League of Legends: eSports are Worth Watching

A few years ago I would have never guessed that I would be following a complete season of any sport, much less a video game. However, this past year I have been following League of Legends religiously; taking interest in statistics, rooting on my favorite teams and digging deeper into strategies and overall game understanding.

When some of my friends hear that I watch a video game broadcast and call it a sport, they laugh and can not believe that eSports is a real thing. They picture the low budget YouTube videos of people in spectator mode watching others play video games with a commentator who knows a lot about the game, but may not be the best at passing on his knowledge to his audience. I explain to them that those still do exist, but eSports has made leaps and bounds from what they are picturing and I can now confidently say that they rival traditional sportscasts in production quality.

As recently as last year, at an international competition, League of Legends drew a whopping 32 million viewers. (Source) That is a significant interest in a video game and I believe this is due in no small part to the efforts being made by the broadcast crew currently found at Riot Games.

In the last two years, Riot Games has invested heavily in developing a high quality broadcast that gamers would want to watch. Taking cues from traditional sports broadcasts, League of Legends has created the gold standard in terms of how video games should be presented as a sport. From shoutcasting (what they call their announcers) and instant replays to post game analysis and stat tracking; any person familiar with broadcasted sporting events would be very familiar with the current state of League of Legends eSports. What I believe to be their biggest strength is their shoutcasters.

Shoutcasters alone have made the game very accessible to watch. Be breaking down plays, explaining why certain moves were good or poor decisions, providing instant replays and slowing down the sometimes chaotic action to explain how close a fight really was, does help bring the game to a wider audience. I believe you break a certain threshold when people say, “I don’t actually play the game, but I enjoy watching it.” This is an indicator to me that League of Legends is being presented in an easily digestible format and that the camera work, combined with the shoutcasters, are allowing viewers to follow and understand the action enough to be part of the experience. I am not a very good League of Legends player, and I really can not keep up with the changes in the meta game, but the way the broadcast crew breaks down the information and allows me to just sit back and enjoy the experience is amazing to me.

Other familiar additions to League of Legends eSports that traditional sports watchers will recognize are teams with sponsorships, star players and player story segments,  large arenas with live audiences and referees and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

My hope by writing this post is to spread the knowledge that eSports is no longer a low-budget production to be scoffed at; it is a legitimate broadcast that I believe any gamer could get into. If you would like to judge the production quality for yourself, you can pull up past broadcasts at twitch.tv/riotgames/profile/pastBroadcasts or watch live weekly games at lolesports.com. If you would like to learn more about League of Legends eSports, head over to lolesports.com.

Hearthstone: A Collectible Card Game for All

Blizzard, the company behind games such as World of Warcraft and Starcraft, has an amazing ability to take any genre of games and make them more entertaining and polished. They may not be leading the industry in creating new genres, but the quality of their product is usually leaps and bounds beyond their competitors. Hearthstone is one of those games.

Full disclosure, my experience with CCG’s (Collectible Card Games) is fairly limited. I have played the standard Magic the Gathering and the obscure Star Wars CCG, but I never really got into the CCG scene. I always felt that the constantly changing decks and cost was beyond my means. There was always that desire to be a part of the culture, but I could not afford the hobby so I avoided it as best I could. Then Blizzard introduced hearthstone.

What makes hearthstone different is it is a completely computer/tablet based game. I am aware that MTG has a similar product, but again this is Blizzard flexing its refinement muscles and creating a truly polished product. There is currently no physical product and you are not required to carry around a stack of 500 cards to remain competitive; decks only consist of 30 cards. They also have a clever mana system (the mechanic that allows you to play cards in the game), so you no longer curse the world when you have an excess (or lack) of land in your opening hand. The game is based around maximizing you mana usage each turn and trying to out-think your opponent. It creates an enjoyable experience that is easily accessible to multiple categories of gamers.

