Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Calling the Shots: Part 1 - Taking Aim for Victory


I recently wrote about how shotcalling is difficult, and often can directly inhibit your mechanical skill.  However, having one or two players on a team dedicated to directing the show can make the path to victory much more clear.  Although I make no promises on the consistency of releases, I'm going to be doing a series of blogs on what it takes to be a good shotcaller.

The first thing a good shotcaller needs is the ability to determine win conditions.  You may think, "Well, if I'm playing a game of Team Slayer in Halo, my win condition is to get 50 points.  That was easy."

No, shut up, you're wrong.  The win condition in Slayer is not "Reach 50 points."  That's a game-ending condition, but it is not required for victory.  In order to win a game of Deathmatch in any first person shooter...you simply have to have less deaths than your opponent.

The first condition of victory in a game of Slayer is to get a lead.  We'll take Halo 3's Pit Slayer for example.  Let's say you get the initial set of rockets, but somehow your opponent ends up with 2 Snipers.  You're up 6-3 after the initial battles settle.  At this point, your win condition is no longer to acquire any kills.  It's to avoid deaths.  You don't need a single other kill in order to win the match.  And, due to Pit's hallway-style map design, and your opponent having 2 Snipers, you shouldn't even be leaving your side of the map for the time being.  Anyone on your team getting sniped is one strain further on your lead.

When it's time for the rockets to respawn, your victory condition is to prevent the enemy from getting those rockets.  Should they acquire them, they'll have an asymmetrical weapon advantage (2-3 Snipers + rockets to rockets+1 Sniper at best)...at which point they can press their advantage and whittle away at your lead, and your victory condition changes to "Stop the bleeding." or "Clear our side of the map and stall for next rockets."

In a King of the Hill match, if you are trailing by 10 points as the hill is 20 seconds away from moving...your victory condition should not even include "Milk the current hill." but rather "Set up for the final hill."  If you get 45 seconds of the final hill uncontested, your opponents no longer have any route to victory, even if they milked the 20 seconds of the previous hill, so establishing full control of the final hill in those 20 seconds while you have a 4v3 offers a higher-% chance of victory than attempting to milk yourself to close the gap.

Now that I've given a few examples of how victory conditions are dynamic, rather than static, let's focus on how you determine what your current victory conditions are.

The first criterion is obvious: Do we have the advantage?

If you have an advantage, you don't need to make risky plays.  Figure out the safest way to press it and do so.  In most cases this is to continue doing what you were doing before.  In League of Legends, this usually means "DO NOT GO FOR BARON." though that can change depending on team composition and current state of vision control.  In a competitive shooter, an 'advantage' doesn't necessarily mean a score lead; numbers advantages in teammates alive are just as important as the scoreboard.  You don't want to try pushing up 2v4, as letting 4 members of the enemy team onto your side can eventually lead to being trapped in your spawn and losing any score lead you may have had.

Sometimes that first criterion can be hazy.  So you may need to parse other information to determine what's important.  Ask yourself, what is the most important task at hand? (Focus: Immediate impact.)

If you're in the above situation of being 2v4, your pressing task is likely to secure a safe spawn for your teammates and push back out.

In League of Legends, this depends almost entirely on team composition.  If your team has Jayce, Lucian, and Nidalee...you don't really want to fight the enemy team around Baron or even Dragon.  The most important task is to keep your enemies huddled around a tower so your team can siege and poke them down.  Generally, these towers are the ones in middle and bottom lane (you want to keep your enemies as far away from Baron as possible, in case anything bad happens with your siege...and be close to Dragon to take an easier objective once you've poked them down beyond safe engage range.)...but if your composition has a lot of champions with good dueling potential, you want to stay split up across the lanes in order to set up those duels, or force your opponents to give up side lane towers for free.

Along the vein of the previous criterion, you also want to ask: What is the safest play?

In order to answer this, you have to know the current status and limitations of your team (which, will be the subject of a future article...eventually...).  Making risky plays is not a path to victory.  In poker, you don't need to bet all your chips when you've got the most at the table.

