Goblinworks Founder
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Pathfinder Online is likely to be an extraordinarily special game environment. My confidence in this is based upon some of the following elements of the Goblinworks narrative:
• Principals: Lisa, Ryan, Mark. These principals bring a proven record of leadership, success, and experience with some of the greatest outfits in gaming history – White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, CCP, Cryptic Studios, Paizo Publishing, and others. Although they are smart business people, more importantly they are committed to quality in their game products. We recognize them as gamers that care like you and me. Their integrity resonates with us. Unlike the faceless corporate entities such as Hasbro and EA, we want these people to succeed.
• Partnership: The Goblinworks partnership with the booming Paizo Publishing provides the new team an incubator for establishing their venture on solid footing and a license to vast volumes of quality content and the intellectual inheritance of decades of D&D game development.
• Community: There is an established customer base in the Pathfinder product line and the fans of the prior works of the principal goblins - Lisa, Ryan and Mark. Pathfinder has captured the hearts and minds of the Dungeons & Dragons community. The zeal and loyalty of the customers provide Goblinworks a built-in set of raving fans.
• Strategy: The plans to grow this game in a measured manner will help contain the development, managed costs, and rise of the game in a profitable manner similar to the amazing history of CCP’s Eve Online which is one of the first, best, and continuously successful MMO’s since 2003. This strategy will help maintain the game’s design integrity by avoiding the financial pressures of having to provide return on investment to equity partners eager for short-term gain. Game design is art. Game communities are people. The Goblinworks growth strategy provides the maximum opportunity to care about their art and their people while still providing financial success for a more intimate group of investors.
• Outsourcing: The plans to license middleware and a base of established code on which this new game will be built is immensely sensible. There is no cause to recreate the wheel. This buy-over-build strategy enables Goblinworks to accelerate their development efforts and focus on the code that is strategic to Pathfinder Online.
• Design: Although, I’ve listed this point last. It is the most significant component to the Goblinworks secret sauce. They are distilling the best elements of other modern MMO design. In some cases these design concepts have been highly refined in existing games. There are strengths and weaknesses to games such as Pathfinder, World of Warcraft, and EVE Online. Goblinworks is bringing the best elements and fresh thought to avoiding the weaknesses of these systems. Some of the key design concepts include:
o hybrid sandbox/theme park-style MMO
o robust trading ecosystem and player driven world economy
o scaling social organizations scale from small groups to player nations
o persistence and immersion
o grief intolerance and philosophy of fun
o sophisticated progression and real time skill development
o PvE and PvP with meaning – fighting for your player controlled territory and for the protection and development of your player built resources brings an amazing dynamism to PvP conflict
I have a one question that I’d like to put forward to this community in support of Pathfinder Online. How do we avoid developing the worst of the social behaviors found in some other games?
For example, I love the sophistication and player driven content of the EVE Online game. In the EVE sandbox, we develop coalitions of thousands of players internationally in the pursuit of empires. In EVE, a player makes their own mark in a manner that can have lasting impact on the game. Individual players can become global celebrities for their in-game influence.
On the other hand, EVE also has attracted or developed a player community that manifests some of the worst of human behavior. The game’s gender imbalance is extreme. Racism, sexism, homophobia, pornography, viscous online bullying, manipulation, fraud, metagaming, cheating, boting, and unsanctioned real money trading are common. It is impossible to find any significant alliance in the game where you are not consistently exposed to these behaviors. In some of the game’s most influential alliances, player credibility is established on the quantity of tears you have caused for other players. All of the game’s major alliances routinely cheat through the use of vast bot mining operations. This cultural phenomenon has become endemic in the game’s player community.
Some of this culture is fostered by the dark future and space pirate aesthetic of the game. Some of this culture seems to be derived from CCP’s failure to control the game’s security and police policy abuse. Some of the game’s designs such as the margin trading mechanics contribute to the problem by enabling in-game fraud.
I’m hoping that Pathfinder Online will grow a player community that is less regressive on the scale of social progressiveness, gender balanced, and definitively less corrupt than what we see in EVE.
What are your thoughts on this?
Goblin Squad Member
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Moderation. Moderation. Moderation.
That's the three keys to a successful community, whether it's on Forums or in-game. PFO will have a great opportunity to set the standard of behavior with their slow growth plan. They can learn from early mistakes and still have time to get it right before the playerbase gets out of hand.
Once the kind of regressive behavior you mentioned takes hold, it's very hard to change course. However, proper moderation early on can set the course towards a desirable outcome, and then that course becomes harder and harder to change.
