On Shacknews there is an interesting article summing up talks given by Rob Pardo and Sid Meier. The topic this time was about math and player psychology. More specifically, it’s all about how the player feels rewarded or punished based on how the game (and its math) treat them. To sum it all up, players in both Civ and WoW were feeling like they were punished because the numbers weren’t always working out in their favor. Sid changed the math in his game to give players better odds and Blizzard tricked players into thinking they were getting more experience because the numbers they could see stated they were being rewarded, and the numbers they couldn’t see nullified the whole thing (rest exp).
In both cases, and in all cases these days really, players just want to be rewarded. The debate of reward vs. punishment is really quite brutal with camps on both sides shouting which they favor more and why. I really do like Blizzard’s method of making the player think they were rewarded while giving them no additional reward at all. Sid’s method actually changes the gameplay instead of a behavior. The psychology behind the entire situation where players want to feel completely rewarded all the time and want no form of punishment is one of the biggest reasons why games, namely MMO’s, are headed into a drab and shallow existence.
Developers need to focus on making rewarding the player a more dynamic and psychological experience and players need to want punishment/consequence. That sounds odd, but if players can accept that consequence and negative only reinforce the positive then the developers would have an even easier time creating rewards that were meaningful enough to make the player forget about and stop focusing on the punishment. Right now players are so focused on always being rewarded that they are actually forgetting about the reward altogether and only want to focus on the negative and how terrible it is for getting in the way. It’s a vicious circle. Like the article says, players are happy to accept the math when it works in their favor but when it doesn’t work out for them they freak.
In a MMO that I’m currently designing it’s important for me to get players to accept consequences for their actions — both positive and negative. It boils down to choices. I want players to see the positive and the negative outcomes before choosing, yet get them to actually choose a negative outcome. A lot of this works into the skill system and how players are forced to specialize. It’s also built into the death penalty and experience bonus system as well. There’s also the example of the quester not getting drops they want, when they want them. There’s a two pronged problem here. The psychology of the player is all off but also the game is designed poorly because the player doesn’t want to work for something and can’t appreciate the outcome. I’m working on designing my MMO such that the player will want to work towards something because in doing so they are increasing the value of their own accomplishments. That’s a fairly basic concept which has become alien in MMO’s.
For now, I would encourage you to think about how you react to situations where you’re not always winning or being rewarded. No one can win all the time. The chance to lose makes striving for victory worth it. It applies to so many things in MMO game design and is at the root of so many complaints, yet people keep complaining and keep wanting instant and constant rewards without any thought to how living in the moment ruins the big picture.
March 15th, 2010 at 7:39 pm
The game needs to be about the game and not the rewards. WoW’s major motivating factor is items, not playing the content. The problem is content is always finite and players need something else to drive them. Blizzard has realized this and changed how WoW works based on it.
Just playing the game, regardless of item rewards, should be the reason to play it.
March 15th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
The secret to punishment is to ensure it is part of the environmental ecosystem, not something prefabricated to ensure a negative outcome. In a sandbox ideal I have the player experiences negative consequences as part of their experience of the game, given certain choices, but not as an ethereal and false experience added on to accommodate a design goal, such as hours played to end-game or whatever. For example, purgatory (Allods) or exp death penalty (EQ) are outside the MMO world environment and added in to accomplish slowing the player in given situations. In UO however, running back to your corpse as a ghost and risking losing your items was much more exciting, part of the game world, and not pre-fabricated as some “other” ethereal effect. It had a built in negative (time to run back to healer, and back to your stuff, and the horror of being a ghost and watching someone find your stuff and only being able to say “ooooooo”. It also gave the player some control over the experience in what way they ran back, the path they choose, who say you naked at the town and followed etc. Negative outcomes should occur as a natural consequence of the gaming environment, not as a “other world feature” to achieve a design goal. Design should be focused on maintaining the integrity of the game world, not of the developers opinions on consequence.
March 15th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
“No one can win all the time”
A fact that causes a lot of conflict in games that provide both PvE and PvP action, like most MMORPGs. Since, in PvE, you _can_ win all the time – and many players expect to! But in PvP, it’s hard to get around the fact that there are winners and losers. And if you try to get around that, you end up doing something like rewarding loss (see e.g. WoW’s battlegrounds) which causes its own problems.
