Discussion Friday: "Exploits" fault or freedom?

Some people hesitate to use the word "exploit" in forum/game discussion because of the negative connotation it carries with so many people. This likely rises from the idea of "an exploit" being equivalent to "a punishable offense", and indeed sometimes this is the case. However, in the vast majority of cases, an in-game exploit is something more subtle. Something useful, for sure, but not necessarily unbalancing in its own right. Unintended, surely, but at the same time a component that generates fun.

I believe much of what makes modern choice-based gaming successful are what many people would call "exploits", but it is important to distinguish how I define this term as opposed to some of the other popular definitions. I discussed the "Oh nos, bad things you should never do or talk about" position above, and the most relevant standard definitions of exploitation are as follows (from dictionary.com):

1. use or utilization, esp. for profit: the exploitation of newly discovered oil fields.
2. selfish utilization: He got ahead through the exploitation of his friends.

So how would I define an exploit as it pertains to gaming, especially the MMO environment. Simply "Anything that can be done, to a level of benefit, that was not considered by the developers at the time of design".

Now, this certainly encompasses things like dupes, abusing broken geometry, and these types of exploits are definitely to be looked down upon and fixed. The kind of exploits I admire, however, are those that thrive in ingenuity. Any class in EQ can claim to have developed tactics that weren't necessarily intended by developers. And, indeed, while some of these exploits are fixed-nerfed (I don't consider the terms mutually exclusive), still others live on and actually become part of classes. Case in point: Both snare kiting and feign-death pulling were entirely unintentional byproducts of skills put into the game that were "exploited" to great use by players. This is not to be looked upon as a bad thing, but rather as a conjunction of the tools given by developers and the ideas of players together creating an unanticipated result, and I believe this to be a Holy Grail of game development.

To explain that statement, we have to go back to the history of MMOs. In the most rudimentary sense, you can trace them back to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), of which some were simply text-based MMORPGs. Certainly the modern MMORPG was influenced by things like roguelikes (both classic roguelikes like Nethack, and more modern roguelikes like Diablo I/II), but the first games we could consider in the same genre as, say, EQ or WoW, were the graphical MUDs. MUDs, in turn, were a blend of the traditional text-based adventure game which added the freedom of deciding your own path and interacting with others. Freedom is the key phrase here.

The modern fantasy MMO also has its roots in D&D, this is fairly obvious to anyone looking at especially oldschool EverQuest content (gelatinous cube, anyone?) This, like MUDs and roguelikes, is the extension of the goal to "play D&D on the computer". This goal, although not in so many words, has been central to modern fantasy game design. Players want a world with rules, sure, but only in the most basic sense. What players really want is freedom. Just enough information, structure, and restrictions to get them going, and the ability to flesh it out from there.

This is why exploits are the Holy Grail of MMO game design. Look at EQ, one of the oldest modern MMOs in existence. Play for a few months and about half of what you'll learn are hard-set game laws and mechanics, the other half is how 10 years and millions of players have bent these rules, combined the tools they've been given, and carved out a path ultimately of their own choosing through the game. In EQ, we define an experienced player not just as someone who knows "Hey, I'm a warrior and I'm supposed to tank and use the taunt button", or "Hey, I'm a cleric, I heal", but as someone who knows how to use those basic tools, along with an ability to think on their feet, to adapt to the situation.

This beneficial situation arises from a couple facts.
1. Players will always always have more time to figure out how things work than developers. There are just way more of them, playing for way more time, and trying way more different combinations of abilities.
2. EQ's depth of content, in particular, means that the developer team today likely doesn't know as much about the entirety of the things available in EQ as the veteran players do, and as a result don't always anticipate that, "Hey, this new expansion ability might work really well alongside this ancient clicky".
3. This is a big one, the developers don't immediately try to quash innovation. Yes, every class has been burned by one of their favorite unintended (but not necessarily overpowered) tactics being fixed-nerfed, but each class will also tell you success stories of how some of those little tactics became a permanent part of their class.

Now, I say all this with the experience of having been beaten down by "exploit-fixes", surely. But I believe EQ is much more lenient (indeed, *must* be much more lenient) with this than other games. Some developers have an issue with the players "Not playing the game the way I designed them to", and these individuals are entirely missing the point. You needn't show them the path up a mountain. You needn't give the boss one weakness. You needn't provide set skill paths along which players can choose to be "An A-style warrior or a B-style warrior". Give them freedom, they will fill the space between your mechanics with ingenuity. They will climb the mountain if you build it. They will kill a boss creature even if you give it no weaknesses (Hi, Kerafyrm kill). They will create their own specialized sub-classes out of the abilities they pick and choose from the ones that are available. Just give them the structure and set them free.

What do you think?

Discussion Friday: Hardcore vs. Casual in EQ

More than anything, I'd like this blog to become a place for discussion more than pure author exposition. I recognize that a blog, perhaps, isn't the best place for this, but neither is a forum, really. Perhaps one day someone will develop a web medium whereby the opening poster can set the discussion in motion, and it'll flow fluidly instead of a straight line of responses down the page. In any case, I digress.

