Sick of stats
Title says it all. I’m feeling cantankerous today — RAWR SYP SMASH! — on the subject of stats in MMOs. Now, I realize that this is a completely futile thing to rail against, but I need to get it out anyway. Some days I’m just sick to death of stats. Sure, they start out with the best of intentions — “We’re going to provide a numerical representation of combat abstracts!” — but after a while a game can become all about them and nothing but.
We joke that titles like EVE and whatnot are graphical spreadsheets, but there’s some truth in that. If you love number-crunching and min-maxing, stats are your best friend. But if you just want to play the game, the more stats there are the more is getting in the way of you and your fun.
Case in point: DDO. I love me some DDO, I really do, but the stats almost kill the game for me. There’s simply too many of them and they’re too obscure for your typical MMO player to where it’s actually harder to customize your character’s progress because if you make a misstep you’re going to gimp your character. I’ve often found myself frustrated by how much of an obstacles stats became whenever I was trying to dream up a class, and even if it’s semi-faithful to how D&D does it, it crosses the line between informational and flexible to oversized and overwhelming.
Usually when I make a character in a game, all I want to know is what two or three stats I should be looking for whenever gear pops up. I’m playing a Rogue? Great — it’s DEX and STA. Easy as pie. Wizard? INT and OZ. No sweat. I just want to know enough to keep my head above water and ignore the rest.
The problem is that developers feel the need to keep adding on more and more stats, particularly in the endgame, and few people ever like that they do them. They’re usually special gating stats that help with resilience or radiance or what have you that are needed to participate in raids, just a superfluous number added on because we were already so good in all the other numbers. Do we need more? Can’t there come a point where player skill is called upon as just as important, if not way more so, than mathematics?
That’s not to say every game is like that, because I see some devs rebelling against the onslaught of stats. I like how Guild Wars has an option to keep tooltips simple without all the numerical details. I actually appreciated back in the day when City of Heroes eschewed public stats in favor of general descriptors like “long” or “medium”.
I know stats and RPGs (and all video games, for that matter) are inseparable, I guess I just wish stats would stop being the overbearing grandma who’s always calling you up to check if you’re eating enough and wearing warm enough clothes to avoid the chills.
- Posted in: General
“Case in point: DDO. I love me some DDO, I really do, but the stats almost kill the game for me. There’s simply too many of them and they’re too obscure for your typical MMO player to where it’s actually harder to customize your character’s progress because if you make a misstep you’re going to gimp your character.”
So do you think maybe the problem isn’t actually the number of stats, but the level that people obsess over optimal performance and not being “gimped”?
Really, the DDO stat system is the same as the 3.5 D&D stat system (no shock there) which has actually simplified from the original D&D and AD&D systems that I was handling just fine back about, oh, 5th grade. If it’s too overwhelming for the typical MMO player, maybe the problem is less with the stats and more with the typical MMO player?
Stats too complicated? Well, maybe in DDO. But stats are in general consolidated, reduced and dumbed down enough by now.
Stats are automatically upgraded on level up in WoW, LOTRO, whatever, we don’t have control about stat distribution for ages anymore and the number of stats gets consolidated more and more with every expansion. LOTRO is next with Isengard.
Special more or less gating stats like “Resilience”, “Radiance” or soon “Finesse” or “+Hit” are not complicated stats but rather arbitrary gear grinds tacked on top.
Hey! D&D was all about stats (and Rolemaster even more), so any adaptation of D&D should show these stats.
Basically, early RPG (pen&paper RPG, you youngsters) were mere derivations from wargames (and it’s interesting to see that the Warcraft Series went the other way round… all the way to a P&P RPG), so all about stats, calculations, optimization… and yeah, a whole bunch of dice rolling.
