Too many tankmages.

This game might be easy to you, at least you claim it is. However, it is objectively provable to not be trivial for most people who play it. We can see that in the data mining the devs do, and the changes they've made over the years.

What you said, which I'll remind you because you seem to have forgotten already was:

What I said is yeah, if you just farm and do trials with friends this game is easy. I don't even know how you could notice what patches do when most don't affect farming and the itrials, which you said these days is all you do.


So just to make sure you don't miss the retort, since you missed it the last time, you implied this game was trivially easy, but I'm saying its only that easy for some, and not the majority of the playerbase. You say you just farm and iTrial, and I'm saying someone who does that doesn't have any real perspective on the challenge presented by the game.

You even go so far as to use as an example of how "easy" this game is an instance where you were -10 and healing the team, avoiding aggro completely. I don't even have to reply to that, my "retort" is just to point that out it, and let that statement speak for itself.

Mostly free form war games are examples that you can do this and have it work. The key difference is with war games balance considerations outweigh everything else.


I have to differ with the argument, that if it were possible it would have already been done. I can't claim to be familiar with every MMO/RPG so for all I know it could already have been done.

Its not a trivial matter to get a game funded and built and you have to convince the people writing checks that they will get there money back. Doing things you have to explain and get people to buy in to. You need to demonstrate that there is a market for the product and inspire confidence you can deliver what you are selling.

As things stand most of the MMO/RPGs I have seen all seem to be cut from the Dungeons and Dragons cloth. You have leveling progression that raises all your abilities power, with each level you get access to either more or new abilities according to some sort of tree system. On top of these progression systems you have loot/gear/booster systems. Its hard enough to balance that hodgepodge in a very constrained system. I suspect you would have to throw those D&D concepts out work out a system fresh from scratch and then backfit into the conceptual framework so people can say "Oh its that ! I like that, lets go play"

All of the above represents extra effort that has no assurance of payout.


I may be misunderstanding but HERO system isnt a wargame, and Traveller was only barely a wargame in that book 5 Highguard had rules for ship to ship combat.

Traveller is a good example of how you can do RPGs without the level up effects and have freefrom skill selection. There were a few skills that were unsuitable and really shouldn't have been in the game (Jack of All Trades for example) but overall it worked well even when you had people trying to break it. IIRC there were two box games based on traveller made by SSI* and while admittedly not MMOs they do show how its possible.


*not sure if the publisher was SSI

I didn't say either game was a wargame, although Traveller did have expansions with wargame-like gameplay. That wasn't relevant to my point, because what I said was:

a) I don't feel most if any wargames even *have* anything I would consider an "open powers system" in a close enough sense to this context (which means I cannot then mention any that have them) and

b) The examples people *most* talk about when talking about "successful" open powers systems are things like the HERO system. I have never seen anyone within the context of discussing game design bring up a wargame that they attempted to make the case did a better job of presenting and balancing an open powers system than the HERO system.

So if you want to mention one and make the case that as much as HERO is lauded for it when it actually fails to deliver it upon serious analysis, this game is a much better example, please do. I'm not a wargaming expert, so its entirely possible there exists such a game that I'm unaware of and no one has thought to mention in any debate about this subject I'm aware of.

What would you consider an open powers system in a wargame ? If I have a well defined question it will make it much easier to provide an answer.

Within the context of discussing them as applicable to the scope of MMOs, an open powers system in any game including a wargame would have to at least satisfy six requirements:

1. There is a system whereby players construct entities with abilities from a list of abilities.

2. To within a reasonable degree, the list of abilities is not trivially restrictive in scope. Obviously if I make a game where you can only take one of a hundred attacks, and all hundred are numerically ultimately identical, that's not really broad scope for the choices involved.

3. The abilities materially affect the ability to complete game tasks in non-trivial ways.

4. The abilities can be selected and combined *after* the game tasks are known.

5. The system does not restrict which abilities can be taken in combination, or has extremely minimal such restrictions, although it can have rules for synergistic combinations that contain both advantages and disadvantages.

6. The way the abilities work obeys precise predefined rules without the need for human arbiters.

To not be a *bad* example of an open powers system, it must at least satisfy three additional requirements:

1. It does not obviously funnel players into only a few optimal choices.

2. It does not rely solely on rock-paper-scissors balancing in PvP only (although this can be a significant part of the system, it cannot be the *only* basis upon which its balanced).

