Grouping as the Better Option

Some games require grouping. We hate that, especially when certain classes are required, because you can easily spend half your in-game time looking for group members. Some games encourage soloing. We often like that, but single-player games deliver a much better solo experience. Some games discourage grouping, often as an accident of game mechanics, which is just poor. Some games encourage and reward grouping without requiring it, which is the best of all possible worlds.

I have a very long version with many examples after the break, but that is the core of my message today: encourage grouping, do not require it, and make sure the game mechanics really do encourage it.

You encourage grouping by increasing rewards for groups and adding abilities that require groups to take full advantage of them. You require grouping by giving enemies ridiculous numbers of hit points, failing to scale encounters for different numbers, or making encounters that demand (or all but demand) several specific abilities that are spread across the classes. You discourage grouping by making quests difficult to do together and failing to scale encounters for different numbers. Yes, a lack of scaling can both require and discourage grouping.

Let’s take that one first. If the encounter is what it is, with no options to vary it based on who is attempting it, its requirements are static.

• If it is designed as solo content, you gain little to nothing for bringing a friend. Indeed, it might take the two of you longer to do it together than it would to do it separately, say if you each need to loot a dozen ground objects that despawn after they are looted; you would have been better off each going alone, five minutes after each other, rather than going together and waiting for the respawns. If the enemies are designed to be soloed, they will be radically unsatisfying fights for a full group. DPS is all that matters in those cases, with the rest of the classes trying to get a spell off before the target dies.
• If it is designed as group content, you cannot complete it without the right group size. If it is not designed for a full group, you can go a bit bigger, but see the previous point. If it is designed for a full group, you might be able to get away with being one member short, but you will inevitably need your holy trinity and/or crowd control. When the enemy has 20,000 hit points and regenerates 1,000 per second, you have no option but to bring >1,000 DPS; when it hits for 200-500/attack, area effect, with an attack every two seconds and a chance for critical hits, and your characters have 2,000-3,000 hit points, you must have a healer; and so on for whatever else is required for encounters.

(As I am tossing out numbers, my apologies if they are the wrong order of magnitude for your game. I always have that problem talking to my WoW-playing friends about The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ prices. 10 gold is the most expensive item in all of Middle Earth, not a normal quest reward. So when a hobbit talks about something with 300,000 hit points, he means a full raid taking an hour against the meanest thing in the game, not a mini-boss.)

Without scaling, you either get a group then see what you can do, or decide what to do then put together the right group for that. Either you have who you want but your options are limited or you can do what you want but the “who” is limited. You need a happy coincidence to match your group with your plan.

I like the City of Heroes scaling because it opens the same content to many people. If scaled properly (significant if), it makes the mission equally difficult for one person as for a full group. Every group can do every mission. You can worry that helping someone does not help; if they could not solo it and the mission scales perfectly, you probably cannot duo it either. But I would argue that is a problem with that one mission, rather than the scaling that works so well elsewhere.

The real problem with scaling is that it limits developers’ ability to create interesting encounters. If everything must scale from one to eight people, there are a lot of things you cannot do unless you can re-write the same mission several times. You would be creating several pieces of content using the same art and text, then hiding all but the one for that group size. This would be inefficient and defeat the notion of “opens the same content to many people.”

One solution is to have tiers of the same dungeon (5-man, 10-man, 20-man, 40-man), so it scales but not as finely. Maybe there can be a little of that standard scaling in-between, so you dial the 5-man up for 6 or knock off some enemy hit points for 9. This last twist might lead to people min-maxing the best size for every dungeon, so it might be a really horrible idea.

Another solution is just to ignore it. City of Heroes have a few missions designed for a certain minimum, meaning they do not scale below that, but they otherwise scale up uniformly. Everyone, including fans like me, should recognize that City of Heroes has very little variation in its core gameplay. Smashing ten Freakshow is not that different from smashing ten Skulls, and there is no interesting synergy that makes ten Freakshow a different experience from six. The difference in experience is based on what the players bring to the table, because the enemies are bringing similar challenges to the table at any group size.

