The Wake of Death

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

The launch is pretty much your make or break point for your MMO. What happens here will be the momentum that carries you through your first few months, and then your first year, and finally into sustainability. If you have a bad launch it can be disastrous, as the word-of-mouth about how bad yo ur MMO is will overshadow any great reviews you pull in or how much marketing money you spend. Now that isn’t to say that a bad launch WILL be a disaster, World of Warcraft actually had a terrible launch with tremendous lag for the first few days, and hours-long log-in queues over a month after turning the servers on. EVE Online has also bucked the trend by skewing subscriber numbers upwards as the years go on.

Now one of the things that will happen at launch is you will have Level Racers. These are the players who must reach max-level as soon as possible, not stopping to smell the roses on the way to the top. They will use whatever advantages they can get, which is mostly “knowledge gleaned from playing the beta“. It might not be outright bugs or exploits that Level Racers use, it might just be efficiency gained from playing the same missions over and over again in beta. Although there most likely will be bugs and/or exploits that people are using, and using often, once the game is Live.

You see, in beta it doesn’t matter “how fast” you reach max level. Those characters will get wiped, deleted, exterminated. This means a traditional datamine won’t show large outliers like “this guy got from level 1 to level 50 in just 8 hours online”. That data won’t show up until the servers are switched over to persistent, “live”, mode.

Now in this mode, progress is kept, so there is some weird incentive to level race, since you get to be max-level for a minimal amount of time investment. N0w you can use that bug or exploit over and over, or that one mission that seems to give out just a little better reward than the rest, or that one power that does more damage than it should. And you keep using it, and other people start using it, and suddenly there is a whole pack of Level Racers trying to get to max level as fast as possible.

Then there is Everyone Else. These are the people who didn’t play the beta, or just played it for a couple minutes to see if the game was to their liking. These are the people who are playing because their friends are playing. These are the people who want to experience the content as it was meant to be, by reading the quests and missions. These people are not Level Racers, but they will come to loathe them. Not because the Level Racers reached Max-Level, but because Everyone Else must now endure the Level Racer Wake of Death.

This is the first real balance patch an MMO gets. Now that the exploits are widely-known, and the broken powers are more obvious, the developers can put a handle on things and make sure that the methods that the Level Racers use are reigned in. Now if you were an everyone else, you might find that the power you picked thematically does less damage now than it did, and the reason for it was that the Level Racer was using it in combination with another power to break the game. You never picked that other power, but you got the smack down as much as everyone else. That mission that gave out the Awesome Reward? It now gives out a Mediocre Reward. Unfortunately you didn’t have a chance to play that mission yet, so you get the lesser reward simply for the fact that you played the game slower.

Is it fair? Not in the slightest. Is it necessary? Unfortunately yes. The developer really only has two options. Tone down the methods the Level Racers use or hit the Level Racers directly. They can do both, but most of the time a developer will leave the Racers alone, unless it was REALLY bad what they did. Now the Everyone Else would love to have the chance to use some of the methods and get some of the rewards that the Level Racers did, but in order to maintain the integrity of the game, actions must be taken and balances must be made, otherwise the “Journey” to max-level becomes meaningless. You don’t learn how to play your character and you end up in groups dragging them down because you have too many options that you never took a moment to play around with and train yourself how to use.

Of course there is hidden option number three: just leave it alone forever. I am actually curious as to how this would work out, but all signs and simulations point to disaster.

Now the “when” a Developer should do this is up for debate. If the really bad stuff isn’t until the upper, less tested, levels, then it can wait until the playerbase as a whole starts to approach those levels. If the bad stuff is right at level 1, then you have a tougher decision. This is an area where events of the past year are something that we can learn from. A headstart followed by a balance patch on the official-launch date can earn your company a bad reputation, no matter how needed that patch might have been.

Leaving things alone for a long time might earn you some goodwill with the players, but in the end the developer is harming his own game, and when the balance adjustment gets to a point where it can no longer be ignored, changing it at this point can be seen as a betrayal in the eyes of all the players who were abusing it.

So as an MMO designer I am pointing this phenomenon out so that the next time you the player feel the pinch of a balance adjustment in a brand new game, you can understand where the developer is coming from. We are not doing it to personally destroy your fun and productivity, we are simply trying to maintain the integrity of the game for as many people as possible.

(I do need to give credit to my friend John who actually put a name to the phenomenon that we had experienced over and over as we played new MMO after new MMO, coining the term “Level Racer Wake of Death”).