作者：Michael Parker

最近，我和几个好友正在玩《超神英雄》（一款多人在线5v5团队游戏），突然有人爆出以下粗口：

让人震惊的是，这些辱骂言辞出自我们团队中某一成员之口，而不是对手的谩骂，而这些话语直指队伍中的一位好友。

我的朋友并未发表任何见解，他的行为并不恶劣——他只是纯粹地玩游戏，然后因一个简单的失误导致他的角色战亡，从而让对手有机可趁。

我注意到，某些游戏中会出现品行极其恶劣的玩家。并非这类游戏吸引某些愤怒的玩家的参与，而是因为正常人在体验此游戏时会转变为愤怒人群。

那么为何会发生这种情况？我们该如何设计游戏，避免此类事情的发生？

在分析具有重大问题的一些游戏之后，就会发现有些游戏设计模式会催生举止不端的队友。这些游戏呈现出的消极设计模式，能够激发和鼓励恶劣行为的产生，而相应的积极设计模式则可以解决此类问题。

首先，我们看下最简单、最明显，但是可能最无效的方法——移除/减少团队合作。我认为这不是一个解决方案。如果你认为删掉团队合作模式可以改变整个游戏，那么你可能会减少团队受挫的情况，但却也可能移除游戏乐趣的核心部分。这就是所谓的“把孩子同洗澡水一起泼掉”。

团队合作 vs 个人体验

有些游戏更有可能让玩家对其队友感到失望。导致队员之间互相发火的最大因素取决于他们之间的依赖性，以及单个玩家凭借己力所能完成任务的程度。

每款基于团队的多人游戏在规模方面都会略有差异：

团队合作取得的胜利<———————————> 依靠个人能力获胜

《军团要塞2》和《魔兽世界》都属于以团队为主的游戏。《军团要塞2》中的团队紧密结合，其中的医疗兵负责队员的受伤治疗，而队员负责保护。一旦医疗兵死掉，队员们就会迅速丧生。同样在《魔兽世界》的竞技场中，治疗者必须正确治疗团队成员，而队员们必须在正确的时间内控制敌方，保护治疗者。在这些游戏中，团队合作是制胜的关键，如果缺少此项因素，单个玩家也不会有获胜的机会。

（在以团队为主的游戏中，一个有组织的拙劣玩家团队可以打败无组织的高技能玩家团队）。

《反恐精英》和《使命召唤》属于以个人为主的游戏。个人无需队员帮助，可以杀掉整个敌人阵队。只要头部中枪，玩家便会丧生。如果你擅长这类游戏，无论此时你与谁合作，你都可以加入一个服务器，积累个人分数。拥有一个优良的团队的确有益（尤其在激烈竞争时刻，团队合作显然是制胜的关键），但是比起其它基于团队的游戏，个人玩家依然能够靠自己的能力绽放光彩。

（在以个人为主的游戏中，一个无组织的高技能玩家团队可以战胜一个有组织的拙劣玩家团队）。

以个人为主的游戏优势

*玩家可以单靠自己的能力取胜

*人们可以明显看出玩家表现是否优势

*玩家无需朋友一同体验

*玩家可以在任何时候享受游戏

*玩家无需组织团队，或者等候队员们上线

*玩家较少感到失望（你不会那么容易地故意让团队输掉游戏）

以团队为主的游戏优势

*玩家可能需要招募好友，鼓励其他人一同体验游戏

*游戏结束后会有更多的讨论话题

*玩家会觉得团结起来力量大，但团队并非各个部分的简单集合

*玩家趋向于同各种玩法的玩家成为朋友，以此在游戏中互补

*游戏更具深度

*产生亚策略、社区等元素

通常，如果你正在制作一款以个人为主的游戏，那么游戏中较少存在诸如团队成员之间吵架这类问题。然而，游戏设计所面临的挑战是制作出一款以团队为主的游戏机制，同时不会让队员感到失望，所以你应保持团队合作的所有优势，避免糟糕队员的加入破坏了整个游戏体验。

