Anti-Fun: an MMO theory

The Game Room
1

Anti Fun is a concept I heard from Riot, the company that made League of Legends. It involves trying to balance a multiplayer game not just around abilities, but the enjoyment between giving, and receiving damage.

A simple example: I have a hero who has 3 basic abilities. In addition to other effects, these abilities each stun their target for 2 seconds. Each ability is on a 6 second cooldown. see the problem? I could “chain stun” your guy indefinitely. Once you got stunned, you’d be helpless. Even if there were ways to break/resist stun, my character creates a dynamic where you MUST take it vs me, otherwise you are hosed.

This chain stun loadout is “anti fun” because you lose control of your character. Skill becomes a much smaller issue- onced you are stunned you are screwed, vs other characters with more balanced abilities.

Other examples of anti-fun: Abilities that excessively relinquish control of a player (chain stuns, mind control, permanent strong debuffs like perma-silence, scrambling controls, stripping enemies of their resource, resetting their ability cooldowns), abilities that excessively punish a player (extending their respawn timer, altering their interface, interfering with macros), abilities that cannot be countered/avoided (infinite range/instantaneous attacks, buffs that reflect excessive abilities/damage, One Hit KO abilities), Abilities that can be countered/enhanced via hardware settings (seeing stealthed players on certain graphics settings, smoke beimg more/less transparent on certain graphics settings, objects/players becoming unfairly contrasted or concealed with certain hardware abilities or limitations).

Care Bear Mentality: Anti-fun has to be blanced with Care Bear mentality. A game should be challenging, competitive, and diverse. If you “over balance” the game, you strip it of elements that could make it more diverse. The game becomes one-dimensional and boring. Its possible to make a game competitive, diverse, challenging, balanced, and dynamic. It just requires a lot of involvement between the developer and playerbase.

Anti-fun isn’t just an unfair disadvantage, its an element that fundamentally detracts from a player’s experience. It can really sink a game since few players will want to spend their entire session staring at respawn screen.

2

Some specific examples of anti-fun elements:

One Hit KO shotguns in FPS games- Its popular in games to make the ‘shotgun’ weapon be an instakill if fired at point-blank range. This seems balanced since shotguns have a comparitively slow rate of fire and range. The problem is that in almost every game like this players invariably find exploits and tactics that make the game devolve into shotgun whack-a-mole. By making a point blank shotgun hit do 99% of a player’s health, you give them a better chance to fairly retaliate.

3

Your solution is wrong. If you make the shotgun do 99% damage, it’s too weak and useless. An example of this is sniping in BF2. It wasn’t possible to one-shot a player, so they’d just runaway and you were useless. The solution isn’t nerfing shotguns (or whatever); the solution is adding more depth to the gameplay. You don’t make shotguns do 99% damage to even it out. You give the players grenades.

Likewise, there is a few perma-stun characters in other dota-like games, such as Meepo and Visage in Dota. While they’re able to permanently lockdown a player, it requires an appropriately large amount of the mysterious resource known as “focus” and players have options available to handle those situations, like warding up the map and asking for counter-gank TPs.

You never make a game better by removing supposedly “anti-fun” mechanics. You make games better by adding solutions.

4

If a shotgun does 99% damage, it will still OHKO an enemy that is slightly damaged. Planetside 2 does this and it works fine. If it were always a OHKO, you’d have legions of players bunnyhopping around one shotting everyone.

In DotA games, crowd control and has to be balanced very carefully. I’ll point out that in League of Legends, there are no abilities that allow you to strip “mana/rage/energy” from opponents. This is because characters that could would have significant advantage, particularly in the top or middle lane where the emphasis is staying in your lane to farm experience and gold.

Similarly, they removed abilities that allow you to kill friendly creeps, to prevent players the ability to ‘deny’ creep farm from the opponent. Now, to disrupt their farming, it actually requires a player to commit to harrassing their opponent to the detriment of their own farm. This at least has its own risk/reward which is more balanced.

Another element they changed was Dodge. Dodge allowed you to have a % chance to completely negate a physical attack. You could also dodge some abilities. The problem with this is that it unfairly punished melee-based champions, as there was no mechanism that let you completely nullify magic attacks.There were a lot of benefits to stacking dodge, and it made some champions ludicrously overpowered, so they removed in favor of straight % damage reduction, which was more balanced than dodge.

