This is part III of the V part series, a collection of my observations and thoughts over on iToS. Took a bit longer than usual for this chapter, due to RL work and the release of HZD. Writing and completing this chapter actually make me think hard on my time spent in this game, hopefully I don’t get too affected after I complete this series.
- Balance in general PVE - A hollow game of numbers
Musings on iToS Balance - Part I of V - A hollow game of numbers
- Balance in player experience - Fun and Time Investment
Musings on iToS Balance - Part II of V - Fun & Time Investment
- Balance within player’s own family - the All for One Syndrome
- Balance in interplayer content - Are we islands?
Musings on iToS Balance - Part IV of V (Are we islands)
- Balance in character building - Achieving the 80 class dream
Disclaimer
These are just my personal observations and opinions, do feel free to disagree, suggest and discuss XD.
[Balance within player’s own family - the All for One Syndrome]
Before getting into the family syndrome let us delve into the 2 other topics which I find associated with the main topic. The first one is about the personalities us players have, and how it affects our behaviors in games. The second is the concept of spending time to achieve a certain goal, in gamer’s terms we call it the “grind”.
If we look into the history of MMORPGs, we will often of not, come across a person called Richard Bartle. He is one of the pioneers of MMOs, which started out as text based MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) in the 1990s. Those of us who are fortunate to live during that era and have access to a computer with a dial-up modem would remember spending hours pressing keys to read through the countless lines of text in the those days. Yes these are the early mmos, they have little to no graphics and are just pure text, like a digital tabletop D&D game with a computer as a GM.
Anyway why talk about this guy? Richard Bartle published a paper on his observations on the types of players, their personalities and motivations in playing a game. The paper categorised the gamers into 4 types, and is used widely by game companies as reference these days in designing content and experiences for their audiences. The 4 categories are, Explorer, Achiever, Socialist and Killer. Explorers are players who likes to explore lore, find easter eggs, experiment with builds and mechanics. Achievers are players who aim for the top or be within the top bracket, like having best equipment, best skills, conquering the hardest dungeons etc. Socialists are players who plays with company of others, they tend to weigh relationships in game more heavily than the game itself. Killers thrive on besting other players, PVP is where they always flock to.
The importance of knowing player personalities and motivations is that with the knowledge, developers can craft out a game which best suits the players. From giving trophy rewards such as map collections for the achievers, creating skill interactions between classes to thrill out the explorers to making balanced pvp/gvg for killers who thirst for the glory of besting others. In an ideal MMO game, there will be an equilibrium of content made for the 4 player types, so that everyone can enjoy the game.
To know what’s your gamer personality type, do try out the test in the link below. For those who want to know, I’m 87% explorer, 66% socialist, 40% achiever and 7% killer btw. :3
http://matthewbarr.co.uk/bartle/
Next is the concept of trading time to achieve a certain goal, or grind. In real life, we do it all the time, like if we want to slim down and keep ourselves fit, we hit the gym and grind it out. If we want to do well in our studies, we grind the books until we understand/memorised everything. Basically grind is hard work and effort put in in order to get something in return. If we perceive the goal’s value as roughly the same value as the effort put into getting to it, it is well worth the effort to grind. Likewise, a grind becomes a chore when the end goal’s worth doesn’t equate to the effort spent getting to it.
Games, especially ones with a character progression system, bring this concept into the game. Players, just like what they do in real life, invest time to grind out objectives in game to make their character progress. Games with huge amounts of time needed to get a small sliver of progress are called grinding games due to this. This is also why player populations are often against behaviors like afk-farming, macroing and botting, as these activities often translate to the lack of “effort” to achieve the same objectives in which normal players place a significant amount of time and effort in getting.
ToS focuses mainly on 3 of the 4 player categories, at least in theory. It provides skill combinations between classes, lore which keeps explorers happy, collections, achievements, gear progression for the achievers and some degree of player communication and interaction in game via emoticons and chat channels for the socialists. There’s some form of GVG/TBL for Killers too but sadly it is ill-implemented, mainly due to class/gear balancing and network issues. ToS is a traditional grind MMO, no matter how much we quest and such, we will still grind at some part of our journey towards end game, whether it is for level or gear. Not to say grind is bad, a healthy amount of grind is actually good for the game. It provides a time sink for players and gives value to the item the player is grinding for. Good implementations of these in ToS are like collecting helms for Magnum Opus to make Phada, a healthy 15-20 hour grind for the item, or the 70-100 hour (estimated) grind for R8 materials to make the orange level330 equipments. The equipments are powerful and is percieved as well worth the effort invested into getting them.
On the other side, grinds which are inserted in just to put a wall to prevent a player’s progress of the game’s content are not healthy to the game. This has been said in Chapter II but I would like to reiterate and add on to here, since the issues are somehow linked together and it will be hard to seperate them. As we know, the content in R8 can’t really be experienced in most maps/situations without some investment in leveling up the weapon via transcendence. Not all classes experience it the same, as some of the classes are too balanced to the content as compared to others.
