One way to 'fix' CoH - rewards for pain

Short form:
Taking a page from Harrah's casinos, I propose CoH consider adding rewards for going through 'painful' gaming experiences. Essentially trying to make players feel like a million inf even though they've just lost 2 million inf.

Longer form:
Inspired by the Radiolab podcast series on 'choice'. One sequence in that series discusses a technique the Harrah's casino chain uses to keep its gamers happy despite everything about going to a casino is arguablly a bad choice.

The first half of the technique is tracking their players. They offer a loyalty card program to their players. When the players use their cards, the casino is able to track their habits and determine their 'pain points', essentially the point at which their losses are enough to convince them to stop playing, and presumably leave feeling bad about the casino.

The second half of the technique is to offer loyalty rewards with perfect timing. When the tracking system notices that a particular player is close to reaching his specific pain point, a friendly attendee is dispatched to the player, with a nice greeting and some loyalty rewards - some coupons to the steakhouse, some free tickets to a nearby show, or even small denominations of cashback - and the gamer is suddenly happier to leave on a high note (there's a Seinfeld reference there too...).

CoH could try a technique like that. When the game detects a player is near his limit for a session, a thank you reward could leave the player logging on a high note. A player is on a pvp losing streak? Give him a special cluster of merits. A team is taking twice as long as expected and with three times as many deaths as expected to finish an Imperious TF? Dispense a couple extra recipes.

Perhaps change the logout screen such that the player is given a summary of loyalty rewards he would earn if he remains logged out for different lengths of time. This way the summary could also incorporate existing similar elements like day job rewards. For example, say you were in a CoH session whereby you were trying to take on the rikti war zone ship raid but was getting wiped too much by maguses to the point where you're too frustrated to continue playing. The game detects your pain point and prepares a special set of rewards for you. The logout screen tells you that if you stay logged out for 4 hours, you'll get a loyalty reward of 40 vanguard merits in addition to your character gaining 4 hours worth of patrol xp. If you stay logged out for 8 hours, you'll get 80 vanguard merits and a bonus to recipe drop percentages for a small time (and patrol xp). The 12 hour mark can give you 120 merits, recipe drop bonus, and a psi-damage immunity temp power, (and patrol xp).

Determining the pain points is probably the trickiest thing, but I imagine the game has many good hooks in it to do so. Perhaps even sending in a verifiable /petition for in-game abuse can be enough for a gm to assign some loyalty rewards to the victims. The bug hunter badge would become no longer the only reward a dev can assign for good /bug reports.

It should be pretty obvious by now that CoH is far from a perfect gameplay experience whose imperfections won't ever really get fixed. But an effective technique to soften the inevitable imperfection impacts on the player can 'fix' a lot of what ails the CoH player.

Half the time when I log out of the game, it's because I either walked away from the computer and forgot the game was running, or because I Alt-Tabbed to the forums and took too long. Besides, when I'm pissed off at the game, a reward isn't really going to make me feel better. When I ragequit because a boss killed me three times in a row, a "there, there baby" reward as compensation isn't going to make me any less angry, not will just auto-killing the boss for me (which actually won't happen).

Besides, this sort of system is infinitely gamable by players. It's hard to design something that's SO complicated that players would never be able to figure it out, post it on the forums and let people earn rewards while watching TV or something. It works in real casinos for the same reason P&P games work so well - there are real people at the controls. Real people tend to have good judgement and are smart enough to tell when they're being duped. A scripted programme isn't going to be anywhere near as applicable, as the days of the Matrix are still some ways away.

Basically, the spirit of this idea (outside the Suggestions and Ideas forum) is good, but I don't think it could work in practice.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Such a system could be gamed (pun intended) in so many ways it's not even funny.

In many ways Patrol XP already does this. If you leave on a bad note and you don't feel like logging in for a few days (at least on that character) when you come back any debt you earned is gone and you've got a bit of patrol XP stored up so your advancement is faster than normal making you feel happier. It's not about ensuring a good leave so that you come back, it's an MMO you will almost certainly come back, but it gives you a good experience when you do come back.

Besides, if the devs were datamining dropped missions and were aware of my pain points, they'd already have stopped having contacts give me "Defeat <count> <faction>" missions.

--NT

http://www.mmodesigner.com/?p=34

One Matt Miller's thoughts on risk/reward in MMOs

TL: DR of it There is no risk, just time:reward

Now, given we have so many people with so many different ideas of what their "pain points" are, how on earth would this even work? Automatically give me bonus whatever for logging on to a VEAT? Give someone else a bonus each time they're hit with speed boost? Reward everyone for sitting through Freedom broadcast chat for an hour?

It's one thing when you have people watching other people - watching expressions, body language and other cues that say "That person is getting frustrated, that person there isn't." An MMO just isn't going to be able to do that. Anything else ("Killed X times in Y minutes," say,) is just gameable.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Lots of suggestions showing up in General Discussion the past couple days. Maybe people forgot there's a Suggestions forum.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I'm very much into reading that blog, as an insight into the designers mind.

Rate of reward, and especially the distribution of that in play is something that can be looked for and controlled. You really want a continuous distribution, not necessarily a true 'normal' in stats terms, but you certainly want to avoid a heavily skewed bimodal, where one particular way of playing has a so much greater rate of earning.

I didn't read anything else... cept for this...