Bottom feeding and time over skill.I have been playing massively multiplayer online real time strategy games (MMORTS) for roughly a decade now. In that time I have seen the most fundamental aspect of the games are how these two issues, bottom feeding and time over skill, are treated. The two are intrinsically interlinked, and I have seen very poor games which got these two things right be successful, while far better games which ignored these issues failed.
Bottom feeding.
For those who haven’t had much exposure to this genre, bottom feeding is essentially picking on the weak. When you have a competitive environment whereby you gain a benefit out of attacking successfully, players are naturally drawn to attacking the weak and vulnerable.
This leads game developers to have to make a choice between protecting the weak, and empowering the strong. When I first started these games I was just finishing my degree and I saw a striking resemblance between this relationship and that of capitalistic free markets against governmental control.
Without regulation and controls players usually benefit from exponential growth, while with too many hindrances the incentive to play for many is reduced. The most enjoyable MMORTS game I have played (and I have played a significant proportion of them) was a game called Dystopia. I would be astonished if a single person on the collective has heard of this game much less played it.
“A paradise in which the weak would be slain rather than protected. A paradise in which the strong were not penalized for their success. A truly dystopian paradise.”
I’m sure you can guess how this game dealt with the bottom feeding issue. It encouraged it. The effect of having nothing in place to hinder the growth of the strong turned the game into a sprint. It was a fight to get an advantage, and if you knew what you were doing once you had that advantage it was game over for everyone else.
This made the game exceptionally addictive. It also made the game very un-casual. Players would go through inordinate lengths in order to get that advantage. Waking up at times such as 3 am, so as to be online at critical times was simply the tip of the iceberg that many people put themselves through in order to compete. No sacrifice was too big to become the strongest, while those unable or unwilling became the weak which were slain.
Throughout the late 90’s and early years of this decade the game went through great efforts to try and encourage people to join this highly addictive game. Yet its player base gradually dwindled. First time players would be discouraged by the ease with which they were killed off, as were the less skilled players. As each layer of the player base left the problem accentuated itself; resulting in increasingly skilled individuals becoming the recipients of bottom feeding. Further dooming any such game which is new player unfriendly is the fact that such games are predominately played by students. They are a loyal die hard group, but there is one inescapable fact, they will one day move on, grow up and get jobs. Without a constant stream of new players therefore the game can only face a slow and painful death.
One intriguing solution to the bottom feeding issue was taken by a game called amber. In this game instead of letting anyone attack anyone, it had a portal system, where you could only attack other kingdoms to which you had opened a portal. The range of the portal was then set to encourage fair fights.
For a time around the turn of the millennium amber enjoyed great success with a system that simultaneously protected the beginner and allowed the strong to prey on the weak. Over time unfortunately flaws and exploits were found by the user base that let the better and more experienced open portals to weaker less skilled kingdoms. This persistence comes from the fact that this is just what the better players want. They want a fight which while a little challenging has very little chance of defeat, to give them maximum growth.
As this decade has progressed the MMORTS has evolved away from having no physical existence, with no limit to growth size, and no other players being any nearer to you than any other. The popular MMORTS of today such as Travian have a world with a physical relationship between your own territories and those of others nearby. The effects of this on bottom feeding are pronounced.
With a virtual, non existent game world, a single player or group of players could easily control every other user in their game world. There could be systems in place to discourage and make it not worth them wasting their time on the weak and even prevent them attacking those too small, but all threats could be reached, attacked and eliminated. There was one big fish in the pond, and it ate everything else.
Adding geography into game play eliminates this. There is no longer one pond and one big fish, now there are multiple micro systems. Someone else far away could be far more dominant than you, but providing you were the strongest in your locality you gained all the advantages that before were exclusive to the player who sitting at the top.
his enables games such as Travian to have relaxed rules to bottom feeding, letting the strong destroy the weak with impunity as the natural distance between player’s acts as a buffer preventing that one big fish from devouring everything else.
Bottom feeding can be likened to a drug. It increases the games addictiveness and can make users very happy, but too much can completely destroy a game.
Time over skill
One of the defining characteristics of the MMORTS is persistence, meaning that the game continues with or without the player. Obviously there is a massive advantage to the person who can dedicate huge chunks of time into such a game. The early MMORTS games got around this by having all the important aspects of the game take significant amounts of time. Attacking another player would, depending on the game, typically take 6-12 hours for your armies to return, while training of new recruits would take similar lengths of time.
