Behavior in raids – initiation rites
The first part of this series of post covered the forming of groups; both the actual raid as well as smaller groups within the raid group itself. Now that the existence of the groups is established it follows to look a little closer on some of the initiation rites I have encountered will exploring Azeroth in the World of Warcraft.
First of all the game itself has several such rites included as part of the game. It can be quests related to your class or challenges to gaining access to certain places. Most of these can be completed alone, but sometimes you need the help of a group to be able to complete such missions in the game. These are all part of your characters story and progression in the game, and they have often given me some extra satisfaction to complete. Especially the ones that in themselves can be shown off as ‘proof of skill’.
Once we leave the game world we enter into the second arena for such initiation rites. Here we find rites from game play abilities to social compatibility. From my experience the game play rites exist in two variations; those you need to go through BEFORE you gain acceptance into a group and those you face AFTER. Both have their own pro’s and con’s and can be used to test players in different ways. In short both are a kind of ‘show us what you got’, but either you are performing to gain entry or you perform to avoid getting thrown out. As the game plays out today BEFORE is mostly related to gaining access to raiding communities and AFTER to keeping your spot as part of the active raiding group.
Social rites come in many forms and may not always be obvious or even consciously enforced, but in general they are relevant for conforming with your fellow raiders. From having similar interests, same type of humor or having a similar cultural background. As mentioned earlier a silent raid seems more likely to ‘suffer’ more when ‘the going gets tough’, and even if verbal abuse might work as a tool for the leadership to keep people in order it rarely helps the raids ability to perform to have one or more individuals harassing other raid members. In short what it comes down to is if ‘the others’ feel that you fit in, and as part of deciding there are multiple different rites of initiation coming from individuals, groups or ‘clicks’. All which brings us to the next part; once you are part of ‘the tribe’ you will be ‘assimilated’.
Behavior in raids – group forming
As my Master thesis is about collaboration the behavior and success of raid activity in any given MMORPG is one of the success criteria I am trying to duplicate. The field of psychology was an interesting choice for analyzing this, and to just have an initial reference I found a simple web site describing ’10 Rules That Govern Groups’ as place to start. For game reference I have been tracking raid behavior in Word of Warcraft from 01.05.2014 to 01.07.2014.
Raids used to be events accessible only through belonging to a ‘guild’ or ‘raid community’, but at this point their creation is more diverse. The most loosely created raids at this time are a result of Word of Warcrafts ‘looking for raid’ tool that is part of the game. You sign up with a role and what raid event you want to partake in and then wait until enough players are signed up for the needed roles and then thrown into a largely random group of 25 players. Another option is for one or more individuals to gather up a group on their own by recruiting these in one of the game chat channels or some outside source (several of these exist today where OQueue and OpenRaid are good examples). Such groups are less random as the creators control the recruitment process. The groups can be generated on the fly with the goal of starting a raid even as soon as possible or they can be set up for a specific time and date, where Word of Warcraft also has a Calendar tool to help organizers set them up. And finally the old school ‘guilds’ and ‘communities’ that are preferred for facing the more challenging raiding content, and that work with the fixed team setups of 10 or 25 players.
In addition to this ‘established’ group setup I continually experience the development of smaller groups within a raid. As mentioned in an earlier post the leadership represents such a group. Roles also tend to group up (tanks, dps and healers). Finally there are situational and social groups. Situational groups are usually a result of events occurring during the raid and social groups can randomly appear and disappear as players socialize in the raid chat channel. And groups can arise from any existence of common identity.
I found that becoming part of one or more of the groups that appear during a raid event both makes the event more engaging as well as secures my position as part of the team. Due to the socially volatile behaviors certain players have it is wise to make sure you have some friends around when the rage hits the fan.
To be able to face the more difficult challenges you are wise to establish contact with more permanent groups that will often require to interact in social channels outside the game interface such as online forums, web applications and audio chat software such as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. Most such permanent raid teams require you to submit an application for their evaluation before accepting you. This brings up the topic of ‘initiation rites’ which is the topic of my next diary post.
Does the content in your bags define how you play?
