Hearthstone - grinding for cards

Players who spend $0 in Hearthstone (whom I call free players) can only obtain new cards from coins. Coins come from daily quests. Most daily quests involve winning 3-5 games against other players. Because PvP involves so much luck, winning games is about trying long enough. Thus the only way for free players to obtain new cards is to grind. How long is the grind for new cards?

The first step in obtaining new cards is unlocking the Naxxramas and Blackrock dungeons. How much time does that take a free player? Each dungeon costs 3500 coins. Daily quests give 50 coins per day, so unlocking them both takes 5 months. And that is assuming that during these five months, the free (yet dedicated) player is not buying any card packs with coins. I could understand that the less committed free players would quit out of desperation. Blizzard may have realized that too, so they introduced two new ways to obtain card packs: Tavern Brawl, awarding one pack per week, and Watch and Learn, a daily quest awarding a card pack for spectating a battle.net friend winning a game. Watch and Learn actually killed two birds with one stone, since it also was the first (and still is the only) incentive to socialize.

Once the dungeons are out of the way, free players receive a card pack every other day. After 3-4 months, nearly all commons and half of all rares have been acquired. But players eventually need specific legendary cards to increase their win ratio. How much time does it take a free player to get a specific legendary card? Since a legendary card costs 1600 dust, and a card pack awards 90 dust on average, it takes a free player 5 weeks to gather enough dust to buy one specific legendary card. And that is assuming that the player trashes all cards found in packs, including those of rare, epic, and legendary rarities. If they keep the epic and legendary cards, a card pack only awards 39 dust on average, and obtaining a specific legendary card takes 6 weeks.

Not all legendary cards are worth keeping. Competitive decks require 2 to 4 legendary cards, ie 5 months of grinding. Moreover, there are 9 classes in Hearthstone, each with different legendary card requirements. Since Blizzard releases new cards every 6 months, no free player can seriously think of collecting all the cards in Hearthstone.

Gravity EU changes XP rates to prevent botting

Gravity Europe is the company running the European Ragnarok Online (euRO) server. Players can play on euRO for Free or by subscribing to a Premium account for 5 euros per month. Premium accounts also provide perks such as more character slots, more space to store items in the game, and a lower XP penalty on character death.

Gravity EU sent an email on October 22, 2015 to notify their players of a change in XP and drop rates:

Dear Adventurer,
As we have been aware that bots are polluting our server more and more every day, we've decided to act and make botting less attractive than it has been so far. From now on, the XP and Drop rates will change for both our Free and Premium users. Indeed, below you will find the comparison between previous and new rates:
Previous rates: Free Players: 100% XP and 100% drop. Premium Players: 150% XP and 100% drop.
New rates: Free Players: 75% XP and 75% drop. Premium Players: 175% XP and 150% drop.
As you can see, we also increased the Premium rates as a thank you to our loyal players and we hope that these changes will make our server a better place to live and play on, for everyone.
Enjoy your time on Ragnarök Online!
Gravity Europe Team

This decision is wrong for several reasons:

• Reducing the drop and XP rates for bots from 100% to 75% does not solve the botting problem. Bots on Free accounts are now simply 33% less productive, while bots on Premium accounts 50% more so. Bots are still here.
• The gap between the Premium and Free rates was moderate. Now it is more than 2x. Why would anyone play for free now?
• Using botting as an excuse to change the rates is a marketing ploy. If Gravity EU had increased the rates without mentioning botting, and only as a thank you to our loyal players, it would have felt like they were forcing players to go Premium. In contrast, by justifying their change with botting, Gravity EU is telling their players: go Premium to fight the bots!
• RO came out in 2002, so its graphics and game mechanics are a bit outdated. Yet, like any MMO, RO must attract new players for its community to survive. Having made the game free was a good first step, but Gravity EU also has to work on players acquisition. Most new players start playing the game for free, to try it out. Reducing the drop rates for the free players certainly hurts day-1 retention.
• The decision to change the rates is framed as a loss for Free accounts and a small gain for Premium accounts (and not as a solution against bots). The decision could have been framed as a large gain for Premium players and no change for Free players. Make it a reward! In fact, the Premium Service page frames it as a 100% vs 230%, not a 75% vs 175%. Why was it not framed that way in the email?

Finding a solution to botting is actually easy. Some private RO servers implemented periodic captcha popups: every 30 minutes, the game kicks out the players who fail to answer a random but easy test (such as 1+2=?). A bit inelegant, but very effective.

Habits

Notes from a French magazine called Ca m'interesse from January 2014. One article talked about choices, habits, and routines. Some findings are applicable to game design.

Richard Weiseman, a psychologist, followed 3000 people taking New Year resolutions. Half say they will hold their resolution on day 1. 12% manage it after one year. Weiseman gives tips on how to keep your resolutions, such as telling others about your resolution (to put peer pressure on yourself), avoiding previous (failed) resolutions (to prevent frustration), breaking it in smaller achievable steps (to prevent hopelessness), and giving yourself rewards for achieving these steps (positive reinforcement). It's been covered elsewhere too.

Based on previous research, Philippa Lally, another psychologist, suggests that it takes around two months working effortfully on new behavior to turn it into a habit.

