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aoanla

"Rich get Richer"/"Poor get Poorer" mechanics in games.

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I've been thinking about this a bit after the E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy discussion over in BenX's FPS Playing thread.

Obviously, all games with a competitive/challenge element have the core result that if you're good at them, you're going to get further in them / finish levels with more health etc.
Some games, however, seem to more interested in pushing this further: usually by giving "better" players bonuses, which often make the game easier in the future if used, although sometimes by punitively penalising a poor player for repeatedly doing badly by making the game harder.

I'm thinking of things from Rogue Legacy's economic model (where buying upgrades between generations needs you to be good enough to earn enough money to buy upgrades... which you need less if you're good enough to earn money), through the unintentional case of Shovel Knight / Dark Souls etc's "you lose credits when you die but you can pick them up again if you don't die before you get to them" (which death obviously is more likely to happen if you're poor at the game... and you probably need the upgrades you can buy more if you're that bad), through to things like E.Y.E.'s (apparently) "if you die multiple times, you can get permanent stat debuffs" mechanic.

[I personally particularly dislike Rogue Legacy's case here, as prices also rise when you *do* buy something, so it's particularly easy to end up in a situation where you literally can't get any further, because you're at your skill peak, and can't afford any upgrades that might help. That happened to me before getting to the second boss...] 

Obviously, this matters more to me as an admittedly poor player, but does anyone have a good word to say about this kind of mechanical approach? Is it justified? Does it encourage you to get better - and what about people who just can't get "better enough"? [Does a game have to be possible for everyone to complete?]

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I really don't know if EYE fits into this. I've played it for 10 hours or so and I didn't notice any of those fatal wounds. I think your stats are in the 10-20 range to start with anyway, then you potentially lose 1?

 

I really want to write a better defence of why EYE is a good game worth checking out but I don't think this is the thread for it. 

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Well, E.Y.E. does also have the sort-of-related mechanical feature that Deus Ex had (your skills influence how much help you get at challenges - including, for example, how accurately you can aim - which you could also just be bad at IRL too), but I'm trying to stay away from that this thread :) And do feel free to make an E.Y.E. thread, I think there's a range of opinion here...

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I've always found killstreak rewards in modern multiplayer games annoying in this way. I don't play them enough anymore to know if they've got better in recent Call of Duties, but the idea that the best players should also be showered with little presents that allow them to maintain or further that dominance is something I always found confounding and frustrating.

 

Games like Titanfall and Overwatch attempt to remedy this -- everyone gets to have a go in the big robot, or use their super ability from time to time -- but I don't know if they go far enough. Overwatch gets credit in my book because it feels less intensely competitive; even when you're losing on a public server, it still feels like a stupid, goofy day out with your buddies. But too often I just feel like the game is throwing me a bone. It's like in Destiny, where you get a little onscreen boop for killing the guy who just killed you, or for coming back from an awful streak of deaths – I feel like the game is smiling and patting me on the shoulder in a way that just feels patronising. So I don't play those games very often!

 

I was never a great fan of the Rogue Legacy approach; progress in that game seemed so tightly tied to upgrading your character over the generations, and seemed to have relatively little to do with skill. Shovel Knight is better balanced, I think: expert players can safely ignore upgrades if they want, while others can sort of fudge their way through the game, even if they don't manage to collect much gold along the way. But it is still a very hard game, relatively speaking.

 

The question of whether games ought to be accessible to everyone regardless of skill level is a bit more complex. Perhaps my head wants to say yes but my heart wants to say no? Also the question of difficulty is just as often to do with knowing how to manage controls and UI than it is health bars and stat boosts. I know my partner would like to play games like Firewatch and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but she can't handle moving a character around from a first-person perspective; those games would be well served by alternative control methods that don't require twin stick/WASD experience. 

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MGSV will let you make things easier but give you a Chicken Hat.

 

I believe that Armoured Core does a really interesting thing in this regard, worth reading through this thread and looking for discussions on how to unlock crazy weapons by losing repeatedly:

You should also just read that thread because it is great. Lork should seriously consider making this into a Youtube series or a book or something.