As mentioned earlier I am an altoholic, and the last week I have been roaming through my bags and reflecting a little over what I found in the and compared it to how I play with them. It would be natural to think that a toon with loads of materials is a farmer, a character with stacks of flasks and alternative non-PvP gear is a PvE gamer, and the reverse a PvP-gamer. And a character with a load of alternative costumes a roleplayer. But what I found was a little different than what I expected.
My farmers bags were usually empty, the materials were stocked in the bank of the toons that produce items. These toons are usually also the players I do PvE with, so add Flasks and gear to this. But also some PvP-gear on the toons I play most, as to grab some of the PvP-items is often a part of gearing for PvE. Add more gear to toons that handle multiple roles (tanking/healing/dps). I do not have any pure PvP-toons, so I lack this setup to have as a reference. My bank toon used to be stacked with loads of materials for levelling professions, but during a spring cleaning earlier this year I sold off most of these materials and opened up some more bank space. I also noticed that farming toons were the ones with the huge material bags to make sure there would be room for huge stacks those few times I had to take a few hours of farming.
So yeah, the content does tell me a lot about what I use my players for and often says a little about how I play them. Now this might seems very obvious, but I started to wonder if I would change the way I play my toons if the content suddenly changed. Would I try out a bit more PvP if I suddenly discovered some hard core PvP-gear in my bags? Could additional random drops add diversity to my game? I am quite certain I would try to find a use for an extremely rare type of material that was required to make an item, but at the same time I am not sure as to what extent I would actually change they way I play to accommodate the content in my bags.
Team structures for raiding
Having been actively WoW-raiding in as many different ways as has been available to me lately I have been able to gather up some data on how raid teams are structured and how they perform and behave. I have earlier mentioned the differences in performance based on active positive communication and leadership compared to those loaded with negative rants and no leadership present, and I have been looking into how team structure also affects performance as well as how a group works together.
First out; small groups are more likely to communicate more than a large one. Add voice communication and this becomes even more noticeable. The social balance in a smaller group is also more fragile, and even small negative outbursts can completely demolish a teams success rate.
So a large group will talk less, and more often you will have people chatting only to ‘hear their own voice’. For random teams leadership is only functional as long as the raid succeeds, and for someone to take leadership after a collapse, or if none is present in the first place, the support of one or two other players is all that is needed to make this happen.
Having a plan always helps. If you have players new to an encounter your best option is to present the ‘short’ version. Focusing on what makes an encounter special or different is all most players need to pull through, and learning by failing seems to be a much better option than a 15 minutes walk-through.
Having one or more ‘heroes’ on your team boosts morale and increases the chance of success for an encounter. A ‘hero’ here being a character that performs noticeably better than the rest of the team. The presence of someone that is likely to increase the teams ability to succeed has an obvious positive effect on the team performance even if the actual contribution of such a player is not critical in any way to the end results.
So what does this mean for the structure of your raiding team? Help someone lead the group – or take the lead yourself if you feel confident handling this responsibility. Get rid of negative players. Make someone your ‘hero’; the illusion of someone awesome in the team that will ensure their success works. Chat – silence is not a team builder. Have a plan and make it visible, but make it a short one. In the end this might not ensure your success, but it will sure as hell give you the best possible place to start.
Altoholics and randomness
When playing a MMORPG I am rarely able to stick to just one character. It feels like I am missing out on what the game has to offer if I do, so even before I have reached the level cap (the maximum level a character can have in the game) on my first ‘game toon’ I have created at least one more that I have tried out to make sure that the ‘toon’ I am focusing on is the right one. When starting out a game this mostly works out nicely.
But playing the same character with the same game mechanics doing the same kind of quests over and over can easily kill the joy of any game MMOPRG. And this is when ‘that other toon’ suddenly becomes a ‘game savior’ by letting me diversify my game experience by alternating a little between the different characters. This way I am able to keep the game interesting and it also lets me explore what the game has to offer in a broader sense.
