Brontoforumus Archive
Activity Boards => Assorted Creations => Topic started by: Kazz on January 15, 2009, 05:27:41 PM
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Many multiplayer games give an advantage to the player who is winning. That player holds more territory, has control of more resources, or otherwise got an early advantage. Now, unless he makes a monumental mistake, his victory is all but assured.
I'll use Advance Wars as an example. Whoever grabs more cities in the beginning has an advantage, but the person who loses more units in the opening engagement will eventually lose the game. The winning side grabs more cities, increasing his income, so for the rest of the game, he will be building more units than his opponent. No matter what the disadvantaged player does, he will eventually be overwhelmed. It could take an hour or more, though, before the losing side succumbs.
Civ 4 is another extreme example. If you watch the scoreboard in a multiplayer match, the person who doesn't get into any conflicts and who grabs the most land early sits merrily on top of the scoreboard with nothing to challenge him. It would take a concentrated effort of each other player in the game to attack the winning player, but even then, some players will be so far disadvantaged that they don't stand to gain anything from that, either. (And, as an aside, war in that game is so slow and tedious that nobody bothers to try to unseat the winner anyway... the game just turns into "Sim-Nation" and everybody quits before the end anyhow because it takes eight hours.)
This is a mechanic that plagues many strategy games. It doesn't make any sense to me to give an advantage to the winning side; he is already winning, and making the game's outcoming into a foregone conclusion so early on is boring to anyone who isn't winning the game.
So, Point 1: Every player in the game should have a decent chance to win the game for its entire duration. The winning side's only advantage should be his lead; no in-game mechanic should make him more powerful.
Now, here's an example of how not to reverse this: Mario Kart.
MK's mechanic of giving better items to the players who are losing is a good idea, but poorly implemented. In effect, it puts the one who is winning the race at a huge disadvantage. Almost every item in the game is likely to hit him in the ass, especially the blue shell (aka the Hand of Fucking God). It is actually a better strategy to avoid winning until the very end of the race.
Speaking of the blue shell: the most likely person to get it is in last place, and it rarely helps that person. It is most likely to assist the players in 2nd and 3rd. If the player in last can move up a few places before he uses it, it would be more likely to help him, but he probably needs other items for that to even be possibel. It just doesn't make sense.
Therefore, Point 2: Any advantage given to a losing side must directly assist that player on the path to victory, rather than simply hurting the player in the lead.
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I fucking hate Counter Strike for precisely this reason.
Well, that and it's a FPS that can sometimes make you wait up to five minutes to respawn after being one-shot by any gun in the entire game.
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That's less rewarding the winner and more punishing the loser, but I don't disagree. Removing the player from the game for minutes at a time is pretty dreadful. Left 4 Dead does it, but it's hard for an individual to die in L4D, which mitigates the problem, and once you are dead, the entire party is likely to wipe without you. Still, it wouldn't kill a team-elimination-style game to give you something to do while you're dead.
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I do always hate that about Mario Kart. I can sit in a race at first place the entire match, up until I get whomped with the inescapable blue shells. And usually not like, one shell. I get hit with that, recover fairly quickly, and then someone comes up (of course) and hits me with 1-3 red shells. Then you're basically screwed.
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It doesn't make any sense to me to give an advantage to the winning side;
it's all about pope game. all. about. pope. game.
(http://i358.photobucket.com/albums/oo22/driftycity/1231615973004.jpg)
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You know what's a great multiplayer game? Shadows over Camelot. You barely have to worry about your allies dicking you over since the cards do it all for you!
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Yeah, that is something that bugged me about Pope Game. However, an extra card for each territory isn't the same as having a 2/3 advantage in resources over your opponents.
We did have the idea of reversing it, so that the person with the least territories got the card advantage of the person with the most and so on, but we never played a game that way.
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You know what's a great multiplayer game? Shadows over Camelot. You barely have to worry about your allies dicking you over since the cards do it all for you!
Yeah... But...
I... Uh...
(http://i358.photobucket.com/albums/oo22/driftycity/1231615973004.jpg)
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:nyoro~n:
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I may have a counter-point to Kazz, but I want to do some research before I post.
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I always like to point to Chess as an interesting take on the concept. When you capture an opponent's piece, you gain a material advantage, but not necessarily a positional advantage. Since the objective is checkmate, rather than the decimation of the opposing army, a player with a material disadvantage can still win with a cunning strategy (even without gaining a material advantage). Still, the player with more pieces has more options and an easier time threatening or defending. The problem doesn't go away, but winning is not impossible.
I think game length should be a factor when determining the effect of winning. Players should not be left hopeless for over an hour while waiting for inevitable defeat. Either have a way of eliminating them, or make the game short enough that the wait doesn't feel terribly long.
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I think when it becomes obvious you've lost, both parties should decide whether or not that game is worth continuing to play. A great example is monopoly. That could take 400 fucking years to finish a game and it's just too time consuming to sit forever and try to beat it, so once you know there's no end in sight, maybe decide who won and end it there.
Edit: I'm not saying people should bitch out early once they think they're losing. I mean when it's blatantly obvious to everyone playing who has won the game, then decide to call the game over.
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Might as well trot out TF2 since it's the hot new thing again.
TF2's rules are very simple: the winning team of the last round has to put up with more bullshit next round. If they were attacking, they get a harder map to clear, if they were defending... well now they're attacking, and the autobalancer will likely pull off the best people from the winning team to stick into the losing one. Even within rounds, as one side gains an advantage they gradually come up against terrain that is suited more and more towards one team's goals. The maps aren't designed to "give" anything to the losing team so much as present a greater challenge to the winning one, which is a natural thing for any video game to do.
Then there's the super bars in fighting games, of course. That's more directly, "give to losing player something of a way to level the field". In many cases when done incorrectly it just makes it easier for the winning side to steamroll over the losing one, though.
