Default Mod syndrome harming spring

[SwiftSpear]

KDR nailed it, as usual, when he described BADSD syndrome. This is not in any way BA-, DSD-, or spring-specific. I've seen this in Starcraft (Big Game Hunters anyone?), Quake (dm4/dm6 - the game is what? 15? and they still play those maps), Quake 2 (q2dm1 for life!), Quake3 (pro-q3dm6, ztn3dm1), CPMA (cpm3), CS (de_dust)... and that's only the games I've played. I think the reason is that players are lazy bastards and don't want to try new things once they reach their local fun/skill/whatever matters to them maximum. Granted, the positive feedback loop that makes starting games easier because everybody knows what to expect is an important factor, too.

No one plays BGH any more. No one even plays Lost temple any more.

Ya, absolutely, in online games there's always a most popular map/mode/mod whatever. The only point of contention is that it's unchangeable. It is changeable.

[Tribulexrenamed]

Every day it takes 2x the previous day's spamming in main to get people to play a different mod, thus solving the problem once and for all.

ONCE AND FOR ALL

[imbaczek]

No one plays BGH any more. No one even plays Lost temple any more.

Haven't played it for at least 5 years, please excuse me

[Neuralize]

Man, too bad it would be so much work to make a clone of BA with all the names changed and a different art direction. That would be a pretty good solution to this whole debacle. It has to be a direct clone though, no funky excursions in the world of lua or whatnot. People would have to be able to transition seamlessly.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Eh, I disagree with KDR.

But first, I don't think the TA IP is abandonware. Chris Taylor made it quite clear that he wanted to get hold of it for a sequel, but was unsuccessful, which is why he created the Supreme Commander franchise. That means that someone out there wanted an exhorbitant fee for the TA IP as late as ~2005.

Anyway, onto KDR's post. I agree that mods need to be easy to pick up and fun to play for nubs. If they are too complicated, people will just not bother.

However, I disagree with the idea of dumbing down games to make them more approachable. It is my belief that if you make a fun game with plenty of depth, the nubs will have fun either way. Assuming you've got a fairly supportive community, they will play their own noobish games, with build time rules, using all the wrong units, etc. However, once they get better, your game will have the depth required to satisfy the more competitive players.

However, if you approach it from the other way around, and make a game that is very easy to play, very forgiving, but also more simple with less depth to it (ie: 'dumbed down'), then the nubs will have fun, sure - but you won't encourage competitive play. The competitive players will go elsewhere. And really, it's competitive players that define a game, that push it's boundaries, and so on.

Basically, either way noobs will have fun, if your game is reasonably easy to pick up the basics for, and there's lots of explosions and so on, assuming there are enough other noobs for them to play.

However, I think the crux is actually the dichotomy between having a game that is simple to pick up, but complex in it's available decisions. It needs to be intuitive, but deep.

I think a mistake many people make is that they think by adding extra complexity they are proportionately increasing the depth. This is not what I am saying people should do. You just have to think hard about the game you're making.

A good example, for me anyway, is Shogun Total War vs the later iterations of the TW series. STW had a very limited unit set - about 8 different types of forces you could build total. Its battle map was very simple - like Risk. As such, it was very easy to pick up - but with that simple ruleset, it had very complex gameplay, and was one of the best, most strategic games I have ever played.
Later iterations decided to 'improve' the game by adding heaps of extra stuff. They added hundreds of new unit types, lots of different abilities, made the battlemap huge, made it 3D, etc etc. They increased it's complexity several fold. However, in terms of actual gameplay they had dumbed it down. It was far harder to pick up, because you had to learn hundreds of different units and abilities and so on - but in the actual gameplay, there were less strategic decisions for you to make. By adding extra fluff, they had dumbed down the game.

Another example of a 'simple, easy to pick up game' is chess. The ruleset is fairly simple, but there's a whole range of depth that derives from it.

So, I disagree with KDR that people should dumb down their games and ignore the competitive player in order to become more popular. I think the games should simply work extremely hard at keeping their games intuitive and easy to pick up - but this does not have to be at the expense of competitive and elite gamers.

[KDR_11k]

That's what Sony and Microsoft thought and why they're now being crushed by a "crummy console for non-gamers".

One problem with depth is that using it tends to be necessary to play, turning it into complexity too. In a multiplayer environment you have to employ all the tricks you can. It's even worse when the game balance requires using the depth to get some things done like one unit type being too strong/weak in weak play and needing advanced tricks to be balanced.

Honestly I don't think developing competitive play is that important. Compeitive play will find its niches anyway, you can worry about that later, first you need to actually get players. Besides, even the good players will take some time to figure out how exactly to break the game, plenty of time to fix that later.

It's more about design focus, most mods are designed for competition first and "the nubs can have fun too" when they really should be designed for nubs with the competition being a secondary concern. There's also the issue of pride, many developers want to stay with their vision even when the userbase wants something else.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Well, I guess that's where we diverge in opinion, then.