The previous two questions go along with an adage that is oft repeated by Tasteless and Artosis (and other casters) when casting StarCraft 2... "When you're ahead, get further ahead."  But if you're behind, your win conditions are different.  You have to find a way to get ahead.

Ask yourself, what can we take from them without giving up something bigger?

Sometimes this may involve sneaking a Baron while you lose an inner tower.  Sometimes it may mean killing an inhibitor in bottom lane while giving up a Baron.  Gambit Gaming are notorious for baiting their top laner to die to a jungle gank while they immediately pounce onto the Dragon for an easy objective pick-up.

In the latter days of Halo 3's run on the MLG circuit, on Construct Slayer, teams began retaking top control on Construct by lifting 3-4 people at a time up the purple lifts.  They'd give up 2 kills to a team with the score lead, but gain map control as a result, and begin to regain the lead.

On the flip side, the enemy team could be asking, what can we do to keep our opponents from retaliating?

Back on Halo 3...GhostAyame had an excellent strategy for Narrows CTF.  Whoever had the sniper on his team was told to sit in the pocket of top middle and watch the lift-side spawns as a flag was taken.  Sure enough, players would spawn there...but Ghost would tell his teammate, "Don't kill them."  Wait, what?  You don't want to kill the guys so you can run a flag?  Nope, just shoot them in the body.

He would tell them to do this so they wouldn't be able to go anywhere -- after all, they're one shot from death...they can't fight.  But, because they're not leaving lift side, their other dead teammates will continue to respawn there, unable to contest a flag run.  Had a player been killed at lift, they would've spawned in positions to better contest the flag.  So, while the metric of victory in Narrows CTF is "who scored more flags" the condition GhostAyame utilized was "Keep the sheep in their pin."

An important question to ask to set up the previous four, what is my opponent's next likely play?

While this can lead to several layers of Yomi (reading your opponent) and predictions of predictions and reactions based off that, generally you should know what your opponent's short-term goals are.  If you can hammer that down, you then ask any of the following questions:


  1. Can I beat them at that play?
  2. If not, can I stall them out of making the play?
  3. If not, what can I do to trade value of the play?  (i.e., can I take something of equal value?)


In some cases in League of Legends, a trailing team can completely out-position a team with the lead and ultimately end up turning the tables.  A great example of this is the recent game between Alliance and Fnatic, where after posturing over a Dragon, Alliance forced Fnatic into their bottom jungle while a few other members of Alliance just pushed the mid lane.  Fnatic lost one member of the team while their two melee members stayed to defend mid lane and their two ranged members went to bot lane to try to base race Alliance.

With no one ranged left to defend the base, Fnatic's two living melee members had to sit idly by and watch as Alliance pushed the base 5v2...which was much faster than the two other members of Fnatic pushed.  As the mid inhibitor turret fell, Alliance killed yet another member of Fnatic and put Fnatic into a situation where they would've absolutely had to have both ranged players recall in order to defend, but the call was made for Rekkles to stay bot and keep pushing to answer back for an inhibitor...at which point Alliance just pushed down the Nexus instead and won the game, despite trailing for the majority of the game up to that point.

Fnatic had skipped the important second question above, "Can I stall them" -- because had their shotcaller asked the question they would've noticed "We only have melee champions defending, which means we have no waveclear.  We can't stop their push." or, possibly, they did ask the question and made an equally poor call of thinking that they could trade the value of the play by taking an inhibitor of their own with less people pushing than what Alliance had.

The final question to ask is "Can we close the game out now?"

The question isn't always relevant (CoD gametypes like Blitz without a score limit don't allow it), but in most cases it should be considered any time you're deciding on a play, even if the answer is No.  If there's ever the ability to close the game out, rather than let it continue to drag on, it's better to do so to prevent leaving any room for a comeback or a throw on your own part.

Even if you're attempting to close the game out, you should re-ask yourself the question several times in the process in order to avoid putting yourself or your team in the position to overcommit to doing so and end up losing your foothold or the game as a result.

