Thursday, September 18, 2014

Parity of Time

Azuriel has an interesting post on Parity as Entitlement. He's discussing entitlement, F2P, money and time. At one point his discussion touches on the different amounts of time people have available:
Perhaps this disagreement comes from differing definitions of parity. Tobold in later comments suggests no MMORPG features parity because different people have different amounts of time to spend playing the game. This is not a dilemma to me – as I mentioned previously, the both of us have the same 24 hours in a day in which to allocate our time. I have zero issue with you receiving greater rewards (etc) for having spent more time playing the game than I. In fact, it sort of boggles my mind that this is even a point of contention. Is that not how any activity should inherently work? “You spent more time reading a book and got farther into than I did… unfair!”
Many players and MMO developers do not agree with this perspective. If it was feasible to enforce parity of time, many games would do so.

Existing MMOs have many mechanics which push towards parity of time. The most blunt example is raid lockouts. Play a little or play a lot, you can only do the latest raid once per week. WoW even tried limiting attempts per boss. It didn't go so well, but they did try.

Often there are extra rewards for the first instance you run per day, or the first X instances per week. This pushes towards parity of time by front-loading most of the reward onto the first few hours. You still get more reward as you play more hours, but the majority of the reward is concentrated in the first few hours.

The Old Republic does something similar with daily quests. The daily quests can be done each day, but there's also a weekly quest that requires you to do each daily once. The presence of the weekly makes the first set of dailies more rewarding.

Pretty much every currency after the base currency has a cap. Maybe you can only earn 1000 Endgame Currency a week, and can only bank 3000. Again this plays into parity of time. After a threshold, playing more hours simply does not help you.

Finally, there's rest XP. If someone plays fewer hours, the hours they do play become more valuable than the hours played by high-playtime player. The value per hour played effectively scales with the number of hours that are not played.

Far from players and developers accepting the disparity in time played, they actively add mechanics to mitigate that disparity. It is unfeasible to enforce true parity of time, but that doesn't mean that devs and players see the disparity as desirable.

(Admittedly, it would be pretty funny to see a game try to enforce true parity of time. Imagine a game which limited you to 10 hours per week. It would be interesting to see the audience's reactions.)

6 comments:

  1. Most games enforce a very rigid parity of time: in a Starcraft, League of Legends or World of Tanks match, I have exactly the same minutes to perform actions as everyone else in the same match. Of course you can play more matches if you have more time.

    The problem with MMOs is that you play the same match for a year. The time limiting could be done as "you can play 10 hours/week in a WoW server. You can play on multiple WoW servers if you have more time, but you can't transfer character to a server where you already have one."

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  2. The issue with not enforcing parity of time is that it stratifies your playerbase.

    Basically, if you could make an immense amount of progress in short order compared to other players, it means you as a player have fewer people to play with.

    Raiding in TBC was a perfect example of player stratification being a negative thing: guilds became feeder guilds, only existing to be stuck forever in Karazhan limbo, despite wanting to progress. Anybody who existed between the top tier and the bottom tier had a small number of players who were either shifting up tiers of play, or were quitting. Basically, it made running a raiding guild incredibly difficult compared to how tiers of raiding work today, where each tier is a reset of the ladder.

    So if you could make meaningful progress by just putting in more time than others, you'd have a portion of the playerbase who were basically playing by themselves; nobody else would be at their level of play as they hadn't put anywhere near as much time as these folks.

    You see this in effect often at the beginning of an expansion, where you have the few who powerlevel to max, and then go try to run dungeons. The population which you're running dungeons with is super tiny. (and from experience in Cataclysm, fast leveling != skilled players, oi). Now, once other players catch up, it's not so bad, so for the leveling game at least it doesn't seem worthwhile to limit it.

    Oooh, another example where parity of time WASN'T limited to disastrous effect? The original WoW PvP ranks. People would have to and did spend literally all day just to get and keep the highest PvP titles.

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  3. A lot of these "time parity" systems were added later to WoW. Vanilla didn't have a dungeon lookout (besides the real raids) nor daily quests. What it did have was the XP penalty, which was renamed to "rested XP" during beta to sound more positive.

    http://wowpedia.org/Rest
    > In the beta version of the original game, rest did not exist and experience was designed to prevent players from playing more than a few hours in a row. Experience gained was divided by 50% after few hours. However, beta-testers did not like it and rest was implemented, giving instead 200% of experience for few hours, which Blizzard's developers later reported as being the "same numbers seen from the opposite point of view".

    > (Admittedly, it would be pretty funny to see a game try to enforce true parity of time. Imagine a game which limited you to 10 hours per week. It would be interesting to see the audience's reactions.)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_gaming_in_China#Anti-addiction_or_fatigue_system

    After all the only viable solution to the time parity system would be horizontal progression. Take a look at GW2. It's still played, there wasn't a gear reset and new player won't have a problem to catch up.

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  4. As I eventually mentioned in the comments, I agree that a permanent advantage due to time would not be particularly fun; I have little interest in a game where the vets get 20% more DPS simply for having bought the game sooner. Gear resets and expansions allow those that are behind a chance to catch up.

    But do "most" players really get upset that someone has better loot than them when said person ended up running way more dungeons/raids/farming runs/etc? Having more of something because you put more time into acquiring it makes intuitive sense to me.

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  5. I think the existing time parity systems are mostly technology driven. You want players to log in for certain hours but you almost always have more characters on a server than the server can handle so you need to have them log in and log out at fairly regular intervals.

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  6. But do "most" players really get upset that someone has better loot than them when said person ended up running way more dungeons/raids/farming runs/etc? Having more of something because you put more time into acquiring it makes intuitive sense to me.

    I honestly surprised that we are having this discussion about time invested / P2W. It closely mirrors something which happens in the real economy and which, if mentioned, would put almost everyone on the same side.

    If you followed the Microsoft trials, noone has a problem with Microsoft having a monopoly on operating systems, the problem is when Microsoft leverages this monopoly to establish a monopoly in other fields. This is identical to P2W. Being ahead if you invest more time is not seen unfair, because as Azuriel says, "more time invested = being ahead" makes intuitive sense. At the same time, using your advantage somewhere else to gain an advantage in a game is like leveraging a monopoly, so it's no chance that it's perceived as unfair.

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