Splinter Topic: Narrative Design Hell Is Other People

Just shifting out some responses to a specific, great post by Ace1234 in a specific thread:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/67715/ashes-terrain-topography-and-cohesion

Full text of post below:

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

Yes, the title is a reference to the literary work/play, heavyhandedness is unfortunately subjective. Very meta. It was either that or something about a "Three Body Problem".

MMORPG Devs are limited by the idea that they should make most of their players at least feel good. But unlike single player games or even competitive team games, MMORPGs are big and very few players care about all their aspects. The concepts laid out for the above area and related interactions are incredibly cool and perhaps even realizable in some modern games, but from what I know of MMORPG players, a nightmare for feedback from a certain subset.

Imagine a player who goes online, reads the guide-history created by the first player to achieve the "Revealer" status, and follows it, then realizes that this guide/experience wasn't about 'making them also be a Revealer' or changing the world somehow, but just so that they could experience the story/concept.

They're able to have the experience, but not the reward of either the title or the recognition.

Or, you can imagine being in the pitch room for such a content type, having to argue against the manager who says how useless it is to make this content which effectively serves one person (in their eyes) and 'doesn't even have anything to do with combat or competition'.

Or the Community Team subjected to the dozens if not hundreds of complaints or even 'bug reports' about how X player didn't care about all this stuff, just wanted a gearpiece they saw in a Guide (because at least one person per Server might have it, and given Ashes' design, there may be another chance to get it, it wouldn't be ridiculous to have the Revealer or similar actually lose any reward item if they are killed while Corrupted, the world could even revert somewhat).
"What's the point of making this content that I personally can't achieve?"

Anyways, my heart goes out to all the Narrative/Lore designers and Devs trying their best to juggle the different player types, but this thread is mostly so my group can contain their 'ranting' to a more relevant thread...

It's the classic problem of people always wanting to be "the chosen one" (well, very generally speaking and mostly about the western players). I've seen sooooo many "suggestions" for mmos to have stuff like the dual-blade wielding from SAO, where only a single person or just a very select few would have that ability.

And people ask for that stuff mostly because they believe that THEY will be the one to have that ability. THEY will be cool and strong enough to stand out. And then when reality comes in and they realize that there's always a cheater/kid/3rd world country grinder for money player that is always better than them - they start complaining and try to make these special ablilities available to their own skill/time lvl.

It always makes me laugh when older players, who played a shitton in their youth, start asking to be pampered and catered too, even though when they were young - they woulda hated if the old people of that time were the ones pampered.

In other words, as cool as these kinds of designs might seem in our minds or in different media - they do not work in real world practice, due to human psychology. And if you try to create something special for literally every player in the game - you'd need SAO-lvl AI that can rebuild the world at will and create all of that content. But alas, for now we only have a text generator that people rely on WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH.

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

Yeah, I shoulda been more precise with my statement. You're suggesting a quest/story-based uniqueness. That type of content usually appeals to the people that aren't as competitive as a pve/raid grinder who'd be ready to sweat and spend countless hours contesting a boss that might drop that 1-in-a-realm item for them.

And also, creating a 3d model, a stat stick and a bit of description for it is not that much dev work. Creating an event/quest/storyarc (M O D U L E) where several different people can make several different choices, with several different outcomes and several different rewards (even if just titles, though the npcs calling you that would also have to be a separate code-based hook) - THAT is a lot of work.

There's a reason why the instanced dungeons in the game will be the story ones. Steven wants to tell his story and wants as many people as possible to experience it, while also keeping the dev costs as optimal as possible. Making a branching story is difficult even in single player games (ME3 3-color lightbeams were a massive indicator of that). In an mmo that's even harder, because you gotta account for all the future interactions with those players, cause if you don't then the immersion and the effect of the story strongly diminishes.

I'd probably be all for this kind of thing post-release, but that would highly depend on whether Ashes is successful enough to support that level of development.

Just a reminder that ChatGPT wrote (co-authored?) that quest/story, but Ace1234 was originally talking about biomes just like everyone else in the parent thread.

We should probably all be 'afraid' of a future in which junior Narrative Designers with less oversight are implementing ChatGPT questlines outright, but on the other hand, it gets right back to the core of it all. For a lot of people, more content is better than 'waiting for good content', and not just because 'they don't really care about the content that much'.

