Citan's update: Enthusiasm

This Blog Post was part of the Gorgon Website blog. It was posted by Citan in early 2016 (Before April.)

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Hey guys. This week's post isn't quite the usual kind, and definitely not something you'd hear a large company say, but it's something that's important to the game. (I kinda want to do this sort of thing as a podcast, but I can never get the audio quality to come out reasonably well. So here's a wall of text instead.)

First, let's talk about why novelty in games is rare and valuable.

Novelty

I like to hear people say things like "I haven't played a game like this before!" or "I haven't had this much fun since <insert decades-old-game here>". The latter sounds like nostalgia, but it isn't. It's newness. Novelty.

I've always avoided calling this game a "throwback game" or a "retro game", because retro-homage games are boring. And most of those old games still exist, so if I want to play EQ1, I already have several options.

But when thinking back on those old MMOs, they seem like such wild and weird places. Why? It's because we didn't know what we were doing, how to do it, or even what the goal was. We had to figure it all out from scratch. Tons of surprises. "It's getting dark in the newbie zone... wait, it's too dark. It's getting DARKER... it's pitch black ... I literally can't see anything! Who thought this was a good game design?! Oh god there's a glowing beetle coming right for me..."

Those old games were raw, and weird, and unashamed. A big part of my love of Asheron's Call was its mind-bogglingly weird world and game mechanics. I mean, the game's backstory is that giant cockroaches destroyed the most advanced magical civilization in the universe. And the game's mechanics... just weird. That moment when you realize you can cast a spell that makes your spellcasting better so that you can cast another spell that makes your spellcasting even better so you can cast yet another spell... in terms of fun repeatable game mechanics that's ridiculous. Absurd. But when you discover it, that's a beautiful moment of realization.

Now, I have never set out to be intentionally weird or different from other games. Seriously, I never think that way. Instead, I have a long list of stuff I've always wanted to see in an MMO, and ideas I've always thought might be fun. And the resulting game is starting to seem pretty novel.

Novelty isn't everything. It's not what keeps people playing for years and years. If those old games weren't FUN as well as novel, they'd be long gone. Novelty is only one variable. But even so, Project: Gorgon has ended up with a lot of novelty, and it's valuable.

But novelty has a very high price in terms of game development.

Let's Talk About Iterations

If game designers could pull fun new game designs out of a hat, every game would be novel. But most designs don't turn out to be fun, at least at first. A lot of this game's new ideas have been stupid and terrible and needed to be revised. Replaced. Iterated again and again. Many are still being iterated on.

This is not a problem that a modern MMO usually has! Most MMOs have a blueprint to work from. But I have no map of how the game is "supposed" to play. I have no highway to take me there. I have to pave this trail, with your help, all the way to the destination... wherever that is. The road tends to be very tricky to find, too, because overcorrection will make things worse.

For example, let's talk about one of the issues I'm iterating on: "one-button builds". This is a trend in the game to choose tons of equipment mods for the same ability, so that you can kill monsters with a single ability, ignoring your other powers. I think we can all agree that it's not a very exciting game design if the best way to play is "have 20 gear mods for the same ability, press a button, laugh and loot". That design just can't be the way the final game works. But fixing it will take a lot of iterations, because I don't want to screw up all kinds of other things just to fix this problem. So I've taken some steps toward rectifying that situation in each of the past few updates, and in the next update -- and in the updates after it, too, most likely.

For the upcoming update, all I did was change one small formula that was dumb, and it's had a ripple effect throughout all the gear stats. The old formula weighted the reset-time of abilities too much. So an ability with a 30 second cooldown had gear that was VASTLY better than an ability with a 5 second cooldown. Obviously lots of other things play into it too, like Power cost and utility role, but reset time ended up really defining a lot of the equipment's stats.

