Cooperative games

[Chris]

If you are into board games you probably noticed the crazines over cooperative games that started in 2008. Pandemic, Shadows over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica, Horror in Arkham, etc. The principle is a complete lack of competition, instead players cooperate to beat "the game", sometimes some players are secretly given a role of traitor, sometimes not (the most interesting in this aspect is Shadows over Camelot since players don't know if there is a traitor or not).

If you don't know what I'm talking about check here:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=cooperative+board+games&aq=f

I wonder if something like that can be used in BBG...


Problems to solve:
- setting proper difficulty level of the game: it has to be connected to players number (it can be especialy tricky when nobs join the game which ups the difficulty while adding poor players performance)
- players deliberately trying to destroy the game: while standard games has already protection agains this via player to player limitations, this once is more tricky. What if players decide to join the "game's side"? Especially devastating when using bots (several accounts doing stupid things and providing no "player's side" value or even negative value).
- join in the middle players problem: since cooperative games are closely connected to number of players when it comes to difficulty level, new players joining in the middle can make finetuning balance very tricky or maybe even impossible.

[Harkins]

Well, if it's good enough for World of Warcraft...

I think most PBBGs are competitive because it's cheaper, you don't have to create missions or levels or bosses or a story, you just have to toss players into the ring together. As budgets grow, I think we'll see a lot more PVE over PVP.

[Chris]

Well, if it's good enough for World of Warcraft...

I think most PBBGs are competitive because it's cheaper, you don't have to create missions or levels or bosses or a story, you just have to toss players into the ring together. As budgets grow, I think we'll see a lot more PVE over PVP.

Please read the first post carefully. It's about COOPERATIVE games, WoW is merely team based and has nothing to do with cooperative game style.

[Harkins]

I didn't miss that. In WoW, players cooperate to beat raids, the game itself.

[Chris]

I didn't miss that. In WoW, players cooperate to beat raids, the game itself.

No, no, no, no and no It's completely different. WoW has cooperative elements (or to be more precise team play elements), but I'm talking about *fully* cooperative game.

WoW would be cooperative (like the games I mentioned) if:
- There was no monster item drops, no levels to brag about
- There was no guilds
- There was no players ranking of *any* kind
- All, absolutely *all* players would wish the raid to be successful
- Failure of one player, any  player, would make sad *all* other players
- The outcome is only one, either all players lose or all win.
- There is no track/ranking of how much each player contribute to the victory

[Hypemaster]

I have never played these cooperative board games but from the videos it looks nice. I dont think its hard to make those to a webbased game for limited players (4) but for 100 maybe 1000 of players this can be tricky. Way to solve is to make sure one single player cant ruin the game.

[Chris]

I dont think its hard to make those to a webbased game for limited players (4) but for 100 maybe 1000 of players this can be tricky. Way to solve is to make sure one single player cant ruin the game.

Hmmm, maybe something smaller would be better.

According to monkeysphere
http://community.bbgamezone.net/index.php/topic,2166.msg13803.html#msg13803 (check Harkins' post) the best would be 60 or 150 players. Making it truly massive could be indeed impossible...

Yes, 60 people sounds nice to me, in addition it has some benefits from designer's point of view (balancing is much easier when you know how many players there will be) and from administrator's point of view (smaller communities generaly do not have cheaters for example). To make it work I would make several worlds. I could also make delayed game start (game starts when world is filled by 30 players, when the population reach 60 no now players can join). In a truly massive it would be deadly financially, but in smaller one it might work. In addition, there had to be invitation only worlds or some other means of assuring that players from previous round can play the next one together as well.
Hmmm, it starts sound complicated already Also, what to do when players leave and from original 60 only 20 is left, or worse?

