Time spent in relation to how well you play a game is an interesting concept. There are always people all across the spectrum - some become proficient fast, some slow. Even chess has young prodigies that can challenge older “hard-earned” grandmasters. And yet, experience itself is a huge boon even in a game where younger players can quickly catch up to older ones.

As a proponent of skill-based gaming, my stance has always been that your skill should simply be your skill, and time spent shouldn’t affect anything. Granted, time spent will always affect at least the meta-game (the aspects in a gaming environment not under your control, such as your opponents play styles and tendencies), but I’ve mostly only meant the extreme cases where games actually increase your ability to perform better through time-based activities. In an acronym: MMO’s, or massively multiplayer online games.

Although not all MMO’s have this feature, most do and it has become a cliché of the genre. You start out with a skill level of 0 in fighting, you attack and kill a rat, and you gain 1 fighting skill throughout the duration of the fight. Or 10 experience towards your next level (increasing your attributes and combat ability), or perhaps the rat drops an item that you can equip which makes you do more damage to the next rat you face. There are many methods that could be employed, but they all share the same time requirement trait. This is in direct contrast to traditional tournament games such as first person shooters, real-time strategy, or fighting games where you simply enter the match, play the match, and then leave the match with nothing of permanence affecting you in the next match (again, aside from possible meta-game aspects such as your mental state). Given this, these games are usually considered to be much fairer and thus much better competitive games as the only resources are raw knowledge and “skill” (knowing how to play the game and having the ability to do so). Of course, you have to expend a third resource to gain knowledge and skill, and that’s time.

After thinking about how many hours a lot of top tournament players will spend practicing a day in their chosen game, it seems a bit strange to keep my prejudice against the MMO system of skill gain. At the end of the day, what is the difference between a Starcraft player spending 12 hours a day practicing a match-up, versus an MMO player spending 12 hours a day to advance his character? If your character still requires out-of-game skill and knowledge to be played better in the latter system after he is “capped” (you are no longer able to expend time to advance his in-game skills), how is it any different to the former game?

Another dynamic in MMO’s that I believe I touched upon in another article is community status. Much more so than one-match-at-a-time genres, your role in an MMO community plays a huge part, as social aspects are a huge part of persistent world gameplay. One recent example of this is in EVE Online, where the group of players in Goonsquad managed to use their social presence to influence a key member in a huge rival alliance, which ended up with the total collapse of that alliance. Even though Goonsquad was enormously outnumbered, their community and social placement in the game allowed them to overcome a very large threat they may not have been able to deal with on the terms of the normal game rules (i.e. combat). In this example, the time investment leading up to this gain for the players would have been purely meta-gaming related. It had nothing to do with the players’ character skills, they all could have been freshly made and still have carried out this operation. It’s also worth mentioning that “the Goons” as they are known play many games, and have earned such a reputation that merely hearing about them coming to play your game, or on your MMO server, is enough to make some people quit or stay away from that game on that basis alone. Even when they choose to play a game that is based on time-based skill gain, their long-term gained social presence gives them an advantage in the meta-game. Ironically, EVE Online is the prime example in this regard as well: the method in which you train your character is by selecting a skill, and then the game tells you an amount of time until you get better at that skill - this time passes regardless of whether you are online or offline, thus your overall skill is directly related to your character’s age.

“Macroing” is yet another interesting concept the MMO genre brings to the table. This is the act of gaining character advancement in a game without necessarily having to pay attention to the game itself - basically, advancing your character “for free”. The time investment is either much slimmer (i.e. a “semi-attended” macro, where you can do something else and simply check back from time to time), to not having to invest at all (unattended macroing: your character “plays itself”, gaining skill in the process). Macros can come in many forms: from sticking a penny in your keyboard to hold down a key, all the way to a custom program made specifically to play your character with specific settings (also called a bot or script). Whether be it a macro, bot or script there is usually a fairly big time investment for the author to actually create the method employed. After he distributes it, there can still be a time requirement for the people who acquire it to learn how to use it, but it is much less given that they don’t have to actually come up with the concept and create the method by hand. In either case, there is time spent in the process of setting up your character to work on its own (saving you time in the end - spending time to make time). What’s interesting here is that while macroing is often called a form of cheating or exploiting, one cannot deny the fact that the player is using this to his advantage. Essentially, the player is becoming a prodigy - advancing in the game faster than other users. Remember also, even if the macro goes at the same pace (or less) than another user playing “legit”, the player using the macro can spend his time to strengthen his community role which, as discussed above, is certainly one way of becoming more powerful at a game.

This is all relative, since in actual tournaments these things almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed. Of course, in most tournaments we do not have to worry about this - but now that the World of Warcraft Arena has become a tournament game in and of itself, it could be cause for concern that players may used some ill-gotten advantage to strengthen their avatars. Fortunately for that game, however, it’s not a very big deal to “max out” your character to a point in which he would be equal to others in tournament play, so it’s not an issue in the big picture. If a game does come along where the time investment is much higher, and it becomes competition worthy, it will be interesting to see how these cases could be handled. On the other side of the coin, the standardized “match-at-a-time” games are also starting to bring in some time-based concepts to the table: we are starting to see first person shooters where you gain experience, ranks, and access to more varied equipment based on your avatar’s skill or experience.