This meant you could effectively compete as long as you were online 2-3 times a day. For some people that is quite a commitment, but for a large number of people that isn’t a particularly difficult commitment. There is still an advantage to being online in the in between times, but it is a negligible one. The increased knowledge of what is going on the whole time leads to an increased awareness which is actually mimicking what the more experienced and skilled player already has.
The evolution of the MMORTS has not been restricted to altering the issue of bottom feeding, and key developments in the modern MMORTS has moved the genre away from a situation with a balance between time and skill.
This development is the ability to create independent structures. In the early games you had a base, which got bigger endlessly without limit. With the introduction of geography came the ability to have multiple bases which could grow either with or without limit. I can still remember my excitement at the opportunities and potential of this development.
The flaw of this however is the user suffers from exponentially growing time requirements. I started playing Travian roughly 4 or 5 years ago and played casually at first learning a few things getting an understanding of the game, and then a new game server was created.
Having got an idea of how the effects of geography were having on the game I decided to wait a week before starting to make sure I wasn’t located around the hardcore gamers who would have signed up on the first day.
I was still effectively a complete beginner but understood the principles by which these games are about, they are a race to get an edge and then you use that edge to push all those around down and prevent their growth. I did a very small amount of cheating sending myself some extra resources from a multi account to give myself that initial tiny advantage, which by having meant my exponential growth curve was ahead of all my immediate rivals and they all quickly became my farms.
By nothing more than investing insane amounts of time to allow myself to attack every one of my neighbours around the clock I had growth that was staggering. Within two weeks I was over a hundred times more powerful than my strongest neighbour and completely controlled an area of 20 by 20 around my home village.
No one else within that area had any possibility to play the game whatsoever. Some were experienced players who understood the game fair better than I did, but my resource advantage over them was so vast that I was gaining more resource than the combined one hundred nearest villages to me.
My area of dominance grew, my number of villages grew, and the number of hours in the day didn’t change. At one point I was at no stage sleeping for more 2 than hours in a day. Of course it didn’t take long for me to burn out and lose interest. I had broken the game and I think after around a month I stopped playing, with my villages already the largest on the server by a large margin and growing at roughly 3 times the speed of anyone else.
This is not to brag about the ability to no life a game, but an example of what happens when the game rewards activity to this extent. Users can gain extraordinary large amounts of power incredibly quickly only for their startlingly brilliant flame to burn out within a short timeframe. Travian game worlds are littered with the decaying ruins of abandoned empires.
Now I can hear you thinking, if the game is so flawed, why is it so popular? The answer is it has the balance of bottom feeding just right. It lets the user have complete and absolute control over all of his neighbours. While it has the potential for the beginner to start in a sleepy quiet corner of the game world filled with out beginners who are content to grow peacefully. I remember reading a quote once that summarised this.
“We don’t want to end the exploitation, we want to become the exploiters”
Very few games allow this to the same extent that Travian does.
The game markets itself very aggressively, the first advert I saw for a MMORTS was for Travian, and I have since seen adverts for it on countless websites, the collective being no exception. It seems to me the makers understand their typical users have a life span of six months to three years. Once they graduate the time requirements can no longer be met, and many in their final years of study will prioritise their studies.
They embrace this, and instead of trying to make the game available for their older members, go out and find the next year’s fresh generation of students. They offer huge game play advantages to those prepared to spend their cash, capitalising on the individuals short term addictions, and tempting those rich graduates to attempt to continue to play.
The question then becomes where does DTC see itself in terms of bottom feeding and the importance of time over skill. Will it be aiming to be a chaotically addictive bottom feeding time sink that has low player loyalty, high player turnover and is a cash cow? Or perhaps it may be a more casual game with protection inbuilt for the lesser skilled at the expense of the dedicated players.
For me the perfect game would have mechanisms that give advantages that stack up over time resulting from good play, but has protection for the beginner so that without advanced strategies they are able to compete to some extent. To involve the investment of a significant yet realistic chunk of time, but that time invested suffers from diminishing returns resulting in it being possible to compete with an individual such as myself who if he so decides could start playing 140 hours a week.The result may not produce the best monetary return, but from a purist view point of gaming excellence it would be a far more successful game than a more profitable yet fundamentally flawed game.
If we take a quick look at the most popular game on this site, minions, despite it being a very different type of game, you can see that it has all those factors which I suggested made the perfect game. Whether by accident or design the levelling system in minions allows a form of bottom feeding, which is restricted so that even if you have 20 levels on your opponents fighting 2v1 will usually end in your own defeat. For me this system represents an important part of the addictiveness of that award winning game.
