Hey there MINDNIGHTERS! This will be our first ever developer blog post.
In these series we will try to cover development, justify new features, share interesting game facts, highlighting community feedback and elaborate on how MINDNIGHT is evolving.
We also want to open a dialogue in order to get the valuable feedback that we need to make sure we are taking the right decisions moving forward.
Why Blog Posts now?
First, we are conscious that until now the discussions around the game have been mainly happening on our Discord Server, but we know that not all of you are there, thus we want to expand our reach and try to gather community feedback from everywhere we can.
Second purpose for these blog posts in the following period is to present the issues that MINDNIGHT currently faces, argue why we call them issues and compile a list of solutions for each issue, in order to make better decisions, develop and change features while letting everyone contribute with their opinions and feedback.
Celebration! Over 200k total players!
It’s been over two years since our journey on MINDNIGHT began and we’re so happy that you’re here with us for this milestone. You guys are a total of 200.000 unique players that installed and played MINDNIGHT at least once. That’s around an average of 7000 new players each month since we launched the game.
MINDNIGHT is also the 2nd most popular game in the Social Deduction genre.
As you can imagine with each anniversary there’s a celebration, and as you can guess, we want to celebrate with you all in MINDNIGHT. You’ll see something really interesting in the game in the next few days so stay tuned!
Improving Community Suggestions Process
We are improving our pipeline to gather and address community ideas, suggestions and improvement inquiries.
On our Discord Server we have introduced a new and improved #suggestions channel where users can directly post their suggestions now, have their suggestions upvoted and automatically be added to our list of to-do and backlog.
If you want to suggest something you can do so by joining our Discord Server, and posting into the #suggestions channel using the command !suggestion and typing your suggestion in the same message as the command. After that the suggestions will be added to a queue and a reaction will be automatically assigned to it.
When it will reach 10 upvotes it will be added to our backlog and we will start discussing it. The system will be adjusted in time in accordance to the interest the channel will have. We might increase or decrease the upvotes threshold needed for a suggestion to be added to our to-do list.
Our views on METAGAMING
What is Metagaming? Metagaming is any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.
Metagaming is usually not explained in a game, although some games make exceptions and they introduce certain elements of metagaming as descriptive parts of the game (e.g: Overwatch Roles - Support/Damage Dealer/Tank etc.)
We are not against metagaming and all multiplayer games that have a high degree of strategy and tactics will eventually have you try to create optimized strategies in order to create a more reliable and safe game space for themselves.
Now, MINDNIGHT is not a game that was built with reliability in mind (we have built it specifically to create gameplay, ONLY out of dialogue and action deduction) - that is why many of you seek ways to create reliability and find step-by-step metagame strategies to obtain an advantage over other players that you encounter. To some degree that will always happen and some metagame rules will always exist, that we are even considering implementing in the game, including in the tutorial.
But, the reality is that more than often, some metagame rules unbalance the game and are a constant subject of harassment. We do not tolerate any kind of harassment and we have seen that some metagame rules came together with a lot of negativity in public matches, toxicity and bad image around our company and game.
This is why we wanted to open this discussion in blog posts and explain why certain metagame rules are in fact cheating, or they unbalance the game substantially, and discuss how we would like to tackle these mechanisms in order to shape MINDNIGHT into the experience that everyone wants. A safe, fun and scalable gameplay environment with balanced game sessions.
MINDNIGHT Development Goals
We were watching several weeks ago one of Mark’s essays on video game design, and there is a thing that Mark says in this video that really resonated with us as something that really is important for MINDNIGHT. Mark said - “Try not to discourage players to play in a certain way, but encourage them to play the way you envisioned”
https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8
We have looked long and hard at the bigger picture and really examined what our goals are with MINDNIGHT and how we can achieve them, before making any big changes. We now feel that we have a better understanding of what we want to to achieve and how to achieve it. We will share all details in these blog post series and await your feedback and opinions.
We can sum the development goals of MINDNIGHT as follows:
- We want to evolve MINDNIGHT into a game that emphasizes the importance of passive information and communication, rather the information that some players invent or exploit through metagame strategies.
- We want you to feel rewarded when you are nice to other players, non-toxic and overall focused on the match to communicate.
- We want you to not feel punished whenever you are playing in a particular style that might not be in line or synced with the other players in a game session
- We want you to not exploit a particular mechanic in order to gain advantage over other players, unless you are just better at communicating, deducing and manipulating
- We want you to have agency, but not be harassed by other players whenever you choose to do something in a particular way
- We want you to feel a sense of progression, but really not blame or rage whenever a game does not end with a Victory.
The game issues really end up to be a circle between three major problematic categories:
- Exploits and Metagaming
- Toxicity and Raging
- Motivation and Competitiveness
Exploits and Metagaming - There are several things that now players can do, but not all players are aware of them such as the Hacker Protocol, Honour Duels, Alpha/Beta Concepts, Node 1 Meta, Testing Bots etc.
