Accessibility of Difficult Content

Before I write this blog post I wanna mention that there seems to be a difference in the understanding of "Accessibility" from a game design and a gamers perspective, which surprised me at first. Anyways this blog post pays homage to a discussion I saw on Youtube by fellow Guild Wars 2 players, Youtubers and/or streamers. As such I will add a link to the said video to where the sources go.^[1]

Accessibility - Game Design vs Gamer Interpretation

When a game developer or game designer talks about accessibility (of content) they're most often not talking about the same thing that a gamer would talk about. In game design, the topic of accessibility deals with the question of how to develop games so that they can be played by as many people in the target audience as possible. If you plan to develop your game for a certain audience you will still have a smaller audience due to the people who cannot enjoy the experience because of illnesses that plague them. Assuming your game requires the player to listen to some sound but the player has hearing loss, you're alienating those players. This is one of the examples that accessibility addresses in game design.

On the contrary, when gamers talk about the accessibility of content

they instead refer to the ability for players to enjoy or be able to access any content in the game. This now has less to do with the limitations they were given in real life but most often the ability for them to be able to complete and conquer the challenges set to them by the game. This is most often an issue seen in multiplayer online games and not in single-player games. However, is there really an issue at hand?

The Current State

Looking at many games, especially in the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) category, you can see content specifically dungeons or more likely raids to be considered locked towards the biggest part of the player base. While the motivation for accessing locked content really differs from game to game one thing is definitive. If some content is only played by less than 5% of the community chances are high that said content might get a lower amount of work done by the staff of the game development team. Afterall while this content might be nice at some point when the numbers drop something has to be done and those niche content additions most likely won't be it. We can all agree that making as much of your game available to as many people as possible sounds like a pretty respectable goal. So, how do you achieve higher accessibility?

The Simple Solution

Since the biggest issue is that content is locked behind gear, progression and/or difficulty. The easiest solution would be to implement easier ways to get gear. Simplify the progression or decrease the difficulty. Given the current state of World of Warcraft, a level boost and probably some quality open-world gear drops could potentially get you ready for the raids pretty fast. Especially if the open world drops were end game drops. You could technically lock these items behind a daily grind but that would be too complicated wouldn't it? 

Another example is getting raid ready in WildStar. At first, you needed about 12 steps or so to complete from farming reputation to killing world bosses to completing dungeons on bronze, silver, gold, I don't remember. Later on, they decreased these steps from 12 to four for accessibility's sake. Removing all steps would allow even more accessibility. Lastly difficulty. If people don't play the content because it is to hard make all the content easier. Then everyone can play it and everyone wins right?

Accessibility In Real Life

Let's get back to the current state but from another dimension so to speak. When we talk about accessibility to education in real life. We're not talking about decreasing the difficulty of the university. We're talking about giving everyone the opportunity, the chance to study. To do so we do decrease the entrance requirements. This allows everyone even those who were bad in one or the other topic to be able to study and get a degree. There are tons of people whose grades did not define their abilities and success in university and this is important. So if we're talking about accessibility in real life we're talking about "the ability to do" something. With this mindset, we're slowly getting there, but it's not enough yet.

Excursion: Difficulty Curves

Also, something I notice a lot here is that in single-player games there's hardly ever a complaint about the accessibility of content. Why is that? Well thinking back to the old time's games have been getting easier and easier and recently started to pick up difficulty again. One fact stays though. Throughout all those years game designers have tried to pinpoint and build their experience keeping a difficulty curve. This means regardless of what game you played, in the end, the difficulty did increase and this is not the case for most of the games with the accessibility issue (or so it seems as there are always exceptions).

The Right Approach

Taking in all this information and coming to a conclusion.

What seems to be the right approach is to implement accessibility by modifying the given factors. First of all, we want to decrease the entrance to the content. We want the requirements for dungeons, for raids or for any content for that matter to be easy enough so that the entrance requirements are set to "E for everyone". Of course, we're not gonna stay on this level. Now the goal would be to increase the difficulty slightly higher and higher perhaps with some up and down jumps to figure out the learning speed of the community (in case games as service) and to make it more interesting. Unfortunately as the level increases only slowly hardcore interested gamers would probably have no interest in this. There's a solution for these two. If we split our hardcore content into packages (cmp. raids wings) and make the first bosses easiest while increasing difficulty by quite a bit until the last bosses per section (wing) we can "carry" the less ambitiously or skilled players with the easier bosses while providing difficulty content to the ambitious skilled players through the hardcore content given by the upper end of our section.

