Take A Moment: MMOs And The Trinity

That old zombie warhorse The Holy Trinity is up and shambling once again, raised from its fitful slumber by opposing op eds at MMOGames penned by Isarii and Liore. Murph offers up an excellent entry to the Dead Horse Stakes with his click-bait-titled "Your MMORPG Holy Trinity is a crock" to which Jeromai replies, wearily, "Why Are We Even Arguing About The Holy Trinity?"

My feeling is that it's pretty unlikely that anything anyone writes on a blog or a specialist interest site is going to change opinions one way or another. At this stage of the argument we're all indulging in the online equivalent of sitting around the pub table, banging on about our individual hobby-horses, while everyone else flips beermats and waits for their turn to pontificate. And there's nothing wrong with that!

I find myself in an odd position. I would openly advocate a return to the Trinity, yet I've spent the last three and a half years playing the heck out of GW2, one of the MMOs widely considered to have done everything in its power to tear that Trinity down and stamp on the pieces. I frequently denigrate so-called "action rpgs" while tub-thumping on behalf of traditional stand-and-cast tab target gameplay, yet this week alone I've written about playing and enjoying no fewer than three center-reticule oriented mouse-thrashers.

So, what's going on? Well, I think Karinshastha, commenting in Murph's thread, expressed it perfectly. If I did "Quote of the Day" posts this would be a prime contender:

"If one wishes to remove trinity elements or play them down, one would have to accept a somewhat more accelerated and perhaps also competitive pace of play. I suppose you could roughly map it to the recent findings released by Quantic Foundry (“The Growing 35+ Gamer Market”) which essentially correlate competitiveness with youth and strategic play with all ages with the qualification that strategic play is valued by older gamers.".

In other words, I'm making the best of what I'm being given but only because no-one is really giving me what I want. The market is taking time to adjust to the new reality: not all gamers are 15 year old boys any more.

By contrast, Jeromai equates The Trinity with both simplicity and laziness "The “it’s too hard for me to understand anything more complex” “casuals want to just drop in and have mindless fun, and feel comforted and familiar with a system they’ve already learned argument" is how he describes it. I think that's just plain wrong.

Forty tanks, no healer.

There was very little that was "mindless" about clearing through Chardok or Sebilis or Lower Guk, inching through claustrophobic tunnels filled with hostile creatures, any one of which could easily kill any one of your group, or quite possibly all at the same time. As a plate-armored tank ,expected to take the lead, every step was freighted with the stark knowledge that, without healing from your cleric, you wouldn't survive a single fight. What's more, if you fell, your body would lie there in the dust or the damp, all your worldly possessions lost with it, while you awoke miles away, facing the prospect of fighting your way back, in your skivvies, wielding your second-best sword.

Meanwhile, the cleric would be equally painfully aware that his ability to keep the tank up and fighting depended on that tank's skill in turning the mob, positioning it efficiently and holding its attention long enough for the rest of the party to finish it. As for the rest of that party, they had a myriad of tasks to consider as they judged how much they dared to damage the creature without making the tank's job impossible, kept an eye out for any of the creature's allies, assessed their dwindling resources and generally remained fully engaged with and aware of their environment at all times.

MIndless? Simple? I should frickin' coco! It was a thinking person's game back then, not a contest of reflexes and reaction times. A tense, high-stakes game of strategy and tactics. More like a game of three-dimensional chess crossed with Russian roulette than a quick hand of Snap.

It may well be that the Trinity has become debased by the general downgrading of content over the years to fit the imagined short attention span of the wider audience developers wish to attract but if so that's a symptom of a much wider malaise. It's not in itself the problem, or the fault, of the Trinity gameplay. Neither is it a structural or a mechanical shortcoming per se.

No, the issue, and with it the key to meaningful, thoughtful, intelligent Trinity-based gameplay, is pacing. All of those games from the past that built on a platform of Tanking, Healing and Crowd Control were slower than any game you'll play today. Not just a little slower - much slower. For the full flavor of the meat to flood through it needs to be chewed steadily and for a long time.

In true Trinity play there were no such things as "trash mobs". Every fight, every single fight, from the guards at the gate to the final Boss, could lead to a full party wipe. If that happened it could mean, at best, half an hour or more just to get everyone back in place to try again. If the group wasn't well-bonded, more likely it would mean the end of productive play for the session and the fracturing of that group.

