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[eclectocrat]

Scumming: the act of collecting easy rewards with no risks.

I'm on a mission to remove scumming of all kinds from my game. It's really hard. Scumming occurs anywhere an unlimited resource occurs. Limiting resources requires a lot of thought and balance work. Too many resources takes out all the challenge, too few and the game is just too hard. So placing unlimited resources at specific points of levels (points usually surrounded by very difficult areas) is a cop out which avoids balancing and promotes scumming.

I put a church in a town that heals your party every time you enter. Sounds like a nice respite from the monster infested forest, so nice in fact that I kept returning after every battle, even having to travel long distances. I scratched that church bonus. Now I've got to put a lot of effort into balancing how much healing there is in a procedurally generated level. On some generations it seems like fruit (healing) is plentiful, and on others it seems very scarce. Damn, maybe I should just let the church heal you.

How do classic games handle this? Aside from a team of japanese guys working long hours on balance, what techniques can be utilized? As far as I remember, in Zelda on SNES, if you leave a room and return, the pots do not regenerate their hearts. But of you leave the dungeon and return then they do, but the enemies also regenerate. In roguelikes, a food counter often keeps you from wandering too much. Hmm... what else... some JRPG's only allow you to use a savepoint once, if you want to save again then you've got to move forward.

It seems as though to prevent blatant scumming, you've got to have a significant barrier or penalty around unlimited resources, or some other way of dissuasion like a countdown or food meter. Significant is the key word. I hated ToEE because the temptation to sleep between every encounter to heal up was almost a no brainer. You might get ambushed in your sleep but most of the ambush parties were easy XP.

Aside from eliminating unlimited resources altogether, what ways can a designer prevent scumming?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

one idea is limiting the amount of resources you can carry. if, in a rpg, you have a dungeon that gives you a lot of items, for instance, you can limit how many you can carry out with you (either by weight or by slots, or both). in zelda it limited the number of bombs you can carry, as another example

[mikejkelley]

Here's the solution; rename "scumming" as something less pejorative.

[Dragonmaw]

Scumming is a valid technique is you want said resource point to be a continual marker for the player. For example, a checkpoint is a form of "infinite resource" (continually respawning with old data to attempt to tackle a challenge differently).

So if you want that church to be a "safe zone" for the player until they, for example, make it to the next church, then what you have is fine. If you want it to provide a short-term bonus, make it so that the first heal is free and subsequent heals cost currency. There are a million ways to approach such a situation.

[Mikademus]

Warning: you're about to be dragged into the old debate about trying to control the way the player plays and enjoys the game.

I got to say, though, that I too dislike the overgeneralised usage you make of "scumming" for what is normal and valid game mechanics.

That said, here's an attempt at something constuctive: what you need is negative feedback loops where the usefulness of something is reduced by an increasing cost of something else. For your church example, one good such negative feedback that might inspire you can be found in the "Infestation: Hall of the Goblin King" roguelike, where your god might be upset with you if you pray too much without having done Godly Deeds for him. Make it so that he might curse the player if he heals without really needing to with increasing severity the more often he does so, where a curse could be that shopkeepers say "you have the stigma of over-dependence, and I will charge double for you!".

[eclectocrat]

Thanks guys, let me try a revised definition.

Scumming: the act of interrupting ordinary game progression (ie, returning to an earlier level) in order to gain easy rewards with no risks. (ordinary game progression is a loose concept, but most people can recognize gross variations from the norm).

The thing that I'm trying very hard to avoid is tedium. Some games have a resource that's so tempting to use, perhaps even indispensable, because of the benefits, and yet very tedious to use. So in my case, the church offers such a valuable service in a game where HP are normally scarce, and yet in order to take advantage of the service you've got to make an uneventful and long journey. I like Mikademus' term of negative feedback loops. The exact nature of those loops are going to require some calibration to my particular game environment.

One of the factors in my loose definition of scumming is the power of the resource, or more precisely, the temptation to go to great trouble to exploit it. So for instance, in games that leave a lot of cheap loot lying around, you can come close to 'scumming' by picking up every item and selling it in town for a few more GP. True scumming (according to my definition), would be to go back to an easier level, or stand at an unchallenging spawn point for the express purpose of taking monsters mundane items. I think that the 'transmutation boxes' of some games like Diablo 3, that turn anything you put inside them into gold, exasperate the problem instead of fixing it. The temptation to grab every item and goldify it has skyrocketed because it just takes one extra click-drag.

Now this is where things get hairy. I have a friend who's a really good roleplayer, and every game he plays, he plays it true to a particular character. Exploiting the mechanics of a game are never a temptation for him, unless it's a temptation for his character. Everyone approaches scumming differently because they have various levels of commitment/patience to a game.