March 15th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
This is one of the reasons I love games like Diablo/Torchlight with hardcore mode. Hardcore mode is extremely high risk, and the reward in game isn’t really anymore than the normal game (the items are the same, the game is the same), but the feeling of accomplishment when you achieve things in Hardcore mode is so much more, and of course the inevitable death is always going to be rough, but overall the experience is always so much more intense and worth it.
Its not really “punishment” per se, I know I am going to die eventually when I make the character, so its not a punishment in the determent sense, I guess. Its certainly a very harsh negative consequence for making a bad choice or mistake though.
One of the reasons I’ve all but quit MMOs at this point is basically like Penny Arcade said recently: http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/807503965_rBNbP-L.jpg
March 15th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
@Mahlah: Fantastic example with Hardcore mode. You’ve pretty much nailed what I’m getting at here and how a negative can make something so much more worth it.
And yeah, that Penny Arcade comic is great. That’s another point altogether though which I’m trying to formulate into a post. It’s not about the GAME anymore, it’s about some meta-system within a game.
March 15th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
@Keen that’s a good point. For instance right now I’m playing WoW just to hit 80. I’ve seen most the normal Wrath dungeons and I’ve seen most the IC ones on my priest. I just want him at 80 before the next expansion, which is sad.
March 15th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
This reminds me of the whole Permanent Death for Jedi’s back in the (Good) ole’ days of Star Wars Galaxies. As one of the original Jedi during that phase when death mean’t erasing your (Jedi) character, I was always leaning towards keeping that mechanic. Why you ask? It gave you a sense that the saying of “with great power comes great responsibility” was actually true and that instead of running in guns (sabers) ablazing, you felt your life in the game was always at the end. It gave me the feeling of passion for my character and a trust that no other game has EVER accomplished in the friends that you kept.
However it being that I was finally assassinated by a friend of mine, it was probably the greatest MMO experience for me to date. To know that everything you worked for could come to an end the second I mess up just gave me a feeling of importance.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
To Blizzard’s credit, they’ve also done the exact same tweak with randomness as Sid Meier did. When you’re doing a collection quest, the game increases the odds of the quest item dropping every time it doesn’t drop, resulting in at least one guaranteed drop every X kills.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Now, I know this argument is all but played, but I think this more pertains to the casual v hardcore in today’s gaming. Not so much in the “elitist” or “carebear” sense, but more in time of involvement. Generally, in today’s society, we’re raised on the ideal of.. if you do something.. you should be rewarded for it (i.e Time is money). A casual gamer wants their rewards now because they don’t have the amount of time it would take to get them otherwise. Also, those are the majority these days. So, it really is a necessary evil that each game should possess to be truly accessible to everyone.
The days of raiding for weeks and possibly even months at a time to get your reward were fun.. for a while. However, if it comes to spending those weeks and months on end to get a virtual item.. or doing what needs to be done else.. I think we all know the answer. People want to be able to come into a game and spend a couple of hours and feel like they’ve gotten somewhere. Can you really blame them? You have to realize. A timesink alone can be a punishment.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
The point of an RPG (to me at least) is supposed to be that the ‘failures’ and ‘mistakes’ of your character are still a part of the growth of the character.
Learning from mistakes. Isn’t that the way it actually works, in life and within gameplay?
If every experience is a success, victory is hollow not just because it was too easy, but because the feedback loop hasn’t led you to actually learn anything.
Progression.
Overall, I think both approaches are flawed and while I have great respect for both designers, there’s too much math at work here. It’s a geek’s dream eh, to solve everything mathematically? This problem doesn’t need a different formula to solve it, it just needs to get itself onto the proper paradigm.
March 16th, 2010 at 2:31 am
You are writing a MMO ? Congratulations. For me I would try something simpler first like finding a cure for cancer…
It should be very interesting to know your design process (i.e. are you starting by the maths, or the concept, do you plan to use a framework etc…)
Good luck to you
March 16th, 2010 at 5:13 am
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2157/soapbox_why_virtual_worlds_are_.php
The problem is that every clueless noob nowadays wants to be rewarded for being such a disgrace.
Bartle forgot one thing: EVE was never very newbie friendly. But it really had and has longterm potential that still sucks new players in.
