Sharpening models in modern games
Each game designer is concerned with two questions: how to keep the players and how to profit from their games? Both topics are very large, many articles are devoted to them, and, I’m not afraid of this word, works. Here we will touch on one practical tool aimed at both maintaining user interest and monetizing the game. Today we look at the popular mechanics of sharpening in modern and past games.
Must immediately make a reservation. Despite the fact that sharpening is largely focused on the monetization of the project, I will consider it primarily as the mechanics of creating long-term goals for the player and withdrawal of surplus game currency. Yes, readers will forgive me, but this is due to the fact that, as a game designer, I think that the main thing is to make a high-quality product that will leave a mark on people's hearts. The product itself, in my subjective opinion, is primary: it is the retention of the player that should be the first goal of the game designer, since without solving the task of ensuring high retention , it’s premature to talk about monetization. Nevertheless, I will not forget the contribution of sharpening in the project’s proceeds and I will say a little about that.
Let's start with the definition - what is “sharpening”? The term is derived from the English word grind or grinding - grinding, grinding. This game mechanics, which combines a systematic, gradual, extended in time, the increase in the characteristics of different objects, whether they are characters, objects, or any individual skills of the characters. The main feature of sharpening is that it occurs rather slowly, and the increase in power turns out to be close to linear, with an exponential or power increase in the cost of obtaining it.
')
Sharpening came to us from Asia, where beautiful Chinese farmers, who are earning money for days in World of Warcraft, in order to sell them to Europeans through pirated websites, by their behavior suggested to game developers how to create interesting game mechanics for them. However, sharpening appeared long before WoW.
Lineage was one of the first games where sharpening turned into an important part of the gameplay. And now, modern Korean and Chinese MMORPGs almost never do without this remarkable mechanics.
Let us remember the recent past and see where the sharpening began, what forms it took and how it came to its modern appearance.
Why do we, in principle, introduce sharpening in games? First of all, game designers say about the withdrawal of excess money from the gaming economy . We call it Money sink. In other words, this is the creation of another channel of spending, which accounts for a significant part of the gameplay. The involvement in this game is highly dependent on the game project itself. In many games, sharpening accounts for a very significant share of the profits. Up to 30% of all monetization in top AAA-class projects is carried out by selling consumables, stabilizers, or other items involved in this mechanics. There are even games where sharpening brings almost 100% of the income.
But the key task that grind performs is to increase Retention . Since this mechanic requires a player to have a sufficiently large time investment to earn resources, money, or other benefits in the game, it rather well raises the possibilities of the game to retain the audience. She is actively used by the so-called Careerists - one of the 4 groups of players in the methodology of Richard Bartle .
And finally, sharpening is a very cheap way to create High-end content , that is, some kind of activity for the player, to which he will switch, passing the basic, interesting levels, on which there was a wide variety of new events and so-called wow effects.
Consider one of the first models of sharpening, which was formed and came to us from the Asian games. If we recall games like Lineage, then there were certain scrolls added to the subject, which improved (honed) them with a certain probability. In the future, this idea was transformed into the addition of entities. When we add two entities, for example, two objects, a staff of 1000 truths and another staff of 1000 truths, then in case of a successful unification, we get a staff of 1000 truths plus one, that is, an object sharpened to a certain level. Its characteristics exceed some of the characteristics of the original staff. We could combine two such staffs + 1, get a staff + 2, then combine two items with a sharpener of +2, and get a staff + 3, and so on. Geometric progression is obtained.
This model coped well with the task of creating high-end content. But the developers felt that the players did not suffer enough, spending a lot of time on knocking out staffs. Therefore, the Korean MMORGP game designers have added the probability of failure to the geometric growth. And every time when a player tries to improve his object knocked out by great efforts, there is a small chance that everything will break. And it grows with sharpening the subject. The most evil developers take away everything from the player, or give him some dust or debris. Kinder developers make one item break, and the original one that we have sharpened remains, and we need to look again for some kind of reagent or a new item. This option causes less negative players. An example of the various modifications of the addition model of entities can serve as the classic Chinese and Korean MMO.
When sharpening just started to appear, in most cases it did not suggest monetization. And only then it began to add to the game, not only for content and balancing the economy, but also for the sale of certain consumables. For a long time, the sharpening process brought players out of themselves, because things broke, they had to be mined again. But game designers did not stop there. They wanted the players to have more fun, but they continued to play the game for a long time. Therefore, the developers went further and made a model with intermediate resources. One example of a modification of this model is Perfect World.