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I think I'm counting the effect in XCOM as being more towards the "this is how games of this genre work" end of the spectrum though. It's totally true that being bad at the tactical game also makes the strategic game harder (and vice versa), but snowballing feels slightly different to me in this kind of game. 

(I guess it's hard to draw hard lines that everyone can agree on as to where these mechanics become egregious, but XCOM feels like it's mostly throwing "Incident Pits" at you - situations which are, separately, not that bad to handle, but will quickly escalate if you repeatedly mishandle them several times in a row.  

Also, these kind of things are always worse, for me, in games where you can end up just "stuck", rather than just "losing quickly", but that's a personal thing - I'd rather, if a game has to do this to you, have XCOM's rapid endgame slide, than end up in the distressing deadlock of Rogue Legacy where you can still play, but you're just not going to ever progress.)

 

 

-Re the point about controller familiarity etc being a factor, from marginalgloss, I totally agree. There's a whole bunch of games that "need controllers" that I basically am never going to be good at because I missed out on building strong muscle memory for twinstick controllers back when I had more neural plasticity. But I'm not sure how you fix that at all - some games are so tightly wedded to a particular control scheme that moving them off that would lose something.

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I'm going to approach this from the opposite angle.  Take a game like Mario Kart.  There's a generous amount of rubber banding such that it's difficult to maintain a significant lead.  While this can be seen as providing a continuous challenge and preventing a player from getting bored, it can also be seen as punishing high skill.  If I spend the entire race in first place only to get taken out by a blue shell at the last second and finish in fourth, something that is entirely outside of my control, is that fair?

 

In a game like Mario Kart which is supposed to be more about goofy fun for all, it's probably fine.  In a game like Rogue Legacy, the difficulty is supposed to be inherent to the game's design.  I suppose it's a matter of negative or positive reinforcement.  Ideally I think good games have a mix of both.  I personally didn't have a problem with Rogue Legacy's method as it kept pushing me to improve (I agree it could be better but I went to NG+++ before I stopped playing).

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Right, but I think the other difference there is multiplayer v single player challenge.

 

Mario Kart wants to keep all the individual players "in the game" as long as possible. (Conversely, Team Fortress 2 maps are intentionally designed to promote exactly the Rich get Richer effect - rather than have a game drag on by making it harder to assault the later control points, for example, respawn rates etc are adjusted so the losing team finds it harder, leading to matches ending in a rush.) The balance here is between simultaneously, in the same contest, giving the more skilled players the win they deserve, whilst also allowing the lower skilled players to feel like they're not just being brutally steamrollered continuously - the "challenge" comes from other people.

 

Adversarial single player games have a different set of tradeoffs, as the only challenge comes from the game itself as designed. The difficulty with Poor get Poorer mechanics here is that they're not doing anything other than punishing people who are already bad (or making things easier for people who are already good) - there's no simultaneous "opponent" who's getting a converse effect to balance things out, as in TF2. 

(And, indeed, they can make the game effectively impossible, or unpleasant, to complete, for a sufficiently poor player, which seems actively negative for the developer.)

The "this encourages you to get better" effect only pays off if the subject is capable of getting as better as you expect them to; or at least, capable of doing so whilst they still retain any enjoyment or satisfaction from playing a game which is actively trying to make your life harder. Although, I would argue that "encouraging" someone to get better by... making things even harder... is a quixotic approach. [This isn't even negative reinforcement - giving someone a "shock" for doing something wrong doesn't increase the difficulty of doing something right subsequently.]
(I'd been bashing my head against the second zone of Rogue Legacy, whilst being unable to earn enough money to buy any upgrades at all, for several hours before I packed it in, for example. I deadlocked in the "second set" of Shovel Knights' zones (Treasure/Plague/Mole?) for similarly hours before deciding that I wasn't going to get anywhere - partly because I just couldn't afford anything, but also because after repeating each level tens of times, I really wasn't convinced I would improve, and certainly wasn't having "fun" anymore.)

