I've referenced Blizzard's strange feedback loops a few
times before, specifically with regard to how their free-to-play structures
constitute effective time sinks. But
there's something especially curious about how these structures are formed, and
how they engage with their players. Normally
free-to-play currencies exist in a kind of equilibrium, allowing players to
invest time or money, and letting them engage with the game accordingly. Some "premium" content can only be
acquired using real world money, sure, but that content is usually
cosmetic. The end result is a game
structure that rewards players for consistent engagement, constituting a player
base, while allowing players of a broader engagement base to invest money as
they see fit. Some players will spend
oodles of time playing a hero and, as such, might see value in buying a cool
new skin for said hero. Heroes of the Swarm does this, and
actually joins a long, proud lineage of free-to-play MOBAs with economies built
around this structure.
There's another structure that free-to-play games use as
well, a conversion oriented structure.
This structure, instead of giving players an opportunity to invest their
resources differently, forces them to invest money at a certain point in order
to continue playing, or expand their play experience beyond the "entry
level" tiers of play that free-to-play structures usually present their
players with. Mechwarrior: Online is a great example of this model. MWO
will let players grind for nearly everything in the game, and grind they must
to get the C-Bills they need to get those god damn mechs. But if a player wants to buy a virtual space
to park their virtual mech in, well, that player is going to have to buy some
in-game currency with real-world money.
Players who are unwilling to do so are capped at playing four mechs,
which is especially rough since "top tier" abilities for each chassis
require at least three variants to unlock.
That means a player who refuses to "convert" to paying-to-play
can only level up one chassis at a time, and can only store one of their "completed"
chassis if they want to continue to be able to unlock abilities on new
chassis. In a game primarily oriented
around letting players experiment with a variety of death robots, that's a pretty
brutal model. All the cosmetic stuff is
in there too (though MWO does have a conversion
oriented mechanical layer which is a bit rough as well, oriented specifically around
letting players who spend money use unique toys) but what makes MWO's system effective at forcing
players to, at a certain point, pony up the dough is the way the game makes you
pay to keep playing after a certain point.
They don't do so through sub-fees, they do so by forcing players into a
corner. If they want to keep playing,
they need to decide to pay.
Blizzard doesn't use this approach. What it does is, in a sense, more insidious.
Let's take a step back for a moment.
Multiplayer games rely on large user bases in order to
work. In the case of a game like, say, Heroes of the Storm, a large player base
allows Blizzard to gather more data more quickly about player habits,
engagement, hero usage, and lets them match players for games more quickly,
encouraging players to actually stick around and play more by letting them
conveniently play in the first place.
The trick, then, is getting players in the door and keeping them in
there over time. This problem is key in
MOBAs, where large scale player bases are a requirement, but toxic social
meta-game interactions increase with community size and, at times, can really
turn players off from various titles. I
essentially stopped playing HoN and LoL because of the myriad of mouth
breathing shitfucks who I had to deal with, categorically more interested in smack
talking their randomly selected teammates choices from the word "go"
because their decisions didn't match whatever fever dream "meta"
these quasi-literate asshats conceived of in their pensive dreamspace than in
working together to win a fucking match.
There's no way to get around this problem, and it really
does push people away. Listen to Jerry
Holkins and Mike Krahulik talk about their League of Legends experiences, and
you'll see that even internet celebrities have trouble with this shit. The royalty of the internet, playing with
friends, still has to deal with anti-social mouth-breathers who play a game
solely to be able to tell others how to play it and, when a disagreement emerges,
explode with all the measured maturity of a pubescent volcano. The problem is endemic to the genre. Even Dawngate,
which used a "karma" system to encourage player civility, still had
its fair share of dickheads, and if it had stuck around, it probably would've
had a lot of them as it grew. So the
question isn't "how to get players to be nicer to one another." Incentivizing good behavior just allows
dickheads to technically work around whatever framework has emerged to enforce
civility. To retain players, to beat
back the tide of inhumanity that the internet brings, developers need to go the
other way. They need to encourage
players to wade through that shit-tide, and to keep on wading for a good long
while.
Blizzard has found a masterful way to do this through their
"daily quests."
Now, "daily quests" aren't a new concept. Blizzard came up with them quite a while back
in World of Warcraft, where they
stood as end-game content that players could cyclically engage in for iterative
reward. The end-game content of nearly
every MMO on the market today reflects this development, because it's actually
really effective: it concretizes the objectives that players are given, and
gives them a reason to stick around after they've finished "the fun
part" of MMOs, the part where you build up a character and a related
legend in the world. But "daily
quests" as a non-MMO development are fairly new, and Blizzard's answer to
anti-social divisions within their player base is, unsurprisingly, the employ
of these daily incentive structures in a new context.
