Monday, May 02, 2016

Yet Another Look At Garrisons

With all the various controversies in WoW over the last couple weeks, I decided to play it again for a little bit. My plan is to at least finish the Legendary ring on my character in preparation for Legion.

I mixed up my playing style a bit, and came to an interesting realization: Garrisons are really enjoyable as "winding down" content.

Basically, you log in and do whatever your main goal is. Join a raid, do a heroic dungeon, hit up Tanaan, whatever. You defer the Garrison stuff to the end of the play session. After you're done your main content and are thinking about logging out, you spend the last 5 or 10 minutes taking care of your Garrison.

I find this works really well. Garrisons don't take much effort, and there's a nice sense of tidying up before you log. It's perfect for the end of a play session. You log out while seeing your followers off on their adventures. As well, being at the end, I find myself more willing to ignore the parts of the garrison which are completely unnecessary. Like the herb garden, since I have no need for herbs.

A player named Torvald had an excellent post where he postulated that doing garrison stuff up front drains a player's "stamina" and enthusiasm for other content. I find that simply moving the garrison to the end of the play session eliminates that entirely. Maybe it still drains your stamina, but you were planning to log off anyways.

There are a couple problems with this style of play though. First, it's sub-optimal. Since missions are timed, you lose out on the time during your play session. Second, it requires you to defer some easy gratification, some easy rewards. And as we all know from various experiments involving children and marshmallows, deferred gratification is not an easy thing.

The thing, though, is that incentivizing the player to do the garrison stuff at the end seems very hard. They could remove some of the time pressure by making missions based on days, rather than timed, where they all finish at the same time at night.

But you're still faced with the deferred gratification problem. The marshmallow dangling in front of your face when you first log in. You can't put a timer on it, because the player might be logging in quickly just to do garrison tasks.

The only idea I had was that while your followers are hanging around your garrison, they give you a stacking buff which increases gold, xp, and valor gained by 1-2% per follower, up to 50% when you have a full complement of 25. That way you want to delay sending your followers on missions while you are doing content, but you're perfectly happy to send them off while you are logged off.

In conclusion, I think that garrisons are much more enjoyable when moved to the end of a play session. But I think actually nudging players into that playstyle will be hard sell.

14 comments:

  1. One of the strength of vanilla WoW was that it allowed you to log out whenever you want. It didn't matter if your mother sends you to bed or your baby wakes up or you have to eat dinner. You use your hearthstone and 10 seconds later you are safe and ready to log out. The game sends a very strong message with its hearthstone: "Play as long as you want and the second you have to leave, you're free to leave." That's very comforting, it removes the pressure from you to finish your daily task list.

    Unfortunately, WoW is more and more destroying this strength. Daily quests require you to fill the bar or you get nothing, you can't continue them the next day. LFR with it's obscene wait time forces you to play them all in one session to reduce the wait time for the second to last LFRs.

    And now you recommend to put garrisons at the end? That's a bad concept because it will lead to stress: "I have to finish this activity immediately or I won't have time left for my garrison."

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    1. I have to agree here.
      Also, I think you are trying nudging on a much too low/detailed level. Nudging at this level leads too to many nudges and too detailed game design that becomes too complicated.

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  2. One of the strength of vanilla WoW was that it allowed you to log out whenever you want.

    Sorry? Aren't you the one reminiscing about "epic long adventurous dungeons?". Sorry, I saw this with LotRO which was more or less the same as Vanilla: play sessions have an enormous set-up and close-down cost. This being usually to actually GET to where the action is followed by inventory management and clean-up afterwards. I won't even mention instances, spamming "LFG" in global chat. Sorry, I don't buy this for a moment.

    And, you know, if one evening you find that you don't have time for the garrison and skip it, nothing bad happens.... If you find yourself unable to sleep because you didn't have time for your garrison, it's seriously time to uninstall and move on.