(as for 'what my experience tells me', it's only that people complain, but because they complain asymmetrically, I wouldn't want to draw conclusions, for that, you have to look at games that have strong modding scenes or private servers)

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

We'll have to see the extent of Story Arcs (M O D U L E S) branching and differing from each other. Though even there, it's more about "everyone who participated got to a singular result", rather than a "people get their own results, based on what they did".

The closest we have to a "you'll have a unique personal story" is this
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Story_arcs
It is possible for some storylines to relate to a darker/evil path, if a character should choose.[18]

But that was stated back in 2017, and I'm sure you know just how many things have changed in the design since then - most of them towards the side of making development easier and design more straightforward.

As much as I'd love a massive sprawling M O D U L E, with several impacting endings and full player choice on what kind of interaction they'll get out of that ending - I expect all of this to just be statistical. 100 players chose to speak to npc A and did its quest. 95 players did npc B's quest. M O D U L E progresses down path A. Rinse repeat.

We'll also, supposedly, have one-off M O D U L E S that don't even repeat once they're done, so I'd at least hoooope that we might get the interactions your post mentioned, where npc can address you based on the decisions you made during that quest chain, but we'll have to see if Intrepid will go that deep.

Azherae wrote: »

it gets right back to the core of it all. For a lot of people, more content is better than 'waiting for good content', and not just because 'they don't really care about the content that much'.

Yeah, we are the locusts, we do consoom. Ashes definitely has quite a few systems where "waiting for good content" is almost the intrinsic nature of the content, so we'll see how the majority of players react to that.

On the topic of design hell, I have a very deep seated hatred of average MMO players and while I try to keep these to myself, I think for once it might be useful to articulate WHY, particularly because to me most of them are average, arrogant as that might sound.

Players ask for things, and then proceed to completely skip them. Which causes a pain for devs who truly love their work (Tico from TL talks about this a bit in an interview) and is a detriment to the very same players. There's no point in asking for content to consume if you're bad at consuming. That's the core of my problem with players.

I will provide a few examples, see if you can find yourselves reflected in any of them. Because if you do, it means you have, hopefully unintentionally, contributed to the design hell.

1) While some players hide their problems by just having maxed gear, late night Dimensional Circle runs in TL (instanced dungeon run with boss at the end) often involve less geared players, which will result in the following: players skip literally all non-mandatory mob fights on the route to the boss like usual, then someone messes up some execution element and the angry swarm of mobs catches up and kills someone. Then people get mad at each other and someone leaves, and we have to search for new members. I've had this process take literally 3 times the time it would've taken to just clear the dungeon once, the normal way

2) I once had a Dimensional Circle run in the orc region and in order to unlock the boss area, we had to defeat a few orcs on a narrow bridge. One of the orcs got pushed by a player ability on the rocks under the bridge, making it impossible to advance. In order to resolve this, I climbed down to beat it. For various level design reasons, climbing back up takes a bit even if trying to kill oneself and respawn. As thanks, my party started without me, and I got locked out of getting any rewards. Please take a moment to process what this means on the design side. Are we expecting devs to design every single square meter of their content with the base assumption their playerbase is made of scummy weasels? Do we even pay them enough for that?

3) In a separate run, I've had a player complain the entire time that the party was being weird or weak (we were about 10-15% slower than usual peak hour tryhard comp) and focused on dropping really unpleasant comments instead of working on the teamwork. When I finally had enough and asked them to stop so I wouldn't block them, their reaction was along the lines of "lol I don't know you, what are you going to do about it?". This might be hard to see at first, but in order to minimize these kinds of reaction, devs need to work really hard on making sure those gaps are not large or frequent for most of the playerbase. Can you do that? I'd quit before I started.

4) I recently had a new member join our guild. They were a returning TL player who had the same standard experience of their party members skipping everything and taking the most direct routes to the boss. When our guild proceeded to full clear the dungeon run, they discovered new and interesting parts about dungeons they'd already done many times before. How's that for asking for content you won't consume?


So here's my tl;dr: from all of my gaming experience, the kind of people that devs need to design around the most is like that toxic rival party in isekai animes. When we watch those shows we root for their downfall, when we play MMOs we become them. How do you design for that?

@Ace1234 - I think the simplest thing I can say about my data/concern is that I worry about this sort of content being subject to 'data-driven development'.

