The Champion Point System

Grinding (locations, nerfs, power-gapping)

Progression Systems - In EVERY form lol, Vertical, Horizontal, Missionary, on so on....

Player segments and play styles.

- Richard Garriott, speaking on his work on the Ultima Series single player RPGs "When you're creating a solo player game, whether you're talking about advancement in your character's attributes or advancements in their wealth and what they can buy with that wealth -- the next armor or equipment -- those are quite controllable, quite containable, we can very tightly constrain the ways that players have to earn money so by the time that they reach a certain point in the story we can know with pretty good authority what we call the relative scale of money they have in their pocket is. You can increase the scale of wealth and the scale of where they are in the story and you keep them in quite close lock-step."

"Shouldn't the developer have expected me to be level 15 by this point in the game?"

- You

World of Warcraft:



Dark Ages of Camelot:



and of course, Elder Scrolls Online:



grind mechanic has been repeated in every facet of your virtual life to the point of, for at least me, distress. Slice the game any place you want and you'll find that exact same game mechanic used over and over again. What you're really doing is having people spend time. You're making them waste time in order to level up." - Richard Garriott, AKA "Lord British" "In almost all RPGs these days, thathas been repeated in every facet of your virtual life to the point of, for at least me, distress. Slice the game any place you want and you'll find that exact same game mechanic used over and over again. What you're really doing is having people spend time. You're making them waste time in order to level up."

"the millennial entitlement generation that has pretty much destroyed the MMO genre"

"cry about the Champion points because it mean they have to actually play the game to get them"

"Pay to win casuals"

"no-life grinders that need their hard-coded power advantage... pathetic"

"need a power advantage to compensate for lack of skill , spending 12 hours a day in a game isn't skill!"