The essence of the approach is as follows. We are pouring in a certain thing not exactly the same copy of this thing, but a certain amount of resources - the dust of time, the flask of 1000 truths, the blood of the demons of the netherworld - whatever. And the more we want to pump it, the higher the level of sharpening, the more these resources we need to infuse. What is so good about it? These resources are often given for the destruction of similar things. Suppose there are 20 crossbows, swords, or other objects cluttering up our inventory. We disassemble it for dust, and we add this dust to the thing we consider valuable, which we want to pump. This allows you to slightly reduce the negative. People independently, with their own hands, in their own free will destroy things in their inventory, and the resulting resources are used for good. That is, now things are not broken by evil developers, but by the players themselves. This slightly reduced the negative compared with the previous model.
By the way, I tell about different models of sharpening at my lectures at VSBI . Well, a lot of other things about game design and game logic. In general, game development is an endless field for lectures and articles. And here I want to share my experience and learn about someone else. But let's continue about sharpening.
In this model, game designers turn the sharpening into a lottery and make two mini-games inside it. The first component of this model is that players are trying to generate a bonus amount for sharpening . For example, to sharpen a thing by +1, we press the “Generate” button. And randomly gives us "You got a +1." What is "+1", why do I need this "+1", I do not like it! The player clicks again. Oh, you got +2. Also nonsense. I pressed the third, the fourth time - you got +10! In, zashib, now I'm lucky, and there will be more. Pushes the fifth time - you got a +1. The player is frantic, furious, but he can click a lot, because every attempt is very cheap. A small amount of coins, gold or other in-game resources is being withdrawn. That is, sharpening turns into a lottery. It is beneficial for the player to try to get a big bonus before fixing this sharpening. Because fixing (fixing) sharpening is an additional process that takes a lot of time.
Thus, on the one hand, sharpening displays resources through the great Korean rand, on the other - it displays time through stabilization. This scheme was quite successfully applied in the game Panzar. However, there was a negative point related to the fact that the players accidentally fixed an unnecessary level for them, and this cannot be canceled. And they pumped the thing further. And the higher the level of pumping, the more various resources are required in order to generate a good level of characteristics.
Sharpening this model consists of two parts - Fuse and Evolve. Fuse is a systematic injection into some object, into an object, into a character of resources, other characters, whatever. A vivid example: “Heroes of Camelot” from Kabam, where they very simply and concisely implemented this sharpening. You have cards, you pour other cards into them. Thus the level, power, health, whatever, grows. The card can be downloaded only to a certain high level, we are severely limited by the limit. What to do next? When the map is swung to the maximum, we must find the exact same map. In the oldest tough Asian models, both of these cards needed to be swung to the maximum level. In a softer modern second card, it is not necessary to pump up to the highest level: we take only one pumped card, and in it we pour in the second one the same, but at any level. During the merge, the maximum map evolves into a new one. This is Evolve. Its characteristics are increasing dramatically. Usually, growth at the Evolve stage is 30 - 50%, while pumping Fuse gives 1% or less for each level. That is, Evolve is a significant event, the wow effect, when one card absorbs another, generating a qualitatively new one.
As with all good Korean-Chinese models, this process can take a long time, and one map can be evolved quite a large number of times. You had Ifrit, became Fire Ifrit, then Fire Ifrit Hell Day and so on.
This model is good because it turns units, cards and everything else into, let's say, consumables. It goes very well with the purchase of boosters. The main monetization goes through them. A booster is the same box - a container, at the opening of which the player receives several random cards. The player opens the booster, and he falls cards. Some of them are useful to him, some are not. Usually at least one of the cards is rare or cooler. The player, of course, expects that there will be cards with a huge number of stars, super-cool, wonderful. In fact, most often a lot of trash falls from there. And all this thrash, so that the player was not insulting, he can use for sharpening. And this is the balance of boosters with Fuse / Evolve sharpening. On the one hand, there is a chance to immediately get a cool card. On the other hand, the player will receive a good card with time, even if he has no luck. It will simply improve the existing weak with sharpening.
This type is more and more common in modern games, primarily in mobile. It lies in the fact that the same entity has a large number of parallel pumped characteristics. In fact, they took the classic RPG model, minimized it and transferred it to sharpening.
A striking example is the game Heroes Charge. There, the character is a cross between the consumables of the Heroes of Camelot and the normal character from the MMORPG. On him as a hanger, you can wear items that enhance its characteristics. And when you put it on completely, he somehow magically absorbs all his clothes inside. Due to the fact that he swallowed up a Torn sneaker +4, a wooden shield and a broken sword, for some reason he changes his color from green to blue ... Although not surprising, if one of us would swallow a tattered sneaker, he too would change color to blue. But the heroes are not very to face. Then they change color to purple, to orange. Thus, the game shows us that the quality level of this hero is growing. This is one branch of pumping.