Another nod to Blizzard, is its ability to integrate its intellectual property into the experience; creating a connection with gamers through familiar lore. Hearthstone is based in the World of Warcraft universe, a lore rich world with many recognizable characters and places. Anyone who has played WoW will instantly be familiar with the heroes, classes, creatures and set pieces found in Hearthstone. (Even the name is a reference to an item in WoW) Creating this connection, in my opinion, is a great way to introduce players to the feel of the classes and how each will play mechanically. (This is similar to deck colors in MTG) Blizzard does a very good job of getting the essence of a class across to a player. Rogues for instance, are very fast at attacking and have a lot of cards which combo off of each other. As compared to priests who are a little slower to start and have a lot of spells that involve healing and buffing. These are Familiar mechanics to any WoW player, but they are not the only features they are planning to integrate into the CCG universe.

Blizzard has also announced plans to introduce a raiding system to Hearthstone where players will cooperate to defeat a dungeon. This is something I am really excited for because many CCG’s are only competitive and introducing a cooperative element is something I would enjoy greatly.

Hearthstone just launched this week and is free to play. There are micro-transactions available, but they are not required to play. Every card can be created without using money; it just takes time. This is why micro-transactions are effective. It is a consideration of how much is your time worth to you, but this is a discussion for another time.

If you are interested in hearthstone, head over to the Hearthstone’s website and start playing today!

Guild Wars 2: Encouraging Cooperation

As of late August, one game has been dominating most of my free time. That game is Guild Wars 2. I played a little before launch (as you can see in my earlier posts) and I am continually impressed with the way this game was designed and implemented. The more I play the game I think about other MMO’s and why they never implemented the mechanics Arena Net put into Guild Wars 2 at launch.

One design concept I want to focus on is Guild Wars 2 wants people to work together. You are probably thinking, well every MMO wants people to work together, what makes Guild Wars 2 different? I would argue that other MMO’s actually encourage being selfishness and avoiding other players. For instance, in most MMO’s when you are fighting enemies in an area, the traditional method for assigning rewards is to give it to the individual who hit the enemy first. This creates a race to see who can hit something before the other player and if you are the loser, you actually have a disincentive to help the person who won. You will not be rewarded for your efforts and it even goes to the extent of the loser wanting the winner to fail in his attempt to defeat the enemy. The winner’s demise creates less competition in the area for rewards and then the loser will be able to defeat that first enemy and get the rewards.

In comes ArenaNet and recognizes this problem. Their solution? Everyone gets rewards no matter when they hit the enemy. This seems like such a simple fix for a problem that has been in MMO’s for years, but it is effective. Another example of ArenaNet’s changes is giving everyone the ability to revive fallen players and rewarding them for doing so. Again a simple fix, but I can’t tell you how many times in other games I would beg people to revive my character and they would demand large sums of in game currency for their efforts or they would leave me to ponder my existence.

These are but a few example of how Guild Wars 2 encourages cooperation in it’s player base, but also highlights a problem with most MMO’s. Over the years MMO’s have begun to feel like single player games with other people there to make your life more difficult. I am guilty of sometimes avoiding players in other MMO’s because the system provides me greater rewards for working alone. I believe these design choices were driving us away from the original purpose of MMO’s, which was to interact with other players on a massive scale.

What was happening was a duplication of a formula and design choices of one successful MMO. Not many companies were challenging this design and so it perpetuated until the success of Guild Wars 2. I am hoping with the success that Guild Wars 2 has seen, future MMO’s will see the power of encouraging your players to work together and have fun!

Screenshot by JBLivin

Opinion: Sometimes Less Can be More

Over the years I have noticed a trend starting to set in within games. They are becoming more and more complex. In some ways this can be good by creating new and intriguing gameplay. In other cases I feel that complexity starts to paralyze the player and detract from the so called “fun factor”.

Designers continue to add mechanics to games to differentiate themselves from previous games in their genre. They want to prove that they continue to innovate rather than continuously producing the same thing over and over. Due to this constantly expanding toolset given to players in a modern game, I am starting to feel gamers are given too many options.