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This is something that can often happen in grand strategy games, but its probably in the part of the game genre. Winning or losing can totally snowball. There are things that I have never been able to pull off in Hearts of Iron, like surviving WWII as Czechoslovakia. Part of the fun of that game is racing the clock. I was recently attempting to rebuild the Austro-Hungarian empire and teamed up with Nazi Germany to do it. Things were going super well, we had taken France and were doing quite well against the USSR, however we hadn't gone to war with Poland yet. Germany decided in the middle of our push towards Moscow that it was time and we suddenly had an enemy in the middle of our lines. I ignored the Polish war and pushed towards Moscow as hard as possible. By the time I had finally knocked the USSR out of the war Polish territory was loaded with Allied troops and Germany had lost Berlin. I joined the Polish war and was starting to build a fleet to allow for invasion of the UK when the US joined the war. I haven't finished that game yet, but I can't see us winning at this point. Might be fun to see how it all falls apart though.

But I have had games where I was able to turn into a steamroller and conquer the whole world. Its a huge problem in Civilization games, you often get to a point where you are the undisputed superpower and the game becomes very not fun at that point.

 

Stellaris has tried to solve this issue by having end game crises, robot uprisings, extra galactic or extra dimensional invaders, ancient stagnant empires waking up and using super advanced tech to steamroll everything. They don't work 100% of the time but can provide a good challenge.

I think it can be an issue in games with unlocks, people who have been playing for a long time have all the best stuff and it puts a newbie at a severe disadvantage.

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For a competitive multiplayer game, I'm completely in favor of snowballing mechanics provided they are in the service of closing the game out faster.

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56 minutes ago, sclpls said:

For a competitive multiplayer game, I'm completely in favor of snowballing mechanics provided they are in the service of closing the game out faster.

Its something i mostly experience in board games, but there are times where its obvious i will lose so i start trying to end the game as quickly as possible

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I actually think the board game analogy is probably why this feels more expected in grand strategy games, too - given that they're basically big boardgames themselves. (XCom and XCom2 especially so.)

 

For single player games divorced from that genre, though...

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It is an interesting issue to try and deal with because there are so many angles to come at it from.

 

Take Rocket League as an example of a game that doesn't use either mechanic. Each player has the same gameplay tools to use and the result comes down to a combination of skill, concentration, experience, luck etc. Win or lose you regularly get item drops or loot boxes but they are all cosmetic rewards and have no bearing on the gameplay itself. When you move over to competitive matches you get a rank and it goes up and down as you win and lose and it seeks to match you with players of a similar skill level. Thus moving down the ranks isn't really a punishment for losing but more of a finding your place where you can be competitive regularly.

 

This approach works fantastically for Rocket League. But would it work in a game like Destiny? In Destiny there are supposed to be differences between the weapon types (Shotgun, Auto rifle, Sniper etc) and the Exotics in particular are supposed to feel special and unique compared to all the others. If they were all basically the same and just treated as cosmetic items the game would lose it's entire driving force for players which is to find cool stuff and use it.

 

RNGesus plays his role here because while better players will get more chances to find better gear, level up quicker, complete missions faster etc, it is randomised so that everyone will get a cool thing drop eventually. So that helps but then on the flip side if I play a match in PVP and do really well even though my team lost and I get nothing while some guy at the bottom of the scoreboard gets an awesome item reward it feels like a right kick in the teeth.

 

Grand Strategy games are a good test for these mechanics because surely you should be able to take enjoyment out of seeing how badly wrong your plans go as well as seeing them crush all who stand in your way. Hearts of Iron is a good example of exactly that. I've often enjoyed watching my grand plan sink faster than the Bismarck just as much as I've enjoyed some of my most ruthlessly efficient victories.

 

I suppose an argument needs to be made that the experience of playing (win or lose) should count for something in games that utilise the rich get richer mechanics. 

