136C. Solving the Core Limitations of Modern Strategy MMOs
Removing the obstacles to success in the strategy genre could spur an explosion of development.
The 4 fundamental problems with modern Strategy MMOs were identified in paper 134A here. They are:
Real Time Play Over Weeks or Longer is Health Harmful
Open Enrolment Leads to Multi Accounting
Player Trade Leads to Imbalances
Monetisation Mismatches
This paper will focus on presenting and explaining the solutions to these 4 conditions. For those wanting to know my intent in augmenting the strategy/wargaming genre, and my 55 year journey in doing so (including 41 years as a pacifist), this was explained in the previous paper.
Long Duration Real Time Strategy Can be Harmful
The problem here is that it makes a player choose between winning and getting proper sleep. When you have to choose between your health and your game, that’s a bad situation. Even if a player adores your product, at some point they have to dump it or risk serious harm.
When I was one of the first people to hit level 60 after World of Warcraft launched, I played 8 days in a row for 22 hours a day. I trained physically for this, the entire run was rehearsed and plotted out, and I had medical support from my registered nurse partner who had an IV set up at my computer in case I got too dehydrated.
Gaming competitively is very stressful on the body. Death can occur before 22 hours just on the first day without proper training. I discuss some real life cases in my I’m Dying to Play paper. I also explain what I believe is the most common mechanism leading to death in that paper, and how to take precautions.
There are many ways to solve this problem. The best and easiest to deploy is to limit the number of actions each player can perform per day. This makes the design significantly more complex than an unrestricted activity design, which is probably why it isn’t attempted outside of mobile games where energy is sold to players. This becomes a pay to win mechanism. I will talk more about this in the section on monetisation*.
There are even more complex ways to solve this problem, that would be higher performing, but I’m going to leave that to the designers reading this to figure out what those might be. Due to the complexity of whatever design you choose that allows at least 9 hours of offline time per day for all players, it likely needs to be built into the design at a very early stage.
For games that have already been deployed, like Bytro games and Ways of History, do they have any options here? WoH could allow players to set a 9 hour period for every day when they will be immune to attacks starting against them. Once they set this, they can’t change it for the 6 months the server runs. Being able to change this would be too easy to exploit.
There is no easy fix here for the Bytro games because of how fast they run. One option would be to slow the game speed down. A better option would be to make the teams larger so that your allies can defend you when you sleep. I will discuss this in more detail in the next section.
Open Enrolment and Multi-accounting
If a player can double their power in a game by starting a second account, completely free, then they often will. If your game has a binary win/loss condition, that’s already a big problem. Sure a game like chess or checkers is fine with a win/loss binary, but when you are simulating a world war, that just doesn’t make sense. Players will go where you put the cheese. If you reward them for multi accounting, they will.
I’ve already written a paper on the win/loss binary.
Your options to solve this are primarily two:
End open enrolment. Implement a matchmaker.
Charge for each account activated in a match.
I actually recommend you do BOTH of these measures, but each alone would still be an improvement.
If you still have a win/loss binary, then you need to make a binary matchmaker with all the players on one of two teams. If a player makes more than one account on the same side then that does not disrupt play in such a situation. If they made accounts on both sides to sabotage one side, that’s difficult to prevent. But if it is detected, it should be an auto-ban.
Option 2, if implemented, would make spy accounts and multi accounts much less common. If a player does run multiple accounts, and is willing to pay for them, well then take their money. This is a problem you might want to have.
When charging per server start, it might be wise to give them back partial game credit if they stay active in the game for some duration. Perhaps at least 2 weeks or until their position is eliminated, whichever comes first. This would encourage players to stay active, and discourage players from harming the overall server experience for everyone by starting positions they don’t intend to actively use.
Player Trade Exploits
If player to player trade is allowed, and winners represent less than half the server population (because a 2 team matchmaker was not implemented), then players will concentrate their resources from multiple accounts to make sure they win. This can be done without multi accounting if enough players are willing to lose to help others win.
If two teams are formed by a matchmaker, then you can solve this problem by only allowing trade with your team. Then trades become zero-sum. Of course players can’t switch sides ever under this system.
