Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[Zetor]

At 50% hit and 10 damage on average hit your will hit for 5 damage/round. At 55% hit and 11 damage on average hit, you will hit for 6.05 damage/round. +1 sword gives you a 20% increase in damage. The reason why you might not see this increase is because its hidden by RNG but if you played a gaming session where your friend deals 20% more damage you will notice it fairly quick.

That's a nice theory. Here's the same fight in practice:

(enemy has 60 hp)

basic sword: hit miss miss hit hit miss hit miss miss hit hit, dead
+1 sword: hit miss hit hit miss miss hit miss hit miss hit, dead

your 5% extra to hit simply doesn't get much opportunity to register. Your +1 damage makes no effective difference -- whether you do 50 or 55 damage to the enemy in your five first hits, is still just as alive and kicking until the total damage meets the 60 hp threshold. And when you do meet it that 6 hp of damage extra you did while at it with your better weapon makes no difference whatsoever.

If we take a typical 10% health and damage increase and put it into a PvP fight, the following happens. Person A has 100 health and deals 10damage/round, person B has 110 health and deals 11 damage/round. After 9 rounds person A has 1 health, it takes 11 rounds for person B to die. This means that person B has 18% health left when person A goes down.

i don't think I ever was part of a PvP fight which involved lining up and then carefully trading autoattack blows until one person falls over, making sure the outcome is controlled by no factor other than the damage/hit rng.

Even so, what you get here is a situation where after 10 hits it takes the weaker person to die (because you know, 99 damage you dealt to them in 9 hits doesn't actually kill them, it will take another swing) their opponent is with 10 hp left. That's actually 9% remaning, not 18% Meaning that yes, if it wasn't for that hp increase they got along with damage bonus, the damage bonus itself made no effective difference. If you had both of them with 100 hp each then whether their weapon dealt 10 or 11 points of damage would make no difference -- they'd die together.

A weapon that does +1 damage by itself doesn't make much of a difference, especially with such low numbers as in your examples (where the advantage is lost in rounding errors). But what happens if A has 1000 hp, 100 damage per hit, 92% hit chance, 55% damage reduction and 25% crit chance while B has roughly 10% better stats (due to better gear / buffs) with 1100 hp, 110 damage per hit, 100% hit chance, 60% damage reduction and 28% crit chance? Obviously they wouldn't try to autoattack each other to death, they would be using burst abilities (e.g. "NotMortal Strike" doing damage equivalent to 5 autoattacks on a 10 second cooldown). I don't have a combat sim handy, but I'm pretty sure B would defeat A relatively effortlessly, and it would be even more pronounced with the addition of healers and other players (less incoming burst = healer can use mana-efficient heals and afford to play aggressively, while the other one has to switch to emergency heals and risk getting caught out of position, etc etc) -- even though he only had a 10% (or less) advantage in stats!

To be a bit more ontopic, I think this was also the case in SWG. I played a doctor, and I remember giving out a shitton of buffs for all health/action stats/substats that were used in conjunction with other buffs like food. Even if each of my buffs only increased a stat by 10%, the aggregate increase in character effectiveness was much higher... especially if you could reach a threshold where using your special abilities while in composite armor didn't damage your own HAM. (aaaand now I think it's time for the usual "lol, HAM" posts)

e: english is hard

[IainC]

In Eve Online most of the advanced skills add 2% per level to the base attribute to a max of +10%, players spend weeks training those skills and the pre-reqs. In any competitive arena, players generally jump through whatever hoops they need to for even a comparatively slim margin because no-one wants to lose for the sake of that 10% edge that they could have had but didn't.

[Cyrrex]

I can honestly say that a huge amount of games I really enjoyed despite them having mediocre AI, and I can't figure out any games I enjoyed because the game had great AI. When it comes to games I will settle for functionable AI.

In an fps I wish for controls that are intuitive and responsive while the layout of the map makes for interesting gameplay. I don't really mind that AI has a tendency to become obvious and in some cases its enjoyable to solve the patterns that mobs go, just as long as you don't have to deal with bullet sponge. DS/bloodborne doesn't have any spectacular AI, but it serves its function, its the tuning of the fights and responsive controls that makes those games such a popular niche.