5

I don’t really follow you on why, on a fundamental level, resource draining abilities are bad, denying mechanics are bad, or why dodge is bad. They all seem like mechanics that are fine, so long as you keep their costs in line. For example, dodge is basically just a DPS reduction against right-click heroes or survivability boost against those heroes. If the items that provide dodge are appropriate priced, they’re fine or have something that counters dodge so that if you notice a player dodge-stacking, you just adjust your build and win. Ditto for resource draining abilities. Those are things that players are able to play around, which isn’t inherently problematic.

I really don’t get the deny thing. With denies present, you can still just harass. Eliminating them just seems to be taking away choices from the player, which is bad. Certainly it’s a counter-intuitive mechanic, which may be a reason to eliminate it, but that’s different than being fundamentally “anti-fun” or whatever.

Like, there is a way to do things that doesn’t make a game shallower and these particular examples aren’t those changes. At least, as I understand them.

6

Agreed.

Take Dodge, where Incubus said:

There would seem to be a rather obvious solution here, wouldn’t it? Or rather, several obvious solutions.

7

In the case of Riot, they decided to do away with the RNG nature of dodge and just make it into a flat damage reduction, simplifying the mechanic without drastically taking away from it. There were only a few (like 1-2) champions they had to re-work in order to impliment this.

Damage reduction is easier to balance, because there is already an existing mechanic in League of Legends that overrides it: True Damage. True Damage does What It Says On the Tin, ignoring any resistance, armor, etc. If there was such an opposition to the elimination of Dodge, then Season III in League of Leagends would be a ghost town, but as I see it, its business as usual.

Over three seasons, Riot has tweaked and modified many game mechanics. Healing, for example, became the flavor of the month for a while before they toned it down. The key here is to create a system where you have a lane phase that has a balanced risk-reward. You can harass your opponent, but in the process you deprive yourself of gold/experience. With some of the older mechanics (denial) there was comparitavely little risk involved.

8

Aaaah, early Dark Age of Camelot, how I miss you not :slight_smile:

For those who weren’t there: basically, the PvE battlefield control abilities worked full tilt in player vs. player. There might have been a chance to resist them (I don’t remember), but if you didn’t you were stunned, rooted or helpless for the full duration as modified by level difference (e.g. if you’re higher level than the mage it doesn’t last as long). Most healers and mages had at least one such ability, and the dedicated crowd controllers had three or four - a single target mez, single target root, mass mez and mass root. Some also had “panic buttons” short range mezzes on top of that.
The kicker, of course, being that the duration of the single target abilities was typically slightly longer than their recast - their whole point was to keep monsters out of the fight after all.

So, yup, PvP skirmishes were pretty much “who mezzed first ? They win”. You’d get ambushed, your entire group rendered helpless from the get go, then you’d get to watch as the enemy group dispatched each of you piecemeal.

Later on they patched in first diminishing returns (first mez lasts X seconds, if you get mezzed again shortly after it lasts X/2 etc…) and then melee classes all earned “break control” abilities (which nevertheless had a very long cooldown, you could definitely still get perma-fucked by a dedicated team of crowd controllers, it took more doing is all) and could get more via the PvP rewards system. Eventually, it became actually fun to fight against players, which is kind of a big deal when the whole game is sold as being all about realm vs. realm combat and massive scale PvP.

But ah, those heady early days, where playing a melee class was utterly useless ! What fun it was to be a Thane, lemme tell you :smiley:

9

“Mez”?

10

Short for “mesmerize”, it’s a blanket term for disables like stun, sleep, etc. Basically anything that makes your character completely unable to act.

11

No, it’s not. Mesmerize is a specific effect - probably like what you are thinking of when you say “sleep”, I’m not familiar with many ‘sleep’ implementations - Mesmerize is a stun (i.e. a state that keeps you from doing anything) that will break immediately if you take ANY damage. It is DISTINCT from Stun, because if you are stunned, people can beat the crap out of you and you’re screwed, whereas if you are mezzed, as soon as someone hits you, you are free to act again.