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    1. I am. But I did not run a dungeon every evening. A dungeon was something special, something to look forward. An epic adventure you did when you had time.

      You did not run 5 dungeons after each other every evening. It's like binge watching Netflix compared to going to the theater once per week.

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    2. Rofl.

      So in short you can log out at any time, except when you're running content which does not allow you to log out at any time. So the solution is to just avoid it and everything is fine.
      Like in any other game, of course. Current WoW included.....

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    3. I think I would rather say that vanilla wow allowed you to log ON whenever you wished (or more precisely, 'not' log on if you so wished). I definately get what kring is getting at with the daily quests "forcing" you to stay logged on. Even if you dont have time to play to day. But you are of course right that you could not just log off whenever you felt like it (if in dungeons, etc). But what you COULD do was just not log on a given day, or log on and do something where you could leave if needs be.
      You can still DO this of cause, but you are hurting yourself if you dont play exactly when and for at least as long as the game wants you to. That was not the case in vanilla. If hou wanted to binge all weekend, and not play at all in the weekdays, the game did not have you any worse off.
      In current wow doing this means 2 instead of 7 sets of dailies. And since daily activities are by far the most effective route to the goal in most circumstances. You would be hurting tour own progression

      I believe this was the point kring was getting at. Not that you could log in the middle of dungeons. And your rebuttal that nothing bad happens by skipping garrisons is of course false. It is a setback. A lost opportunity that you wont get back. Ergo it is bad. Is it worldshattering? Nope. Is it bad. Yes

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    4. Well, with this logic the annual events are the worst thing possible.....

      At times I really wonder if I'm from mars.... I mean, for me:
      - not doing dailies today is perfectly fine, them being DAILIES, it means I can always do them tomorrow.
      - progressions is because I enjoy progressing, making it as short as possible is a bad idea. This is why I always tend up to be a freeloader in "pay2progress" games. Why would I want to pay to shorten the fun?

      In any case it's pretty much clear that looking at the current MMOs, I'm not really the target audience..... and good luck finding one which does not reward daily logins.....

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    5. I ran all of mauradon once when it was current content(6 hours), it was not something I did every day.

      Some annoying facts about dailies, As an Australian playing on a US server(since day 1), dailies are not gone the next day, they are gone at 8-10pm depending on the season. The daily clock is not reliable. You have just flown across panderia. The time is 7:53, the quest givers are visible with question marks, in chat Daily quests have reset, and the question marks are gone. /sigh.


      Personally If I log into a character to do something I will generally do my garrison first, if I don't log into a character I log in daily while watching tv at night

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  3. Wall of text incoming:... no seriously

    Annual events aren't exactly my cup of tea. But in truth they are not inherently as bad as the everpresent dailies. (current version of annual events in wow are bad though, I'll get to why later) There are three reasons for annual events not being as bad as dailies as I see it:
    First of, novelty/rarity. If the events where you are "required" not to miss playing are few and far between, scheduling around them is easier. And it may feel rewarding to participate in 'special events'.
    Secondly if the stretch of time you have before the event is over is big enough (2-3weeks would be fine for most people i guess), the issue doesn't arise as such. Most MMORPG players will be able to fit in playtime to do the event some time within a 2-3 week period.
    And lastly: Annual events are often of the one and done version. Meaning once you have done it once, you dont "have to" repeat it the next year.

    The problem with dailies is that they are... daily. You have to set time aside to do them every day or you will fall behind (yes i know it is not a lot, and likely doesn't actually matter, but the problem is how it feels to miss them, not what the actual outcome is). If you skip you dailies today,you will not be able to just do them twice tomorrow and catch up. Ergo you are "forced" to do them every day.

