Category: Game Design

I’ve spent enough time in the guts of broken MMOs to know that when people talk about how to design for accessibility, they usually mean it as a checkbox for a legal department or a way to squeeze an extra five percent out of a niche demographic. They treat it like some expensive, high-level DLC…

I spent three years moderating a forum for an MMO that died because its developers forgot how to talk to their players without using a spreadsheet as a translator. They thought they were being clever, hiding “value” behind artificial scarcity and psychological triggers, but all they were doing was writing a sentence that said: we…

I spent three years moderating a guild forum where the most heated arguments weren’t about raid mechanics or boss rotations, but about why a new seasonal pass suddenly made the weekly grind feel like a second job. People love to pretend that monetization is just a “layer” added on top of a finished game, but…

I spent three years moderating a guild forum where I watched “engagement” metrics lie to people every single day. The devs would point to a spike in daily logins and call it a victory, but I was looking at the chat logs; people weren’t logging in because they were having fun, they were logging in…

I spent three years moderating a forum for a dying MMO, watching players scream about “content droughts” while the developers frantically pumped out more of the same repetitive dungeon crawls. Everyone thinks they know how to design an endgame, but most people are just building elaborate hamster wheels and calling it progression. They think they…

I spent three months of my life building a “dynamic scaling system” for my first solo project, convinced that complexity was the same thing as depth. I thought I was being clever, but all I actually did was create a mathematical treadmill that made every player feel like they were running through waist-deep mud. Most…

I spent three years moderating a guild forum where the entire community imploded because a single patch changed the drop rate of a mid-tier crafting reagent. Everyone blamed the “math,” but they were wrong; they were actually reacting to a broken promise. Most people think learning how economies are designed in games is about mastering…

I spent three months of my life building a procedural loot system for my first solo project, convinced that complexity was the same thing as depth. I thought if I just layered enough weighted tables and rare proc chances on top of each other, I’d have a masterpiece. Instead, I ended up with a system…

I remember sitting in a dimly lit Discord call at 3:00 AM, listening to a raid leader scream at a teammate because they’d gone forty runs without seeing a single legendary drop. The math said they were “statistically due,” but the player felt like the game was personally out to get them. That’s the trap…

Most design textbooks will tell you that avoiding a broken meta requires complex mathematical modeling or a team of PhDs running Monte Carlo simulations on your combat data. That is total nonsense. In reality, when people ask me how to avoid dominant strategies, they aren’t actually asking for a math lesson; they’re asking why their…