The Lava Lamp

[tim]

DRAFT

Difficulty

Harder challenge = better rewards.

That's the mantra of WoW's development team right now. The clearest statement of this is way back in patch 1.10 (although some time before this they also capped raid instances to 40):

"Along with the new Armor Sets, the high-level 5-10 man dungeons have received some changes regarding loot. Many items have been improved in quality and use. In addition, several epic items, such as Headmaster's Charge and the Runeblade of Baron Rivendare, have had their drop rates significantly increased. In order to preserve the challenge of these dungeons, they have had their instance caps lowered. Stratholme, Scholomance, and Blackrock Depths now allow a maximum of five players inside, and Blackrock Spire allows a maximum of ten."

Since this time, they've been true to this maxim, with a few notable exceptions. In general the few exceptions have attracted attention, being cited as dumbing down or poor design or welfare or errors. I propose that it is the rule, and not the exceptions to the rule, which cause the problem.

What Is Hard?

Of course, people mean subtley different things when they say something is "hard" (or "easy"). In the end it will always come down to one of two things - something which is hard taxes either your ability, or your persistence. Generally the two interact, such that the better able you are, the less you have to persist. Something is easy when it taxes neither your ability nor your persistence.

Of course, people have different levels of ability and different thresholds of persistence. Children are blessed with a mysterious abundance of persistence (at least in computer games, if not the rest of their lives). Adults will be "better at the game" if they take the time to train, but individual level of ability can fluctuate wildly, and deteriorates with age. There is no objective bar to rate "hard" or "easy" against because of this.

Why Hard?

People are lazy. In real life, humans as a rule don't make work for themselves. There are people that do, and often we'd be better off without them. I'm not talking about productivity - anyone who goes out of their way to be extra-productive is a godsend, befriend or marry them immediately - I'm talking about make-work. It's a maxim of its own now - work smarter, not harder. Smart, lazy people look for low-effort rather than high-effort solutions to problems. It's not a vice - at the virtuous end, you achieve more in less time, meaning you can achieve even more in the time you saved. Of course you can also slack off, but it's the slacking off that's at fault, not making efficient and optimal use of time. In real life, given two solutions to a problem, each of which would be equally effective (and interesting) but one of which is simply harder work, rational people will choose the easier (or faster) option.

So why does the question of difficulty come up in computer games so often? Because (some) people like challenges. They want to be tested. They want the satifaction of having overcome an obstacle. Something which is achieved too easily is unsatisfying. But it's deeper than that - something which is achieved too easily is boring. Especially in gaming, but also in the educational or work environment depending on the individual, a trivial task fails to maintain interest, resulting in low morale and poor performance.

The role of carefully managed challenges is (relatively) well-understood in the field of game design. It's known that a challenge must be difficult enough to be taxing, but not so difficult that it becomes frustrating. The elder designers in their wisdom left us with a powerful artefact to help us achieve this goal, even when the concept of "difficulty" is so subjective and dependent on the attributes of the individual.

Difficult Settings

Easy/Medium/Hard. Call them something stupid if you like, but every game should have them, unless that game is totally devoid of challenges. The purpose of difficulty settings is to allow the player to salt the game with their preferred flavour of challenge, in two ways. Firstly, to make sure the difficulty band of the game matches their attributes (both ability and persistence) and secondly, to allow them to choose the manner of game they desire (even if they have sufficient ability, some players would prefer a low-intensity, relaxing game experience to a high-intensity, challenging one).

A good difficulty setting system has at least three modes, preferably more. A good medium setting means "I'm familar with this sort of game, but not looking for a ball-busting ordeal". A good easy mode means "I'm going to struggle, because I'm either unskilled or a novice, or I have no tolerance for failure". A good hard mode means "I'm looking for something to really test me, either so that I can show off, or to maintain my interest".

Superlative difficulty settings will go further in each direction. A great example is Serious Sam, which has six difficulty settings. On the easiest, enemies do so little damage and your regeneration rate is so high that it's almost impossible to be killed. This is ideal for players who have never played an FPS before, and are struggling to even look consistently in one direction, let alone kill anything before it starts chewing on them.

Poor difficulty settings are either pitched too high or too low (Aliens vs Predator 1 and Far Cry were both numbingly hard, even on the "easiest" difficulty, and were essentially impossible for players who were not FPS veterans), or make too little difference to the game.

Rewards

Now it gets complicated. Sometimes the purpose of difficulty settings is corrupted (remember, the purpose is to allow people to select the difficulty level they are comfortable with and find interesting), most often through offering incentives. Maybe the game has unlockables, or the new fad, achievements. Some (or worse, the best) unlockables are only available playing on hard mode. This sounds like a perfectly logical extension of the concept - you want people to replay your game, you want them to spend time playing it so they feel like they've got their money's worth, so why not incentivise the more difficulty play settings?

