Optimum Party Size

[Zwiebelchen]

Varies from person to person, but is based on the player's short-term memory. Very few players have trouble handling a party size of 5 or less, almost no one feels right managing 10 or more. The average person could handle a party of 7, but if you went with this several below-average players would feel off while playing; you don't want to design only for the top 70%. 5 or 6 is probably best answer from a design standpoint; I would have gone 5.

 

Can you give a research paper on this? Sorry, but I somehow doubt that there is any scientific evidence for this. Sounds like completely made-up.

 

The reason why a game would go with either 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 has nothing to do with people's memory, but very simple practical reasons based on genre:

Duo: typical co-op type games. Two is the most practical number for such games, as it's most likely scenario of having a friend coming over to your house. Having two friends come over to play games is much much rarer.

Three: typical action-type games with AI companions. Those are usually there for filling the other two roles of the holy trinity setup.

Four: this setup emerged from the restrictions of console game controllers, which mostly have buttons placed in groups of 4.

Five: this setup comes from early MMO days and is derived from the statistical distribution of holy-trinity roles in most player communities:

20% play tank, 20% play healer, 60% play DPS classes. So this became the standard of intended group setups for allowing maximum community contribution.

Six: this setup is a cRPG classic and most likely derived from a statistical analysis of the average player number in tabletop-game sessions. From all the setups above, it's probably the most arbitrary.

Eight and Sixteen: these setups are the go-to setups in Squad-based tactical games. It's based on early days of computer-gaming where memory was limited and maximum numbers were mostly determined by integer sizes as base-2 for easier computing.

 

 

On-topic: On BG2, I mostly played with a permanent group of 5. Not because of personal preference, but for effectivity reasons: it allowed for a temporary sixth member to complete NPC-specific quests to get more XP and items out of the game. Once I finished all the NPC-related quests with all 16 NPCs in the game, I usually didn't fill the last slot permanently as mostly the NPCs in question got outleveled already (So, the sixth slot almost always went to Sarevok or Imoen, which were the last two available companions by default).

 

 

In PoE, I see no reason not to use 6 party members, as the companion quests yield no significant rewards and the required XP to cap the game can be reached early no matter the number of party members.

 

I'd say this is a major balancing issue that should be adressed, but then again, we haven't seen any intel on possible expansion content anyway.

Edited April 20, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[Anaeme]

The party interactions are phenomenal when you have a full house of 6 characters...however when it comes to combat, i find that one party menber or the other is just standing there and not doing much because i forgot to micromanage

[scrotiemcb]

The party interactions are phenomenal when you have a full house of 6 characters...however when it comes to combat, i find that one party menber or the other is just standing there and not doing much because i forgot to micromanage

This is what I was talking about in terms of short-term memory. Most people can micromanage 6, but a statistically significant portion of the population won't.

 

Only a fraction of one percent of people have consistent issues micromanaging 5.

Edited April 20, 2015 by scrotiemcb

[scrotiemcb]

 

 

Varies from person to person, but is based on the player's short-term memory. Very few players have trouble handling a party size of 5 or less, almost no one feels right managing 10 or more. The average person could handle a party of 7, but if you went with this several below-average players would feel off while playing; you don't want to design only for the top 70%. 5 or 6 is probably best answer from a design standpoint; I would have gone 5.

Can you give a research paper on this? Sorry, but I somehow doubt that there is any scientific evidence for this. Sounds like completely made-up.

 

The reason why a game would go with either 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 has nothing to do with people's memory, but very simple practical reasons based on genre:

Duo: typical co-op type games. Two is the most practical number for such games, as it's most likely scenario of having a friend coming over to your house. Having two friends come over to play games is much much rarer.

Three: typical action-type games with AI companions. Those are usually there for filling the other two roles of the holy trinity setup.

Four: this setup emerged from the restrictions of console game controllers, which mostly have buttons placed in groups of 4.

Five: this setup comes from early MMO days and is derived from the statistical distribution of holy-trinity roles in most player communities:

20% play tank, 20% play healer, 60% play DPS classes. So this became the standard of intended group setups for allowing maximum community contribution.

Six: this setup is a cRPG classic and most likely derived from a statistical analysis of the average player number in tabletop-game sessions. From all the setups above, it's probably the most arbitrary.

Eight and Sixteen: these setups are the go-to setups in Squad-based tactical games. It's based on early days of computer-gaming where memory was limited and maximum numbers were mostly determined by integer sizes as base-2 for easier computing.

 

 

On-topic: On BG2, I mostly played with a permanent group of 5. Not because of personal preference, but for effectivity reasons: it allowed for a temporary sixth member to complete NPC-specific quests to get more XP and items out of the game. Once I finished all the NPC-related quests with all 16 NPCs in the game, I usually didn't fill the last slot permanently as mostly the NPCs in question got outleveled already (So, the sixth slot almost always went to Sarevok or Imoen, which were the last two available companions by default).

