117B. Layering and Zero-Player Games

This is a commonly used technique used to attempt to repair a quantitatively unstable design. What it is and why it doesn't work is explained.

This is a more detailed analysis of the subjects brought up by Asmongold and myself in 116A. Promoting Bad Design. As always I recommend reading a series in order. While the focus here is on layering in game design, layering is also used extensively in conventional economics. This is why conventional economics are such a train wreck, and considered “pseudoscience” by all of my mathematics professors. You will note that I am very critical of conventional economics and economists in some of my papers and here I will shed more light on why, but will stay focused primarily on game applications.

What is Layering?

Imagine that you put all of your players on a line. The “hardcore” players are clustered on the right where I will call the polar cluster “B”. On the left you have the more casual players clustered around a polar cluster I will call “A”. In the middle you have your functional game design represented by a circle. It’s not large enough to cover both poles. As a designer you can move the circle to the right towards “B” and favor hardcore players, or move it to the left towards “A” and favor your casual players.

Yes I use a white board, I’m old.

In the above example the blue circled numbers in the upper left corner are the iteration/patch numbers. Here the designers have shifted to the right with one patch, then compensated with another patch to shift the design to the left. They keep doing this, usually based on “data/analytics” (more on this below). But they don’t revert so all the patches remain, stacked one on top of each other. Each new patch raises the complexity of the design and game, not only for the players but also for the designers. Soon this becomes a nightmare for everyone.

Why Layer?

In a single player game you don’t need to layer. If the difficulty is too high or low for your player you just allow them to shift the difficulty level to their preference.

The problem comes when you link players via a player to player game economy and/or some sort of ranking system. Now everyone has to play by the same rules or the system becomes unfair. So the developer has to pick the difficulty level, not the players. There are ways to get around this problem in games like Path of Exile 2 as far as ranking goes, but not with regard to the economy.

With each patch the designers will try to move the design difficulty circle towards a mythical golden target somewhere in the middle to make everyone happy. This mythology likely comes from data driven design and the belief that data by itself is useful. As I’ve explained in many papers, especially the ones talking about applications of Moneyball [16., 19., 23., 49., 50P.), data can be more harmful than helpful unless you have a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to interpret that data. Any honest qualified data “scientist” (as little as 6 week certificate training, google it) will admit this if pressed, but won’t volunteer this information as it might make them appear less useful. In some extreme cases (here I’m thinking about Blizzard specifically) a company’s data scientists will block the hire of an SME to protect their jobs. This internal sabotage is a real problem if it is allowed to persist, and this is the most hidden aspect of what Asmongold is observing. He just can’t understand why the designers of WoW can’t see what he sees so clearly.

I don’t know if this is the scenario at Grinding Gear Games, but the player ratings of POE 2 are dropping rapidly with each patch as GGG goes down the Layering route trying to solve their collapsing economy.

A solution might be to allow players to “opt out” of the economy, as I suggested in my Path of Exile 2 review. As long as the developers need to maintain economy asset values, they will need to keep raising the difficulty and scarcity as players learn how to optimize asset generation. This will challenge the hardcore players (move the circle to the right) but make the game frustratingly difficult for new players. Thus the declining reviews and waning enthusiasm for the game. Even the hardcore players will be upset because their desire to get rich will be blocked and the game turns into a low paying job for them.

Each new patch without a rollback increases the game’s overall complexity, creating a barrier to entry for new players.

But…could you solve this problem by making the circle larger?

Zero-Player Games

I played World of Warcraft intensely for the first year after it’s release. I was one of the first 100 players in the world to level 60, and without using the bare handed rogue exploit that most of the others used to get there before it was fixed after the first week. It took me 8 days playing 22 hours a day. That was essentially what I call the “content lifespan” at launch. Today a good game should have quite a bit more than that.

I stopped after a year when I realized that on raids I was no longer playing with people. Everyone was activating bots and going and doing something else. Typically for up to 8 hours during a raid. I didn’t see any value in an automated game.

