#paying to win

[askagamedev]

Is the term "Pay to Win" really that accurate in multiplayer games? In some single player games, is very accurate because you can buy extra lives/attempts to clear a level. But in a well design multiplayer game, you can't directly buy a "win." And if you do buy power advantages, it will just shift you up to play against all the other people buying power advantages, and in any PvP matchup, some has to lose, by definition. Is the term P2W a strawman? Is there a more accurate term we should use?

"Pay to Win" is definitely inaccurate. Most players use the phrase as shorthand for “if all other factors are the same, players can pay for advantage”. This dismisses all other applicable factors that go into playing the game competitively - maximum earned in-game benefits/gear/levels, chosen build, player skill, internet connection, gaming rig and setup, team coordination, strategy, and so on. You are quite correct - the goal of our matchmaking services is to pit players against each other that reach equilibrium. A player who is significantly better than others, be it because of paid benefits, natural skill, experience and training, better hardware, or whatever, will rise in the rankings until they reach an equilibrium point where they are regularly pitted against players of equal win ability.

It is during the intervening time when the matchmaking algorithm is still evaluating total player power that there is the imbalance between the players put into the game. This is especially prevalent early in a game’s lifespan because most players are still exploring the game and learning how it is played. Optimal strategies, builds, gear loadouts, etc. haven’t been perfected (or even discovered) yet, so the early advantage conferred by paid boosts has a larger effect on competition. These issues naturally sort themselves out over time as players figure out better strategies and matchmaking eventually sorts players into  their appropriate power/skill tiers.

It is important to separate the actual issues of paid game advantages from the emotional responses of a loss. Losing a game feels bad for obvious reasons. Salty brains often soothe a bruised ego from a loss by coming up with a reason that removes the responsibility from the player - the game was laggy, I pushed the button but the move didn’t come out, that move/character/whatever is overpowered, this level is terrible, I don’t really play this game, I picked an underpowered character, my teammates were all awful, nobody listened to me, the other player is paying to win, and so on and so forth. When someone is upset, their brains will do things (even subconsciously) to make themselves feel better. It’s a survival thing.

A more accurate phrase would be "Pay to Compete". When a player reaches their natural limit within the system, the only way for them to gain additional power is to pay for it. This can mean paying for in game boosts, recruiting training partners and coaches to practice strategies and execution, getting better gaming equipment, getting a better internet connection, and so on. This is why tournament competition for games tends to be dominated by the same highly skilled group of players - they have the paid boosts, so the determining factor swings back to player skill, teamwork, and preparation. The winners of competitive tournaments are generally not the players who spent the most on in-game boosts. But they have spent on the game because they need to “pay to compete” at the highest level.

Ultimately, the goal with competitive games is a sustainable system where players quickly reach the equilibrium point given their total aggregation of skill, preparation, gear, paid boost, teamwork, etc. where they win and lose about 50% of the time against the opponents chosen for them. This tries to maximize closer matches between players and minimize the curb stomps games that result in bad feelings on all sides. When winners are bored and losers are frustrated because of lopsided matchmaking, the game tends to fall apart.

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[askagamedev]

As a game developer, what are your thoughts on "pay to win" mechanics (I.E. being able to buy more "power" in a game, particularly multiplayer ones, with money), both in business terms and in "fun" terms. Based on your "flow" graphs, it seems it would be a bad idea overall as the players facing pay to win players would fall into frustration area while those buying power would rise into the boredom area.

These sort of paying/nonpaying issues are typically ironed out by the multiplayer game's matchmaking system. Players often (mistakenly) think that matchmaking only considers player skill when distributing players into games. If player power (such as gear, level, paid or earned boosts, etc.) is a factor, I guarantee you that the matchmaking algorithm will take it into account because we don't actually want lopsided games - if we pit teams of equal skill against each other but one team has much higher player power level than the other, then the game will be a curbstomp. We actively want to avoid this - curbstomp games are both frustrating for those getting stomped and boring for those who are doing the stomping.

The actual goal of the matchmaking system is generally to even out player power and player skill on both teams. Our rough formula often looks something like this:

[Player Skill] + [Earned Player Power] + [Paid Player Power] = [Total Player Power]

Equally geared players who have paid boosts but are lacking in player skill, for example, would probably get crushed by a significantly more skilled or geared player without those boosts. A mediocre skilled but well-geared player can ride lots of paid boosts higher, but will still hit that ceiling of highly skilled players, some of whom might occasionally pay for stuff they like. As long as our metrics can measure player skill well enough (and we generally get it right after a few games to calibrate), the matchmaking algorithm usually does a pretty good job of setting up reasonable multiplayer games. This does mean that the upper ceiling on total player power does include paid player power after skill and earnable player power have hit their own upper limits, but this is also only at the very highest skill levels in general.

