No Pay to Win!

A Note About Premium Goods, Asymmetrical Matchmakers, and Fairness

In our Prelüde limited event you will have the opportunity to craft items that will give an advantage to you and your team in how fast they progress through StarGarden. What you can’t get (from any source) are things that will give you an advantage in battle that would be unfair within the parameters of the asymmetrical matchmaker.

We explain below how this magic is possible.

Prelüde gives our players a glimpse of how we are building StarGarden, which is a very different game than what has come before. That said, it is the product of a very logical evolution in gaming, with games increasingly designed to meet the needs of players. The focus in StarGarden is on positive social interaction. A sense of “fairness” is critical here. Unfair systems, like Pay to Win, lead to antisocial play spaces, so they don’t exist in our game. So how do we sell cool stuff that isn’t just cosmetic, and still make it all fair?

After the intense two years that Shokrizade spent working on Shattered Galaxy (Nexon, 2001), the first persistent progressive MMORTS, a lot was learned about balancing these huge projects. Shattered Galaxy had no matchmaker so much of the strategy players would engage in was to try to make unfair situations in order to win within the win/loss binary. Shokrizade began working on advanced gameplay and metagame solutions and was ready to deploy by the time Trion Worlds began working on a sequel named End of Nations. No agreement could be made and Trion was unable to complete the EoN design.

Soon after that, in 2013, Wargaming hired Shokrizade to be their metagame/economy designer across all their titles. Their World of Tanks game had a symmetrical matchmaker to keep battles “fair” but this made it very restrictive as far as what range of units could mix within one battle. This made it almost impossible to join a battle with your friends, and Wargaming knew that this was a big weakness of the design.

When Shokrizade designed the metagame for World of Warships, he was permitted to make the units unequal (Battleships and Carriers were more powerful than Cruisers and Destroyers), but both sides were still balanced with a symmetrical matchmaker. Prior to Shokrizade changing the design, all ships were balanced to be equal so that a Destroyer was as powerful as a Battleship. This change allowed for a much more realistic play experience, and some advances in the economy and business model. The result was both innovative and massively successful commercially.

For StarGarden, this next step in social gameplay technology is fully realized. Now not only can individual units vary (sometimes wildly) in power level in larger battles, but the overall team power levels don’t need to closely match. For an asymmetrical matchmaker to work it has to be married to a reward system that boosts the rewards for the underdog team, and the removal or at least softening of the win/loss binary. Thus a smaller team that performs above the expectation in that situation could receive greater rewards than the larger “winner” of that battle.

So if two teams in the same city wanted to have Tribe vs Tribe battles against each other fairly regularly, even if one team was ahead of the other, they can now do that with this technology. As the game progresses and StarGarden size caps increase, new recruits may often be tapped from other teams in the neighborhood, and these players won’t be strangers. Community is developed continually with challenging teams that may end up later being teammates.