原则1：避免消极强化机制，注重积极强化机制的设计

首先是强化成功 vs 强化失败。如果一个治疗者完全治愈角色的概率为99%，然后治愈失败且导致玩家角色死亡的概率为1%，那么，玩家通常会忽略他那99%的成功率，而对这1%的失败感到愤怒。这就是“消极强化”。即成功是件正常事件，而失败却尤其明显，且会遭到严重惩罚。

比如，消极强化常常发生在《魔兽世界》的袭击事件中（25个玩家一同围攻大boss），如果每个人都能正确掌控自己的技能，那么团队就能取胜。如果有人在错误时刻投掷咒语，或者站在错误的区域，或者未及时按下按钮，那么整个团队都会阵亡，而团队成员会集体围击那位引起失败的玩家。

积极强化指，一些意料中的小失误总会发生，而成功性将会更加明显。比如，《反恐精英》中的玩家在遭遇敌人的围攻时，他会请求队友的帮助。人人都料想他必定死亡，但是如果队友完美地投出一颗手榴弹，消灭了3个敌人，从而使该玩家幸免于难。本来该玩家意料自己会阵亡，但是他的队友却投放手榴弹拯救了他。这就是积极强化。

如果这个手榴弹并未消灭任何人，而玩家角色如预想般死去，该玩家也不会感到失落，但是被成功解救的情况会让他感觉良好。人们更容易记住、谈论成功强化——这些将会保存在玩家的记忆中（“还记得我们做过的伟大事迹吗？”），同时能够吸引玩家再次体验游戏。

原则2：不要完全依赖团队成员

如果团队成员没有任何行动，你就无法前进，那么这会造成玩家的挫败感。比如，《反恐精英》中的某个队员持有炸弹，但他却不愿走到爆破区，或者保持在原地不动，或者向错误方向前进，那么他的这些行为会引发队员的愤怒。

再如，《军团要塞经典版》中的一些关卡设置了某些墙壁，这需要某个职业（比如榴弹兵）炸出一个洞。考虑到职业数量的限制（游戏邦注：比如每个团队只允许存在一个榴弹兵），如果你的团队正好有个榴弹兵，但他并没有投掷手榴弹爆破墙壁，那么整个团队就无法前进，他们就会生气。

游戏还大量依赖某些职业的特定性能，比如，工程师负责修理升降机，间谍负责开门等等。但这无法鼓励职业的多样化和“团队合作”，这样只会给玩家带来更多的挫败感。幸好，《军团要塞2》成功克服了这一点。

解决这种问题的办法是提供替代物。《军团要塞2》的关卡中布满医疗包，所以你不必完全依赖医疗兵。如果你受伤了，而你的医疗兵已牺牲或者拒绝给予治疗，那么你只需拾起医疗包，或者走进能量补给站。你不用100%依靠医疗兵予以治疗。

原则3：提升准确判断队友战略选择的难度

如果队员表现不佳，我们显然可以一目了然，同时我们会对他的行为感到愤怒。比如，如果你处于较低的生命值，而医疗兵却选择治疗生命值已满的角色，最后导致你的丧生（“为什么你要治愈他？你应该先治愈我！”），显然，该医疗兵做法错误，所以玩家很容易对其感到反感。

但是，如果你不清楚哪些是他的正确行动，那么你就更难指出“你做错了”。

处理此事件着实复杂，它需要结合3个元素进行判断：

*深度

*不完全信息

*隐藏个人信息

深度意味着游戏中需存在多个可行的战术选项。如果队员需要面对多种选项，他们就很难估计出正确选项，那么他们更难指出正确的战略并说道：“你应该这样做”。

不完全信息，即你应故意遮掩一些有关游戏状态的信息，那么玩家就无法做出完美的决定（他们必须猜测/评估）。比如，如果你确切了解队友目前的生命值，那你就清楚需补给多少能量，那么玩家可能会精确预测正确的做法应该是怎样。