I find 90% of games on the Wii to have about 3 hours worth of gameplay in them, and really just passing curiosities. The main game I've spent any real amount of time with is mario kart, which I just found a pale shadow of the former mario kart games. A lot more accessible, but I had beaten the championship on the hardest level within the first 15 minutes of playing. I was also playing with a bunch of people who were definitely not 'gamers'. They picked the game up quickly (Score one for wii), and were enjoying themselves - but I wasn't. There was little to no actual skill involved in the game - infact, coming in the top 3 was the last thing you wanted to do for any duration of the game except the last 20 seconds. They had removed the impact of skill on the game in order to 'level' the playing field (and thereby make it 'more accessible').

I think as soon as you bend over for the sort of mass-market popularity contests that the most succesful games do today, you really give up what got me into games in the first place. Not only that, but you open yourself up to the fickle consumerism that typically goes hand-in-hand with a mass-market appeal.

I don't think you cut out your market by making your game have depth. Certainly you won't appeal to everyone, but if you try to make everyone happy, you'll fail on all accounts. And if you try to appeal to the lowest common denominator you get Brittney Spears instead of Miles Davis. Equally, I don't think depth by inference means 'complex and hard to pick up'.

[hunterw]

mario kart, which I just found a pale shadow of the former mario kart games.

There was little to no actual skill involved in the game - infact, coming in the top 3 was the last thing you wanted to do for any duration of the game except the last 20 seconds. They had removed the impact of skill on the game in order to 'level' the playing field (and thereby make it 'more accessible').

u sure u played the old mario karts?

[AF]

The old mario karts are classics.

[Otherside]

old mario karts own

n64 mariokart is my faiv

i agree with warlord being at front = just asking to get pwnd by superior items like bullet bill / blue shell

and being further back but close of the pack is better because you have a higher chance of getting these items and insta win at last 20 seconds

tho this item thing is in all mariokart games its why more evident and unfair in mariokart wii

[El Capitano]

Let's see...what are the two giants in the RTS world? Starcraft and the C&C series, I guess. C&C is as simple as it gets, it's still built around the tank rush. However, Starcraft, which has three completely different races, rules the roost. Sure, it doesn't have that many units, but think back to the days where the Zergling rush ruled supreme. So many people whining on the forums day in, day out. Still, it's the most played RTS in the world. However, its down to many reasons that it's heavily played:
* It'll run on everything. Fuck, the DS has the power to run it if it was ported. Thus, poor Asians with crappy computers can still run it fine. Blizzard always makes this design choice and it has always paid off.
* It's really, really well balanced. This is actually important because it's what keeps people playing. If the game wasn't balanced, it would decend into cheese-fests online and even new-to-moderate players would get annoyed because tactic-of-the-month spreads really quickly.
* It has an engaging single player mode to teach you the units and the various races.

It's not one factor that makes a game popular, it's many. In regards to Spring, BA largely wins due to momentum, IMO. It's not a bad game, all things considered, but it basically took over from AA, which itself is an evolution of the uberhack from TA (IIRC), giving it its starting audience. Other mods can build a niche and CA proves that. A couple of months ago, it could be tricky to get a game, but these days, I can get a full game with a lot of specs every evening. There's even enough players to fill up another autohost, if people would take a hint and stop speccing in the hope that somebody drops

Still, to make this wall of text even longer, there are truths in what people say about CA. Making every unit viable in a wide range of circumstances makes it slightly less newbie friendly. Making every tech level available from the start gives you a very wide range of options, but that can hurt newer players, especially when they're used to T1->T2->T3 in nearly every other game. Still, the wide variety of options and starting stances make it a very fun game to watch, especially with the greater emphasis on skirmishing rather than trench warfare, which is what BADSD normally turns into.

[TheFatController]

About all this IP/Copywrite debate - I've never really payed any attention to it as I own both OTA and The Core Contingency and still posses the original CD's...

In my mind I'm not violating anything by playing BA with the content on those discs especially because in both original games there is no EULA or agreement on the load screens or in readme.txt or anywhere (plus the original creators wanted it to be as modifiable and open as possible as part of the original appeal of the game). In this regard I don't feel guilty playing BA myself.

It's not the responsibility of the creators of the Spring engine to ensure that every BA player owns OTA - they're all individually liable. Not that Atari will ever chase it up, the most they'd do is order any mention of Total Annihilation to be removed from the main website if they cared at all.

[Pxtl]

I think StarCraft's big success, beyond its balance and art, is that it is exactly as complicated as a good gamer can handle. Units stand-still while attacking, so you don't have to worry about the massive tactical implications of fire-while-moving. Most units can see as far as they can shoot, so you only really need to do spotting for artillery. There are, with few exceptions generally only three ranges - artillery, ranged, and close-combat, so you don't have to worry about managing ranges too much, about whether unit X outranges unit Y. You don't have to worry about death-explosions chaining or the enemy cleverly self-destructing something and taking out the attackers. The game keeps unit counts low enough to manage. You also don't have to frantically manage a geometric growth of your resource units, as setting up a resource outpost is so expensive and simple that you either do it or you don't. I don't see the game being any worse for any of those features, and they free up the player to focus on the tactical operation of commanding combat units and choosing where to spend their resources.