In the next update, abilities with fast resets have significantly boosted equipment mods, and slow-reset abilities have their equipment nerfed. Did I do a good enough job? We'll see in a month or two. If the reset-time ends up under-valued, we'll see players dropping their slow-reset abilities and gravitating toward using just their best 5-second ability -- something we've seen happen before in in older iterations of the game. If reset time is still over-valued, players will stick to what they have now, and will perceive the nerfs as "pointless", since players' behavior didn't change. If I got it right, we'll see players starting to spread their gear mods out some, but WITHOUT entirely abandoning slow-reset abilities. It will take a while to see how things settle out, and then I'll iterate some more.

Even if I get this one part right, there's lots of other parts that need changing too. This little change might cause people to make "three-button builds" or even "four-button builds", which is an improvement. But my lofty goal is for max-level players to have 12-button builds, using gear for all (or at least most) of their abilities. That's a long way from here, with many systemic changes to come. But it's an entirely achievable goal, if you can stick with me through the changes.

Enthusiasm

How can one person make an MMO? Well, there's a lot of answers to that question. One secret is knowing the critical parts of the content pipeline that I had to get right before I started. (This is what kills so many technically competent MMO teams: they make an engine but then they can't add content fast enough.) Another reason is that I've been willing to cut huge features (like, say, PvP). Having already worked on several MMOs before doesn't hurt either.

But I'm still just one person, doing most of the day-to-day coding and content. And if I just work at normal speeds, it's not enough. MMOs are big games. To make it happen, my secret weapon is enthusiasm. Being enthusiastic makes me faster. A LOT faster.

As an example of what enthusiasm can do, I implemented all of Ice Magic in a day and a half because I was excited about it. I designed and implemented all the abilities, gear, particles, effects, pets, advancement, everything. If I wasn't enthusiastic, that task would have taken a week or more.

Enthusiasm is so important that managing it has become a big part of my job. And I try not to thwart my enthusiasm whenever it shows up -- I revise my schedule instead. I can tell that at some point in the near future, my enthusiasm for the Dagger skill will push me to implement it very quickly. And I will drop whatever I'm doing to implement it. Not because the game needs the dagger skill right now (it definitely doesn't), but because doing it with enthusiasm will make it so much faster that I can't afford to lose the opportunity.

I've spent years now honing my enthusiasm, learning to guide it and drive it so that I can be fast, fast, fast. So my enthusiasm is a resource -- an unconventional one, but a crucial one.

Protecting Enthusiasm

After the last update, I lost my enthusiasm. Negativity, lots of bitching about nerfs, people exploiting a stupid bug -- it just makes me want to go do something else. I still put in a good 10 hours of work every day anyway ("suck it up and get to work", I tell myself), but the results are nothing special. Without enthusiasm, my ten hours are no more productive than anybody else's 10 hours. And as you probably know, MMOs require hundreds of thousands of "regular" hours of work.

Does a post on the forums have the power to disrupt my enthusiasm that much? No, a few comments definitely don't. But a long train of negativity can. And I can't just will my enthusiasm back instantly. You can't demand your muse show up for work. I have to just keep working and wait for it to return.

That's why I'm not personally dealing with the bans or the appeals or the other fallout of that bug, except in a vaguely supervisory role: it's too disruptive to think about it.

It's also why I responded as quickly as I could to the forum shouting about evasion. There's a funny thing about the evasion update: there's a bug in it. I didn't notice it until I went to look at the logs, but the boss monsters don't have higher evasion than solo monsters right now. Which means the top evasion in the game is 6%, for level 60 monsters. Nothing has higher evasion, despite what my patch notes say.

A 6% evasion is not that high. Certainly not high enough to quit over. But a bunch of the feedback wasn't reacting to the gameplay, it was just reacting to the concept of evasion. I even saw signs of forum brigading (where a group of players collaborate to bitch about the same topic).

Forum brigading isn't always bad. Sometimes it's a good thing, bringing to my attention something that I just hadn't given a lot of priority or thought to. But the response to evasion was pretty much the opposite of useful. A lot of people made VERY exaggerated claims, on the forums and via in-game feedback, about how much they were being evaded. (I do have logs...) Some people claimed that I had ruined the game, as if this were the first experiment I've ever run. This experiment is actually pretty tame!