Individual fights with what would now be called "trash" might take three, four, five minutes. There would be a constant concern over whether the fight was taking too long. Long enough that a roamer might come around and add, making the outcome even more uncertain. Long enough that mobs already killed might begin to respawn.

Strategy Meeting

The Tank might need to decide mid-fight to move the mob to a safer spot because the ranger, with a better view, spotted a roamer on the move. The cleric might find mana running low and need to judge the merit of sitting to regain a little more against the risk of "sitting agro" pulling the attention of the mob away from the taunting tank and onto himself.

I could go on and on and, yes, on. This is all old ground. I've been over it before so many times. I can only conjure a tiny, tiny handful of the potential outcomes and events that every player under the Trinity would have been considering every time the Monk ran back into the room and flopped down with a slavering monster tight on his bare heels.

I really don't think it's possible to convey to players now, who weren't there then, just how complex the possible range of interactions between players and players, players and mobs and, yes, mobs and mobs, used to be. The level of complexity simply dwarfed anything I've experienced in the genre in a decade and the reason for that is pacing.

Trust me, you don't need an opposable thumb. I'm asking you to tank, not hitchhike.

For that level of complexity to be viable as entertainment requires long, slow combat that gives everyone time to look around, to think and to plan, even while everything still happens in "real time". At any moment, a sudden explosion of action could send the entire movie into fast-forward. From calm reflection to frenzied firefighting in an instant was the transit when bad luck or misjudgment brought potential doom and destruction to the room.

When older players hanker after The Trinity that is what I believe they are yearning for. The chance to have every fight matter, not just the Boss fights. The luxury of being able to make meaningful choices based on coherent, fully-developed chains of thought, not merely on reaction and reflex. The opportunity to play characters with quirks and foibles and preferences, not toons with rotations and optimal strats.

Over the past decade or so there have been trends towards slow food, slow travel, slow living all around. It's about time for some slow gaming. Past time. The Trinity is no magic answer to the genre's problems but it is a sign and it's pointing in a good direction.

The Race Goes To The Swift

Murf and Syl both have great posts up about DPS and The Holy Trinity. In the long and lively comment thread following Murf's piece (on which he offers extended commentary here) I chipped in with a lengthy ad hoc homily on how EverQuest, as usual, Got It Right. Which, of course, it did.

The trouble is, like a lot of other cultural experiences that have passed into folk-memory, the decade-old EQ gameplay experience is hard to communicate meaningfully to those who didn't encounter it when it it was in its prime. As the years roll on it becomes increasingly clear that you had to be there to understand just how very, very much more fluid, complex, intelligent and interesting the quotidian combat mechanics of a bog-standard, leveling PUG were in the MMORPGs of the first half-decade of the 21st century.

Just telling people how it was back in the day is hardly likely to convince anyone who didn't get to experience it for themselves. And, of course, there will always be pushback from those were there but who thought the things I'm portraying as positives were largely problems to be solved.  That, after all, is how we got to WoW and thence to where we are today.

It might be easier if we'd had YouTube and Twitch and all the rest of the streaming, videoing self-recorders to document the everyday lives of a few of the half-million people playing EQ at its peak. Moving pictures do trigger emotions well. At the time, though, I rarely thought to take a screenshot during combat let alone a video so words will have to do what they can alone.

In discussing DPS and The Trinity in the light of the experiences of those days a key point that should be remembered is that DPS often wasn't thought of as a full role at all. Even when it was credited with being a bona fide job it was seen as a highly specialized one. Most six-person groups would only take one pure DPS class, maybe two at a push if they were different classes.

When compiling a group, something I did often once I gained the confidence and couldn't con someone else into doing it, I'd usually allow just one space for pure DPS. Since Mrs Bhagpuss often played a rogue or a monk (DPS of a sort although a lot more useful and versatile, being one of the best pulling classes in the game and a very fair off-tank when required) it didn't generally leave much opportunity for anyone else to fill that slot in groups that she or I were leading. Consequently I didn't get to meet all that many DPS specialists, which might have colored my view if it wasn't for the fact that there weren't all that many of them looking for groups in the first place.

Everyone just had so many more important things to think about and so many more interesting options. There was so much to do in those days. Really, who would want to play pure DPS? Even most of the Wizards had probably rolled that way for ports. The long list of key tasks, all of which featured well ahead of just inflicting damage, included but was by no means limited to tanking, healing, slowing, hasting, pulling, crowd control, mana replenishment, buffing, debuffing and, of course, rezzing.

