Blog FeedGame Development - Frustration
Frustration in gaming is something which I wrote about quite some time ago, and is still something which I think every game developer needs to be acutely aware of. That is not to say that frustrating games are unpopular - in fact I would say that Counter-Strike has single handedly proved that is not the case. However, I do think that player frustration is something that needs to be dealt with. Consistently frustrating experiences invariably lead to bad attitudes. Road rage would be an extreme example.
Given my past experiences in online browser games, this has been at the forefront of my mind throughout the development process of The Project. Seeing as it will be a game where there are no computer opponents, both the winners and losers are human. The last thing a player wants when they’re on a losing streak is to be plagued by irritating problems which serve only to frustrate, and stop the user from getting on with the game. For a project with such a big focus on community, bad attitudes are something to try and minimize.
NukeZone could be quite frustrating at times. It was the only browser game I have played where you could actually die - losing all your buildings would mean you were out of the game for 24 hours, after which you would “respawn” and essentially start over from scratch, perhaps with some monetary bonuses to get you going again. Of course, nobody likes dying, and sitting around waiting for their accounts to respawn is probably when a good lot of players decided to make illegal second accounts.
Starting over from scratch can take a long time - particularly if your clan members are all quite large. If a large clan has one of it’s members die just a couple of weeks before the end of the round, there is little hope for the recovering player to be a useful size again before the round is over. For that player, the round is essentially over early. Fair? Perhaps. Frustrating? Definitely.
Mech Wars always had a different approach - players could not die. The economy of the game was based on how many “Extractors” a player had. These could be built by the player or stolen from others during combat. The closest a player could come to dying was to have their army wiped out, and so many of their extractors stolen that they would become essentially powerless. Once a player was forced in to such a position, it could take an extremely long time to recover. Unlike in NukeZone, there was no real way his clan members could donate resources to aid his recovery.
The problem was that once a player was powerless to defend themselves, they were open to having their extractors “farmed” by half the entire enemy clan. Being constantly visited by hostile forces meant there was no opportunity to rebuild an army, and with such long wars, it could be weeks before the player was strong enough to be useful to their clan once more.
To counter this, a minimum-extractor limit was imposed, under which no more extractors could be stolen from a player. On top of this, stealing limitations were imposed so that larger players could not steal as many extractors from smaller players. The exact balancing of these algorithms lead to quite some uproar, with no good balance really able to be struck between protecting weaker players and rewarding successful ones.
All that said, there needs to be a balance here, and I plan on providing that in my game. When a player is defeated they deserve to die. The victors should no longer have to worry about that player for the remaining duration of the war. It would hardly be fair in an FPS game if you killed an opponent, only to have his corpse pop back up and take you out. At the same time, losing players should not be able to get so screwed over by the enemy that they are too weak to have any fun for the remainder of the game round. Starting again from scratch is certainly out of the question, and allowing them to be constantly hounded while they are helpless and unable to recover is no better at all.
As those who have read previous installments of this series may have guessed, my solution takes in to consideration both methods used in other games. For The Project, players can essentially be removed from the game for a period of time just as though they had died in NukeZone. They can not attack or be attacked, and so pose no threat to those who conquered them earlier, at least for a period of time.
However, like in Mech Wars, they don’t actually die. They are free to continue researching new technologies and building up their armies. They will be unable to do anything else for at least 24 hours, and if they wish, up to 1 week. This ensures that they can rebuild for long enough so that by the time they are open to attack again, they can have built up a sizable enough force, and can once again join in the fun of the game.
This rather elegant solution is a by-product of the hard limit introduced earlier, and as such I will reveal a little more about it. The limit takes the form of gateways between players empires. Larger empires have larger gateways, and gateways of drastically different sizes are incompatible. The natural side effect of this is that as a losing player forfeits some of his territory, his gateway system will automatically shrink. If the enemy clan wishes to continue attacking him, they will have to use their smaller members to do so, ensuring a more even battle.
If a member starts to lose the very last vestiges of his empire, his gateway system is shut down. No-one can travel to or from his empire for at least 24 hours, however he is free to continue playing, researching, and rebuilding for as long as he likes up until a week has passed. Typically someone in such a state of defeat will need the entire week to rebuild a reasonable force.
