This is also an integral part of the appeal of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Even if those games aren't mass market, the developers were clearly surprised by just how many people enthusiastically responded to being handed a game and told 'here, figure it out. we left you lots of clues. also, you'll die a lot.'

Demon Souls sold 1.7 million games, Dark Souls sold 2.4 million games, which puts it in the Top100 for its year:

http://www.vgchartz.com/yearly/2011/Global/

These games are surprisingly mass-market.

That's impressive, I didn't know they had sold so well.

What I meant by 'not mass market' was more the developers' reckoning of the game's appeal. In practice, a lot of people imported the game from Japan to play it in the US because they didn't even think it would get released here! Then, when it came out, IIRC sales dramatically outpaced the publisher's expectations and they had to rush to make and distribute more copies.

Given that Demon's Souls was conceived in Japan, I would describe it's mechanics as very fitting to the huge group of core-gamers there. The western success is surprising, I give you that, especially considering the rather meager marketing of the first.

There is plenty of exploration in modern MMO's if you sit at the top of the player curve. Unlike single player games they often have vary little documentation or handholding it's only the shear number of players that makes most secrets leak so fast and more importantly you dont't need to read all that player documentation of you don't want to.

A great example of this might be haste vs crit vs power. There are generally trade offs between them and the game in no way says which is more useful per point. In large part because the math depends on play stile, spec, and the dynamics of a specific fight. Still players often spend a lot of time trying different optomizations and building different simulations based on different assumptions. End result tens even hundreds of thousands of hours of experementation that ofen gets tossed out after each patch.

And because players will find this crap out on there own games have become vary vague with exactly how things work or what they changed. Aka "spell power less useful for ability X" which says vary little overall.

One of the nice things about not having documentation is that only those that take the time to explore and learn can exploit the feature. On the contrary, when documentation exists, not reading it would put you at a disadvantage.

> One of the nice things about not having documentation is that only those that take the time to explore and learn can exploit the feature.

Why exactly is this "nice", but having features that can only be exploited by grinding XP and equipment drops is horrible?

I mean, yes, exploration is more enjoyable than grinding, but isn't that already its own reward?

Why does it make a game better to reward one kind of massive time investment, but not another?

Nobody said anything about a massive time investment. When I said "take the time to explore and learn", I just meant somebody who does it, as opposed to someone who doesn't.

In my opinion, putting options in a game for people who want to discover mechanics on their own and be rewarded for it is appealing. It goes along with the hacker mentality.

It's a subjective opinion...you don't have to agree with me.

There is a huge difference between figuring out what the best balance of stats is for min-maxing compared to the actual exploration that takes place in EVE. Seriously, it's no comparison.

It took vary little effort to understand that eve wormholes are mass limited the popup even tells you when they are about to destabilize due to traffic. On the other hand figuring out the cap recharge equation was significantly harder and far more useful.

If anything the difference was fewer players cared about wormholes and people where far less interested in sharing info about them.

Just an aside - Fez and The Binding of Isaac are 2 recent examples of games with lots of hidden content. Nifflas' (http://nifflas.ni2.se/) also often have plenty of hidden stuff for the players to find out.

Of course, the rogue-like scene is also as strong as it ever was -- and it's definitely got a ton of hidden content/game-play mechanics.

I wish I saw more games like one Ragdoll Invaders, though.

The reason I say this is that much of the hidden game-play/mechanics was emergent from the simple basic game-play -- you controlled a ragdoll shooting and avoiding a series of progressively more difficult enemies.

You could use the physics to, for instance, somersault gracefully through oncoming bullets (reducing your surface area), keep your body tightly curled into a ball if you moved slowly enough, continue to play with just one arm (the other would continue to shoot) so you could make the decision to lose an arm in order to survive.

This struck me as being really cool, and I wish there were more games which did allow 'special moves' as a natural side-effect of the physics they were using.

This was one of the best things about the recent HN front-pager A Dark Room. It felt like everyone was figuring it out at the same time.

the little i know about MMO, I'm willing to bet money that all the reverse engineered rules were in some wiki in less than 5 hours.

They were not, I assure you. Indeed it was months to get to even partial documentation of the system publicly available. Tactics were refined, information spread, and some bugs were found and exploited#. Information is always a closely guarded secret in eve.

#negative penalties from the highest level of wormhole could be used along with player used module debuffs to reduce values below 0 - on an unsigned value which then reverted to being incredibly high.

Since everyone in EVE is primarily competing against each other, this type of information is often kept close to the chest and used as leverage against others.

No user's manual or documentation.

Hmm - sounds familiar.

Like God and real life?