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I am wondering why real time skill progression is listed as though it is a great feature? Is it not just another way to increase skills? Why do people in these forums see that option as a great thing?
I see it as just another way of doing things with nothing good or bad about it( though it is not my cup of tea, personally)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am wondering why real time skill progression is listed as though it is a great feature? Is it not just another way to increase skills? Why do people in these forums see that option as a great thing?
I see it as just another way of doing things with nothing good or bad about it( though it is not my cup of tea, personally)
My understanding is that is is intended to decrease the overall grind of the game, to help bridge the gap a bit between hardcore and casual players. To some people, albeit not all, that is a very good thing. Hardcore or casual, too much grinding sucks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am wondering why real time skill progression is listed as though it is a great feature? Is it not just another way to increase skills? Why do people in these forums see that option as a great thing?
I see it as just another way of doing things with nothing good or bad about it( though it is not my cup of tea, personally)
It varies from person to person whether it is better or worse. For me it is heaven, considering I usually stick with my fiance and 2 close friends. In most games we hit nights where 1-2 of us aren't availible etc... at which point we either all are unable to play, or if we do play we wind up outleveling the person left behind, leaving us unable to group until that person catches up etc... For my group this system is perfect, basically no matter who gets busy when, or if one of us wants to go work on something solo etc... there is no reason to worry about anyone getting ahead or behind.
Second reason is because in most games, the grind is what bores the crap out of me, usually hit a point where what entertains me, and what is needed to progress my character forward, are polar opposites. Greatly cutting into my fun.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@DLH, Ryan did a fantastic job of covering the pros and cons in the blog.
For my part, I think it's great because it:
1) Removes the xp grind. The xp grind is why a good friend of mine just won't play MMOs anymore. He's already leveled up characters in a bunch of different games, and the thought of grinding through in another is not fun for him, or for me.
2) Keeps you on par with other players that started at the same time as you without requiring you to all be playing together all the time. Onishi covered this well.
3) Frees you up to do what you want to do in the game, rather than giving you a very strong incentive to do what the game decided you must do in order to advance your character. This is the most important aspect of it to me.
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Goblinworks Founder
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real time skill progression...[clip]... just another way of doing things with nothing good or bad about it
I think this is a strong design from both a player’s perspective and from a developer’s perspective. I'll use EVE Online as an example as it is the only MMO that I have played that uses this system.
A low skill point character in Eve can be nearly as effective as a high skill point character for a specific function. For example, I could have a 3 million skill point character fly a Frigate with the role to tackle enemy ships preventing them from fleeing the battle field. I could have a 40 million skill point character perform the same role, but only manage the job slightly better than the 3 million skill point character.
The difference between the two characters is range of roles and activities that two characters can perform. The more advanced toon can be good at flying a larger number of ships performing a wider range of functions.
As a player, this is valuable because no matter how new I am to the game, I can still be comparably useful to my friends and colleagues in the game. Generally, others players don’t say to me, we don’t need you because you are not high enough level or don’t have enough of the right gear. What they say is “which roles are you best at?” Sometimes, in larger fleets there is a call for specific types of DPS ship to be flown in the main line of battle. If you’re not skilled in those ships, you may be asked to perform an alternative role such as scouting ahead or behind the fleet to prevent the team from being surprise by approaching enemies. Both functions, dps & scouting, are critical to the overall success of the fleet. It’s been my experience that adding players to the fleet has always been welcome and that everyone brings something of value to the group.
Real-time progression contributes to focusing the environment on not how powerful your character is but on what you accomplish in the game world. This helps maintain the immersion and contributes to the player-driven nature of the environment. If you and your friends have set for yourselves a goal such as to capture a particularly valuable resource like a moon ripe for mining, than the focus is on accomplishing that goal and the reward is achieving the goal that you’ve created for yourself. This rich moon might be just the resource you needed to complete the construction of that larger ship that your team was hoping to have in a future fleet operation that will drive forward your alliance's overall strategic plans. Character skills are an enabler for participation and not the focus of personal power.
Personally, I enjoy planning and creating artful characters. This skill progression system inspires me to plan my progression and enables me to tailor my characters to the types of roles and functions that I enjoy most. This skill planning is like a mini-game plotting out how I want the toon to evolve overtime. There a few “best builds” or assumptions that because I’ve chosen to take a particular skill path that I might not also be good at something else as well.
Enabling the progression to occur in real-time, enables to me play when I want to play and doesn’t force me into playing just to keep up with my friends and colleagues.