While all that was going on the DPS just somehow filled itself in in the background. The tank did a lot of constant DPS to hold aggro, almost everyone did their bit and it added up just fine. Having more than one person who was only going to stab things in the back seemed like a huge waste of resources.

For the other five non-DPS-specialists, as I said, dealing damage was something you'd fit in between all the other things that were taking up most of your attention. You'd throw in a nuke when you could, apply and refresh your dots as the opportunity allowed, but it was the bit no-one particularly cared about. If you missed a round, or several, no-one would either notice or care. As a cleric I prided myself on never doing any damage at all. If I had to smite it was a sign something had gone  badly wrong.

That general lack of interest, affection or desire for causing damage is one of the biggest differences between MMORPG combat then and now. Another, and the underlying reason, I believe, that perceptions on what's required have changed so much, is that over the years combat got faster. Much, much faster. It isn't just that DPS has somehow, perhaps almost without anyone meaning for it to happen, become an end in itself. That's merely a symptom. The real problem is the inexorable pick-up in pace that still hasn't peaked.

MMO combat used to be almost stately; highly tactical, it was more about thinking than doing. Increasingly the reverse is true. Modern MMO combat isn't necessarily less complex but it requires an entirely different set of skills, ones far closer to other forms of video gaming, where everything, all the time requires action, reaction, movement. Like the shark, if a group isn't moving forward it's dead in the water, or so the wailing and moaning that breaks out should anyone dare to pause to take a breath would seem to suggest.

When we did dungeons more than a decade ago no-one, and I mean no-one, cared how fast we did them. I cannot recall a single time when anyone commented negatively on how long it took to kill a mob, let alone complained that it took too long. The important thing was that it died and we didn't and that was a function not of patience but of difficulty.

Mobs were tough. Tougher than you. Always. The idea of racing through a dungeon never arose because it would have been impossible. Even though the standard respawn time was somewhere around a now-unimaginable 18 minutes, still in normal dungeon play it was often difficult for a full group to clear a whole room before the respawns began.

Difficulty levels in EverQuest peaked (unintentionally, as we discovered years later) in the Gates of Discord expansion but even by the time we got to Planes of Power, for players in my weight class each single pull was taking 2-3 minutes with another 1-2 minutes recovery time. If we managed twenty pulls in an hour we'd think we were kings. Most sessions it was four slow, arduous, careful pulls followed by a misstep that sent anyone left alive running for the zone-line yelling "Train to zone!". And that was outdoors!

In dungeons that louche, lax, relaxed attitude wouldn't wash. There, the focus was on a) getting in b) clearing a space and c) holding it. If the group was very confident we might "crawl", moving through the dungeon, doing a) and b) repeatedly as we moved from one room to the next while foregoing c) altogether. If we did, we knew we were almost certainly going to get in above our heads and wipe, eventually. We wouldn't even attempt a crawl unless we had a porting class (druid or wizard) with us to get us out when we'd had enough. There was no Gate spell, recall or hearthstone for half the classes in the game. Either you got a port or you walked out. And you weren't walking out.

Before the arrival of the sixth expansion Lost Dungeons of Norrath, (one of my personal favorites and the one where I and many, many others finally learned how to play effectively and efficiently in groups), which introduced the Instance to EQ, all dungeons were both persistent and open. Everything respawned. There were many roamers and some of them were other players and groups. About every mob you saw was powerful enough to kill any one player-character easily. Many were powerful enough to wipe the whole group. It wasn't always easy to tell which was which.

That meant there were often group discussions before each pull over how to proceed. Having been in a particular spot many times before did not preclude these discussions. We did the same dungeons nightly and yet we went through the same debates every time. Experience helped but variations in group membership, spawns and, especially, roamers meant circumstances were often far from predictable. Just deciding whether the Cleric should Lull, the Enchanter Mez, the Bard do that weird song thing they did, the Monk FD pull or whatever might take as long as the fight itself.

As I recall the main problem was too many people wanting to volunteer their own, particular skills and the discussions of their relative merits that always followed. And if you were crawling through the dungeon you'd have that discussion afresh at every junction, every doorway. Old EQ vets often reminisce about the social aspects of grouping but in my memory we talked far more about game mechanics than we did about our real lives. That's one of the things I miss most about the silent groups of the modern game - that technical to and fro.

