"Optimal Play Patterns and Pokemon GO [LONG]"

#PokemonGO: Quick Intro: I'm a former professional gamer and now a veteran game designer with nearly 10 years of industry experience.​Optimal Play Patterns (and Pokemon GO)Optimal play patterns and what your game is encouraging your players to do. Examples are drawn from various titles with a major focus on Pokemon GO.Firstly, what are optimal play patterns? Optimal play is when the player is making the best possible play in any given situation. Ideally if the player keeps making optimal plays, they will reach their goal/victory sooner than if they made sub-optimal plays. Optimal play patterns then are when the player successfully makes the optimal play repeatedly to fast track their success.In some games this is easier than others. There are some games where you can study and understand the optimal play very quickly and master the game. In other games, making the optimal play may be significantly more difficult due to factors such as mechanical skill level, game knowledge or hidden information.As an example of an easy to master game, there’s Tic Tac Toe. The game is very simple and there are only 3 possible opening moves. Because the number of permutations is very limited, one can study and discover the optimal play very quickly. Starting in the middle is the optimal play. If the player who goes first continues to make optimal plays, they cannot lose the game even if both players are equally knowledgeable. This game by design encourages the player to make the optimal plays to guarantee victory or at worst a draw.As an example of a game gated by mechanical skill level, I’d reference League of Legends and point to this clip here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0suIFAAClvg of Faker’s Zed vs Ryu’s Zed. Faker makes the absolutely optimal plays to win this battle but the mechanical skill level required to make these plays is so high that most players would not be able to execute. Additionally because this is a multiplayer game, each player must continually adjust to what their opponent is doing to make multiple optimal plays in rapid succession.And now onto Pokemon. The original Pokemon games. I’ll use an easy example of a 1v1 where Player 1 has a Raichu that outspeeds Player 2’s Cloyster and can hit it for super effective damage. However, Player 1 also knows that Player 2 has a Dugtrio they can swap in and immune the damage from the Raichu if they use an electric attack. Meanwhile Player 1 also has a Venusaur in the back that will deal super effective damage against both the Cloyster and Raichu but also take super effective damage from the Cloyster IF the Cloyster uses an ice attack rather than a water attack. What is the optimal play here? Because of hidden information, there isn’t enough information to decisively figure out what the optimal play is. There are many factors in play and each player is going to be trying to game the other player and make the optimal play based on what they think the other player is going to do. Because the optimal play isn’t perfectly clear and there are many (but finite) decision points to factor in, this makes the gameplay fun/engaging/interesting.Assuming all players involved are of equal skill level and all players are exhibiting optimal play patterns, the game should at this level of balance be fun, engaging and interesting to play. In the Tic Tac Toe example, the play and counterplay is very straight forward and a skilled player will never lose while making optimal plays. This leads to repetitive and boring gameplay.Side note: There are times when the best play should be clear as this is less mentally taxing and other times when the optimal play should be less clear and provide a challenge to the player. A good flow of having easy optimal plays and difficult ones makes for more exciting gameplay than being always easy or always difficult. Overwhelming the player with too many decisions can also be bad but this isn’t the focus right now. This is a whole other topic.​But now that I’ve introduced the topic we get to the focus: Pokemon GO and Optimal Play Patterns. What is Pokemon GO encouraging the player to do? Assuming the player makes the optimal plays at all times, what is the game making them do?In order to make optimal plays, there needs to be a clear goal for an accurate metric to measure by. Achieving this goal should require some mix of mechanical skill and decision making to create a fun and engaging experience. Here are the goals set out in Pokemon GO:- Catch them all (Complete the Pokedex)- Train the strongest pokemon to battle with.- Become the very best like no one ever was.And here are the in game resources we have to work with:- The pokemon themselves (Complete the Pokedex)- Experience Points (to reach Level 40 to train the most powerful pokemon)- Stardust (required as a resource to power up pokemon)- Pokecoins (These can aid the above by buying items that boost the points given)Now we have resources to collect. If a player exhibits optimal play patterns to best achieve these goals, what is the player doing? The idea here is that every player should try to make the optimal plays at all times to reach their goals. This is how by design the game is encouraging players to perform certain tasks not necessarily because they are the most fun way to play but because they are the optimal way to play. Ideally, if the game is designed well, the optimal way to play will be among the most fun ways to play the game.Why is it important to take note of optimal play patterns in game design? Because making the optimal plays in a game defines what the game is about. If players are always taking a certain action in a game, then this is what the game becomes. The optimal