**Beware the wall of text - Part MMO game development theory, part insight, part history, and most importantly - Part opinion.**Over the week, we have all noticed an increase in passionate topics and heated debate around issues like:While divisive topics in themselves. I think we can agree they all are just discrete symptoms. The real subtext of all these posts, rants, flames, and ideas is:Fairness The MMORPG F-wordI honestly believe that there is no "version" of fairness, it's an idea, an expectation, not a mechanic. While people will differ (greatly) on their opinions as to any single certain mechanic being fair or not; this is simply their assessment as to its individual contribution to overall fairness.In order to better understand the dynamics of fairness in an MMORPG like ESOTU, let's just consider far simpler example of a single-player game. This I guarantee as gamers we are all intimately familiar. In a single-player game, everything about the game is exclusively in the domain of the developer's control. The dev makes all the rules: from whether where/when/if monster re-spawns, how much gold it has, how much inventory space you have, what items drop and when and where. All of these details are determined by the developer. In fact, all of these details are carefully crafted to produce the game experience.Avid RPG fans know that scaling is an important element for an RPG retaining it's sense of challenge. In an RPG, the challenge of an any encounter is directly proportional to the difference betweenand the. If your level 30 and your opponents are level 30, the difficulty may be normal; if you're level 33, the difficulty might be easy and if your level 27 the it may be hard. If your too low a level -- the challenge is too hard, and theplayer response is to backtrack, and "level up" by completing easier challenges. This "" is something many older players of Japanese RPGs from the '80s and '90s will be very familiar with. However, if you're too high a level, and the challenge too easy, the game just feels badly designed. We as players think:This brings us to one of the major changes in single-player RPG design, the somewhat controversial implementation of. Oblivion was famously criticized by a portion of "hardcore" gamers for scaling every encounter throughout the entire game to the player's current level. Every dungeon visited, even if previously done previously at lower level, would have monsters at the player's current level.You could never encounter a challenge that was too easy or too hard. That barrier to exploration, that sense of, at some point, you'll be strong enough to go somewhere or do something, simply doesn't exist in Oblivion.As many here know, Bethesda's follow-up RPG hit, Fallout 3, used the same scaling to set the initial level of encounters, but "locked" the level of monsters once the player visited an area, this avoidedof the annoyances many had with the complete world scaling found previously in Oblivion.So what does this have to do with MMORPGs, and why is this important? Well, MMORPGs don't scale. They, really, because players of all different levels might wander into the same area at the same time. You wouldn't want a game that would spawn a level VR14 mob right next to a level 5 player just because a VR14 player rode by. Thus MMORPGs scale their content in the same way that classical Japanese RPGs did: Mobs of various difficulty levels are intentionally painted over the landscape. Here are just a few examples of this."So, WTF does this have to do with fairness?". The point is that the distinct geographical layout of mobs in, for example World of Warcraft, or EverQuest; meant that players could directly associatewith. When I first set foot inside Cazic-Thule -- when I finally joined the elite ranks of those who roamed Onyxia's Lair, and Molten Core -- that was an accomplishment. And any time there's a sense of accomplishment compared with others,Fairness is a very important concept in developing MMORPGs. This is because fairness doesn't exist in their single-player predecessors. "Cheating" and other forms of rule-changing in single-player games is not only acceptable, it's encouraged. Many games have difficulty settings or consoles, or built in cheat-codes that allow players to tailor the experience to suit their desires. Does it really matter that you beat the game on easy instead of hard? Only to you.Fairness comes into play with multiplayer games as well. Cheating suddenly becomes frowned upon when in competition with other players. But only if some players don't agree with the cheating. If you think about it; when everyone agrees to a specific "cheat", it's not really cheating anymore, is it?Changing the rules is super common in multiplayer; creating game-mods, which are basically changes to game rules, are incredibly popular; things like FPS maps mods, MineCraft mods and RTS-mods gave birth to entire genres and franchises. But these rule changes intrinsically depend on the agreement of all participants. Everyone has to download the game-mod and choose to use it.The problem is that there is no structure for change in MMORPGs. There are no cheat codes, no mods, no way to have a subset of people play by a different set of rules. There is one and only one set of rules and if anyone even slightly smudges the clear lines of those rules, all hell breaks loose about fairness. It's this sense of fairness affects everything from PvP class balance to PvE raid progression. And, of course, it affects the in-game economy.Nowhere is this economic fairness more clear in MMORPGs than in the rate of progression. MMORPGs tend to be based on a very simple formula:. Most modern MMORPGs are not particularly challenging. They're just time-consuming.The utter bottom line of ease of play in World of Warcraft gave birth to the termThe sheer numbers in EVE Online gave birth to the Blob, and all of them have given birth