See, I'm not a tremendously big fan of HotS. It's fine, and I play
it to try to sharpen my skills and improve a little so as to embarrass my
friends a little less, but I don't think it's as enjoyable as other MOBAs past,
and I see in it the echoes of a world I left behind long ago, a world of
explosive, dramatic social interactions and old consumptive patterns that left
me largely sealed away from the people around me, attempting to eke out a name
for myself in the dark spaces of the internet.
But here's the other thing: I play HotS a lot.
I don't play it for the game, although, as I said, the game
is fine. It's polished, well developed,
and engages all of the right MOBA portions with enough new stuff on offer to
keep things interesting. No, I play HotS for the daily quests. See, in HotS,
nearly everything but cosmetic changes can be purchased using currency earned
in-game. That's not a bad thing. Dawngate
did the same thing, and both games kind of did something great by doing so:
they encouraged players to play their game a lot. But whereas Dawngate just let players grind cash ad-infini, treating weekend
binges in much the same fashion they might treat daily binges, Blizzard asks
players to check in every day for a new game-chore.
All of these chores are simple: play a certain number of
games with a certain kind of hero, for example, or win a few games for a god
damn change. But if you don't finish
them, they start to stack up, which means you can't get new chores. This is no big deal, in a mechanical sense,
but these chores are actually how you'll end up earning the vast majority of
your in-game currency. Playing three
games as a warrior hero will net you as much as winning ten games of ranked
play. Winning three games rewards you
with the equivalent of twenty victories worth of currency. Whereas Dawngate
let players iterate currency based on how nice they were, Blizzard makes
players do their chores if they want to get paid.
A similar system persists in Hearthstone: daily quests are
pretty much the only way to earn gold in that game, and buying cards without
gold can get expensive fast. And in Hearthstone, grinding for cash really
does move painfully slowly. Players who
win a game might earn one stack towards potentially earning 10 gold later,
after they win another two games. That
means players will need to win 45 games to earn a single arena play without
daily quests. Given that I win matches in
Hearthstone less than half the time
(I'm terrible at it, to be fair) that means I'd spend an eternity trying to get
the cash together for the most basic purchase if I'm left to my own devices.
These quest systems let me earn my keep, but keep me looped
in to the game. This is Blizzard's solution:
not just rewarding me for continuing to play, but orienting their reward
structure around keeping me tangentially engaged, without encouraging me to get
too into the process of playing itself.
If I dig too deep, I'll find myself being tugged away by other forces,
but if I play the way Blizzard wants me to, I end up playing for a few hours a
week, casual-style, and then feel very comfortable walking away from a
structure that I am simultaneously drawn to and a little bit upset at.
And this is where it gets a little irritating: now that I'm
playing Hero League games in Heroes of
the Storm and figuring out which classes I like in Hearthstone, I'm
beginning to take umbrage at quests that ask me to specifically shape my
gameplay to earn gold. I still want to
do it. Gold is how I earn new
characters, after all. But if I spend
too much time playing "the game" and not playing "the quest
game," then I won't earn gold, and I'll thoroughly tucker myself out from
playing Heroes of the Storm, which is just as exhausting at most other MOBAs
thanks to its extra-dysfunctional community.
These structures, aimed at getting me to play the game that Blizzard
wants me to play in a way that sustains growth and permits their "whale"
customers to have other people to play with, keeps me from feeling like I want
to play their game in earnest, as a fucking game.
I'm not sure how to really define this kind of structural
engagement, especially since I'm still playing these games as I articulate
it. I suppose I see it, in a sense, as
parallel to my adult masturbation habits.
I see the value of what I'm doing, and I enjoy doing it, to an extent,
but the reality, all too often, is that I'm just trying to finish this up, get
the outcome that the powers that be want from me, and then get on with my day,
so I can get back to being a person, working on writing things and reading
books and playing other games, games with stories, or reward structures that I
invest myself in for the simple joy that they provide. I'm compelled to engage in this repetitive
activity, and if I don't do it I'll get the sense that something is missing
from my day, but the joy is tarnished by the mechanical nature of the
surrounding apparatus and the compulsion to do this, lest I lose an opportunity
that, divorced from this structure, I doubt I'd care about.
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