Games do not get better if player wishes compromise design too much. And actually, good games make players happy in the end, not short term appeasement.
March 16th, 2010 at 6:22 am
I was always a fun of hidden punishment. You can make death mean nothing in terms of loss except time it take to get back and damage your death does to achieving overall objective.
Think about game like Team Fortress or for mmo example take DAOC. On death you lost nothing except chance to earn RP if you were alive and whatever damage it did to your side to holding a keep or losing a relic.
March 16th, 2010 at 6:50 am
Very interesting post. This is a topic I’ve been discussing a lot lately with my gaming friends. It seems the older we get the more instantly we wish to have our gratification. This breaks down to two things which have controlled our game choices lately:
1. The new MMORPGs feel like waste of time as one needs to play at least weeks in order to reach the endgame and start playing the game for real. At least this is how it feels. The leveling process is most of the time just something one must do because it is part of the MMO experience. Lately we’ve been choosing games like Left 4 Dead instead, as we can start playing immediately on the “top” level.
2. The rewards offered by MMOs are based on players need of pimping his character. Getting experience or better items. The sooner the games evolve into a direction where the players can have a real effect on the world, the better. To begin with one could have a political system, where the players choose the kings and the kings really have an effect on economy, power given to the others, wars, etc. A living breathing world, where the players have a big responsibility of creating the story. Maybe even model for character aging and family creation.
PvP in MMOs resemble sports more than war, as in the worst case scenario you just lose and get less points. Thats it. I’d love to see PvP which has a meaning. If someone would implement systems for raiding the opposing sides banks and a possibility for real territorial fights it would be much more interesting. Also the PvP systems should be steered into a direction where strategies and tactics play much bigger part (combine this with the political system please) and zerging just doesn’t work.
Give us truly unique items which cannot be bound to a character. Give us a PvE where the monsters don’t just spawn after five minutes (and quests where one must do something else than kill 10 monsters), give us world events which really shape the world and give us the players power over the events. And give us PvE (or gamemaster) controlled bad guys, who are unique, near impossible to kill even with every player on the server combined, who play an active part in world politics.
This way the game would create great stories, and I believe that great stories and to be able to be part of them are the greatest reward there can be.
Ok, I know I’m wishing for a lot. But SOMETHING should evolve in MMOs soon. Now everybody’s just doing WoW all again with a bit tweaked graphics.
March 16th, 2010 at 7:34 am
@longasc “http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2157/soapbox_why_virtual_worlds_are_.php”
man, I read that whole article, finding the entirety of it insightful. Then I realized it was written in 2004, the month that world of warcraft launched. That hammered me. that was written before the first wow-derivative bubbled to the surface. the past 5 years have certainly proved him prophetic.
I believe I am now inconsolably depressed.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:30 am
I find 15 minutes of FoD after being ganked by a gang of ??’s with a banner while questing inspiring; thank you sir may I have another?
March 16th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Wow (and I mean the exclamation, not the MMORPG), I was thinking about that just a couple of days ago, about how I felt unrewarded with the MMOs I tried lately. I said unrewarded but in a different way than the one presented there, to me, being rewarded does not necessarily mean getting something better, but getting something every now and then. I’ll try and explain myself better with an example:
The game I felt most rewarded by EVER was Diablo II (Yep, Blizzard’s again); that game was so brilliantly balanced that they had no need of loot tables, every mob could drop everything, there was just a level interval for the dropped items. They coupled it with a perfect (IMHO) quality and enchant system.
85 / 90 % of mobs dropped something, 80% of those dropped items but most of them dropped pure crap (crude, broken, normal or low enchanted items), the rest dropped something good but, again, most of them dropped something for other classes.
There was just a little more than slim chance to get something that was for your class AND better than yours and that chance continued to get lower as you leveled because your equips would get better.
STILL, seeing something “unexpected” to drop was already a reward, you knew that possibly every mob you downed could drop something good for you and that was a BIG incentive to continue playing.
In modern MMOs, 90% of the drops are money and (maybe) some collectible leftover which is always the same over and over, plus there are semi-fixed loot tables so that, with some insight (that pops out in wikis very quickly), you already know beforehand what to expect from a certain mob.