In parallel, there are several others at once. Firstly, it is pumping skills - the abilities of the hero. In Heroes Charge, this process is limited by cool downs. That is, in a unit of time, the player is given a certain amount of skill leveling points, and he cannot get far beyond these limits.
There are other ways of pumping inside this parallel model. Say, you can improve the quality of the hero due to the fact that he has more than some abstract stars, which he gets for the Stones of Souls. That is, the logic of the model implies many simultaneous mechanisms for improving the same or similar characteristics.
The choice of sharpening model strongly depends on the region of the game . You can recall the same World of Warcraft, which tried to introduce the mechanics of sharpening, rethinking it in the European manner. They made some special items literally have a couple of sharpening levels. It is because of this that they reduced the mechanics of sharpening simply to regular activity. After all, the sharpening lost the very role that was mentioned at the beginning: the planned, linear development of power with the exponential time spent. Therefore, implementation is very important, as is the focus on the region. Also, the choice of sharpening model is greatly influenced by the game genre. The setting has less impact.
It is also important which segment of the players this mechanic is focused on . That is, who will use. Will someone pay for it? The same Fuse / Evolve is designed for the broadest masses of players. It is easy enough for all people to buy inexpensive boosters. Anyone who, in principle, is willing to pay money in games.
Well, and naturally, the distribution platform is important - a client, mobile, browser-based, other game. This is due primarily to the length of the session and the time that the player is willing to spend on the game on this platform.
And the last criterion when choosing a sharpening model is targeting a casual or hardcore audience . The truth is that sharpening as a game is interesting mainly to hardcore players.
And finally, I want to wish the players to meet more and more good games, and developers to use more interesting and diverse game mechanics. Recently, the opportunity to experiment has become available to game developers as it was during the inception of the industry. This is facilitated by the expansion of the mobile gaming market, which, on average, is much faster and cheaper to create than high-quality client projects. At the same time, even relatively small mobile phones are able to bring good revenue and remain in the memory of players for a long time.
If you have questions about the mechanics of sharpening - ask, I will answer in the comments.
Must immediately make a reservation. Despite the fact that sharpening is largely focused on the monetization of the project, I will consider it primarily as the mechanics of creating long-term goals for the player and withdrawal of surplus game currency. Yes, readers will forgive me, but this is due to the fact that, as a game designer, I think that the main thing is to make a high-quality product that will leave a mark on people's hearts. The product itself, in my subjective opinion, is primary: it is the retention of the player that should be the first goal of the game designer, since without solving the task of ensuring high retention , it’s premature to talk about monetization. Nevertheless, I will not forget the contribution of sharpening in the project’s proceeds and I will say a little about that.
Let's start with the definition - what is “sharpening”? The term is derived from the English word grind or grinding - grinding, grinding. This game mechanics, which combines a systematic, gradual, extended in time, the increase in the characteristics of different objects, whether they are characters, objects, or any individual skills of the characters. The main feature of sharpening is that it occurs rather slowly, and the increase in power turns out to be close to linear, with an exponential or power increase in the cost of obtaining it.
')
Sharpening came to us from Asia, where beautiful Chinese farmers, who are earning money for days in World of Warcraft, in order to sell them to Europeans through pirated websites, by their behavior suggested to game developers how to create interesting game mechanics for them. However, sharpening appeared long before WoW.
Lineage was one of the first games where sharpening turned into an important part of the gameplay. And now, modern Korean and Chinese MMORPGs almost never do without this remarkable mechanics.
Sharpening goals
Let us remember the recent past and see where the sharpening began, what forms it took and how it came to its modern appearance.
Why do we, in principle, introduce sharpening in games? First of all, game designers say about the withdrawal of excess money from the gaming economy . We call it Money sink. In other words, this is the creation of another channel of spending, which accounts for a significant part of the gameplay. The involvement in this game is highly dependent on the game project itself. In many games, sharpening accounts for a very significant share of the profits. Up to 30% of all monetization in top AAA-class projects is carried out by selling consumables, stabilizers, or other items involved in this mechanics. There are even games where sharpening brings almost 100% of the income.
But the key task that grind performs is to increase Retention . Since this mechanic requires a player to have a sufficiently large time investment to earn resources, money, or other benefits in the game, it rather well raises the possibilities of the game to retain the audience. She is actively used by the so-called Careerists - one of the 4 groups of players in the methodology of Richard Bartle .
