130. Asymmetrical Matchmakers (and Games)

A completely "fair" game can be a bit boring if everyone is the same. With some creativity (and a lot of math) a game can be created where everyone is not equal, but the game is still fair.

Fairness

The word “Fair” means different things to different people. The reason it took 3 months (out of my entire 14 week deployment to Saint Petersburg in 2014) to convince the team to make World of Warships an Asymmetrical game was because Russians and Americans have different definitions of fair. It took me 3 months to realize that, and once I did, and explained that in an internal document, the move to Asymmetry was greenlit and we were soon printing a lot of money.

You may have heard the phrase “Life is not fair.” Well, it’s true. If it was then things would be a lot more boring and there would be no Heroes. A more controversial statement is “People are not equal”. We know that’s true, some people are taller, or stronger, or born into money, or smarter. That’s part of what makes our species so successful is our diversity and how there’s always a “Right tool for the right job”. Somewhere.

Various very well funded teams from Activision (2015), Electronic Arts (2016), and NetEase (2024) were spending a lot of resources experimenting with “what if games were not fair? Could that be more profitable?” And ultimately “How do we make an unfair game that people prefer?” These are fair questions. I’ve tackled the same questions myself.

But it doesn’t matter how big your spear is if you throw it in the wrong direction. Usually really big technological leaps occur when some inspired person comes up with a plan, spends years fleshing out that plan, and then a team is built around them to test that plan. That’s not what was done by these three groups. They assembled a bunch of computer/data scientists and just said “we suspect (correctly) that something useful is here, and let’s throw money at it to find it”. And when they didn’t find it, they just faked it. No one wants to admit they blew that much money.

The core assumption that all three teams used, that was fatally flawed, was that

Fair = Equal

My Russian colleagues at Wargaming had the same belief. And to their credit the culture in the company back then (this has since changed) was that their games needed to be fair. So thus they also needed to have everyone be equal.

Equal is boring. Fair is aspirational. Humans will consider something as “Fair” if they have a reasonable chance of winning. They don’t expect equality, they expect opportunity. Being an underdog and still winning is Heroic. And heroism is a universally admired trait for humans.

While I hope I am making sense here, this is really a very complex topic that you can see a small army of very smart people could not figure out. So let me throw down some definitions and go into a bit of history so we can tackle this fully prepared.

• fairMM: This is a matchmaker that all three teams defined as attempting to match two (or more) players against the closest ranked player in the queue.

• unfairMM (EOMM): Here the MM algorithm “plans” (literally) which matches you will win or lose that day and creates an environment where that almost certainly happens according to the plan.

• unfairAsymMM (EnMatch): This is a situation where the teams are internally unequal (either in power or skill) AND the wins/losses are predetermined. Internally unequal is possible because this MM is team on team instead of player on player.

• fairAsymMM: This is a team based MM where internally the teams are unfair, but externally they ARE fair.

Let’s assume that we rank all players from 1 to 100, with 100 being best and 1 being worst.

fairMM would attempt to match player 55 against 54 or 56.

unfairMM would attempt to match player 55 with player 1 or player 100, and would match “up” 5 times and “down” 5 times to force 5 wins and 5 losses.

unfairAsymMM would attempt to team player 80 with player 11 and player 15 on one team and player 40 with player 1 and player 5 on the other team to force a win/loss.

fairAsymMM might team players 9,13,18,21,24, and 25 against player 80, or could team player 60 and 50 against 40 and 55 where bold numbers are OP/Big (overpowered) units.

For fairAsymMM, the first scenario is an example of a Heroic Game. The latter two scenarios are Big Games. Sorry for the complexity, but if this was intuitive all these scientists would have figured it out a long time ago without my help.

The Activision and Electronic Arts patents were for unfairMMs. There was never any evidence that either model worked, and as I showed earlier the supporting research was faked. Players obviously prefer “fair” games over unfair games, that’s why these models had to be kept secret from players. I believe the reason this tech path was pursued at all was an extension of the Zynga-era “Fun Pain” which I identified as being horrible for both gamers and the industry back in 2011. This world view where consumers are “prey” and the relationship between players and developers is antagonistic could only lead to bankruptcy and layoffs.

The NetEase team was painfully close to figuring this all out. They almost literally tripped over the solution they were looking for and didn’t notice. I believe this was because they held the EOMM research from Electronic Arts as true, and just adopted its conclusions without challenging them. These guys are really good at making CO models and really bad at reading research papers.

The NetEase’s “diversity teams” where they make teams using one highly skilled player and two lower skilled players is a huge leap in MM because it turned an unfairMM into an unfairAsymMM. This works because it allows all players to feel Heroic one third of the time. This is much better than fairMM where players almost never feel heroic. But they killed it by forcing the unfairness and predetermining match outcomes.

These Diversity Teams in MM are identical to my “Power Rotation” in MMs. I invented this in 2012, deployed it in 2014 (World of Warships), and revealed it in my How to Make Healthy Games paper in 2018. I even put pictures in that paper so you could see how the “Diversity Teams” were built by the MM. I wrote that knowing that the “Fun Pain” people who view gamers as prey would never read a paper with the word “Healthy” in it. That’s my Machiavellian nature peaking through. People assume that because I protect children, I’m a Paladin. I’m not. I’m a Druid.