By the way, I’m no min-maxer, but I like when stats are clear and usable. And a counterexample would be in my mind the “simplification” of stats and their tooltips in LOTRO. Back in times, you could see on a blink of a tooltip how everything contributed to your stats (basically, you had VIT = 150+275+36+12, corresponding to your base stat + the different bonuses from the armour/weapon/traits). Now you just have one rough number, and need to juggle with every piece of gear to see how it affects your build…
And it was called “simplification” by the team *chokes*
In fact, MMOs are this millenium’s equivalent to the late 70es (and early 80es) RPGs: rigid systems to dictate some rules to the players. And stats are the top of this iceberg of rules…
Regards,
Skro
It sounds like you don’t really have a problem with stats, just superfluous stats. If you don’t need a stat from level 1 to max, you shouldn’t need it when you’re max. Adding stats that only apply to max level characters is just a way to artificially create complexity and a secondary leveling treadmill. The sole purpose of such stats is to keep people playing longer by decreasing their ability to progress through content until they have accumulated a sufficient quantity of the “special” stats.
It’s rubbish like that that has reduced my interest in endgame activities over the years to the point I almost can’t be bothered anymore.
I would absolutely love to try a fantasy MMO featuring gameplay that revolves around combat and magic, in which there are no stats of any kind visible to the player. Nothing. No Str/Wis/Int, no Damage/Delay, no level numbers, skill numbers, NO NUMBERS!
A game in which, when you pick up a new two-handed sword, you have no idea at all whether or not it will do more or less damage than the one you are using. Want to find out? Go and hit something with it. Watch what happens. Try and work out for yourself whether it’s a better sword or a worse one, and if it’s better, how is it better, and why.
Maybe it took longer to kill that wolf with it, but it seemed to kill the orc faster? Perhaps you found a Two-handed Sword of Orc Slaying. Maybe you better kill a lot of orcs and see if that seems right. If it does, well you can call your sword Orcslayer. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re just seeing what you want to see.
There are more imaginative ways to suggest, imply, hint or flat-out reveal what an item is good for or what a character does well than just appending a bunch of numbers to the icon display.
“Can’t there come a point where player skill is called upon as just as important, if not way more so, than mathematics?”
No, and for a very simple reason (which you know). Player skill isn’t accessible to Mr “I used to be awesome at the Bard’s Tale and Atari Boxing but now I can’t even keep my targeting reticle steady in any shooter style game”. Also, as a longtime CoH player, the old system was pure garbage because it wasn’t consistent. Or those powers will less than the standard accuracy (AoE controls, for example) that just say ‘slightly less accurate’, expecting people to know what that meant. That’s where the non-stats point falls down. You MUST have consistency or numbers become the only reasonable alternative.
@Buhallin
“So do you think maybe the problem isn’t actually the number of stats, but the level that people obsess over optimal performance and not being “gimped”?”
…
“If it’s too overwhelming for the typical MMO player, maybe the problem is less with the stats and more with the typical MMO player?”
I think a mistake is being made here. In my experience, as one of the accursed “metagamers”, the typical MMO player isn’t all that concerned about “optimal performance” or “not being gimped”. Sure, some may do some reading up to prevent that occurrence but most may not even know they’re gimped because they’re not familiar with optimal performance. They have nothing to compare themselves to (no frame of reference). Once they get that frame of reference, they may want to make a few changes to get closer to that “optimal” ideal but they’re not going to be willing to look at anything but the lowest hanging fruit.
I could be wrong here (wouldn’t be the first time
) but I think the vast majority of MMO players fall into the ‘casual’ category. So without ‘accessibility overload’ (see: present day WoW), those types of players typically aren’t very into the minutia required to determine optimal performance and they’re not generally willing to put in the (sometimes ridiculous) amount of time required to attain that optimal performance level. Generalizing, sure, but we’ve all seen the trends toward “easier” and “less time consuming”, which seems to indicate most folks want it like that.
In City of Heroes you can have it both ways – just the overall description is there if you are ok with that. If you want more detail, that can be shown also. And you can enable monitoring in run-time of various stats that you choose yourself, if you want it.
I find such numbers useful to for example see whether I have been slightly debuffed by enemies debuffed into being completely useless. Will kind of notice that anyway in many cases, but sometimes it helps to see the actual numbers also.
