve been thinking on this and I think it hinges on whether you treat someone as having free will, or whether you treat them more like a vending machine that has statistical odds of giving a logged in/logged out result. There’s some terrorfying truth to the latter, and that truth would make true your risk theory…but for a game?
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Anyway, it takes awhile to describe it in full so I put it on my blog: http://philosophergamer.blogspot.com/2010/02/logged-in-but-as-what-free-will-or.html
Callan: One problem is since we are using totally different definintions, we aren’t really talking about the same things. That’s my fault for taking the word “risk” (because of the term risk versus reward) and applying a more specific definition than we are used to. I am doing that because as players and game devs, we have muddled the terms and focus too heavily on your version of risk (chance of failure) while sanitizing our games of my version of risk (consequences of failure).
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We have a whole Tower of Babel thing going on and thus, we are talking past one another. Happens all the time and to paraphrase Darkfall… “Welcome to the Internet.”
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Regardless, I enjoy the discussion and so, to the point you made in your blog, which I found interesting, I don’t think it is as sinister as you make it. You don’t have to “treat someone like a vending machine” even if you make a statistical analysis.
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Case in point: The past four times I have logged into Darkfall, I have gone to the same region and farmed Trolls and Akathar. Three of those times, I farmed unmolested and made a nice haul of gold and goods. Last night, I got rolled by PKers twice and lost a large portion of my reagents and a nice set of armor.
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As a Darkfall player trying to succeed at the game, I look at that fact and judge my odds based on what I know. That’s not taking some kind of extreme deterministic view of the universe that crushes free will under my Orwellian thumb. That’s acting on my past experience and trying to form a strategy based on that experience. Do I bet my best gear (to make the PvE easier), knowing I still can’t win a PvP battle (which has by my experience a 25% chance to happen) against anyone who is going to attack me at those spawns? Or do I take crap gear to mitigate my risk, at the expense of making the PvE harder? That’s a cool choice to have to make.
If on average they have a 25% chance of turning up – well, what’s the difference between that and the computer rolling percentile dice, getting 25% or under and teleporting a couple of players in (who were on que for it, ala wow battle grounds)?
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Nothing! And to me that’s far more satisfying because I know I’m facing 25% odds. Not some unknown organic odds which in the end will become a hard averaged number anyway.
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For me, if I want to face a certaub chance of danger, then I want a game that guarantees that certain chance will occur. I don’t want a game that leaves whether I get what I want up to a human element that might go out on bio break. It sounds like you don’t want to be guaranteed a chance of danger, since your leaving it to a system that’s human element may fail to provide any chance of danger? Perhaps we differ there?
Gah, I’m posting again. I’m terrible…
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It just seems to me to be the orwellian thing, or it’s like turning up to a chess club, setting up a table and getting excited if no one sits down to play a game of chess with you, because that means a danger (of losing). And maybe 25% of the time someone does sit down and play, so it seems like your facing a chance of danger/risk. And you can mitigate the risk by setting up a table in a hard to see corner and other things.
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Rather than facing a chance of danger/risk, it just seems to be not playing a game at all, to me.
@callan
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Lets consider the chess analogy. Suppose someone will pay you 100 dollars if you sit down at chess club with a board and don’t lose a game. How you look at the situation now depends on what your attitude is. If you want the 100 dollars, you don’t want to play anybody, if you don’t play you can’t lose. So setting up in the corner, or not showering for a week, or wearing your Barry Manilo tour tee shirt might all be good ideas. If you are there to play chess and could give a crap about the 100 bucks, then you would actively seek out players.
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So in CMags terms, the 100 dollars is what you are risking, or gaining, (loss of potential gains are a form of risk I suppose). The Challenge is whatever opponent you happen to face.
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If you are in it for the challenge, then by all means play WoW battlegrounds, or League of Legends (which is awesome). However in a game like EVE players are often more concerned with their profit margins than shootemup lazer gun fights.
Yes, but look at your own attitude there – you would be all too happy (because your getting $100) if there was no risk/no chance of losing at all, even from the outset.
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Ie, you’d be perfectly happy if risk was entirely absent.
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I’m not laying into that preference at all. But I’m presuming Cmag, from his posts, has found some thrill in risk itself.
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You can’t love risk and want to face some, yet want a game design that can completely remove risk from gameplay. Ie, a game that entirely removes what you want.
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For people who don’t actually enjoy risk, fair enough, that makes sense. But I’m pretty sure Cmag has been talking about building risk into mmorpgs moreso, and because of that I take it that he likes facing risk. And if you like facing risk, you don’t want to advocate for a game design that removes your chance to face risk.
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I know he’s been talking about consequences of failure when he refers to risk, but if the game design removes any chance of failure then the consequences are moot as well. There’s no way of getting around it – you have to decide if you like facing a chance of danger, directly. You can’t continue to not like it, yet try and build up the consequences of failure because of the thrill it brings to play.
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Well, I guess you could, but only for yourself. All the people who don’t like risk will dismiss the idea utterly (weve seen posts like that already) and all the more play to win/enjoy facing risk guys (kinda me) dismiss it as not facing risk. Not that you need other people – you could write games for yourself, for example.
“I know he’s been talking about consequences of failure when he refers to risk, but if the game design removes any chance of failure then the consequences are moot as well”
Right, I agree and even said as much but neither Eve, or Darkfall, or any other PvP-centric game removes any chance of failure. First off, you can PvE to your heart’s content in any of those games and Darkfall’s PvE is as challenging as I have seen in an MMO. Second, if you are a PvPer and want to increase your odds of an encounter, you merely go look for an encounter. In Darkfall, this is as simple as walking into someone’s city and antagonizing the occupants (usually by killing them and taking their stuff).
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Callan, reading back to your previous comments, your argument seems to be, “I like Battlegrounds.” Awesome. Battlegrounds are pretty cool. I thought scenarios in WAR were fun, and I occassionally get into a game of MW2.
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But even if they are challenging, none of those things are the least bit risky. Even if you lose a Battleground, you are still rewarded with shiny “Get Stuff” points and experience (in WAR at least. I honestly forget if you get xp in WoW for BG PvP). I liked the challenge of scenarios in WAR, but ultimately tired of them because death (or victory for that matter) was mostly meaningless. I find deaths in Darkfall sting more, and victories are sweeter, not because the game is harder, or offers insta-press-a-button-PvP, but because of the consequences… the risk.
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Now… why aren’t I talking about Challenge? Mainly because I think MMO designers have challenge figured out. Not all of the time. Not in every encounter in every game, but for the most part, you can take any MMO and find a playstyle that provides an entertaining level of challenge… Champions Online might be the one exception.
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But the phrase isn’t “Challenge vs. Reward”. If it were, there would be no article, because most devs can sorta do challenge. Unfortunately, they muddle the ideas and we get silliness like CoX or CO devs talking about “Risk vs. Reward” which is silly because there is no risk in either of those games.