Despite all the preparations situations frequently got out of hand. When they did, everyone in the group needed to be able to think on his or her feet, to adapt and innovate. DPS was rarely a solution to a problem because no one character ever had the resources to just burn something down. Just a single add might tie up most of the the groups resources. More  might mean a wipe and a wipe might mean ten or even twenty minutes just to get started again. At such moments the last thing you needed was someone standing around blasting away and hoping for a miracle.

There would be times, many times, when a bad pull, a resisted spell or a roamer arriving at an inopportune moment meant all six players going into triage mode. As a cleric I remember so many fights where every member of the group was dealing separately with adds, moving them into corners, locking them down, taking them out of contention using whatever tactics their wits and their spell selection suggested. I had to keep all of them and myself alive long enough for order to reassert itself. When it was all over we were either sitting down recovering our breath and our mana and laughing our heads off or lying on the dungeon floor hoping like fun that someone with a rez had managed to camp out. Oh, wait...that'd be me.

That was what passed for a normal leveling session back in the day. Is it any wonder people who had that nightly experience find the current vogue for speed-runs unsatisfying? Not least because in some important ways we aren't playing the same kind of game at all.

Over the last couple of years I've done dungeons in FFXIV and Fractals in GW2. I'm not for a moment suggesting they are easier. In some important ways they are much harder. But it's the kind of challenge that I don't enjoy. Everything comes down to dodging out of shapes on the floor, countering specific scripted events or burning hard and never stopping. It's a young person's game now. When I was younger it was almost the opposite.

In essence the core gameplay of MMORPGs like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot consisted of risk assessment and resource management. They were first and foremost games of strategy, planning, tactics and logistics. More chess than Twister. Combat was merely how the gameplay expressed itself.

That's why DPS didn't seem to be anything special and why it's so hard to take it seriously now, (although I'm quite sure that Mrs Bhagpuss, as a dedicated DPS specialist herself, would have a different view. She did then, too). Of course, even back in the day there did have to be DPS.  Progress would have come to a halt without it but then so it would had the pulling stopped or the mana run out or no-one was slowing (even by the time we reached Velious fighting unslowed mobs had become like trying to stop a buzzsaw by grabbing the blade).

It was a game of specialists and the loss of a key role might mean a rest for the whole team while a replacement was recruited, although usually someone had a second-best to offer. We'd muddle on with that while the group leader sent tells to find something more suitable.The one role whose departure would never bring pulls to a halt was the DPS specialist. Without him or her little would change except that the fights would take longer and no-one much minded that.

The thing is, for all we talk about it now, back then nothing was ever all about the Holy Trinity. It was a game designed around collective responsibility, around creativity, around imagination. There was rarely much agreement over who was theoretically best in class for each role and function and even if there had been it still came down to who was available.

We filled the roles with the best people we knew not the best classes and that applied equally to DPS specialists, the few we encountered. If I couldn't find the best people, though, I'd go with whoever we could get and then we improvised. With six spaces in the group and many classes able to handle multiple responsibilities we could have filled more slots with more DPS classes even then. We didn't because there weren't that many LFG. DPS was not what most players wanted to be doing most of the time.

It's not what I want to be doing most of the time now, either. It never has been. And yet for years and years it's almost all I do. Solo, duo, group, zerg: all the games, all DPS, all the time. At least that's how it feels. DPS players may feel they have the short end of the staff with the long queues but that's just a marker of the way what was once a niche specialization has grown to overwhelm an entire genre.

Whether the engine of change can be thrown into reverse I very much doubt. Those slow, thoughtful, careful, groups, who took each goblin on its merits and watched neither a clock nor a meter are gone for good. They say you can't win an MMO but it seems you can win a genre. Good game, DPS. We're all in your world now.

Towards A Theory Of Fun

J3w3l at Healing The Masses posted a very interesting contribution to the current Trinity debate. Balkoth then summed up the entire thing in a nutshell in the first comment:

"I think designers are looking at the situation where many groups are stuck waiting on a tank or healer in a trinity system and going “Well, let’s try to fix that by removing healers and tanks!” This obviously sucks for people who LIKE playing healers and tanks."

Jeff Butler, who was mostly very calm and laid-back and spoke so much sense in most of the SOELive footage I watched, became animated, almost angry, when talking about players being stuck waiting on a Tank or Healer to get started. It sounded to me as though he was talking very much from bitter personal experience, that he's almost made it a mission to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. Other devs spoke in equally heartfelt fashion about being the Tank or Healer on whom the responsibility for other players' entertainment lay, about how that meant they couldn't play the way they wanted. They sounded emotionally as well as professionally engaged.