Serving different niches is one of the most important design feats an mmo can achieve. I think the biggest 'sin' or 'hell' for me in game design, especially as someone who has had to actually do the leg work to make a good product, is the lowest common denominator weighs down the cool factor by a lot. This can either be an intelligence thing, a toxicity thing, or the audiences the developers think they 'have' to appeal to. I often think of ideas that end up being too cool or 'specific' for the world to accept (not even vanity, this is a problem EVERY game dev or creative will run into.) Fortunately for me I have people on my staff who can tell me why it won't work for audience reasons, but in an mmo this is magnified times as many interests and audiences you serve.

In many ways for me, design hell isn't other people, it is 'other genre's/niche's that feel entitled for THIS game to be THEIR game'. In an mmo, if you have fishing fishers will ask you to make it a fishing game. If you have pvp gankers will ask you to make it a gank box. If you have team vs team fights herofighters will ask you to make a moba. If you need funding from angel/demon investors, the investors will ask for you to have loot boxes and a heavily monetized shop front. The magic of mmo design in particular (or any crossgenre game for that matter) is learning how to make a game for a niche that fills multiple audiences rather than a single audience. But what a lot of those various audience members don't seem to understand is that if you, the dev, listen to every member in the audience the reasonable conclusion will be to not build an entire game but many smaller ones. I would argue there is a path in game design where you can make a skeleton that holds a bunch of different games but it won't feel like a game with 'identity'.

This isn't to say the 'experts' of that 'genre' shouldn't be listened to when making the game, it means that they should be listened to with a removal of self centered requests from their feedback. It must always be measure by what is the most essential for the core experience first. Additions are at the behest of what would lead to the world feeling most alive that doesn't become exploitable or obstructive to other audiences. You can't make crafting the only way to progress through an mmo that isn't trying to be solely about crafting. It bogs down the gameplay for many and takes them away from 'the fun part'. That is why econ design and marketplaces are essential! They help you solve problems for other audiences so that everyone can 'get along'. The worst kind of feed back, the hell, comes from other people telling other audiences that not only they are wrong, but that their most selfish wishes should be prioritized 'if the game really wants to succeed'.

I think this is my biggest gripe with people who come into mmo forums with WoW as their foundational background. They played 'the most succesful one' for so long that they don't realize that people NEED not just want or 'expect' the game to NOT be WoW. Yet because of the success of it, it is easy to think this is 'the only path'. Many suggestions by this cohort end up eroding the identity of so many games. I'm not saying you need to play a wide variety of games or that all WoW player advice is bad. There are definitely good WoW players who know what design hell looks like and are benevolent and good contributors. But it is COMMON. And I am sorry to say, but if you don't have a wide enough mmo experience it is hard to know when you are being someones 'design hell' or when you are requesting something 'selfish' in the design space.

I think that is why I love Ashes audience based approach, at least in the past, they tended to really talk to people who had very different mmo backgrounds. This let them get to the real heart of what Ashes could be and developed a distinct brand for a time despite Steven's relatively limited mmo experience. I think Steven genuinely enjoyed that period of Ashes development as well. He seems most at home talking to other mmo players about the topic they love most. But at the end of the day, I think if you suffer design hell long enough it's hard not to come to your own devilish impulses. It's hard to make a game, but even harder to fight for an audience that isn't your own even if that same audience is responsible for creating the unique identity and feel of your game.

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

Lawless zones definitely 'changed the entire genre of the game' for me so I don't think I really disagree with you.

I can clarify why we (biasedly and hopefully incorrectly ) see this as something other than a 'resources' problem, and a thing that has been worrying people in my group (again, hopefully incorrectly) for a while now...

Complaints are asymmetrical, both due to 'culture/behaviour type' and expectations.

I'll use a Throne and Liberty example here because it's so simple and so incredibly ... 'not nuanced'?

Soon after the release of the expansion (perhaps with it, I should check but I'm in a flow) they halved the respawn rate of basically every mob in the world .

Blanket change. Everything just respawns twice as fast. Who asked for this? If we assume it needed to be done because of increased player count, sure. It makes the world feel silly in a lot of places, but whatever, it's not that big a deal...

If it's temporary.

It's still there. The world still feels silly. Some events don't work quite 'right' anymore. Some PvP for spots is just ... entirely weirdly unbalanced now. One off-to-the-side area has mobs respawn almost faster than certain classes can kill them.