然而，如果正确的行动依赖于：

*估算某物的距离

*估计敌人的准确性

*猜测敌人计划的行动

那么人人将会得出略微不同的总结。而基于这些总结的战术选项会提高队友正确指出“这是个错误的选择”的难度。

隐藏个人信息，即每个玩家都具有团队所不知的个人信息。比如，如果你不知道队友的生命值，你就不能责备其掩藏自己的生命值。如果你不知道他使用了多少子弹，那你就不能责备其重装子弹，如果你不知道他的法术是否可行，那你就不能责备其未使用法术。

原则4：糟糕的队友比没有队友更具优势

此原则十分明显，但是许多游戏并未遵循此原则。无论此队员的行为多么糟糕，团队中最好不要一个队员也没有。如果一个糟糕的队员比没有队员对整个团队的破坏性更大，那么显然，玩家总会对其不满。

比如，团队共享的资源允许队友的浪费行为吗？队员可以阻碍你的进程吗？他们会导致你直接或间接受伤吗？

以下是拥有糟糕队员比没有队友更劣势的例子：

*系统中，通过杀掉你的队友，对手可以获取优势（比如，金币、经验值）

*系统内资源有限，队友可以拒绝你使用，或者不恰当的使用（比如，在他们只失去1个生命值时，你却使用+100生命值的医疗包）

*系统中，队友之间需共享资源（较小团队规模=个人可以获取更多资源）

*系统中，任意队员都可能误伤你（比如误向队友开火）

*系统中，队友可以扭转目标的发展，以错误的方式发展目标，或者阻止它的发展等等

*系统中，队友会让团队失去目标（比如，击中人质、本该保护的炸弹，或者游戏中存在“强化剂”——队友的死亡会消耗强化剂，同时你也会失败）

*系统要求队友“排队”复活——队友的阵亡意味着你必须等待更长的时间准备复活。

总结

如果你正在制作一款基于团队的多人游戏，以下设计有助于避免队友受挫的情况：

1.避免消极强化，在设计中加入积极强化因素。让某些失败情况成为普遍现象，突出成功性的稀有性。

2.不要完全依赖队友。队友再愚蠢，你也可以在游戏中继续前进。

3.提高判断队友战略选择的难度。隐藏玩家的个人信息，提供多种选项，让他们无法正确估计某些事件。

4.确保糟糕的队友比没有队友更具优势。如果某个愚笨的队友死掉，不要让敌方因此获得奖励，确保队友不会浪费团队的所有资源。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Designing Multiplayer Team-based Mechanics without adding Frustration

by Michael Parker

Introduction

I was recently playing a game of Heroes of Newerth (an online multiplayer 5v5 team game) with a few friends, and all of a sudden the following chat appeared:

What might surprise you (if you haven’t played this game), is that this abuse came from one of our teammates, rather than the opponent, and was directed at one of my friends.

My friend had not spoken a word, he was not behaving badly – he was simply playing the game, and he made a simple mistake which led to his character dying in game, giving the opponent the advantage.

What I have noticed is that certain games bring out the worst in people. It’s not that angry people are attracted to this type of game, it’s that normal people are turned into angry people by playing this game.

So why is this? How can we design games to prevent this?

After examining the games with the biggest issues, certain patterns in the game design have emerged – there are some running themes with badly behaved teammates. These games share negative design patterns, which provoke and encourage bad behaviour, and can be solved with corresponding positive design patterns.

Firstly, lets look at the easiest, most obvious, and yet in some ways most useless pattern – removing / reducing teamwork. I consider this a non-solution. If you are changing your game to remove teamwork, you will get less teammate frustration, but are also removing a core part of what makes team-based games fun. Also known as “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

Teamwork vs Individuality

Some games are more at risk of teammate frustration than others. The biggest factor in whether teammates will get annoyed at each other is how reliant on their teammates players are, and therefore how much a player can accomplish on his own.