If there are more than two sides, like there is in Ways of History, this gets complicated. Player to player trade does not happen in Bytro games, so I will focus on WoH as my example here.
Imagine we had 2 teams of 200 players in WoH. Given past player behavior, at least one side would put “spy accounts” on the other team to try to destroy resources. Some players will go to great lengths to exploit in that game, or any game where you reward it. This can be partially mitigated by requiring all players to pay for accounts. More importantly, it is easier to Know Your Customer (KYC) if they are forced to submit a credit card versus just using a VPN to provide a disposable email address. With KYC enabled, it becomes a lot harder (and more expensive) to make multis without the developer detecting them.
Movement of resources in a game like WoH is limited by range and merchants required to carry them. There are two resources that don’t require merchants: Research and Money. Let’s call these “Weightless Resources” or WRs. WRs are very easy to move around, if it is permitted. It would sound silly to allow all the research for a team to be handed to one person, who would then leave your team, join the other team, then distribute it. But this is exactly what is done with money. Multiple slave teams are set up to generate money, which is then transferred to the team you intend to win.
This is wrong on so many levels and is such an obvious exploit that it is used by all groups that use more accounts than the maximum country size. Development on WoH ended in 2018 and in the last 7 years players now measure their skill level by how well they can organise around these exploits. Fixing the money trade exploits would revolutionize the game, but presumably this problem had no solution in 2018 and likely still does not.
So how would I solve this? We could treat money the same way we treat research: have it auto transferred to the country, with no ability for it to be moved out of that country. This would eliminate the ability to buy resources with money, which is a big part of the game. Prior to learning the “money” technology, all resources are traded via barter. Even barter is exploitable, and I don’t want to solve every possible trade related problem here, this would become a small book.
My easiest fix for this would be for all money (or any other WR) on an account to be degraded by 50% if that player chose to leave the country. If they were kicked from the country then they would still lose the 50% but the country would also incur an equivalent debt as punishment. It’s generally a good idea to punish any team for kicking a player to discourage frivolous anti social behavior. If the team has a big enough problem with a player, they will be willing to accept the penalty.
In my own designs I generally set all currencies as either personal or collective. The more currencies that can be collective, the better the game is likely going to perform due to peer effects negating churn. A collective currency is immediately auto-transferred (AT’d) to the team in one direction that cannot be reversed.
Examples:
CivWorld (not my design, I did the post mortem only): Research only AT’d.
Civilization Online: XP retained, all resources AT. A prestige currency is returned that allows the player to take special actions like building personal structures or accepting finished goods (like a tank they could drive around) from the country.
Project Drakara: XP retained, all 3 kinds of recovered technology AT. Players can equip anything that the team’s tech levels and the players piloting levels permit, without cost.
Guild of Guardians: XP retained, all resources AT. The team factory auto builds high utility NFTs from collective inputs which are then auto sold to market and all players are rewarded with real world currency based on their contribution level. This system requires blockchain tech, and was likely removed from the design after I left that developer due to its complexity.
Star Garden: XP and Aurah and resources retained. The resources included 120 different FT’s (fungible tokens). Only some of these are available to each team, requiring trading (on chain) to complete many crafting options. Teams collectively get credit for team quest completions which advanced the buildings and related technologies on each Star Garden. This was a very complex design which took me 3 years whereas World of Warships only took me 14 weeks and Gods Unchained took me 3 weeks.
As you can see, very elaborate trading options and economies can be added to Strategy MMOs which can add enjoyment, complexity, and extend product lifespan. If you are on-chain, players can also trade outside the game space and potentially make money playing (from each other, for me the whole point of going on chain is to sunset microtransactions). But for most teams you are going to want to just disable player to player trading entirely unless you feel comfortable adding these things to your design.
Without blockchain, player to player trade outside the game is going to be high risk, so this is where blockchain really shines.
Monetisation Mismatches
My long time followers know that I’ve been a huge proponent of Games as a Service (GaaS) and F2P for over two decades. My latest design (Star Garden) was designed as F2P with a complex multi tier progressive microsubscription system. This means there were 12 subscription options (one for each realm) that would change over time [beyond the scope of this article].
