Fun and Forced Team Play

#41 ---------------------------------------------------------

As for fostering teamplay among players outside of using a physical game type, I'm fond of the "mutual dependancy" formula. This is the design that works away from the "Jack of all trades" feeling of allowing a single player to be able to perform a multitude of tasks themselves, effectively enough, to accomplish winning the game.

Every class in the game should be able to perform an effective and important role that no other class can do effectively enough themselves. That said, no one class is absolutely dependant upon any other class to get anything done in the game. They all can function just fine within their most basic "intuitive" role(s) on their own. However, to reach beyond their most basic role(s) and achieve a greater overall potential, they will need to rely on the basic role of 1 or more other classes. In fact, in doing so, they may even create greater potential then merely adding 2 separate and basic roles together.

For example, A "Chaplin" may not be a very offensive class, they may be fragile and lacking some basic attacks to use against the other team. The Chaplin mainly uses his role to passively bolster other classes with "Health" and simple things. However, locked deep within the class is a potential power that may need the assistance of other, more durable classes to unlock. Perhaps the Chaplin can uses his faith to call down "Fire and Brimstone" from the skies in a barrage attack against several foe. Now, it takes time and energy to muster the strength to call for this attack and while doing so the Chaplin is very vulnerable to retaliation. So, if another "Knight" or "Man-At-Arms" were to screen the Chaplin from attack, they all can benefit.

Another example is that perhaps a talent of the Chaplin involves instilling "resounding faith" in the teams cause. The Chaplin can "inspire" his fellow classes to greater deeds, fighting harder and with greater effect. Obviously a useful guy to have around so other classes would seek him out. While the Chaplin would be inclined to seek out his teammates because without other classes to "inspire", the talent goes unused and wasted.

This "combo effect" may even be less complex in simply unlocking hidden attacks for a class automatically as long as the right class is within range, such as the blade of a Knight igniting in a "holy fire" if the teams Chaplin is close enough.



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Another item that effects the overall presence of teamplay in a game is the mentality of the average players themselves. Despite what it appears, the "Obnoxious Llama" is actually a minority in any game. Those players who are credited as being the reason teamplay doesn't exist in games. However, IMO, the vast majority are "normal" players and merely are introverted and very shy. Most join a server and then go about doing their little thing by themselves. If it benefits a teammate, then it's a nice convenience. How often do you join a true public server and start chatting about team strategy with the other players? (I don't, and I consider myself a true team player). If players are not willing to physically interact with the others in the game, the degree of teamplay in the game is limited no matter what game type or system is designed.

Case (#1) in point. When Valve Software announced they were going to add Voice Communications to Half Life and its mods to allow players to physically speak to each other, there was a resounding opinion that the game would be overrun with these "Obnoxious Llamas". This even despite the "Mute" function, created the picture of immature players ruining the game by voicing obscenities and other annoying things over the network. The reality of that never happened. In fact, just like in T2, the system goes unused, despite the high level of potential for increasing teamplay in a random setting like a pub. Despite all the talk of abuses, the mic is quiet in HL and I have only ever had to mute 2 players (despite the countless hours of playing team games for HL). Players are just too shy to use the system even if its working just fine for them. A system that works so well that my "Beer and Pretzel" clan for HL would rather leave and find a new server then play with the system turned off.

Case (#2) in point. Once upon a time in the Tribes Community, a group which populated one of the major community forums of the time were talking about the state of teamplay in pubs and how they never find a good game. Well, this came to that and someone suggested the forum arrange to play a game of tribes together "as a forum" because despite being familiar with each other on the board, none had played the game the forum was dedicated about together. So, a server was donated and converted and the game was set up. The game was played, and enjoyed so much that other games were arranged and the server became dedicated to just the posters of this one forum. The overall opinion being that the teamplay was far superior and the game far more fun then anywhere else. Why though? Aside from the common connection of a forum, this random group of players was no different then any random group of players anywhere else.