3. It should generate a spectrum of performance results that are not only superficially dissimilar. Its fine if it can generate very bad results for the player with bad decisions, it just cannot generate only a few obvious optimal ones and it cannot literally be designed to generate only homogenous ones.


The trump card of most PnP games is #4 above. No matter how you min/max a character, the GM can always shift the playing field to one where you are strong, but not optimal. And in fact its a presumption that the purpose of a good GM is to challenge players without assassinating them, which means almost by definition no matter what you make, the GM is going to throw you content that you cannot trivially handle. Rule #4 is extremely difficult to enforce in an MMO.


I would not say the list above is complete: its a complicated thing to judge game balance. But I would at least concede that any wargame that satisfied all the above strongly (particularly #2 in the first list and #3 in the second) would be worth additional study.

Arcanaville is too polite to go all caps on people, but it's worthwhile to emphasize that system worked ONLY, ONLY because a human being was at the helm. And the rules book(s) were explicit on that point.

Heh. Anecdote time. One of my campaigns had a pair of players who thought they were "logical" in ways others were not, and one time they declared that it "made no sense" to go where the bad guys were and fight on the bad guys' prepared home turf, so they refused. This wasn't the first time they'd basically refused to be motivated and tried to get the other players and GM (me) to bend over backwards to include them in the story -- despite the fact that, during character creation, I had emphasized that I required every player to provide me with his or her motivation for being a superhero, specifically to head off this sort of dilatory timewasting.

So the entire team and I went into the other room and played out the night's adventure utterly without the players who did not want to be "tricked" into participating. They just hung out for hours wondering when we were going to come get them.

The very best part is that the villains had delivered a fancy card to the superheroes' base stating their plans and daring the heroes to stop them. So afterward I could say, with literal accuracy, that these two wouldn't participate even with an engraved invitation.

Which starts me thinking how cool it would be if there could be an algorithm in the game that could produce an opponent tweaked to be an extra challenge for a given character, for "special occasions".

Like, at the end of a storyarc, Nemesis deploys a robot specially made to fight your character. It gets a +20% resist bonus to your primary damage type and it's attacks are typed to where your Defense / Resists are weakest. Could also be used for story ideas like a Malta assassin specifically prepared for your character, and so on.

Probably would be way too programmer-time intensive to implement for a gimmick that, to be fair to the players, should only be used rarely.

But I would love it if in some future Storyarc, Dr. Aeon dialogues "You think you've got me, $CharacterName? Hah! This robot has been designed to resist your $AttackPowerset attacks! I made is specifically to fight you and your powers! $CharacterName Slayer-Bot Deploy!"

It would be cool, but in most MMOs it would also be avoidable. Can you imagine the uproar in this game if the devs added non-optional opponents designed to actually be difficult to defeat no matter how strong you designed your build?. Its a social dynamic thing: when this game was young the Praetorian arc was considered a good challenge. At some point, that changed to being a tedious and sometimes impossible to solo speed bump. I actually watched it happen unfold in real time.

An MMO with GM-like enforced challenges would have to somehow seek out and find a playerbase that actually wanted such challenges, and the MMO playerbase in general is primed to believe its their god given right to choose for themselves what content to play. This doesn't happen in PnP games because the GM is himself or herself a living breathing human being that you'd have to stomp all over. In a computer MMO, that GM would be an impersonal and easy to ignore machine.

We treat GMs as people that themselves have a right to gain something out of the gaming experience. They are usually a friend or acquaintance, and we trust them to at least try to provide a nominally entertaining experience as part of their role in the roleplay. But its obvious MMO players treat the computer as just a tool, and a tool has no feelings and no rights, and can be exploited without restraint. And since the human developers are just an extension of the computer, very often the developers also become things without feelings or rights. The only thing with rights is the paying player, and the attitude is consistent with that feeling.

That makes it hard to make a computer game that behaves like a GM. Even if you could make the technology work, the computer would tend not to have the respect of the players necessary to make it work.

Sorry but when I read this I was a little nonplussed and had to wonder if you were kidding. I know war games and tactical simulations aren't as dominant as they used to be, largely replaced by less complex games but there are plenty out there and are still popular enough that you would almost have to go out of your way not to know of games that meet those criteria.

Anyway core wars as a paper and pencil game meets your criteria in spades. There are also the entire families of space exploration/conquest games that derive from the old starfleet battles model of gaming. Some are not a great examples because they may have singularities where performance/cost blows up but the better realizations avoid the problems.

