eSports is one of the hottest topics in the games industry at the moment, so I wanted to share our recent experiment in fusing MMORPG gameplay with eSports competition. With over 50,000 peak concurrent viewers, a top ranking on Twitch and the player community energized, last weekend's RuneScape eSports tournament was more successful than we could have imagined, but was not without its challenges and surprises. In this article I'll outline what we attempted and what we learned, and hopefully make the case that there's a whole new avenue for eSports to explore with MMOs.

A bit of background: Jagex is best known for our flagship game RuneScape. As one of the original F2P and MMO game studios, we're obsessed by games as a service: by community, by data, and by creative content and events. But we also try to do things a bit differently and are always trying out new ideas. Right now, we're flush from the best performing year in the company's history, and in RuneScape's 15th birthday year are growing our community and growing the brand by adding new games to the RuneScape family.

We don't just pride ourselves on running great game services, we strive to surprise our players by trying new types of content and events. Our player community means the world to us so we love finding ways to connect the virtual with the real world, such as running mass-participation quiz shows, 24hr charity marathons, and epic fan conventions. Our latest idea was to find a way to mash up MMORPG gameplay with intense eSports competition.

So far major eSports events have revolved around match-based games, where everyone starts afresh at the beginning of a session, individuals or small teams battle for victory, and the matches usually last between 15 minutes and an hour. Even where MMORPGs have featured in eSports competitions it has been limited to their match-based PvP modes. This is simple, pure, focused. It's also easy to administer and structure into tournaments. So it's no wonder this is really the only form of eSports around.

But does that have to be the case? Maybe adding some "MMO" to the mix could be really interesting... MMORPGs in particular give an immense depth and freedom; the vast choice in how to level up a hero, huge variety in gear and abilities, expansive worlds and market economies. Could these qualities be applied to competitive eSports play? Would more time building up heroes give spectators greater emotional investment? Would the vast variety of content mean less predictability and more drama? Would a virtual economy add another dimension to competitive play? Would it be exciting to watch large clans battle across a whole world (and not just an arena)? We hoped that, if done right, many of these questions could be answered with a "yes!"

'Old School RuneScape', which is the retro version based on the classic 2007 era game, has a big PvP community and the dev team were keen to offer players a new competitive experience. They needed to find a way to distill these MMORPG qualities down and merge them into a competitive structure, and settled on using the 'Deadman Mode' of Old School RuneScape. Deadman Mode is an alternative ruleset which is like Old School RuneScape on steroids - PvP anywhere, massively accelerated progression rates but big death penalties, and if you kill someone you get to not just loot their corpse but raid their bank. As a high-stakes, high-intensity mutation of a normally laid back MMORPG, it was an ideal starting point.

(If you'd like to find out more about how Old School RuneScape came into being, check out the post from my colleague Mat Kemp)

Our Objectives

The team identified several important objectives to guide the design of the competition:

Make it big - Allow mass participation so it would feel like an MMO experience. To achieve this the competition had a qualifier for entry: the top 2000 ranked players in Deadman Mode would be invited into the tournament. This meant all players had a chance to participate, and meant that the competition itself would still be at a massive scale. Those 2000 players would start from scratch on a new tournament server, which would run for 5 days, with massively boosted progression rates, so participants could build up their heroes sufficiently within that time. It would be like an MMORPG on fast-forward!

Make it exciting - Have a nail-biting finale that results in a single winner. The challenge here was to channel a sprawling MMO experience with thousands of players into a showdown. This was achieved by making the final hour of the tournament into a last-man-standing battle. Respawns would be turned off so that if a hero died they stayed dead. A deadly fog would encircle the game world and shrink inwards over the final hour, pushing players together, decreasing their health if caught inside, acting as a further catalyst to whittle down the remaining participants.

Make it meaningful - Give players a reason to take it seriously and invest their time into a limited-time event. We agreed a $10,000 winner-takes-all prize. At this level it was big enough to be meaningful to individual players, but not too much that we were betting the farm on an experimental event.

Make it real - Tie into a real life event so fans could attend in person and shoutcasters could draw from their energy. Jagex teamed up with Multiplay, masters at running big consumer game events, to give the tournament real life presence. The competition finale would be hosted at Multiplay's Insomnia57, a massive gaming festival set within one of England's biggest venues - the Birmingham NEC. The RuneScape tournament would feature on the eSports stage and livestream channel, with a huge audience and live commentary.



So that's what we put together, here is what we learned:

What went well

Last Man Standing - This was the core concept which crystallized how the competition would work. It was an easy concept for players to grasp and make the MMORPG/eSports hybrid understandable.

Accelerated MMORPG - For the most part the MMO influences really did create a different but still compelling type of competitive drama. By having competitive play at such an expansive scale we saw clan warfare, conflict over trade and resources, uneasy alliances being formed and broken, teams of players working together not just at a tactical level but with more strategic purpose. And fans got to follow a longer journey as their favourite players built up their heroes in the preceding week.

Participation - Allowing so many players to actually get involved in the competition themselves, and offering a significant cash prize, made the event more relevant and meaningful. While the elite players tended to be the ones that survived deep into the finale, many more got a taste of the high-stakes drama of the competition. Allowing all players the chance at qualifying for the tournament spurred lapsed players to return to have a go.

Excitement - The event was successful in catching the imagination of the player community. Many took part but even more watched it on Twitch, where the shoutcasters did a great job in narrating the unfolding drama. The spectacle and enthusiasm rippled outward to the wider Twitch audience, resulting in record viewer counts for RuneScape, and a boost in content creation both in streaming and video making, which grew the awareness for the event and the game.

Continuation - As the finale came to a close, the next 3-month competitive season immediately kicked off, allowing players to channel their excitement straight into the next season. This also was a prompt for new players, whose curiosity had drawn them to the tournament broadcasts, to get involved on a level playing field when everyone was starting from scratch.



What didn't go so well

Spoilers - In standard match-based competitive games a 30 second to 1 minute broadcast delay is more than long enough - the compact nature of the arenas and fast moving action means there's almost never a competitive advantage in knowing what your opponents were doing 30 seconds or a minute ago. In an MMORPG context, with an expansive world, and tactics like ambushing or hiding, such a delay was not enough and the official broadcast occasionally gave away important information to other participants. In future we will use a much longer delay and be more tactful about what is covered in the livestream broadcast.

Cautious competitors - With so many competitors taking part, some players expected others to do the killing and take the risk while they hung back and built up strength for the final minutes of the competition. The 'deadly fog' feature which was intended to counter this wasn't effective enough, and in the end some players preferred trying to out-last the damage-dealing fog rather than risk running into rival participants. In the future we will redesign the finale mechanics to ensure more confrontation between players.

Verification delays - With so many participants it wasn't possible for everyone to be checked for rule breaking in real time. There were automated checks for compliance but we still needed to check the server logs to verify the actions of the final few participants who were battling it out in the last minutes of the competition. This meant there was a delay in announcing the winner. In the future we will add more automated checking and look for ways we can confidently announce the winner the moment the competition finishes.



Overall it was an exhilarating experience for Jagex. We tried something new, it was more successful than we could have hoped, we learned a lot that to make it even better next time. I think it also goes some way to showing eSports still has a lot of room for innovation, and that MMORPG gameplay can add new dimensions to competitive play. I'm very proud of the Old School RuneScape team for putting together the event, grateful to our partners Multiplay and Twitch, and of course to our community who came out in force to both compete and give their support.