Player discontent feeds on itself very quickly, and I know most of the feedback on evasion was sincere -- even if some of the unhappiness wasn't even really about evasion, but about unhappiness with the way the game is going. It was a reflection of community unhappiness.

But the immediate impact of that feedback was to slow me down, because I lost my enthusiasm. I stopped thinking about how cool the new city of Rahu could be, and started daydreaming about playing some XCom 2 when I finally got to take a break. I stopped giving a shit, for a little while.

Now I should back up here: the upcoming changes I've announced about Evasion aren't fake, or overcompensating, or appeasement, or anything like that. I decided right along with you that universal evasion wasn't a fun mechanic. So the next update has a lot of changes there. But I did announce this very quickly, before I even got most players' feedback on it, because I needed to quell the shoutfest.

I am only now starting to get my enthusiasm back, and things are starting to happen quickly again. But there will be more nerfs in a week, and I can't afford to lose enthusiasm again.

How You Can Help

We've all seen forums become toxic. This recent event shows a glimpse of how that can easily happen. To some extent, it's up to me and my team to manage the toxicity, but we can't do it alone.

And if the forums get negative, I have to protect my enthusiasm even if it means disengaging with the community. But I don't want to do that. In fact I want the opposite: the forum can EASILY help bolster my enthusiasm. It's done it before many times. So I need your help making that happen.

First rule of thumb: before you complain, tell me something that you find fun. I can't tell if you're having fun just by looking at your posts. When I read a really angry diatribe, I ask myself, "why the hell are they even logging in?" Sometimes the answer is "I dunno, I fucking QUIT!" but most of the time, players are actually enjoying the game, but are just frustrated by something. I need to know what frustrates you, but I also need to know what's fun. (This also helps prevent me from accidentally removing the things you really enjoy, which has happened plenty of times in the past.)

Second, be polite. I'm just one person. The whole TEAM is just a couple of people. We are not sitting on piles of money here, laughing at your posts with gleeful abandon. We are working very hard out of love for the game. Please don't let your frustration keep you from seeing that bigger picture.

I'm not saying to censor yourself. I know that it's normal for you to want to complain about things more than compliment things. I'm just asking you to fight that natural inclination a bit. Take a few moments and think about why the hell you're playing this game at all. Let me see that.

Lastly, if you have an urge to express your enjoyment in other ways, I love to see it. Monger's "two bovines that need each other" post was great. Betanotus often posts screenshots that show players having fun, or just ridiculous things happening in-game. Actually there's lots of enthusiasm in here already! I'm just asking you to keep it up.

Thank you all for your enthusiasm so far. I'll have a new update in a week or so -- it's big, with new mechanics, some brand new skills and game ideas to try out, lots of new content, new areas, and many bug fixes. Stick around!

Edited To Add...

(This is what I posted when I closed this thread.)

Thanks everyone! I'm going to close this thread because I fear it comes across as "please give me compliments now" and that's not really my point. I do appreciate the compliments! But the larger goal is that I need your help in keeping the forums from becoming too negative.

I also didn't intend to suggest that negativity could cause me to stop making the game. Come on, I've been doing this for a long time, well before there were ANY players. I'm not going to quit over some complaining on the forums. The danger is not me stopping, it's me disengaging from day-to-day communication to some extent.

If you've ever wondered why a game team was super communicative before the game launched, but then disappeared after -- this is why. Enthusiasm must be protected. As a producer for AC2, one of my daily jobs was to help run interference for my designers so they could keep their enthusiasm up. It's not like I'm the only person who wants to protect my enthusiasm -- I'm just the only one who's asking for your help in doing it!

I also firmly reject the notion that "well, the community is doomed to be a shithole soon when there's more players, and there's nothing you can do." If making this MMO has taught me anything, it's that conventional wisdom about many game-related topics is... junk. Things that seem like universal truths are just patterns that can be changed and subverted. It won't be easy, but we *can* make a positive community here -- I've seen large communities that didn't devolve into constant shitfests. Maybe you have too. It can be done. So hopefully, we can do that.

Thanks again!

http://projectgorgon.com/forum/general-gorgon-discussion/1690-citan-s-update-enthusiasm#11742