The Culture: Second Order Effects Will Wreck Your Game

An example of how Your Brilliant Idea in game design can fuck everything up.

Behold the thing that ruins large-scale PVP in Final Fantasy XIV: Battle High.

How Battle High Works

In the Frontlines PVP mode, players may gain points of Battle High by killing enemy players (10 pts.) or assisting another's kill (2 pts., soon to be 4 pts.). For every 20 points, you get a Rank of Battle High; this caps at 100 pts. and Rank V. Each rank grants a massive bonus to damage and healing done, and maybe influences damage taken.

When you get killed, you lose half of your Battle High upon respawn.

What Frontlines Is

Frontines is a large-scale objective-based PVP mode. There are three teams of 24 players each. There are three (soon again to be four) submodes with specific maps; each one changes how scoring points based on taking and holding objectives. Combat is meant to be focused around the taking and hold of objectives, and the first time to reach the point score goal wins.

Furthermore, team scores are adjusted by giving 5 points per kill scored and losing 5 points per kill sustained.

If you're familiar with team-based PVP in any other MMO, you'll know that "Fight on the Flag" is both (a) how you win and (b) something that too many cannot be bothered to do. Frontlines is rotten with this too.

Second Order Effects

Battle High directly contributes to the problem of people playing Frontlines wrong, and the developers of FF14 (who still treat PVP as second-rate and unserious content) refuse to fix this despite the dysfunctional incentives being obvious and the interactions being observable in the data.

Instead of focusing play around teams fighting over the objectives directly, you get rolling deathballs of teams steamrolling other teams as early as possible to farm Battle High and the first team that does so goes on to win two out of every three games. If that team has a shotcaller using macros to give orders, it's 3 in 4; they can't lose if they are in voice comms and can easily coordinate.

Why? Battle High is a Win More mechanic. If you ignore the objectives early and get a lead on Battle High as a team instead you'll continue to win more and more as your steamroller gains momentum, such that it will take both of the other two team cornering your team into a deathtrap and wiping all of you out to stop you- and if you're that far along, that ain't happening.

Objectives, as a result, had to be adjusted (in that typical work-around-the-edges manner seen at places like Square) to keep things appearing to be working (they are not); win thresholds lowered, point scoring raised, and (as seen in the upcoming patch for this Tuesday) Battle High gain rates tweeked.

But doing the things that would fix this--yetting Battle High entirely; removing kills as a scoring method in either direction--is off the table because that's too much of a change to do during an expansion's lifespan; those are left for Big Game Change Reveals when new expansions get announced. (FF14 needs to do a total teardown and rebuild of PVP to really fix this, but yetting Battle High will remove the big dysfunction ruining this mode.)

It is the second-order effects that combine to make what should be a PVP mode focused entirely around objectives to instead be Team Deathmatch with extra steps. Fixing it would solve the problem, direct attention where it is intended, and thereby have a wargame mode actually focus player attention and effort towards contending over the objectives instead of playing Team Deathmatch out in the middle of nowhere.

You Must Test Your Design

Second order effects are not obvious to most people. You are likely to need to see your machine in motion to see the dysfunction and start figuring out what isn't working, why it isn't, and thus how to fix it to become what you intended for it to be.