Then we start ‘capping’ characters. And this is where the random element in the game starts messing things up. When I first returned to WoW (World of Warcraft) last year after a long break my plan was to avoid some of my original characters to make the game feel ‘new’. Initially this worked out quite well, but as the game progressed the altoholic in me took over and in due time all of my ‘toons’ got capped and opened up the door for ‘end gaming’ or ‘raiding’, which is also the part of the game I enjoy most. To avoid playing all of my characters at the same time I kept trying to focus on a few of them and preferably characters with focus on different ‘roles’ in the game (healer/tank/DPS). I would have preferred to make this choice myself, but this is where the random element appears and the game chooses for me. How does the game choose? Well, to be able to progress in the game and face new and more difficult raiding challenges I need to upgrade the ‘gear’ my characters have. And the ‘gear’ is randomly generated as ‘loot’ from these raid challenges and are largely out of my control. From a statistical point of view I know this is not the truth, but it feels like when I try to focus on getting certain items for a specific character I enjoy playing, they seem to have completely disappeared from the game.
When faced with this frustration over several gaming sessions in a row it is easy to pop over to one of my ‘alts’ to ‘calm down’ only to have all of the best possible items drop for this ‘toon’ without focusing on it at all. So suddenly the only character I can actually continue progressing with is a ‘side kick’ that I originally had not intended on playing that much. The randomness of loot from boss challenges has made the choice for me. And last night I was wondering if this is an intended element of the game or if this is just a random result of how certain game mechanics work together? The reason was of course that I have been trying desperately to ‘gear up’ one character and failing, when suddenly a character I have only been playing one the side ended up with some amazing gear that suddenly makes this character my best candidate for further progress in the game.
Naturally this is a situation that becomes even more prominent with the LFR (Looking for raid) tool that allows anyone to be teamed up randomly to take on ‘raid challenges’. Its easier for me to just sign up for a ‘raid event’ on any of the game characters that I play, and the ‘loot’ I might get is random. I could get loads and I could get nothing.
Time for game event reset
In World of Warcraft Wednesday is the day when all of the raid instances reset. It is also the day when your earning potential for the raid currency Valor resets. In short; all the challenges you overcame last week are now back in play to be confronted again, and you get to earn more Valor so you can upgrade your virtual gear or buy some new gear. Its with mixed feelings I log in on Wednesdays as I am part happy to be able to ‘continue’ advancing my favorite character, but at the same time its a hassle to have to work my way through loads of the same content as the week before…
Luckily this concept with weekly resets is better than the Daily quests; quests that add some kind of game value to your character that reset every night to be repeat again – and again – and again the following day. Some of these you only do to reach some kind of goal in the game, but some of them are endless and you can keep doing them until it drives you crazy. To counter this repetitiveness they have added a pool of quests that rotate to let you have some variation to the quests you ‘have’ to do, but it still feels a lot like unrewarding work to me and I am quite certain that I do not feel that these Daily quests add anything positive to the game, especially since most of these quests are mostly solo activities that turns this MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) into a MOQGG (Massive Online Quest Grinder Game). I truly hope the game designers out there are working hard to invent something new, something more meaningful and fun, than these tedious Daily quests that are driving me nuts and killing the fun of playing.
My first collaborative game experiences
It is hard to state what my first collaborative game experience was as it depends on how you define it. Personally I subscribe to looking at it from two perspectives; one involving collaboration outside the game itself and one that involves the in-game multiplayer experience we have grown accustomed to today. Even today I feel both are equally relevant, but naturally the in-game collaborative game experience dominates my gaming schedule today.
My first memory of collaborative gaming was with the 1982 Atari classic Choplifter. A friend taught me the basic concepts of the game, and then after this we had a part competitive and part collaborative relationship when playing. Competitive regarding score and progress, but at the same time watching each other and discussion problematic elements of the game and trying to solve them as a team. This collaboration introduced a social aspect to the game even if at any given time only one of us was actually playing.
A few years went by and I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, and with it all of the early games of the 80s. This included the game Bruce Lee (1983, Datasoft Inc.) which became my next collaborative memory. Conceptually the same type of game experience as with Choplifter, but this time the collaboration ended with a complete success and the game was completed. Alas completing the game just meant you would start again from the beginning, but it still felt ‘special’ to have made it to ‘the end’.
Shortly after the success of Bruce Lee we discovered M.U.L.E and everything changed. While competitive at its core – naturally you want to win – it also included options for collaboration. Both keeping the ‘colony’ alive as well as making sure that the computer did not win created a window for a collaborative gaming experience, and many hours were invested in this game at the time. Even if it would take some years until we could sit at home and enjoy a multiplayer experience this game will always be my first.