Ill. 1: Representation of a simplified difficulty curve
 showing the applied system

To simplify, we're basically treating each content drop or section of the game as it's own subgame providing its own difficulty curve while still increasing the overall position of the section difficulty to average out on a classic difficulty curve. The illustration (Ill. 1) shows this by splitting the overall difficulty curve (shown as a line for simplicity) fragmented into smaller sections that each have their own difficulty curve forming the overall one. Each section increases in base difficulty while having their base lower than the previous sections the last boss to provide an easier entrance for those who could not grow with the previous curve. You can see it as a way to catch those who were unable to grow as rapid giving them another chance.

Regardless of whether or not you successfully defeat all the last bosses in all cases, you can select your own difficulty curve created from your selection of bosses you wanna do and can do. This system is partly inspired by the system Guild Wars 2 / ArenaNet is trying to implement.

Conclusion

While I may call this the right approach this may also be a wrong approach for all I know. After all, this is just theory and without taking it and applying it into praxis who knows. However, so far it sounds like a better approach than giving away the rewards and at the same time allows better and less skilled players to play more or less in parallel as Player vs Player does. Though it is important to say that this approach does not replace tutorials. It is imported for you to explain your community or audience in-game mechanics via good game design philosophy (which is another topic) or via text or even better give your community the option to repeat and skip said tutorials even for trivial content such as raiding in groups. Here too good game design philosophy and awesome tricks are better than forcing or a skip option. Get creative or take examples from those games that did an awesome tutorial.

^[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHVuY3ac170

Guild Wars 2: About the Beetle Races and Their Difficulty

I had the calculation already prepared for about a week, but I couldn't find the time to write this blog post due to, math homework (discrete structures), pgdp (abr.: Praktikum: Grundlagen der Programmierung, engl.: apprenticeship: basics of programming) and the winter update for Against the World, but now that I'm almost in the Christmas break... Time! Yes!

What's Beetle Racing?

Beetle Racing has been added to Guild Wars 2 on the patch of the 26th of November.^[1] Beetle races are race tracks with checkpoints that have a three-lap racing event to go with them gratulating the first three winners as well as time trial adventures that save yours overall best and daily time for one round or lap. Additionally, there are bronze, silver and gold rewards for these time trials that are achieved by being below a certain time. These racing tracks are designed for the beetle mount that can grow in speed when continuously rolling, especially downhill while having a super-speed ability that is bound to the endurance bar. This endurance bar fills over time, when colliding with objects, drifting or doing tricks in the air (if skilled). ArenaNet added a total of six races, which means there are now eight beetle races in-game.

• Domain of Kourna
• Mad Kings Raceway^[2]
• Kessex Hills
• Gendarran Fields
• Diessa Plateau
• Mount Maelstrom
• Brisban Wildlands
• Snowden Rifts

About the Race Tracks

Domain of Kourna

This is the first track added to the game, it's an adventure for people to experience the beetle racing for the first time and required you to have quite a good grip with the beetle to achieve gold. Not hard yet.

Mad Kings Raceway

Following the previous one, this is the second race track that was designed for the beetle and added to the game. Before the patch, this needed very good usage of the beetle. There were a lot of places that actually required you to boost and drift well enough. Especially since there were objects that unmount you on collision. It is a fairly short track though. Since the nerf you can do the track with other mounts just as well making it one of the easier ones. It's only available during the Mad King's Eve if at every.

Kessex Hills

Kessex Hills is the first of the six new ones I'm gonna talk about. Kessex Hills actually is less of a race and more a practice run. It is extremely short and asks you to do drift and learn about the speed increase when rolling downhill (if ever slightly) and the loss of speed when rolling uphill as shown to the end. Getting the drift to work and maybe using one boost is enough to get gold. It is, therefore, the one I deem the easiest.

Gendarran Fields

With Gendarran Fields the second of the six new ones were implemented. This one now features a much bigger track there are about three jumps where you can do tricks to gain endurance and multiple chances to use a boost. It's also the first map to introduce you to the water mechanic. The beetle can go over water if fast enough, it does lose speed though. According to an NPC, you can keep more momentum if you jump onto water instead of rolling into it. There is at least one spot where you most likely need to drift, which is shortly before the bridge. I recommend keeping a boost after the first water passage. Aside from that use the boosts where you're sure you can use them well. I'd deem this one the second easiest one of the new ones.