The NetEase people are so close. I’ve always had a good relationship with them. The last time they sat down with me in meat space to pump me for information was in 2015 or 2016, and they didn’t ask me good questions. All they have to do to fix up their model is remove the unfair mechanics (the vast majority of the work that went into their research paper) and keep the Diversity Teams. That might even solve all or most of the problems they are going to have with EU regulators next year.

That will leave them with a high functioning Category 3 game. Cat 3 games are old at this point and hard to make money on. But at least they won’t lose money. World of Warships from 2014 used Asymmetrical units, not just Asymmetrical player skill levels, and this allowed me to charge for access to Asymmetrical units. That’s why World of Warships is a Category 4 game and why it outperforms everything else in the market despite being low budget and “old”.

Before I get too much into how this relates to revenue, let me finish explaining the difference between a “Heroic” game and a “Big” game, both of which are made possible by AsymMM’s.

Heroic Games

I had severe asthma from age 5 to 14 because I was smoking unfiltered Camels at age 5. I beat my asthma by running every lunch break at my school when I was 14. I was inspired by the time I spent at the Muscle Pit in Venice Beach talking to all the original body building masters, who took me under wing. I was either going to beat my asthma or die trying. It took me 3 months, having an asthma attack every day, and on the last day I could not trigger an attack, no matter how hard I tried. I threw away my medicine and vowed to never stop running.

I became a good runner, but because of my late start I never won a race in high school. Taking 2nd or 3rd in a race helps the school, but it’s not great for morale. There’s nothing like winning. Everyone should get the chance to win sometimes.

In traditional “fair” games we create a whole class of people who try hard but rarely win. And then we have players that win a lot and they get used to it. That’s boring for both groups. By using Power Rotation (aka Diversity Groups) everyone gets to be a winner in every play session, even if their team loses. Remember, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the person next to you!

So even if your team lost, but you were amazing compared to your teammates, that makes you feel a bit heroic. Also, this allows newer and less skilled players to learn from more skilled players. This is critical to the human experience, and that’s why when I was coaching at UCLA we treated our new runners with the same respect as our elder runners. Even though the new runners rarely won races, the elder runners will age out and today’s young runners become tomorrow’s elder runners.

If your game design permits it (some of my unpublished designs do), you can have one highly skilled player fighting off several lower skilled players. While there may be some technical constraints, there is no design limitation that prohibits you have having 5 on 1 Asymmetrical matches. When I was a top player (and also on the dev team with Nexon) in Shattered Galaxy, the first MMORTS, I would often fight 15 players solo to a draw.

In this case not only was I more skilled, but because I was typically higher level I also had Bigger Units. Which is the other kind of Asymmetry.

Big Games

One of my favorite early games was Crush Crumble Chomp . I had a brief window to play this on friends’ Vic-20s (with cassette data drive) before I became homeless (for 5 years) in 1983. Being able to fight armies as Godzilla or any of the other well designed Giant Monsters was a blast, and flattening entire cities was a bonus. The game was hard, and the humans would always take you out, eventually.

Big games involve the opportunity to play an Overpowered (OP) unit or character. Pay to Win games provide a similar experience, except that in P2W there is no fairness. Fairness is important to players, even big spenders, so P2W is not a good model, even from a monetisation view.

The challenge of balancing “BIG” games was successfully tackled in large scale table top wargames like Warhammer a long time ago. You give both sides a budget to spend on units, and the two teams have to be equal in budget. Every unit has to have a rock/paper/scissors weakness to prevent a super unit from being undefeatable.

No matter how OP one player may be, there is always a balance point where two teams will be “fair” with similar opportunity to win, if enough players are allowed on the other side. Of course a game like this has to be built from the ground up to support this sort of gameplay.

Another designer who was a “Big” fanatic was Chris Taylor. His Total Annihilation game was his calling card. The difference in scale from the initial units to the end game units was unlike anything that had ever been attempted before in gaming. The rights to that game were purchased by Wargaming in June of 2013, and him and I ended up in a Belarusian bunker in August of 2013 together, with only 6 people in the room. That’s when I was hired, and a deal was sealed to transfer Gas Powered Games (Chris’ studio) to Wargaming in return for them funding the creation of his BIG MMORTS masterpiece. This game was so big in terms of scale and OP units that even in 10 years no one will be able to make this game.

Of course, this game would have been dead on arrival without a fairAsymMM, but they were not thinking that far ahead. They also wouldn’t realize that I had invented this until almost a year later. I had originally created that MM to solve the problems of End of Nations in 2012, and I made it clear that their game would be DOA (dead on arrival) unless they used my tech. They weren’t thinking that far ahead either. When they realized the situation, instead of eating a bit of crow*, they converted the game to a MOBA which was DOA.