Gamers are optimizers by nature. What I mean by this is gamers seek to find the best possible solution to a given problem and use it to their advantage. If they are given too many options, they will stop and consider each possibility and its advantages to find the so called “best solution.”  In my opinion, this “stop and go” game play detracts from the over all experience.

The Civilization series is a perfect example of this idea. Civilization is a game where you run an empire and try to out fight or out produce your enemy in a turn based strategy setting. You are given the ability to micromanage individual economic options, propose trade agreements, work political intrigue and run military campaigns; and this is just scratching the surface of the possibilities.

If anyone has ever taken advantage of the multiplayer option for Civilization, they can relate to how long individual turns can last with so many options. Players consider in their heads, “Would it be better to build more infantry or develop better farming methods?” “Do I need to move that troop over there or over there?” While one person sits there debating these issues, other players in the session are waiting to continue the game. This paralysis is caused by having too many options.

Over the years the number of options available to the player has expanded to a point where new players to the series feel completely lost. I understand that a designer does not want to just continuously produce the same game over and over with a new coat of paint, but when your game is so complex it drives other away, you are walking a fine line. You start to appeal only to a niche audience of hardcore fans which will continue to dwindle without new players joining in each iteration. By stream lining your options and removing unnecessary choices, you might capture new players and grow your fan base.

Designers need to take a step back from a project sometimes and just ask, “Does the player really need this option?” I feel designers are chock-full of ideas and can get too close to a game. They forget that even though they may be good ideas, those ideas don’t all need to be in just one game.

I believe people underestimate the value of simplicity. Some of the games I enjoyed the most had the fewest “options.” An example of this was Borderlands. A very simple game in premise; shoot the bad guys, get better guns and keep going to shoot bigger bad guys. The only options were the guns you used and the specializations you chose.

When playing with other gamers, the flow of the game was never stopped longer than it took someone considering if a gun that dropped off of a bad guy was better than the one they had. Borderlands even implemented a quick and easy way to compare guns. The gun on the ground would be compared to the one in your hands through a simple pop-up menu that compared the stats of the guns using up arrows for better and down arrows for worse. Simple, fast and effective. I felt I was spending more time enjoying the game rather than optimizing.

Through simplicity comes creativity. When given fewer options, players are forced to be more creative with the tools they are given and sometimes come up with clever solutions to problems. By limiting a tool set, players will spend less time deciding what option to use and more time experiencing your game.

Photograph by br1dotcom

Opinion: The Future of MMO Monetization

Free to play is a growing monetization method for games. The idea behind this model is consumers are allowed to play a game for free and the company generates revenue through micro-transactions. Pioneered in the social gaming space by companies like Zynga, it has been very successful and seen sizable returns. MMO’s are hoping to emulate this success and offer a “higher quality” gaming experience.

Free to Play has really begun to hit its stride this year in the wake of the failure of Star Wars: The Old Republic’s (SWTOR); which used a monthly fee structure. SWTOR believed that there was still a market that would pay a monthly fee to access a “quality” MMO. In less than a year SWTOR reported a drastic drop in their subscriptions and announced that it would transition into a Free to Play model. Many other MMO’s in development were following SWTOR closely to see if there was still room for a successful monthly fee MMO like World of Warcraft.

I believe SWTOR’s failure marked the end of an era where monthly subscription fees were the norm in the MMO industry. There have been countless MMO’s that have come and gone, all trying to emulate the juggernaut that is WoW to varying degrees of success. None of these MMO’s have been able to pull those same numbers and so a new structure was needed — Free to Play.

Dungeon and Dragons Online was one of the first large MMO’s to adopt this structure. Through the micro-transaction market in their game, they were able to  maintain profitability, and thrive, and became a proof of concept to other MMO’s. The success of DDO even led the developer, Turbine, to change its other large MMO, Lord of the Rings Online, to a Free to Play model. If you look around today, you will notice almost every MMO coming to market is Free to Play; Planetside 2, World of Warplanes and Neverwinter just being a few examples.

