Challenge, anyone?

In 1973 two young guys founded a company named Tactical Studies Rules to produce a rule set for a tabletop war-game. The game was to be a squad-based tactics game, and the new idea was to have every player play one soldier in the squad. As there were already lots of historical war-games on the market, the developers decided to use a fantasy setting, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and other authors. The game came out a year later under the name of Dungeons & Dragons, the company shortened its name to TSR, and the history of role-playing games had started. Fast forward to 2007, and the face of role-playing games has changed a lot, with World of Warcraft being a prominent example of the genre now. But at the heart of it every MMORPG is still a squad-based tactical war-game, and the challenges the game poses you are still mostly tactical in nature.

The main challenge in the gameplay of a MMORPG is to take tactical decisions in a limited time-frame. You have to decide which of your abilities to use, or when to run away. Unlike a first-person shooter or platformer game, a MMORPG isn't very twitchy. You have a second or so for each decision, and being much faster, or having much better hand-eye coordination, doesn't make you much stronger. At any given moment there is a cap on how hard a challenge your character is able to overcome. That cap is given by in-game statistics like level, skill points, or how much damage your spells do. Somewhere out there, there is a mob you can't possibly beat solo with your current level and gear, however hard you practice. Only by going up a level, or getting better gear, can you get past that cap. Or by not taking the challenge on solo, but forming a squad, a.k.a. group. In the hardest cases you even need a platoon, a.k.a. raid.

Playing in a group or raid increases your options, because of the interaction with the other group members. The group is stronger than the sum of its parts, because you can make tactical decisions which bring out the strong side of every class. In a solo combat you have to deal damage, withstand damage, and heal damage all by yourself. In a group you can have the tank do the withstand damage part, have a mage or rogue do the damage dealing part, and have the healer do the damage healing part. The challenge becomes one of coordination and aggro management. You don't pull when the healer is out of mana, you don't launch your fireball before the tank has sufficient aggro, and so on. The coordination of a 40-player encounter can be truly challenging, and need a lot of practice before the raid gets it right.

But practice you can in a MMORPG, in solo, group or raid mode. Unlike a real war, or a pen & paper role-playing game where the mob is controlled by an unpredictable dungeon master, in a MMORPG a mob is controlled by a predictable artificial intelligence. You died the first time that murloc ran away from you and alerted all his friends, but the next time you pulled him away farther from the others and beat him. You learn which mobs have what resistances and weaknesses, and how to beat each of them. With the harder and more unique boss encounters, you might even be able to read the tactics on the internet, or even see a video on YouTube. Chances are when your guild first saw Onyxia, you already knew about the three phases of the combat, and somebody was making a "minus 50 DKP" joke. It is more a matter of learning, of knowledge, and less of skill.

Now if you compare different MMORPG, you call some of them "easier", and others "harder". But in fact the "hard" games like EQ1 or Vanguard are not requiring an ounce more of skill than the "easy" World of Warcraft. The only difference between these games is in how much reward they give out for a success, and how much punishment for a failure. It is absolutely necessary to have both a reward for success and some punishment for failure, otherwise there is no game. But success or failure do rarely depend on the actual skill of the player, but more on the risk he is willing to take. You died because you fought a monster you didn't know yet and it was stronger than you thought, or because something unexpected like a respawn happened. Once you know all the abilities of that mob, the layout of its camp, and the potential adds and respawns, you don't die any more.

So if a game is "harder", taking away experience from you when you die, and handing it back to you slower, you automatically react by taking less risks. The game effectively punishes you for taking on new challenges, so you better get to know one camp of mobs very well, and stick to it. In Everquest people could stay for several levels camping the same mob encounter. There were other mobs of the same level in the game, but why would you want to go there, if tackling that new mob probably meant a bunch of lost experience points and no added reward? In the "easier" World of Warcraft you don't lose xp by dying, only some time and money for repairs. And with nearly every monster camp being covered by a different quest, moving from one encounter to the next suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. Even if you die once or twice before you learn the new encounter, the added quest reward more than makes up for the small death penalty. So the “harder” game doesn’t take more skill, it only pushes you into a more boring gameplay, taking away options from you.

If a mob can’t be beat in solo mode at all, you need a group to do it. If there is no mob that gives reasonable xp in solo mode, the game is effectively forcing players to group. Forced grouping is another way to take away options from the players by making the game "harder". If one day you don’t feel sociable, or you don’t have the time required to first set up a group and then stay together long enough to make the group finding worth while, you lost the option to go adventuring that day.

In group situations, making a game "harder" also has mostly bad unintended effects. If you grab 5 random people of the correct level for a group, and fail to beat a specific encounter, what do you do? Making the group stronger by improving coordination is hard. Often all the group members already play their class reasonably well and have grasped basic concepts of aggro management. Sometimes there is a complete idiot, but these people are usually hard to educate. And if everybody is already playing reasonably well, getting coordination to perfect isn’t going to make enough of a difference to really become much stronger. So often players take the easier way of making a group stronger: changing the composition to something closer to ideal. Out goes the shaman healer, in goes a cleric. Instead of tanking with a warlock’s pet, you invite a warrior. If you group with these people more often, for example because they are guild members, you exert peer pressure to make the cleric specialize in healing, and the warrior wear a shield instead of a two-hander. Again the "harder" game is just taking away options from the players, because suddenly playing your shadow priest becomes less viable, or your hunter can’t get an invite to a group.

The problem is that nobody has yet come up with a way to make a mob encounter more *mentally* challenging. Making something harder just means increasing the stats of the mob, not increasing the artificial intelligence of the mob, or forcing the player to think more when beating it. Because there is no more clever way to beat a mob, the only options of the players are to become stronger by going up in level or gear, or by bringing more other players to an encounter. We talk a lot about Chinese gold farmer bots ruining the economy. But the real scandal behind that is that it is actually possible for a bot, which is just an extended macro with no artificial intelligence to speak of, to play a MMORPG well enough to earn rewards that other players crave. That tells you a lot about how "hard" a MMORPG really is. Telling somebody to "learn2play" is ridiculous, because even a bot can play this, there isn't much player skill involved once you learned how a specific encounter works.

I would like to play a MMORPG that was more mentally challenging, in which I would need to think more in each combat. I would like mobs to have better artificial intelligence and be more unpredictable. I would like having to make more tactical decisions, based on what I see the enemy doing, or other random factors. Sooner or later the "collectible card game" concept, where the abilities you can use at any given moment are "drawn" at random from a "deck" of abilities is going to hit the MMORPG genre, and I’m looking forward to that. I can also see a future generation of more twitchy "action MMORPG", but I’d prefer my challenges to remain tactical.

What I don’t want to play is a game which is only called "harder" or "more challenging", but does nothing more than have mobs with higher stats, less xp per kill, and more xp penalty in the case of dying. I don’t want my ability to explore the world taken away because I just can’t afford to die that often. I don’t want my ability to play solo taken away, because playing solo gives no or too little xp. I don’t want my ability to play with my friends taken away because the friend has the wrong class or the wrong spec. It doesn’t matter if the fanbois of the "hard" games call me a "carebear", I simply refuse any harder challenge that is only arrived at by taking away options from me. Give me a MMORPG with tactical challenges that a bot can't play, and I'll show you who really is the more skilled player.