Diessa Plateau

The third one I'm gonna list goes through terrain with obstacles such as trees, bushes, walls and more in the way. There are a lot more places where you actually need to drift to get around well. You get some help thanks to some of the checkpoints working as a "start-to-drift-here"-marker. Aside from that, there isn't much more to say to this one. I deem it harder than the Gendarran Fields one though.

Mount Maelstrom

Now we're starting to get into the tough territory. Oh, and you might notice that I sorted them by the release as well as difficulty. This track starts with a lot of uphills that requires you to place your boosts at the right point. Follows up by mountainous terrain some tight corners and then even more mountainous terrain. There are a lot of spots you can easily get stuck with, you need drifting and if you don't drift correctly you're hardly better than not drifting at all. You really need to make sure you use your boosts at the right places, especially as you get hardly anything out of a boost if you can't get a grip on the ground. The boost in the air does not give you as much push as you get on the ground, quite realistically. Though even with a few mistakes here and there you can possibly get gold as the time is set gratefully.

Brisban Wildlands

Well so much about grateful time. We're starting to get a smaller window for gold now depending on how many mistakes you make. This one is considered the hardest one by people and track-wise, that's correct. However, due to the time window for gold, I do not consider this one the hardest but instead, the most time consuming one. This is the biggest and longest of the races and has many places that are mean, especially the corner at the Thaumacore Inquiry Center [&BFoAAAA=]^[3]. The end of the track through the Lionshead Outcrops is also tough. Another down, but there are a lot of points you can get stuck on, such as bushes and whatnot. There are some tricks though where you can use jumps to gain endurance through tricks to get faster endurance that way.

Snowden Drifts

Last but not least the one I consider the hardest. This is an extremely short race track but the timing is extremely tight. If it doesn't go nearly perfect you can easily pass on the gold time. Note that you do need to use two boosts at the start to negate the speed loss of uphill rolling, you need to get enough endurance to boost before the endurance refresher later on the track and you need to boost after the drift after the second bridge you cross. Additionally, depending on where you drift, there you might lift off the ground failing to get the angle to stay on track and losing control of the drift and beetle. Also, don't miss the last bridge.. that hurts. Some trees hate you, haha. So, many obstacles, endurance control, tight time, small passages, and drifts on tricky terrain. Yes, I consider this one the hardest.

Overall Difficulty Ranking

Well, to recap I would say:

1. Snowden Drifts
2. Brisban Wildlands
3. Mount Maelstrom
4. Domain of Kourna
5. Diessa Plateau
6. Gendarran Fields
7. Mad Kings Raceway (assuming you chill through it with another mount)
8. Kessex Hills

There is to say that this is my own opinion trying to weight the features and challenges each track brings with it. So there may be differences in the ranking.

Next Post Already Planned

So, I wanted this post to be about how many races you need to do or how many days it takes you only doing it daily but this post has gotten too big already. This means I'm going to split it into two posts instead. I hope you enjoy this one nonetheless. I'm probably going to write the next post tomorrow.

^[1] https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/61676/game-update-notes-november-26-2018

^[2] https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mad_King's_Raceway

^[3] https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Thaumacore_Inquiry_Center

Goodbye, WildStar!

"Greetings Sapient beings."

~Caretaker from WildStar

is a quote that I took from WildStar. It's one of many quotes that I enjoyed in WildStar.

Good Bye, WildStar

Since today, November the 28th 2018, the WildStar servers were stopped. They've been running since the 3rd of June 2014.^[1] That's a total of 26 days 5 months and 4 years. I've been playing it since the head starts with only one big pause and I don't want it to be nothing. WildStar might not have been a perfect game, no game is perfected. There also might have been a lot of mistakes Carbine did, but WildStar did things right too and I want to tell you the reason I played it, why I think it has some aspects that are really great and what we can learn from it.

Why Did I Play WildStar? 