I with rpg's would have better AI, fights usually ends up being about statistics. However, I will enjoy a good rpg even though it has mediocre ai.

The Grunts in the original Half-Life came as a pleasant surprise at the time and actually worked to give you a challenge and scare you.  I suspect, however, that was only because the AI in opponents up until that point had been so shockingly bad.

Having a Grunt fling a grenade at your camping ass was...both terrifying and gigglesome.

This reminds me actually of the original Far Cry.  That game was one of the first real games where you could really hide in the brush and use it for cover.  And then when the bad guys did it right back to you it was OMGWTFROFL.  Especially in the dark.

[tmp]

In Eve Online most of the advanced skills add 2% per level to the base attribute to a max of +10%, players spend weeks training those skills and the pre-reqs. In any competitive arena, players generally jump through whatever hoops they need to for even a comparatively slim margin because no-one wants to lose for the sake of that 10% edge that they could have had but didn't.

EVE skills get trained because it costs you nothing to do so (well ok skill books cost ISK, lol) They're passive "train and forget" improvements which don't require you to repeatedly jump through the same boring hoops just to maintain them. Some of them are also required to operate certain equipment. But around the time I played EVE it had its own share of "lol, nope" stuff that was not permanent upgrades (certain faction gear, ships and implants) which, while providing noticeable edge, wasn't going to save your bacon against three more dudes in stock ships or plain lag spike. Sure, there were some people who would get that equipment but they're relatively few.

That's ultimately the difference it boils down to -- easy, cheap, permanent improvements vs stuff which is nothing like that. If your "buffs" fall under the latter and require repetitive daily effort to obtain then the benefits they provide should be noticeably better than what you get without such effort. If you fail that, a normal person will give it a try or two but eventually conclude that you know, they don't really need this extra work for dubious gain. And the only audience who will keep jumping through these hoops (and bitch all the way while they do) gonna be the 1% "hardcore spreadsheet raiders" who convinced themselves that yes, it's totally worth it because look, charts. Which in itself should be a good indicator the balance of the system is shit.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, look at the same bonuses you get in MechWarrior Online.

Small percentages that cost a fuckload of time, XP and cash.

So I took the 'fuck that' approach.  They're utterly worthless, unless (and here's the important bit) you're GOING TO GET THEM ANYWAY.  So if you're a grinder in MWO, you'll get them and use them, but if you're not, you probably won't.

And it just widens what I like to refer to as 'The Cunty Gap'

[sam, an eggplant]

You don't necessarily get that stuff anyway. Not in a diku. If you don't raid, you always perform substantially behind those that do, and there are multiple raiding difficulties that offer increasing power levels, worth around 10% total performance per step up. Since equipment is the only way to improve your character at maximum level, this is a powerful incentive to raid.

Now raiding isn't difficult, by any means. It does consume a great deal of time (usually in a static period every night), generates unending drama, and constant wipes can be excruciatingly boring, so lots of people are either unwilling or unable to do it. Those people are dramatically less powerful than those that do.

The usual response to that is "if you don't raid you don't need that gear in the first place", but that doesn't stand up to examination. Dikus are engaging due to the prospect of constant progression, and once that progression is curtailed, the core gameplay is short-circuited and the game becomes markedly less sticky, relying on soft social connections. If those social connections are weak or dissolve, and your player can't progress their character, he quits.

None of this has anything to do with SWG, of course. Derailed bigtime!

[Malakili]

The principle of 'kill bigger, badder guys" to get "bigger badder loot" makes sense.  The problem is that in a game with raiding that creates the aforementioned divide.  You have to wonder if Dikus would do better just to leave raiding out altogether at this point and just make increasingly difficult small group content.  I realize the limitations of what you can design for 5 people compared to 25, but it isn't 2005 anymore.  I remember when WoW world firsts were big news. Not even people who raid every night care about that crap anymore.

[sam, an eggplant]

Yes, dikus absolutely should offer alternative advancement paths. PvP is technically an alternative, but that's really an entirely separate game.

So far, nobody has tried offering small-group progression content, but I don't see why that would necessarily be so different than raiding. WoW raids already scale from 10 to 30 players, if they scaled to 5 players would that solve anything? I doubt it.