Really most of the things you are talking about here as problems seem positively baffling. Most of the problems implementing open systems as beer and pretzels games, is the beer and the argumentative nature of the players.

I apologize but I still don't understand. IMO Arcana was spot on about the issues facing game developers designing powers systems. I think that you are underestimating the difficulty of translating something that works in a war game (assuming it does work) to what works in a single-character centered RPG. It leads me back to my original question: if all developers had to do to implement such a system flawlessly was copy a war game, why haven't they done it? I'm going to invoke a game design version of the Standard Code Rant here: game design, not just programming, has a blind challenge curve.

Of the items on Arcana's list, the item that has the most significance to me is the one about players knowing what exists in the game. In a game where the encounters can be predicted, it is almost impossible to prevent players from min/maxing to that encounter, or to some kind of general style of encounter. What prevents this in other circumstances is that the player is unable to determine how often any particular ability will be critical, so all abilities still have weight; in fact, a smart GameMaster will often insert opportunities to use "useless" powers to facilitate this exact result.

As a case in point in City of Heroes, we know going into it that Intangibility is rarely useful. It's not necessarily because the idea of Intangibility itself is flawed, nor that the implementation is flawed, but could be because the game rarely presents us with any circumstances to make it useful. However, if every mission you ran featured assassin robots that were unkillable and otherwize unmezzable, this type of ability might actually be critical. Likewise, -Defense is "worse" than -Resistance in City of Heroes not because it is actually worse but because the enemies you face are not hard to hit, a fact known to players from the start.

A lot of players think open power systems are possible if you just "balance the powers." But it is never the case that powers operate in a vacuum. "-300% Regen" is a meaningless statistic unless we know that the main fail point for team tends to come from the Regen of ArchVillains, who almost always appear at the end of Task Forces, and that -Regen itself is in short supply. I could completely alter the balance of numerous power sets in City of Heroes while never touching those sets at all by simply dropping in a readily available temp power that provides -500% Regen for 30 seconds, with 20 charges. Or I could just make fewer encounters with ArchVillains, provide players the ability to obtain NPC "hirelings" to aid them, and on and on.

You're going to have to be more specific. The only core wars I'm aware of was the redcode core wars: I used to participate in that one myself. And most starfleet battles-like games, including literally StarFleet Battles were not remotely open powers systems by any reasonable definition, including the one I list above.

If there are really that many, you should be able to name at least one specific example that can be reviewed. But unless you're talking about another Core Wars (and you have to be: the one I'm aware of wouldn't make sense to mention here), both types of games are actually things I'm very familiar with, moreso than just wargaming in general, and I cannot see how either is applicable.

I have to apologize, I was specific in my original post right up to the point where I realized forum rules forbade the mention of any computer game not just MMOs, and then removed specific references.

Trying not violate forum rules here but SSI had 3 conquest of the Galaxy games that allowed you to design both ships and fleets where the where combat/movement rules were almost direct copies of starfleet battles but the fleet composition was purely on a point system and so was the individual ship cost. Microprose had 3 games where you sought to master a constellation and the entire galaxy also where both fleet design , ship design and planetary defense all met the criteria.


Just a suggestion here. Corewars is as about as open a conflict simulator as you might conceive, if you feel your checklist is valid you might ask why you don't feel it meets the criteria or if there are some criteria you aren't articulating.

Don't make the encounters as predictable as ours are. There is no reason that the game can't dynamically adjust enemy group composition if the team is doing well. It doesn't even need to be particularly intelligent just random changes should do. Your team fighting battle maiden warriors ? Oops half their damage is now energy.

If you really wanted to up the ante you could actually have the game plan against the pc group. Seeing as Arcana brought up traveller, there is a very good example of the computer out min maxing the players. There used to be a tournament held using the trillion credit squadron rules in that game. Two years in a row it was won by a program called Eurisko and afterwards the program was asked not to participate. Always thought that said more about people that played Traveler and the rules they came up with for fleet design than anything else.

Its not an open powers system as is being discussed, and furthermore there is no specific design intent for corewars to be "balanced" by any criteria other than the obvious: that all options are available to both players. The reason for my PvP rule above is that *all* combat systems, including randomly generated ones, are trivially claimed to be balanced if the definition of balance is that no matter what random options are made available to the players, both sides have the same opportunity to select the same options.