The "make it harder for the winning side" method is probably the best thing you can do, as it emulates the natural difficulty curve of a standard video game, serves as a perverse sort of "reward" for the victorious players, and actually continues to challenge both sides rather than keeping one at the same level and setting a crutch up under the other. The trick is doing it in such a way that it's natural and mostly unnoticeable. Have you ever seen anybody ever use the handicap option in Super Smash Bros? Even if there is a huge difference in skill level between the players? An artificial limitation like that just irritates players on both sides. You need to build the game at its fundamental level so that the side with the advantage has to deal with increasing challenges. So for the Advance Wars example, the player with more units should have to deal with certain maintenance and organizational issues that the less large army doesn't have to worry about as much, allowing the player on the losing side to devote more energy into finding a way to turning the situation around.
The most classic multiplayer games have usually evolved from single-player exercises. The pervasive idea that nothing about single-player pertains to multiplayer games tends to cause developers to miss a lot of key ingredients that are crucial to both. Throwing out single-player concepts wholesale means you're going to lose a lot of babies with that bathwater, and that's going to leave some players very unsatisfied.
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The main thing is that everybody starts with the same number of units in Chess, and you never get any more. Also, Chess doesn't have any random chance, which means that everything that occurs is deliberate and concrete. If you lose a piece, it is your own fault (that or your opponent is being reckless). That is fine; in fact, I'll make it the basis for:
Point 3: Any victory or defeat, big or small, should be a consequence of the strategies in play.
(also, LD's point seems better applicable to Risk)
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Chess is very nice in the way the advantage is granted, as opposed to strategy videogames. In games like starcraft and advance wars, the winning side gets not only the benefit of a reduced enemy force as in chess, but it also gains the ability to just grow even bigger. Chess just has a very limited way to obtain new pieces, plus both players start the game with the same amount of resources and positions. Of course chess is a much simpler game compared to starcraft and such, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
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Point 3: Any victory or defeat, big or small, should be a consequence of the strategies in play.
(also, LD's point seems better applicable to Risk)
...you immediately followed up your point by casually mentioning a successful counterexample. Bold.
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Also, RE: Super bars in fighting games
SNK games are the ones who come to mind that give the loser and advantage, since in some games when you're really low on life you have unlimited supers. But most fighting games bars fill up faster for the guy who is attacking more, so this encourages people to be on the offensive, which of course means that you are more likely to make a mistake and leave yourself open for a counterattack.
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...you immediately followed up your point by casually mentioning a successful counterexample. Bold.
i contradict myself a lot, but this time i don't know how i did. elaborate, I am curious!
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Risk lasts a while because there are so many things you can choose to do each turn. Monopoly lasts forever because people are stubborn.
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Monopoly is great fun in theory, until you've been playing for 6 hours and can't take it anymore.
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Exactly.
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It is entirely possible to win at Risk by simply being lucky.
Of course you need to be very lucky for a very long time. It's probably fairer to say "one who does not play as strategically as his opponent at Risk can still win by offsetting it with luck."
On a macro level the game will very very probably go to the player with the better strategy (meaning the one that best accounts for the inherent randomness) but on a micro level small wins can easily be won through no fault of the winner's own, and this doesn't seem to have killed the game's popularity by much.
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Last time I played Risk, we started the game with random territories, and I drew Siam, Western Australia, and New Guinea (as well as a bunch of other shit that I ignored).
I placed every starting soldier into Siam, took over the rest of Australia, and then took one territory per turn (solely for the card), then I turned in a set and eliminated Ocksi and took his cards and then I turned in two sets on my next turn, GG.
Did I have the best strategy? Maybe. Did I deserve to win? Maybe. Was it a decent strategic exercise though? Fuck no. Siam is an insurmountable chokepoint. If you hold it, which is not difficult, you can win.
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Oh. I was under the impression that Risk was regarded as a generally unbroken game, but I can understand if you disagree with that.
(I personally don't like the game very much so my experience is limited.)
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Also that's why there's usually house rules of one set per turn.
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TF2 purposefully tilts the balance towards the winning team, so that the round ends faster.
I've considered an 'auction' model, where weapons and items used more frequently by winning sides start costing more and more.
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I'm debating with Kazz over vent. Too much stuff to cough back up here.
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TF2 purposefully tilts the balance towards the winning team, so that the round ends faster.
Not really. At least, none of the official maps do; the game itself sort of does but only to prevent rounds from becoming an almost assured stalemate.
There's a reason why most rounds tend to bog down on the last CP, or the last checkpoint for Payload. The terrain gives a huge advantage to the attackers in the beginning and a huge advantage to the defenders near the end of the course. Whoever's getting their asses beaten will end up with the terrain advantage, and can almost always use it to mount a turnaround if they get their shit together.
Of course if you're talking about CTF (or straight CP to a degree) then there's no tilting at all, which is part of the problem with those modes. They're fine on their own but TF2 was specifically built for a specific attack/defense dynamic and modes where both teams are doing both just don't mesh.
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Re: Risk
Risk is one of my favorite games, and I consider it very well balanced.
Yeah, it has an element of luck, but I equate it to about the same level of Poker. (Almost all the time, the best players will win.)
Australia is overpowered, though, especially in a five or six player game. Not every game is perfect. South America is actually just as good despite having two defense points, because it goes directly into NA and Africa, which are fuckloads easier to control than Asia.
... which still doesn't solve the problem of having only two countries that are good for at minimum four players. (I refuse to play Risk with three or less because it is gay.)
Anyway, the game rewards players for winning by giving them more dudes, HOWEVER, this comes with the cost that people will focus fire on you, if they even remotely know how to play. I have made an art form of hovering around second or third most powerful so as to avoid player aggro until I have the cards and position to chainkill the game.