[Ard]

So far, nobody has tried offering small-group progression content, but I don't see why that would necessarily be so different than raiding. WoW raids already scale from 10 to 30 players, if they scaled to 5 players would that solve anything? I doubt it.

Final Fantasy 14 does this exact thing, and is probably the main reason it still has players, other than being final fantasy.  It's raid size caps out at 8 players.  There are several non-raiding alternate gear paths.  Three months after a new raid tier comes out, they make it easier to obtain raid tier gear.  Six months after, they add in the mechanism that makes that tier easier to do in general so that pretty much everyone can do it, tosses it into the dungeon finder, and releases the new tier.  They've also been adding ways to help other people do the raids after you've gotten your weekly loot from it yourself.  They've honestly been doing a damn good job of reducing the hurdles to progression for the average player.

edit:  Oh, they also keep adding incentives to run older dungeons and raids via their dungeon finder or new crafting drops that actually mostly works

[sam, an eggplant]

WoW offers catch-up mechanisms with every major content release also, that isn't unique to FFXIV. Catch-up after 6 months or a year isn't exactly compelling.

[Ard]

I'm not saying the catch up mechanisms are.  I'm saying that they have NON raiding progression paths, along with raiding progression paths that get easier over time, while still being somewhat relavent.  

Edit:  I should also be clear, I haven't played in like six months now due to work, but when I did play, I'd generally go through 3 month cycles where I just wouldn't bother raiding because I didn't feel there was any real need to.  I was really heavy into the crafting side and could generally make nearly comparable gear.

[sam, an eggplant]

Crafting is a separate game, if you enjoy that stuff it will keep you playing. Otherwise, if you didn't have strong social connections in-game, you probably would have quit between content releases.

[Ard]

edit:  You know what, no, I'm not biting, I'm done.

[Torinak]

Onto game systems and social structure now: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/21/designing-a-living-society-in-swg-part-one/

Covers levelling, skills, power differentials, resources, crafting, and economy.

Hope to get to social stuff tomorrow, but this was foundational to talking about it.

Is it just me, or did the craptacular database performance end up torpedoing nearly every really innovative and interesting system in SWG?

It makes me sad as I remember talking to my colleagues about some of the SWG DB issues for commiseration as we fought with another of that company's databases...when we finally junked it and replaced it with a different database, we got about two orders of magnitude performance increase on less-beefy hardware and with about 1/20 of the annual costs (fully loaded engineering, hardware, DB admins, licensing costs). If we hadn't been dealing with real money, we could have boosted performance much much higher at the cost of a tiny amount of reliability under certain failure modes, or with non-real-time processing.

Some of my more remote colleagues were dealing with write loads in the millions of TPS, too, which was doable with moderately-customized open-source solutions (in 2003!) for a tiny fraction of the total cost of the commercial database system.

Come to think of it, I never encountered anyone who had good things to say about databases like the one SWG used for its first few years...

[sam, an eggplant]

SWG used Oracle, which is by far the most capable transactional database in the world. It was in 2003, and it still is today. It has zillions of knobs to twiddle to optimize performance, too. It is the best transactional database product available. It is incredibly expensive, though, and Oracle (the company) is evil.

Back in 2003... Postgres was on version 7.something, before point in time recovery and before it even supported replication. Not usable for a MMO. MySQL was version 4.0. It did statement-based replication, but no subqueries, accepted all kinds of broken-ass input without complaint, no information schema, views, triggers, cursors, and it wasn't even transaction-compliant without an external storage engine. I used it myself, I've been using MySQL since 3.23, but it was seriously primitive stuff. NoSQL DBs were a decade away.

Oracle was well over a decade ahead of the open-source alternatives back in 2003. It's still substantially ahead.

That doesn't mean it was the right choice for SWG. I have no insight into how their application was architected. But saying "SWG sucked cuz Oracle is bad" is simply not accurate. It's MMO forum twaddle.

[Torinak]

SWG used Oracle, which is by far the most capable transactional database in the world. It was in 2003, and it still is today. It has zillions of knobs to twiddle to optimize performance, too. It is the best transactional database product available. It is incredibly expensive, though, and Oracle (the company) is evil.