[for my non native English speaking readers]

The Russian ultra nationalist that the CEO hired at Wargaming ended up purging all the key Americans from the company in 2015, which included Chris Taylor and myself. So his BIG game died and WG never made good on their promise to build it. Chris was so heartbroken that he left gaming, permanently. This is what upset me the most, because he was one of the greatest computer game designers of all time.

Monetising Asymmetry

Asymmetrical games are incredibly powerful. I explain why here and also in my Healthy Games paper. Even the tainted research from NetEase shows a huge advantage when they included Asymmetry. The real power won’t be revealed to them until they disable the “unfair” part of their model.

What is holding back all these teams and their associated mega AAA companies, is these subtle distinctions that I clarify for the first time here in this paper. I considered taking these secrets to my grave unless someone asked me a “good” question related to them, but at this rate it became clear I would die of old age before that happened.

I created an Asymmetrical design for a League of Legends MMO in 2012, but they refused to sign an NDA and RIOT has never seen it. When I realized how important Asymmetry was in 2011, all of my designs since then have been either Heroic or Big, or both. Usually this has to be designed at the beginning. I managed to convert World of Warships into a Big game, but that was kind of a hack job. A multibillion dollar hack job. I’ve designed two more Asymmetrical games (Project Drakara and Star Garden) but they didn’t make it to market for various reasons (PD: Main backer pivoted to medical marijuana mid-production/SG: Funding for blockchain games dried up after the FTX scam).

But the billion dollar question isn’t related to “more engagement” like all these teams were focused on. If you can’t translate that to monetisation, then what’s the point? None of these teams were able to demonstrate an increase in monetisation because they never tested for monetisation.

You have to pair the monetisation to the MM, and the entire design has to support that. I call this process Integrated Metadesign. Which, I’m not going to talk about publicly. The monetisation half of this riddle is the easier half, I’ve explained the more difficult part here. But even that only gets you to Category 4.

Asymmetrical designs magnify contrast and make players feel powerful. This boosts both dopamine and oxytocin release. And, more importantly, it improves dopamine uptake which I’ve just begun to talk about due to the laboratory research being less than a year old. 99% of my readers won’t know the difference between dopamine release and dopamine uptake, unless they’ve read my paper on Ecstatic Monetisation. It could easily be 30 years before that trickles down to the rest of the industry.

In order to magnify dopamine uptake, you need to concentrate peer effects in your game. This has been the focus of my private research since 2014, 10 years before academia confirmed my suspicions. Having dopamine pooling in the blood without uptake can actually hurt the monetisation of your gamers a lot. I have been very busy, I haven’t been sitting on the coach with my popcorn throwing curses at professors of computer science the whole time. Just part of the time. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with CS PhD’s, but you have to use the right tool for the right job. If you don’t, those millions of dollars has to come from somewhere and that usually means creatives are being fired on the other side. If the CS PhDs were making you money, it might be worth it, but so far they are not being allocated to the right tasks. As I talk about in my various Moneyballification papers, data without a Subject Matter Expert to interpret it is at best useless and at worst harmful (especially when you factor in opportunity costs).

The jump to Category 5 and 6 games involves magnifying these peer effects, because those peer effects trigger dopamine uptake which is blocked if oxytocin is not present at the same time. If a person feels heroic, but not a single person they know noticed their heroism, then the effect is fleeting. You will observe (if you read the research papers) that all of this MM research required all participants to be strangers. That tech tree is a dead end. 100% dead end! I can’t stress this any stronger. That tech tree hits a dead end very soon and only leads to financial ruin. I can see these tech trees and you can’t. You are just hoping there is a rainbow and a pot of gold ahead. It’s not happening.

The next step in gaming is to make it so that people can feel heroic in front of people they know, so that people will think more highly of them. This is so fundamental to the human species. But this is not a computer science problem. If I stuck 50 CS professors in a room and they all had CS professor babies, in 100 years they would not solve this problem. And it’s a fairly basic problem. But it’s not a computer science problem. If you want to do this properly, create a diversified team of scientists, designers, and engineers (like pretty much every other industry does) and have them work on this. Like we did at the Think Tank in Austin Texas that Wargaming built in 2013. That they could only keep running for 2 years because of politics.

I’ve already done the hard parts. I haven’t automated my designs at the level a PhD CS could, and that would be a fantastic pair up. But as we move towards these more complex designs (Cat 5, Cat 6, and whatever Cat 7 ends up looking like) the budgets are going to get bigger and the number of experts needed is going to go up. Not 7 experts of the same type, 7 different synergistic experts. I keep trying to do it without help from AAA, just to prove the research, but that’s an almost impossible task with a start up.

As you can see, the games of the future are going to be very complex. Like our cars and our phones which talk to and spy on us now. If we want to continue to exist as an industry, with anything bigger than “indie” titles (i.e. any GaaS games), we have to take the process a lot more seriously than we have been. AI might make your existing games cheaper to make, but it won’t unlock the next paradigms you need to be profitable. If everyone makes cheaper games and user acquisition keeps going up in cost, you haven’t climbed out of the hole you are in now. The first peer effect games (Cat 5+) are going to render all those other products non competitive.