Revisiting Bartle

Greetings Traveler!

I told you I would get another post out before the end of the day. I hadn't thought about WildStar too much in the past few years, now I've had two reminders in the same day.

With thanks to Thyanel, I decided to take the Bartle test again for my evening post. And like Thyanel, my score hasn't really changed much over the years. I think the player "types" that Bartle originated can be valuable as guides to design and plan a roleplaying game, particularly an MMO. However, too much emphasis on Bartle types can lead to poor design decisions, WildStar being a case in point. The result of my own test today is shown below.

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology

You are 73% Explorer

What Bartle says:

♠ Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (ie. bugs) and figuring out how things work. Scoring points may be necessary to enter some next phase of exploration, but it's tedious, and anyone with half a brain can do it. Killing is quicker, and might be a constructive exercise in its own right, but it causes too much hassle in the long run if the deceased return to seek retribution. Socialising can be informative as a source of new ideas to try out, but most of what people say is irrelevant or old hat. The real fun comes only from discovery, and making the most complete set of maps in existence.

You are also:

47% Achiever

47% Socialiser

33% Killer

This result may be abbreviated as EASK

Background & Acknowledgements

The Bartle Test is based on the player types identified by the legendary Richard Bartle in his paper, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. It is strongly recommended that you read this paper if you wish to find out more about your player type, and what it all means. Bartle revisits and expands upon these ideas in his book, Designing Virtual Worlds, which is also recommended if you wish to delve a little deeper.

The original Bartle Test was created by Erwin S. Andreasen and Brandon Downey and this implementation is based on the question data which Andreasen has made available at http://www.andreasen.org/bartle/.

As you can see, while I heavily fall in the Explorer group, I also have significant scores in both Achiever and Socializer, and occasionally might dabble in the Killer group. The folks at Carbine mistakenly (in my humble opinion) thought that players would be one or another type, when I suspect we are all more of a blend. I need to read Bartle's original paper to get more nuance, but I think it is worth noting that he was talking about (and possibly promoting) a specific type of game: Multi-User Dungeons.

As Bartle himself wrote:

Are MUDs
games? Like chess, tennis, D&D?
Yes - to achievers.
pastimes? Like reading, gardening, cooking?
Yes - to explorers.
sports? Like huntin', shooting', fishin'?
Yes - to killers.
entertainments? Like nightclubs, TV, concerts?
Yes - to socialisers.

While MMORPGs share many traits with MUDs, they are not the same. And few MMO players have ever played a MUD. As I wrote above, I do believe that Bartle types can be helpful in designing MMOs. However, they are just one of many considerations that should infuse the design of a game.

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Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after publication. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

DAW2015: Most of the Rest

I've played quite a few games this year, though perhaps not as many as some other folks. As Belghast said in today's Aggronaut, "[Devs] are my rockstars, and even if you are making a game that no one will ever play…  you are being awesome.  Games bring me so much joy, and there is a cast of often nameless and faceless people who struggled through crunch time to get that product into my hands." Even games I decided not play after some trial or beta are still herculean efforts by teams of people who poured no small portion of their lives into making what they hoped would please the players. No one sets out to make a crappy game. It's usually time and/or resource constraints along with pressures from folks who don't really understand the process that do damage to it. And sometimes a perfectly well-made game just isn't my cuppa tea.

Carbine's Wildstar Team

I spent a chunk of the summer playing Wildstar with Scooter. Wildstar is an interesting mix of old and new game design. I liked the irreverent approach to storytelling, the cartoonish art style, and of course the great music from Jeff Kurtenacker. You can tell the team had a lot of fun developing it. In many ways, playing Wildstar was a lot like I imagine playing in the Firefly 'Verse would/will be. And that's not nothing.

ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 Team

Tyria is always a nice place to visit, and ArenaNet's buy-to-play approach means that I can poke my my head in whenever I get the itch, without worrying about the hobbles of F2P. I started a couple new characters around Christmas to experience GW2 anew, and enjoyed the look around. While some folks are not impressed with the living story, you can't deny the team is trying to keep things fresh. And of course the "Game of Thorns" expansion is on the horizon.

Trion's Rift Team

Rift will always have a special place in my heart as the game that Scooter and I bonded over. We returned this fall just in time for the Nightmare Tide expansion, and things are still hopping. I like the new minion mini-game, and I really like the Dimensions housing system. It seems like Trion has done the most to enable players to play with all their friends, with the "Faction as Fiction" crossover content; and not only the ability to "mentor" down from higher character levels, but also the ability to "sidekick" up lowbies to match veterans for some content.