After much mulling, I think that all opportunities for scumming must give only marginal benefits, thus leaving room for creative play without unbalancing the game mechanics. it's fine if you want to do tedious things in a game, collect every twig or whatever, but the designer should not encourage boring activities through significant mechanical rewards.

[RCIX]

The simple solution then (as mentioned in at least one previous post) is to make sure there's no way to get infinite resources for free (or a static initial outlay). Design the combat mechanics such that you always take some form of damage from even vastly down-level monsters (or have those monsters drop nothing/insignificant quantities of any valuable material). Have all forms of healing cost something (perhaps in the Church example, maybe it has a small chance to be raided by bandits and you are dropped into an impromptu battle instead of getting healed?). Things like that.

[King Hadas]

Tedium itself is a heavy penalty. Most people wouldn't backtrack a long ways unless they absolutely had to. Most people won't do a tedious task over and over again unless they absolutely have to. Those who would, well, if that's how they want to play that's their business. Whatta ya gonna do? 

Also, on first seeing the term Scumming I thought you were describing the act of littering game levels with collectibles like coins and other baubles. Small, easy rewards with no risks.

[dustin]

This question just relates to your game, not scumming in general (did you just make up this term or have I just never heard it before?)

Is the game more fun when you can go back to the church every time (if you disregard how unfun it is walking all the way back to the church)?  It seems like then you might be looking at the problem wrong.  If the way you want to play the game is to heal after every fight maybe you should make a less tedious way of doing it.

[baconman]

Really think about if/how you could lose your game, and the appropriate level of penalty you want to incur. Also consider consequences of utilizing it - most games that have a mechanic like that tend to respawn all enemies obstacles by using it. If you're going to have something in your game, give it a real purpose; make it challenging enough to be worth considering a fresh retry (and not incredibly time consuming to pull that off, if you do).

If it's so favorable of a feature, just place more of them spaced out so that you don't have to trek all the way back to that one location; but far enough apart that getting from one to another is challenging but managable. Then you just counter-balance the CHARACTERS by limiting their maximum capacity. Although it would probably help a lot to know what kind of game this is, and how your life system works (HP? Health Meter/Icons? Extra Lives?)...

Even if you aren't scumming, good players have numerous methods of farming (I think that's the term you're really looking for here) - even where games like Metroid (OG) have no refill points; continual enemy-spawning points are frequently used to refill health and missiles, for instance. It's not totally effortless, and it's rather time consuming (and arguably boring) - but there's usually always a way.

[eclectocrat]

Scumming is a term that's loosely thrown around to indicate taking advantage of a mechanic to give a gameplay boost. I mostly hear it in the roguelike community. It's usually reserved for things which are tedious or time consuming. Save-scumming is when you keep reloading a game until you get the most optimal result from some encounter. Here's the definition from the ADOM site:

Scumming techniques are certain repeatable actions or strategies providing players with unusual in-game benefits, usually exploiting a bug or simply quirks of the game design that might not have been intended to be used this way, or to this extent.

It's not 'more fun' to heal between fights, but certain things are just compulsive. Taking advantage of a certain game design that provides huge benefits is hard to avoid, even if the designer (me) intended them to be used differently. I intended the church to be a temporary respite, not a permanent source of healing. I've 'solved' my particular problem by letting the cleric heal you when you first encounter him, and offering the reward of a wand of healing (with limited charges) for performing a simple quest. Thus the scumming problem becomes a resource management issue, and by making the healing portable I remove the annoyance of having to return to the church over and over again.

[dustin]

Ahh ok I definatly know the type of thing in rogue likes, I guess I just hadn't heard the term before.

Also, yeah if it's not fun but it is powerful it needs to be changed.  I read a good article about how players will use the most powerful tactic even if that tactic ruins the fun.  You expect it to happen in competitive games but the study found it even in non competitive games.  Players would spam 1 overpowered move even though it was described as being less fun then not using the 1 overpowered move and instead using the other weaker moves.

[baconman]

I thought "scumming" (save-scumming in particular) was where you take a game, save it, copy the saved game (because permadeath in Rogue then deletes it - in fact, even LOADING the saved game does that sometimes), as a permadeath workaround. Many "hardcore" players became so because this allowed them an expedient way of dealing with unfortunately-generated levels or n00b mistakes.

Which is different than repeatedly applying something simple (which IMHO, would be more akin to farming or spamming). Either way, I'm glad to hear you've struck your balance.

[Kapser]

I guess if you want absolutely no way for the player to be scumming, you don't mind as much of getting the player in a progression stopper situation where he can't win like in a roguelike.