The reason the game could still be F2P was because KYC was required to protect the system from frivolous multi accounts. In addition there were multiple other social and economic systems to passively discourage multi accounts. These systems ate up a significant amount of the 3 year design time. This title was designed for large persistent teams of up to 40 players playing on a 4+ year content runway.
For any reasonable strategy MMO game project I would strongly recommend against using the F2P model. The advantages, which are ease of access and discriminatory pricing, actually work against everyone’s (yours and the players) interests in a strategy title.
Replace this with a charge per match account creation.
For instance it might cost $5 or $10 to join a match (depending on the value of your game in terms of content and time per server). Part of this can be returned/refunded to the player if they are still active after some time or were active at time of elimination. This has two main effects:
Discourages multi accounts, and if someone does multi you still get paid,
Acts as a retention booster to discourage players dropping out of matches early.
If you have concerns that new players might not want to do this, create two classes of matches:
Free Matches: Similar to Bytro or WoH models. Players can mess around here and learn skills with zero spend.
Deposit Required Matches: Veteran players will prefer this because less players will drop out and instead of utilizing Pay to Win mechanics where a few players outspend the rest, everyone is paying for a match. This gives the premium true strategy experience that players in this genre want and expect.
[Bulk Deposit Option]: Hardcore players can buy 10 match deposits at a 20% discount and burn one for every match they join. So instead of $10 per match they would get 10 matches for $80. If you are returning part of the deposit if they hang in there long enough (or maybe all of the deposit if they win) then decrease the deposit return by the same ratio.
If Bytro switched to this model, for instance, their overall per player monetisation rate would increase significantly. More importantly, players would play the game a lot more. Unfortunately, since their pay to win business model is incompatible with the genre of games they specialize in, they are trying to win a track race after having blown their whole leg off.
If they kept their existing model in place, and then added the above model as an alternative option, then they could A/B test the two models and see which one generates more per player revenue. This would not take much effort and would give clear unspeculative data.
Similarly, charging per new server start in Ways of History would solve a lot of problems. I’ve mentioned this to a number of players there and the Russians have said that this would likely prevent a lot of Russians from playing. That’s not really a problem since WoH has both Russian and “International” (INT) servers. The non competitive Russians that can’t win on Russian servers will drop 200 to 300 accounts on the INT server, all on on team, when there aren’t even 200 non Russians on the server. This causes the INT players to drop out.
So in the above scenario, you actually want the non paying Russians to be blocked from the server since they are discouraging participation from paying non Russian players. Thus you can keep the Russian servers F2P and the INT servers using the above system I recommend to Bytro. This creates another A/B test also where you not only will see high per player spend on the INT servers, but you might actually see INT server census increase as previously discouraged non Russians return to the game now that they feel better protected from multis.
*As mentioned in Section 1, if you are going to sell energy/actions per day to players, you have to cap this. Unlimited actions breaks a game. The easiest/best way to handle this is the attach it to a subscription so that the extra actions are an off/on binary so that all payers are on equal footing.
Final Thoughts
Since strategy (especially economic strategy) is my jam, this is the genre where I feel most comfortable doing extremely deep dives. While I primarily talk about 2 live titles here (Project Drakara, Star Garden, and End of Nations never made it to market. Guild of Guardians had to be stripped down to a MOBA to reach market), the strategy genre is potentially a very broad genre.
The key advantages of the strategy MMO genre compared to other genres is that the player demographic tends to be older, wealthier, and like longer games. The cooperative nature of these games also yields much higher LTV numbers. Thus it might be valuable to consider how you could turn your existing designs/IP into a strategy version. An example would be that League of Legends strategy MMO design I made for RIOT back in 2011 that they never saw (because they declined to sign an NDA).
Many of these older MOBAs in particular are reaching the end of their commercial lifespans and need to come up with some sort of transition plan to something. This would be a good something, especially for older titles where their core player base might be aging out of the MOBA genre as they become increasingly adrenaline adverse. As the demographic collapse accelerates, the average age of gamers has to increase as the average age of the population increases. The companies that can get ahead of this shift will have the advantage in grabbing market share. Companies that repeatedly iterate on old IPs will be trailing the trends and will progressively lose market share.