To recap the questions that help you determine victory conditions all in one place:

  • Do we have the advantage?
  • what is the most important task at hand?
  • What is the safest play?
  • What can we take from them without giving up something bigger?
  • What can we do to keep our opponents from retaliating?
  • what is my opponent's next likely play?
  • Can I beat them at that play?
  • If not, can I stall them out of making the play?
  • If not, what can I do to trade value of the play?  (i.e., can I take something of equal value?)
  • Can we close the game out now?


The most important thing to stress regarding victory conditions is that, despite what single player games may lead you to believe, your victory condition is not the task that brings your current mission to its end.  Victory conditions are a series of decisions that lead to advantages accrued, and decisions on how to press those advantages without giving up things of equal or greater value to your opponent.  Contrariwise, when trailing, your victory conditions are how to reobtain the lead you lost or at least close the gap to set up for a pass later on.

Audley Enough, you'll find that keeping a level head and weighing the options for how to press your lead with these questions will increase the amount of times you keep a lead secure and by extension, win games.  That's all for Victory Conditions; I'm unsure when the next part of the series will come, or which facet of the skill gem knokwn as shotcalling I will cover, but rest assured, it will come some day.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Emergence: Gaming the System, or Glitches: A Slippery Slope


With the recent announcement of the Halo: Master Chief Collection and also Smash 4 looming on the horizon, there's a familiar subject bubbling near the surface of every competitive player's mind: button glitches.

In Halo, we know BxR, BxB, RRX, et cetera.  In Smash, L-canceling and Wavedashing were big deals.  (I know technically wavedashing was not a result of a glitch, but rather a physics exploit for how the game handled aerial movement... That argument is not quite relevant for the points I intend to make.)

While each of these mechanics were great for displaying a skill disparity between players, none of them were intended by the game's design and emerged as a result of abusing holes in the game engine.

So a big question comes forth, are button glitches a bad thing?

Personally, I support the removal of unintended button glitches in subsequent titles (or through patches of the current title) when they are found.  You're probably thinking, "wtf this Audley guy's an idiot then" -- but wait.  I wholly support methods to reduce/remove recovery animations through INTENDED gameplay mechanics.

Putting the ability to trim recovery animations in the hands of a player is one of the best ways a developer can allow players to separate themselves in terms of skill.

The BXB and BXR in Halo 2 were great examples of this in action, though they were originally unintended.  Reload, when used, always took over priority of any current action; when used after a melee had connected, it erased the recovery frames.  Firing or Meleeing again would interrupt a reload animation, nullifying the reload and allowing players to chain together multiple hits.  It was a great way for increasing the interactivity of melee range between players and enabling players down in health to out-skill their opponents to kill them...

But the problem was that it was neither intentional nor intuitive (primarily due to players not being able to see much of their own animations in first person view).  It was a glitch.  A similar instance occurred early in H4's lifespan with "Superman" grenade throws, where sprinting during the wind-up animation of a grenade throw would cancel the wind-up and force the physics engine to calculate the grenade's trajectory differently (and therefore throw it much faster/farther due to the faster animation).  Again, this was an unintended glitch and was quickly patched out of the game.

If BXB or BXR were to return in a future Halo title, it could be made clear through better HUD animations that the recovery frames are being dropped or sped along when a player attempts to reload during a melee attack...or, alternatively, attempting to Reload during a Melee attack with certain weapons could eject the clip and have the player quickly retract their arms back to them, enabling them to either complete the reload animation or begin a new melee once the arms have retracted, with the necessary frames ending up as less than a standard double-melee animation, with a drawback of the player now having no ammunition in their gun (this option would remove the existence of BxR in exchange for making BxB an intentional, intuitive part of the game, with a drawback designed into the game for the faster animations.)

In the case of RRx (and RRXYYRRX) -- such a button combo doesn't belong in the game; however, I've spoken in a previous blog about a method using a bloom-like mechanic (without the randomness of Bloom) in order to allow players to choose their own gun cadence...  I'll paste it here so you don't have to go hunting...