Future hypothetical rewards (e.g. slim body in a month) are higher to accept than instant gratification (e.g. eat tasty food right now) because they require an effort of imagination. Solution: make future rewards more visible.

Baba Shiv, professor of marketing, asked 165 undergrads to pick either a chocolate cake or a fruit salad. The chocolate cake has a positive affect and negative cognition, ie it's emotionally appealing but you know you should not take it. The fruit salad is the opposite: negative affect and positive cognition, ie it's the rational healthy choice. In both groups, participants were asked to remember a number throughout the experiment. One group was given a 2-digit number (low cognitive load, ie high processing resources) and the other a 7-digit number (high cognitive load, ie low processing resources). 41% of the 2-digit group picked the tasty cake vs 63% in the 7-digit group. Under heavy cognitive load, people are more likely to choose options that are immediately pleasing. As a side note, when the presentation of the choice was through photos rather than the actual items, the difference between the two groups disappeared.

If I perceive a task as more difficult, I will expect a higher reward. It is not just about being strong-minded, but also about my perception of the task's difficulty.

Diablo 3 - item sets

Modern item games like Diablo 3 (D3) use a mechanic called sets: when used together, certain items unlock particular bonuses. For example in D3, Litany of the Undaunted increases attack speed, The Wailing Host increases crit chance, and used together they give 15% extra gold from monsters. Item sets is an old mechanic - the Diablo 2 expansion already had some in 2001.

Sets in D3 are a great mechanic for at least two reasons. First, sets let developers encourage the use of certain skills. Since the bonuses from set items nearly always provide more damage than regular non-set items, players use them. For example, the Marauder set for Demon Hunters requires the use of sentries, a skill that would not be used otherwise because its AI for picking a target is unpredictable. Second, set items are a great mechanic also because they give players a goal. When I dropped my first set item and saw the set bonuses, I immediately wanted other items in the set.

Sudden increase in power

End-game starts after reaching level 70. Reaching level 70 by yourself takes roughly 15 hours. Difficulty from then on can be measured by the Greater Rift (GR) level your character can reach. Set bonuses are so powerful that they make your character jump multiple GR levels at once. For example, going from 5 set items to 6 can double your character's effective damage or toughness, and make you reach 5 or 6 GR levels higher. This explains why the Ring of Royal Grandeur, which reduces the number of items needed for set bonuses by 1, pretty much a wild-card for all your sets, is such a game-changer. These sudden increases in power sometimes surprise players, but I think each bump makes them suddenly feel very powerful. Interestingly, back in 2013, sets used to be as good as non-set legendary items.

Vague descriptions or hidden mechanics?

The descriptions of D3 set bonuses are often vague, and require the player to check the forums and Youtube videos for details. Here are two examples.

Marauder set

This is a Demon Hunter set. The 2-piece bonus is straightforward: it gives 500 dexterity (on top of the approximately 500 dexterity already contributed by each set piece).

The 4-piece bonus makes the Companion skill call all possible companions (instead of only one). Do passive effects from the Companion skill (e.g. the boar increases life regeneration) apply as well? And do all active effects trigger when I use the skill? The answers are not written in the description, but people figure it out quickly by trying.

The 6-piece bonus reads: Sentries cast your equipped Hatred spenders. After trying it out, I realized that sentries have a different rate of fire for each spender: Cluster Arrow (massive area damage) seems to happen only every 5 shots, whereas Elemental Arrow (small multi-target damage) the rest of the time. Looking at high-level Demon Hunters, most wear Tasker and Theo, which increases the attack speed of your pets by 40-50%. Are sentries pets? (Yes!) And how can I make my sentries use Cluster Arrow more often? (You can't!) Theorycrafters figured it all out by analyzing game frames one by one and sharing their findings. But is the average player supposed to read the forum to improve their character?

Zunimassa set

This is a Witch Doctor set. The 2-piece bonus gives 250 intelligence and grants 30 Mana per Kill. Is it only when my character performs the killing blow on a monster? Does it also work when it's one of my pets? Does it also work when it's another player?

The 4-piece bonus reads: Your Fetish Army (FA) lasts until they die. This is straightforward, and it made me think about the passive skill Fetish Sycophants (FS). FS seems to combo well with FA: When you hit enemies with your spells, you have up to a 10% chance to summon a dagger-wielding Fetish to fight by your side for 60 seconds. There are several problems with this apparent FA-FS synergy.

First, why the up to? What makes the rate be less than 10%? That is where theorycraft comes to the rescue. The community found out that one can have at most 15 active FS at the same time. So the rate of FS trigger is 10% until 15, at which point it becomes 0%. The description of FS should also mention this cap of 15.

A second problem is the easy confusion between the two types of fetishes. 1) Witch Doctors can have many pets: a Gargantuan, zombie dogs, FA fetishes, FS fetishes, and mimics. FA and FS are both fetishes, so intuitively, they must benefit from the same bonuses. 2) Why excluding FS from the 4-piece bonus when the effect from the Carnevil helm applies to both FA and FS? 3) The distinction between FA and FS is not for game balance: in practice, it's very easy to maintain 15 FS active all the time by speeding through monsters.

Why so vague?

