Rolling a one..

It’s amazing how easy it is for some people to muck up something which is entirely about illusion. Take, for instance, the number of advancement points in a system. Let’s say, for argument sakes, a time honored system has 20 major points of advancement. Everyone expects 20 points of advancement, because that’s how the system has always worked in the past. Now, far be it for me to knock breaking traditions, as I’m all for stirring things up, by why change something if it has no applicable gain? Let’s just say, for instance, that we’d rather have 40 points of advancement in our system, because in this case we feel we need to have them at a more frequent rate. We have two choices; we can add 20 points of advancement by simply raising the number of points by 20, or we can introduce some type of sub-advancement scheme that keeps the numbers how people expect to see them; in other words, you have 20 levels, with 1 sub-level advancement each.

With either choice the result is the same; you have x amount of content divided over n points of advancement. Simply changing the numbers does not change the amount of content in the game. And often, the sub advancement system requires the creation of new content as well. But perception is a funny thing. For instance, when we were working on AC1 people complained that they didn’t get enough skill credits. So we doubled the number of skill credits, but doubled the cost of each skill. While the result was no different than the previous system, people loved the new system and said it was a great change. In reality, the perception of how those numbers played out was far more real than the actuality of how they played out in the design. There was no design difference. Nada. None. But bigger numbers felt like an improvement to people, and they got them more often.

Now, imagine if we had gone the other direction. Imagine that when they complained we had decided to half the number of skill credits while halving the cost of each skill. The net result would have stayed the same, but it’s quite likely we would have incited riots within the community. Sure, we could have told them things like “Hey, we’re saving those extra skill points for later skill expansion!”, but the reality would have stayed the same, and all we would have done was piss off the community for no net gain to the design.

Now couple this with an expectation built from previous experience with a product. Say you buy a deck of cards, but this deck only has 26 cards instead of 52; but each card can actually be one of four cards depending on how it’s drawn from the deck; thus, you’re really getting two decks for the price of one with twice the chance to win! (or so the marketing pitch says) Which deck of cards will you bring out when your friends come over to play poker?

Sometimes I make no sense..

I just installed google's adsense onto this blog for fun. I know, I know, ads are annoying; and if you've looked at the hit counter, it's pretty obvious that in about 3 years I should expect a check for 29 cents. I don't really advertise this site, or even go out of my way to tell anyone about it, so it's pretty amazing that it gets the hits it does. But somehow, the occasional royalty checks I collect of various projects please me to no end. I did some textures for Turbo Squid about 5 years ago, and about every other month it buys me lunch. Every time the check arrives I'm excited to find out if I made $2 or $4. I have various other checks that come in from time from other past projects, and I find them equally amusing. Somehow, in some strange way, this trickle of micro-payments pleases me more than the main paycheck I get every week. The whole thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, but what the hell, its fun. And maybe it will encourage me to keep writing in this thing so that one day I’ll get my 29 cents!

Oh, I submitted a proposal for a lecture on latency management in high latency environments (ie: How to do real-time combat in 500ms of lag) for GDC next year. If it gets approved, Dan and I will be presenting it together, and I expect it to be a pretty good presentation for those involved with MMPs. We did some really cutting edge work on the problem together, with some really great results, so it'll be great to present them. Here's hoping it gets accepted; my lecture last year was a bit of a disaster (laptop died on me, and it was a entirely demo driven presentation) so hopefully that won't tank us.