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How games cheat to help players

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Re: How games cheat to help players

#31

Post by law_of_poe »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #13
mey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think rubber banding, part of the fun for the player is thinking they have a chance. Either by splitting up the players into leagues based skill levels (star craft 2), or fudge the game slightly (or significantly in mario kart's case)

I agree with you, but here's my core problem. My gameplay involves 32 human players playing against each other in football for a title that only one can win. Each season takes a month. That's 32 shades of grey, with 31 of those shades being losses. How do you rubber band that? I'm about to build a facebook app for our game, and I'm trying to brain storm solutions to this problem. The only answer I have so far is make…

Split into four ordered leagues. Let the leagues last one week. In each league, promote the top two and relegate the bottom two.

Re: How games cheat to help players

#32

Post by exolab »

I bought the game to see how you implemented that. The game is 99 cents. Before the second(!) level, I am asked to buy a blade. Turns out

a) I have to buy money to buy a blade (WTF?! Either you charge for the game or the in-app purchases) b) I cannot close the buying menu without buying anything c) It is completely unclear to me how the practice blade is different from a "real" blade

You talk about how you detect players' intentions. My intention was to buy a game for 99 cents. Not for 10 bucks.

Seriously...

Re: How games cheat to help players

#33

Post by exolab »

exolab wrote: post #32

I bought the game to see how you implemented that. The game is 99 cents. Before the second(!) level, I am asked to buy a blade. Turns out a) I have to buy money to buy a blade (WTF?! Either you charge for the game or the in-app purchases) b) I cannot close the buying menu without buying anything c) It is completely unclear to me how the practice blade is different from a "real" blade You talk about how you detect pla…

And then I get the vanilla sword for free after lv.2? Dude, you are confusing me. What would have happened if I had bought that sword after lv. 1?

Re: How games cheat to help players

#34

Post by exolab »

exolab wrote: post #33
exolab wrote: post #32

I bought the game to see how you implemented that. The game is 99 cents. Before the second(!) level, I am asked to buy a blade. Turns out a) I have to buy money to buy a blade (WTF?! Either you charge for the game or the in-app purchases) b) I cannot close the buying menu without buying anything c) It is completely unclear to me how the practice blade is different from a "real" blade You talk about how you detect pla…

And then I get the vanilla sword for free after lv.2? Dude, you are confusing me. What would have happened if I had bought that sword after lv. 1?

And now, after lv. 3, I think I understand your approach. IMHO you should explain that buying for cash is an alternative for the lazy. Still I think that if you go down the IAP road, you should only ever charge for additional content (e.g. the next 50 levels), and not for power ups for the game.

Just my 2 cents (sorry, couldn't help it).

Re: How games cheat to help players

#35

Post by onemoreact »

greendestiny wrote: post #21
AndyNemmity wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but here's my core problem. My gameplay involves 32 human players playing against each other in football for a title that only one can win. Each season takes a month. That's 32 shades of grey, with 31 of those shades being losses. How do you rubber band that? I'm about to build a facebook app for our game, and I'm trying to brain storm solutions to this problem. The only answer I have so far is make…

The problem is in seeing it as a single competition. Have small sub-competitions with a higher luck component, so that people can experience winning a game, or even a round on the way to getting good enough to win a whole season. Make those wins satisfying and people will happily take a beating overall.

The idea of several different goals is how the US football system works. Most games in the season 'count' by improving your seeding in the playoffs but it's also binary so you get in or don't. Adapting a similar system for video games could work vary well.

I would suggest banding things so 20 teams compete for a spot in the playoffs which consists of 16 teams. (aka 16 people get a win at the cost of 4.) And in the actual playoffs you only lose one game, so rank people based on what round they get to. Something like winner!, (A++) lost final game, (A+) final 4, (A) final 8, (B) got into playoffs, (Try again)did not get into playoffs.

The secret is letting people move on as soon as they can't win any more while making them feel like getting as far as they did is still worth something. Lost the first 6 games? Hey start over it's ok, I hope you learned how the game worked etc.

Re: How games cheat to help players

#36

Post by jm4 »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #10

I run a simulation football game called http://deeproute.com So far the biggest mistake I believe I've made is not cheating to help players win. I made a brutally difficult simulation game. We have tons of players quit simply because the game is too hard. Because you are 1 person versus 31 other people, there is only 1 winner, and 31 losers. People don't like this. Compare this to our competitors, and they make losse…

That sounds like a neat game, but there is zero information on the website. I went ahead and signed up anyway just to see what it's about, but I would not have if I wasn't such a football nut.

How is the game played? Is it like fantasy football? It there a screenshot of what the game looks like? Are real teams and players in the game? You should consider answering these questions on the home page.

Re: How games cheat to help players

#37

Post by gumbo72 »

icebraining wrote: post #30
v21 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Mario Kart is infamous for it's rubber banding. It's possibly a case study in going too far - it's prominent to the point that almost all players notice it. And it's frustrating to get spammed with blue shells when you're in the lead and not be able to do anything about it. Ideally, as the article says, you'd never notice.

And it's frustrating to get spammed with blue shells when you're in the lead and not be able to do anything about it. I wouldn't say anything ; a decent strategy for when you see someone else with a shell is to slow down to 2nd place and let the new 1st get hit (which will then put you on 1st again). Timing is essential, though.

This.

Re: How games cheat to help players

#38

Post by eru »

jamesu wrote: post #28

Also interesting is this deconstruction of Super Mario World's camera logic. I never noticed so much thought was put into something as trivial sounding as camera movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCIMPYM0AQg

We can only say that today, because we forgot about the other early third-person 3d games that had horrible camera movement.

Re: How games cheat to help players

#39

Post by eru »

latch wrote: post #2

A lot of which is probably what makes us old-timers complain about how easy games are these days. I don't think i ever finished battletoads! On the flip side, someone once commented that games should have a "toddler mode" where anything the player does just adds up more points and won't kill you. Obviously wouldn't work for every game, but I thought it was a brilliant idea.

> A lot of which is probably what makes us old-timers complain about how easy games are these days.

Still there are some who buck the general trend. And I'm not only talking about indie games like Spelunky, but also (among all things!) several games for the oh-so-family-friendly Wii: Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and even Mario Kart on the higher difficulty settings.

Re: How games cheat to help players

#40

Post by jeffem »

Developers really need to understand their users and implement these cheats intelligently or they create frustrations of their own.

As an example, I played a football game that obviously had some type of tackling assistance. When I dove to tackle someone, my defenseman wouldn't dive to the spot I was aiming at, but instead try to orient himself to the ball carrier. The developers probably thought that this was helping people with their "misaimed" tackles, but it was actually causing me to miss them. When I dive, I'm aiming for a spot where I think the runner will be, not where he is at the moment I hit the button.

I've seen these types of things enough that I'd approach the idea of implementing a cheat much more cautiously than other features.

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