There is a category of responses to any column about mechanics, and it came up with the recent couple of columns about level scaling, but it comes up with every column about mechanics. And even in its most benevolent form, it features one perfectly valid statement… and one that is just, unfortunately, misinformed.
“I don’t like [mechanic]; therefore, it shouldn’t be in MMOs.”
The first thing is perfectly valid as a statement. You can not like almost anything. You can not like elves or short races or pop culture references or group finders or level scaling or PvP or the color green or silly player character names. That is completely valid. There are things I personally dislike. When people talk about “opinions can’t be wrong,” this is what it actually means; it doesn’t mean that something is incapable of being wrong just because it’s an opinion, it means that I can’t tell you that you do like geese in video games if you tell me you don’t.
But the problem is the second part. And even when said with good intentions, it belies a mistake in thinking. Whatever problems you have with the mechanic are probably problems the developers knew about.
Let’s go back to level scaling for just a minute. In last week’s column, I noted that there are weaknesses in the way that Guild Wars 2 implements its level scaling in a worldwide sense. None of that makes the game bad, and that was not my point in the slightest; I think it handles its level scaling very well. But it is a valid statement to say that you don’t like the worldwide level scaling because of those bad sides. That makes sense!
However, I do not think the problems I pointed out were somehow shocking to the designers. I remain very confident that no one at ArenaNet’s office burst in with the article on a phone shouting, “Sir, you have to see this! It turns out our level scaling approach has… weaknesses!” In fact, I think pretty much everything I observed is something the developers thought of – just as an estimate – around 14 years ago when design documents were being finalized. Maybe longer.
“So why weren’t those problems fixed?” Because fixing those problems means… bigger problems. That’s the whole point.
I do not find it fun when I do a lower-level roulette in Final Fantasy XIV and my main job loses most of its defining and fun abilities because I’m stuck in Sastasha yet again. But I also understand that the reason for this is that I am scaled down to ensure that I am not tromping the whole dungeon and teaching newer players to not even bother trying. And if I want to say that this whole mechanic should not exist and I should never have to do Sastasha again, I should probably have a proposal for how I am going to keep lower-level dungeons populated so newer players who want to group up with other people can do so.
The developers thought of this. They thought of all of this. These are not unique insights that have never been considered. Naoki Yoshida does not have to be told that going from level 100 to level 16 reduces your combat options. But it’s more important that sprouts can have someone going through the game alongside them. This is an accepted compromise.
Life is absolutely full of them. Game design is full of them, for that matter. There is no law that says that the hardest content in a game has to be locked behind the largest groups possible. Fromsoft has long made games in which larger groups taking on bosses make them easier to deal with, and there is a remarkably large number of players who try to argue that you need to introduce involuntary PvP to “balance” that. But you do not, in fact, have to do that. It is a choice. It is a compromise made with the way the game works and can, in fact, be changed.
The designers are not blind to the idea that they are making compromises in design. No one is suddenly blindsided to learn that choosing to do X leads naturally to Y. Everyone who made that decision knew, just as I know that choosing to open one column in a certain way means I can’t do certain things later in the column. And there’s a kind of solipsism in play, at best well-meaning, thinking that because you don’t like a mechanic the compromises that those mechanics are made for shouldn’t exist at all.
Do designers make bad calls in this department? Of course they do. The level scaling in World of Warcraft is bad, for example. But the reason should be obvious: The level scaling that the game does tries to scale the open world when the game is much more focused on instanced content, which means that it’s a mismatched approach. If you read last week’s column, the reasons are bad is clear as day. The problem isn’t level scaling as a concept but doing it in the worst possible fashion, along with a few other WoW-specific design errors. Yes, I could talk about that more, but this isn’t a WoW column.
Many moons ago, I did a Perfect Ten about MMO mechanics that could, theoretically, be good… but I hadn’t seen it actually happen. Because these mechanics have potential. They’re neat ideas! Very few mechanics are developed because somebody just hates people playing video games. They’re developed because someone has an idea for how to make a good game in various ways, and ideas are flung around to solve problems, and then the mechanic is implemented and… it’s just not very good.
Star Trek Online implemented duty officers because it wanted a reason for players to feel like their crews were staffed with lower officers. Did it work? Well… no, not really. But it was a good idea. It was a way to add more loot and rewards to the game, a new system to engage with, more chances to add the flavor of the franchise into gameplay. But it’s not very fun.
But at the same time, I can’t be too harsh on it because the idea was to give players new loot to chase, and I don’t actually have a solution to the game’s existing problem of “how do we add new rewards that aren’t just ever-better weapons or shields or whatever and keep things interesting?” Adding duty officers is another option in that regard. It may not be a perfect implementation, but it is in the game for a reason, meant to solve a real problem.
You aren’t under any obligation to like it, and if you tell me that you don’t enjoy it, I believe you. But if you tell me that it shouldn’t be in the game at all, I think it also kind of is incumbent upon you to explain what other solution to the problems that it was intended to solve would be better. Because nobody failed to notice that it was an imperfect solution. The devs just realized that an imperfect solution was a better solution than no solution at all.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