Back in 2003... Postgres was on version 7.something, before point in time recovery and before it even supported replication. Not usable for a MMO. MySQL was version 4.0. It did statement-based replication, but no subqueries, accepted all kinds of broken-ass input without complaint, no information schema, views, triggers, cursors, and it wasn't even transaction-compliant without an external storage engine. I used it myself, I've been using MySQL since 3.23, but it was seriously primitive stuff. NoSQL DBs were a decade away.

Oracle was well over a decade ahead of the open-source alternatives back in 2003. It's still substantially ahead.

That doesn't mean it was the right choice for SWG. I have no insight into how their application was architected. But saying "SWG sucked cuz Oracle is bad" is simply not accurate. It's MMO forum twaddle.

I'm glad you've had a more positive experience than has everyone I've ever worked with. At least now there's one data point in the positive column!

For anyone who was playing SWG after mid 2006 (when Sony Entertainment moved every game to another database platform, according to a press release), did the performance issues get any better? Did SWG or any of SOE's other games start to have new problems that were blamed on the database? I wasn't playing any SOE games in the relevant timeframe.

[sam, an eggplant]

The people you worked with either weren't DBAs or were incompetent DBAs.

SWG's problems were commonly blamed on Oracle at the time, but like I said, that was MMO forum twaddle. Oracle wasn't the problem; it was their hardware's lack of power or their chosen implementation of Oracle was wrong for their app. Oracle can do almost anything. At the time, before nosql DBs were available, Oracle was king of the world. DB2 was cheaper (IBM would give it away) and MS-SQL was easier to use, but Oracle was the most flexible and powerful.

[tmp]

Raph didn't link it here yet but the second part of the last article is up: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/22/designing-a-living-society-in-swg-part-two/

[Ironwood]

It's a doozy.  I can understand him being hesitant to post it here personally.   

[Raph]

It's a doozy.  I can understand him being hesitant to post it here personally.   

Actually, I was quite looking forward to Ironwood's reaction to the combat section in particular. :)

Am on the road, at the Crowfall offices now and then heading to Europe to do consulting gigs, so I just haven't had time to post here, is all.

I think I have one more post to go.  I will whet your appetites with the draft title: "Did SWG fail?"

[Lantyssa]

I miss my critters.

[Merusk]

I think I have one more post to go.  I will whet your appetites with the draft title: "Did SWG fail?"

Yes. It failed in the same way Zaha Hadid's Library and Learning center in Vienna, Peter Eisenmann's DAAP addition in Cincinnati, Many of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings and Rafael Viñoly's 20 Fenchurch Street in London did.

It ignored the client demands in favor of a greater ideal. While actually completed and marked as iconic, it has underlying flaws and failures of foresight that can not be denied and a designer who still hasn't learned.

[Ironwood]

It's a doozy.  I can understand him being hesitant to post it here personally.   

Actually, I was quite looking forward to Ironwood's reaction to the combat section in particular. :)

Am on the road, at the Crowfall offices now and then heading to Europe to do consulting gigs, so I just haven't had time to post here, is all.

I think I have one more post to go.  I will whet your appetites with the draft title: "Did SWG fail?"

Heh.  I put  in when I'm in no way serious.

For my part, I'm not sure I have much to say on it.  I can't exactly call myself an avid consumer of SWG due to it being a huge disaster (which you're picking apart nicely), so I can't even come from the angle of 'omg, I was horribly betrayed' or anything like that.  I don't think anything in the combat section will surprise anyone here...
What I will say is that you're actually kind of lucky that it failed your vision, because a worse fate would have been it all working as you intended, I suspect.  I am eagerly looking forward to the last part, though an alternate title might be 'Sucking The Marrow Of The Earth.'


If you're drifting round my part of Europe, feel free to claim that drink though.

[Paelos]

I'd say calling it a total failure would be petty. It failed in several respects, and succeeded in several others.

I still look upon the crafting system as one of the biggest success stories ever in MMOs. I look at the combat system as one of the biggest failures in MMOs.

