Why I Gave Up On D&D Online
We played Dungeons & Dragons Online for a little more than a year. Our gaming group had some fun playing it. But a couple of weeks ago, we cancelled our accounts and switched to a new Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. Why did we quit?

Arguably, it was because Dungeons & Dragons Online was too well balanced. Okay, it was too well balanced for a particular mode of play that we found frustrating. What I find somewhat ironic is that the game was balanced in a way that I probably would have designed about five years ago, when I was pondering such things in my love / hate relationship with EverQuest.

How It's (Im)Balanced
So here's the deal, for those who haven't played D&D Online: The game is all about instanced quests. There are a few "danger zones" that you can wander through for "random encounter" fun, but mostly the game is about undertaking quests. So far so good. The quests are easy to get to, with very little travelling involved. Even better. The quests are conveniently labeled for challenge level, which you can compare to your party's level. Very nice. And they are repeatable, albeit for less experience points (and less loot if you repeat the same quest too often during a particular time period).

Okay. Not too bad. But here's the rub: Except for solo quests, the quests are all balanced for a FULL GROUP of characters of exactly the appropriate level. The quests are balanced for a full group that has "appropriate equipment" for their level. If you have a single character in your party above the challenge rating of the quest, the entire group gets penalized in total experience points. Oh, and the loot given out in the quest is all based upon the challenge rating of the adventure.

Reading Between The Lines
On the surface, none of that seems too bad. Though it does stink a little bit about paranoid MMO designers trying desperately to put the kibosh on power-leveling techniques. So if you bring a very low-level character in your party, not only will they not get any more experience than anybody else in the party (though they will level faster), they will also end up being something of a burden to the party, as without all six party members really contributing, the game is going to lay the smack down on everyone. And bringing someone four levels higher than the rest of the party to make things easy on everyone would just slow everyone's progression down.

But in practice, there are some real problems:

* Extremely narrow level ranges for players. You get to the point where you RESENT the player who hit the next level above the rest of the group. As he is only one level higher than everyone else (though for a while we had a 2-level difference), he'd have near zero impact on the difficulty of the quest, but would cause something like a 10% impact on overall experience.

* For a while, we had too many players - but not enough to fill two full groups of six. This means we were forced to fill out the ranks with pick-up players. Which isn't too bad - I don't mind doing it on occasion - but though we tried to split things up evenly, what inevitably happened was that latecomers ended up playing in pick-up groups while the first people online were on a quest. Eventually, people gave up and quit, as they really wanted to play with their friends.

* There were some nights where not everyone could play. The way the game was balanced, and the way roles are set up, this would mean that we either had to spend time finding some pick-up players to join us, or we'd have to cancel the game. I mean, if we didn't have a cleric, we were pretty screwed - unless we took some really easy dungeons.

* We had a group of six who stuck with it, but then one of us dropped out. At only five players, this made quests of our own challenge level about 16.666% more challenging. Challenging enough that we were having some trouble beating quests of our own level. Doing an 'easier' quest was a possibility, but that would mean significantly reduced experience points AND reduced loot, which caused another problem...

* Weaker loot from weaker quests ended up causing a "positive feedback loop" which made the more challenging quests even more difficult because we were ill-equipped to handle them after a level or so. Of course, with all the cash we were getting from taking on, say, 20% - 30% more quests than an "optimum, balanced" party should have to take in order to gain a level, we could BUY ourselves some decent equipment at auction. Which we were doing. Because it's so much more fun to buy the really cool swords than to earn them.

Greener Pastures
We were seeing which way our path was leading after a level or so of this, and to be honest nobody in our group really loved the game. We were playing because other people in our group was playing, and we all like playing games together.

We ended up going with a much more "casual-friendly" MMO. The choice came down to City of Heroes and World of Warcraft - both of which are very friendly for more "casual play" and smaller groups (I understand WoW is pretty solo-able all the way up to max level). There were people in our extended group of players (including those who'd quit the Tuesday Night group) who really loved both games.

The winning combination for City of Heroes (besides the fact that I was actively lobbying for it...) was this:

* Up to 8 players in a group
* Instanced missions scale up and down with the size of the group - so even if only two people show up on a given night, you've got game.
* Instanced missions are scaled by number of enemies, not by their quality (or their "loot" - in terms of enhancements, salvage, and special gadget powers)
* EXTREMELY flexible grouping --- due to the sidekick / exemplar system, you can have people of extreme level differences still group up together and have fun together.

And overall, one thing I've always liked about City of Heroes is the less hardcore attitude of the designers - probably to the chagrin of the most hardcore players. They seem far less concerned about players "maxing out" their characters and "beating the game." There are lots of freebies thrown at the players - double XP weekends, special holiday events, veterans awards, and so forth. The attitude just seems (to me) to be more casual, and more focused on making all the levels fun than just daring the players to face the grind to end-game content.

Considering the number of players =who have several different characters they actively play, I would say that attitude is working --- though CoH has never enjoyed the subscriber numbers of the top MMORPGs.

One Play Style to Rule Them All?
Maybe it's just a play 'style' or something. But I for a long time I thought our play style was perfect for Dungeons & Dragons Online... we had a stable bunch of players who adventured together week after week through the DDO quests. It seemed like a cool idea at the time. But ultimately, it just seemed too rigid and inflexible, and it became frustrating. Even that wouldn't have been insurmountable, but it was just evident that nobody really loved anything in the game enough to bother.

I've seen members of our play group getting some additional play-time in between Tuesday nights. Maybe it's just because of the novelty, but hopefully the game's proving more fun for all of us that just being something for us to play on a Tuesday night.


(Vaguely) related dissapointments:
* How to FUBAR an MMO Launch
* When Magic Becomes Mundane in RPGs
* Still Playing Dungeons & Dragons Online
* DDO Flies Solo --- Kinda

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Labels: Game Design, Mainstream Games

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