Having an equipment wall such as this to prevent players from accessing the content hurts the playerbase. Explorers lost the motivation to carry on their quest for lore and experiments due to the high bar set for R8 content. Killers get more unbalanced pvps and gvgs due to gear discrepancies. Achievers do gain something here though, since getting to high trancendence is an achievement by itself. But then, we players aren’t stupid, instead of waiting daily to slowly get the transcendence shards on our character to progress, we create alternate characters (alts) to hasten up the process.
This creates the “All for One” Syndrome, where many characters pool together their resources to build 1 character up (Yes I do know and read the manga Hero Academia, but the all for one isn’t derived from there :3 ). Many games do this, where alternate farming characters are set up to farm in-game commodities to help fund the main character. But, there is one key difference between these games and ToS, and that is ToS has character limited commodities, which is blessed shards and the ever elusive practonium.
Unlike alts in other games where they can continue progressing, Alts in ToS who gave their shards and practonium to the main, lose their ability to progress in game.
This is due to the limited nature of practonium (max of 1 in iToS and 2 in other ToSes per character) and how the material is needed for weapons which is crucial for R8 content. One can argue that practonium and shards can be bought off market, but do bear in mind that some other player is also sacrificing their alt’s chance of progression just to sell that material. Some character builds such as Cannoneers, Musketeers will require more than 1 practonium as they need more than 1 weapon type to dps. Transcendence on 220 equipment can do the job too, but it defeats the purpose of having alts in the first place (in this case alts are created to fund the main) since all other characters will need to pool resources together again in order to make that alt able to progress. Moreover, transcended equipment is non-transferrable making the grind for equipment to level another character to become R8 viable a huge chore. The player will need to create more alts just to push another character up.
Limited resources such as practonium stunts character progression
It comes to the question, does the ToS developers’ vision of a team means 1 main character with many alts built to support it? What kind of player personality type does this type of concept supports? Will explorers, socialists and killers want to level and grind additional alts just to be able to do what they enjoy most in game?
Suggestion(s) on how to break All-for-One
Increase ways and means of getting Practonium
PrinceKen has stated that limiting practonium a way for not letting players get to the end game equipment so fast. We can have practonium still retain the same rarity but characters are able to get them in more methods rather than only through the mystical cube. One way to do it is via Alchemist’s Magnum Opus, where the ingredients needed require a substantial amount of farming to acquire.
An example:
Homuculus’s MO requires the alchemist to gather materials all over the ToS world, the practonium MO can be of similar nature too except the materials are harder to get and/or require many crafting classes to combine their crafted materials just to make… like require crafted mat A from squire, mat B from pardoner, mat C from enchanter and alchemist to combine everything to get practonium.
This creates a way to grind for the material without needing to create alternates just to get more. Alternate characters will also have the chance to level up too besides being a farming mule due to the material being no long character limited. It also helps boost the playerbase’s interaction with each other by introducing things which requires multiple players/builds to craft.
Allow transcended equipment to be traded via team storage
Transcendence by itself is supposed to be an end game implementation. Since it is implemented it is hard to remove it. Besides nerfing or changing transcendence, it can be made only traded via team storage so that each character within the team has the chance to use it for content progression. This helps lessen the impact of needing additional alts and time just to make 1 more character viable for R8 content.
To read about the previous sections, please visit the links listed at the beginning of the post.
Next upcoming Section IV - [Balance in interplayer content - Are we islands?]
Killers get their kicks from imposing themselves on others. This may be “nice”, ie. busybody do-gooding, but few people practice such an approach because the rewards (a warm, cosy inner glow, apparently) aren’t very substantial. Much more commonly, people attack other players with a view to killing off their personae (hence the name for this style of play). The more massive the distress caused, the greater the killer’s joy at having caused it. Normal points-scoring is usually required so as to become powerful enough to begin causing havoc in earnest, and exploration of a kind is necessary to discover new and ingenious ways to kill people. Even socialising is sometimes worthwhile beyond taunting a recent victim, for example in finding out someone’s playing habits, or discussing tactics with fellow killers. They’re all just means to an end, though; only in the knowledge that a real person, somewhere, is very upset by what you’ve just done, yet can themselves do nothing about it, is there any true adrenalin-shooting, juicy fun.
Now just playing here and there a little and mostly waiting for them to fix their game.
Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (ie. bugs) and figuring out how things work. Scoring points may be necessary to enter some next phase of exploration, but it’s tedious, and anyone with half a brain can do it. Killing is quicker, and might be a constructive exercise in its own right, but it causes too much hassle in the long run if the deceased return to seek retribution. Socialising can be informative as a source of new ideas to try out, but most of what people say is irrelevant or old hat. The real fun comes only from discovery, and making the most complete set of maps in existence.