And finally, sharpening is a very cheap way to create High-end content , that is, some kind of activity for the player, to which he will switch, passing the basic, interesting levels, on which there was a wide variety of new events and so-called wow effects.
The first models - the addition of entities
Consider one of the first models of sharpening, which was formed and came to us from the Asian games. If we recall games like Lineage, then there were certain scrolls added to the subject, which improved (honed) them with a certain probability. In the future, this idea was transformed into the addition of entities. When we add two entities, for example, two objects, a staff of 1000 truths and another staff of 1000 truths, then in case of a successful unification, we get a staff of 1000 truths plus one, that is, an object sharpened to a certain level. Its characteristics exceed some of the characteristics of the original staff. We could combine two such staffs + 1, get a staff + 2, then combine two items with a sharpener of +2, and get a staff + 3, and so on. Geometric progression is obtained.
This model coped well with the task of creating high-end content. But the developers felt that the players did not suffer enough, spending a lot of time on knocking out staffs. Therefore, the Korean MMORGP game designers have added the probability of failure to the geometric growth. And every time when a player tries to improve his object knocked out by great efforts, there is a small chance that everything will break. And it grows with sharpening the subject. The most evil developers take away everything from the player, or give him some dust or debris. Kinder developers make one item break, and the original one that we have sharpened remains, and we need to look again for some kind of reagent or a new item. This option causes less negative players. An example of the various modifications of the addition model of entities can serve as the classic Chinese and Korean MMO.
Intermediate Resource Model
When sharpening just started to appear, in most cases it did not suggest monetization. And only then it began to add to the game, not only for content and balancing the economy, but also for the sale of certain consumables. For a long time, the sharpening process brought players out of themselves, because things broke, they had to be mined again. But game designers did not stop there. They wanted the players to have more fun, but they continued to play the game for a long time. Therefore, the developers went further and made a model with intermediate resources. One example of a modification of this model is Perfect World.
The essence of the approach is as follows. We are pouring in a certain thing not exactly the same copy of this thing, but a certain amount of resources - the dust of time, the flask of 1000 truths, the blood of the demons of the netherworld - whatever. And the more we want to pump it, the higher the level of sharpening, the more these resources we need to infuse. What is so good about it? These resources are often given for the destruction of similar things. Suppose there are 20 crossbows, swords, or other objects cluttering up our inventory. We disassemble it for dust, and we add this dust to the thing we consider valuable, which we want to pump. This allows you to slightly reduce the negative. People independently, with their own hands, in their own free will destroy things in their inventory, and the resulting resources are used for good. That is, now things are not broken by evil developers, but by the players themselves. This slightly reduced the negative compared with the previous model.
By the way, I tell about different models of sharpening at my lectures at VSBI . Well, a lot of other things about game design and game logic. In general, game development is an endless field for lectures and articles. And here I want to share my experience and learn about someone else. But let's continue about sharpening.
Stabilization game
In this model, game designers turn the sharpening into a lottery and make two mini-games inside it. The first component of this model is that players are trying to generate a bonus amount for sharpening . For example, to sharpen a thing by +1, we press the “Generate” button. And randomly gives us "You got a +1." What is "+1", why do I need this "+1", I do not like it! The player clicks again. Oh, you got +2. Also nonsense. I pressed the third, the fourth time - you got +10! In, zashib, now I'm lucky, and there will be more. Pushes the fifth time - you got a +1. The player is frantic, furious, but he can click a lot, because every attempt is very cheap. A small amount of coins, gold or other in-game resources is being withdrawn. That is, sharpening turns into a lottery. It is beneficial for the player to try to get a big bonus before fixing this sharpening. Because fixing (fixing) sharpening is an additional process that takes a lot of time.
Thus, on the one hand, sharpening displays resources through the great Korean rand, on the other - it displays time through stabilization. This scheme was quite successfully applied in the game Panzar. However, there was a negative point related to the fact that the players accidentally fixed an unnecessary level for them, and this cannot be canceled. And they pumped the thing further. And the higher the level of pumping, the more various resources are required in order to generate a good level of characteristics.