So, the attacking clan has successfully eliminated him from the war for a substantial period of time. Meanwhile the defeated player still has things to do and can pop right back in to the game with a force substantial enough to stay afloat. There is still the problem of large people taking longer to recover to the level of their clan mates, however because the player doesn’t die like in NukeZone, they are able to keep their research and this drastically reduces recovery time.
Specifics will of course require adjustments come a playable beta, but this is certainly one major aspect of frustration which I think will largely be eliminated. The fewer bitter players in the game, the better. In two weeks I will be finished university forever, so I can dive back in to this thing. Hell, it’s about time.
Series Index
- Game Development - The Project
- Game Development - Playing Fair
- Game Development - Communities
- Game Development - The Gap
- Game Development - Frustration
5th June | Reply
While it’s vital that players can be defeated in any competitive game, the level of frustration resulting from a defeat should be limited to the moment of defeat. Whether you actually die or not doesn’t matter, it’s about the speed at which you can return to your previous level.
Obviously, the return to power shouldn’t be so fast as to encourage players to die (that would be silly), but the speed shouldn’t be zero either. Zero progress is, quite obviously, by far the most frustrating thing in any game and can occur in two situations:
1. Not being allowed to play (like in NukeZone)
2. Constantly being attacked to a point where you really can’t do anything anymore (like in MechWars)
Nr. 1 is easy to avoid. Simply don’t limit players there and you’re done. Nr. 2 is more difficult (especially if you don’t want the speed of recovery to be higher than the normal building speed) and requires balancing.
Imposing limitations is a one way to balance things, but in my opinion also the least elegant way.
Personally, I really dislike limitations in games. Of any kind. It’s one of the reasons why I generally dislike RPGs, where even if through some one-in-a-billion chance you manage to obtain some uber-item, you often will not be able to use it. If I have a special item, I want to be able to use it. Either that or I want a damn good reason for me not to be able to use it (I’ll accept not being able to even lift a big heavy sword, but I won’t accept not being able to wear lighter, but stronger, armor).
Anyway, back to subject, I personally feel that the greatest games in any genre tend to remove limitations. I feel this isn’t so much because of the gained freedom (which often remains a mere illusion), but because of removed frustration.
So you don’t want to limit players, but you do want to protect them. Your solution sounds a bit like an idea I once had for situations like this I’d like to call Limbo Land. After dying you go to Limbo Land, where you can quite happily and without fear of being attacked or hurt in any way regain your strength, rebuild your forces, etc. However, it being Limbo Land you won’t be able to use your forces either. And the real rewards in the game are in the area where you can be defeated and hurt.
Although I wouldn’t object to there being a time-limit on being in Limbo Land, I’d mostly suggest you’d encourage players to return before the week’s past. Not because Limbo Land won’t be fun anymore, but because the rewards for going back will be greater.
Heaven might be safe, but Hell’s a lot more fun.
5th June | Reply
I recall players in NukeZone who hung around the lower size levels would actually prefer dying over just being beaten down to a smaller size and slowly recovering. The bonus they’d get on respawn would make the rebuilding process quicker, and that’s something we do need to avoid like you said.
The thing with allowing players to jump right back in to the war barely a day after they were eliminated from it is that it is frustrating for the people who already “killed” them. Like I said, if someone has been defeated then the people who defeated them deserve the luxury of not having to worry about them for a while. In an FPS if you kill someone, it sucks when they respawn right behind you. This is why a defeated player can’t choose to come back less than 24 ticks (hours, though we may shorten ticks to 15 mins for testing) later, and why they are encouraged to wait longer. I would expect wars in this game to last at least 1 week, probably more, so the bare minimum wait time of 24 ticks isn’t that much in the long run.
I do agree that restrictions are something to avoid where possible. NukeZone is a game of many restrictions and I think it hurts the game terribly. I did a write up earlier in this series about having a balance on this exact issue. Depending on how things turn out in the beta, we may relax the hard limits of the gateway system quite substantially and respin the soft limit scoring system to fill in that gap. It really depends on how the players behave. Yes, Mech Wars was fun when there were fewer restrictions but it really screwed some people over.
7th June | Reply
“It would hardly be fair in an FPS game if you killed an opponent, only to have his corpse pop back up and take you out.”