Now we have two dissimilar personalities that are interested in hard mode. The challenge-focused (or highly skilled) players are playing on hard for the sake of it. The goal-focused (or obsessive-compulsive) players are playing on hard because they need to tick the "hard" box. Let's take it one step further - assume that completing hard mode unlocks an achievement which gives you +10% damage during online multiplayer games - now we have a third group, who aren't interested in the challenge for the sake of it and wouldn't be trying to attain mechanically irrelevant achievements who are playing hard mode solely for the reward it gives.

Conflicting Interests

When you have conflicting interest groups involved in a task, it takes a great deal of design skill to have them play nicely together. Games have the notable advantage over real life tasks that people are playing them for the sake of playing them - they WANT to play them. If they didn't want to, in general they would stop. However, as soon as you introduce incentives for play, suddenly you lose that advantage by expanding your population to include people who *don't* want to play.

Remember, people are smart and lazy. They look for the easy way around problems. Faced with "having" to do something they don't want to, rational people will look for shortcuts. They'll cheat. They'll exploit. They'll do everything they can to avoid having to do something not fun with their leisure time. Don't scorn this - it's vastly more rational than exerting a great deal of pointless effort on something you don't enjoy and which ultimately doesn't achieve anything.

In single player games, this is relatively harmless. So someone feels compelled to spend a few hours playing a game or game mode they don't like in order to unlock something they do want. So what? I'd say it's bad design, but it's not crippling. In online games, this changes completely. Not only does the "arms race" of mechanical effectiveness make for a stronger compulsion to complete the mandated tasks, but the short-cut behaviour that people are likely to resort to is actively detrimental to play. Cheating and exploiting in a single player game is fine. Cheating and exploiting in a multiplayer game is about the most disruptive thing possible, short of extreme harrasment.

Heroics = Mandatory Hard Setting

Let's bring this back around to WoW for a more concrete example. Heroic dungeons are our hard mode. Badges of Justice (tradeable for epixx) are our incentive for playing on hard mode. As with all such cases, some people are in it for the challenge (they would run Heroic dungeons whether they gave rewards or not, they enjoy being tested) and some people are in it for the reward (they would never run a Heroic dungeon, or perhaps only do it once, if the incentive were not there).

What behaviours do we see as a result of this design? Well, we see pretty much exactly what we'd expect to see. People are smart and lazy, and this manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, they don't want to play in easy mode, because they'd be missing out on the incentive (compounded by the fact that the incentive is the only upgrade opportunity, rather than just an incentive). Secondly, since the majority are going to the Heroic for the reward rather than for the challenge, they're not interested in it being difficult. This leads to skewed composition requirements, with heavy demands on gear (especially for tanks) and heavy demands on crowd control from dps classes.

These behaviours in turn lead to a few (negative) consequences. A) It's very difficult to get a group for non-Heroic mode instances, because the majority of the player base are avoiding them, due to the lack of incentive. B) It's very difficult to catch up with the gear level of players running Heroics, because without being able to get a non-Heroic group it's impossible to acquire gear from those instances. C) Challenging content is not readily available (at the 5-man level) for those who want it, because the available pool of players are not actually interested in the gameplay of the Heroics, preferring instead to exploit around it using overgeated tanks, excessive crowd control, etc. D) Relaxing (but rewarding) content is not readily available (at the 5-man level) because there is no available pool of players for running normal instances, and even if there were, there would be no reward available.

Soft Instance Caps = Selectable Difficulty

Compare this to the non-raiding situation at 60. There were serious problems, of course, but there were also systems that worked. Prior to patch 1.10, endgame instances could be attempted with roughly 4-10 people. The more people, the easier (unless some of those people were morons who actually managed to detract). Two incentives for bringing less people were offered - that with less people, the same loot was shared between less people, and that quests could only be completed in groups of five or less. And people ran them. And ran them and ran them and ran them. Mostly in groups of 8-10 (on some servers a culture of bringing one character of each class developed), but occasionally in groups of 5 to complete quests.

The relevance is that this is a selectable difficulty setting. People who actually wanted challenges could attempt the instances with the number of people they were intended for - five. People who didn't want challenges weren't forced to experience them, unless they wanted to complete a one-off quest. There were other advantages (and disadvantages) to this ad-hoc, emergent difficulty slider mechanism, but the crucial point is that it existed.

At 70, there is no such mechanism. Heroics are supposed to be the difficulty slider, but they forgot to incentivise normal difficulty. Is it too much to ask that people just run the instances for the fun of it? Yes, it is entirely too much to ask. A few rare WoW players genuinely enjoy running the same instance again and again and again. The rest are doing it for the reward. It may not be a nice thing to say about the game, but it is the case.



Raiding = Mandatory Hard Setting

Learning - Practising - Farming

RPGs - intrinsic difficulty settings

examples of hard = better reward

examples of better reward without increased difficulty
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