Originally I was adverse to the idea of the Free to Play model for games. I had a bad taste in my mouth from Zynga games on Facebook. Their micro-transaction market felt more like a requirement than an option after a certain point which ran counter intuitively to the whole idea of Free to Play in my opinion.

Free to Play should be exactly as the name suggests — free to play. I do not believe in Free to Play games requiring you to pay to advance after a certain point or giving individuals advantages over non-paying players. My thoughts are that Free to Play games should have all their content available to players as long as they contribute enough time to achieve their goal. What should be monetized are cosmetic items and convenience services.

Cosmetic items could include appearances, which also entails appearances only available through the market, or titles placed beside a character’s name in game. Convenience services are the ability to transfer characters to another server, increasing the speed at which you gain experience and in-game currency, additional character slots and inventory space. There is a fine line to walk with these services and it takes a lot of thought to determine the items that should be in the market.

What constitutes crossing the line, in my opinion, is when a game offers items in its market that give paying players an advantage, in terms of power. The colloquial gaming phrase for this is “pay to win.” This is when a player can pay to do more damage or have more health which is not available to people who don’t pay. I feel this detracts from other player’s enjoyment of the game and creates an unneeded rift inside the player populace. People who don’t pay are then at an immediate disadvantage, which can be very frustrating, especially in a competitive gaming environment.

What developers tend to forget is that the populace is what makes an MMO. Without the other people in the game, you might as well be playing a single player game. By implementing “play to win” market items, you are angering your customers and driving them away from your game. As the players leave out of frustration, the people who did pay for those items will begin to follow as the population diminishes.

Free to Play has a major advantage over subscription fee models, anyone with the right hardware can play. MMOs thrive on a rich social environment. By making the game more accessible, they increase the player base and statistically the number of people who will pay for market items. MMO players like to socialize and the more people you have, the more likely your game will thrive and the more people with feel attached to the game. As the populace grows, players will want to maintain their individuality and this will lead to cosmetic items becoming popular.

The Free to Play model has developers listening more to their communities. Since they depend on players choosing to spend money, they have to provide services that would appeal to them.

To use a recent example, SWTOR did not launch with a bank for guilds. It was a large complaint in the community and they informed the community they were working on it. A large patch comes out, not too long after launch, and still no guild bank. The problem was, no matter how much the community complained, they still are paying their monthly fee so the developer is in control and decides the importance of items. The only way a player could fight back is to cancel their subscription, but then they are not playing the game during their protest and it could lead to them finding a new game while the issue resolved.

In the Free to Play model, if the majority of the community asked for a guild bank, the developers would put that as a top priority. The developers have to be more aware of what the community wants or they will not succeed.

I like the idea of paying for what I enjoy and ignoring what I don’t; rather than paying a monthly blanket sum for a whole lot of content that I may or may not want to play. This is commonly refereed to as “voting with you wallet.” The developers are given an indication of what the community likes through the purchases they make. Again this ties into developers listening to their community to determine what they want. This gives the players a way to tell developers, “We like what you did here, make more of this!”

Some people will argue that this takes the control of the game out of the developers hands and detracts from their vision. I believe it is more of a give and take. Developers must be open to listening to their communities. They may even come across an idea they hadn’t thought of that would improve the game for everyone. At the same time they may have to make the hard choice to ignore the community’s desires to maintain their overall goals for the project. It’s just the fine line developers must walk in a Free to Play environment.

I think Free to Play will be the new model for MMOs, at least for the near future. It seems to be a strong model allowing gamers to pay for what they want and ignore what they don’t providing valuable feedback to the developer. With the way the Free to Play markets work, there is also potential for MMOs to make more money than in a traditional monthly fee structure. We will have to wait and see how well the Free to Play structure does in practice, but with so many MMOs putting their games on the line with this model, it seems the analysts have faith in it.

Screenshot by BleatingHeart