Icarus Studios News

This post calls attention to an issue in multiplayer, turn-based games. Namely: when players take turns in a conflict situation, they are less likely to coordinate their actions with one another. They will pay attention primarily on their turn, using their personal capabilities without much consideration of the tactics of the other players. The article suggests that turn based games feature more cooperation and coordination if players are encouraged to act all at once and decide their own turn orders.

Very few video games are turn-based these days, and especially not massively multiplayer games. The need for potentially unlimited players means that having to wait for the actions of others could be very problematic. So how does coordination work when there is no time to adjust tactics given turn-by-turn discussion?

The primary coordination strategies in team play are role-based tactics, ally buffs, and pre-conflict discussion.

Common since the early class-based MUDs, party roles provided a shorthand for a player’s optimal tactics in a conflict situation. A player in a “tank” role would typically have lots of ability to avoid incoming threats, and would be encouraged to try to get opponents to attack him or her to the exclusion of much easier-to-harm (“squishy”) allies. A player in the “healer” role would typically have minimal offensive abilities, but be very good at protecting other allies from the back lines and repairing what damage they did take. Most other players served as “DPS” due to their ability to output a lot of damage-per-second. Most fights in modern MMOs progress in the same way: the tank players draw the attention (“agro”) of the computer-controlled enemies, the DPS players harm them from relative safety due to the tanks, and the healer players keep their allies from dying.

Role-based play is the most basic level of player coordination, and is present in almost every MMO to some extent. It has the benefit of making sure every player knows his or her tactical contribution to a team, even of completely new allies. It has the drawback of making some challenges in the game much harder if the players do not form a team with the optimal array of roles.

The second common method of team coordination involves buffing allies. A “buff” is an ability that temporarily increases the capabilities of another player. A buff might reduce incoming damage on the targeted player, increase his or her ability to deal damage, or give new capabilities altogether (such as the ability to travel underwater). While players in the healer role typically provide most buffs (as protective buffs are complements to healing), in many games nearly everyone has some capability that they can grant to allies. Many games make buffs a limited resource, and make players choose between buffs of a similar type, creating even more tactical options. In a fire dungeon, it’s very useful to bring along an ally that can buff the party to resist heat. But what happens when the tank must choose between resisting the heat of the room or the poison inflicted by its denizens?

Buff-based play is well understood in the MMOs that support it, and it can provide a useful tactical and team-building exercise to choose between appropriate buffs. This has the benefit of allowing new tactical options that players can use on their allies during play. It has the drawback of number crunching: players can quickly figure out which buffs have the most statistical significance to their characters, and then the game becomes less about coordination and more about remembering to re-apply the optimal buff when it runs out.

The last type of coordination is pre-conflict discussion. This method is the closest to real-world tactics, and is mostly important in games that feature fights against “boss” enemies. These fights are often more difficult than other fights in the game, and may feature special rules unique to the fight (e.g., the boss periodically teleports one of the party members to another nearby room). The chance of success is greatly increased if all the players discuss the possibilities before the fight, and develop a tactic for the unique aspects (e.g., “if the tank gets teleported, I’ll act as tank until he gets back.”).

True tactical play of this sort doesn’t really become common in most games until the end-game. It may be due to resource allocation: creating and testing a fight that requires tactical cooperation is more difficult than using the standard monster AI, so may not be resource efficient for content most players will level past and never see as it was intended. However, once players reach the end-game, and can only progress by receiving the rewards from a particular challenge, the designers can be much more confident that players facing the challenge are of a certain power level. Thus, challenges requiring pre-conflict discussion tend to make up a large portion of any given MMO’s end-game.

The benefit of creating challenges that require tactical discussion is that many players seem to find it more fun than just fighting the basic AI. Players feel rewarded when they learn and master the tactics that turn an impossible encounter into a challenging one. However, because game tips are posted online as soon as they’re discovered, many players will simply read another group’s optimal strategy and practice it. Players can feel like they’re simply robotically acting out an arbitrary set of instructions, rather than feeling like a true, coordinated team.

In part 2, we’ll look at some of the less common types of coordination.

(Continued in part 2)

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team