I truly believe that a good game should include a social element. And even if you play the game alone the experience can be enhanced by having someone to share it with. That said, even outside my gaming I prefer collaboration to competition. When comparing the element of winning versus participation I believe that participation will always end up as the most important of the two. Given this, combined with the fact that it feels better to have everybody ‘win’ and at the same time avoid forcing anybody to ‘loose’, games the focus on collaborative game play are just more interesting. And of course it never hurts to be able to grab a beer with your collaborators to get some time away from the computer screen…
Positive goal oriented communication enhances performance?
This weekend I had two experiences with LFR (Looking for Raid) in WoW (World of Warcraft). LFR is an in-game tool that lets you sign up for a raid event with 24 other players facing some of the tougher challenges in the game. Both experiences relate to what happens once a raid is unable to handle the game challenges they encounter.
The first episode happened in a raid where there was were little communication going on between the players, and the little communication that was there was either casual or negative. The moment the raid started to have performance problems or wiping as it is often called, the negative comments in the raid chat channel increased and players were looking for someone to blame rather than looking for solutions. As the raid had no established leadership and no one trying to hold the team motivated, annoyed players left the raid rather than trying to collaborate and look for a solution. This is where episode two becomes interesting. Later during the same weekend in another raid the same level of chatter was going on, but this time there were also a few people trying to lead the group. The raid encountered the same performance problems as in the first episode, but due to the presence of leadership very few players decided to leave. The presence of leadership analyzing the problem and working on finding solutions kept most players focused and motivated, and having these solutions solving the problems kept the raid from loosing any more players as the raid progressed.
It seems that even the smallest presence of leadership or guidance is enough to motivate a team to continue working on overcoming problematic challenges that the game throws at them. For collaboration to work this part of the collaborative effort must be kept present and positive. For LFR in WoW this is a role that one or more players need to perform, but it should be possible to introduce mechanics in the game that would help motivate players into taking on these types of responsibilities. Motivational game mechanics that create a solid communication platform for positive social interactions is an interesting design challenge for MMORPGs today, but so far I have yet to see any attempts on solving this aspect of game play.
Why write a game diary?
When I started out working with my Master thesis it was largely inspired by my long history as a gamer. It was also part of my initial hypothesis that game design patterns can be identified and transferred into a gamified system, and part of my initial research was looking into games that contained some form of collaborative game experience. After having browsed through several different types of games I landed on using a combination of MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and RTS (Real Time Strategy) to look for the earlier mentioned game design patterns. To get started I chose three games that each contained game design elements I believed could be relevant to my thesis; EVE, World of Warcraft and Civilization V.
Why did I choose these three? EVE was chosen due to its massive space battles that involves collaborative game play at an unprecedented scale. According to an article in Wired more than 7500 gamers participated in the event making it a very interesting game to analyze. I have tried the game, but have no recent game play to refer to and my documentation for my thesis here is based on interviews with active players. World of Warcraft was chosen both for its popularity as well as its collaborative PvE (Player versus Environment where the environment is the virtual reality of the game world and its game challenges) team game play with focus on raids (large teams of 10 or 25 players). An enormous number of gamers join up in guilds to spend several hours every week facing the raid challenges in highly efficient teams where collaboration is a key element to succeed. Finally I spent some time playing Civilization V for its turn based game play. I found this interesting since a turn based gamified solution for open innovation would allow for more flexible collaboration that would not require the players to be online at the same time to interact with each other.
I spent time from November 2013 and until the end of February 2014 to look for relevant game design patterns, and during march I found three game elements that I would work with to design a prototype to test later this year. These were user profiles, game activities and ranking, each representing core game elements that I believe to be important for an open innovation gamification application. Since then the design process has included both participatory design workshops as well a several hours of actual game play. Both have been important sources of inspiration for the design work and contributed with key findings to help improve and innovate the prototype. To document how the game play has contributed to the design process I have created this game diary that will contain entries referring to actual game play experiences that have yielded interesting findings or input to the design process. I am quite sure I will not be able to make use of the data from these entries, but hopefully that will be something I will be able to work on later.
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 