The F-Words of MMORPGs: Fairness

Gamasutra has kicked off an interesting three-part article series called “The F-Words of MMORPGs”, with the initial installment covering “Fairness” and how it applies to in-game economies, exploits, character progression, and more. Portalarium’s Richard Garriott, Turbine’s Cardell Kerr, Cryptic Studios’ Jack Emmert, NCsoft’s Lance Stites, Trion Worlds’ Scott Hartsman, and TERA’s Brian Knox all contribute commentary to the article:

In order to better understand the dynamics of MMORPG economies, consider the far simpler example of single-player games. In a single-player game, everything about the game is within the domain of the developer’s control. The developer makes all the rules: whether or not monsters respawn, whether or not they drop coin, how much inventory space you have, what things drop and when and where. All of these details are determined by the developer. Indeed, all of these details are carefully crafted to produce a planned game experience.

“When you’re creating a solo player game, whether you’re talking about advancement in your character’s attributes or advancements in their wealth and what they can buy with that wealth — the next armour or equipment — those are quite controllable, quite containable,” explains Richard Garriott, when describing his work on the Ultima single player RPGs.

“We can very tightly constrain the ways that players have to earn money so by the time that they reach a certain point in the story we can know with pretty good authority what we call the relative scale of money they have in their pocket is. You can increase the scale of wealth and the scale of where they are in the story and you keep them in quite close lock-step.”

Scaling is an important element in maintaining the sense of challenge in a game. In an RPG, the challenge of an encounter is directly proportional to the difference between your level and the level of your foes. If you are level 10 and your foes are level 10, the challenge might be normal; if you are level 12, the challenge might be easy and if you are 8 the challenge might be hard.

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“In almost all RPGs these days, that grind mechanic has been repeated in every facet of your virtual life to the point of, for at least me, distress,” says Richard Garriott. “Slice the game any place you want and you’ll find that exact same game mechanic used over and over again. What you’re really doing is having people spend time. You’re making them waste time in order to level up.”

So why do games keep going back to the grind? “If you look at Ultimas in general — not just Online but Ultimas in general — Ultimas have very customized storylines. A customized storyline is very expensive to build and takes a lot of time and effort. To do 10 more, and 10 more, and 10 more, is something you can create algorithmically, and it works very well. So as much as those hard core ‘role-playing’ gamers in us might complain, the level grind works astonishingly well.”

So the grind is inescapable in game design, and players will pay to skip past it, but where’s the unfair bit? Is it really “unfair” that some people spend months getting to level 50 and others spend money? Is it unfair only because the game doesn’t officially sell you the levels and some shady third party is doing it? Or is there some inherent sense of fairness in actually doing the grinding yourself?

When Turbine brought Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online over from a traditional subscription model to a hybrid free-to-play model, the developers had to face this sense of fairness straight on. Cardell Kerr, creative director at Turbine, describes the process:

“When we did our migration, there were definitely moments of concern, on all sides. No one wants to break their baby. Each of these games is based around certain designs that were meant to go in a certain way. But one of the things that we ultimately gravitated towards was time. That was it. Pretty much everything was always about time.

“With that in mind, it’s kind of us trying to give players two different sides of how they can progress in the game: either they can spend the time and go off and fight and participate in the natural game mechanics themselves, or they can spend the money in order to not spend the time doing those particular things.

“With that in mind, and applying that to what we see in each of the games, it didn’t have as large an effect as you might have thought. I guess the reason for that is, under the hood, it has really always been about the amount of time that the player has available to them to participate. The difference that we really saw has been that people who didn’t have the ability to participate at that level of intensity have suddenly become more competitive. Suddenly, they can make the most of what time they had to spend, as opposed to spending time gathering resources or finding weapons or gear.”