Original Post
To what lengths will a player go to get a 'better' in game title? I'm wondering how powerful persistent player rankings can be for determining how much effort players put into the game. How much can we, as game designers, rely on them for encouraging the player to play how we want them to? Players will spend a fortune trying to get the best score in arcade games, months trying to get the highest level character they can etc. It seems to me that rankings can be very powerful. Although this can be applied to almost any genre, to get an idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about, I'll provide some context specific to my own project. I'm designing an RTS game which, among other things, has no resource management as such, but instead has a reinforcements system enabling the player to draw more troops as and when he needs them. Now, obviously there needs to be something to prevent players from just spamming hundreds of units all the time. I've toyed with a few heuristics to decide when and how much the player can reinforce, but none of them seem to be quite what I'm looking for, just resource management by a different name. That got me thinking: rather than restrict the number of units with some complicated clever algorithm, why not let the player restrict them himself? What if, the player got a better 'score' and hence a better ranking for using fewer units? Obviously, some players would probably not give a shit about their score, and would enjoy playing silly games involving every unit they can get. This doesn't really bother me - if that's how they want to play the game, that's fine. The ranking system will also enable more serious players to avoid this type of player if they want to. Hopefully however, a significant number of players will care about their score, despite it's arbitrary and ultimately meaningless nature. These people will strive to maximize it as much as they can, and in order to do so they will become reluctant to summon reinforcements, yet they are never strictly prevented from doing so - in effect, the game is as difficult or as easy as the player wants it to be. There is still some balancing to do. The score gained for winning vs. the score gained for using fewer units needs to be looked at carefully, or you get weird strategies like players walking in with one unit and losing but getting a good score, or players choosing to win at all costs (back to spamming units again) So... Are player rankings strong enough to encourage such behaviour? Do they need some kind of parallel incentive? (i.e higher rankings gives bonuses or new units etc) Or is this simply not going to work?