This is where the idea of "pay to win" tends to break down - there comes a point where players can't actually guarantee a win by paying more, they can only increase their player power. At best, their Total Player Power will increase due to the paid boosts, but they’ll get eventually sorted by the matchmaking system and reach equilibrium for their new Total Player Power level. In the vast majority of games where players can buy power, there's still an upper limit on the power a player can buy or earn. When they hit that limit, then the only recourse is raising their skill level. This is, for example, why nobody can win competitive Magic: The Gathering tournaments by buying the most expensive cards. Even if a player owns every card, they still need the skill to construct a good deck from that card pool and make the right in-game decisions to pilot that deck to victory. While some exceptions exist, this does tend to be the general rule when it comes to selling power. Since one major goal of matchmaking is to reduce the frequency of lopsided games in favor of closer games, our matchmaking and ranking systems are designed to take paid power into account. Our games might not always hit this goal, but it isn’t usually due to malice so much as flaws in our matchmaking and ranking systems.

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[askagamedev]

Every iOS game I play seems to have a high score board filled with fake scores that are impossibly high. What's the deal with that?

Those are real scores. In most popular new mobile games, wealthy players will often compete for leaderboard dominance. Imagine somebody with unlimited funds playing the game and think about how high the scores could possibly be based on that. No expense is spared; these players will spend thousands of dollars for a spot on the leaderboards. It actually happens quite a bit, especially in China.

Typically in any mobile freemium game, you’ve really got two sets of players - whales and the rest. The rest just play normally, but the whales will push a huge amount of money into the game for their leaderboard glory - especially at launch. After the first few weeks, the leadership positions will solidify to the point where it becomes much more difficult to break in, and the whales that play competitively but could not secure a top spot will leave for another new game in hopes of making their mark elsewhere. Those that can usually jockey for position until they move on after getting bored or through attrition.

TLDR: the leaderboards are the “pay to win” part of most mobile games.

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[askagamedev]

Could you give an example of a game that exists or one that you would hypothetically work on that would have microtransactions and not make them seem like its exploiting a person's impatience (i.e the pay 2 win model)?

Here’s the thing about microtransactions - their level of acceptance varies from person to person. Unless the microtransaction doesn’t affect the game at all, what one person considers paying to win might not be for another. I’m not sure it’s possible to create a microtransaction model that is universally accepted. You might take offense that someone can reach the level cap faster than you, someone else might be unhappy that the custom paid skin actually conveys an advantage because that character is harder to see on certain maps in competition, and others still might just be upset that the paid player can buy a weapon that’s stronger than what’s available to the free player. That said, there are definite ways to improve the model.

There was a talk a while back given by one of Valve’s TF2 developers, who was specifically talking about microtransactions for that game, and he brought up a good point - what microtransactions needs more of is positive externalities. What he meant by this is that when you play with someone who has spent money, you should have more fun, whether you are playing for free or not.  Everyone should be pleased that this person bought the item, not just the buyer herself. Conversely, if you play a game and you have less fun because another player has spent money, that's a negative externality. Positive externalities help everyone, because it makes people more willing and happy to pay for the game.

The Pile o’ Gifts from TF2 that’s a great example of this. It’s a paid item that doesn’t net the user anything, but gives a random item to up to 23 other people on the server at the time. This certainly meets the requirements for a positive externality - everybody should be pleased that they got a gift from the generous person who bought the pile o’ gifts. But is it possible to turn this into a means of paying to win?

Another example would be Peter Molyneux’s android game Curiosity. In it, there’s a shared persistent world where there’s an enormous cube built from tiny cubes that disappear when tapped or clicked on. Players can find their own section of the cube and click away. Molyneux, in typical Molyneux fashion, promised that whatever was in the center of the cube was “life-changing”. So people started clicking the cube - 3 million people were all clicking away in December of 2012. There are also microtransactions involved - players could pay for better chisels to help destroy more little cubes at once. The ultimate result of what was in the center was this video, which the ultimate winner (a Scottish teenager named Bryan Henderson) shared with the world. Now… was this pay to win? It’s questionable. I’m pretty sure that the winner wasn’t the one who paid the most. But it is an interesting example of cooperative gameplay with microtransactions mixed in.

It really comes down to how you define “pay to win”. If you look at a game like Hearthstone, there’s a certain point where you can no longer pay to win - when you have all of the cards already, buying more really won’t make a difference. At that point victory is entirely up to the player’s deck construction, deck piloting skills, and the luck of the draw. There’s a very deep skill element in these games - making the right play is paramount. Having a deeper card pool certainly can convey an advantage, but so is being blessed with better strategic thinking skills. At a certain point, the advantage of deep pockets is nullified. So is that “pay to win”? It depends on who you ask. If you ask someone who has earned all of the cards already, probably not. If you ask someone who doesn’t have all of the cards, then the answer is probably yes. But just because you have all of the cards doesn’t mean you’ll keep winning. 

I think the most important takeaway overall is that microtransactions can be a useful tool to make people happier overall, whether they pay or not.  I’ll just leave you with the Valve video on in-game economies. It’s pretty interesting stuff, if you’ve got 40 minutes or so to watch it.