Cooldowns

One of the things MMO designers fear is a player running out of content. This is especially true with a brand new MMO which has to compete with MMOs that have had years of content updates behind them. Making content takes time, and that time is usually not 1:1 to the time a player will spend consuming said content. How can a designer ensure that the content they are putting into the game will engage a player long enough until the next content patch can be put out?

Two words: Cool downs.

What is a Cooldown? (Yeah, I know I said two words, but in my eye a cooldown is a singular “thing” and therefore a single word). A cooldown is an artificial stoppage that prevents a player from doing something in the game “too fast”. Cooldowns can take many different forms. The best form of cooldown is one that a player doesn’t even notice; something that is seamlessly integrated into the game play. Those are rare and hard to pull off (and often times get mistaken for “grind“). A “Defeat All” mission in City of Heroes is a good example of an integrated cooldown. You can’t just blitz through this mission, you have to fight and beat everything on the map. It’s also an example of grind and something that the players don’t look favorably on.

Other cooldowns can be seen in games like Star Trek Online, which has a 30 minute cooldown on their Explore missions. This is basically the same type of cooldown as World of Warcraft’s Dailies, only on a much smaller time-scale. WoW also has cooldowns on their highest-end crafting materials, just to slow their entry into the world so the market isn’t flooded with top-end items simply because there was an unlimited amount of resources available. These were removed recently, likely to clear the way for a whole new set of cooldown-restricted materials in their next expansion.

Cooldowns are super-annoying to players, especially if they are tied to fun content. World of Warcraft’s week-long “lockouts” on their raids is a game-killer for many. “I enjoy raiding”, they say, “why must I wait an entire week before I can clear that raid again?” Again, the content here is gated simply to slow down your progress until they can get the next piece of content out to you.

Do cooldowns work? Oh yes. Gating the rate at which content is consumed by the players ensures that the developers can have new stuff ready to go shortly after the players are finishing consuming the old content. Is it a “cheap” tactic? I’d probably agree with this, but there is not much better. Integrating the cooldown into activity the player can do can quickly turn into grinding and giving players “enough different things to do they don’t need cooldowns” is the White Whale of MMO gaming. However these “enough different things” all take time to make, and remember, that time isn’t 1:1 with the rate players consume it!

Is it a balancing factor? Kinda. In some ways cooldowns can make an unbreakable “pace” at which a character can progress. No matter how many hours you play, your progress (within the realm of whatever the cooldown is limiting) will be exactly the same as the player who only plays as often as the cooldown lets him. This makes the less-often playing player feel that they are not getting blown-away in terms of progression, which makes them more likely to stick around to see that next round of content you are cooking up.

12 Responses to “Cooldowns”

  1. A.L. says:

    It’s an interesting thing, and one I don’t think a lot of people who don’t do design of any kind often don’t get. The time not being 1:1 is true for any type of creative work, be it game, writing, art, movies you name it.

    A movie that takes 2 hours to watch, takes months if not years to film. Even worse, special effects people will work for weeks on a 5 second shot in some situations. In writing, you spend months writing your book only to have someone burn through it in a couple of hours.

    In MMOs the problem is more clear though, since you are looking to keep those people subscribed continuously to your game.

    Out of curiosity, are there any examples of the kinds of cool downs that players just don’t notice on average?

  2. Ura Hero says:

    Quote: “Out of curiosity, are there any examples of the kinds of cool downs that players just don’t notice on average?”

    The most prevalent that I can think of is travel.

    Uh, what???

    Yep. Travel is a cooldown. Having to move from objective to objective counts as a cooldown. Why? Because you have to spend some amount of time to do it.

    Players dislike travel in general, but it is the most effective and widespread cooldown in use.

  3. Ura Hero says:

    And as a close second, Questing in general. Which counts as travel in a way.

    There is a reason that quests are spread out and that one person doesn’t give out thirty quests at a time.

    Following up in third place is item drop rate and NPC spawn rate.

    One might argue that these three things are just part of MMO’s in general, and I would agree. But without them taking up some amount of time, the MMO wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.

    And time is what cooldowns are all about.

  4. says:

    I don’t mind cooldowns of the type that are a hard stop, like the week-long lockouts. Why? Because I just switch to another character (or maybe another game) and keep playing. The cooldown expires while I’m doing something else.

    I greatly dislike the cooldowns that force me to spend a long time doing something simple. Defeat All missions, extremely long travel times, waiting on spawns…these sorts of things are a horrible gameplay experience. I can’t just leave the game or the character and let the cooldown expire. I have to keep doing something that’s not interesting. I’m effectively forced to be bored.

  5. Scrub says:

    Wouldnt content alternatives also be considered cooldowns? If there is more than one worth while thing to do, I could avoid boredom, character alting, avoidance, play vacations, or suffering from withdraw. If raiding is clearly the funnest (most entertaining) aspect of a game, skipping all the rest of the content, revamping make sense.

    Travel time makes sense if you are headed to something good, but that is subjective.

  6. Golden Girl says:

    I think one way to make cooldowns seem less grindy is to add more randomness to them – for example, in a couple of low level misisons against the Outcasts in the Hollows in CoH, players need to defeat a mob that has a key to progress – so while they MIGHT need to defeat everyone to find the key mob, there’s also a small chance that they could find the key mob right away – so menatlly, it doesn’t feel as grindy as entering a mission and knowing you have to defeat every single enemy to complete it.

