Bad Game Design

[FangirlNation]

This read-through led to a passionate argument about game design from reader Leah Miller:

Just finished my second read-through/listen-through of RPO. I remembered as an MMO designer being really pissed at a lot of Halliday's design decisions, and I was not wrong.

Re-reading it without the suspense of wondering what was going to happen next just made these flaws stand out even more, especially when I could clearly see other ways for the plot to create similar circumstances without invoking FLIPPING TERRIBLE GAME DESIGN DECISIONS.

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First... there's no hearth or bind function? For a simulation in which kids' avatars have to be physically present in a school sim to attend school, there's no way for a kid stuck on another planet to just "hearth" back to school? even if that option was only available during the school day (to prevent exploits), or once a day/week/month... not having it is stupid. What if some kid tricks another kid into catching a ride with him, and drops him off in some zone where he could never even conceivably earn his travel fee back? This is the kind of trolling that happens DAILY in EVERY EXISTING MMO EVER. Seriously, I once watched as a group of people stripped a guy naked, destroyed his hearthstone, and dumped him at the bottom of a well in an unreachable glitch zone. And those people were that guys' FRIENDS. They were WELCOMING HIM BACK TO THE GAME.

Also, IOI's schemes for improving monetization are hilarious. "Let's go away from the already lucrative Free-to-Play Business model (ok technically BTP) and into an outdated subscription system! As someone who is IN FAVOR OF the traditional subscription model, their plan makes no sense. Traditional subscription models are for curating a small community of highly-active, highly dedicated players. Selling more advertising makes more sense as a short-sighted evilcorp business plan, but sub fees? Other players are free content. If you start as FTP/BTP model, you've already gotten your userbase used to having a lot of "plebs" around, and since this is a traditional "Pay to win" model where you can buy items and artifacts legally on auctions (that I presume GSS takes a cut of, a la the early Diablo AH implementation), you need those people to provide the items that lazy "whales" will buy.

There are a bunch of perfectly plausible evil monetization schemes. This is not one of them.

Don't even get me started on the fact that all the documents you save to the cloud are linked to your fragile avatar. What if a scammer lures granny into a PVP zone? One blaster shot later and she's lost all her recipes, family photos, and tax records? I understand the urge to be "Hardcore" James, but don't link your hardcore gameplay to the non-power-user functions of your system.

Honestly Og, you should have stopped him from doing 80% of this. That's your job as the guy who isn't just an engineer and who can understand how non-hardcore players play. Yeah, you'll never get the credit for being the "idea guy" and history will never laud you in the same way, but it's your job to protect the filthy casuals from people like James. You know this Og. You made highly user-accessible education software that helped prepare people for the obtuse and intense world James made, but it might have been more helpful if you'd just stayed on the big product line and kept it sane.

James Halliday, you are a glorified engine engineer who doesn't know anything about user experience or social systems design.
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