In the end, I think the bigger question aside from which version of time investment is superior, is what goal is the person asking the question trying to pursue. Even monetary gain can be had via both systems - tournament earnings versus playing letting bots run their characters, earning them items or money that they can sell for real world currency. It’s all relative to each person’s particular goals at the time of asking said question.

inspired from tonight's martial arts class... (figure journal is the best place to put random quotes I come up with? :p)


There is no such thing as perfection. There is merely Right and Wrong. The key to bettering oneself is simply finding the path to Right amidst a sea of Wrongs.

First journal (about time).

So, stuff is really going down in the world, and I must ask myself: will gaming fit into my future? I've really wanted to go to FPS tournaments, but it seems more and more unlikely/unwise.

Actually, let me start over. I've always been a competitive gamer, ever since I had some semblance of maturity. Starting as early as Street Fighter, I just loved to compete and try to get better (sadly, the same train of thought never applied to school). Eventually I did go to tournaments for fighting games, and loved it. However, by the time I was doing this, I had a new, bigger passion: FPS. First Person goddamn Shooter. Starting with doom and exploding with quake, I couldn't get enough and I've been gaming the hardest with FPS ever since netquake. This is all well and fine, except for one nagging fact...

I've never been to an FPS event.

My fondest hobby, my most beloved past-time, and I've never really competed. Sure, I've been in tons of clans and leagues of varying skill, but they can't be anything compared to the main events. It's like the difference between playing a fighter on a console in your living room with friends, and playing it in an arcade with a hundred spectators watching and analyzing your every move against your opponent. Where one false move could cost you the entire tournament and make the crowd forget about you - compared to at home, where the same false move would do nothing more than make you give up the controller to whoever's next in line to play.

So, naturally, I've been planning to fix this problem with the new generation of games.

At first I was thinking Doom 3. And I really should've, because I was one of the better players - and the first-time tourney nervousness I was sure to experience probably wouldn't have made such a big impact in a "small peanuts" game like D3. But, I made up excuses not to go... too expensive, I'd never win... etc, etc. A week later, I'm sitting in my room watching Daler versus Fatal1ty on the most unbalanced map ever created, d3dm2, and they're both playing terribly. Cursing myself, I promised not to make the same mistake again. Except, of course, for the event next year under the same name, with the same exact kind of final. /me sighs, and smacks head against wall

So I really wanted to "put my foot down" with quake4. And it seemed the perfect game to do so for because... well, it looks fun! I hated doom 3 terribly (another excuse to get out of going to the tournaments). But quake4 looks awesome, and has the faster gameplay that I enjoy much more.

But, of course, as I'm planning all this and prepping myself, Nature decides to shake things up with a storm the likes we haven't seen in 13 years. To give you an idea of how much this hurricane will affect me personally, I work for my parents company - which hauls gas. We haul gas out of terminals that get all of their product from the refineries that were shut down. We've never let a station we deliver to run out of gas... but, my dad predicts every single station we're contracted for to go empty by tomorrow night. After I heard that, I realized that this is indeed what would be defined as "serious shit".

Already we can easily see the effects of it here in gas prices, and I don't think they're ever going to go away. Ideally (it's hard to say that), this will be a "wake up call" to the world to let everyone know that "hey - shit is going down, do something or die" - because that's the truth. Unfortunately, it isn't much fun for our generation to have to take the force of this full-on.

The speed of which this changes things is just insane, too. I had a trip planned to go to Rochester this weekend - not too far away, about 4 hours. But definately more than one tank of gas. But... if all the stations are out of gas, and panic sets in, how the hell am I going to get home if I get stuck out there? Pack some red canisters in the back seat?

On top of that, if this gas shortage lasts for long, the trucking industry (which is very fickle, and obviously very gas-based) will just buckle instantly. Which means stores not getting deliveries. Which means panic since this country relies entirely on the ability to "drive to a store and get what you want".

Thinking of all of this, it makes my concerns about a petty thing like computer gaming rather insignificant, but it's still something I would "like to do" (if liking something has any role in my future, that's to be decided). Before, like, last week, I had the mindset that - even though something like this would eventually happen, I'd still get some tourney time in, do something I've always wanted to, and be satisfied. But now, it seems as if I don't have any time left, and am left high and dry before I even get a chance.

So, the real questions are, are my concerns valid? Or are they just more excuses to get out of breaking my FPS-tourney cherry? Or, is it extremely selfish that I'm even considering this as a possibility with the possible emergency at hand?

At least we have a few more weeks before quake 4 to see the situation mature a bit, whether be it for good or ill.


On a random, unrelated note - if you want a good, small book to read, go pick up Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

oh, and I just beat Lumines challenge mode a couple hours ago... woot.