Back when I played WoW I used to check every now and then what the mobs I was killing could drop and most of the time I was disappointed to know that, even if I was REALLY lucky, nothing that could drop out of those mobs was even remotely useful to me. That was a HUGE turn off for me, especially if the quest/farming session was long.
For comparison, i felt more rewarded from mining than mob killing because, from a certain level on, you could randomly find blue gems (even if, if you ask me, that drop rate was a bit high).
In the end, the probability to get something good for you may even be the same but long sessions of absolutely nothing are, to me, boring and unrewarding.
March 16th, 2010 at 9:11 am
I forgot a point:
as for the quest items, you actually have different options at hand:
- ask for more instead of lowering the drop rate
- keep the rate low but allow mobs to drop more than one
- make them drop by harder mobs (bigger version of the normal mobs or groups of the same mob).
etc. etc.
Players may not know/care about math but you can play with it so that even if the result is the same, the players will perceive a better probability towards them (like WoW’s rest exp “bonus”).
March 16th, 2010 at 10:42 am
On the topic of the rest XP bonus. DAOC had 2 other bonuses. First was for groups of mobs. If you killed 4 at the same time(linked mobs) you would get a sizable bonus. Second was for mobs that were not killed for a while, basically if you killed a mob that was not killed in certain time window you would get a bonus (this was to promote people moving around instead of camping one spot). I remember soloing as Runemaster and lookin for those special areas to collect as much bonus as I could.
March 16th, 2010 at 10:46 am
Yeah, I dunno if you’ll ever be able to change human nature. This is some pretty deeply embedded biological response to override.
Think of it this way: suppose you’re making a single player game. You can save anywhere in it. How do you create a punishment in that game that someone won’t simply reload to avoid? You can sort of do it with long term consequences, but hurt someone too hard for something they did 5 hours ago and they’ll quit in disgust.
I’m aware that there are people who aren’t like this, who play hardcore mode in games, etc, etc. Thing is, there aren’t enough of you. Or rather, there are way less of you than the people who just want to win with the illusion of a challenge. You can expect a niche-targeted game or two, but the businesses are going to go where the money is.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Moon, I would respond like this: it’s a f’ing video game. You want challenges and a sense of accomplishment, go learn to play the guitar or join a softball team or something.
This is like people bitching that Monopoly is designed for noobs; it’s a game. Most people don’t get their self-esteem from games. People who aren’t deriving a sense of accomplishment from a game aren’t interested in redoing 5 hours of gameplay cause they turned left instead of right. They don’t want to lose all the gear it took them months to earn, or even the character itself, because of a lag spike or cause they just straight up screwed the poch. And that is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. The problem here is not noobs— it’s that most people don’t find the idea of having weeks or months of work wiped away cause they aren’t leet fun. That’s not laziness or stupidity— it’s a rational decision not to spend money and time doing a recreational activity they find boring and frustrating and unrewarding. The fact that some tiny portion of gamers WANT these horrible things like permadeath and gear loss is fine and all— but that doesn’t mean you get to demand that everyone else play your game. If you can’t find enough people on the internet to make a viable MMO, then that’s your problem, not the worlds.
I think the problem is that the hardcore guys want the graphics and the player base that comes with popular games, but doesn’t want to either pay $50 a month or put up with the crappy Darkfall style graphics that would come with a high quality niche mmo. Hows that for the problem? Hardcore gamers, you can have hard, cheap, or pretty. Pick two. Stop whining you can’t get all three.
March 16th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Good article – it is very true but what I have found is that as a developer you need to force negative experiences on players – you cannot ask “would you guys be cool with that?”
Games need potential negative experiences or else your positive experiences are just shallow and meaningless. Without being able to being screwed, you cannot experience the sweet taste of victory.
The problem is if you ask players about this, many will cry and whine about the potential implementation of something negative or difficult. It is as if you were to go around to people and ask them…would you like to pay more taxes for the benefit of the country…and most people when directly confronted with the potential loss of $500 a month would tell you to go to hell. Some will agree to it (the democrats) and that is why democrats are hardcore and republicans are carebear and weaksauce.
Asking people to accept something negative is usually a bad idea…as a DEV – just force it onto players and the earlier the better. It is better to start tough and ease up.
