Balancing and Nerfing

One of the most hotly debated subjects between MMO designers and players is the one of game balance, and how it should be tackled. Most players want to keep powerful abilities and simply balance everything else to them. Most designers want to nerf those abilities down to a reasonable level.

Note: I am going to use the word “nerf” several times in this blog post, simply because it is a word that does not need definition. When I started working on (and posting about) MMO’s I swore never to use the word, since it carries a largely negative connotation, which was never the message I was trying to get across. I tried to write this without using the word, but it simply seemed distracting and the point of the post was getting lost in flowery verbiage.

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March 29, 2010 | Posted in: MMO Design | 24 Comments »

First Impressions

A lot of game design is figuring out the “moment-to-moment” gameplay that a player will experience. We look at what a player will experience in a small slice of their game time (5 to 30 minutes) and usually add that to the design document as a “what the player will experience” section.

This is a vital litmus test to tell us if what we are designing is fun and engaging. If we can’t make a small slice of gameplay compelling, then we probably have failed. Today I want to talk a little about the most important “slice” of gameplay for engaging the player: the First Impression.

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March 22, 2010 | Posted in: MMO Design | 8 Comments »

The Wake of Death

Dictionary.com defines the type of “wake” I am referring to in the title as:

The track of waves left by a ship or other object moving through the water: The wake of the boat glowed in the darkness.

At this point you are probably wondering what a ship’s wake has to do with MMOs. Well, for that I have to start with how every MMO begins… the Launch.

Risk vs. Reward

Some of the things I have learned over the six and a half years I have worked on an MMO is many lessons on “rewards”. What makes a good reward, and how do you decide how to hand out rewards? Should risk be the deciding factor on how good of a reward is handed out? What if risk can somehow be mitigated? Does that make the reward no longer applicable and should be changed?

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Becoming an (MMO) Designer

I thought this was a great “first topic” as I can give my story, plus what I look for when hiring new designers.

My story starts when I was working at Domark Software as a Tester and Phone Support guy. We just got greenlit for the first internally developed game, “Out of the Sun” which used Flight Sim Toolkit as the engine for the game. It was my first experience at game design and I was hooked. Around that time, Meridian 59 was in beta, and a bunch of us were discussing it, how it put graphics on the traditional MUD, allowing several players to interact, team up, and defeat foes from different parts of the country.

Eventually I ended up at Prolific Publishing and we got an opportunity to pitch a design for an MMO. I was in heaven. I’d played a ton of EQ and other games, but to actually get to MAKE one? That would be amazing. Alas, that never came to fruition, and I ended up leaving that job to move back to the SF Bay Area. Once up here, the guy who was my Best Man at my wedding got a job working on CoH. I was unemployed and asked him if they had any openings. It was a couple months later, but they did ramp up hiring and I got the job. So in my case there was some “I know someone”, and a lot of serendipity. Read the rest of this entry »