Games 18 Dec 2006 12:08 pm
Magic Numbers
Something that we’ve discussed when brainstorming MMO ideas is the issue of Magic Numbers - that is, how many of anything is ideal? Even more specific, how many things can a person keep track of and still be effective?
This applies to a number of MMO constructs: group size; number of races, classes, skills; range of hit points, experience, skill points; number of quest entries; number of bag slots… its really quite amazing how many areas have somewhat ‘magic numbers’. Now, obviously I’m not saying that all the numbers were pulled out of someone’s ass - lots of balancing and tweaking went into the 5 person group in WoW, etc.
But it all starts somewhere. There is some ideal for the maximum manageable number of things at one time. Generally this is somewhere between 4 or 5 to about 9 or 10, though Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror thinks “magical numbers are a red herring”. I’m not too sure about this - I’m generally pretty good at remembering things like numbers or strings (given some hinting, I could probably still remember the corporate OEM keycode for Windows 98 from my first IT job), but in an MMO, you’re tracking things that change, not something that you use over and over (and over, and over…) and memorize almost by muscle memory.
This is why we don’t see games that display 5 resource pools (mana, health, etc) on the screen. That’d be insane - you have to pay attention to 5 different resource pools and make sure you’re not running low? Heck, two is sometimes hard enough.
Its not just how many stats though, its the range too. One of the worst was (well actually, still is) Anarchy Online - the numbers were all into the high thousands if not millions and above, and thats how the game was designed from the beginning. Browsing through the skill screens and trying to discern which one you should buy up was a chore, and those high numbers start losing their meaning. Obviously, since we’re talking computers here, these high numbers are all possible and easy for the game to arbitrate - pen and paper games kept with low numbers to make those easy to arbitrate for people. But maybe there’s something easier to deal with using those low numbers, especially if you don’t like having your scientific calculator out while playing your MMO.
How about no numbers at all? This is an avenue that has been little explored in the MMO space yet. Let the computers deal with all of the number crunching and go as far as hiding it from the user. It’d certainly take a different type of player (likely, more roleplay focused) than the general gamer these days who expects (and loves) those numbers. A game set up like this would probably end up being a niche game, because it doesn’t appeal to the broad spectrum of gamers. Now, if you can set up the interface and game mechanics in a way that can hide or display those details, you might have something.
This is one of those topics that is pretty fun to explore and imagine. There is definitely something more to it than just picking values out of ones ass - there are comfort levels and other human factors to consider. There is a lot of tweaking and adjusting that can be done, not just to balance, but to make it ‘feel’ right.