It is my hope that I will manage to come up with a discussion topic at least once a week, so without further adieu I'll present the first subject on which I've got a lot to say, and I hope you will as well:

Hardcore vs. Casual in itself can be quite a large discussion, so I've tried to confine it to this particular game. I hope to have a chance to discuss it as it applies to the industry as a whole at a later time, but for now this is quite topical as the talk on the EverQuest forums has once again become heated over this particular subject.

In short, EverQuest's newest expansion, Underfoot, is quite a large step-up in difficulty over the last expansion, Secrets of Faydwer. Mobs respawn quicker, in general, they hit harder and have more HP.

My personal playstyle is spotty. Some days, I am definitely a hardcore EQ player, pursuing my goals for hours and hours (or, if time allows, days) on end. Other days, I'm more interested in casually achieving a few things in an hour or two of quick play. What makes the MMO medium so great is that it supports this through a breadth of content. At the risk of running into a cliche, compare EverQuest to a more linear game like Halo, or indeed one with scaling like Oblivion. In either of those games, if you're high-level and want to fight pathetic enemies for a casual good time, you have to start anew, with a new character (although doing this in Halo is pretty meaningless, due to a lack of character progression). In EverQuest you simply go back to where the weak things are and kill them. This issue arises, however, when new content is released. Should it be hardcore content, or casual content? In a perfect world, I believe new content would be continually produced for everyone, but at a different rate. I see something fundamentally wrong with equally splitting development time between casual and hardcore content when casual content is made, by default, by aging hardcore content. For my personal view, I believe SoD was a bit on the easy side, and Underfoot is a refreshing challenge, *but the easy SoD content is still there for anyone who wants to do it*.

The issue is that people view EQ as simply "the latest expansion", and not "the game as a whole". If I want to kill trivial content with my eyes closed (and I do enjoy that, often), I go to easy_content_land (my poison of choice is RSS). If I want to be up against content that will really make me pull out all my tools and face it at near-100 %, I'll go to the latest expansion, wherever that may be. You can't can't work that in reverse. Old content doesn't suddenly become challenging, but new content does become less and less challenging as time goes on (due to new expansions upping the ante for progression, and slowly trivializing the old game in an attempt to make you seem new and shiny and strong). The zero-sum effect of increasing PC power at the same rate as increasing mob power is another discussion topic by itself, of course.

This all traces back to everyone wanting to have a reason to purchase the expansion. However, I don't think what is best for the game during this expansion cycle was to make an all-encompassing for-everyone expansion.

Now, several times during this debate I've made the point that the opposition wants "carbon copies of content (namely, SoD content) that is already there". This is a strawman. In truth, this is a delusion on my part because I don't want to come out and say what I actually think the people campaigning for easier Underfoot content want. Namely, they want less difficulty, but they want the loot to remain the same. They want a loot pinata with little risk, as much of SoD was. This formula works great for Diablo and its ARPG ilk, but I believe much of EQ's fun has always been from overcoming challenges, as opposed to simply looting the next shiniest thing. A shift from progression/challenge-based fun to loot-based fun for EQ is not a good direction, and is part of the reason gear as-of-late has become so much less interesting. I see Underfoot as an attempt, both on the player and developer side (because, make no mistake, players guide development too), to make content that is satisfying to beat not just because you got a +9 Longsword of Winsauce, but because for a moment there you didn't think you could win.

These kind of debates are always ready to open old wounds and rehash the age-old casual vs. hardcore questions. A particularly well-discussed point of contention, especially as it pertains to EQ, is whether raiders (people who adventure in two or more groups of 6), by their very nature, deserve better equipment than players who adventure in a group of 6 or less. For full disclosure, I'm almost entirely a group player, and oftentimes a solo player. In these discussions, however, I often find myself siding with the raiders, but not for the reasons many of them profess. The idea that raiders are somehow more skillful, or that they put in more hours for their equipment, is a dead end. Skill, effort, and the grind are universal to both the group and raid game. No, what really makes raiders "deserve" better equipment is simple: they face bigger challenges. To make a boss monster difficult for 2+ groups, it (usually, barring unique design) has to hit harder than a mob tuned for 1 group. This means the tank needs better armor to take those hits. It is a factual point based on simple tuning. Once that is established, though, there is plenty of wiggle room. Many have proposed that raid-geared characters are "nerfed down" to group-level gear in group content. Honestly, barring the massive logistical troubles of implementing a system like this, it isn't a terrible idea. The main problem I'd have with it is that going backwards on progression in any kind of character-building game is simply unfun.

Another oft-mentioned point is that raiders get too much development time devoted to their particular subsection of the population. I don't believe this one either, simply because most expansions are vastly vastly weighted towards the group side. For every raid designed, there are usually four or five group missions, not to mention all the static group zones.

But I'm not posting to hear people agree with me, what do you think?