March 16th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Few examples of negative rewards:
- WoW from Vanilla to BC and its new degenerating stat rating system (level up and stats are worth less).
- Arena and +dmg, +crit, +haste …. then introduction of resilience.
- Aion’s enchantment failures & gem slot wipes(drove the economy wild but made finally finishing your gear enhancements so satisfying)
- Always considered WoW gear sets to be negative reinforcement since I never liked the stats on my class gear, but wanted set bonuses.
- I like Aion’s rez-stone idea … you pay for the ability to res in a reasonable place rather than scatter your entire group on a wipe.
- Instance lockouts heightening importance of performance.
- Multiple-boss encounters where kill order determines loot.
- Crafting that requires parts to be crafted first
- Here’s one …. Disenchantment!
March 17th, 2010 at 6:35 am
WTB Zombie MMO where the negative is the reward
March 17th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
If WoW had a “Hardcore” mode for the PvE content would I play it? Would anyone else?
If I did I wonder how much that would change the game? Hmmmm.
I’d probably do it. I loved the Hardcore Diablo 2…but then I died at that big worm that lagged when you went in the cave. ahahhaha….. Moment of silence for that keyboard!
March 17th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
You do realize that WoW does have a “Hardcore” mode for it’s endgame PvE content, right? It’s called “Heroic”, which makes everything “Hard Mode”. Which are actually pretty damn difficult.
March 17th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Well there is a fairly well established precedent that you don’t need to have a game that rewards you over time to keep the people coming. You just need to have the occasional reward worth it, even if it rarely happens. Basically this is how any profitable gambling establishment works. Yet even knowing that over time, the probability is against you, people still play.
This is partial the reason why I rarely PvP in MMOs. Many of them have harsh penalties to the looser, with little (or no) reward to the winner.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Shadrah,
While I tend to agree with you simply saying WoW has hard mode doesn’t completely explain the problem. Alot of people don’t have the time to commit to a full time raiding guild. People don’t pug the hard stuff, they pug the easy raids assuming you have a gear score high enough to make the encounter more or less obsolete.
So when people say that WoW isn’t hard, it is more that the parts of WoW they are able to access aren’t hard. I think that is very true. If you only play WoW 1-2 hours a night the game offers very little challenge. You don’t have enough time to commit to any sort of arena team or raiding guild.
When compared to as Howdy Doody brought up Diablo 2, or Borderlands, you can play on the hard modes no matter how many hours a night you play because you don’t have to worry about with logistics before attempting the challenging content.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I can see that, too, actually. Which was the basis for a previous argument of mine on the forum. About anyone who does any real competitive playing needing to spend a significant amount of time in game to accomplish such a goal. Which.. in all actuality.. tends to leave the casual gamer sitting in the dust wondering just where the fun is supposed to be. That’s why I like a game like WoW, for instance. It allows you to spend minimal amounts of time and play catch up. While, you can’t hand the best. Putting in maybe an hour or two a night can at least put you onto a partially competitive level to be able to enjoy yourself once more.
I think that’s something that most MMOs are missing. The accessibility. Highly apparent in most of today’s F2P games. Where time/cost really doesn’t come to an equal ground. Or rather, time/benefit doesn’t. However, it most F2P that gap is even larger. Simply because, in most F2P cases, it’s fairly common to pay for boosting your character. Some of the more notable F2P today show it quite well. Runes of Magic being a prime example. Where spending a buck makes you amazing, and spending hours on end and possibly even weeks makes you partially competitive.
March 17th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
@Shadrah
WOW doesn’t have a hardcore mode, it has a hard mode and it only has a ‘hard’ mode for 10 man and 25 man dungeons. There are no real penalties for failing in these dungeons, you don’t lose loot, you don’t go down in level, all that happens is you have to pay a bit of gold for repair (earning gold is nothing in wow crack now) and I think you get locked out after x number of attempts. For those that aren’t interested in 10/25 man raids, there is no ‘hardcore’. The WOW open world area (which seems to have been forgotten about) have no hard areas. And the ‘Heroic’ modes of Warcraft are just a another gear grind, ‘so you completed ICC with 232 gear? now that you’ve got 245 gear you can try the next level, then you can do it again with 246 gear level, then the next level with 247 gear level’.
