Session: Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design
Speaker: Rob Pardo, Blizzard Entertainment
Rough notes below
Game Balance
- solo to max level
- important role in a group, raid, and group PVP
- Starcraft - Race totally different
- Better players can win games fast
- Offense over defense (don't want Starcraft 2 as a Sim City simulator)
- Creative strategies
- Every unit has a counter
- Be fun Game Balance
- Game Balance: Math vs Fun
- Math is the foundation
- Everything should feel overpowered
- Don't balance the game into mediocrity
- Must understand nuances
- Can't balance the game through replays (doesn't show up in spreadsheet, pathfinding algorithm)
- Balance for all skill levels
- Shamans could buff (bloodlust) became much more overpowered, aoe spells needed to be adjusted
- No super weapons
- Super weapons are fun (not so fun for the other person)
- Ex: Ghost, powerful weapon feels super (sees nuke silo), see ghost sneak in, nuclear launch detected
- Use your beta
- how i approach beta - 3 months get as many balance patches within that time, buff it a little more
- UI affects balance
- Unlimited selection vs 12 selection
- Internal battle about
- army of 100 zerglings, game became easier to play, overpowered?
- Players didn't understand why they could only select 12 units
- Multiple building selection
- Subgroups
- Before Warcraft 3, all you would get is intersection of abilities (lowest common demoniator)
- Hero can still cast spells
- Before Warcraft 3, all you would get is intersection of abilities (lowest common demoniator)
- Wow - Click to move - play more like diablo, not the preferred way to play
- Originally got put in a way to auto-face/pathfind to player (PVP)
- In Wow Beta
- UI Mods
- has a dark side
- What mods are out there
- should we balance game for modders vs non-modders?
- make the choice to break the mods
- Mods are bad when they play the game for you (bot)
- Balance - It Never Ends
- Change is always bad to players
- Maintain your game to keep it relevant
- Still putting out Warcraft balance patches
- Ban the cheaters -
- plan patches, but leave time to be reactive
- Talent reviews for each class
- at any given moment, a strategy or bug will be uncovered
- Don't panic
- Competitive Sports - Football
- 3-4 Defense, Zone Blitz
- NFL isn't outawing defenses, enable players to find the counter
- Player Psychology
- Not always predictable
- Perception of fairness -
- Best balance spreadsheet and tester in the world
- if players don't believe it, it doesn't matter
- Can't argue in forums with a million people
- Arguing is not the answer
- Players hate losing
- Counterstrike can play 10 games
- 1/2 hour - 1 hour long game if you lose, not interested
- Alliance wins 90% of AV, lose AB 90% of the time
- Make sure losing side still gets something out of it
- 1 mark of honor and still get honor
- How do they climb the ladder?
- Need to decide what your goals are
- Starcraft 1 ladder - ELO chess system
- Not necessarily fun to play
- #1 player in world doesn't gain anything from playing
- No incentive to be #1 until #2 passes you
- Right amount of complexity
- Starcraft II - 15 units is the right amount, depth to game, learn units and strategies, can still easily identify units, understand counterstrategy
- Magic - The Gathering: Hundreds of thousands of options, turn based,
- AV
- Original vision o fAV was epic, huge battle zone including player controlled bases, npc support, quests, and capture point
- av was ment to be fought in several smaller fronts with npc assistance in a war of attrition
- isn't exactly waht happened
- How we designed map isn't how we made it
- incentive to get honor is to kill opposing NPC and just zerged to win
- players ride by each other
- wave emote on horseback
- players on losing side still get honor
- knew it was going to be a 30-60 minute match
- AFKaving - players leeching honor because of insufficient incentives to actually play PVP
- Inspect messages was creepy
- [altair] is inspecting you
- players felt they were getting stalked, removed the message, now everyone loves the feature
- Rest isn't a penalty it's a bonus - original implementation, keep playing you get less experience, instead switch it to a bonus
- Exact same system, now people love it
- Warcraft 3 "thumbs" - thumbs up/down any map you wanted
- Then changed it to a veto system to thumbs-down a map as players were asking WTF when they thumbs -down
- Does a unit, gun, weapon, suggest it's function and power
- Special effects can cause confusion in battle
- Team differentiation (Warcraft) races, and colors in Warcraft 3
- Avoid hidden modifiers - do this very selectively
- Visualization
- does the art tell you who has more HP or who runs faster - art and balance is not aligned
- MMO - much, much tougher
- class-based armor sets - make the art of the armor set suggest the class - gear and equipment visualize
- Home Stretch - Maps
- Random vs pre-made
- Age of Empires vs Starcraft
- Player perception will be that map generator screwed me in starting point
- Number of maps - more is not better
- Starcraft II - 8 maps
- more maps means players won't world battle field very well
- Black shround vs Fog of war
- reveal resources
- Size does matter
- Bigger isn't better - people want to be in the combat right away,
- design as small as make sense for # of players
- Random vs pre-made
- Matchmaking
- Less buckets is better
- What type of game play will it be
- Don't give players too many choices, no one in your matchmaking bucket
- Feedback on system - LFG doesn't give feedback, AV is in queue
- momentum works against you so if matchmaking doesn't work, it falls aparat
- E-sports
- Decide upfront if you want an E-sport game
- Replays
- Spectator mode
- If a player beats me
Questions
- World of Warcraft not designed to be E-sport game, now retro-fitting, I hope one day we can get a spectator mode into it, but it's non-trivial
- Why don't we have stats on server on maps like there is in Warcraft 3.
- We consciously don't put up race versus race stats (Orcs vs Undead), you put that on the Web and players will jump onto Orcs
- If we put up there that alliance always wins AV, horde will stop playing
- Can balance stabilize: Starcraft is pretty well balanced, need
- Warcraft: Cross-server interaction,
- hardcore stance that we wanted realms to be their own communities
- softening up - battlegroups, matchmaking (arena), battlegrounds (queues)
- cross-server chat a possibility
- Philosphy on super-weapons - is this for all games or subscription games?
- For PVP, did the other side feel like there was no way they could have stopped it