I can see several reasons:

• Practicality: the developers want to be able to modify the bonus (through hotfix or patch) without modifying the description.
• Brevity: a precise description may require too much space in the item tooltip.
• Practice: figuring it out by trial is more visceral than by just reading the description.
• Theorycraft: explaining everything spoils the fun of theorycrafters.

Uselessness, sub-optimality, and combinatorics

Some sets are clearly underpowered compared to others. The Witch Doctor Invoker set and the Demon Hunter Shadow set are only useful when your character gets hit. Sadly, in D3, the best defense is offense: the goal is to kill monsters quickly enough that they don't kill you. Therefore these sets end up never being used (except the 2-piece Shadow set in hardcore mode, maybe?).

The Natalya set is not useless, but rather suboptimal. Both the 2-piece and 3-piece bonuses increase damage slightly and enhance mobility (more discipline means more Vaulting). The 4-piece bonus reduces the cooldown of Rain of Vengeance by 2 seconds for each enemy you kill. RoV has a base cooldown of 30 seconds, and does 1000% area damage for 5 seconds, so the set seems very interesting. In practice however, it is difficult to keep monsters grouped in an area for 5 seconds. So while some players use the 2- and 3-piece bonus, nobody cares about the 4-piece bonus. I wonder if the set would be more used if the cooldown was reduced by 2 seconds for every enemy hit (instead of killed).

ArcheAge boasts 120 classes, but it's only because players can pick 3 skill trees among 10, ie C(10,3) = 120 different combinations of skill trees. I don't think that all combinations are efficient, but ArcheAge achieves such diversity simply by leveraging combinatorics on 10 coherent sets of skills. In D3, a player using a Demon Hunter can pick 6 active skills among 24, so that's a total of C(24,6) = 134k different builds. Add to this that each active skill has 4-5 runes, and that there are also another 4 passive skills (5 if we count the Hellfire Amulet) to pick among 18. That's billions of combinations! Yet the only sustainable Demon Hunter builds actually played are minor variations around the same 6 skills. That is because the Marauder set forces players to pick these skills. Moreover, I really liked combining multiple 3- and 4-piece sets together, but the 6-piece Marauder took all the spots. I wish D3 had 1) more 4-piece sets and fewer 6-piece sets, and 2) combinations between sets, not just between sets and legendary items (e.g. Marauder and Tasker and Theo)

Diablo 3 - the item game

In item games, the main goal of players is to continuously upgrade their gear. Diablo 3 (D3) is the perfect example: kill monsters in order to drop better gear in order to kill monsters faster. Bungie just released Destiny, an item-game FPS budgeted with half a billion dollars. Yet Destiny could learn from Diablo 3. So here are some thoughts about the item game in D3.

Prevent farming ...

In D3, like in D2, the drops are completely random: with a few exceptions, nearly any item can drop from any monster or wreckable object (e.g. jars). The odds are just higher for harder monsters, and way lower for wreckable objects. The exact drop rates are secret (except the 10% legendary drop rate from Kadala). This secrecy has led to various rumors and tinfoil hat theories about how loot can be influenced.

D3 has, or used to have, farming spots such as the Decaying Crypt, but they were mostly for XP, not for drops. In D3, farming boss monsters actually brings fewer drops than farming normal or elite monsters. This contrasts with Diablo 2, where players were grinding bosses like Baal or Diablo for XP and loot. So in a way, the grind in D3 is less boring than in D2.

... Yet allow farming

As of October 2014, there are 2 exceptions to what I just wrote: 1) bounty rewards like RoRG or Helltrapper, and 2) Hellfire Amulet.

The RoRG was introduced in February 2014. It is a mandatory item to reach the game's highest difficulty levels. Players have to camp Act-1 bounties to get one with good rolls. To farm as quickly as possible, players join co-op games to split farm: instead of spending 15-20 minutes completing the 5 bounties together, they each complete a bounty in 5 minutes. I am surprised that the developers did not see it coming: split farming is very clearly not how we want players to play the game. Yet nearly a year later, they still have not changed the bounty system.

The Hellfire Amulet is not as mandatory compared to the RoRG. But its bonus is so useful that all of the top players have it. Farming it is somewhat more fun than farming for RoRG, since it is a quest in itself: a) hunt for the 4 Keywardens on the game's largest maps to obtain 4 keys, b) combine the 4 different keys into a portal, c) kill 2 super bosses at once, a somewhat more difficult task than the Keywarden hunt, and d) combine 4 super bosses' loots to obtain a Hellfire Amulet.

The Reaper of Souls expansion

From launch in May 2012 until the retirement of the Auction House (AH) in February 2014, players were mostly buying their gear from the AH, and sometimes grind-crafting it. They nearly never dropped it themselves. Legendary weapons had 7-8 affixes. After the AH retired, Loot 2.0 arrived, and the expansion Reaper of Souls (RoS) shortly after that. Legendary weapons now have 4 primary and 2 secondary affixes. Secondary affixes do not matter much (e.g. more XP when killing a monster), so RoS drastically reduced the item entropy.