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On 7/14/2017 at 11:02 AM, Cordeos said:

Its something i mostly experience in board games, but there are times where its obvious i will lose so i start trying to end the game as quickly as possible

 

Yeah exactly. It is a greater sin of strategy games to have a "dead man standing" design where you've definitely lost, but you still have to play out a bunch of turns. Better to get it over with.

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Right, so almost everyone approves of the mechanics in settings where there's some kind of opponent, playing under similar rules/context to you - strategy games, board games, and multiplayer FPSen are all cases where you're either competing against other humans, or against AIs controlling agents like you. 

 

My initial concern was over the exporting of this into single-player asymmetric contest style games - like platformers, for example - where the "opponent" is more in the way of a constructed challenge, rather than an AI competing directly with you. 

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1 hour ago, aoanla said:

Right, so almost everyone approves of the mechanics in settings where there's some kind of opponent, playing under similar rules/context to you - strategy games, board games, and multiplayer FPSen are all cases where you're either competing against other humans, or against AIs controlling agents like you. 

 

My initial concern was over the exporting of this into single-player asymmetric contest style games - like platformers, for example - where the "opponent" is more in the way of a constructed challenge, rather than an AI competing directly with you. 

I didn't think about that, one of the things I dislike about platformers is that many still use lives or have annoying checkpointing. There was a puzzle late in the first Little Big Planet that I was stuck on for a long time. If I failed it 4 times I would have to replay the whole level just to get back to that spawner. I quit the game for a year after failing it repeatedly. Its the game saying, oh you're having trouble with one part? Lets make you replay the entire level just to return to the one part you are actually stuck on. (This is probably why I will never like the Souls games)

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I hadn't thought of it in the context of platformers. I'm not super well versed in platformers because the hardcore ones are beyond me. I can finish the Metroid games, or like Limbo, but games like Oni and Guacamelee both eventually hit a difficulty spike that I lost patience at attempting to surpass. I don't think the reward structures of those games is really what I would take issue with for the most part so much as certain strains of them eventually demand a sort of mechanical precision I'm not necessarily interested in engaging with.

 

That being said, I agree that the gradual introduction of permadeath and Dark Souls style penalties into platformers doesn't feel good to me. For example, Rogue Legacy was a game that really didn't impress me. I didn't enjoy it on a mechanical level, which is the most important aspect of a platformer, and I didn't appreciate the unlock system to me which felt more like a grind to me than the sort of thing that I would experience in a roguelike (a genre I mostly enjoy). When I first heard about Dead Cells I initially ignored it because of the Rogue Legacy comparisons. When I finally played it I found I actually did like it a lot more just because the controls felt a lot better to me. Unfortunately the grinding for unlocks system still rubs me the wrong way so it isn't clear to me that I'll get much more enjoyment out of the game since I've hit a point where it seems like to make any progress I'm going to have to repeat a lot of content that feels rote to me at this point. How far I go also seems dependent on a lot of RNG too, which is not great.

 

I've also been playing a lot of Hollow Knight recently, which I think is excellent, and probably my favorite modern platformer. Unfortunately it also does the Dark Souls thing of you have to return to the spot you die to retrieve your money. This seems baffling to me for a ton of reasons:

 

1. The economy of the game works very differently to Souls. In HK you aren't spending your money to level up or buy lots of little items. There's basically a fairly fixed amount of stuff to buy in the world, and after you buy all of those things money in the game is worthless.

 

2. It typically isn't challenging to get back to where you died since super tough enemies and platforming sections are rare.

 

3. In the rare situations where it is difficult and you get stuck somewhere where you are at risk of dying again it is easy enough to cheese the system by exiting and re-entering the game where you will respawn at a safer location.

 

So basically despite borrowing this mechanic from Dark Souls, it operates in a very different game environment, and so it doesn't feel good the way it does in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls I feel a sense of risk, tension, and excitement about trying to recover lost souls. In Hollow Knight it just feels like a tax on my time as a player.

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