Every team-based multiplayer game sits somewhere different on the scale:

Teamwork wins <———————————> Individual skill wins

Team-focused games include Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft arena. TF2 teams are closely tied together, with a medic healing their teammates, and their teammates protecting the medic. Once the medic dies, their teammates quickly fall. Similarly in World of Warcraft arena, healers must heal correctly, teammates must control the opponents at the right time and protect their healer. Teamwork is absolutely essential to success and without it individual players have no chance.

In Team-focused games, an organised team of unskilled players can beat a disorganised team of skilled players

Individual-focused games include Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. One person can kill the entire enemy team, without any support from his teammates. One good bullet to the head can kill each player. If you’re good at these games, you can join a server and get a great personal score, no matter who you’re playing with. Having a good team obviously helps (and at the highly competitive end, teamwork can become essential to win), but compared to other team-based games, individuals can really shine on their own.

In Individual-focused games, a disorganised team of skilled players will beat an organised team of unskilled players

There are advantages to both design directions:

Individual-focused games – Advantages:

Players can win the game all on their own

Its more obvious who is good and bad at the game

Players don’t need any friends to play

Players can play whenever they want, drop in / drop out

Players don’t need to group up, form teams or wait for teammates to come online

Less opportunity for griefing (you can’t make your team lose deliberately so easily)

Team-focused games – Advantages:

Players are likely to recruit friends, encourage others to play with them

More talking points after the game

Players can feel like part of something bigger / teams become more than simply the sum of their parts

Players more likely to develop social relationships with each other / playstyles of players can complement each other
More depth

Meta-game, community, etc

Generally, if you are making an individual-focused game, you’ll have less problems with teammates shouting at each other. However, the design challenge is creating and keeping team-focused mechanics without introducing teammate frustration, so you keep all the benefits of teamwork without bad teammates ruining your gameplay experience.

Rule #1: Avoid Negative-spike mechanics, and design in Positive-spike

The first concept is spiking success vs spiking failure. If a healer is healing perfectly 99% of the time, then 1% of the time he fails and a player dies, that player will typically ignore his healer 99% of the time, and get angry 1% of the time. This is what I call a “negative-spike”. Success is normal, failure stands out and is heavily punished.

For example, negative spike occurs often in World of Warcraft raiding (25 players defeating a large boss together), where the team succeeds simply if everyone does their job reliably. If someone casts the wrong spell, or stands in the wrong place, or fails to press a button in time, everyone dies, and that failing player gets shouted at.

Positive-spike is when small failures occur all the time and are expected, so success stands out. For example a player is surrounded by enemies in Counter-strike, he’s scared and he calls for a teammate to help. Everyone expects him to die but his teammate throws a perfectly placed frag grenade – it kills 3 enemies and the player survives. He was expecting to die, and yet his teammate (surprisingly) saved him with an excellent grenade throw. This is a spiking sucess.

If the grenade didn’t kill anyone and the player died as expected, he wouldn’t have been upset, but yet the success was a spike and that feels good. Success spikes are more easily remembered, talked about, and laughed about – those are the memories which stay with players (“Remember that awesome thing we did?”) and bring them back to your game again and again.

Rule #2: Remove any 100% reliances on teammates

If you cannot progress until your teammate does something, this leads to frustration. For example, a teammate in Counter-Strike has the bomb but he doesn’t go to the bombsite, or he stays at spawn or goes the wrong way, this will cause anger in his teamates.

Another example is Team Fortress Classic, which had certain walls in some levels which required a certain class (demoman) to blast a hole through. In combination with server-based class limits (e.g. only 1 demoman allowed per team), if you have a demoman on your team and he does not blast through, your team cannot progress and will get angry.

There were even some community-made maps which placed heavy reliance on other classes performing certain actions, e.g. an Engineer to fix an elevator, a Spy to open a door, etc. This is a really bad way to encourage class diversity and “teamwork”, and leaves the door wide open for frustration. Fortunately the feature was not carried over into Team Fortress 2.

A way to overcome this problem is to provide alternatives. Team Fortress 2 has health packs dotted around the levels so you aren’t completely reliant on a medic. If you get hurt and your medic dies or refuses to heal you, you can simply pick up a health pack or go to a resupply station. You aren’t 100% reliant on the medic for healing.

