The Pain -- and Joy -- of Alpha-Testing

This Blog Post was part of the Gorgon Website blog. It was posted by Citan on Friday, September 25, 2015.

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This post was going to be a forum response, but I decided it'd work better as a blog post. (I never remember this poor blog!)

Alpha Play Isn't The Same As Launch Play

For me one of the most stressful parts of Gorgon's development is that there are invested players already playing, and having fun, and I don't want to piss them off. Seeing people having fun is the motivation to keep doing this incredibly hard job!

So I have a mental block against doing things that will make players quit. But it's sometimes my job as a designer to push through that, because this is Alpha, and the game isn't well-designed enough yet. It needs major changes to the game mechanics. Let me give you some examples.

Example 1: Player DPS Must Come Down

At high level, player damage is so high that it's literally the only variable in combat. Players right now are only picking gear that makes their damage per second (DPS) go up.

This makes huge portions of the game irrelevant. For instance, tanking will always be irrelevant if you can kill a monster in a few seconds.

My first attempt to fix this was to make monsters tougher. But that actually made the problem much worse! It meant that you need fairly good DPS just to survive the fight. That means players don't have any room in their builds for stuff like tanking.

I need to make battles longer so that things like tanking, crowd control, rage management, aggro management, and Power management are more important.

If player DPS goes down, that will mean monsters get weaker too. Here's an important design rule of thumb: monster stats are reactive to players' ability, not the other way around. It's never the case that I go "well I can't nerf that ability or they won't be able to kill monsters." I just nerf the monsters instead. Monsters have no emotional response to being nerfed, buffed, or literally wiped out of existence, so they naturally bear the brunt of the most volatile changes.

But unfortunately I can't make everything work just by changing monsters.

Example 2: Power Meter Must Matter More

Recently I made a very small reduction to player Power, and got some unhappy reactions to it. But looking at it objectively, the changes were very small because they don't change how you build your character.

My goal is for Power to have an impact on how you set up your character: what abilities you use, what equipment you wear. I know that Power isn't a big factor in builds right now because players are stacking nearly every single high-damage skill in their build, regardless of Power cost. That shouldn't be possible unless you're in a group where somebody is feeding you constant Power. So Power isn't doing its job.

If Power doesn't affect player builds, then it's just a vestigial thing, a "nuisance factor" -- something that can go wrong in combat. "Oh crap, I'm out of power." We have enough nuisance factors already. Power has to do more than that.

In the short term, I suspect that increasing Power costs -- or otherwise changing how Power works -- can play a role in lowering high-level player's DPS, too.

Other examples of big changes are how Armor works and how loot is distributed. Those are other parts of the system that still need more work.

Impact on Alpha Testers

Some aspects of the game are in good enough shape that I take great pains to keep players from being impacted by them. If I change the XP curve, you always keep your old level in the skill. If I heavily rewrite a skill, I bend over backwards to make sure it doesn't dramatically impact players. (For instance, when I redid Fire Magic to require research, I sent all existing fire mages a bunch of free research components.)

But combat itself needs a lot more iteration, and I can't afford to go out of my way to keep the existing alpha-testers from being impacted. Some of the changes are too dramatic.

So the bottom line is that I will be nerfing characters a lot, and buffing them a lot, and changing them in pretty drastic ways.

Because I didn't copy an existing game design, I have no roadmap for the design. I have to experiment over and over and over, trying to find game mechanics that work well together. And we're getting closer -- if you were here a few years ago, you know what I mean. Things are falling into place. But the next six months will be a whirlwind of changes.

Don't Quit On Me!

Although I am constantly thinking of how to mitigate the impact of changes on players, I can't hold back big changes just to spare your existing builds. If I do that, the game will fail. Sometimes I MUST make drastic changes to combat, and you WILL hate them, as players, because players hate change. They hate not being able to do exactly what they could do before. They often quit. As a player I'm not immune to this. I quit when I get nerfed too. I'm not blaming you -- it's human nature!

Players quitting is incredibly hard on me. I hate it. Watching population counts go down is SERIOUSLY damaging to my morale. And seeing enthusiastic players quit in frustration is very depressing. But if the design isn't sustainable, I have to deal with the pain. And thus so do you.

Or quit -- that's your prerogative. But I hope I can convince you to look at changes objectively, to sometimes put aside your "game-player hat" and don your "game designer" hat instead, and help me figure out how to make the mechanics work better.

After the game ships, every single change will be weighed against how it impacts players. But right now? I can't always do that.

The Golden Time

If this sounds like a bad time to play the game, let me counter that: if you like having an impact on the design of a game, this is the best time to be here. I'm actively reading all your feedback and often making changes that are direct results of your ideas. In the next update I've made changes to the quality of crafted items based on your suggestions, and I'm working on how to get "non-lethal combat" into the schedule based on a forum post. This is the time where I can fit a lot of good ideas into the schedule.

That won't always be the case. Over time, things will start to get locked down. That has to happen so that new content can get implemented systematically. But right now... right now damned near anything can happen.

This is the best time to be involved. It's also sometimes going to be painful. But hopefully at the end we'll have a game we can all be proud of.