So, if anybody has been watching the Vanguard stuff this last week they will have seen some interesting things (I can call it that now right? Seeing how they keep calling it that? Watch it change, when they finally announce their title, into something like: “Legacy of Wahpsnoodle!”). That interesting stuff manifesting primarily in the form of riddles that tease the already massively coalescing Vanguard community.
It all started on Monday or so (I could be wrong, I suck with dates) when they released a piece of teaser fiction on their website. I briefly mentioned it, funny thing is, the next day that piece of fiction had changed. Not the fiction itself (though that would’ve been really neat. Fiction that morphs day to day telling different stories with some riddle between the lines… anyways) but the fact that a bizarre number had been tacked onto the end.
That number?
562528500361
Uh, okay. I’m not the brightest light bulb out there, hell, I’ve got the arithmetic skills of a rat on LSD, so I’ll readily admit, this number means absolutely nothing to me. I’m not even interested in attempting to figure it out. In my opinion, leave that up to the mensa dudes who apparently have nothing better to do than to decode strange freaky numbers. What did interest me is how much of a stir this had caused. Everywhere you could look on every messageboard it seemed there were four or five pages of people speculating about it. On the official Sigil boards people were phoning up phone numbers, turning it into letters and trying to descramble it, square rooting it and attempting to figure it out in 1337 speak. Really, it was like this massive hive mind that just set to work on totally exhausting every possibility of that number.
The interesting thing is, the next day, another number (756110555893) appeared. And then something else appeared. A poem of some sort (obvious by the stanzas), first in some language, then translated, and then with another number at the end (yes, you have to click). Now? A NEW poem (dwarven it looks) with another number at the end (I think the first was elvish).
I know, I know, you’re sitting there, staring, blinking your eyes, looking at the nearly empty bottle of whisky beside you wondering if it’s the booze’s fault you’re missing the point. You’re thinking to yourself: “what the hell? It’s been three days and anyuzer has lost his mind? Yeah, I'm talking to you whisky. Hey! Don't turn away when I'm talking to you! DON'T MAKE ME DRINK YOU!”
Uh, well for the sake of us all, before you hurt the poor whisky, no, it's not the booze, and I haven't lost my mind. I simply haven’t made my point yet. My point requires us to jump back into the early days. Early EverQuest is the best example. There are two reasons EverQuest is the best example, one is that it’s entirely PvE (which means you don’t have the entire psychological spin PvP places on a community and how it affects it) and you also had the point where the most numbers in a game were hidden to players.
Experience was hidden, mana pools were hidden, haste and slow percentages were hidden, buff effects even were hidden to a degree. Now, take a second for those of you who were there and remember, for those of you who weren’t just try to imagine. Remember when you had entire messageboards devolve into giant ten or fifteen page debates on this stuff? How much mana did each point of intelligence or wisdom really give? Did charisma help for the fear spells? What percentage of haste did the FBSS really give? And what percentage of slows did Shamans and Enchanters get? What gave better DPS, two one handers? Or a high damage two hander? Could shields be used in any viable way? And it goes on and on and on.
Riddles. Number riddles. A part of the metagame played by the community. It’s easy to forget what sort of side effects these riddles had on community, but something like these Vanguard teasers really bring that back to light for me.
These riddles have one primary result. They get people talking. What’s the number one thing you need to do to get a community forming? You need to get people to talk to each other. Considering the fact that there’s a good chance your primary demographic is going to be largely partially socially inept gamers, getting people to talk anonymously online, no matter how comfortable they are with the concept, considering they’re mostly loners by nature, is no easy task. Riddles get people to talk. This doesn’t end here though, it also promotes debate, as well as team work (people working off on concepts of other people to come up with new concepts) and on top of that all it also creates a reward.
"What reward?" you gasp. The reward of knowledge. I know that sounds cheesy but hear me out. If you played EQ use that as your experience, if you played any other MMOG, use that as your high level experience. For EverQuest though, remember what it felt like to be a level 60 character who knew every zone off by heart? Who had every statistic memorized and knew exactly what statistics were important for which characters? Knowing what every single spell did in the game, even if you had never played that class? Knowing all those hidden numbers off by heart. Then having that newb send you a tell saying: “hey, could you tell me about (insert question here)”. You know what that feeling was? It was a feeling of accomplishment.
Maybe it was a dumbass feeling. Maybe all it said is that you’d spent way too much time catassing your way through the game. That wasn’t the point though, the reality of you being a loser was not the question, but rather the satisfaction of having a wealth of knowledge that truly set you apart from anybody starting the game.
This is true to a degree in all MMOGs, but again, the more riddles there are to figure out, the more knowledge there is for players to inherently know. The more websites there will be to show that knowledge to the world and the more people who will go to those websites, participate on them, and make them a success.
It’s a cycle, all starting because of one thing, a riddle. Yet this has not been the way the industry has been going. For good reason the industry felt that EverQuest in particular was far, far, far too un-newb friendly and so games are looking at walking players along step by step, explaining every little thing, making sure the numbers are all there for players to use at their disposal.
Part of the reason for this is the knowledge that: “Well the players will figure it out anyways and the information will pop up on spoiler sites.” This is true, but it’s also true in the fact that when you cut out that cycle, you cut out communication, and while it’s not going to mean your game is a failure or anything, it simply doesn’t encourage community like the full cycle does.
Interesting, no? Think about it. The more information we have, the worse it actually is for us. At the same time, before you freak out at me, I’m not saying the answer is hiding all the numbers from players. Personally? I DAMN WELL WANT TO SEE MY EXPERIENCE GAIN. Really, I never want to have to just do it blindly again.
So in my opinion the key is finding all sorts of riddles you can put in your game, this simply allows the players to metagame away and helps build your community all at the same time. It’s human nature to want to solve problems, it’s what we do, and there is no better environment to present these problems in than a PvE game. Of course, the way the industry seems to be ignorantly going, we’ll never have to work for anything again in our lives. Hopefully we’ll see some company do it differently, and if these pre-announce teasers are any sign of the paths Vanguard is taking, hopefully we’ll see some cleverly implemented metagames that will help foster this community cycle.
An amusing addendum: Already a fan has made up a mock teaser in very good humor of the whole thing directed to Brad "Aradune" McQuaid. It's vaguely amusing, but even better in my opinion is it just goes again to show how the cycle all kind of fits together. A fan put time and effort into doing something like this. How many people will see this? Thousands? Suddenly it becomes a community private joke, which just fosters more relationships. And where did it all start? The first riddle...
Blackguard edit: This article was actually written by anyuzer. I just converted it to BBCode and posted it here.