Real-time skill progression enables the persistence of the world environment. The game continues whether you’re there or not and so does the character’s progression.
Real-time skill progression doesn't establish an arbitrary level cap. There is no dramatic shift in play style from leveling a character to cap to find that the way you have been playing your character from the beginning is completely different than what's expected of you now that you've finally hit level cap.
I'm speculating, but from the game developer perspective, I believe that this system also contributes to other design and strategic goals. One goal that has been articulated is that the design should encompass a five year life cycle for a character with a first capstone ability being achieved somewhere around the character’s second year. Another strategy has been set to grow the game at a measured pace. Both of these goals are served by a real-time skill progression which will help prevent a scenario where the hardcore players achieve their level cap within days of release and then sit around clamoring for new content. Character progression will mirror the game’s development. For example, in Eve’s history the largest ships were not released on day 1 of the game. When some of the larger ships were introduced, they were added with skill requirements that would take a player some time to have developed anyway. Therefore, as the population of characters was maturing to a skill set that would fit these big ships the big ships became available in the fresh content added long after the game’s release. Most players were excited by this new big ship content and no one said that we should have had these ships on initial release.
I can only imagine what kind of character skills and associated game development might occur in PO. Let’s imagine that the construction of magic flying cloud castles is an advanced skill requiring characters some substantial time to master maybe as long as 18 months of play. This would allow Goblinworks to plan for the full coding and development of magic flying cloud castles to be completed many months after initial release of the game.
In Eve, a character with 100 million skill points has nearly the same utility as a character with 80 million skill points. Let’s say that in PO, it may take five years to reach the PO equivalent of 80 million skill points. This could represent the five-year horizon mentioned on the Goblinworks blog. Sure, characters could continue progressing after that point but the relative utility of additional training is diminished. This represents the horizon of design requirements. For example, maybe there just aren’t any player built structures to be included in the game more complex and skill intensive than a magic flying cloud castle and that it would be reasonably common for a five year old character to have achieved the skill to build one. This seems to me like an elegant means to help manage the growth and development challenges to the game.
This is not the only viable system but I listed it as positive design concept because I believe this system’s strengths are greater than the alternatives. I also believe this system will help differentiate PO from other sword and sorcery MMO’s.
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Goblinworks Founder
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Earlier in this thread, I asked about the Pathfinder Online community's thoughts on how we could manage some of the more obnoxious player behaviors sometimes seen in other games such as EVE Online.
In reviewing some of the older posts in other Pathfinder Online forum threads, I found this post from Ryan about PvP Griefing.
<clip> There are three ways that behavior can be limited:
1: Game Mechanics - the game itself can establish limits on what can and cannot be done. It can also establish punishments for doing things that are considered poor behavior even if it does not outright restrict them.
2: Community Management - the humans who watch over the game can act to force certain kinds of behavior to cease when they are petitioned for help. Those same humans can escalate the matter to the point where a repeat or particularly egregious offender's accounts are closed.(*)
3: Social Engineering - the humans who play within the game can act to enforce certain norms of behavior by providing and withholding access to shared community resources in response to character behavior.
It is not our intention to create an "anything goes" world where players are subjected to endless scams, ganks, and immersion breaking behavior.
It is our intention to apply some of the real world lessons learned in our major cities by focusing on "broken windows" - that is, stopping minor transgressions of our social behavior policies before they escalate out of hand. It is my opinion that doing so will reduce antisocial behavior substantially. People who want to be anonymous jerks will not get much pleasure out of being quickly and unceremoniously silenced, booted, or banned. Without the ability to encite "rage & tears", those folks will have no good reason to haunt Pathfinder Online.
All three kinds of tools will be used to help enforce our social behavior policies. But the meta-rule will be: "If you're acting like a jerk, we'll feel free to give you a time-out lasting from minutes to forever without appeal and without warning."
I'm especially concerned with ensuring that new players are able to learn how to play the game, gain some mastery of basic gameplay features, have some fun, and have a great experience without having to worry about someone intentionally ruining it for them by scamming them, killing them, taunting them, or otherwise disrupting their attention which should be focused on dealing with the sensory overload of going into a new virtual world. ...<clip>...
Players should also be free from metagame harassment of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political or religious affiliation, favorite college football team, or participation in other MMOs. Taking someone's off-line world into our on-line world will be totally unacceptable and we'll have a very low tolerance for those who break those rules.
I apologize for raising a question that had already been addressed in a previous thread.
With Ryan's remarks, I am happy that Goblinworks has a keen understand of the issue and a plan to manage it.