Multiplayer games that rely on teamwork are often have some
pretty core problems. Gamers are all too
often conditioned to avoid seeing aspects of their environment as anything more
than potential threats. Consider the way
a first person shooter works conventionally: you're surrounded by dozens of
enemies, forced to fight your way through them with guns blazing. If allies are helping you, they're usually
either set pieces in action sequences, or working invisibly on the sidelines,
so that you feel like you're the center of the action. As a result, games that mimic these forms
often have difficulty actively encouraging the kind of teamwork they rely on, or
even just establishing an effective framework for it.
Even the most teamwork intensive games, like Left4Dead, encourage their teamwork on a
subtextual level: in Left4Dead, you
live or die based on how well you act as members of a team, but there's very
little on your HUD to that effect.
Keeping track of your fellow players is a responsibility largely left to
VOIP chat. It's still a bit of a
crapshoot: an uncommunicative or inattentive player will still trash the whole
game, and just what good teamplay is might not be apparent to such players at
first. Consider some basic formations in
Left4Dead, like the corner phalanx,
wherein players back up against a wall and do their best to hold off a large
number of enemies by having two players use melee attacks to push the horde
back while the other two mow them down with ranged weapons. It's a highly effective strategy (so much so
that the game was actually rewritten to make it less sustainable as a tactic)
but explaining it to a new player can be challenging, and engaging in the
strategy seems counterintuitive. It's
best to enact it in a confined space with absolutely no avenue for retreat,
something most players are rightly nervous about doing. In the early iterations of the game, it
involved two players forgoing heavy firepower in favor of the ability to knock
enemies back. If even one of the meleers
slacked off or didn't do their job, or if anyone was grabbed or knocked loose
from the formation, it could prove disastrous immediately. All of these issues hung on deliberately
maintained voice communication - the game was little help on anything but informing
players when one of their teammates was incapacitated by an enemy. Then it would help out with a little outline,
giving allies a sense of where they need to shoot around to free their ally.
It's all slapdash, and yet, despite that, quite fun. Teamwork is pretty great, and games built
around teamwork are becoming more and more common in the landscape. Payday
2, for example, is a heist game which works best with other players, even
if the AI does its very best, and a team of good Payday players can do some
amazing things. But Payday is godawful at actually making this sort of teamplay into a
mechanic. Some basic elements of the
game, like forming a fire line to move bags, and floating between objectives,
aren't clearly established as mechanics, and are actually problematically
implemented. Certain roles are less
valuable than others, or just less viable.
It's a well crafted game, but the teamwork that actually ties all of its
various elements together often feels like an afterthought. And really, who can blame them? Teamwork in and of itself is something that
relies on strong, direct communication, something that games often have to rely
on third party programs for. A good team
doesn't just fall together, it has to practice together until the entire team
doesn't just know their own role, but the role of every other person they're
working with. How do you make something
like that into a mechanic? How do you
incentivize that kind of play without making the game lock into a fail state
the moment you commit a teamfail?
If you're MWO, you
create an internal system of incentives that overwrites your entire existing
scoring architecture.
MWO's scoring
system functions along two channels. There
are experience points, which gate progress and allow you to make general
improvements to a specific chassis, and C-Bills, which allow users to buy equipment
and upgrades for their mechs. In days of
old, MWO's score system was oriented
largely around the amount of damage players could do. There was some technical stuff behind it,
where destroying components of enemy mechs and landing a killing blow earned
you cash, and a neat little trick where just tapping every enemy at least once
with the tiniest of lasers would earn you the full payout for a kill assist,
but for the most part it was all about the damage you did. Do more damage, get more money. That meant heavier mechs with bigger payloads
tended to get higher payouts, and lighters mechs, a necessary part of the game,
had to kind of suck it. Teamwork, a
fundamental part of a game where two teams smash into one another, was actually
sort of discouraged: if you were part of a pack of light mechs running around,
spotting targets, you'd just be earning money for some back-line missile boat,
raining fire down on foes. Even with a
victory under your belt, your winnings would be paltry compared to what the
heavier mechs you were assisting earned.
But Pirahna Games, who seem to be on the right track more
often than not, have been iterating on their scoring system to try and make the
kind of activity that light and medium mechs engage in more rewarding for
players. It makes sense: light mechs are
riskier to pilot, often more challenging to use effectively, and do
considerably less damage, but they fulfill a necessary role in the context of
the game, acting as scouts and spotters for the rest of the team, and using
their ability to cover vast distances relatively quickly to control territory
in certain game modes. Without lights, a
team can't win matches, but the incentive to play a light mech is pretty
low. Pirahna changed that by actually
adding reward mechanics for doing all the things light and medium mechs were
meant to do anyway. Spotting for
missiles gives you a nice little cash bonus, and an impressive experience bonus
as well. Neutralizing ECM cover so that
those missiles can rain down on your foes will net you even more bucks. And if you're hanging out with your light
bros, or just piloting a light or a medium mech near other mechs, you'll receive
a cash infusion for every few seconds you spend in combat.
It's not a perfect system, by far. Piranha originally set the payouts for these
rewards so low that in-game progress slowed down dramatically in most
games. Even after they tweaked the
numbers so that they became more reasonable, certain kinds of play are
aberrantly profitable for players to pursue.
Want to get a lot of money?
Engage and disengage from combat with enemies your allies are engaging,
so you can grab a bonus for hitting an engaged target for the first time in a
while, and a bonus for surviving a quick, brutal engagement. Both those rewards are larger than the
rewards for staying in the fight with your team which is, fundamentally, a
problem, especially when you consider those rewards are pretty substantial.
Of course, the biggest rewards in the game are still levied
towards destroying enemy mechs, but in a whole new way. Standing toe to toe with an enemy nets you
about five different kill bonuses, if you do it the right way, which incentivizes
a particular kind of solo play (or perhaps merely acknowledges that that kind
of solo play can only really occur once in a given game). Even so, the application of incentives for
teamwork is an interesting conceit, and it seems to be working. While games remain hit or miss, I see people
working together and sticking together as a team more often than not, now. No one wants to miss out on the money you get
for sticking with your teammates, after all.
Incentivizing the framework for a given game can't operate
as a panacea for the issues that face designers. It seems to be working, sort of, for MWO's developers, but Payday 2 actually attempted to implement
a similar reward system to encourage players to complete missions stealthily
and play a variety of missions, and that system, rather than inviting a
particular kind of play, actually just makes the already intense nature of Payday 2 even more frustrating. It's a slippery slope: you can lead your
players towards one another and give them cookies when they play as a team, but
if you're trying to get them to do things they don't want to do already,
incentivizing that behavior doesn't seem to be particularly effective. At least, it doesn't seem to be that
effective yet; a proof of concept to that end would be interesting as all
getout, though.
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