Ask Massively: Taking out the yard trash

In last week's Ask Massively , we discussed some of the lessons learned from "Old School" MMOs and how they have been applied to newer games in the genre. This week, we're going to go into more detail about one area in particular.

It's time to take out the yard trash.

Yo Massively!

You mentioned, last week, that games should strive for balance between "accessibility" and "challenge". Since you set yourself up for it, and even promised to write about it in a future column, can I get credit for asking the question "What is 'challenge' in an MMO?" I just want to see my name in lights, so to speak. Chicks dig famous people, and Massively is my ticket to Internet stardom!

-Llamas Notsheep

William Hung. Adam Carolla. Ric Ocasek (obscure 80's references FTW!)

If those guys can "score babes" just for being famous, then I guess I can help Llamas out here. Lord knows he needs the assistance. Of course, if you really think appearing in this column is your "ticket to Internet stardom", let's just say that it's a lot cheaper for me to be flattered than it would be to give you prescriptions for all of the drugs that you so clearly need. With a name like Llamas, I'm fairly certain that your issues stem much further than the merely pharmacological.

Now that we have skirted close to the event horizon of "getting off the subject", let us take a gut-wrenching pull back on track and discuss "What is 'challenge' in an MMO?" Challenge can take several forms, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. A good dungeon, and by extension a good game, will combine these forms without relying too heavily on any one type of challenge. We will discuss examples of games or even individual dungeons that lean too much on one type of challenge and show how that can adversely affect the player experience.

In the beginning, when Everquest was king, and World of Warcraft was just a gleam in Blizzard's eye, dungeons were rather formulaic and adhered to the time-honored formula of crawling through narrow passageways, encountering groups of angry monsters on the way to a large encounter, commonly known as the "Boss Fight". It worked for pen-and-paper games, and for the most part, it worked for MMOs as well. You hack through enough little guys, and pretty soon you got to face the big, bad dragon who was "La Pinata de Looto Gordo"

The hitch was, in EQ there was no upper limit to the size of a raid. If a fight was too difficult, you could always throw another body or two (hundred) at it until it became easier. Eventually, some guilds threw so much cannon fodder into a raid zone that the zones themselves would crash under the strain. EQ's answer to the problem of making an encounter more difficult usually focused less on tactics than on giving mobs more hit points or armor, or making them hit harder (thus requiring more healers and support classes) In later expansions, that changed somewhat, but encounters still required a large number of players. If you recall last week's column, Furor mentioned that his guild needed 80 players to defeat an encounter. That particular encounter was not focused on hit points or DPS as much as it focused on our next example of an MMO challenge.

Crowd control fights. Instead of one "big boss", some encounters require a group to defeat a group of "mini-bosses" simultaneously in order to win the encounter. The most obvious example from World of Warcraft is the High King Maulgar fight in Gruul's Lair. Generally speaking, World of Warcraft's end game content requires significantly more strategy than in older games. With raid party size limited to 40, then 25, or even 10 players, players don't have the option of throwing more bodies at an encounter and must come up with a workable strategy for boss fights. A crowd control fight means that players cannot simply focus on doing as much damage as possible in order to win an encounter, but such fights have their own flaws. More attention must be paid to the makeup of your raid party. Some players might be left out of raids that require heavy crowd control because their class doesn't have that capability. Another problem is that crowd control can make an encounter relatively trivial. Using the Maulgar fight as an example, once mini-bosses start dropping, the remaining bosses drop that much faster until Maulgar himself is relatively anti-climactic.

To illustrate another problem with crowd control fights, let's go back to the beginning and talk about the basic formula behind a dungeon crawl. The process of clearing out groups of smaller monsters in order to reach the boss encounter is commonly referred to as "cleaning out the yard trash". The mobs themselves aren't particularly difficult, and might even be solo-able on an individual basis. The flip side of that is that there is a large number of those mobs, and a raid never seems to have the luxury of fighting one at a time. A large group of players fighting a large group of monsters can be a lot of chaotic fun, but with the ability to manage crowds comes the ability to render such encounters as trivial and boring snooze-fests of "Pull a group, crowd control it, kill off mobs one-at-a-time, rinse, repeat for an hour" In order to increase interest in yard trash mobs, designers might add cash drops, or rare recipes, or other goodies that might pop up at random, however it doesn't change the fact that these fights turn an exciting 30-45 minute raid into a 2-3 hour marathon where the greatest enemy that the raid faces is the intermittent boredom between boss fights.

The key to an exciting raid dungeon is a good mix of encounters. Between straightforward "tank and spank" fights such as the Avatar of War fight in Everquest, dealing with multiple mini-bosses in an crowd control encounter such as High King Maulgar, the total chaos of large numbers of small, low-powered mobs engaging a raid party at once such as the Hamidon fight in City of Heroes or the Thurgadin Ring War in Everquest, and innovative fights requiring coordination and timing such as the Magtheridon fight or Prince Kael'thas, there are a lot of ways to make end-game content more challenging than simply giving a monster more hit points or a more powerful attack and a lot more ways to make a dungeon crawl interesting besides adding copious amounts of yard trash.

Once again, it is time for us to wrap up this week's edition of Ask Massively. Our tipline and email box are waiting for your questions, comments, and pharmaceutical offers. And to the unnamed gentleman who offered me a wager that I could not go through an entire column without mentioning a certain game. Pay up.