That's not a useful metric of balance for most MMO designs.

Incidentally, my own personal favorite corewars tactic from the late 80s was what I used to call hijacking, and was later more commonly known as vampire bombing. Between Corewars, Conway's Life, Fractint, and DKBTrace (aka POV-Ray) I don't know how we got anything done in the 80s.

Eurisko is actually the perfect example of an entity that only wants to win, and is willing to destroy any semblance of gamesmanship to do it. Eurisko is digital pun-pun. Its worth noting that Eurisko wasn't particularly innovative, it was pure cold evil in its decision making that would bring a smile to any real min/maxer. In its first outing in TCS it spent all trillion credits on a gigantic fleet of the tiniest ships it could make with nothing but guns; not even engines. To win, its human opponents had to engage him because his fleet couldn't move, and when they did their own weapons were overkill against his unarmored fleet. But because he often outnumbered his opponents a hundred to one, he ultimately blasted them to pieces with sheer numbers. Today, we'd just call that stationary zerging.

Its second outing proved its real evil genius. The TCS rules were changed so you had to be able to move: in addition you got bonuses for the average ability for your fleet to move. So Eurisko created ships with the minimum propulsion possible, and then during the game it self-destructed any ship that was hit to eliminate a damaged ship from the fleet, maintaining its high agility bonus. When you still outnumber your enemy ten to one, you can blow up your own ships to game the rules.

It was *that* maneuver that caused the tournament to ban Eurisko (or rather: threaten to cancel if Eurisko entered). The problem was that people were entering real fleets that might reasonably exist in the Traveller universe, and Eurisko could care less. Could they have made TCS balanced enough for Eurisko? Probably only by sucking the life out of the game to the point only computers would want to play it.

But what Eurisko did is nothing more than what min/maxers have done throughout the history of gaming: shredded rules intended to be used to make an entertaining game, not to be beaten. The response in *every* gaming system to such people who were willing to burn the game to beat it has been the same: ban them.

For humans, its not usually enough to win. You have to win in a way that people will invite you back to play again. But Eurisko just really didn't care. It wasn't programmed to win graciously. And that same distinction is evident in the difference between how most people play PnP games with other people, and how they play computer games against the computer.

When you said the Bolded part my mind went straight to card counters and black jack. Funny how that works eh always banning the people that can walk around the rules without actually breaking them.

Its amazing how two people can look at the same scene and come away with completely different interpretations of what happened.

You say Eurisko as being ruthless and evil maybe a correct assessment. I am very sure that Doug Lenat was more ruthless, and definitely had the eye for recognizing rubes and a possible scam when presented with the opportunity.

As I said from the beginning traveler had lousy wargaming rules. They were always pretty much a bolt on and never the primary focus of the game. To understand how bad and incomplete they are, almost any of the games published in strategy tactics where more detailed and properly formulated than their whole system. I still remember the 25 tonne ship computer they had. You could see how they were just shoehorning things into system to make it work.

Anyway, the tcs tournaments were more or less tournaments for people that weren't great at wargaming and weren't willing do simple math to characterize the effectiveness of how their fleets would perform.

Now at the time the events occurred you had the start of 80s defense build up in place, You had ARPA/DARPA seriously working on expert systems meant to help commanders make the "Right Decision" and you have an AI researcher with a program who knows of a situation he can use to make a splash.

Did Eurisko outsmart on its own ? Could be you really can't say the published work on the system isn't enough to recreate it. Did Lenat take an opportunity to make a bunch of gamers look foolish, and gain a position with DARPA ? most definitely.


Back to the primary topic, just because its possible to come up with opponents that will completely destroy the players, there is no reason to always go that far.

Edit: Just a note one of the reasons I am suspicious of how this was spun, is that the particular munchkin tactic had already been used in battle tech tournaments where players were assigned a given amount of tonnage to build their units.

A little too late for me. I do still have a 5 MeV linear accelerator that I built back when Scientific American still published interesting projects.

Interesting projects that would get them sued out of existence today. My own foray there was the carbon dioxide laser. Too big and too fragile, ultimately.