March 17th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
That’s because WoW isn’t about the middle of the game. It’s about what you do at max level. The middle is strictly for leveling and learning your class to an extent. Faulting a game because it doesn’t make the learning curve incredibly steep is not a reason to down it. The game wouldn’t still be as strong as it was if it wasn’t a good game. If you want difficulty while you’re leveling, then PvP. How difficult do you honestly think a game will eventually get that has a set of actions that any NPC you come across will take no matter what?
What’s challenging is learning how to develop your character to the fullest of it’s potential. Which is the very meaning of progression. Also, the lockouts are a pretty steep penalty. Seeing as you get a small amount of them per week. It slows down progression and forces you to do better each week to complete content in any reasonable amount of time. That’s a negative in and of itself that offers pretty great rewards for continuing to get better (i.e The more attempts you have left when you complete a dungeon in a lockout period, the better your rewards at the end).
Other than that, it has a 10 minute death penalty if you rez without running back to your body. Which could take up to 10 minutes given where you are, might I add. There are plenty of penalties. Deleveling and losing experience are not penalties. They’re just F2P mechanics designed to take your money.
March 17th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
- ‘That’s because WoW isn’t about the middle of the game’
So the 4 continents exist because…. I gather you’ve had a chat with GhostCrawler and other devs at Blizz and they told you this? I don’t suppose you could point me to the blue post on the blizz forums, something along the lines of ‘we only had an open world because so you could spend 60-80 grindy levels learning how to play your character’?
If all Warcraft was about was the end game, then you’d have one city/chat room and just a bunch of portals, then Blizzard could rename the game to guild wars (at which point you stop being an MMO and start being a singleplayer/multiplayer game with a chat room).
And if Blizz weren’t about the ‘open world’ they wouldn’t be rebuilding it for Cataclysm, the next expansion would just be a new set of portals in Dalaran leading to the 10 new dungeons.
- ‘What’s challenging is learning how to develop your character to the fullest of it’s potential’
Paladin Tanking: press buttons 1, 2,3 then keep rotating 4 and 3. Yep that takes 80 levels to learn.
10 min death penalty – which I only use if I’m really too lazy to take 30sec to run back to my corpse, then I hop on a flight while I go to the bathroom, to burn out the 10min debuff, then do 3-4 daily quests to pay for the repairs. I don’t understand how this is punishing.
I confused about how you are developing your character? What exactly differs your troll elemental shaman wearing his tier 9 gear in his cookie cutter spec/glyphing from the tauren elemental shaman wearing his tier 9 gear in his cookie cutter spec/glyphing. How has your character developed?
I don’t see how Deleveling and losing experience are directly related to F2P games, are you saying that you can’t have these mechanics in a subscription game?
When I used to play EVE Online, that had Punishment and Reward, I remember having a real sense of fear when another player warped into the same space as me and alerts were flashing as they targeted me. All my hard work for the last hour about to be blasted apart, and the relief I felt when I managed to jump out to the safety of the Space Station. Something I’ve never felt in my years of WowCrack. Even in EVE’s PVE you can be outgunned and have your expensive Spaceship blasted to bits by an NPC ship, where as ‘Oh No I got killed in WowCrack, looks like a 30sec run to my corpse!’
March 17th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
The 4 continents exist because it’s a part of Warcraft Lore for them to be there. They want you to get a sense of the lore, but if you think in any way that that game focuses on the center and not the end. Well, you’re really not playing WoW properly. Tell me. What’s the point of spending months at a time just to level in a game? Hm? Where’s the fun in taking forever to get to endgame content in a PvE game? Especially when grind is incredibly monotonous.
Playing classes are easy? Sure they are. Playing one correctly is not, however. I can lay my face on the keyboard with most classes and prolly do something. However, I can not sit there and spam buttons and do those things effectively. It’s called learning how to play a game. Learning what to do in a given situation. Do you know what cookie cutter builds are there? So that people can use them as reference points. Anyone with half a brain will actually cater their character to their personal playstyle. Not someone elses.
So, because in EVE you can lose an hours worth of work that’s hardcore? No, that’s just idiotic. Why should I be subjected to wasting hours of my life away for all of my work to very possibly be for nothing? That’s more than a negative. That’s a reality and that’s not why we play videogames. If I wanted it to work like the real world.. Guess what.. I would play Life. Where there are no respawns.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
So I’m still waiting for your link to the blue post where Blizz says ‘yep it’s all about the end game raiding treadmill’.