... please note that the preceding paragraph also applies pretty much directly to Settlers.
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not to imply it's a pinnacle of balance, but funnily enough, WoW's lead dev just today said that its arena system was more like poker than chess.
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Poker is a game designed by people who are good at Poker in order to take advantage of people who are not good at Poker. Not only is it unbalanced by design, the purpose of its design is to be unbalanced.
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Not that I know much about poker, but most well-balanced games would reward players that are good at the game. That's where skill is involved.
Rewarding a player that is not good is what makes Mario Kart what's been already stated.
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Well, if you look at what Kazz is talking about, the person who has the advantage in Poker pretty much controls the pot. They can match any bet at all without worrying about going out, and everybody else has to just hope they can catch him with a series of good hands. Also, implicit psychological advantage, which is what the game is pretty much about.
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chainkill the game.
You are playing with house rules where you can hold more than five cards at a time, I presume? Or are you talking about chain-eating the other players from weakest to strongest to combo-stack forced turn-ins?
ps risk rules
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On the issue of rewarding good playing:
I think that games where the winners are rewarded for doing well need to also have a strong luck element. See: Poker, chess and backgammon.
I think that the rewards should never be greater than roughly 15% (if you can even quantify an advantage in percentages).
I also think Kazz is awesome.
That is all.
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Thanks, Guild. You, too, are awesome.
Let me describe a game called Wesnoth. The game isn't bad, but it does a lot of very bad things.
The combat mechanic of the game is simple: a unit has an attack damage value, and then a number of attacks (followed by damage type and other details). For instance, a unit may have an 8-3 weapon, which means it attacks three times, and each time it hits it will deal 8 damage. A unit typically has about 35 hit points.
Problem number one is how the game determines to-hit. An attacker's chance to hit a defender is determined entirely by the type of terrain the defender is standing on. Mostly these are values between 40-60%, which is reasonable. However, there are many extreme examples; for instance, an elven unit in a forest can only be hit by 20% of the attacks that target him. The vast majority of the time, the attacker will miss.
Problem number two is the total miss. I don't think that there should ever be a situation in a strategy game where an attack has zero effect. Even if some form of protection prevents damage to the defending unit, that protection should be very special. In Wesnoth, it is quite possible for every attack on a defender to miss, and for the defender to be totally unaffected.
Problem three is counterattacking. Each time a unit is attacked, that defender counterattacks fully. For instance, if a 6-4 unit attacked an 8-3 unit, the attacker would strike once (perhaps dealing 6 damage), then the defender would strike once (perhaps dealing 8 damage), and then the attack would strike again, and so on, the attacking unit having the last attack (because he has 1 more). Let's say this defending unit is surrounded and attacked from all six sides; he has the potential to deal 166 damage this turn! That's greater than he could possibly deal on his own turn!
Problem number four is the XP system. In Wesnoth, units level up as they engage in combat; each time one unit slays another, that unit gains 8 XP. For each combat the unit survives, the unit gains 1 XP. Once the unit gains enough XP, he levels up. The problem with this is that the unit gains experience on other player's turns as well as his own, and as soon as that unit levels up, he regains all of his health.
So, let's put all of these problems together: a rather dangerous unit has invaded your territory and you want to kill it before it causes any trouble. Not taking any chances, you send six units to attack it! However, the unit is sitting on an advantageous piece of terrain, granting it 70% defense. "No matter," you think, "for with so many units, I'll make short work of him." So you order them all to attack. The dangerous unit counterattacks your units, leaving many of them brutalized, but taking quite a bit of damage himself. However, you fail to notice that his XP bar is slowly filling; after a bad string of rolls, one of your attackers dies to the defender's counterattacks, and the defender suddenly turns into a monster with far more dangerous attacks, 50% more HP, and no damage done to him at all.
This. Is. Bullshit.
Point 4: An attacker must always do harm, no matter how small, and never the opposite.
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I think when it becomes obvious you've lost, both parties should decide whether or not that game is worth continuing to play. A great example is monopoly. That could take 400 fucking years to finish a game and it's just too time consuming to sit forever and try to beat it, so once you know there's no end in sight, maybe decide who won and end it there.
Edit: I'm not saying people should bitch out early once they think they're losing. I mean when it's blatantly obvious to everyone playing who has won the game, then decide to call the game over.
My cousins and I play speed Monopoly. Everyone has a calculator instead of money and if you take longer than fifteen seconds to roll, move your piece and read your card/buy your damn property already Jesus fuck it's only 300 fucking bucks you cheapskate SOMEBODY THROW AN UNOPENED SODA AT HIS HEAD RIGHT NOW ...yeah.
Big pimpin' (that's me) and his crew can finish a full game in two hours or less.
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it really shouldn't be difficult to. Monopoly is really, really simple.
honestly I think they should cut out the Rent prior to houses, or just make them a blanket 10-20-30-40 bucks depending on board side and fuck all the bills smaller than $10.
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In Multiwinia, there are no special units, only en masse generic men who spawn periodically at captured crucibles. The best strategy on many maps is to rush the farthest capture points early on, securing an advantage that soon becomes self-perpetuating.
Team Fortress 2 in instant-respawn mode has the annoying effect of skewing balance too far in favour of the defenders. The points near enemy spawn are almost impossible to take, thanks to an endless stream of defenders.
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Let's talk about tactics.
The first element of a tactically interesting game is some degree of resource management: making the biggest gains out of the smallest expenditures. The exact nature of the resources can vary considerably. Number of units, available cash, HP/MP, items. In Heaven and Hell (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=2133.0), your actions are resources, because they each have a cooldown period of 1 turn (or 2 if you're injured). As an evil player in a larger group, you'll probably want to hold off on attacking until an injured player has defended once or twice consecutively.