play pattern in the League of Legends example shows that the game (or this aspect of the game) is primarily about mastery. Mastering your mechanics to outplay your opponent. The optimal play pattern in Pokemon (original) shows the game is about strategy and outthinking your opponent by choosing the best move. The optimal play pattern in Tic Tac Toe shows the game is about simplicity and understanding very limited permutations. There are other aspects to these games as well but if you hone in on a focus point and figure out what the optimal way to do something is, you’ll have your optimal play pattern in view.So what are the optimal play patterns in Pokemon GO?If you are focusing on experience points, you want to figure out exactly the optimal way to obtain the most experience points quickly. Firstly, there’s an item called a ‘Lucky Egg’ that increases the amount of experience gained in 30 minutes. In optimizing experience, you always want this item active. However, this item costs money. In the past, the optimal play pattern for experience gain involved catching a ton of common pokemon with low evolve costs and then using a lucky egg and ‘spam evolving’ to maximized your experience gain. This put the focus on catching a lot of the same common pokemon. This meant that the focus of the game due to the optimal play pattern was on catching a ton of common pokemon.What was good about this? The tagline “Gotta catch ‘em all” was highlighted and the optimal play was to catch a lot of pokemon to evolve: ‘spam evolve’. What’s bad about this? The optimal play that every player aiming to get to level 40 quickly did involved hoarding common pokemon to evolve in a laborious thirty minute process where you clicked each common pokemon, evolved it and then afterward threw it away. Was this the experience the game designers were after? Was the goal of the game to ignore rarer pokemon in favor of common pokemon to evolve to maximize experience? This was the optimal play pattern that anyone who hit 40 early on at some point used, likely multiple times. And to some extent this is still true today.Between the old and the present, there was a time when doing raid battles was the optimal play pattern. In combination with the ‘spam evolve’ from the previous optimal play, the giant bonus of experience from doing the raid battle made this the best way to gain experience. The time invested to the amount of experience gained was slightly superior if doing multiple raids on one egg. These systems also worked in tandem as you could both evolve and raid at the same time.What was good about this? It put the focus of the game on battling strong pokemon and having strong pokemon to counter them. It brought people together to work towards a common goal. Raids overall have been a great success (though with their flaws). What’s bad about this? This is the most ‘pay to win’ the game has ever been. With both Lucky Eggs and Raid Passes costing Pokecoins (purchased currency) and Pokecoins being heavily gated by time, those who spent money in this system had a significant advantage over those who didn’t by being able to do more raids. Ideally, the free to play player would be able to invest time/effort into the game to yield the same result but that option was never given. The optimal play pattern should never be ‘spend more money on the game’.Then there is the present optimal play pattern which involves abusing the friend system. The friend system is currently the best way in the game to gain experience. You get 3000 experience for simply adding a friend and sending/opening a gift. That’s equal to 6 evolves in the old system in less time. Even greater, continuously sending gifts to breakpoints of 7 days, 30 days and 90 days yields huge amounts of experience that dwarf any amount of experience gain in the past. This means the current optimal play pattern doesn’t actually involve catching pokemon or battling with pokemon or anything related to pokemon at all. The game is about adding ‘friends’, sending them gifts and then deleting them to repeat this process again.What was good about this? In theory, it encourages the social aspect to make friends playing the game. What’s bad about this? In practice, it likely involves adding people off internet forums, getting your experience points and dropping inactive friends. The optimal play has so little to do with the actual concept of the game and is so far removed that it inspired this article. The game went from being about capturing a lot of pokemon to evolve to battling powerful pokemon to scrolling through buggy menus.Is the game Pokemon GO supposed to be about scrolling through buggy menus and clicking on people? Is it a clicker game? The game designers need to be extremely mindful of optimal play patterns to understand what players are going to be doing with their game. If you make the optimal play something that is grossly unfun or a negative experience then you are doing an extreme disservice to the players. The players will jump through these hoops for the reward but they wont be happy about it. It is likely that few people really enjoyed watching 20+ second animations for their pokemon to evolve. And it is even less likely that people are going to enjoy scrolling a menu that often freezes, errors and cannot be easily searched in order to get the most experience. But the players will do it.Players will always find ways to optimize their play experience. As game designers, being aware of the optimal way to play the game – the optimal play patterns – and adjusting rewards to make that experience the most fun, interesting and engaging is important. The closest this game came to fun and engaging ways to maximize experience game was when doing multiple raids