What prompted Asmongold’s rant this week was Blizzard announcing that they had introduced a built in one button bot that any player could click and have the game play itself. Without this button, the game had become too complex for most new players. Thus Blizzard “solved” this problem by lowering the difficulty for everyone to zero. This is actually pretty fair.

Blizzard had previously removed the need for any sort of social development by creating a button that would automatically place you in a group. That made it so that you didn’t need any friends or reputation to play. Now you don’t even need players to run the game. It’s just one big world filled with bots.

I have previously complained that online games that you can play all by yourself like Star Wars: The Old Republic died because people play online with the intention of having social interaction. If they don’t want that, they can have a much better experience playing a dedicated single player game. I call these Massively Single Player Games.

But Blizzard went one step further. They did manage to expand the circle I use in my above model to cover everyone and thus solved their layering problem. They did it by creating the world’s first Massively Zero-Player Game. There should be some special award for this. You may laugh (and I hope you find this funny), but the developers don’t seem to realize there is an issue with their solution. That total oblivion is what was driving Asmongold and his followers crazy. It’s like Blizzard has gotten so disconnected from their players that they managed to even become disconnected from reality.

And money.

Because of course zero players = zero revenue.

Preventing Layering

The only way to avoid layering is to create a game where everyone can play happily at their own difficulty level without harming anyone else’s interests. I actually described this problem in my 2009 Third Tier of Game Development paper where I predicted that a future metaverse would be created to solve this problem in education and the labor pool.

You see in a classroom if you have one teacher and 30 students, the teacher is forced to teach to the level of the slowest student in order to teach everyone. If they just try to teach the smartest kids, they leave most of them behind. Teaching at the lowest rate year after year dumbs down the entire population, a recipe for disaster especially as the dumbing down effect of AI compounds with this.

Thus for decades educators have struggled with this same layering problem of where to put their teaching circle and who to leave behind. The only way to do this is to create a single player experience for each student, where they can go at their own speed. This is what I predicted in 2009 we would create by 2030. A single teacher can’t do this, but AI can. Thus AI is another prerequisite to The Metaverse, along with the strong authentication system I described back then (which we now call Blockchain).

We can save all the effort of building this Metaverse by just getting rid of all the people we don’t need anymore. This is my fear, that this is where things are heading. In a way, Blizzard has taken the first step by getting rid of all their people that they didn’t need: their customers.

There is a reality where Blizzard’s actions make total sense. If they don’t make sense to you or Asmongold, that’s because you exist in a different reality from Blizzard.

In my reality you solve this layering problem by converting competitive games to cooperative games, just like real life used to be. When one person wins, everyone wins. This is how tribes lived for 99% of the time that humans have lived on Earth. Our physiology and internal reward systems are set up to promote this. Our nature as a social species is what made us so successful.

You create an ominous threat for all players and have them cooperate to overcome that threat. If someone spends, everyone on that team benefits from that spending (my REVENGE and Star Garden designs both work this way). So now instead of people getting mad at you when you outspend them, everyone encourages everyone else to spend. In such an environment, you get a lot of spending.

Or, you can take the Blizzard design option and go happily into the light.

Note that since there are no rollbacks in real life, layering is what is taught in conventional economics. Systems exist that were built before anyone alive now was born. This is why I go back and read Adam Smith (1775) carefully, to understand the mess we are in now. I’m not a fan of conventional economics, but I do understand it, probably too well. Complexity and loopholes abound, allowing some to get incredibly rich while merit is deemphasized. The Wealth of Nations wasn’t really a guide book, it was more of a recipe book. Pretty soon all this complexity will get handed to AI and I’m eager to see what happens. If all the existing exploits (that are protected from repair) are run by AI, but at a trillion times the normal speed, our world will change in minutes.

Conventional economists are taught only the most recent layers, and thus can’t know what’s going on underneath. They also can’t do repairs without breaking something they don’t understand. Similarly, if you brought me in to repair your layered design, I probably couldn’t without just starting over as there would be so many layers that even the designers might not understand all of them. And then of course you can’t replace those designers, since they are the only ones that know how you got to where you are now.