Only solutions I can think of are either having a time limitation,  like every time the player sleep is another day and it can have consequences on his objective, story, seasons, age,ect. Or you make it cost money which is hard to get. You could also have the church cost more money or heal less when you over-use it, or resting not healing as much when you're hungry. I don't know how your game works, but maybe you can alternate the church/HP with whatever other thing the player will need to survive (like food, potion shops or gold) and encourage the player in moving foward. You can make some ressources depletable.

For example, in FF4 you try to manage your potions so you can reach the next save point. However not only you don't know if it's closer than actually coming back to the last one, but if you move back you might not have enough potions to go all the way again to the next -village where you can buy potions.
Or in minecraft you need food to go into an adventure, but if you hunt too much you might kill all the animals near your home and run out of food.

[Fallsburg]

Well, as you said, most roguelikes make sure that there is a resource that limits the player that isn't available in infinite amounts. 
Here are some options:
1) The church will heal you, only if your deity is sufficiently happy.  Your deity is only happy if you smite the evil-doers.  e.g. You can only heal if you have killed a sufficient number of monsters.  This might be too hard on the player, but it removes the kill a monster, go heal, repeat.
2) The church can heal your body, but does nothing to sate your hunger.  Standard RL procedure.
3) Remove the church.  The player can pray to heal, but this takes time, so they can't do it in the middle of battle.  Also the 1 & 2 can modify this.
4) Churches aren't an infinite resource.  You have to pay, or they are a one-shot use, or something.

[rek]

It would seem to be there are two types of "scumming" (awful word) here – resource (HP potions, bombs, rupees, and so on) and mechanic (save points/save states, level access, and so on).

The solution to the former seems simple enough: resource abundance can be tuned directly to the player's status. For example: Link has two of nine hearts full, so the likelihood of heart refills appearing in the next pot/bush/enemy is really high, plateauing when he's at five full hearts, and then decreasing again. At, say, seven of nine full, the appearance of a refill would be at its absolute lowest or completely random. This isn't to say there should always be a Blue Shell for the loser in 8th place though – that's rewarding the player for sucking.

This can be tweaked according to the needs of the area/dungeon as well. If you're expected to beat the boss with fire arrows, arrows and magic potion abundance will skew higher than elsewhere. (I wouldn't be surprised to find this is more or less how it's done in many games.) Keep it tuned though, because beating the player over the head with reminders of how important arrows are in this dungeon by giving them more arrows than they're able to use cheapens the experience and diminishes the challenge.

Mechanic scumming is another matter entirely, and dealing with it may require rethinking key parts of the game. I don't think anyone really considers restarting from a save point because you failed to be a problem, but some games seem to and will halve your HP, empty your wallet, leave your items scattered where you died, etc, when you respawn. Again, not a big deal and it teaches the player there are still consequences. Having access to earlier levels with enemies that are now easy to beat and flush with rewards can be dealt with by treating it from the resource angle: factoring in the player party's levels, treating XP as a resource that influences monster encounter frequency (a level 3 player will encounter as many as 15 Green Slimes here in Newcomer Fields, but a level 9 player will only encounter two at most, frex). Or by changing the mechanic, cutting the player off from those levels completely.

In the example at hand, you could change the mechanic: healing isn't free, or it isn't complete, or it's limited in some other way; or you can treat it like a resource that is only useful or available to those who really need it.

[DjangoDurango]

Tedium itself is a heavy penalty. Most people wouldn't backtrack a long ways unless they absolutely had to. Most people won't do a tedious task over and over again unless they absolutely have to. Those who would, well, if that's how they want to play that's their business. Whatta ya gonna do?  

This is true. The original Pokemon had a feature very similar to your church in the pokemon graveyard tower. There was a square you could walk into and it would heal your entire team for free without even making you go through the long (or rather, long when you had to read it every time you wanted to heal) dialogue at the centers.

But it was on the second or third floor and you had to deal with being accosted by ghost pokemon the whole way to get to it. In my own experience, it was wonderful when you were actually in the Tower for that part of the game because you may be getting your shit roont by the ghosts since there weren't a lot of pokemon up to that point that were good for fighting them, but it was too much of a pain in the ass to use regularly after you'd done all you had to there.

Especially since Pokemon also had centers in nearly every town that would also heal your team for free.

Is it still scumming if you recognize and embrace the reason why a player might return the church instead of trying to thwart it?

[baconman]

Pokemon is ridiculously forgiving if you know how to play it right. And it constantly spells out how to do that for you. Only major encounters or really long caves have ANY chance of whiting you out, unless you really suck at managing your money and resources - which is quite difficult to spend in any way and NOT manage well enough to get through. Even the chances of a type-themed "Gym Master" taking out your team of six with their team of (3, at most) is completely ridiculous.

It is a valid example, if that's the level of difficulty/forgiveness you're going for, and it is something fairly common that can be designed around (lots of games feature save + refill points). But I dunno if it's the right one.