The expansion also reminded me of Blizzard's somewhat elegant solution to a common MMO problem. Most MMOs in the early 2000s had the same problem: players who have been playing for a year have too much of a head start compared to players who have been playing for 3 months. New players are hopeless, especially in PvP situations. World of Warcraft solved this problem with what I call expansion gating: WoW vanilla capped the character level at 60 and item level at 92. Until the first expansion came out to increase these two caps, players were gated there. The advantage of expansion gating is that it gives the same chance to old and new players. The main drawback (if any) is mudflation. Diablo 3 is no different: level-70 items have twice more DPS than level-60 items. Thus when the expansion launched, players threw away all the gear they had acquired before.

Few links to other end-game activities

Item games have a great loop, but it is not enough in itself. D3 launched in May 2012. The Auction House (AH) launched in May 2012 too, so players could play two games in one: the action RPG and the auction game. Note that you did not need to play the aRPG to play the auction game, but you did need to buy gear off the AH to play the aRPG well. Had it been the opposite, I think the game would have been much better.

In July 2012, the developers realized that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. Since launch, the game also allowed players to hunt for achievements and start new characters (in softcore or hardcore). In August 2012, the developers added the leveling up grind through 100 Paragon levels. Every Paragon level increased the chance to drop an item and the amount of gold dropped by 3%. In February 2014, Paragon levels became infinite, and the 3% bonus was removed. Clans and communities were also added in February 2014. Since August 2014, players can compete on the greater rift leaderboards, and start new seasonal characters (in softcore or hardcore). Interestingly, the item game is completely independent of all other end-game activities (except the AH and the original 100 Paragon levels increasing magic find and gold find). In other words, the item game of Reaper of Souls could be directly copied into another game without having to also copy the other activities.

Improving the end-game of social strategy games

Improving the end-game of social strategy games

I removed Clash of Clans (CoC) from my iPad on August 20, 2014. The game had just reached two years old, and I had been playing it since February 2013. I played very actively (2-3 hours per day on average) until December 2013, then considerably slowed down (1 hour per week).

No new content

I think I slowed down, and eventually stopped playing mostly because no significantly new content was introduced. New content mattered a lot to me because I had reached Town Hall 10, the very end of the game, for many months. So far, the game has received four updates in 2014.

Month	Description
January	Introduced Hero abilities, which are not really a new gameplay feature, but rather a design fix to encourage players to use and upgrade their heroes. Great, and perhaps even necessary, but no impact on battle strategy or base design.
April	Introduced Clan Wars, a feature asked by players since the game came out. My clan was very excited, but we stopped Clan Wars after a couple weeks. We realized that the match-making algorithm alternated pairing our clan against once a much stronger clan, once a moderately weaker clan. Clan Wars require a lot of time and in-game resources, so we kept asking for enemy clans, but only attacked when we were sure to win. After a few weeks, we realized the Clan Wars rewards were not worth the frustration, so we stopped match-making.
May	Mostly usability tweaks.
July	Improved Hero abilities. Once again, this was more a design fix to encourage the use and upgrading of Heroes than a new feature.

Moreover, in these four updates, the Hog Rider received three nerfs, but my base still got trampled by mass-hog armies. (Yes, anti-hog base designs exist, but these designs are very vulnerable to air attacks). The Valkyrie was buffed twice, but it still was not enough to make her useful for her cost. To sum up the last 8 months, no new mechanic, be it a unit or a tower, was introduced, and I did not find the balance tweaks adequate.

Lessons for social strategy games

Troop synergies

The game was released with 10 basic units that make sense when used together. For example, the Giants are slow and target defenses so that the Healer can follow them without being hit. These synergies are expected: the team had time to iterate and polish before launch. But introducing new troops after launch is tricky: the new troops must 1) have an interesting gameplay element, 2) complement existing troops, and 3) keep existing troops useful.

The Minion is a perfect example: it is cheap and flying. This makes it a great complement for farming with Barbarians and Archers (called the BAM strategy). It is also great for high-level PvP when paired with Balloons (Balloonion strategy). And since it costs dark elixir and has low HP, it can't be used by itself.

The pricey Golem is another great example: it synergizes well with Wizards and Pekkas (GoWiWi strategy), which are necessary troops in high-level PvP. The Golem's production stats are perfect: 45 minutes to make, and a cost of 2.5 hours-worth of dark elixir, which is the same as Pekka. The Golem was clearly designed to be trained in parallel of Pekka. Plus Supercell must have made a lot of money from players gemming it!

On the other hand, the moderately expensive wall-jumping Hog Rider does not complement any other troop. Neither does the Valkyrie. Interesting ideas, but no synergy! Supercell keeps trying to fix them, so they may have realized that. Or maybe Supercell abandoned them completely, and has been working on more troops, such as the Spider, Centaur, or Yeti, which have not been released yet, but were leaked in July 2014.

More things to do in the end game

As the Town Hall levels go by, so does the average duration of building upgrades. For example, upgrades take 3-10 hours at TH3, 1-3 days at TH6, and 7-14 days at TH10. By TH10, the player should have 5 Builders, so the average time between two building upgrades is still 2-3 days. During these 2-3 days, players come back to the game only because their troops are ready for battle, not because they have something to do with their base. But by TH10, players have spent months being progressively conditioned to come back for their troops and not their base. So they still come back, but more and more reluctantly, since the rewards are less and less frequent. At some point, they unlearn the habit of coming back to play: what's the point when nothing seems to be happening? They eventually stop playing.