to a multi-milliondollar industry of gold farming and power leveling.We know the math is simple. Time = progression. Time = money. So, logically, money = progression, right? Yes. Absolutely. Anyone who tries to rationalize otherwise is just plain wrong. So why the outcry about gold farming? Whats wrong with it?Well, a lot. But on a fundamental level, it points to a major flaw in the game design. If you're willing to pay someone to skip through a game for you, that's a good sign that you're not enjoying the game, and if you're not enjoying the game, then the game is bad. To a game's developer, buying gold or leveling is akin to telling them their game is so bad, you'll actually pay money to avoid having to play it.So why do MMORPGs keep going back to the grind? Well, if you look at Ultimas in general -- not just Online but Ultimas in general -- Ultimas have very customized story-lines. A customized story-line is very expensive to build and takes a lot of time and effort. To kill 10 more, and 10 more, and 10 more, is something you can create algorithmically, and it works very well. So as much as hardcore 'role-playing' gamers in us might complain, the level grind works astonishingly well.So the grind is inescapable in game design, and players will pay to skip past it, but where's thebit? Is it really "" that some people spend months getting to level 50 and others spend money? Is it unfair only because the game doesn't officially sell you the levels and some shady third party is doing it? Or is there some inherent sense of fairness in actually doing the grinding yourself?It's useful to think of "pay for" not as a purely monetary exchange. Players who have limited time to devote to game-play -- begrudge being out progressed by players who do have a large amount of time to devote to game-play. Interestingly, in almost the identical way that those who devote large amounts of time to the game -- begrudge those that purchase progression. But why? Why are players so caught up, not only in the progression of others, but also the method in which they progress? The divide is deep, as a quick look into the forums reveals:Players with limited time to devote to the game are:Conversely, those that do devote significant time to the game are:All hyperbole, and not particularly helpful considering we are all on the same side. However, it is useful to note that each groups comments about the other have to do with the legitimacy of the exact same thing. Achievement.I think the actual sense ofemanates from a much more fundamental issue: the game-play associated with progression in most MMORPGs isn't fun. It's tedious, it's repetitive, and it's time-consuming. The "leveling" part of most MMORPGs (ESO included) canbe described as an extremely long tutorial you're obliged to complete before you're allowed to start playing the real game. As long as, it's fair because everyone suffers equally, but if there are ways to pay (by either sinking time or money) to skip the level grind, it feels unfair primarily because of how unpleasant the leveling experience really is. People paying others to level their characters, are P2W. Grind spot locations are exploits. Interpretations abound, and shots are fired.One big concern is that, if games do start to directly (or indirectly) sell levels or level progression, they also unfairly elongate the actual leveling process to encourage more people to pay their way to the top. Players have developed a strong sense of "unjust game development" due to free-to-play game designers who produce absolute barbaric "games" in the hopes that players will pay to avoid having to play them. If ZOS were to roll out a paid service for instant max level characters without shortening their leveling experience to less than a few hours, players would be waving their pitchforks in the air and faces would roll.These fears are also based on a large number of Asian free-to-play games with extremely harsh "free" environments and a heavy emphasis on forcing players to buy power and progression from item stores. "Free-to-play", technically, but definitely "pay-to-win".But it's important to note that the crucial difference between these systems and what I was previously describing is the difference between paying for an advantage that cannot be obtained without buying it from the item store and paying for progression that can be obtained by taking the time to do it yourself.It seems recently that many have voiced approval for the implementations akin to WoW's season's and tiers as a possible solution to the divide. Lets look at that. When Blizzard introduced "tiers" of raiding content in World of Warcraft, especially in the Burning Crusade expansion, it dramatically changed the meaning of "gear" in MMORPGs. Weapons and armor used to be more than tokens compiled into a gear score; they used to embody the tales and accomplishments that went into obtaining them.Everyone I know that played pre-WoW MMOs -- games like Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot -- could spin a grand yarn of adventure about at least one piece of equipment they had. Many of those pieces of equipment weren't even the "best" of their type, but the rarity and surprise of getting anything special added a great deal of magic to that style of game.With its refinement to raiding tiers, WoW introduced the concept of gear progression. Progression through raid content was heavily dependent on acquiring the previous tier's gear. You had to get everyone in Tier 1 gear to do Tier 2 raids, and then get everyone into Tier 2 gear to do Tier 3 raids, and so on and so forth. Gearing up became as trivial as leveling up. And, just like XP, all of this gear had to be obtained first-hand. It was all bind-on-pickup.It should come as no surprise, then, that the same "Chinese gold farmers" who were selling leveling services quickly began to offer raiding services: they would take your