Rule #3: Make it hard to correctly judge teammates tactical choices (back-seat playing)

If a teammate is doing something wrong, and it’s obvious, it’s easy to get annoyed at him. For example, if you are on low health, and the medic instead heals someone that is already full health, which causes you to die (“Why are you healing him? You should be healing me!”) it is obvious he is doing it wrong, so it is easy to be annoyed.

On the other hand, if you have no idea what his correct action is, it is much harder to point and say “you’re doing it wrong”.

Fixing this is actually quite complex, and requires 3 components:

Depth

Imperfect information

Hidden personal information

Depth means multiple viable tactical options. If teammates have lots of choices, and it’s difficult to calculate the correct choice, then it’s much harder to point to the exact strategy and say “You should be doing that”. Without depth there is only one sensible thing to be doing, and doing anything else gets shouted at.

Imperfect information is where you deliberately obscure some game state information from all players so they cannot make perfect decisions (they must guess / estimate). For example, if you know exactly how much health a teammate has, and you know exactly how much you can heal, it is possible to calculate (and later argue) precisely what the correct course of action is (this is bad).

Alternatively, if the correct choice of action depends on e.g.:

Estimating how far away something is

Estimating how accurate your enemies are

Guessing what your enemies are planning to do

then everyone will come to slightly different conclusions. Any tactical choice based on those conclusions is much harder for teammates to say definitively “this was the wrong choice”.

Make it impossible to analyse and calculate what the correct course of action is, by making it impossible to perfectly identify the situation.

Hidden personal information is where each player has personal information that their team is not aware of. For example, if you don’t know how much health your teammate has, you can’t blame him for hiding on full health. If you don’t know how many bullets he has left, you can’t blame him for reloading. If you don’t know whether his spells are available or not, you can’t blame him for not using them.

By making knowledge private you prevent players from disecting their teammates actions.

Rule #4: Bad Teammates should ALWAYS be Better Than Nothing

This rule sounds obvious, and yet so many games fail to adhere to it. Teams should never be better off without a player, no matter how bad he is. If a bad player is more damaging to the team than no player at all, then obviously players will get annoyed at him.

For example, are there shared team resources which teammates can squander? Can teammates get in your way? Can they cause you harm directly or indirectly?

Some examples where bad teammates can be worse than no teammates at all:

Any system whereby the opponent gains power from killing your teammate (e.g. money, experience)

Any system which has limited resources which teammates can deny you use of, or use inappropriately (for example using a +100 hp health kit, when they are only missing 1hp)

Any system where resources are shared out amongst teammates (smaller team size = you personally get more resources)

Any system where teammates can hurt you  (for example friendly-fire)

Any system where teammates can reverse progress on an objective, take an objective the wrong way (for example a flag), get it stuck somewhere, etc.

Any system where teammates can fail team objectives (for example shooting hostages, shooting a bomb you’re supposed to protect, or even games where there is a “reinforcement count” – teammates dying will use up the reinforcements and you will lose)

Any system which involves a respawn “queue” – teammates dying mean you must wait longer to respawn.

There are plenty of guilty mechanics. If you are considering including the design for a mechanic like this, think “Is it possible to achieve the same gameplay result without punishing the whole team for 1 player’s mistake?”

Summary

If you are designing a multiplayer team-based game, here’s your checklist to avoid teammates getting frustrated:

1.Avoid negative spike, design in postive spike. Make certain failures common and certain successes rare and therefore celebrated.

2.Remove any complete reliance on teammates. It must be possible to progress even if your teammates are really stupid.

3.Make it hard to judge teammates tactical choices. Give players hidden personal information, give them lots of options, and force them to estimate factors which cannot be known accurately.

4.Make sure a bad teammate is better than no teammate at all. Don’t give bonuses to the enemy team if an idiot teammate dies, and make sure teammates can’t waste all the teams resources.(source:gamasutra)