Musings on Mods

[Carson_The_Brown]

So, I heard from a fairly popular Youtuber that Square Enix is considering mods. Generally I take a fairly libertarian view towards game design but I think I have a few... reservations... on the matter of mods in MMORPGs.

So, I'm not going to fluff this thing too heavily, lets jump straight at the elephant in the room, namely damage meters. I heard from this youtuber that you can read your DPS against a target dummy, I don't know how that works but I think damage meters are great in the abstract. The problem is when you allow damage meters in the field.

The pro-damage meter argument usually goes like this: "I want to know how well I'm doing compared to other DPS". To that I say: Awesome. My Lich King raid group regularly had friendly arguments about who was top DPS 1 week or the other. This doesn't become a serious issue until you look at the PUG scene. My personal, very unscientific case studies indicate a general attitude of camaraderie among PUG groups in FFXIV. Attitudes typically come down to "did we kill it or not?". I think this is an excellent attitude and I sense it regularly in PUG groups on FFXIV. Seeing as how 90% of the content is geared towards PUGing I wouldn't change it for the world.

Compare and contrast to the PUG scene in World of Warcraft. Damage meter mods are not just expected for raiders, you are actively looked down upon if you choose to keep it off. This, my friends, is very stressful. On top of that, other people can see your damage readings in which case you run headlong into what the folks at Penny Arcade refer to as GIFT (Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) which is normally formulated as:

(Normal Person)+(Captive Audience)+(Anonymity) = (Complete Asshole)

That usually covers the reason why people become insensitive and generally sociopathic online. I would offer a corollary that I believe includes why this is worse in online games; formulated as:

{(Normal Person) + (Captive Audience) + (Anonymity)}*{1 + (Data Known)/(Data Available)} = (Online Game Troll)

So, what does this Gobbledygook mean? All it means, generally speaking, is that what is considered general internet douchebaggery is amplified by raw data. The type of people who fall victim to GIFT are generally made far worse when given just enough information to give them a sense of empowerment. I point again to World of Warcraft. I played heavily in Lich King (I was a semi-pro Holy Paladin) and PUG raided as a resto druid in Cataclysm. PUG raids in WoW are... pretty vitriolic. All it takes is 1 wipe for people to descend upon the lowest DPS like a pack of ravenous Tonberries. On top of that we have all seen that one mage that is constantly pulling ahead of the tank because he wants to pad his Damage Dealt reading. On top of that, damage meters eventually leak into players' expectations for game design. The drive for optimized builds and streamlined experiences has pushed Blizzard to embrace level design that closer resembles hallways with copy paste monsters than well fleshed, organic zones with mystery and danger like The Vault.

As a quick aside, I would like to point towards Rift : Planes of Telara. specifically the class system. you are allowed to choose 3 classes and mix/match them to suit your play style. This would normally lead to thousands of potential classes but the drive for optimization has slimmed that down to 2 or 3 viable combos per archetype.

To compound this, mods require a great deal of momentum from the player community. We can romanticize all day but ultimately, mod designers do what they do for recognition. This isn't a bad thing, I'm not saying modders are greedy or fame obsessed. All I'm saying is that human beings need to eat. People do in fact make mods because they love the medium, but in the end every modder hopes to bet scouted by an organization that can pay more regularly than a tip jar. For this reason, modders will generally flock to games that guarantee a large payoff in exposure for their input of time and effort.

To illustrate this point I would like to bring Rift back into the argument. Rift does in fact have mods but they aren't nearly as high in quality as World of Warcraft. This is because there was a mad rush initially to become the Tandanu of Rift. Unfortunately, the lack of a very large player base meant that the Curse Spotlight only fell on Rift developers rarely; sure, there were mini spotlights like "Best in Class: Rift" or "Best in Class: Elder Scrolls IV" but the major spotlights always went to WoW and Minecraft and those were the guys getting scooped by talent agents. Nowadays, Rift's mods are out of date and buggy.

Another quick aside, Optimization. 1 guy in his basement can't ensure that his killer app will work on every PC out there, let alone the PS3/PS4. when Blizzard allowed DBM in WoW it worked... okay because it allowed them to slack on encounter design (specifically conveyance) because DBM could pick up the slack. Will there be mods on PS4? if so, what kind of quality control could you possibly enforce? how do you know Tandanu will develop for all 3 platforms? Hell, I cant even get Recount to work right on my top of the line 2011 PC. We cant expect someone working for free to make a mod that will run equally well on an '08 laptop and a PS4 while maintaining the 30 FPS minimum necessary to remain competitive. That kind of thing takes dozens of programmers and QA personnel with fleets of computers testing on a wide array of hardware skews. WoW modders can (kind of) get away without the professional QA testers because the player base is so incredibly huge that the reams of metrics data provided by the 6 million players allows for them to pull off--- admittedly half assed--- quality control but those same devs would have to hire entirely new teams to develop for the PS3 and PS4.

TL;DR: Square Enix is one of my favourite development firms, but I seriously doubt they have the infrastructure to do it. just because Blizzard can (barely) pull off mods that doesn't mean that its a good thing for every MMORPG, or even any MMORPG.