character through a raid and get you all the raid gear. Once gearing up became mere progression, it became a time sink… or, optionally, a money sink.What's ironic is that thethe gear was bind-on-pickup was to ensure a sense of fairness to enforce those accomplishments. You had this epic gear because you raided, not because you bought it from someone else who raided. That sense of accomplishment was part of the rules and circumventing that accomplishment by paying someone to get you the gear was cheating.The player outcry against "raid farming," however, was dwarfed by outcry against Blizzard's own actions. In Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard had the goal of making raidingto more players. One of the big difficulties, however, was in the nature of gear progression. If you needed Tier 2 gear to go on Tier 3 raids, but no one was doing Tier 2 raids anymore because they were all doing Tier 3, how could you get caught up? Blizzard added the ability to gather tokens from much easier 5-man dungeons -- trivially difficult challenges that merely required a-- and added merchants that sold gear equivalent to the previous Tier of the current raid zone. See the problem coming?When Tier 4 raids were introduced, Tier 3 gear showed up on merchants, and within days players who had never set foot in a raid instance were as well geared as those who had toiled for months facing the game's toughest challenges.Players were justifiably upset: why raid at all if you can just wait for the next set of raids and buy your way through the previous tier of content? What did that accomplishment mean when Blizzard would hand it out to everyone a month or two later?Blizzard faced a fairness dilemma: the new system wasn't fair to the raiders who worked hard on raiding, but the old system wasn't fair to the casual players who didn't or couldn't spend the time and effort raiding.The problem was that the raid gear progression in WoW used to be skill-based, rather than time-based, progression. Having a full set of raid gear didn't just mean you had invested the time in raiding, it meant that you were good enough a player to overcome those raid bosses.It was also a huge mark of social status: it meant you were a part of a group that was capable of working together to overcome those challenges. Throughout Vanilla WoW and, arguably, most of Burning Crusade, raid gear was a very impressive status symbol.Status symbols are valuable. If you could go online and buy a knighthood for $15, the title "Sir" would no longer be a status symbol.Blizzard's error was thinking thatmeant that everyone should have the opportunity to have this status symbol and thereby destroyed the very value the status symbol carried. It's basically the Queen going on TV and announcing "Knighthoods for everybody!"Still, raid content was very expensive to produce, and arguably some of the most fun content in any MMORPG. It makes perfectfor Blizzard to want more of their players to be able to enjoy raiding. Blizzard tried to retain the sense of status in a different way: instead of tying it to gear, they tied it to achievements. Blizzard added "normal" and "hard" modes to raid encounters and rewarded players who completed all the hard challenges with rare mounts, titles, and cosmetic achievements.In "theory", it might appear that this should have worked. However, it didn't. I was certainly pleased with my Ironbound Proto-Drake. At the same time, I found myself extremely aggravated with "hard" modes after Ulduar, and quit WoW after beating the Lich King on normal. The fact was that I enjoyed playing role-playing games for the role-playing aspects, the excitement of adventure, not the convoluted and bizarre challenges contrived for "hard" modes of boss fights. Although the new achievement-based rewards and other later leased reward systems were "fair", they just weren't ones I was interested in achieving.Itemization. WoW is just not a good example of what happens when rare goods can be traded, since everything of value in WoW is un-tradeable. Final Fantasy XI, can shed some insights on the fairness of trading.Final Fantasy XI featured "notorious monsters" which rarely appeared in certain locations and had a slim chance of dropping some very rare and valuable gear or crafting material when they were slain.Similar to EverQuest.Notably, gear in Final Fantasy XI did not "bind", so not only could it be traded, it could be used and traded many times, potentially used and reused by many players. EverQuest did introduce some BoP in expansions and in endgame raids. However, for the most part, if a player wanted one of these rare items, they basically had two options: they could kill the monster and get it themselves or they could save up enough money to buy it. The interesting thing is that, because there were so many possible valuable items for sale, money in FFXI and EQ was extremely valuable and meaningful.Actually earning enough money to have bought one of these items was no trivial task; it might actually be more challenging than killing the monster and getting it yourself. So, no matter which route you took to obtain the item,. And both routes were inherently(disregarding the manipulation by RMT activities)."Fairness" is best maintained in a "wide and flat" game design: allow players as wide as possible a set of challenges to tackle and keep each of these challenges as self-contained as possible. Allowing players to "trade" challenge accomplishment, through the exchange of rewards in an open market, is perfectly fair and acceptable so long as many challenges as possible are accessible to as many players as possible, ensuring that everyone has the chance to complete the ones they wish to complete and trade for the ones they don't want to do. The preference for one challenge over another, does not a good player make. It just make them different.- "Not that you care, but now you know"