At the heart of this complex debate is the intractable problem of "Fun". Going back some years, long before I had a blog or even knew what one was, I would often oppose, even attack, the concept of "Fun" during debates and discussions on various MMO forums. There's more to life and more to MMOs than having fun, that was generally my line. I'd have heartily endorsed J3w3l's observation that "Sometimes it isn’t fun healing the dungeons or raids although many times I enjoyed it precisely because it wasn’t."

As time trundled on and MMOs became easier and easier to enjoy in short sessions without much assistance from others I began to believe I'd been mistaken. I couldn't put my finger on exactly when it happened but probably some time around 2007 my personal balance tipped. Instead of opposing fun for fun's sake I started to endorse it. If you're not having fun, why are you playing? That kind of thing.


There's a marked difference between a lesson learned a lesson learned well. Just as it had been shortsighted to dismiss the significance of fun, so it was equally shortsighted to raise fun up and worship it as a god.

Recently, in a reply to a Ravious post at Kill Ten Rats, I observed "The ironic thing is that GW2 seems to have become that thing I thought I always wanted – an MMO that’s played for no other purpose than the fun of playing it, but now I have it I’m not sure I know what to do with it."

That's the nub of it. Fun is a good thing in itself but it's not enough. Not to hold my attention. Not for long. That requires not just fun but satisfaction. Satisfaction is the feeling J3w3l is referencing when she posits the paradox of enjoying something because it's not fun.

Most people don't find household chores fun. Tidying a room, doing the washing up, mowing the lawn, the prospect doesn't generally fill anyone with joy. When you roll up your sleeves and get on with it, sometimes it feels pretty good right away and sometimes it doesn't, but once you're finished, once you can stand back and look at what you've achieved, at the difference you've made, at how much your environment, your living conditions, have been improved by your own effort, then you feel that long, slow burn of satisfaction.

Satisfaction is a feeling that lasts. Not indefinitely, but for a good, long time. Whenever you walk into that kitchen and see the gleaming surfaces, the neatly stacked, clean dishes, cleaned and stacked by you, it feels good. There's a little glow. It's called A Job Well Done and it's a feeling so universal it spawned that cliche.

It's also the feeling you get in MMOs when you know you are playing well, to your capacity; better yet helping others play to their capacity. It's by no means unique to the Trinity but the Trinity has always provided a straightforward route to achieving it.

Right now, that's the feeling I'm seeking in my MMO play. I've lived through the Wonder Years when everything was new, the Grind Years when everything was hard, the Social Years when everyone knew my name. The Fun Years had a good run but there's only so much fun you can have before it stops being so much fun any more.

Coming back to where we started, The Trinity is but a small part of all this. Many have pointed out, rightly, that the Trinity only exists because of technical limitations in the engines of the early MMOs, that it was those limitations rather than any intent of design that shaped what became the expectations of the genre. Flosch at Random Waypoint recently reminded us that even the Trinity started out as something very different from what it means today. Mechanics change. That's understood. It's not about that.

Extreme solutions, however well-intentioned, risk creating further problems as least as bad as those they intend to remove. Relaxing the reliance on specific individuals is a laudable aim, but removing the options for those individuals to accept and embrace the roles they love is not. I believe it is well within the capacity of game designers to create an MMO in which the roles of Tank, Healer and Crowd Control exist in recognizable form, are satisfying to play, yet are not essential.

It should be entirely possible to construct a combat system and encounters within it in an imaginative and flexible way so that, for example, five DPS players can succeed as easily as two DPS players, a Tank, a Healer and a CC. There is no need whatsoever to coerce or cajole players into playing their characters in specific ways, especially not when the only motivation for doing so is that you believe you know better than they do what they will most enjoy.

Give players all the tools. Leave all the options in. Let players decide how and when and where to use them. Let players be generalists or specialists as they prefer. If that means some cleave to a new orthodoxy while others cling to tradition, so be it.

With full disclosure, the Trinity has little direct relevance to my own enjoyment of MMOs. It's seven years or so since I last counted Trinity healing the mainstay of my own gameplay and I was never more than a part-time, stand-in Tank. Combat mechanics are not the be-all and end-all of my enjoyment and neither do I define myself as a player by the roles my characters take. Other people do. They should be supported in the choices they make.