Meanwhile, in addition to all that complexity, each of BA's laundry-list of units is roughly as complex as a Starcraft unit. Marines do reduced damage to small targets, and can be "stimmed" to boost their speed and attack rate. Guardians do heightened damage to naval units, and can be set on "High Trajectory" where they have lower accuracy and rate-of-fire, but greater blast-radius. Except that BA's units are so much more numerous and varied, and have the added gameplay complexities that I mentioned before.

Realistically, there are only maybe 2 or 3 players who truly "grok" BA, and that's a huge flaw in the game and its clones.

[Sleksa]

I am a n00b

QQ

[Teutooni]

Sure, BA has lots of units. There are 12(ish?) factories per side, each with numerous units. That's a lot of learning, if they were all unique like starcraft's. However, most factories have a builder, typically a fast raid unit, an assault unit, AA and artillery. Once you know how to use a stumpy, learning what a reaper does is easy. A large part of the unit system is easy to learn and intuitive. ~~

[KDR_11k]

Sleksa: You've summed it up wrong. "Most people are noobs" is the correct summary. And yes, that's the whole point, most of your users are noobs and you can either embrace them or alienate them. Most new mods seem to choose the alienate option.

I think as soon as you bend over for the sort of mass-market popularity contests that the most succesful games do today, you really give up what got me into games in the first place.

That's the point I was making. You, the mod author, are not representative of the market and by choosing what appeals to YOU over what appeals to the masses you push your game into a niche.

Of course you can't please everyone but you can aim to please the most people. The problem is that "most people" usually doesn't include yourself and you're very likely to limit the appeal of what you're making to groups that include you.

(I haven't liked a Mario Kart after the SNES version where items were still fairly limited in power)

As for Starcraft, it's still really damn simple compared to the *A mods.

[Warlord Zsinj]

KDR, perhaps if you judge the worth of a mod by the sheer amount of players playing it.

The whole point of this thread was not that people want other mods to become the dominant mod, simply that smaller mods are being 'muscled out' of the chance to create their own self-perpetuating communities by the larger, already-established BA mod. A self-perpetuating community, in my mind, is one where the net amount of players is stable or growing, and there are enough players for people to find games most of the time. Which is where my request to have player funneling came in.

Of course my own opinions are going to seep into the mod I'm designing. That's the whole point of the creative process. To produce purely what the mass market wants is essentially whoring yourself out in order for some sort of self-edifying egotistical gratification (seeing as there's no money to be made here) had by winning a popularity contest. I want plenty of people to play my game, but I'm not going to do it at the expense of my own personal ideals in game-making. Nor do I think I am ruling my game out of the race simply because I take this stance.

If you try to please everyone - or, you try to piss the least amount of people off / scare the least amount of people off, you will have a very average product. The average consumer is exactly that - average. At the top of the bell-curve. In order to make a product that moves beyond such blandness, you need to take a risk and target a market. You'll piss some people off, but corner a market that is more likely to be approving, and loyal to your product - what is needed to create a loyal self-perpetuating community.

[KingRaptor]

Isn't RTS an inherently niche genre anyway? It's also the absolute second-worst genre if you're looking to "dumb down" your game - its entire basis is depth and strategy, second only to TBS.

Newbies and casual players will just gravitate to SP (which we don't really support at the moment though) and MP games with their own set up rules like "no unit x" and "no rush y mins" - the developer can afford to concentrate on top tier play where balance actually matters; if the artwork is flashy and there isn't an excessive disconnect between how the game is played and low vs. high level, things will work out just fine, like they have for every RTS ever made.

[El Capitano]

Try to please everyone and you'll end up pleasing nobody. This is an open source game and it actually has quite a decent following, all things considered. Don't throw that away in the name of mass market appeal.

[smoth]

Warlord I disagree on the competitive point. Any one that ever argues that spring can be competitive is wrong. Spring is open source meaning that is is by the grace of luck that we have not seen true hacked spring.exes. Lua allows players automate areas of the game in ways that may circumvent what the designer had in mind and through this circumvent the competitive environment with unfair advantages.

Whatever countermeasure we come up with will ultimately be worked around because the code is open.

As far as people trying to be popular for ego reasons. Is it not egotistical also to completely dominate the mod with only your concept of what you want to see.? You have to consider that user input might actually augment the game and you do. So I don't buy that you entirely make it to what you designed. The whole start a project and make it ONLY what you envision to be is waterfall and not agile. Better projects evolve through iterations, sure it is important to have a few goals but to presume that the design is perfect in it's inception is the sort of assumption a fool would make. again, I know that you don't do this but I wanted to say something.