The second element of a tactically interesting game is the presence of dissimilar assets. Dissimilar assets can be easily seen in modern warfare: artillery is powerful and long-ranged, but vulnerable to almost any attack. Armor unites power, mobility, and protection, but runs into trouble against certain infantry-defended terrain. Infantry is slow and light on weapons, but gets maximum use of terrain. Each asset advertises both a strength and a weakness.
(An aside: dissimilar assets does not mean rock-paper-scissors--which is to say, the use of options which have no in-built reason for picking one over another. Rock is only preferable if you think the opponent is going to play paper--which is only preferable to him if he thinks you're going to play scissors. If you wanted to make RPS more tactical, you'd need to imbalance the moves: maybe make one of them an attack, one of them a defense, and one of them a recovery. Which is where I started when I was designing Heaven and Hell.)
The third element of tactical play is some quantity of maneuvering. If it takes work to get the right resources into the right position at the right time, you're on the right track. Thus we see the positional advantage of chess, and the card "programming" of Robo Rally.
How these three elements are executed in a particular game determines that game's "pace of decision". Pace of decision simply indicates how quickly a player can lose. (As Kazz pointed out, it's not very fun when a game with a short pace of decision takes a long time to play.) It's a measure of the importance of each mistake: can you blunder twice before victory is unattainable? Five times? RPGs generally have very, very slow PODs: as a resource, your HP serves simply as a "buffer" between your mistakes and losing.
If the POD is too slow, tactical errors don't matter, and it becomes simply a question of who had the most resources. If it's too fast, though, the battle is often over before it even began, with initial deployment likely determining the ultimate winner. The ideal balance between the two extremes is one of personal taste, as always.
Okay! Let's talk about strategy. (Great fuck, I'm not done typing yet? No, not yet--food is tasteless until someone posts "tl;dr" in response to something I wrote that day.)
If tactics is making immediate decisions for concrete gameplay advantage, strategy is the metagame consideration of your opponent's nature and how you plan to use it against her.
Broadly, strategically interesting gameplay often requires you to predict your opponent's decisions, deceive the opponent about your own secret decisions, commit resources for purely informational purposes, and (unsurprisingly) make heavy use of tactics.
One of the most important ideas for a strongly strategic game is the importance of causality. When thinking about a particular course of action relevant to strategy in a specific game, the causal chain is the series of actions, decisions, and time required to bring that course of action about. In Chess, I might want to get my bishop to G7 so I can threaten my opponent's Rook, or I might want to put a guarded knight on F2, to fork a Rook and a Queen or King. Engineering such an outcome will probably take between 2 and 6 moves, but possibly more if my opponent suspects what I'm up to and takes steps to stop it. I can distract the opponent if I first position pieces such that my intermediate steps seem to be supporting a different strategy altogether.
In Heaven and Hell, I intentionally kept the causal chain short: you have one secret action, the results of which are immediately revealed. I didn't want to obscure the underlying mind game with a complicated, untested strategic superstructure.
So, bringing this all back into thread relevancy (...or, uh, not):
Kazz, it sounds like you want to play Fluxx.
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Fluxx is terrible, but I'll take what you have to say into consideration.
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Many territory-control games give you more resources to work with, but force you to spread them across a wider area. Balancing the density of resource distribution is something that designers and players both must worry about. A mechanic like that is what makes chokepoints as valuable as they are.
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Collecting more resources than your opponent is a great problem to have. And at any rate, you're not spreading your forces thin, you're placing them where they are needed; only in the case of multiple opponents should you really worry about anything but crushing your rival with bags of money.
(And by the way, I think a permanent alliance structure in which one weak player can choose to ally with a stronger player to take on the currently-winning player, on the condition that their alliance is unbreakable and they share equally in victory and defeat, would be intelligent. It would keep weak players who would otherwise lose interested in the game and give the winner the sort of challenge he should be able to overcome if he's going to deserve a strategic victory.)
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TF2 purposefully tilts the balance towards the winning team, so that the round ends faster.
Not really. At least, none of the official maps do; the game itself sort of does but only to prevent rounds from becoming an almost assured stalemate.
At the very least, the defending team's respawns are slowed down when defending the last point, so they can't instantly march back into the fray.
But yes, it's true that the first CP in most maps is easy as butt to go past. Think of it as a warmup.
Risk's constantly escalating armies is an incentive for playing better during the start of the game and unfortunately makes the endgame a total drudge.
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Poker is a game designed by people who are good at Poker in order to take advantage of people who are not good at Poker. Not only is it unbalanced by design, the purpose of its design is to be unbalanced.
I'm sorry, but if you think that a game is "unbalanced by design" because the good players can beat the not good players then you are doing it wrong.
You are playing with house rules where you can hold more than five cards at a time, I presume? Or are you talking about chain-eating the other players from weakest to strongest to combo-stack forced turn-ins?
The latter.
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It's ridiculous how quickly one runs out of armies in physical Risk.
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My cousins and I play speed Monopoly. Everyone has a calculator instead of money and if you take longer than fifteen seconds to roll, move your piece and read your card/buy your damn property already Jesus fuck it's only 300 fucking bucks you cheapskate SOMEBODY THROW AN UNOPENED SODA AT HIS HEAD RIGHT NOW ...yeah.
Big pimpin' (that's me) and his crew can finish a full game in two hours or less.
Good thing I don't play with you then. It takes me at least 5 just to figure out what fucking piece is mine on the board. Derpy confusing nintendo monopoly with its no dog piece.
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I have always hated Monopoly's pieces. They need to be huge and brightly fucking colored god damn it shit.
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Hey, I know where my piece is when it's a dog. It's when it's a god damn barrel. Or whatever the fuck. The deviation from the norm is actually mind imploding to me I guess.
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I prefer my life to be about a racecar who does day trading and real estate.