This points out a way to encourage grouping: what the player characters bring to the table. You want them to have abilities that work solo but do better in groups. City of Heroes has many area effect heals. That is fine if you are solo, especially if it is a PBAE, but isn’t it better if that same heal also helps four other people who are attacking while you hit it? Ditto on area effect buffs, debuffs that benefit all attackers, and area effect attacks. Why throw your fireball at three targets when you could hit ten for no extra endurance cost? That area effect hold is an expensive toy if you use it solo, but locks down twelve enemies as easily as two.

The best powers along these lines are auras. Auras have two great features: they work equally well on multiple targets, and they are low maintenance. I have already addressed the target issue, so let’s talk about maintenance.

Abilities with low duration are huge annoyances. If my buff lasts 30 seconds, I need to refresh very often. I may not bother to, making it a half-wasted ability. How much of your character’s life do you want to spend refreshing that one buff? Duration is often used as a way of limiting the available buffs, but there is a better way: just limit them directly. The Dark Age of Camelot concentration system does this (or did when I played). If you want one buffer to be worth “50 points” of buffs, give him 50 points to spread and leave them on until he dies or breaks group. If you really do want the buffer just to stand there buffing for his entire in-game life, make it a channeled ability rather than one with a low duration. Think of the medic in Team Fortress: he follows one target around and keeps pumping the juice. There is nothing wrong with a channeled buff, as long as the buff is big enough to be worth it: it admits to the player that this really is all he is doing, rather than getting him to think that he may not be chained to that animation for the rest of his life. (I prefer the concentration approach.)

No, we must go back to targets. Making buffs area-effect increases their value for reasons already stated. Think of how that interacts with single- versus multiple-target abilities. A teamwide buff that lasts ten seconds is something I cast every ten seconds; a single-target buff that lasts ten seconds will be gone from my first teammate by the time I put it on the last. My beloved Kinetics includes two buffs called Speed Boost and Increase Density. Increase Density cures and protects against some crowd control, which is a great thing, except that it lasts 60 seconds, single-target, in a game with teams of eight. No one wants to cast that every 8 seconds no the chance of a sleep or hold, so it is used reactively if someone gets held, with the protection as a secondary effect of the cure. Speed Boost is one of the best buffs in the game, but it only lasts two minutes, so you recast it frequently (or in fairly long binges as you hit the whole team).

On another front, single-target buffs with long cooldown/recharge times mean that you can keep it active on one teammate or maybe a few. This limits how much you are encouraging grouping, because it works as well in a duo as in a full team. Why meet new people if you need just one friend to get the most from your abilities?

(Does it show that I play support characters a lot? Yes, I think about teams in terms of sharing buffs and debuffs, not in terms of tanks and healers. Also, the benefits of area effect attacks in teams seem to obvious to belabor further.)

So auras get the best of both worlds. They affect everyone, no matter what the team size, and they are always on. You get a 5% damage buff if you solo; if you are on a team, everyone gets a 5% damage buff. Isn’t that team looking a bit better, especially since that other guy has a 5% accuracy buff? This encourages teaming by making what you already do better in groups, even without your doing anything else.

Note: if you balance around this too much, it can lead to forced grouping. If encounters assume multiple stacked auras, you better have multiple stacked auras, or you all die. See non-scaling encounters above, particularly the ones with “you must have this much DPS to ride.”

You also encourage grouping by giving rewards for it. By this I do not mean the standard forced grouping for late-game content, requiring raids to get the best equipment. I mean simply increasing the amount of experience and loot an enemy provides based on the number of people fighting it. Any game not doing that by now is too stupid to discuss, at least on the experience and currency side. Actual loot scaling is a hard spot for many. Sure, make that rat start dropping five or six tails.