    Compared to annual events dailies have the following problems:
    They do NOT feel rewarding. Since the activity is one you perform every day it does not feel special (thats just how the human psyche works), so the novelty/rarity factor isn't present. Secondly the constraint it puts on planning your time is rather strict. Do it within this 24 hour period or lose out on the chance. If you have a busy day (everyone does once in a while) you are out of luck and feel bad for missing it. If dailies were also one-off events (do your full set of dailies once and you get a special price), you would not feel bad for missing it one day, as you could just do it the next day. But since dailies are a continous progress towards a set goal, with each day giving an incremental reward, missing 1 daily means being behind for the entire progress with no means of catching up. The result is the same. If you only miss your incremental-progress-dailies once you still get the final reward 1 day later than everyone else (not a big deal), but the feel is very different. You will be "behind" a lot more days.

    Think of it this way. The daily you didnt do today you cannot do tomorrow. (cause tomorrow you will be doing tomorrows daily). The daily you miss today you will only be able to do the day after you would otherwise have been completely done with the dailies. Which usually means at least a month into the future

    In short, and just to make it clear that I don't think you are wrong per say: You are absolutely correct that missing a daily is not a big deal, it only sets your progression back one day after all, but it feels like a punishment, and that is what matters. The fact that it doesn't feel bad to you is nice (yeah you are probably from mars :-P), but the feeling of falling behind is a very real downside to a lot of other MMORPG players.

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  4. Continued...
    Wall of text incoming:... no seriously

    Annual events aren't exactly my cup of tea. But in truth they are not inherently as bad as the everpresent dailies. (current version of annual events in wow are bad though, I'll get to why later) There are three reasons for annual events not being as bad as dailies as I see it:
    First of, novelty/rarity. If the events where you are "required" not to miss playing are few and far between, scheduling around them is easier. And it may feel rewarding to participate in 'special events'.
    Secondly if the stretch of time you have before the event is over is big enough (2-3weeks would be fine for most people i guess), the issue doesn't arise as such. Most MMORPG players will be able to fit in playtime to do the event some time within a 2-3 week period.
    And lastly: Annual events are often of the one and done version. Meaning once you have done it once, you dont "have to" repeat it the next year.

    The problem with dailies is that they are... daily. You have to set time aside to do them every day or you will fall behind (yes i know it is not a lot, and likely doesn't actually matter, but the problem is how it feels to miss them, not what the actual outcome is). If you skip you dailies today,you will not be able to just do them twice tomorrow and catch up. Ergo you are "forced" to do them every day.

    Compared to annual events dailies have the following problems:
    They do NOT feel rewarding. Since the activity is one you perform every day it does not feel special (thats just how the human psyche works), so the novelty/rarity factor isn't present. Secondly the constraint it puts on planning your time is rather strict. Do it within this 24 hour period or lose out on the chance. If you have a busy day (everyone does once in a while) you are out of luck and feel bad for missing it. If dailies were also one-off events (do your full set of dailies once and you get a special price), you would not feel bad for missing it one day, as you could just do it the next day. But since dailies are a continous progress towards a set goal, with each day giving an incremental reward, missing 1 daily means being behind for the entire progress with no means of catching up. The result is the same. If you only miss your incremental-progress-dailies once you still get the final reward 1 day later than everyone else (not a big deal), but the feel is very different. You will be "behind" a lot more days.

    Think of it this way. The daily you didnt do today you cannot do tomorrow. (cause tomorrow you will be doing tomorrows daily). The daily you miss today you will only be able to do the day after you would otherwise have been completely done with the dailies. Which usually means at least a month into the future

    In short, and just to make it clear that I don't think you are wrong per say: You are absolutely correct that missing a daily is not a big deal, it only sets your progression back one day after all, but it feels like a punishment, and that is what matters. The fact that it doesn't feel bad to you is nice (yeah you are probably from mars :-P), but the feeling of falling behind is a very real downside to a lot of other MMORPG players.