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FULL-CONTACT MONOPOLY RULES
1) If you don't purchase a property in 15 seconds, each person names a price and highest gets it.
2) If you can pay to get out of jail, you will pay to get out of jail.
3) Players that lost the game instead roll in their turn to move another player's piece backwards.
4) No mortgages, only selling things to other players.
5) The free parking bonus is a punch in the face.
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fuck yes
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I think rule 3 is hilarious.
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verdict on collecting rent while in jail?
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hmmmm
ok that might be a better deterrent to not sitting in jail all day long
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I suppose TF2 counters the "winners keep winning" by making the last point progressively closer to the base. TF and Counterstrike are polar opposites like law-and-chaos; Counterstrike giving huge advantage to the winners, TF2 giving advantage to the defenders.
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When the rounds are 5 minutes, with no bonuses or penalties carrying over from round to round (notable exception being maps like Dustbowl), these concepts become less important. And most given action games can be fun even if you're losing terribly, by virtue of the hectic gameplay.
In a large-scale strategy game, it can really kill the experience if you allow the player who gains the first advantage to maintain that inertia for the rest of the game. (Risk's scaling card-set mechanic fixes this problem, but creates many others.)
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Diminishing returns on power might be one solution. In UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-Com), a jumbo squad of ten men isn't ten times as strong. They block each others' fire, only so many will have line of fire to any given spot, and clumping together makes them vulnerable to burst fire and grenades.
Multiwinia does the same thing. Grenades will take out a hundred in an area as easily as fifty.
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Diminishing returns are a solution reflected from the way things work in real life, so it sounds like an excellent place to start.
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Real life is way overrated.
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Real Life is so interesting and detailed that it wraps around and becomes boring and bland again.
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I wanna call out a lot of these Counter-Strike whiners. I played Counter-strike for a lot of years as Iron Mongrel can attest to, and while I have to agree that the game is very beginner unfriendly due to the possibility of spending the rest of a round on the side lines doing nothing if you die in an openning retard charge, it is not the defining experience of the game.
"CS sucks because noobs end up just sitting around watching other people play."
I learned very quickly in CS to NOT DIE IN AN OPENNING RETARD CHARGE. The thing about CS is that players are very fragile sort of like how people actually are in real life. Players used to the watergun fight that every other online FPS was at the time (Quakes, Unreals), may have found this very unintuitive and died a lot, but people who played CS a little and got used to it realized something quickly; if you wouldn't do it in real life, don't do it in CS. If you handed me a gun and told me there was a whole other team of guys with guns on the other side of a playground who wanted to kill me, I wouldn't charge straight at them, firing.
When people play CS properly, you end up with longer ranged battles occurring where people are at a range where being fired at almost never results in instantly being killed but just being freaked out for a second unless the shooter really earned it (Azns with AWPs aside).
Now, I acknowledge that the environment of CS created by random people of all playing styles and walks of life made it possible for many people to never experience this reality of the game and I understand that not everyone would even enjoy it if they did try it. It's a lot more of a chore to think about a gun fight rationally than to just run out, spray your waterguns at eachother and allow the game to be decided simply by who was the most accurate shot, who got to the best weapons/armor, and who got lucky. I however, enjoyed CS because it made tactics a lot more important since each player only had one life to give.
Anyway, a lot of that is debateable and I won't call anyone who disagrees an idiot or anything, but what I'm saying is that was MY experience with CS and I think the popularity of the game points towards me maybe having some sort of point there. It's clearly a possible experience because I had it and I had to be a noob at some point.
"On top of my previous complaint, CS is even lamer because the people who win get the good weapons and then you are double fucked (by which I mean, double penetration in the same hole not like throwing some one on the rotisserie)."
I find this to be a bit of a fallacy for the simple reason that the top tier weapons in CS are not that expensive. Winners in CS hit a ceiling very quickly. The most expensive weapons in CS are the light machine gun or SAW if you will, and the semi automatic sniper rifles. These are not the best weapons in the game. The best weapons in the game are all mid-tier pricewise and you only really need one good winning round to be able to afford them. They are the AK-47, Colt M4 carbine, and the infamous Arctic Warfare Police(AWP)*. They are at least the only weapons you really need to be considered 90-100% combat effective in CS. One of those and full armour and you are ready to go.
Finally, three losing rounds of CS and the game awards the losers with money anyway.
*This weapon name is one of the many inaccuracies in Counter-Strike as the actual rifle that was modeled and simulated in the game was actually the AWM or Arctic Warfare Magnum. The AWP used a smaller round than is depicted in the game, was black and never green, and is never recorded as ever having killed anyone after hitting them in the toenail.
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To make another point about Shadows over Camelot working so hard not to reward the winning side (I guess I can't really call the good side the winning side, but I did anyway), it appears the Merlin expansion (I'm absolutely buying this now after reading about it) adds an extra traitor card. And it has new black and white cards. This game just wants you to lose so hard. I'm not sure if the fun is in winning or losing, but god damn it, two traitors would be the most amazing game ever. You never get rewarded for being good, but you get rewarded for being evil, even after you get kicked out of Camelot.
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Geo's right about CS. It has a learning curve that is at first based on learning what not to do, but after about two hours of frustration the curve becomes outsmarting the enemy almost purely. It falls well within my 15% winner advantage rule.
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Players used to the watergun fight that every other online FPS was at the time (Quakes, Unreals)
Actually my recollection of those games was "if you're anywhere in the vicinity of a rocket, you die".
It just seems a lot more lenient because death at that point meant a second or two checking the scoreboard and then you're back. CS really just pioneered the idea of death being inconvenient for more reasons than giving your opponents points. That and shooting like a half-blind drunk.
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The versions up to CS 1.6 I can only recall
'<KsGB-PartayBOY>' has changed his name to 'HeIsHidingInTheBathroomW/Hostages'
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too bad about the insane hitboxes in CS.