There's so much to be learned from the game, and so much that should be implemented in games to come with better emphasis on combat. I think SWG's failing was it created the world, created the economy, and then made the actual fighting part of the game a pointless slog.

[Ironwood]

Nothing is ever a total failure.   At the very least, you learn not to do it again.

That being said, I guess that outcome will depend on Crowfall, won't it ?

[Paelos]

Nothing is ever a total failure.

True, if the question was it a bigger success than a failure, I think the answer would be that it was a bigger failure. Mainly because financially it had to be retooled, the game had a major overhaul that rivaled Trials of Atlantis in terms of driving people away, and the combat system is still looked upon as what not to do.

I don't have rose colored glasses about the game, I remember quitting when I realized I was literally logging in to check and move my mining harvesters, make sales, and logging out. That was the end for me. The worlds were barren and there was little reason to participate in the "War" of Star Wars.

[sam, an eggplant]

The true tragedy was how SWG's failure to execute was taken as an object lesson by the industry.

The right lesson would be "don't release until it's ready". Simple to say, harder to do. But the lesson they took to heart was "focus on combat at the exclusion of all else".

It's only now over a decade later that we're starting to see MMOs explore systems other than combat again, after endless timid and largely unsuccessful iterations on WoW.

[Ironwood]

That's also because they learned the wrong lesson from WoW's success tho, eh ?

[taolurker]

Hey Raph.. Your instances metaphor about player homes was something actually in Anarchy Online at launch, so that iteration in EQ2 was actually innovated even before SWG.

I truly miss the chat system, with it's emotions, animations and scripted things, because I think it enhanced my roleplaying even more.

I also was the only profession NOT mentioned in any of the "articles" so far, a Combat Medic. I never had as much fun as I did using my mind poisons on whole groups in faction PVP. Truly was sad when that entire class and poisons/diseases disappeared completely.

I too miss my pets, and droids.  At the time of the NGE I think I had written an article for Morlocks or someplace, and I sure wish I was able to locate it.

Almost posted a link to the video I made of SWG mo-cap that was an entry for the SWG Adventure Pack under the comedy section, but since it lost to a Jedi doing lightsaber twirls to Yackity Sax it likely would be as well received here as it was in the contest.

[sam, an eggplant]

That's also because they learned the wrong lesson from WoW's success tho, eh ?

Yes, what they should have learned from WoW was "be player-friendly and polish beyond belief". Instead we saw release after endless release of "WoW but X".

[Lantyssa]

Without knowing the exact numbers, I would guess it wasn't a failure so much as a failure of expectations.

[HaemishM]

The Grunts in the original Half-Life came as a pleasant surprise at the time and actually worked to give you a challenge and scare you.  I suspect, however, that was only because the AI in opponents up until that point had been so shockingly bad.

Having a Grunt fling a grenade at your camping ass was...both terrifying and gigglesome.

This. When I think of great AI in an FPS, I think of Half-Life 1's soldiers tossing frags at your ass as you cower behind a crate. The first time I realized what was happening, I practically shit my pants.

I think "MOST" video game players want an AI that 1) is challenging, 2) is BEATABLE with effort and 3) is as unpredictable as a teenager covered in Cheeto dust and fueled by Moutain Dew Red. There are masochists out there, but they are rare.

[Ironwood]

They also worked to flank you two, if there was more than one of them. 

Truly, that game was brilliance for the time.

[HaemishM]

If I remember right, didn't they also flank you in other ways? Like if there was an open stairwell behind you they could reach, they wouldn't just walk up the pathways between the crates to get at you (thereby funneling themselves into chokepoints), they'd actually avoid the chokepoints at come at you up the stairwell to your back. I could be wrong about that, but I seem to remember them not funneling into predictable kill zones.

Whereas MMO's couldn't even pathfind their way through open fields. I keep remembering the entrance to Mistmoore and the Unrest house in Everquest 1. God what fucking nightmares.

[Malakili]

Let's not be too nostalgic about it.  The first play through of Half Life 1 was undoubtedly an amazing experience in part because of one's own expectations about how AI worked at the time.  That being said, after you played the game a lot you could actually just flat out skip a lot of enemies.  While they were busy flanking and hiding behind cover, a lot of the time you could just sprint through to the next area.