Yes it would, it’s called Deathmatch
Much better and more enjoyable than perma-death a’la Counter Strike (even if it’s just for a short round). Respawning isn’t a problem either, because in every decent deathmatch game the respawn points are fixed. As such you can predict where they spawn and move out of the way, or go in for successive kills. The target on the other hand can opt to delay respawn or simply move out of your way in time, so there’s no blame on the superior player either.
In terms of webgames like Mech Wars however, I do think respawning with a sizable force instantly isn’t such a great idea. Your solution seems to be the best, once you manage to strike a balance - and manage to convince players to try and return to the ‘real world’ as soon as possible.
Still… catering to the carebear isn’t the only means of creating a great game. It is for browser-based games imo, but not for most other genres. Many of the most enjoyable game experiences are true hardcore, unforgiving, games (EVE Online, 10SIX, Quake 3, etc.), particularly because you actually have something to lose. When something important is on the line, or when you’re down immensely, games tend to become a lot more exciting. Then again - I tend to like competition in games… and I’m usually pretty good at what I do, so I don’t lose quite as much as the average gamer…
7th June | Reply
“If the enemy clan wishes to continue attacking him, they will have to use their smaller members to do so, ensuring a more even battle.”
I don’t remember the exact detains of the Nukezone “declaring war” option, but it always seemed to me to be a way to balance the game out.
If one clan (org, whatever) declared war on another, members from both clans could only attack opponents with a networth of +/- a % of their own level. If the other clan declared back, then you could hit all targets, down to the smallest levels. If they didn’t, then the attacking clan generally beat the opponents down to a lower level, beyond which they either had to sell their own units to keep hitting the targets, or get bored and attack someone else.
The advantage of this was to increase the importance of arranging conflicts, as well as keeping relatively balanced sides. If there was some means of one side surrendering (with a public notice, for a set period of time, and prevented from attacking anyone in the clan they’d surrendered to) or both sides declaring a truce, it seemed like a workable solution. I certainly thought it could have been implemented in MechWars, and would have added to the diplomacy element.
Also, in Mechwars, you couldn’t destroy anyone completely; I gave up on Nukezone because it was just too much hassle rebuilding structures from scratch, whereas if you kept the tech and facilities, it was easier to rebuild an army. Never could quite understand the whole -paying- for Nukezone, either…
7th June | Reply
NukeZone’s war declaration system is a farce. As you said, wars can only be fought to the death if clans “agree” to, and this simply led to pre-arranged wars which took diplomacy out of the game completely. Not that there was much to begin with. Hell, alliances are banned outright.
In Mech Wars, diplomacy is actually important because you can have “full” war declared on your clan at any time. So it is important to have allies or whatever other political deterrents at your disposal to protect your clan. At the same time, there is going to be a system in The Project to ensure clans don’t only ever try and attack clans they know they can beat easily. That would just be silly, and I experienced that the last time I was playing Mech Wars.
NukeZone’s restrictions stagnate the game. I don’t want to go in to all the details on what I have planned for diplomacy and war, but suffice to say a lot of thought has gone in to it over the past couple of years and I think it will be a pretty good system. It won’t be ridiculously restricted like NukeZone, but it won’t be completely without restrictions like Mech Wars.
8th June | Reply
Mmm. I guess. I know diplomacy in Nukezone was useless, but from the original post it seemed like you want to stop larger players attacking smaller players, and I’m not sure that was such an issue in MechWars - smaller players could always get more defence than larger attackers. I still like the idea of some sort of formal surrender which would limit revenge attacks for a period of time - e.g. you can’t attack people in the clan you surrendered to for the next 4 days.
Anyway, good luck with the design of the system. Will keep an eye on things every so often.
8th June | Reply
Like in NukeZone, an official war declaration will relax the restrictions somewhat. Again, just how strict things are will depend on the testing.
There will be Civilization-4 style peace agreements though. After declaring peace, two clans are bound by the peace treaty for at least a few days, and can’t declare on each other or directly attack each other. Which is good because it will automatically prevent your clan members from attacking the enemy when they are unaware that peace has been made - something which always frustrated me in Mech Wars.
I did plan on writing about other types of such frustrating things in the article but it got long enough just writing about death/recovery.