Possible solutions involve shortening upgrade times or providing more builders, but both may seem like Supercell would lose money. The game should at least give players things to do with their buildings (beyond collecting resources twice a day). The Bomb very short upgrade times have been a step in that direction. A crafting system like in Monster Legacy, or Angry Birds Epic, but applied to strengthening buildings, or increasing towers' rate of fire, may increase the game's lifespan even more.

The loops of Diablo 3

In Vanilla D3 (D3 for short), players could buy or sell gear for in-game gold or real money at the auction house (AH). Players reported feeling frustrated: they drop legendary gear (yay!), but when they check the AH, they realize their legendary gear is actually average. So they buy amazing gear from the AH for cheap, roll over monsters they used to have so much trouble with, and become bored with the game quickly. Damion Schubert, a designer on SWTOR, echoed that the core loop of D2 was much stickier than D3's. So did players during a Reddit Q&A session with D3 designers. Personally, I started a year after the game launched, bought all my gear from the AH for little gold, never dropped any better gear, rarely managed to sell gear on the AH, and left after a month.

Blizzard removed the AH for the D3 expansion, Reaper of Souls (ROS), released in March 2014. The game feels better. Is it because the core game loop is back to what it was in D2?

Two core loops

At its core, Diablo (D2, D3, and ROS) has actually two intertwined core loops: the usual XP loop and the item-game loop. XP loop: kill monsters to accumulate XP to increase level to improve stats and skills to do more damage to kill harder monsters. Item-game loop: kill monsters to drop gear to improve stats and skills to do more damage to kill harder monsters.

To mix these two loops together, the Diablo designers decided that damage was dealt by skills, but increased by stats (e.g. each point of DEX increases damage by 1%) and gear (e.g. increase the damage of fire skills by 10%), especially weapons (which is why 40% of all drops are weapons or off-hand gear).

In D3, characters unlock skills every level until they reach 70. After level 70, characters gain Paragon levels. Each Paragon level gives 1 point to increase a stat. The real goal of Paragon levels is not better stats, but rather frustration control. The item-game loop triggers randomly and irregularly: a player could go for hours without dropping a better gear. The XP loop, on the other hand, is reliable and constantly increasing. In other words, the item-game is a roulette, while the XP loop a grind. While not super fun by themselves, combined they make the game more fun. Interestingly, Paragon levels were an afterthought, and only shipped 3 months after launch.

ROS and removing the AH

The XP loop did not change between Vanilla D3 and ROS, but the item loop did. In D3, the primary way to convert gold into items and vice-versa was the AH. But the AH went out of hand: powerful items were available for cheap, and a hyper-inflation boosted by a gold dupe bug made the economy collapse. In ROS, the AH was decommissioned and replaced by a beefed-up crafting system (crafting was insignificant in Vanilla D3).

As of patch 2.0.5, though, the gear available from crafting is mostly defensive or utility. The best gear is offensive, and dropped from monsters in high difficulty or found randomly in bounty rewards. Except for enchanting, crafting is pointless.

Rewards, pacing, and dopamine

Rewards and pacing

There is something mysterious when people read through 1000 pages of Cryptonomicon, a 1999 novel from Stephenson, or through the thousands of pages of Martin's A song of ice and fire. What keeps people reading? Here are some rewards that both authors use throughout their books:

Reward	Pacing	Description
Character progression	Randomly (but fits the story)	The protagonist learns new skills, grows up, meets love, learns a lesson of life, or gets rich. We care about this character's well-being because we empathize.
Action and passion	Every 3-10 pages	When stuck in difficult situations, the reader knows that the hero can not die, so she asks herself: how is the hero going to get out of this alive? (Except sometimes, main characters actually die, leaving us in shock). The same applies for romantic scenes, where we wonder not if, but how it's going to work out between two characters.
Story progression	Every 10-30 pages	Right from the start, the authors put under the reader's nose a bunch of questions: what is happening, why is this guy so mysterious, and so on. The reader wants to know the answers, so she keeps reading until answers are provided, along with new mysteries to figure out.

Looking at blockbuster action movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum, the same kind of pacing emerges: action scenes are followed by the protagonist learning about his past. Then the plot moves on, the character meets new people, finds himself new tasks to do, and back to action scenes.

These rewards and pacing also echo those found in games and mentioned in a class on game balance from Ian Schreiber: gains in character power, discovery of new areas, and progression of the story are rewards to be used at irregular intervals to keep the player engaged. So reading books, watching movies, and playing games seem to provide similar rewards.

Dopamine

Let's dig down to the physiological level of rewards. Most of the articles dealing with the physiological response of gaming revolve around addiction. For instance, a 2012 NY Times article reports that Zynga helps addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction.. To that, the Zynga co-founder replies: Given that we're human, we already want dopamine. And that does not calm things down. So let's look at a less controversial topic: the physiological response of reading. This is not a survey of the field, but rather some picks from a few Google searches - nothing very serious.

