Comments on: Never Balance Cool Against Useful

By: n.n

n.n — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:40:04 +0000

Idle observation: The coolness of an item will always be inversely proportional to its proximity to the local utility maximum, and directly proportional to the number of different alternative items which are roughly in the same proximity to the local maximum.
In other words, if you have a big flashy ability which is on a 10-minute cooldown, but you MUST use the ability every 10 minutes in order to achieve maximum performance, and there is no alternative ability which might also grant close-to-maximum performance, then it is not cool.

But this may be because I’m a Johnny (I suspect most game designers are). A Timmy might still find it cool.

By: JZig

JZig — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:08:50 +0000

Bartle’s mud archetypes are a reasonably accepted model of MMO player behavior, although I would add a few other goals to it (namely players who want to express themselves or put on a performance, which are fairly common depending on the game). You could break down my stats vs. effects argument to Achievement vs Exploration (of combat systems as opposed to the world, but still exploration) and it roughly works.

Heh, that magic article is interesting because “power gamer” in MMOs means the exact opposite of the example he gives. I personally fall squarely in the “Johnny” group of creative expression through combat, which is why I like procs and conditional effects in the first place. Thanks for the links dusty.

By: Dusty Leary

Dusty Leary — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:48:05 +0000

This reminds me of a couple of similiar stories:

In “Magic the gathering”, the designers consider 3 player archetypes when designing cards/sets: http://www.hereirule.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11b

In “Players who suit MUDs”, the author considers 4 archetypes. http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

I would be interested in your thoughts on those, particularly if you haven’t run across them yet.