Tech Support
On a side note, it is not just the people creating the game that we need to appreciate. I've been assisted many times by the support teams of various games, fixing issues with my account or the game client. Often issues caused by my own derpiness. Thank you so much to all the support personnel and community managers out there.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

It's the Little Things

Darn it! I started writing this post yesterday after reading Syp's Poky Little Puppy post. Then he goes and posts his own 10 Little Things, and I look like a copycat. Well, this won't be all happiness and fluffy Aurin. There's some Chua in there, too. Evuhl vermin!

Little things I love:
For lack of playing time, I am not quite to level 11, with Scooter on my heels. My main is RowanBlaze—how original!—a Human medic scientist (or is it scientist medic?), and just barely Monday, Scooter and I realized that I could activate some mining bots that she, as a settler, had repaired(?), which then provided building materials for her. We'd heard of synergies between the paths, but this was the first time we'd really seen it in action beyond simple buffs and things that benefit anyone walking by.

Another little thing that I find fascinating is that the water flows. If I am in a river, there is a current. I move downstream if I am not actively swimming. There may be other MMOs that have done this, but Wildstar is the first that I have played with moving water.

Breaking out of crowd control is a welcome mechanic. Nothing is more frustrating than being stuck helpless while some other player—or an NPC—whales on me. I've been blinded and stunned a couple times, but haven't reacted quickly enough to get out them before they end on their own. Luckily, Scooter is often right there with me, fighting the good fight; though I have died several times as well, still learning my character's strengths and vulnerabilities.

I like the costume button, which allows you to customize your look without sacrificing your stats. [EDIT] Unlike GW2 at launch (ANet has since revisited that mechanic—thanks João Carlos), costumes are not just "city clothes." I realize this is not a new concept, but it's a pretty good implementation.

I love the buff stations and other benefits of the Settler path. Scooter and another settler made a plant and seed vendor as well. I'm not sure if this feature actually supports a sense of community, but it certainly makes me appreciate at least one subset of players. I haven't really seen much of how the other paths benefit everyone in quite the way that Settler stuff does, but I'd like to think that's because I just haven't realized what they were.

Some things I already find annoying:
Challenges: Ludus interruptus, with a healthy side of "Hell is other people." Challenges break the flow of a relatively leisurely questing session. And in the current fairly well-populated areas, they are virtually impossible to finish, since the the quarry is hunted to extinction on a regular basis.

Class/Race limitations: My opinion on this matter has not changed. I came up with the perfect name for a Mordesh esper the other day, only to realize the Mordesh can't be espers.

Fully separated "Realms": Helloo, Carbine, this is 2014. For one thing, calling them realms (a la WoW) makes very little sense in the context of a Sci-Fi planetary colonization setting. "Worlds" (a la GW2) would have been a better word choice for the servers. And more importantly, why is the playerbase being separated from itself in such a way at all? Plenty of modern games, from STO to TSW and GW2 (and dare I say it, TESO?) have had either seamless super-servers or easy visiting privileges. Even Rift has had free server transfers almost since its launch.

Yesterday, the official launch day, Carbine announced free realm transfers so people could join their friends without losing any progress they'd made. But the fine print, as it turned out, was that free transfers were only offered from high to low population servers. Which meant that my BtV buddy, Feii, had to re-create his character on my server and essentially losing any head start he once had. While I applaud the server balancing effort, it would have been obviated by a better, more modern server structure. [EDIT] As I was reminded by the MMO Gypsy, there is also a region lock, meaning North American and European friends don't even have the option to play on the same server.

Factions locked in eternal conflict: I've harped on this before—repeatedly—but I feel more ranty about this than the Class/Race thing. Segregating your playerbase along faction lines does not really serve anyone but the PvP fringe, which can be addressed in a different way. I know, PvPers like to think they are hardcore and a major factor in MMO gaming. I believe that many game developers are PvPers too, and that explains the devotion to PvP in so many games. Hey that's cool, but many people don't do any PvP at all, at I'd be willing to bet that most who do only dabble in it at best.

Now you may be saying to yourself—maybe even getting ready to comment—that the story lends itself to factionalism. And you'd be right. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that the idea for opposing sides in a war over the planet came before any details about what those two factions would be like, or even what the war would be about. They certainly gave the Exiles who went to Everstar Grove reason enough to hate the Chua, though.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.