This definitely feels bad , and basically since the population distribution is back to 'normal', it's no longer serving any real purpose. But I bet that the number of people who 'complained that the mobs didn't respawn fast enough' (assuming there were any) was higher than the number of people who bothered to give feedback to complain that they respawn too fast now.

This also illustrates the cultural difference. @Ludullu pointed it out in a different post to someone else recently, that a certain subtype of player just 'goes along with changes they don't like as much' because they understand certain needs (I can't say they're actually more patient, but all the ones I personally know are). Whereas impatient people who prefer/seek quicker gratification don't see the validity in 'soft' needs of others.

Basically, you'll get more PvP players complaining that the Devs spent any time on Fishing, than Fishers complaining that the Devs spent time balancing PvP. Both are important, but by 'volume'...

This is a place where data gathering doesn't help as much. You can gather a lot of data about PvP because PvP is competitive and people won't 'give up' their PvP territories just because Balance is currently swingy (looking at you still, Ravagers and ubertanks). But I'm still here fishing up Nature's Jade and unable to make them into anything that makes me enjoy Fishing more, because even if I did yell about how X item needs to have a crafting recipe to make this game more fun, it's not as visceral as 'your balance is shit, NCSoft, fix your game!' from 40 random people.

And I'm not going to respond to those 40 people by going 'shut up, the balance is fine, I need them to focus on Fishing!' because that's stupid.

But I'm sure you know that there are definitely people who respond to Fishing improvements with 'who the fuck even fishes in this game? Why are they wasting time on this?' (verbatim from World Chat).

The people who would enjoy the Weeping Hollow get to do it a few times or 'occasionally', and it's part of their love and experience of the genre, but they're not going to kick up as huge a fuss when someone else yells about how 'this quest isn't rewarding enough, it's such BS', nor possibly even when some Dev changes the Quest/world to be more 'accessible to more players'.

Honestly one of the greatest validations I've received from my time with Ashes of Creation is to get to see all those people passionate about things like immersion and economy before they give up on the game, to remember that they're still at least equal measure if not a majority. When someone next asks "Why did this MMO fail, what was wrong with the playerbase?" I can actually say 'nah, crafting was bad/nonexistent/ignored so game was cooked' and not worry so much that I'm just projecting my biases.

Well, either Intrepid/First Spark will save us, or we wait a few years and some AI will.

Thanks Dygz, always helpful to get your perspective (in this case it matches my data/models).

@Ace1234 a question then given your perspective, because I think we've 'soft-disagreed' before on whether or not PvX 'means' integration or not.

Ashes is the game where you are forced to consider both halves of the content all the time. There are games where you aren't, where the distinction is closer to what you describe, where the games themselves describe as 'PvP and PvE' (could easily be because PvX isn't a term that has caught on yet).

But in those games, if you decide to do most PvE things, you can only be delayed by PvP, not 'forced into it' (i.e. the area becomes PvP and you have to wait, or try to PvP a bit).

I would argue that the type of Story Arc content or even Biome-based gameplay that we were discussing in the parent thread fits better in those games than in Ashes, because PvP does not have the capacity to utterly overrun a progressing narrative in those games.

I'm sure Ashes could be designed such that PvP can be suppressed out of 'existence' by doing the narrative/preparation really well (Elite Dangerous works like this for instance, mostly), but it keeps shifting away from that design space so the 'concept' that spawned this thread still seems to apply.

Thanks, that's very clear, actually.

You seem to be even moreso the person who wants the other type of design direction for this game type, than I originally thought.

I don't think Steven intends to make that game, but it's already been made, so thankfully, he doesn't have to.

I actually find it really interesting that GPT has so relatively few references to multiplayer gaming narratives, and therefore comes up with stuff like the above.

Lots of tells of its 'ignorance' there, but ofc, if there isn't enough openly available data on it, that's what it can do.

Okay so like, let me give you a tabula rasa answer as if I hadn't read your posts before (honestly I tend to not read chatgpt related material because if you aren't a strong prompt engineer you are going to get either long winded or off target audience style output and I do not trust most people to do so.) So I have skimmed your post before but not in full...