"This implementation of randomness is completely unnecessary, as it only serves to limit the individual's capability for outplaying, rather than to facilitate the potentially intended goal of assisting less skilled players in scoring kills.  If the designers wished to include a cadence to assist newer players, the "bloom" should've been replaced by a sort of on-board aim assistance for the gun.  As the rate of fire increases, the computer's "processing speed" decreases, reducing the aim assistance and bullet magnetism of the gun and making the bullet actually fire more accurately in regards to the player's reticule.  In the case of high levels of player skill, the players can shoot at the max rate of fire without being punished for their level of skill.  In the case of lower levels of player skills, players can fire at cadence with moderate accuracy and still be able to score kills in a consistent number of shots." - Fighting Chance: Randomness in Competitive Gaming (and Sports)

The above suggestion would allow players to fire at their own rate without the requirement of unnecessary button combos, and leave gun battles determined by how well a player aims, rather than how well he pushes additional buttons.  So once again, players still have a window through which the brighter talent can shine, but without the secret to doing so being buried in word of mouth and internet tips sites; it's clear through playing the game.

Although it's not a game I mentioned in my opening, DotA also has a mechanic that was unintended design-wise, but as a result of the engine the original game used, played a huge part in the shaping of the competitive scene and global balance of the game.  I'm speaking, of course, of denying.  If you talk to a serious DotA player about denying, they'll likely praise its existence.  I mean, you can keep melee characters from getting gold or experience as easily and it's very clear how powerful the rammifications of denying are.  Heck, you can even keep your opponents from getting full credit for killing a tower.

But there's a problem: The core gameplay goal in Defense of the Ancients is to work with your army to kill the opposing army's base.  Why the fuck are you killing your own units?  It's wholly unintuitive emergent gameplay.  League of Legends took the polar opposite approach and left lane dominance entirely in the hands of champion interaction, which mostly leads to players reaching their necessary items much quicker, but reducing the ability for a player to stop another from reaching their items unless you are just leaps and bounds better than the opposing player, or focusing on shutting them down hard (or more recently, lane swapping 2v1 to avoid them being able to do anything in that lane.)  Neither of these are ideal solutions.

In DotA's case, there's room for skill disparity, but poor clarity in design.  In LoL's case, there's clarity in design, but less room for skill disparity.  Infinite Crisis approaches a middle ground for this.  Killing an enemy minion gives you the full reward for its death, straight to your character.  However, if a minion dies without being killed by a champion, it drops "credits" onto the map which can either be picked up by a player on the opposite team, or "stomped" by a player on that minion's team.  Stomping credits denies the gold gain from the minion to the other team.  While it removes the experience denial, it increases interactivity of the lanes.  In lower skill games where players aren't landing last hits, they can still acquire gold (making the game less punitive for new players).  In games where players are both very skilled at last hitting, however, it still leans toward League of Legends' methods in that there's little room for the better player to come out ahead.  It does, however, allow melee characters who aren't being zoned to punish ranged characters that miss their last-hits more easily.

So what's the perfect solution to denying?  Believe it or not, I don't have an answer to that.  I think Infinite Crisis is a good general direction, but more sweeping changes to the balance between melee and ranged champions through core gameplay systems would be required for a perfect adaptation; that's a discussion for another time.  The point here is: Intuitive mechanics go a long way for the health of your game, even at the cost of skill differentiation.

The Super Smash Brothers franchise recently saw a huge revival in its competitive scene after Super Smash Brothers Brawl removed some key techniques the top players relied upon to dominate the scene.

Wavedashing is the most prominent of these.  Wavedashing, in simple terms, is air-dodging toward the ground immediately after jumping so you slide along the ground.  While Wavedashing, a player is still treated as "standing" and not actually dashing, so they are essentially in a neutral state, and still able to perform any ground move.  Players could wavedash and shield, sidestep, or use their standing grabs/smashes while quickly sliding toward an opponent, or even play edgehogging mindgames by facing away from a ledge and wavedash backwards to grab the ledge as an opponent tried to recover.