Mesmerization type effects were a staple of PvE crowd control back in The Day (EQ/DAoC era, particularly) but it took some time before folks figured out that they weren’t a lot of fun to play AGAINST. As usual, Blizzard took the easy way out and all-but-removed PvE crowd control from WoW, and few games since have included much, because it requires actual effort to balance.

12

Mezmerize actually refers to a specific type of stun that breaks on any damage, not quite as bad as a straight up stun that last the duration regardless.

13

I haven’t played an MMO since they were text-based things called MUDs, but one of the things I always enjoyed the most was finding unbalanced game elements and exploiting them until the owners were forced to implement a fix. For some a truly balanced game would have no appeal.

14

Yup, and for the rest of us, the fact that it would have no appeal to you only adds to the appeal.

15

That’s a little hostile.

It also goes to the heart of the issue with MMO’s. First, in virtually all MMO games, you have to develop some kind of “build” or character-specific abilities, which are usually options form your class or race. And for a lot of people, having lots of interesting, diverse abilities is part and parcel fo the fun. They like building characters.

However, this cuts into two branches. Some want to play with interesting choices they think are fun. Some people want to find effective and efficient choices, and use those to test themselves against the system. Group (A) and Group (B) demand very different things, and its bloody hard to please both. The in-game content, not to mention PvP, tends to screw over at least one of those groups, and both have some very vocal members.

And this gets into unpleasant territory, because the game often can’t quite please either group. There’s also limitations and more-efficient choices, and quite frequently they’re blatantly obvious to everyone except the dev team. There’s always cool builds which would be really fun… except they arbitrarily suck ebcause they don’t stack exactly the options, attributes, or whatever the game was intended for.

16

Ah, sorry, jargon creeping in :slight_smile: But yes, as **Jragon **and others explained, it’s short for mesmerize and generally denotes status effects that make a character (or monster) completely unable to move, attack, cast spells etc… until either the spell runs its entire duration or someone “breaks” the mez. Traditionally by swinging a massive fuck-off axe in their face :stuck_out_tongue:

17

League of Legends had this issue too. The tricky thing is balancing ranged classes with melee classes. What gave ranged classes a huge advantage was that they could fire over friendly minions to hit enemy minions. The melee guy, however, was relegated to getting up in the scrimmage where he would get mercilessly pelted by ranged players.

The solution is “gap closers” for melee classes. Whats interesting is that while older champions had their stats tweaked, only a few were fundamentally changed; a “newer” melee champion’s kit tends to be better at getting up close and personal. So now, being melee isnt necessary a huge disadvantage. In fact, there are several melee classes that can absolutely destroy ranged classes.

18

Eh, the problem I had with my Merc in DAOC wasn’t gap closing (at least not in a zerg vs zerg fight), it was the fort battles that were my only option was to plink with a shortbow, or otherwise serve as a wall decoy to draw fire away from important people.

19

First you tell me I’m hostile, then you basically go on to completely reinforce my point?

A LOT of people aren’t interested in sharing an MMO with people who play to break the game. It’s really that simple. People who play to break the game are all about the optimization and being “better” than the game (and usually, than other people as well.). They tend not to be much fun for people who are looking to relax and have a good time to play with - as you’ve stated yourself, a game balanced for one group or the other isn’t often much fun for the other group.

Therefore, lack of interest from your group (a balanced game) leads to it being more fun for the rest of us - not only because it’s balanced for us, but because we don’t have to deal with the behavior of as many of the game-breaker group.

Edit: Oh, and this:

20

That Penny Arcade comic cracked me up. I gotta admit, sometimes I get fed up with doing things the ‘meta’ way and do them the ‘fun’ way. The ironic thing about the ‘Metagame’ in a game like League of Legends is that it can get so rigid (A sustainable solo guy in the top lane, a caster in the middle, a guy wandering around killing creeps in the jungle and ambushing, and a pair in the bottom lane consisting of a ranged guy and a support guy) that if you do something really off the wall it can be surprisingly effective.

Whats tricky about it in that game is that the outcome of the battle is very much the sum of all 5 players’ abilities and cooperation though- as fun as it is to ‘lone wolf’ it, you can become a liability to your team. I try to follow the Golden Rule in this case; I generally avoid doing a stupid strategy on the hopes that my teammates will avoid it too.