Icarus Studios News

(Continued from part 1)

The most common methods of encouraging players to coordinate in MMOs are party roles, buffs, and fights that require advance discussion. In many ways, however, these don’t always feel like true coordination: filling party roles and an optimal strategy are often arbitrary requirements for success, while applying buffs is often an easy decision. What are the less common strategies for adding coordination to MMOs, and how do they compare to the original three?

Many games have set up some variation of a “combo” system: the side effect of one player’s abilities gives more options to another player. One player may have a power that has additional effect on a stunned target, but might not have many stuns of his or her own. Another player has several abilities that stun, but no additional benefit from doing so. When the two players are on the same team, whenever the second player stuns an enemy, the first player can use the power that works better on stunned targets, creating synergy. However, while many games have some elements that are like this, few games make them truly pervasive: only the occasional ability will set up a combo in this way.

Uncommon outside of battles that require pre-conflict discussion is coordination based on party positioning. This involves situations where the party can gain an advantage based on more complex arrangements than tanks in the front, everyone else in the back. Enemies with attacks that affect a long cone (e.g., the archetypical dragon’s breath) are easier to fight if the party can keep as few members in front as possible. Roguish archetypes may benefit from having a teammate help turn the enemy’s back for a sneak attack. Some ranged attackers can benefit from a wolfpack tactic: carefully trading aggro so the enemy wastes time running back and forth between players. In most MMOs, these tactics only come up as part of pre-planned, optimal strategies. However, when they can arise as useful but non-essential tactics, they fall into this latter group.

Another tactic that is common in end-game battles but possible in others is kiting, trapping, off-tanking, or otherwise splitting an encounter. In this method, one member of a team distracts a particularly dangerous member of an enemy group while the rest of the team defeats the rest of the encounter. Then the entire party can take on the original enemy who is much less dangerous without the rest of his group. Essentially, one character sacrifices a typical role in the party in order to distract an enemy until it can be safely dealt with. This tactic is powerful, but only of situational usefulness: the conflict has to take place in a location with enough space for one enemy to be safely separated from the group, and is only of benefit when one enemy is so powerful that it’s worth losing a party member for the fight against the other enemies.
And there are other tactical methods, but coordination in MMOs remains more limited than what is possible in a real world combat situation, sport, or even online player vs. player fight. Between creating fun, balanced challenges and the eventual predictability of most AI routines, conflicts in MMOs tend to boil down to optimized tactics. Rather than giving players a variety of cooperative options and requiring them to be used dynamically during a conflict, strategies are researched online and coordinated only so far as it is necessary to remind new players of their preferred action set. Coordinated innovation is only required when something goes wrong.

In many ways, this is actually a very good thing. While simplified options for cooperating are easily mastered by skilled players, they can eventually be learned by any player with an interest. A wealth of tactical possibilities could create a profound split in the capabilities of the player base: elite teams with military-grade coordination could find most challenges too easy, while pickup groups of new players could find them all but impossible. By creating a simple system of coordination possibilities (with a few variations to reward skilled players), all users are able to have fun within the scope of the same type of challenge.

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team