First, according to Farland, a current writer, the dramatic structure of stories (exposition - action - climax - denouement) matches the bio-feedback of hormones such as dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol. He says: As a person "hunts" for clues, or for a way out of a problem, the brain rewards the person by releasing dopamine as a reward. [...] When you reach the climax of the novel, [...] you reach the climax of your emotional exercise. When the story ends [...] your stress is released. The adrenaline and cortisol stop flowing.

As notes from a psychology class on stress can tell us, cortisol is the key hormone of stress. Adrenaline is the hormone that tells our body to be alert. And finally, dopamine is in charge of rewarding our brain.

So what happens when we start reading? Some have guessed that we are having pleasure because reading is a tough task, and our brain rewards us for completing such a hard task. This seems confirmed by a 2001 study who showed that transitioning from rest to reading produces the same increase in dopamine concentration as transitioning from rest to memory-intensive tasks (something cognitively demanding). Although, a 2000 study seems to reject this hypothesis. Something that might be worth investing is whether reading a microwave-oven manual generates as much dopamine as reading an exciting short story where the action starts right from the start.

It may actually be more complicated: the dopamine concentration could actually not indicate our pleasure, but our expectation of pleasure: dopamine motivates us, increasing our energy and drive and compelling us to engage in the pleasurable activity. If everything is as nice as the brain predicted, dopamine levels remain elevated. If things turn out even better than the brain hoped, dopamine levels are increased; we engage in the pleasurable activity even more vigorously. If, on the other hand, the activity is less pleasurable than we thought it would be, dopamine levels plummet.

Back to games

So, what can we conclude about games? First, much like movies and books, reward us by generating dopamine when we succeed at a difficult cognitive tasks such as a head-shot in an FPS, or a successful Chess trap. That is pretty close to fiero, and in fact, Bateman already suggested in 2008 that fiero is a cocktail of epinephrine and dopamine. So, nothing brand new here.

Perhaps more interesting, long-term enjoyment seems to require the dopamine to yo-yo - which is bad. Let us assume that our brain produces dopamine by expecting a nice event. Then when our brain is done with those nice events, the dopamine level will decrease. That would be a horrible yo-yo if there were only one kind of event, but books, movies, and games, have at least three: action, story, and character events. So alternating events and interweaving them in such a way that our brain is always on the lookout may keep dopamine, and pleasure, at high levels instead of making it yo-yo.

There might be a few gotchas, though. First, the magnitude and the lifespan of the dopamine burst depends on a lot factors. Grinding monsters for a drop is only pleasurable so long as the brain is expecting that item to drop. After a couple days, the dopamine is all gone, and it's just boring. Some studies should investigate the average magnitude of an "achievement unlocked!", or the lifespan of a boss kill or a level up.

Second, dopamine bursts may not stack. The brain may be too busy expecting a story progression event that it may ignore, or even worse, be displeased, by a character progression event: it was not expecting it! This limitation does not seem cognitive, but rather emotional, so maybe people with higher EI could stack expectations and dopamine bursts more easily than indifferent people who say "it's just a game"?

Third, and to finish as we started, with books: Stephenson and Martin alternate their character viewpoints chapter after chapter, possibly to keep the reader's attention. By the way, they rarely handle more than 7 characters at the same time, since 7 is a magic cognitive number. These changes in views often cut short the action, so the reader may get frustrated, or even vexed for being tricked to continue reading by the exact same three mechanisms every chapter. It is interesting to know why people keep reading those long books, but that last reason is exactly why I stopped.

The social side of gaming - Ducheneaut 2004

Notes from: The social side of gaming: A study of interaction patterns in an MMO, by Ducheneaut and Moore, 2004

• SWG in 2004: 400k subscribers. The game mechanics make the classes interdependent: after fighting, marksmen go to cities to be healed and buffed by medics and entertainers. Medics need materials from scouts, etc. Social interactions clearly happen in cities.
• Collect public chat events (= text + gestures such as '/bow') in the 2 places with most people on a single server. 100Mb of chat logs using the '/log' in-game command daily for a month. Used Perl to parse and MySQL to store and query events: who talks to who, how (eg /shout), and the actual text content.
• 5500 unique players. Up to 1,200 chat events per hour in a single place.
• Player interactions can be:
  • AFK macros: sending more gestures than they receive
  • Short and efficient instrumental talk: "buff plz", sending very few gestures
  • Genuine socialization, with as many gestures given as received
• Entertainers get XP when performing for someone else, and owning a high-level entertainer may be required to become a Jedi master. Hence lots of entertainers were AFK-macroing their buffs.
• Similarly, to become master in a discipline, players need to teach their skills to other apprentice-players. Hence, experts need to interact with newbies. That was also sometimes macroed.
• Problem#1: AFK macroers and live players do not cohabit well in the same places. Live players do not know what to expect.
• Solutions:
  • Different places for AFK and live players [eg Ragnarok's autotrade merchant map] - but then, the AFK players are never visited.
  • Players should be able to know, at a glance, who is available (and live) for a particular service. The existing name tag system, already indicating the player's guild and faction over players' head, could be used for that.
  • Reward live play
• Problem#2: instrumental play (for the points) uses any means to progress fast; that includes macroing. Social play is not point-based, yet 1) social interactions are measured in points, and 2) playing for points requires taking part in social activities.
• Solution: social progress should not be measured from instrumental play data (HP healed, buffs delivered, number of disciples ...), but rather from live social data (social graph ...).