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  5. Thanks for your answer. Lots of good points I agree and disagree with :)

    For the annual events: it's not always easy to plan your schedule to be present for them. They tend to be during holidays, and I've missed my share of them due to simply not being near a computer.... They also have the tendency to more or less require you to log in all the days they run. Miss one and you have to wait ONE YEAR to catch up.... like daily*365 worse :)

    Dailies: it's probably my vision of "progression" which does not really register dailies as something where falling behind is a big deal. In any case you've highlighted their "mental mechanics", which I agree with.... except when I read them I wonder how could the possibly work.... I mean: if what you write applies 100%, then they should spell the death of any MMO, while, on the contrary, they are omnipresent.... in WoW the expansion which got almost rid of them (in Cataclysm you could get reps through dungeons) is considered the worst of all, while Pandaria (which went overboard on the opposite direction) does not get the same bad press.

    Going back to the original topic: I still find that dailies are a lot more "logout friendly" than any other group content, so I don't buy the argument that Vanilla was at the same time good for the forced grouping and good for the logout friendly.

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  6. Reading the new post i realized i had posted the same half of my comment twice. (I wrote it in a document and copy-pasted... and failed apparently). The second half went like this:


    Other topics:

    On WoW's current annuals: Yeah they are horrible. They basically take the worst aspect of normal annual events and dailies and combine them into one needy package. The only positive feature of those i mentioned above that they still have is the rarity.
    Wow annual events (the seasonal stuff) ”require” you to log in every day during a specific week (or two) to do dailies in hope that you will get the rare drop item you want, or in order to get enough tokens to buy the thingiemabob they sell this time. (Ok I am exagurating a bit as usually you only need some days of dailies to get enough tokens to buy the special item). Some of them even have an incremental progress structure. Where you have to do the annual event several years to get all the rewards (children's week pets), making you ”fall behind” the incremental progress an entire year if you miss it

    On P2Progress games: I am entirely with you there. I never pay to progress in these games. I still however feel the urge to optimize my free progression. I think the reason here is that I see paying as cheating, and I dont feel the urge to cheat.

    About finding an MMORPG that doesn't have daily login rewards of some sort: Vanilla wow was the one mentioned by Kring (and to be honest even then there was a few - Like daily transmutes). I don't know of any current MMORPGs that completely echews the mechanic I am afraid. That does not however mean it is a good (for the players) mechanic.


    Solution to the feeling forced issue: The PvP conquest point cap structure is actually very good. Rather than capping you to earning X tokens(rep/free ore/whatever) per day/week. They set a moving cap on how much you can have earned at a given point in the expansion/season. If you could normally earn 1k tokens/points per week (just a random number) then the cap after 5 weeks would be 5k. Meaning if you had not done the activity in question at all and started in week 5 you would be able to catch up if you did it a lot. With conquest points there is a 'tax' of sorts, in that your cap is not AS high if you start in week 5 than it would have been had you maxed it every week, but it is still significantly above the 1k/week cap. I SORELY wish they would introduce a similar mechanic to daily quests. Allowing you to catch up (or almost) even if you skipped your dailies a couple of busy days. This is obviously a simplified example of how conquest points actually work, but the point should be clear enough.

    Blizz tried another solution with HS and HotS by allowing dailies to stack 3 days at a time. Giving you some leeway for when you want to play. They also tried something like it back in WotLK with 7 weekly (dungeon)-quests replacing the 7 daily quests you would get in a week. The problem then was that people felt even more pressured to hop in and do them on the last day of the week if they had missed them during the week than they do with dailies (or some people do at least). By using the conquest cap model you effectively remove the 'forced to do it now'-feeling, while still limiting progress so people can't just blaze through on day 1.


    End note: There is a reason I use ”forced” and ”falling behind” when i do. You are obviously not ever forced to do dailies. The ”force” is one exerted upon you by psychological mechanisms punishing you if you don't do you dailies by making you feel bad.

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    1. You should really start your own blog, Shandren! :D I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one who'd read it.

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    2. Heh, I was thinking the same thing.

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