    I still think “defeat alls” have a place in the game for story purposes, but right now, they’re overused, and are found in missions where chained objectives would make more sense, and be more dynamic.

  7. TonyV says:

    I really think of the Mission Architect in City of Heroes as capable of doing away with cooldowns almost completely. This is one of the reasons I was so ecstatic when it was released.

    I’d like to eventually see some formal system in place where the story gurus at Paragon Studios vet player-generated content into the official canon of the game. I know that there are tons of crap out there right now, but there are also real gems among it. I’d really like to see some of the best of the best arcs be pulled out of the Mission Architect and made into official arcs and contacts within the game. It could even be used via one-mission arc contests and such to do things like generate so-called “newspaper” missions.

    Messages and news items could be posted if the story writers want arcs along a certain theme. “Hey everyone,” a message could read, “We’d like to have a mission that explores your interpretation of the history of Dr. Webb’s creation of portal technology.” The players then go nuts, and if the story writers see an arc that is awesome, they yank it out, give it a contact, and let everyone else have at it.

    One thing I like to do sometimes as I play is to make up back stories for the contacts in the game. Wouldn’t it be cool if, for example, Paula Dempsey had 150 different missions, all specific to her and her back story, to give out instead of the five or six, most of which are generic missions that are shared by all contacts in that level range? Reading her in-game description, she sounds like a fascinating character, but everyone deals with her for like an hour at most and most never know anything about her. Use your magic free content generator (which is honestly how I thought the developers were going to eventually use Architect Entertainment) and turn the players loose on it!

    There would be the added bonus that if players felt like they had an honest chance of being officially recognized like that, you’d see a massive upswing in the quantity and quality of arcs being generated. Even those that didn’t get converted over would be much, much better.

  8. C_Amazing says:

    An interesting insight as always, I’ve often called them TIME SINKS myself but CoolDown is the new word of the week ;)

    I agree that there are, be it limited, abilities to do away with the AE as one of the posters said. In general this seems to me a smart idea as some of your more…self aware(?) players tend not to like time sinks / cool downs like that and realize they are possibly being manipulated.

    Everything else is..KINDA already been touched on but I enjoy each new article as it comes along!

    -C.A.

  9. GavinRuneblade says:

    Girl, Another great one, that I actually like a little better than the one in the Hollows is in the Oroboros Pseudo TaskForce from Tesseract where you’re going after the president of the Rogue Isles and you have to take out his security officer to get a key. Since it’s a named person rather than a random mob, it has story flow. But I agree this mechanic, no matter how implemented, is a good one. And I agree the randomness is a big part of the appeal.

    But in addition to cooldowns the other trick is repeatable content. The Radio/Newspaper missions are one form, but they are limited. WoW’s dailies have a huge amount of variety including a variety of rewards. Then there are the PvP minigames which nearly all MMOs (notable exception being CoX) have. Runescape’s castle wars, WoW’s battlegrounds, etc. These are an amazing timesink in a way that the Zones and Arena will never be and can never be, and once implemented, they are a timesink forever.

    The Mothership raid and Hami are great ones from CoX. I know I’ve spent hours and hours on a string of mothership raids. The different stages from racing through the pylons, to planting bombs the GM fight and then being surrounded and assaulted by an endless horde of enraged aliens for as long as you can hold out is totally a rush. I’d love an expansion where we can fight along the interior halls, but still, the Mothership keeps me throttled in a very contented manner.

    Oroboros was a very effective way to implement repeatable content. By letting us revisit our favorite missions with the same character Oroboros effectively doubled (at least) the play value of already existing missions at (I suspect) a very efficient ratio of developer time to actual play time.

  10. WHTJunior says:

    I don’t think that time sinks and cooldowns are the same thing. They might serve a similar, albeit very different purpose. Time sinks are, by their very definition, there to use up your time. This isn’t really used to delay content, and are designed more along the lines of “How do we get people to stay in the game?” In some cases, time sinks can be used as a cooldown, but I don’t think that many of them are.

    As an example, Radio/Paper missions were brought up. If anything, these actually progress you faster through the game, since you still get experience for them, with less travel time between zones. There are also no contacts to report to, and really nothing to stop you from playing the entire game that way. These are definitely not cooldowns. Any other action that moves you forward is likely not a cooldown, either. Just because you can sink your time into something like arenas, markets, costume creator, Architect, etc, does not mean that it is preventing you (mechanically) from doing something else.

    Also, developers have to be careful that they don’t include unwanted actions in their cooldowns. Sending people to defend Recluse’s Victory for one hour before they can run a Task Force or Strike Force would bring an outcry from the non-PVP crowd for forcing content on them. You hear a little of that from Wintergrasp in WoW, but it seems like most people have come to terms with it.

  11. WHTJunior says:

    To clarify, while the Police Band and Newspaper mission don’t require contacts to pick up or turn in, you do have to speak to a Detective or Broker in order to start them. You will also need to speak to them after completing so many missions, so that they can give you the Bank Robbery scenarios.

  12. [...] the difference between a Timesink and a Cooldown? A cooldown lets you do what you want to do immediately (or quickly), but its the act of repeating [...]

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