 

 

In PoE, I see no reason not to use 6 party members, as the companion quests yield no significant rewards and the required XP to cap the game can be reached early no matter the number of party members.

 

I'd say this is a major balancing issue that should be adressed, but then again, we haven't seen any intel on possible expansion content anyway.

The link to Wikipedia can take you to short-term memory studies. All I'm saying is that holding your party member's actions and status in memory makes for a better gaming experience than continuously pausing and reevaluating. It's still possible, but tedious.

 

You seem focused on genre conventions. The way we've done this before isn't necessarily the best way to do them. Question the status quo, and look to research on how human brains actually work to help determine what provides the best gaming experiences. (Of the numbers you listed, only "five" seemed to have any real thought behind its design... although one might ask why tank and healer seem much less sexy to the general populace, and what could be done to achieve 25/25/50.)

 

I highly recommend looking up Malcolm Gladwell on YouTube. It doesn't relate directly to the topic, but it's good for getting the right mindset.

Edited April 20, 2015 by scrotiemcb

[Crucis]

 

The party interactions are phenomenal when you have a full house of 6 characters...however when it comes to combat, i find that one party menber or the other is just standing there and not doing much because i forgot to micromanage

This is what I was talking about in terms of short-term memory. Most people can micromanage 6, but a statistically significant portion of the population won't.

 

Only a fraction of one percent of people have consistent issues micromanaging 5.

 

 

Ah, but the way to ease the micromanaging load is to not try to MM all 6 characters.  Try to have a couple of "fire and forget" low maintenance characters that you don't need to babysit every couple of seconds.  For example, (annoying pet aside) a ranger-archer can be fairly low maintenance in most battles.  As long as he's not shooting at charmed team mates, he can't really screw up much by targeting pretty much any enemy in range.  You can usually leave him to go about his business and pay attention to other party members, unless there's a specific enemy that you feel is critical that he targets.  A front line Fighter can often be "fire and forget" as well.

 

Some people may claim that this is boring.  But if you have trouble MM-ing all 6, why would it be boring to lighten the load a little with 1-2 low maintenance characters so that you can focus on the others?

 

Just a thought.

[Crucis]

Its obviously 4 vs 6 because those are the party sizes that CRPGs use. NWN and Dragon Age were dumbed down to just 4 party members, as are the latest spider web software games.

 

4 party members is lame because you need to always pick the same basic roles - healer, tank, offensive caster, weapon DPS. There's no room to try anything else.

 

I've always kind of thought that the same was true for teams of 6 as well.  That is, you'd have that same core of 4.  And then you add a couple of others to fill things out.  Perhaps a locks and traps rogue.  Perhaps a secondary spellcaster, such as a bard or druid or even a second mage.  Or whatever floats your boat.  The first 4 fill the critical roles, the other 2 flesh out the party.

[Zwiebelchen]

 

The link to Wikipedia can take you to short-term memory studies. All I'm saying is that holding your party member's actions and status in memory makes for a better gaming experience than continuously pausing and reevaluating. It's still possible, but tedious.

 

You seem focused on genre conventions. The way we've done this before isn't necessarily the best way to do them. Question the status quo, and look to research on how human brains actually work to help determine what provides the best gaming experiences. (Of the numbers you listed, only "five" seemed to have any real thought behind its design... although one might ask why tank and healer seem much less sexy to the general populace, and what could be done to achieve 25/25/50.)

 

I highly recommend looking up Malcolm Gladwell on YouTube. It doesn't relate directly to the topic, but it's good for getting the right mindset.

 

 

It's a known fact that most untrained humans can't memorize a number sequence longer than 6 ad hoc (hence why most PINs you have in RL either have only 4 or 5 digits). Telephone numbers are basicly "cheating" here, as some parts of the number are mostly static based on the location we live in, so our brain uses a different method of memorizing them.

However, this only applies to memorizing number sequences. There is hardly any correlation between this and memorizing anything in computer games, which have a strong visual feedback. Hence why I call bull.

 

Genre conventions aren't a bad thing. Conventions help you understand concepts and make your game self-explanatory. Imho, this is a trait that PoE lacks with all those "special flavour" mechanics like Engagement, DR and deflection and unintuitive stats.

Beneficial Genre conventions happen, when you read the name of something and instantly know it's purpose. You know a fighter is there to beat stuff and get beaten. You know a fireball is there to burn your enemies. Those are great genre conventions, as they immediately provide you with all the critical informations without having to read and internalize a tooltip.

That being said; Party size genre conventions are based on certain core game principles. There's not much to gain from going to far away from those. And the "MMO Five" dynamics won't be changed by making tanking and healing more interesting. In fact, there's a couple of games that tried that already, like TERA online. With active blocking and cross-hair aimed healing, healing and tank classes are far more interesting to play than in any other game. But also way way more difficult aswell. Which basicly brought the community balance back to 1/1/3.

Edited April 21, 2015 by Zwiebelchen