‘Playing classes are easy? Sure they are. Playing one correctly is not’
I can max dps with 2-3 buttons and no effort on my pally, I’ve known hunters that used to be the highest dps in the guild and they had macro’d their attacks to the mouse scroll button.
Grinding raids differs little from grinding open world content, it’s still a grind, I’ve raided since Vanilla WOW and it can get very grindy.
On what basis do you argue that someone is ‘not playing wow properly’ can you point me to the this definition? an official statement from Blizzard that says ‘this is how you are meant to play WoWcrack’. Some people play WOWCrack FOR the leveling, not for end game raiding, some people play low level twinks, I know some people that just like to play the auction house market. Other people play Arena matches or PVP.
EVE not hardcore? lol
March 18th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
So, because you used to be able to chain macro abilities together and spam them like someone on a forum told you to that makes the game easy? Well, seeing as you can’t do that anymore I’ll just leave you to that fantasy.
I have a Paladin, level 80. I know what it takes to play the class properly. Sorry, but laying my face on three buttons didn’t cut it.
It is all about the end game. Why do you think there’s as much, if not a little more, content at max level as opposed to the entire leveling process? It’s like two completely different worlds. Also, news flash, Arenas? They are the “end-game” for PvPers. Hence them not being ranked and whatnot until max level. So, that only reinforces what I’ve already said. Twinks? Do you know what twinks are? They’re characters made by high levels who can’t hack it at max level. So they have to imba a lowbie to stomp on other people.
But of course, you’re just going to come back at me with. “Where’s the blue post saying that Arenas that only count at max level is the end-game for PvPers?”
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:24 pm
@Shadrah
To be honest, trying to convince World of Warcraft haters is like trying to get a baby to eat food she really doesn’t want. You have your reasons (the baby food), and the proven effect of it working (the spoon), but as soon as the baby sees the (yucky) green stuff on the spoon all hell breaks loose.
You can yell, scream, and shout all the reasons its good for you, but it always falls on deaf ears of people who are too stubborn to listen to what you say. My opinion on this matter is to stop arguing with them, countless times I log into another MMORPG only to hear of some stupid debate on why this game is better than World of Warcraft. It’s a nonstop, inexperienced battle of nitwits who are either mad at WoW because they cannot experience the content, or people who wish that WoW would put a ball gag in their mouth and whisper in their ear a Safety word when things get too rough.
PS: I am going to let all the WoW haters out there know one thing. WoW is a casual game now, it’s the same model that made the game famous. Vanilla WoW was fun, but that is like saying playing DAOC before it’s first patch came out would be fun today. IT WOULD be fun to maybe a couple hundred people, but only an ignorant developer would make such a closed in game that was only accessible to the hardcore. With WoW being the way it is it has let my family and friends have countless hours of fun in leveling, crafting, exploring, instancing, raiding, socializing, the list doesn’t end. So before you post some unprecedented opinion about the game, remember that none of us give a ****. We love WoW, and it honeslty the only P2P game out there that gives what the player wants in an MMO right now.
Persistence, Social atmosphere, loot, and content.
Simple. As. That.
March 23rd, 2010 at 10:51 am
It’s always better to lead with the carrot than beat with the stick. Even (or especially) if the end result is the same.
That said, I don’t think we need or want to consider everything in terms of “reward vs punishment”; much of the time, it’s just “cause vs effect”, i.e. consequences. For example: Jump in a river, you’re likely to get cold and wet; for some that may seem a punishment, but for others it’s a reward. And for some, it’s neither, merely a state.
That point needs to be made because often certain features of MMOs are polarizing, i.e. some hate them, others love them. If you view those features in simple reward/punishment terms, you might try to “balance” those features, but which side do you then favor? The haters? The supporters? Do you remove or replace the features in their entirety…? Viewed in terms of consequences, those features are simply a part of the game, little to no “balancing” required. (I put “balance” in quotes here because rarely does “balancing” actually balance anything in a MMO…) =P
Hopefully you’re pickin’ up a bit of what I’m puttin’ down here… =)