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Many of Geo's points about the good parts of CS are reasons why I had the idea for, and am going to make, Pod. Pod is actually a lot like CS in several ways, but just the limit of 8 players in a game should be enough to limit round times to somewhat reasonable lengths for those who die early.
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If you die in Pod, you should have a limited capacity to steer an asteroid.
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I was actually thinking more along the lines of giving you a different, more informative radar HUD and allowing you to continue chatting to your allies. That way, even though they become short handed when you die, you can still help them with information.
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Players used to the watergun fight that every other online FPS was at the time (Quakes, Unreals)
Actually my recollection of those games was "if you're anywhere in the vicinity of a rocket, you die".
It just seems a lot more lenient because death at that point meant a second or two checking the scoreboardfilling your water gun back up and then you're back.
Perhaps I should clarify. What I mean by "watergun fight" is that the players in the game only really care about blasting the opponent who is usually anyone else on the field. They have little regard for themselves being shot since the penalty is nothing more than getting wet on a hot day. It was not meant to be a comment on the power of weapons for as you say, Quake style games usually give you much more firepower and make delievery of that fire power much easier.
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I think that my experience with CS soured after playing on too many of those 'Azns with AWPs' servers, which seemed to take over slowly over time. In spite of being one of those people who LOVES the 'watergun fight', I also love teamwork and tactics and can certainly enjoy a more realistic FPS. I mean CS did some great things. A lot of poeple forget that it was really the first FPS to fully force a clip-and-reload ammo model, rather than the 'giant ammo bucket' model that had continued ever since WolfenDoom, among other good things.
What annoyed me was those one-shot toenail kills which were such a glaring breach in the attempt to be more realistic. I think that the problem is when you go from 'very little room for error' to 'no room for error, period, LOL go play Defender or something'.
It's like trying to get a pickup game of Starcraft nowadays... after a while in any popular online game, the casual types drift on to other games, leaving only freakish monsters who've been playing non-stop for years because THIS IS MY HOBBY GODDAMMIT.
In fairness to the games mentioned above, this only happened when the environment became rarified over time, as the percentage of remaining players who could be considered OMG HARDCORE rose to unsustainable levels.
The lesson being, that unless you're trapped in the 80's again, you always have to give players SOME kind of chance. The corollary to that is that it's very hard to design a game in such a way that your balance fixes will still be valid if the player population becomes skewed, without actually punishing peopel for being skilled. TF2 continues to be one of the most impressivey balanced games I've played in this regard.
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Perhaps I should clarify. What I mean by "watergun fight" is that the players in the game only really care about blasting the opponent who is usually anyone else on the field. They have little regard for themselves being shot since the penalty is nothing more than getting wet on a hot day. It was not meant to be a comment on the power of weapons for as you say, Quake style games usually give you much more firepower and make delievery of that fire power much easier.
Oh. Then I agree completely.
I did enjoy CS at the time because it was a departure from the "kids in a sandbox" style of play. Now that multiplayer gaming is deeper in general it doesn't seem all that fantastic, but then again neither do the deathmatches in DOOM.
Quake II manages to hold up due to some unknown quantity, though I suspect it's merely the ability to be a guy on an ostrich and shoot missiles at Astroboy.
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I think you may have hit the nail on the head there. Isn't Quake 2 still one of the most easily modded games out there? I mean, from the point of view of any idiot downloading themselves a new model and telling people to kiss their shiny metal ass, not from the perspective of the actual modders per say.
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You could get a pretty extensive model collection just by hitting servers where other people were using them. A popular model would make its way through the playerbase pretty much exactly like a virus.
A sort of viral mod system like that done on purpose would make for a pretty fascinatingly evolving game. May be worth looking into.
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It'd need a damn good interface. I don't want to have to sift through fifty million different minor variations on PENIS GUN and NAKED LITTLE GIRL and other, even more depraved horrors. Play once on a server where some chucklehead decided it'd be funny to use that, and then how much of a pain is it to find and delete? No thank you, Sir.
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You can sort by type, category, alphabetical, originating server and most recent. Mods can be removed from the list (and put on a separate one) without necessarily having to uninstall. Optionally new mods can be added to an "approval" list first, from which the player can either add to the main list or gag list, and automatically moved to one or the other after a period of time.
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You could get a pretty extensive model collection just by hitting servers where other people were using them. A popular model would make its way through the playerbase pretty much exactly like a virus.
A sort of viral mod system like that done on purpose would make for a pretty fascinatingly evolving game. May be worth looking into.
Ha, that reminds me of the Outbreak achievement in Left 4 Dead. It says "Catch a rare strain of infection, then pass it on to someone else.", and as far as I know, you get it by being barfed on by a player-controlled boomer who has it, and then barfing on someone who doesn't have it. And I hear the only people who had it to begin with were Valve employees. According to the stats page (http://www.steampowered.com/status/l4d/), 57,9% of players have it at this moment. There's probably a hard cap on this percentage though, on account of people who stop playing the game for good before they get it, and players who never play Versus mode.
EDIT: Among other interesting stats on this page, apparently less than half of the players have survived the first campaign. :wat:
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Fluxx is terrible, but I'll take what you have to say into consideration.
Fluxx was a flippant recommendation, largely because I'm having a hard time figuring out what you're looking for. Once again:
1. Every player in the game should have a decent chance to win the game for its entire duration.
2. Any advantage given to a losing side must directly assist that player on the path to victory, rather than simply hurting the player in the lead.
3. Any victory or defeat, big or small, should be a consequence of the strategies in play.
4. An attacker must always do harm, no matter how small, and never the opposite.
It seems to me that rules 1 and 3 exist on a continuum. The more any given game supports one of those rules, the less that game supports the other one. I mean, if a game involves strategic decisions, then there's probably a game state in which it is much easier for one player to win than for the opponents. If the player in the lead doesn't have an easier time winning than the other players, then is he really in the lead? At what point does a slight advantage become a degenerate advantage?