For one, unlike other random groups, this forum group was familiar with each other on the very basic level of recognizing names. They recognized each other and because the server was passworded to ensure only the those who posted to the forum played here, the presence of faceless "unknowns" was limited. Players are far more likely to come out of their shells and physically interact in the game with other players if they are at least familiar with those others to some very basic degree. Second, there was a level of accountability here. Act like an Obnoxious Llama here, and the entire forum community you participate in will know about it.

If one can magically break or reduce this barrier and get players to be a little more extroverted in interacting with their teammates, this "forum server" could be any server. Some think the anomaly of the "random public forum server" was pure chance or a fluke that it worked. Regardless, the environment of the server spawned teamplay to a degree that the more games the players played, the more teamplay occurred and it finally climaxed in the entire group forming a true clan equal in teamplay to any competitive clan. An anomaly indeed, but the keys to successfully achieving teamplay as the norm for a random pub are there. Hopefully, just not out of reach.

#42 Some nice idea's Mark.

Ive got a couple of comebacks..

If you have a player rating system, whats to stop people actively creating accounts to diss another player? It'd only work if you could "personally" rate a player, just for your personal playing. So you wouldnt join any game with a player you *personally* decided was crap.

The meta server you mention has been done with a few games. Nettrek has a pre-game warmup, it has meta servers and it has match time. Another thing is that it has a waiting list on the server, so you wait in a list to get on that server if someone else drops.

I like where youre going tho. I was thinking of things to do in game that help teamplay. There's a good one lately from wolfenstien and some other fps games. Which is to spawn people in waves. This means that when you spawn, you dont spawn completely alone.

I think this may be one of the biggest issues actually. Thinking about WHY counterstrike is popular. Given that its mainly deathmatch. I can see that spawning all together immediately adds something for newbies. They can just follow the crowd.

If its possible to make the game work so that people spawn as units, so that there's automatically an obvious fighting force to band with. Maybe thats something we can consider.

Phil.

#43 Oh, forgot another issue.

In game, it should be easy for people to give situational info to others. Now that implies another view.

What I'd like to see is a sort of Whiteboard. A map with an overview that everyone can then see. Maybe restrict access to writing on the map to a squad leader or whatever rank.

Then have this and a chat panel in a pre-game interface, and between deaths (if thats allowed). So someone can actually explain a plan with clear markings.

Another thing in game, would be that there needs to be a fairly good help system, not simply passive, but active to an extent. Telling you when you do something useful or good. Explaining when you do something wrong. Of course it'd be possible to turn this off. But a sort of helper to newbies..

It'd help everyone out not having to explain everything over and over again. For instance, you could have a "AI practice" mode, which is just the AI helper and some enemy bots. It would teach you how the basics worked. Whilst being there in game as a reminder.

Phil.

#44 As for the player rating other players, take a look at the April newsletter for a link to an article that covers a MMORPG developers roundtable at the GDC.

In it, they discuss how a few companies wanted to use that system but haven't had luck in figuring out how to prevent people from "Farming" the items (creating alternate characters and giving them to friends or themselves if they have 2 games running) or people just giving bad ratings to everyone to piss them off.

The problem in MMORPGs is that if something can go wrong... it will. Many people play specifically to ruin other people's day.

#45 The problems with MMORPG's is that the design of most of them almost encourage the behaviour that they say they don't want. "We don't want unattending macroers but we will design the game around leveling." "We want PvP but not overly rampant PK'ng, so we will divide the game in two where PvP people will rampantly kill each other and the carebears will never PvP whatsoever and thus the two groups will never interact with each other."

As for the ranking idea, I don't think it's an answer to anything. If you don't want a certain behaviour, design the game around to either eliminate or discourage it, not to have players tattle-tale on each other. If the game has a political system to actually award people for their behaviour, that might work as a ranking system. But not the other way around to punish someone.

#46 I dunno Chris, I think tailoring the game mechanic design to curtail antisocial behavior usually fails... people will always find ways around the blocks to annoy and harass other players. In a real world drop in team game situation - say pick-up basketball games - you don't change the rules of the game in order to protect people from jerks - you just don't play with jerks. The problem I see with political systems and so on is that they try to over engineer the solution to the social problem without giving players real control over who they interact with in the game, and don't necessarily provide players with the ability to accurately predict if they will enjoy playing with another particular player.