Whether Eurisko really did the investigation as Lenat suggested or not is not really relevant to my point. We can call the combination Eurisko/Lenat and the same discussion applies. The point is the cybernetic combination is illustrative of what happens when you take a gaming environment judged "reasonably balanced" by its participants and insert into it something that doesn't want or care to do anything but beat the system. Not even win, per se, but literally beat the system. Whether TCS was actually balanced or not is almost besides the point, because it was judged so by its participants which is important. That same belief translates to other systems for which there exist a large number of people who claim its balanced, only to discover that claim contains an alarming set of caveats. Which usually turn out to be variants of "balanced so long as no one tries to break it."

Every scrapper that has taken one of the challenges understands that none of us is actually "winning" anything: we're knocking down pylons and wiping out spawns as feats that involve beating the system, in achieving levels of performance clearly beyond the devs intentions. We win nothing really for doing that. We just gain some satisfaction from taking the game system and turning it into a pinata. Its harmless fun so long as we a) don't leverage that performance for exploitive levels of gain and b) don't judge other normal players against anything remotely resembling that level of performance. And the scrapper forums have held both rules more or less since the beginning of performance challenge threads in those forums.


Keep in mind, I'm not saying balanced gaming systems can't exist. Starcraft is a great example of a relatively strongly balanced game system and its a moderately heterogeneous one as well. And even more interesting in terms of game design is the game Ogre, which was in my opinion the absolute pinnacle of asymmetric game balance. You can't get much more asymmetric than Ogre.

But open powers systems are not the same thing as balanced gaming environments. Open powers system presume a far wider latitude of choices than most balanced gaming environments contain. There's no strong lessons to be learned in Starcraft that would be easy to extend to balancing an open powers system that could drive a game like City of Heroes (or, say, Champions Online).

You've mentioned Ogre a few times, so I was wanting to look into researching it. Are the more recent editions still good exemplars?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

You got that right. I remember playing Ogre in the late 80s/early 90s.
I love Steve Jackson's games. Started out with Car Wars. Most recently, been playing Munchkin.

Although I don't have first hand experience buying recent re-releases and such, my understanding is most versions of Ogre use the same basic rules. Also keep in mind I'm talking about Ogre the hex-board wargame, not GURPS Ogre the RPG or the miniature system Ogre which is based on the hex-board version but I'm much less familiar with.

In my opinion, if you're a student of game design and game balance, Ogre is your first point of call. You could spend years thinking about how and why Ogre works. There's even a *hint*, albeit only a hint, of the kind of thinking that should go into open powers systems design. I suspect that might be where Another_Fan is coming from by mentioning wargames. In a sense, you could analogize an army as being a set of powers, and the assembly of an army as a form of open powers selection. However, that analogy doesn't hold strongly enough for it to be a model for open powers design in an MMO for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that there's no good evidence that any wargame like that cared about constant-point balance. It was all about making a better or more effective force than your opponent, and the balance was due to both sides having similar options or being put into static situations that themselves were engineered with balancing forces.

Ogre is interesting in that it has a stronger hint of open powers balance than most wargames, because one side is very strongly fixed: it takes the Ogre. For Ogre (the game) to work, of all possible counter-army constructions there cannot be lots of combinations that are obviously more powerful than the Ogre, but there must be a wide rage of combinations that are nominally as powerful as the Ogre. Which meets some of the requirements I set forth as mandatory in a balanced open powers system.

Why its just a hint of the problem is because the strength of the counter-army is difficult to fully assess because its partially based on the tactics used to drive it. Its hard to say if the Ogre is exactly balanced with the intrinsic power of the counter-army, or if the Ogre is easier to tactically deploy and the counter-army much harder to get maximum effectiveness out of, which acts to handicap the counter-army. In other words, I don't know if in a computer vs computer match, if the Ogre has a significant advantage or the opposing army does, eliminating human factors. It would be an interesting problem to study, though.

At the end of the day though it is really one of the fundamental rules of gaming: if someone is not enjoyable to game with, do not game with them. The same rule applies to card-counters in a casino. A card-counter is ruining the casino's fun (where for a casino fun = profit) so they don't play with them.

Back when I used to play 40K there were some people I did not want to play with (essentially "banning" them from playing with me) simply because playing with them was not an enjoyable experience. This doesn't (at least for me) come down to winning or losing, some of my favorite opponents could consistently kick my ***, it really came down to attitude. A good example would be rules lawyering, I enjoy a good rules argument as much as the next person (in fact probably more) but when it comes time to actually play I'd much rather reach a suitable gentleman's agreement for the rules that allows both players to have fun.