And yet--if you limit a game such that, as soon as one player gets a significant advantage, the game ends, it winds up feeling like luck again, even if every decision was deliberate. Look at Rock-Paper-Scissors; look at Tic-tac-toe. If going first is the significant advantage, then the game isn't "where to play your piece" so much as "who gets to go first."
It seems almost like the game that best satisfies your requirements is one in which the decisions each player makes and the game state is a secret. You know how close you are to winning, but you can only make inferences about the other players, based on what they're doing; you can interact and disrupt them, but you don't get to see the exact nature of the other players' disruptions. It's never obvious who's in the lead, until suddenly, one player lifts up the curtain (so to speak) and reveals a winning configuration.
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The problem with Fluxx is that the resources you can accumulate are too small compared to the scale of randomness. There's little strategic point to playing one object or another when you don't have a goal relative to either, and when they're very likely to not be there when it's your turn again.
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Newbie: I think I'm being unclear.
What I mean in Point 1 is that there shouldn't be a point during gameplay in which it is no longer possible for one team to win. I don't know if I already posted this analogy, but I'll use baseball. If a team is batting, that team can win the game. There is no time limit, and the game will continue for as long as it needs to. It may be very unlikely, given the current score, but the chance for the any team to win is not zero at any point during play.
If there comes a point where it is impossible for you to win, because the other player has built a billion cupcakes and destroyed all of your cupcakes and now he's keeping you from getting any more batter for cupcakes, gameplay shouldn't continue. This is a very boring but very common game state.
What I want to do is reduce the scale of the strategic game, place the victory condition within decent reach at all times, and make clear the consequence of every decision. Not only that, but there should be pressure from the mechanics to support the person who is losing; not hold him up and make him an automatic contender no matter his strategy, but keep the winning side from using inertia from an opening engagement to dominate the rest of the game.
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Competitive Candyland.
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That makes me think of Carcassonne. I don't generally mind when I get behind in points during the game, because if I have the farm, I know at the end of the game there's a damn good chance I'm going to win with that stupid farm.
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I wish we had played Carcassonne at MAGfest. That game looks fun.
Actually, that Harvest Moon esque game people were playing was pretty cool looking too.
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Competitive Candyland.
why do you feel the need to do that
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T: Geo
We did play it, actually. Myself, Det, LD, and.. uh, whoever was across from me.
T: Kazz
Sorry Kazz, I just find it amusing how you have this great argument about what you feel is bad game design. The games you don't like sell very very well. I'm not saying your ideas are wrong, I just hope there is a market for whatever 'balance' in a game you are seeking.
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Popularity isn't a measurement of merit. StarCraft is a good game, probably the best game of its type, but I want to do something else. Forgive me for having ideas.
Most of the playtime in your average RTS is spent delaying the engagement for as long as possible, because whoever loses it will lose the game. Until then you're playing Sim-Warbase.
Even the idea that you should have to build structures and harvest resources on the battlefield is extremely ludicrous. Leaving aside the fact that that isn't even how war works, it's a terrible game mechanic. Once you allow people to concentrate on the military action (reducing the scale) you'll get far more interesting possibilities in the actual engagement; people won't be dividing their attention any more.
At THAT point, you're going to start wanting to giving a bit of favor to whoever is being put on the defensive. You shouldn't hand them equilibrium but you should at the very least allow them to push back. Most strategy games hand the game to whoever claims the first economic advantage. If that's your bag, hey, have fun.
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Okay Kazz. Stratego. You've played this, right? It's tangent to your arguement, it's not RTS, it's turn based, and it's just troops.
Does the first one to score a kill have advantage the rest of the game?
Edit: I think this question just causes a loop back to previous conversations. Nevermind.
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Max, Arc and Doom both played too don't forget.
Also, I played at least 3 games of it, and I don't think Geo or Ocksi were anywhere in the vicinity of any of the games.
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Max: Nope. But that's an incomplete-information game where you move along ploddingly, one space at a time. I'd argue that one's victory actually has nothing to do with who takes the first piece, or any other piece. It's actually a decent example of the principle I'm describing, but I don't think it's a fun game.
I don't understand where you're coming from, though. Are you picking games out of a hat and trying to use them as counterexamples?
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I'm not trying to troll you if that's what you're asking, I'm trying to get a better understanding of what you're looking for. There has to be something that you like, as-is, out of the box.
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Blokus seems good, actually. Although that can get pretty "impossible to win" if you've made sufficiently bad decisions.
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Maybe it's bad because instead of rewarding cleverness it penalizes mistakes. I never played F-Zero on the hardest difficulty because at that point the winner becomes the one who makes no mistakes. Once your opponents have overtaken you, you can't win unless they slip up, which they don't.
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Blokus seems good, actually. Although that can get pretty "impossible to win" if you've made sufficiently bad decisions.
Blokus has no element of chance, so someone who's behind can't get lucky and bust ahead. However, Blokus (and Chess, and Checkers, and any other complete-information diceless game) is a prime example of Point 3. In order to win, you absolutely must have employed the best strategy. (This is assuming that all players in a game are playing to win and not being dingbats who just pick a player to fuck over and do so.)
You may say "Well, then the game just degrades into people employing the best possible strategy and then people trying to counter it" and yes, I fully agree, at the highest level a diceless complete-information game will become that, that's why Chess pros go batshit insane after a while.