Ethnographic play on a 25-rate RO private server

I wanted to play RO for some days. Something quick, but not too easy, and with not too many people to have to talk to while leveling. Kind of a nostalgic try. So I picked a private server which drop and XP rates are 25. That means killing a monster brings 25 times more XP to the avatar than on the official servers, and a 1% chance to drop an item becomes 25% on this server. I conducted an «ethnographic» play: based on my (relatively extended) knowledge of the game I analyzed the server through player avatars in the game but also on the control panel of the website. I found the private server on ratemyserver.net (RMS), but I will not write its name here so that nothing bad happens to its administrator. Launching a private server is an illegal activity after all.

Demographics

At 3pm on Friday, the control panel showed 2 players were connected: T an Assassin and J a Hunter, both around level 80. These are the most solo classes of the game. When I logged in, it was not long before T arrived and, without a word, sent me an invitation to join guild G1, which he was the guild master of. I accepted, and saw in the guild panel that J the Hunter was also in the guild. Three days later, on Sunday night, there were 9 players connected on the server at 7pm. Among them, 4 belonged to guild G1, 2 to guild G2, 2 were not in a guild and 1 was an AFK merchant, used as a mule selling items to other players.

As mentioned before, the guild master of guild G1 was T, an Assassin. He had spent the last 2 days camping equipment on a low-level randomly-appearing monster called Ghostring. He had reached level 98 and had not made any other character. He was very confident and experienced in the game, and gave advice to the other 2 players he had recently recruited in his guild. IRL he was a 19-year-old jobless American. He started playing RO in 2007, had played on iRO Loki (official international server) and 5 other (much more populated) private servers, ranging from 6 to very high rates.
The sub Guild Master was J, the Hunter. He had actually played a lot and was now a lvl-96 Sniper. He had managed to collect a few Field Manuals in fishing, a custom activity of the server. When used by a player, manuals give 3 times more XP for 30 minutes. Although J seemed less confident than T, he said he started playing RO in 2006 on RuRO, the official Russian server. He gave spontaneously several items to other guild members. J and T talked quite much together in the guild chat. IRL, J was a 19-year-old Russian who worked in a call-center. He found his job boring and managed to play at work.
A was recruited after J. He was a lvl-90 Monk, a quite complex class combining support and high damage attacks. He was a basic member of the guild but talked a lot with J and T when he was connected. Each of them gave advice about where to XP or which equipment to get. He said he started playing on several euRO free-trial accounts in 2004, and tried another private server later. He looked quite unexperienced. IRL, he was a 19-year-old German working in a call-center as well (but not playing at work). When they realized through the guild chat that they were all the same age and two of them had the same job, they enthusiastically sent Facebook invitations to each other.
B was a lvl-96 Rogue recruited last. Rogues are a mixed class between Assassin and Hunter. B was not connected at that time.

In the other guild, the guild master was a quite experienced lvl-98 Hunter very in view on the forum. He had, among others, argued that the custom items provided by the administrator were balanced while another player thought they were not. The second player in the guild was a cheerful Bard, a support and/or high-attack version of Hunter. I was enrolled by him in the guild, and he even asked if I needed any piece of equipment. During week days, they were never connected before 5pm, I concluded they worked or went to school. Most of the time they were connected, the guild chat stood silent. When they happened to speak, it was in German to each other and out of the guild chat. Later, the Bard added that the 25-rate server opened following the wipe of a high-rate server. Maybe they knew each other before the low-rate server opened?

Server features

The capital city was Prontera. @go was given to players, but not @storage or @warp; this meant players had to go back to the capital to go where they wanted or use their storage. In my opinion, this increased the frequency of little social events that happened in the capital between players. The custom NPC were those usually found on any private server; they were:

• The Warpra teleports players wherever they want for free. This solves the problem of long and boring transportation time when there is no player to teleport other players to their destination.
• The Healer heals players and solves the scarcity of support-class avatars who, most of the time, need a group to XP quickly.
• Stat and Skill Reseter: resets the avatar skill and stat points. If a player wants to change his character build (eg from a Support Paladin to a Tank Paladin), she can.
• Job Master saves players the time to do job changing quests.
• Banker, Identifier, Bonus skill giver (to save time to the player), Universal Renter (for Cart, Falcon or mount)

There was also a Kafra Employee that lets the player save his respawn point when dead or open his storage, but this is an NPC found on official servers as well. A vending zone had been added as well where Merchants could set up their shops, but the server population was too small to have any virtual economy. The guild versus guild event, the WoE, was supposed to happen twice a week but was deactivated by S, the administrator of the server, probably because there were not big enough guilds.

S was German, although his advertising for the server on RMS mentioned the server and forum language was English. He came on the forum once or twice a day to reply to suggestions or technical problems with the game. He did not harass players for votes or donations, and stayed remarkably quiet. In the game, his player account was the Monk A. As a Game Master, He never improvised any live event for the players. Technically, he designed and coded his own website and control panel, manipulated client-side files, added and edited a few small NPCs in the game, tried (and failed...) to balance his custom items (eg the fishing rewards) but never seemed to have modified the server source code.