At first, I didn't want to play WildStar. I'm not a fan of Sci-fi or Science fiction games in comparison to medieval games. That's the reason why I play Guild Wars 2 instead of WildStar, why I play Terraria instead of Starbound or why I play Minecraft instead of Space Engineers, etc.. Well, I don't hate Sci-fi or science fiction. Empire Earth is a game that starts in the medieval and goes through the epochs into the future. I enjoy that, but space itself... meh. Yet, WildStar plays almost completely on a planet with a few space missions here and there. With this barrier removed there was nothing in the way for me. "But you're playing Guild Wars 2. Why switch?", is a good question. Something was missing in Guild Wars 2. At the time I was playing triple trouble was the second hardcore boss they added. Fractals of the Mists has gotten boring over time and raids didn't exist. I am one of the players who yearn for difficulty. Even now I might complain and get angry at my fails, still, the reward is greater than the anger if the difficulty is implemented correctly. This is exactly what WildStar promised. It promised to be a difficult game for hardcore raiders. I'm not a raider, but I get the basic idea behind it and difficult? Yeah, I'm in!

WildStar's Approach to Difficulty

I'm fascinated at the idea of this and at the same time a little disappointed they didn't go through more with it to the end. WildStar uses a telegraph system. This means each and every attack that is not target based uses a telegraph. This allows you to mark the area in which enemies or bosses attack. You know exactly - before - where the damage or area of effect will be. This allows you to perfectly avoid damage as long as you don't have the enemies aggro since the auto attacks can't necessarily be avoided. Furthermore, the first boss of the first dungeon I've seen makes me notice something. The number of telegraphs, the number of safe spots, most of the arena was covered. This really reminded me of bullet hell games. That's actually really awesome. How many 3D games actually implement the idea of bullet hells? Even though WildStar's punishment was hard. You either stand right or you're as good as dead, but you know what you died on. "Don't stand in the red!", is a famous quote you might hear very often in games that use telegraph systems - completely or partially.

So Where Did It Fail?

There are probably many reasons why WildStar ultimately failed, which was revealed over time. Promises that weren't kept from the game developer, complete rework before release, mistakes in the stat system and complete reworks after release, weekly server maintenances, requiring high amount of players for raiding (starting with 40 decreased to 20 everywhere), organizational issues of Carbine and the publish NCSoft, etc.. One of the issues I wanna talk about is something that could be a negative precedent case. 

Difficult Can Work Though

WildStar had its goal to be a difficult hardcore game. Over multiple years, especially triple-A companies avoided developing difficult games. The reason for this is that difficult games don't sell as well as games that work kinda like "everyone wins". Additionally, for an MMORPG, the hardcore community may not be big enough to keep an MMORPG running. Especially since you can't suit every taste there is out there. Does that mean there will never be a difficult or hardcore MMORPG? Yes and no. While I don't think an MMORPG that only focuses on hard and difficult content works, I do believe that it's possible to create an MMORPG that has a casual base and expands with difficult content on top of that. Even better when they implement a difficulty curve that raises the player bases skill level.

WildStar Is No Example For MMORPGs Not Being Worth It

You might, or might not have realized it. The amount of released MMORPGs is rather scarce in the past years. The giant World of Warcraft is still alive and many MMORPGs were stopped. Resulting in a decrease in published MMORPGs. However, WildStar is not an example of there not being the possibility of having a successful MMORPG. As I already mentioned, there were a lot of mistakes done in WildStar that ultimately resulted in its death. That has nothing to do with it being an MMORPG aside from the MMO part. That's similar to making a Dark Souls MMO. It doesn't work as the community is not big enough. MMOs are one of the games that actually need to cater to different audiences and speak to as many people as possible.

With this being said. If you plan to make an MMORPG, don't make another World of Warcraft clone and don't repeat the mistakes that were done. Learn from the mistakes and build on top of them. 

Remember WildStar

I want people to remember WildStar as an example of the good and bad points it had so that we as game developers can learn from the mistakes and apply the improvements or good aspects. I don't know about you but my goal is to improve MMORPGs for players to have an even better experience.

Also, don't forget that WildStar is one of the games that didn't go with the "Ranger" and "Mage" classes. Breaking from the standard.

With all that being said. Thanks to Carbine and NCSoft for making this experience possible despite the bad things that happened. I really enjoyed all the years and it was an awesome experience. Now I can only hope for another MMORPG that learns from the mistakes and improves on it or that Guild Wars 2 expands their content into the direction of more difficult content further. We'll see what the future holds. 

Goodbye, WildStar! May your work be found as an inspiration for further games!

^[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=wildstar%20release%20date