was the optimal play pattern – however, this created somewhat of a pay to win environment in which those who spent money on the game on raid passes had a huge leg up on those who did not. There are so many subtle knobs to be tuned in order to balance the game and provide the players with the optimal play experience.Thus far, I’ve only looked at a single metric in experience gain. But as a cohesive design, the other systems should be working together with the experience system to encourage the player along the path of optimization. Getting into Pokecoins is an entire other topic on monetization which I can cover another time but in short, the optimal play to earn pokecoins is to hold a gym for exactly 8 hours and 20 minutes and then lose the gym. To do this in any contested area you need to have optimal defenders. So what do optimal defenders look like? (Spoiler: Blissey)The optimal play for defending a gym is simple. Put a Blissey in it. Far and away the best defender, all players who intend to hold gyms by themselves are encouraged or even forced to farm Chansey candy and Blisseys. Though the reason for this may be a broken Counter System (also another topic), having a clear cut optimal play isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To truly optimize the play you want to work together with other players on other teams to take you out at exactly the right time.There is a lot more to be said about pokecoins, optimizing pokecoins, monetization design, pay to win and all the other aspects that come along with an in game currency bought with real money. The optimal way to play involves spending coins on bonuses that augment the gain of your other resources but because of this indirect method, it masks the potential pay to win nature of the system. It goes on the time vs money invested property.Next there’s Stardust. The optimal way to collect stardust is to simply capture a lot of pokemon. As this ties in with the theme of the game, stardust is in a good spot from a game design standpoint. Capturing evolved forms or rarer pokemon could and should net you more stardust. Numbers are adjustable but it’s in the right place. To maximize stardust gain, the optimal play is presently to stack quest rewards and then chain them during a stardust increasing event with a premium item called a Star Piece. This is done in addition to being in an area saturated with wild pokemon spawns.Why is this good? It encourages the player to interact with the primary focus of the game in catching pokemon and encourages the player to do quests which adds to the interest/fun of the game and helps avoid a stale repetitive play pattern. The optimal play pattern for stardust is to complete as many encounter quests and save them up to chain them all at once catching lots of pokemon. It encourages the player to go to specific locations. Why is this bad? Stardust events are not in the player’s control. Quest rewards aren’t consistent. It limits the best way to obtain stardust to a singular play pattern rather than being able to augment stardust gain with other areas of the game (ie battling) for where the stardust is used (making pokemon stronger)The only major issue with the optimal play pattern for stardust is that it doesn’t necessarily have all that many ways to gain it. However, the resource itself does create interesting choices in how you spend it. Now that you’ve acquired all these resources of pokecoins and stardust, what is the optimal way to spend it?Here is where there is more choice and ambiguity in the optimal play. What are you trying to maximize specifically? And how do you focus in on that? What pokemon do you spend your dust to power up and what is the optimal pokemon to invest in? If you’re looking for strong defenders you’re going to want to invest resources into Blissey while for the strongest attackers right now you would want to invest into Machamp. There are different ways to spend the resources to meet your goals.When there is no clear optimal play, it makes for interesting decisions and choices. When optimal plays change based on what other players are doing, based on what’s available in the game, all of that factors in to keeping the game engaging and interesting. So long as you don’t go too far the other way into decision paralysis where one cannot make a play because they are overwhelmed with too many options of what might be optimal you’re sitting in a good spot.Finally, there’s the seemingly ‘ultimate’ goal of completing the pokedex. What is the optimal way of doing this? There are many ways to obtain new pokemon including visiting specific locations, ‘nests’ where the pokemon you desire inhabit. There are also eggs to hatch that may randomly contain a pokemon you’re looking for. And then there are rare spawns to chase after when they are discovered. It’s wildly unclear what the optimal way to complete the pokedex is but it involves a culmination of all the other game mechanics to do so. With different pokemon only obtainable in specific ways, it switches up the availability and difficulty of different pokemon so that filling the pokedex should be an engaging experience that doesn’t go stale quickly.Pokemon GO has many metrics by which to measure success and the optimal play patterns for each metric should all focus in to create a cohesive picture of what the game is about. The optimal way to play the game becomes what the game is about. As a cohesive whole, most aspects cement the game’s theme. However there’s a major disconnect when the optimal play pattern for experience gain detracts so much from the core goals of the game and dictates unfun gameplay.edit: the last paragraph also serves as a TLDR. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2Luj0Cu