Toxicity - Players get mad and toxic over primarily two reasons. One is for not following the exploits and metagame rules from above and the second is for not winning - which actually translates into not having the same playstyle and strategy like others.
Motivation and Competitiveness - The game cannot inherently be competitive due to the nature of the game and the math behind a game match. But most players think that it's competitive due to the way we framed the game with Ranks and Leaderboards. And we take full responsibility.
Conclusion - Players always want to win, thus they become toxic, thus they use exploits and metagame rules to gain an advantage because the game rules are naturally quite unreliable.
That is why we will address each aspect mentioned above, one by one, in this blog post and in future blog posts - with the objective to slowly but surely push some changes into the game. We will not get into details on how we want to solve all of this in this post - but we are quite sure we have found a way to adjust and evolve MINDNIGHT to serve the goals that we mentioned.
Bot Reading and Bot Exploits
Introduction
We will be starting with one of the most important issues that the game faces now, in order to slowly start aligning the game to the new direction.
We have introduced bots into the game primarily as a way to replace a disconnected player and have the game continue as seamlessly as possible for the rest of the players in the game session, without interruptions.
Our goal with the Bots was and still is to create a complex framework of artificial intelligence that tries to behave to their best ability to replicate human decisions in order to serve their objective. Either to not get caught as a hacker and to get into missions as an agent.
Bots have some patterns, because there are certain situations that they cannot accept or refuse certain missions because it doesn’t serve their objective. But - bots also have in some decisions a form of randomness in order to simulate humans unpredictable behaviors. We call it controlled randomness.
We never wanted to share exactly how bots work, because of obvious reasons - but many players have argued and complained that the bots became readable in time. Patterns became more and more clear for experienced players and this gave an unusual advantage to players that knew and knew how to exploit the system.
It is needless to say that we will never be able to make bots totally random, because well - humans are not totally random in this game - and that would only create more gameplay problems than solve them.
But - let’s not forget the main objective of bots. Replacing a disconnected player and continuing the game.
Some players or more specifically Agent players started abusing the bots behavior for information - according to experienced players, here's how the current behavior works:
- An agent bot is more random, it's the hacker bot that has a pattern.
- The hacker bot will always refuse a proposal with his hacker teammate, except if the proposal was a hammer or a reproposed hacked node or after two hacked nodes. To confirm this, players re propose a proposal that a hacker bot had refused, if he refuses again, that confirms the bot is a hacker & his teammate is in that proposal.
- If the bot does not always refuse a proposal with a certain player, then the bot is an agent.
This gives a great cheating advantage to agents.
Currently, abusing bots using the methods mentioned above, is considered a very discouraged metagaming.
Some players leave the game to intentionally abuse the bot behavior - usually to prove innocence - this is reportable & bannable. Intentionally leaving the game is not allowed, moreover this is a direct abuse of the game behavior, it is considered cheating and you should report it under cheating.
Well - frankly speaking - players wanting more reliable gameplay outcomes is the cause of the problem. Any way that a player can take advantage and win a game - is a good excuse for exploiting a mechanic. Making bots not have a ruleset, will make the bots have no value.
What are the consequences of this problem?
Whenever a bot is tested by agents, hackers are put into a significant unfair disadvantage
Significantly lowers the quality of matches, due to how reliable bot testing is sometimes.
We will try as much as possible, periodically - sometimes without notice to make the bots unreadable and non-abusable, but solutions and discussions will not be limited to that, we are open to different mechanics for disconnected players.
The next update will have changes in bots and we think that will make them non-abusable for a while.
That is why we want to propose the following solutions and we want your thoughts around them:
We are considering adding a feature when after a player disconnects a match, to let the players choose if they want to continue the match or not with a Bot replacement - while also making the match not count as a win, nor as a loss - if continued.
Changing their behavior periodically in order to not become abusable - but within a ruleset that is not 100% random.
You might say - make them completely random. There are pros and cons to that.
- Bots behavior is completely unreadable
- Hackers hesitate to hack when included with their hacker bot teammate. This is good because when bots are unreadable, they become agents’ disadvantage
- It becomes a great disadvantage for agents, because even if the bot is an agent, its complete randomness makes it difficult to convince it for their proposals and they can’t gain reliable information about its role.
- Agent bots can become the hackers advantage, by accepting their proposals or hackers framing the proposals.
That being said - because we want to ultimately address the disconnections issues - we want to go away from making Bots random, as it was proven in our tests that they are in their best form now - and they are trying to play as human as they can. We will just improve and change them periodically while considering other options to handle disconnections.
Let us know your thoughts around this and we will listen closely on all of our communication channels. Join our Discord to have the highest chances to have your voice heard.
Stay tuned - In the next blog post we will be talking about the next issue in line - Hacker Protocol.
Over and out,
MINDNIGHT TEAM
