This article primarily focuses on PvE combat in RPGs, though its methods can be applied to PvP or other types of games.

Role playing games have a tremendous amount of content, each piece with multiple parameters that define what they do in combat. Damage dealt by a sword, bonus granted by a skill, total health of a level 23 bandit, etc. It’s not too hard to tune content when you look at a single game zone or a fixed character level – you can playtest that area and tweak values until the game feels right. However, trying to tune values for a giant world with 100 levels of content and multiple classes is much more complicated. How do you choose values for RPG content without playtesting and brute force tuning every type of character at every level?

I wrote earlier today about how I was recently banned from the Diablo 3 Beta for making literally 11,000 gold per hour, as well as taking advantage of a secret strategy for obtaining materials. I assumed that this was the reason for the automatic ban, because there was no possible way for Blizzard to have conducted a "thorough investigation" since I had only played the beta for a few days. Today I received confirmation that my use of the tools Blizzard provides every player were considered exploitative of the Diablo 3 Beta economy. I have been asked to tell customer support about my ideas for making gold or real money BEFORE trying them in the retail version of the game.

I am fascinated by economic theory. Time is the ultimate resource, and what are we, then, if not economists dealing in the exchange of fun for time and money. I find there are many parallels to game design, and the tools and theories they provide are a great comfort to me. So when my good friend told me to read Predictably Irrational, I pounced on that book like a hungry hungry hippo.

The book is about Behavioral Economics. A relatively new field in the study of economics, and it starts with the assumption that human beings are not as rational as traditional economics likes to think we are, and in fact, we are irrational to the point of being—wait for it—predictably irrational (herp). It goes on to detail several major points of irrationality, and then backs them up with field experiments that are almost as much fun to read about as they are edifying.

Of the myriad of topics, that ones that stuck with me the most were, no surprise, the ones that provided clear insight into common game design problems. The topics of relativity, the power of zero, the social verses market exchange, and the power of ethics and cheating all showed me new ways to think about common problems, and I’m sure there is even more insight just out of my minds eye, waiting to be tapped. But insight for insights sake is pointless, so it’s time to share my thoughts with you. Let’s start with how the value of things is not as simple as it appears…

Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
Games, however, are so complex that it is difficult to anticipate exactly how players will optimize a game until after release, once thousands bang away at the game and share their ideas with each other online. Often, designers don’t even understand their own games until they finally see them in the wild.

Can you perfectly predict the weather? No, because it’s too complex — the “chaos factor” makes it impossible to perfectly predict. The same holds true of the balance of any modern MMO. This may be surprising. We create every aspect of MMOs, so why can’t we perfectly predict them? It turns out that the “chaos factor” in an MMO comes very quickly too — much more quickly than players realize — and there’s no way to model the entire possibility space

I’ve played a lot of Travian over the last few years and perhaps one of the first things you learn as a Travian player is that one player on an account is not enough to be competitive. In my recent mini-return to Everquest 2, this has got me thinking of how this would work in an MMORPG. Granted, MMOs don’t have quite the time constraint as a 24/7 strategy war game would, but they do still consume an awful lot of time if you want to be a hardcore raider.