InsaneBear

Feature: Rethinking the online experience

After spending a fair amount of time with the Halo: Reach beta last week, which I had a pretty good time with, online multiplayer has been the focus of my thoughts for the first time in a while. And really, when I think about online gaming, I tend to think about how little of it I do these days. Back in the days of Halo 2 and maybe even extending into my time with Modern Warfare 1, I generally paid a visit to the virtual killing fields on a daily basis. But a lot has changed since then, both in my personal life and in the industry. Rather than wasting your time with an exploration of why I can’t seem enjoy the competitive online scene for more than a month at a time anymore, I’ll just go with the easy answer and say that all the kids I used to play with no longer play games online and that I’m not entirely interested in meeting digital friends. So for me, the novelty of a new game and primal competition can keep me satisfied for maybe month, but as soon as I pick up a newer game I have no interest in returning to the never-ending massacre that I had been contributing to. How can developers change this behavior?

Well, it’s probably a good idea to examine the online games that I’ve gotten involved with over the past couple years. I’ll only bother to list the ones that managed to draw me into public matches with the rest of you strange weirdos for more than a week–BioShock 2, Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 1943, Left 4 Dead, and Gears of War 2. My motivations to suffer through BioShock 2‘s multiplayer were pretty much achievements and the need to properly review the game. I also enjoyed the Big Daddy twist applied to your run-of-the-mill CTF game in the “Capture the Sister” mode.

Modern Warfare 2 genuinely had me hooked for a while with its immense customization and class-balance. Not to mention, persistent leveling is always one way to keep a player going for one more session. But ultimately, I just got sick of running around and shooting things for no apparent reason other than to release stress (or build it, depending on how you’re playing).

Battlefield 1943 is a game that I enjoyed the hell out of in the down months of summer and pretty much played just for the sheer joy of it (remember when we used to do that?). I also really liked the effect vehicles had on the battlefield and how they essentially created different classes of play-style.

Left 4 Dead is probably the one game out of this bunch that I still come back to from time to time, although I haven’t bothered to touch it since Left 4 Dead 2 came out and likely destroyed the first game’s player community. But I think it’s the necessity of team-work paired with the intensity of fighting off an undead horde that makes that game so consistently fun. I actually talked to strangers when I played Left 4 Dead.

And lastly, Gears of War 2 entertained me for a good long while with one of the best online experiences of this generation. But unfortunately, Epic may have created a monster when they introduced the irresistibly fun Horde mode. They need to find a way to make the competitive element of multiplayer just as addictive as the cooperative one in Gears 3.

So the recurring theme I’m seeing here is that games which require some degree of team-work tend to last a little longer than the lone-wolf bloodsports. That’s not to say a game can’t hook me with rewarding progression systems or good old-fashioned gameplay, but I definitely feel like cooperation is the best way to get me invested in a “community” of total strangers who belittle each other like it’s their job (and considering some of the CoD players I’ve had the pleasure of gaming with, unemployment isn’t really that big of a stretch). The question now becomes, “How do developers convince gamers that we want to work together to accomplish objectives that don’t revolve around simple body counts?”

The first thing that comes to my mind is the system in PS3 exclusive MAG, which I haven’t had the pleasure of playing myself. But from everything I’ve read and watched of the game, it seems that Zipper Interactive incentivized team-work by rewarding players with more experience for completing tasks assigned by their squad leaders and things of that nature. That is certainly a step in the right direction, but this rational-self-interest model doesn’t necessarily equate to true cooperation. In my humble opinion, voice-chat is essential to real team-work and convincing people to actually problem-solve with strangers takes more than a few stat bonuses and arbitrary experience rankings to accomplish.

So this is the part where I reveal my master plan that will surely leave you in awe. I hope you’re ready. Leagues. Allow me to elaborate. See, in my experience, when you’re split-screening on the couch with your friends or siblings, it doesn’t even matter how good the game you’re playing is because the company you’re in makes the experience fun. When you’re gaming with people you actually know, everybody’s more willing to abide crazy rules for made-up games, everybody’s slightly more competitive but never begrudgingly so, friendly rivalries develop when you’ve learned another player’s tendencies. And maybe I’m crazy, but I get the feeling that if we actually got to know who we were playing with on a first-name basis then maybe we’d show them a little respect and cut all the BS that comes with online anonymity.

How would these leagues work? How would they be any different from clans or dedicated servers? Well, to be perfectly honest, this idea is mainly about transferring that real sense of community found on PCs to consoles, which have struggled mightily with the concept. Even games that have introduced clan features have failed miserably in implementing them. Halo 2‘s clan playlists were so underutilized that Bungie eventually cut the content out of the game in an update. Developers need to realize that console gamers just don’t have the dedication to pursue vibrant clan communities (hooray for ignorant generalizations!).

Community needs to be forced on us. The idear is that once we get a taste of it we’ll wonder how we ever got by without it. So that whole oppressive forcing part comes into the equation as follows–the developer creates tier groupings based on skill level. And when I say skill level I mean just that–not experience level. Games have recently gotten in the habit of inflating our egos with experience-based leveling, rather than the cold, hard facts of skill-based levels. I don’t know how Bungie determined my skill in Halo 2, but it seemed like a fairly accurate gauge. Anyways, the developer makes these tiers of level 1-10 players, level 11-20 players, and so on. Within these tiers, which would likely contain tens, in not hundreds of thousands of players a piece, small leagues of maybe 100-200 players would be carved out so each tier contains hundreds of small leagues within. If you’re still following me, we now have a system that ranks a player based on performance and accordingly places them in a random league within their skill tier.

Now that we are in a league, all of our matches will be played with the 100-200 (obviously these numbers are examples that would need to be fiddled with until a proper balance of familiarity and quick match-making could be found) fellow gamers in our league. Being stuck in one league forever certainly runs the risk of getting boring, so the developer could reset the league populations every month or something like that. But for the time spent playing with the same people, we would inevitably become familiar with our peers. Deep stat-tracking and highly visible leader boards would only serve to stiffen the competition. We’d make friends and make enemies, we’d become known ourselves, classic rivalries would form and make for some legendary show-downs. And even if all that stuff didn’t happen, I think everybody would be more receptive to actually talking to each other during games. And if you’re stuck in the same community for a month then you really can’t be a jerk-face or you could get booted from every match you play.

This idea that I’ve presented is very bare-bones and would require a lot of fleshing out were it to ever be applied in the real world, but I see so much potential in it. A developer could even add more depth by letting players pick filters on what types of matches they like to play, so you could join a league that focuses more on objective games than deathmatch or vice versa. I just think that if developers want us to continue playing their games and buying their DLC, and if gamers want to enjoy friendly competition in an online environment akin to your living room couch, then the only answer is to find a way to force cooperation and community on us. Games like Left 4 Dead and MAG are a start, but we need a system that makes online conversation something to look forward to, not dread. If anybody else has thoughts on how to accomplish this goal I’d love to hear them.

Author: Cody

Tags: anonymous jerks, battlefield 1943, bioshock 2, feature, gears of war 2, halo reach, insanebear, left 4 dead, mag, modern warfare 2, online gaming