After reviewing a good chunk of it I have encountered the problems I generally encounter unfortunately, but that's nothing 'bad on you' it is just that prompt engineering is an actual skill that needs a lot of practice to get the ai to do a good job. However there was one thing I found worth reacting to here down below:

Reaction: 'hybrid approach to pre-existing character vs player expression' I reject this. Games with pre-made character backstories almost always have lower roleplay freedom. Even when you go as simplistic as PoE tends to, it interferes with rp flexibility. It gives a crutch to less creative people, but that is the main benefit. I preffer games with strong NPC character writing to give the 'crutch' through 'emulation' basis. For example, in FFXI you really get to know Shantoto and a noob rper would 'learn how that behavior interacts with others and you can learn to mimic it from there'. Player expression designs are just flatly better for mmos.

The rests of the points in that part of the post are 'standard game design' and not really an expansion relative to most mmo story telling. I think that is why Azherae is having the reaction above. So it is 'correct' but also 'not worth discussing if you have played an mmo with good story telling and quest design before'

MMO story telling really depends on the goal of the over arching 'pinnacle' play experience. If your game is heavily about tactical 'team composition' battles you can rely on 'the player is using a pre-written character' as the players personal journey is less relevant to the content. If your 'pinnacle' is say, 'gvg siege' then that personal journey is way more important because PERSONAL DRAMA is the bigger player. If 'npc factional conflict' is more important, the thing I was talking about irt 'having strong npc character writing to give people characters they can emulate or project specific types of social behaviors and personality traits onto' is even more important than the 'personal drama'.

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

So first of all I think that we don't necessarily disagree but we might be considering things differently. I'm not sure what you mean by the spine (and am too lazy to look it up rn sorry) but I think I can assume you don't necessarily mean this has to be a character, but rather 'a premise' based on your example and that is something I agree with. It can be easy to forget that the genre you pick in the first place to make your game in kind of limits the design space on it's own due to the tropes and design expectations that come with selecting that genre. Obviously it is fine to break those and there is a lot of power in that but I think you have been around Ashes long enough to know how whiny people can get if you try to do something unique/different >_> That's an aside although I think one directly relevant to this splinter topic.

We were unable to determine the author of the quoted post.

No worries, it is after all best practice to go over said basics in this forum given how uh... sideways people can come at you disingenuously or not. I was more so referring to the fact that Chatgpt itself was doing that, not necessarily you. Let's just assume both you and know what we are talking about and we know that each other knows what they are talking about >.>

We were unable to determine the author of the quoted post.

True but I was more so trying to explain the premise of 'how that contextualization works' since it is in contrast with the Chatgpt output to highlight the difference. Unfortunately without knowing the prompt itself it can be difficult to gauge a posters intention. Which brings us to your aside questions.

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

First of all the tell: Basically if you don't specify the template/format of an answer you want, Chatgpt has a few defaults. The one you posted here seems to be a variation of one of them. If you told Chatgpt to give the answer in that format, then you are probably the 'universal average' that causes it to be that way and there is no problem with it, but it does tend to give too much detail relative to the goal you might have intended. So relative to that specific issue really think about how you want your answer to be structured format wise. If you do a lot of writing elsewhere study your personal responses and try to describe hallmarks of that to Chatgpt and give general framework that incorporates them. I also find that arbitrary word count limiters help a lot. Just like with a human having a limit on how many words you can use to describe something keeps Chatgpt on task more often than not.

Part of the reason I don't find Chatgpt very helpful is that the prompt engineering required to get something that cuts out most of the bs and sounds relatively sane and doesn't distract from your personal goal with the output, tends to be about the same 'planning' process that is necessary to make a good piece of writing in the first place. That is usually the biggest amount of 'work' required to write well. I find it is better at critique or modifying your personal rough draft and enhancing a piece with feedback.

For the purposes you were using it though, I think the main thing I'd do is try to give it a reference set like a certain website that might be in it's domain, or a set of articles that explain the various ideas you want to use for the prompt. I'd also make sure I set what tone, voice, and level of formality I want the post to have. If my memory is correct I feel like you might have done this? Part of the thing I found most interesting about the output you posted was how it seemed to kind of lack clear examples of mmo writing which was what made me 're-explain' the different types of story telling relative to the goal of the mmo in particular. You'd think that'd be one of the easiest things for them to steal. Fortunately for creatives, there seems to be a hurdle in a lot of subgenres relative to Chatgpt's refrence set that make its output feel really generic and unhelpful.

We have not received permission from Ace1234 to share the quoted post.

After reading your new edit I think I can post to something really specific and it's shameless self promotion

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/49859/character-creation-tips-for-an-mmo