What if each player of the game has a trust network of sorts... say, when you play with someone, you can rate that player for your own purposes... but those ratings propagate to other players based on how they rate you. So creating a bunch of spare accounts and having them all rate each other highly will do no good, because they will never make it in to other people's trust networks... of course the implementation of this could be an interesting challenge...

#47 Execpt that, a rating only you can see isn't useful unless you consistantly encounter that same llama. Through my experiences, usually you encounter a bad player and deal with him, but then next time its a whole new llama. In that case, the rating isn't going to help. Only if you can some how determine if a player is a good candidate for wrecking a game, before, they get a chance to wreck it is a system of any use.

A player has to wreck the game first before you know that player deserves a bad rating. Even then, you are really only rating them for the sake of future games with other players. It's unlikely the act of rating a player is going to help you very much and if others can't see your rating, your effort isn't going to help them much either.

#48 Maybe the only real system of any use is the usual admin kick/ban thing.

Of course you could add in voting off players, at least that would require a concensus.

I'm still in favour of looking at AI to watch a players actions and maybe automatically penalize them if theyre doing things wrong repeatedly. That would be part of the "help" system too. So it would train you to do things right, but punish you if you did things wrong.

Its one of those really sticky issues though, how to control unruly players.

Phil.

#49 I kinda like the distributed reputation system. Another addition to that would be the ability to see how long an account has been active. # games played vs. # finished.

This would be more for Pub games... Or to keep with the baseball analogy:

Playground Ball = Pub Games
Little League = "clan" tryout/recruiting matches
Minor League = Clan Challenges
Major League = Tournament Matches

With the distributed Reputation system the Llama is not even going to be touching the Minor or Major league games. And for the Little League games if the clan restricts tryouts to those people who have a favorable reputation they could be eliminated from there also.

The only problem area is going to be the Playground Ball games. And with those it will help people identify possible problems before the match even starts (if RW goes with the pre-match staging for pub games.

#50 In Unreal Tournament there's a vote mod where players can vote other players off (also be able to vote for maps). It's hardly ever used on most servers and sometimes when it is, the map voting is on while the player voting is off. Why? Just because like any other system that tries to punish llamas gets turned around and used by llamas. People that were playing well were usually the ones being kicked not the ones that were being lamers. There also seems to be a misunderstanding that llamas have no friends. I have seen a whole clan of llamas take over servers in FPS games and have also seem them run rampant in MMORPG games.

And Mark, I agree that most attempts to curtail antisocial behaviour fail. Because most attempts are going towards the punishment method. I believe the opposite should be done in multiplayer games. I think that game mechanics should award those who play by social standards and discourage but not punish for unsocial standards. I can probably do a full page about MMORPGs and what kind of system that might work in that kind of environment. But to be honest, I'm not sure what kind of system I would place in standard FPS games.

It's easier designing rules for single player games vs multiplayer games, because the rewards are usually reaching objectives or finishing levels in the game. There are no external influences that can ruin somone's game time (not counting the telemarketing calls interupting your play). Designing rules and gameplay for multiplayer games do need to take into account the social behaviour and adapt the rules for it. Maybe some of the out of work psychology graduates should be hired into the gaming business to work with this. :)

#51 Tribes and Tribes 2 had/have the best set of in game otions for controlling the game, the players and the server with a vote. I havn't seen a game with a system I thought was better so far. Some have come close, but none that I'd say did it better.


What if you had a system where if a player had a problem with a Llama in the game, the player can register a complaint with the server they're playing on. If that server collects enough complaints about a certain llama, then that server can lodge an official complaint with the Meta Master Server. The Meta Server then handles rating the players itself and taking actions to disipline problem players. Dedicated servers can even screen new players to the server by the Meta servers ranking and setting the game to only allow players who are not considered problem players by the MMS.

That way, 1 player can't pick on another player and just repeatedly complain about them. It has to be somewhat of a consensus of the server. Multiple accounts wouldn't work because a llama would have to login and have all of them on the server at the same time. Which could be prevented if the server simply rejects clones. Now its becoming alot work to harrass another player.