The strategy game in my brain contains an element of chance, but contains a mechanic that increases the "luck" of a losing side. You can't neuter the winning side or else winning becomes disadvantageous. One mechanic I came up with for the Wesnoth framework involved a sort of "karma" system, where whoever gets a lucky string of rolls (haven't decided what constitutes this) rewards a "karma" point to the opposing side. This karma can be spent to ensure a hit on an enemy opponent, but you have to choose to spend the karma before you start the attack (so you don't know whether or not you would have rolled a hit anyway). The karma point isn't nearly as dangerous as luck is, but it serves to balance out the extreme swings that the dice is prone to. Any game I design won't be quite so chance-dependent as Wesnoth, but this should give you some idea of where I'm coming from regarding balancing things for the losing side.
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Chess, technically, isn't solved yet. As long as a game isn't solved, the best strategy isn't known, so the game remains interesting.
Checkers was recently solved, but nobody who plays it has access to the kind of computing power necessary to employ an unbeatable strategy.
In an unsolved game, it is basically not possible to play without making a mistake, which is why upsets can still occur.
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Chess, IIRC, is not solveable, as it would take more energy than there is in the universe to solve it completely.
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Kazz, it looks like your only hope is to play go and play it against a person who learned it at the exact same time as you.
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Hey, I whup everyone's ass in Blokus. I'll throw down. I ain't scared.
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Kazz, it looks like your only hope is to play go and play it against a person who learned it at the exact same time as you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS8MWmvnNvU
just make sure they aren't haunted.
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Hey, I whup everyone's ass in Blokus. I'll throw down. I ain't scared.
Not when it's just me and you babe. If you'll recall:
(http://von.pyoko.org/blokus.jpg)
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what did yellow win or something
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I am assuming you used the yellow pieces to make a frame to make a smaller board, akin to blokus duo?
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Yeah, that was before we had 2-player travel Blokus. But did you see that? 19-13.
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Thaaaat's Blockus! :8D:
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Thaaaat's Blockus! MAGDARRRRRR :8D:
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i was drunk
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:objection:
That is an outright LIE! Take the loss like a man.
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I found my copy of Moonbase Commander. Does this qualify? It seems like it would.
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I loved that game but I can't say I completely recall how it worked.
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In MBC destroying the opponents main hub means their entire base is destroyed. There were lots of ways to win quickly because most maps forced some kind of glaring weak point in a base setup.
It rewarded destroying an opponent with 7 energy, which made finishing off their ally quicker if they were already screwed.
So, this probably qualifies as the game doesn't flail around for an hour as you try to find their last supply depot hub. It doesn't reward the winning side as much as crushing the losing side to the point of a :gameover:, which accomplishes the same thing as instead of an unfair advantage that last the rest of the game you just have a finishing blow.
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This post (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=2244.msg56199#msg56199) reminded me of a point that's gone unspoken, but that I felt I should put into words here.
JD writes about how the element of chance gives new players the opportunity to beat experienced ones. In broad terms, this means that the worse player can get lucky and beat a better player. Frankly, such a conclusion is largely unsatisfying for both players; the winner doesn't feel he deserved to win, and the loser doesn't feel he deserved to lose, and neither player learns anything. (I don't know how Battle Masters worked, I'm just making a point.)
A better system involves managing risk. Rather than praying for good rolls or the right cards, the player should be able to increase his immediate risk of failure for the chance at a big, or even decisive, payoff. This is the strategic equivalent of pushing all your chips into the pot. It's not something that most games do well; while it's certainly possible to select all of your units and throw them at the enemy base, you're unlikely to complete an objective like "destroy all enemy buildings." If the victory condition is simple and the objective is fragile, such as killing the enemy leader or destroying the enemy HQ, a player in dire straits can feasibly make that all-or-nothing gamble, and win or lose, the game's conclusion becomes exciting and satisfying for all parties.
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An example of this would be, say, fate points in tabletop RPG systems, right? Just to see if I follow you.
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There are similarities, but I'd hesitate to expand the analogy to other genres. Tabletop RPGs focus on cooperation, not competition, and the balance of power is up to the GM.
Every genre looks at the element of chance differently; someone here recently linked to a blog about interactive fiction, where random elements are rarely a good idea. Strategy and action games rely on the chance of victory to entice players; if a player can't win, he probably doesn't want to play, and I don't blame him.
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This reminds me of the luck system in a "choose your own adventure" book series. I don't remember the name of the series but I think it was about a ninja. Anyway.
Luck was a stat with a value of 1 to 6. To test it you rolled a dice, and if you got lower than or equal to your luck, you were lucky, and if you rolled higher, you had bad luck. The thing is, whatever the result, the dice roll became your new luck value.
You could choose to use luck in combat whenever you wanted to increase accuracy or damage or whatever it was, but there were also points where the book forced you to roll a luck check to determine the result of an event.
So if you had 6 luck and were therefore guaranteed to get lucky, you had to decide if you wanted to keep it for a crucial moment, or if you wanted to use it and risk getting a low score. And if you had 1 luck, you could decide to risk a combat setback in the hopes of rolling high and being ready the next time you sprung a poison dart trap or whatever.
In effect, the mechanic itself was entirely random, but there was still a strategic decision regarding present risk vs future risk.
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Fighting Fantasy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy) did something like that, but the luck was a limited resource that you spent every time you "tested" it. I think I like the version you described better, though.
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Unpredictability is an advantage if your goal is to level the playing field between experienced players and newbies. For experienced players, managing that unpredictability as risk and balancing that against rewards creates another element of strategy. It doesn't zero out the benefits of skill or experience, but creates diminishing returns, so that the game is not a chess grandmaster event of who can make fewer mistakes while predicting his opponent ten steps ahead.
Supposing in Battle Masters you don't know whether your orcs will wait one turn or twenty to move next. You can still play the odds with that. How much risk do you take by moving into the enemy's area? What is the payoff? Are you likely to kill him before he takes his turn again, and if so, is the sacrifice worth the risk?