CoH stats are also pretty clear what they mean in most cases; things like damage, accuracy, defense, damage resistance, recharge time, endurance reduction etc are quite straightforward to understand.
It also provides a more interesting approach to advancing your characters abilities than just focusing on one or two numbers and different playstyles can have different models for what works well for them.
I’d prefer a far more simplified version of stats, to be honest. Something more transparent. You can make your stats be interesting and varied without turning your game into Excel with orcs.
For example, sente described City of Heroes’ system. I think that’s a great system that is pretty easy to understand. But the important part about the system is that you don’t need to understand all of those things to have fun and succeed in the game. Part of the reason I don’t do endgame in WoW and don’t try to read too much in LOTRO is because I need to understand a whole manual of things before others will group with me.
I still don’t know what fate is, but the cheap collector’s edition I got gives me an item that boosts it. So…yay for me?
You’ve hit on the old power creed discussion here, but from a different direction. Things always have to get more powerful and more complicated until they reach a breakpoint, when suddenly things get a lot simpler and more homogenous, then rinse and repeat.
WoW’s a perfect case; it got more and more complicated with avoidance, defense, hp, hit rating, +to healing, +to arcane, expertise, 71 talent points… then bang. Half as many talent points, some stats eliminated.
On top of that, the numbers become ridiculously big. We went from tanks that had 4000 hit points to tanks that can push 200,000 hit points in 25 levels. That’s foolish for two reasons. One, it inflates the importance of the number (ohhhh it’s SO BIG), and two, it makes monsters have to do that much more damage, widening the gap between “geared” and “under geared.”
The only benefit is that players get to feel more powerful than they really are because weaker players or mobs have numbers so much smaller than theirs (analogy, anyone?).
At any rate, great post!
@Bhagpuss, You sort of described Asheron’s Call 2 there. And we all know how that turned out . . .
As much as some people find stats to be annoying, they do act to define the characters and items in a game world in a meaningful way that allows players to relate to those characters and items.
Also, any game run by a computer is going to use math to model things, which means, in the end, stats. You can hide those stats from players, but they still exist, and then players just feel like they’re being kept ignorant to their own detriment.
In the end, RPG players want stats, and stat-less games tend to not do very well.
I think DDO is an exception as you pointed out because it tries to emulate the pen and paper version where stats are absolutely intregal to the game play, but come to think of it I had way more fun playing even the paper version when I was just adventuring with my character and not caring about modifiers and such
http://www.killthegoblinsavetheworld.wordpress.com
The problem is: That in the old traditional RPGS (Paper and books), we were forced to solve the missions by wits and shall we call it “skill”? The stats only contributed to increasing your chance for success on the dice roll.
The problem with MMO´s is that the stats now only contribute to you success, not the other way around. There are very few quests in MMO´s that actually require you too think and solve the task in the old RPG fashion.
I would really like too see more RPG into MMO again! Would’t you?
Final Fantasy XI had many elements of what’s been discussed throughout the comments section, here. While stats existed, it was in small numbers and the calculations were all hidden from the players.
Expectedly, people parsed and parsed and reverse engineered calculations to determine what things are best. Not everything was solved, though, as there’s still some mystery today (I think) about what influence things such as hour or day of week (in-game), direction faced, etc. as it relates to crafting.
If you never game FFXI a spin, I’d recommend trying it out. At least ahead of FFXIV, anyway.
I totally understand the need and appeal for stats, just that some days they rub me the wrong way and I wanted to vent. No huge stance here, just venting!
Stubborn, did you mean the gap between geared and ungeared? I have to admit I understand why Gutrot (who leveled up to 80 without using any gear and wanted to continue in Cataclysm but I don’t know whether he was successful there) would be unhappy but it’s not something that would worry most of the players. For undergeared players, the number does not matter – what matters is the difference.
On topic of pen&paper RPGs, GMs can and should bend the rules if the players seems to be more or less successful with the stat-based part than intended. The computer can’t do that (yet?) so no matter how important the “skill” part in MMO is, the stats will play a role. They might offer an option to hide it like GW or WoW; they might make it not an option like some games do – but the stats will stay.