This becomes particularly important for quest drops. One way of encouraging grouping is sharing “kill ten rats” quests. Heck, we could solo five rats next to each other while “teamed” and come out ahead. One way of discouraging grouping is sharing “get ten rat tails” quests but not increasing the number of tails per rat in groups. (Okay, that thought makes more sense for “get ten chunks of rat meat.”) If I must still kill ten rats per person to get my tails, why have I gained by grouping? This makes even less sense when the tail has less than a 100% chance of dropping. Each rat drops a tail 50% of the time, we have six team members, and everyone needs ten tails; welcome to the quest of “kill 120 rats.” Shoot me now.

The oddest example I have ever seen comes from the Evendim wood trolls in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. There is a quest chain involving them, and it is pure group content because it involves elite trolls that can sometimes aggro two or three at a time. The second quest is to get pieces of wood, and there are two sources. Some spawn on the ground around the trolls, so you can grab them as you clear trolls, and some trolls will drop some. There are several “some”s in that sentence, which is because the mechanic is not “everyone on the team gets one.” If you pick one up from the ground, you get one; if you loot one from a troll you get one, although some trolls seem to drop more than one, but only one per person and not enough for a full group. It seems that the amount of wood the quest-giver needs is multiplied by your number of teammates, but the amount of wood available does not scale, nor is the amount of wood designed for teams to collect even though you need a team to collect it. May the gods help you if another team is doing the same quest and competing for ground and troll spawns. (It does not help that the chain ends in possibly the most unreasonably difficult and under-explained quest in the game, even after a round of toning it down.)

This is part of my reason for looking forward to Warhammer’s public quests.

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ does have one of the best incentives to group in its fellowship skills. Randomly against elites, or whenever the Burglar uses a special ability, you get a chance for free health, mana, or damage, with bigger bonuses if you can coordinate your team, and even bigger bonuses if you have a full team. A full team can cure all its debuffs, summon two oathbreakers ghosts from Return of the King, or fire off an AE that is about half an elite worth of damage. And some classes let you buff the fellowship maneuver. Doing these well and often is the difference between a great group and a mediocre one.

I should explicity mention area effect attacks, just for completeness: they work better when you have multiple targets. Duh. If you fight one enemy solo and five in a group, your AE attacks are worth more in a group. AE crowd control is also worth more in a group. Please be careful if you have both AE damage and AE crowd control.

Sharing quests is the modern way to encourage cooperative questing (although public quests as auto-shared may replace that). WoW does this pretty well, as best I recall. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ is okay but not great. Many missions are in chains, and I cannot share step 5 with you if you are on step 3. Repeatable quests also have sharing issues, but that’s tech/buggy. City of Heroes is the best: for any instanced quest (almost all of them), everyone who walks in the door is sharing the quset. You get the mission complete bonus as long as you were there for enough of the mission. It does not matter who owns the mission; you still get the experience and influence. (You do not get your own private credit with the mission contact unless it was a newspaper/radio mission.)

City of Heroes is also the best known for having sidekicks, although EverQuest 2 and others now share this. You can encourage grouping by making level less relevant to group formation. I can sidekick up or exemplar down to be the same level as my friends. This works best if you have the “buy your skill once” system like City of Heroes, The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, Warhammer, or any game that does not still require the stupidity of “Fire Bolt III.” Yes, WoW, you should just have Fire Bolt and make it scale with level.

Finally, you discourage grouping by placing hurdles between people and their quests. long delivery quests between group content bits in a quest chain are a great example. I do not want to make my group wait for me, nor do I want to wait on the slowest or least considerate person in my group. If step 4 is a cave full of trolls, steps 5 and 6 involve running across the zone three times, and step 7 is another cave full of trolls, I am probably going to do steps 4 and 7 in different groups. How do you prefer to wait: on people running or on groups re-forming, to say nothing of what you do when someone goes linkdead “but I think he’ll be back” on step 6.

The more extreme case is just to force solo content in there. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ has some of those: quests that you cannot do on a team. You must go into a solo instance. Hopefully your team needed a break at that point.

This is already tl;dr, and my apologies if the order was annoying. I decided to try a conversational flow rather than a closely structured list. Feel free to critique the style or content in the comments, or add your own examples of works well and poorly.

: Zubon