Conclusion

Certainly, the players from this private server had different origins (Russia, Germany, France, US) and had different gaming expertise. However, all the players were all males of the same age (16-25) and had all tried official servers and/or private servers before. They all played solo but their belonging to a guild showed they wanted to socialize with other players. Alone Together.

This private server had several custom hats. They all required grinding at least a hundred items, and rewarded the player with unbalanced items (eg inflicting +12% damage on other players). Somehow, it was too easy, but players did not seem to see it this way, or at least they did not complain about it - for now... I doubt the administrator had the community management, game design, programming, and graphic skills required to make his server grow as much as he would like to, but I am sure he had the will. Private server administrators are a particular kind of consumer of MMOG company's products - they use the game client. Of course, this is an illegal activity, or maybe a not-yet-channeled activity. MMOG companies could choose to design their games and pay attention to these determined and skilled consumers. They could be included in the product community as content contributors.

Drop systems

Traditional

In MMORPGs, monsters have a list of items they can drop when they are killed. A player can get 0, 1 or more items from the same monster, but a dice is rolled for EACH of the dropable items.

WoW: To get Zod's Repeating Longbow, one knows Lady Deathwhisper is the only one monster to be killed. The game rolls a 1000-sided dice, and if 136 or below comes out, the bow is dropped. However, one can also drop the Nibelung from Lady Deathwhisper at 15.6%. Hence, approximately 2.1% of the time, the dragon will drop both the Longbow and the Nibelung, and maybe other things as well.

RO: To get an Ice Pick, one has to kill Eremes, LoD or RSX, but they drop it at respectively 15%, 0.1% and 0.05%. But Eremes also drops Glittering Jacket at 90% or Exorciser at 35%. So 4.7% of the time, Eremes will drop at least these 3 items.

Procedural

Roguelikes generate a lot of their content procedurally. Unlike MMORPGs, roguelike drops are most of the time randomly-generated: monsters do not drop specific items at certain percentage, they drop classes of items.

Diablo (and Diablo II): the drop system consists of Treasure Classes (sets of items) and a drop process. When a player kills a monster, a first random number is used to determine which TC will be dropped. For Andariel, some of these TC are armo18 (1.02%), weap69 (0.017%) or nothing (28.35%). All monsters have the sum of their TC = 100%. In other words, 28.35% of the time Andariel will drop nothing, and the rest of the time, it will drop one item. Once the TC has been chosen, another random number comes out for "the odds". "The odds" is the chance a particular item is chosen from a TC. For the weap69 TC, the Eldritch Orb has 1/15 chance to be selected. In the end, a player has around 0.001% chance to drop exactly the Eldritch Orb from Andariel. But Baal also drops the weap69 TC at 0.54%, so Baal can drop Eldritch Orb at 0.54% * 1/15 = 0.036%. Finally, various elements such as the item property (fire, ice, ...), name prefixes/suffixes or durability are generated.

Scheduled

Team Fortress 2: the Item Drop System used to give (at 25% chance) a weapon to the player every 25 minutes of game. To avoid unlucky streaks that players complained about, Valve changed it: every time an item drops, the time of the next drop is determined.

[Literature] Death matters: understanding gameworld experiences

by Klastrup in 2006, located on ACM portal

Motivation and methodology

To fully understand [virtual] worlds in their complexity, we need to study the combination of a navigational fictional setting, a given world system and its design, the possibilities of performance and interaction within it, and the social interaction in and about the world, which forms the player's experience of a particular world. The motivation of the author is to understand the many factors that help create a sustainable experience of "worldness" in order to improve online games in general. Even though the author acknoledges that within the humanities, no tested methodologies yet exist for the study of particular gameworld features, she argues that virtual death, under certain circumstances, is not just a question of game mechanics, but is a pivotal element in the social and visual design of the worlds. Klastrup also notices that designers prefer to follow genre conventions rather than break the rules and "innovate" death. Therefore, she suggests designers should consider different ways to implement death.

Game design perspective

Player versus designer: According to the author, how death should be implemented from a game design point of view is an important matter. She gives several quotes that players have left on her survey website (the website used to be death-stories.org but seems currently down) and also quotes from designers such as Richard Bartle. Bartle argues in his book Designing Virtual Worlds that some tedious aspects of the real world that players do not want to experience act, unfortunately, to set up [...] enjoyable aspects that they do want to experience.

How to stage death: Klastrup explains that in virtual worlds, death is everywhere: my avatar dies, other players' avatars die, death happens to everybody. Death is made permanent by the players' corpses which serve the purpose of conveying the concept and existence of mortality. However, by shortly placing avatars "outside" the game itself with no possibility for powerful action within the world, players are reminded that they should be wary of death.

Grinding to become a hero: virtual heroes can either be cast as "winners" who, through a combination of strength and skills are able to slay dangerous mobs or as "group servants" who are willing to offer their lives in order to save the group. A player wrote Every time I died, I would repeat "doesnt matter guy, keep it up.". Klastrup concludes that mastering when and how to die will make one a better gamer and death help define what and who [players'] characters will become.