Fuse / Evolve
Sharpening this model consists of two parts - Fuse and Evolve. Fuse is a systematic injection into some object, into an object, into a character of resources, other characters, whatever. A vivid example: “Heroes of Camelot” from Kabam, where they very simply and concisely implemented this sharpening. You have cards, you pour other cards into them. Thus the level, power, health, whatever, grows. The card can be downloaded only to a certain high level, we are severely limited by the limit. What to do next? When the map is swung to the maximum, we must find the exact same map. In the oldest tough Asian models, both of these cards needed to be swung to the maximum level. In a softer modern second card, it is not necessary to pump up to the highest level: we take only one pumped card, and in it we pour in the second one the same, but at any level. During the merge, the maximum map evolves into a new one. This is Evolve. Its characteristics are increasing dramatically. Usually, growth at the Evolve stage is 30 - 50%, while pumping Fuse gives 1% or less for each level. That is, Evolve is a significant event, the wow effect, when one card absorbs another, generating a qualitatively new one.
As with all good Korean-Chinese models, this process can take a long time, and one map can be evolved quite a large number of times. You had Ifrit, became Fire Ifrit, then Fire Ifrit Hell Day and so on.
This model is good because it turns units, cards and everything else into, let's say, consumables. It goes very well with the purchase of boosters. The main monetization goes through them. A booster is the same box - a container, at the opening of which the player receives several random cards. The player opens the booster, and he falls cards. Some of them are useful to him, some are not. Usually at least one of the cards is rare or cooler. The player, of course, expects that there will be cards with a huge number of stars, super-cool, wonderful. In fact, most often a lot of trash falls from there. And all this thrash, so that the player was not insulting, he can use for sharpening. And this is the balance of boosters with Fuse / Evolve sharpening. On the one hand, there is a chance to immediately get a cool card. On the other hand, the player will receive a good card with time, even if he has no luck. It will simply improve the existing weak with sharpening.
Parallel sharpening
This type is more and more common in modern games, primarily in mobile. It lies in the fact that the same entity has a large number of parallel pumped characteristics. In fact, they took the classic RPG model, minimized it and transferred it to sharpening.
A striking example is the game Heroes Charge. There, the character is a cross between the consumables of the Heroes of Camelot and the normal character from the MMORPG. On him as a hanger, you can wear items that enhance its characteristics. And when you put it on completely, he somehow magically absorbs all his clothes inside. Due to the fact that he swallowed up a Torn sneaker +4, a wooden shield and a broken sword, for some reason he changes his color from green to blue ... Although not surprising, if one of us would swallow a tattered sneaker, he too would change color to blue. But the heroes are not very to face. Then they change color to purple, to orange. Thus, the game shows us that the quality level of this hero is growing. This is one branch of pumping.
In parallel, there are several others at once. Firstly, it is pumping skills - the abilities of the hero. In Heroes Charge, this process is limited by cool downs. That is, in a unit of time, the player is given a certain amount of skill leveling points, and he cannot get far beyond these limits.
There are other ways of pumping inside this parallel model. Say, you can improve the quality of the hero due to the fact that he has more than some abstract stars, which he gets for the Stones of Souls. That is, the logic of the model implies many simultaneous mechanisms for improving the same or similar characteristics.
How to choose a particular model of sharpening
The choice of sharpening model strongly depends on the region of the game . You can recall the same World of Warcraft, which tried to introduce the mechanics of sharpening, rethinking it in the European manner. They made some special items literally have a couple of sharpening levels. It is because of this that they reduced the mechanics of sharpening simply to regular activity. After all, the sharpening lost the very role that was mentioned at the beginning: the planned, linear development of power with the exponential time spent. Therefore, implementation is very important, as is the focus on the region. Also, the choice of sharpening model is greatly influenced by the game genre. The setting has less impact.
It is also important which segment of the players this mechanic is focused on . That is, who will use. Will someone pay for it? The same Fuse / Evolve is designed for the broadest masses of players. It is easy enough for all people to buy inexpensive boosters. Anyone who, in principle, is willing to pay money in games.
Well, and naturally, the distribution platform is important - a client, mobile, browser-based, other game. This is due primarily to the length of the session and the time that the player is willing to spend on the game on this platform.
And the last criterion when choosing a sharpening model is targeting a casual or hardcore audience . The truth is that sharpening as a game is interesting mainly to hardcore players.
And finally, I want to wish the players to meet more and more good games, and developers to use more interesting and diverse game mechanics. Recently, the opportunity to experiment has become available to game developers as it was during the inception of the industry. This is facilitated by the expansion of the mobile gaming market, which, on average, is much faster and cheaper to create than high-quality client projects. At the same time, even relatively small mobile phones are able to bring good revenue and remain in the memory of players for a long time.
If you have questions about the mechanics of sharpening - ask, I will answer in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/267429/
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