While wavedashing was not technically a glitch in the game, but rather a physics exploit (much like skiing in the Tribes series, which became an intentional, core part of the design in future Tribes titles).  Because of the freedom Wavedashing gave players, however, Nintendo elected to remove it from the game going into Brawl.

Nintendo took a very heavy-handed approach to their method of removing the mechanic from the game.  In Melee, air-dodge direction was determined by the analog stick when the air dodge was pressed.  In Brawl, Nintendo changed it to be based on physics; the character's air dodge is based off their momentum.  Additionally, characters' traction (determines how far they will slide) upon landing was also changed to clean up the movement exploits.

Rather than outright removing the option from the game, Nintendo could've elected to shift it into an intentional one -- leaving the stick-related air dodge direction (and ability to slide once colliding with the ground) and simply name it "Sliding," introducing "Sliding" as a character state where the game would not view the wavedashing character as "standing."  From here, the moves considered too exploitive during a Wavedash could be disabled, while others remain enabled (could leave backwards-sliding enabled for edgehogging mind games).  While I'm not versed enough in Smash to know exactly what the biggest culprits are, it just seems that making waved-err-Sliding an intentional part of the game (much the way Dynamix handled Skiing in Tribes) would go a long way into appeasing the competitive crowd while bringing in some intentional balance control into how the mechanic affects play in both casual and competitive levels.

As a competitive gamer, I can always appreciate when a gameplay mechanic or a spell in a game offers players the ability to show how they are better than an opponent through their utilization of the mechanical skill or their decision making to utilize the mechanic rather than a less optimal one at the time...but from a design perspective, the goals of said mechanics need to be both clear and intentional.

As an example of another mechanic that bothers me: In League of Legends, characters like Shen, Gragas, Sejuani, and Alistar can flash during the animations of their E, E, Q, and Q respectively, and have the effects of the spell take place at the location to which they flashed, rather than where the spell was cast.  As a competitor, that's fantastic.  As a player, it opens up the ability to surprise the opposition.  As a designer, it's bad gameplay.  The player can intentionally (or accidentally) miss an ability, but still get the effects for it by recovering with their flash, in a method that is neither predictable nor readable by their opponent.  It's unintuitive and it doesn't allow counterplay (because flash is instant, giving no chance for the players to flash-dodge the ability after the user has flashed).

Audley Enough, Riot had a similar problem with Thresh's Q (Death Sentence) allowing a player to flash during the wind-up frames and fire the hook from the new location.  To me, this one makes more sense than the former.  In the latter case, you're still gambling with your flash.  You're merely changing the ORIGIN of the skillshot, rather than outright changing the impact zone.  Players may still dodge as usual, and have time to react with counterplay options such as built-in character dashes, their own flash, or even the S key to stop in place and dodge a leading hook.

The above examples violate both consistency and clarity of design.  It's not consistent which skills can be flashed during, nor is it clear when a player is or can flash during their ability, and although their inclusion seems to be the result of bugs, Riot has made no steps to add clarity or consistency with other spells (Why can't Malphite flash during Unstoppable Force?) nor to clean up the bugs that allow those abilities the freedom to "miss" and still get their effects through the use of a summoner spell.

So if you're one of the players excited about the announcement that engine-related button glitches like BXB and BXR and RRX are returning in Halo 2's Master Chief Collection incarnation, and as a result begging 343 to put those same button glitches into Halo 5, stop for a second and think, "How can these mechanics, which were technically bugs in the past, be made intentional so that even Little Dimmy Timmy down the lane can utilize them?"

While competitive merit is important, you must also keep in mind that Clarity of Purpose and Consistency in Design go a long way in improving the new user experience, and more players playing your game is even better for longevity than a few really good players still playing it.  That said, it's never a bad idea to try to explore the middle ground first in how to take what makes a mechanic good for competitive play and tweak it to make it understandable for players who are still learning the game.

Audley out.  No catch phrase this time.