[Hypemaster]

massive is impossible i think, but people leaving is always an isseu. you can prob make veteran only worlds and then noob ones for beginning players. veteran players are less likely to leave, most players who leave are new ones. Or maybe make like only 5 or 10 of those 60 can be new players. It isent a perfect way but thats only i can think of atm

[Scion]

I very much doubt that these 'cooperative games' like pandemic etal can be directly implemented as a MMO game.

One place where web implementations of these games for smaller/low player numbers might find a foothold is in the social networks....allowing friends to play co-operative games together as they would a board game...

However there is certainly room for including more co-operative elements in games...

starting from missions that groups of players have to co-operate together to achieve....or creating environments where players group together to achieve common goals...through to defining a specific goal that the majority of the player base need to co-operate together to achieve.

Increasing co-operation / interaction between players should also have the side effect of increasing player lock-in....once people have a vested interest in the game they are more likely to continue playing....

[travo]

Scion you sparked an idea in my head.

Sure, each army/clan/tribe etc is cooperative (if them leader knows wqhat hes doing lol) but why stop at that?

There should be a town hall or similar, where players can post that they want to take out whoever, and other players can join up. This would be a great way to make the difference between the big players and the small players alot smaller IMO

[Scion]

hi im noobamatic 2000....id like to hire some uber powerfull dude to take out the leader of the 'GameGodz' clan...argh whats this how come ive just been pwnd.....

still some sort of anonymous assasination agency that holds the payment in escrow for who-ever is taking the job could alieviate that...however i have seen it abused where the target will co-operate with a friend to get the reward.......still maybe the assasins could also be NPC's

but then Ive reduced it down to one player interacting with the game....not very co-operative .....seems that co-operative mechanics are easy for cheaters to abuse....probably why co-operative elements are restricted in a lot of games.

[travo]

The assassins being NPCs would make the gap bigger... Big players dont even have to fight, they just pay off the assassins to attack for them

[zykal]

Co-op games require tons more planning and thought. theres quests, maps, NPCS , economy types, crafting, banks, story/lore; its just a lot more involved then: pick your character warrior , pick your starting stats, equip your weapons, enter arena, fight!

[jannesiera]

Co-op games require tons more planning and thought. theres quests, maps, NPCS , economy types, crafting, banks, story/lore; its just a lot more involved then: pick your character warrior , pick your starting stats, equip your weapons, enter arena, fight!

You're thinking in one genre, but there are other genres too . Not everything has to be a mmorpg to make co-operative gameplay work. But I'm tired and not really intrested in the subject so I'm not going to say much else for now :p. I'm sorry for correcting you but not adding anything of value...

[zykal]

very true jannesiera, I was providing an example of different things to think about in each type of game.  but to go very basic,

Environmentally heavy games are harder to think up and create, without much environment there's not much use for CO-OP.

[shoespeak]

This is a pretty new idea to me, but I think it would be fun to try, at least! In order to get the players to cooperate, they all need to be fighting for the same thing (freedom from the robot overlords, successful escape from the jail super computer, etc). The players must also be connected to each other in some way, whether it's sharing time ticks or having a global life force/hp.

setting proper difficulty level of the game: it has to be connected to players number (it can be especialy tricky when nobs join the game which ups the difficulty while adding poor players performance)

Can't just add more evil robots or probing aliens and find some way to weave that into the story? Or have rounds and max the players out...after 200 players the others are put on a waiting list for the next round.

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- players deliberately trying to destroy the game: while standard games has already protection agains this via player to player limitations, this once is more tricky. What if players decide to join the "game's side"? Especially devastating when using bots (several accounts doing stupid things and providing no "player's side" value or even negative value). I guess we would need to have some strong anti-bot measures and allow ourselves to delete users without reason (just like drawing a "go back to start" card). Monitor players and if they seem to be getting too "rich"(or powerful, or whatever we measure) you can always just throw the evil overlord card.

[zykal]

creating a coop community is really hard, just like real life they need an actual common goal, but the goal needs to be hard enough no single player could obtain it.


as for the evil overlord card, be careful how you play it, it may bite you in the butt