Reward-driven mentality

SPT:
IMO, the distinction is more that they want and expect us to keep playing the Skinner box they built, but are unhappy when we find a way to bypass the intended mechanisms - the levers and buttons - in favor of breaking into/prying open/etc the reward hopper and gorging ourselves on All The Pellets. (And then, players being players, demand that the hopper be refilled immediately so we can continue.)

The Devs have tried again and again to make a box that can't be broken into, but players are a cunning lot, and there are lots of them.

Like a lot of social things we talk about on the boards, this is a really complicated topic.

Among game designers there is a somewhat well known "Interest Graph" that attempts to map out player's approach to the game. It was created by Richard Bartle in the early 90s. The graph divides players into rough categories of Killers, Achievers, Explorers, and Socializers, and attempts to explain the relationship each has to each other. IMO it's not a perfect taxonomy, but it at least gets designers thinking about people's various motivations.

I happen to own a book by Bartle called Designing Virtual Worlds. It's a bit outdated now (Copyright says 2004 but it spends a lot of time talking about Ultima Online and LambdaMOO). In it he provides very detailed opinions--I can't call it "analysis" because he doesn't exactly use a scientific approach--about the ways players interact with a game. His explanation of "Achievers" could be boiled down to saying that some players play to acquire and conquer. Even players who do content with little apparent reward (e.g. killing AVs) tend to do it for the intangible "bragging rights."

But it's a footnote about the hazards of the free markets economies on pg 305 of Designing that I always remember: "It's easy to mistake what people do for what people enjoy doing. The chances are if players tell you they don't like doing something, they're not lying--no matter what the data mining results say." That is, if you put a reward in your game behind irritating content, players will torture themselves with it. Quoting Bartle again: "Players will spend a lot of time being miserable if the reward is high enough. They'll mindlessly click on the same mining icon for three hours, hating every moment of it, if the result is that they find the the diamonds they need to give them an arrow of dragon slaying."

This doesn't speak specifically to why players avoid content that isn't high in reward, but IMO it does address it tangentially. Many players want "stuff."
Part of the reason the teaming mechanics in this game are so successful are that players benefit tremendously from it on a reward scale.

But in addition to "stuff," players also like transition. I once had a character in another MMO who got "stuck" at certain level. Every time I went up in level, the game mechanics would change, and the character ended up fighting the same enemies again. The lack of a sense of progression was a factor in my eventual decision to leave that game.

An abstract of Richard Bartle's propositions is posted on the web, by the way. You can read it here: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

When I play this game, I try to forget about mathematics and immerse myself in the mindset of the character. In 3 years of fairly contant play, I am just beginning to vaguely understand the process of making a toon incredibly powerful. I have done no real PvP aside from one encounter, where my guy Hawk-Owl was slain instantly by an unseen Stalker, who added salt to the wound by saying "WTF? *Claws*?". Ouch...

Though it's the heart of the game, & the reason we are not allowed to make Blaster Tanks a la Iron Man, or other multi-Origin types, I have done very little teaming lately, due to the birth of twin sons. So I take my fun from CoX when & where I can find it, and am grateful that this incredible game exists at all. Keep in mind that I'm 53, a comics fan for 47 years, and being freed from pencil & dice to play out super-adventures on what I call the "Poor Man's Holodeck" is far more amazing to me that it might be to a younger, more tech-savvy person.

I can appreciate that folks want many rewards and more power--this is normal. I enjoy being able to put two or three ultra-enhancements together & feel clever, but on the other hand, I don't mind playing with a high-level but underpowered respec-ed toon who's patiently huntng down more INF & better enhancements to fill his / her vacant slots. Nor do I mind trying to stay alive with a character who's so Natural that he / she refuses to take Bonus powers which involve magic, mutation, or the like, or strength enhancements which involve a Hulk-like level of power--i.e. hurling chunks of concrete or earthquake stomps. I just assume that a high-damage Natural Tanker or Scrapper knows WHERE to hit an opponent to best use his / her peak-human strength, or employs some kind of off-screen cunning to get over. Even the Death-God Thanos backed down from Captain America.

I agree with the original poster that CoX would be a better game overall if everyone wasn't into instant gratification, but I also realise that means it would be better for US, not for the people who want Instant Godhood, etc. If you paid to play, you have the right to use the game as a first-person fighter game, or a "Monty Haul" grab-the-loot game instead of a superhero role-playing adventure. It's your dime, after all.

Still, to those who are concerned more with the destination than the journey, I can only say that if this was "Pantheon of Deities" instead of City of Heroes, and your toon started the game as a God, he or she would still probably begin as a rather minor God. Can you say Bes, God of the Hearth, instead of Osiris, Lord of the Dead? ; ) Like Osiris, even Lord Odin had to go through some rather unpleasant & challenging circumstances to become head of the Norse Pantheon. I doubt, however, that most players would care to pluck out an eye or hang on a tree for 9 days to get Odin-level power.

With the Incarnate system coming, we do indeed have a Godlike adventure ahead of us. I don't mind waiting. But as the old Southern US saying goes, "the trouble of it is" that in r/l, we have only so much time & energy, & what if we uh, you know, actually, like, uh, DIE, before we get Hero X to Level 1,1000?

Don't worry about it. If even ONE OF your toons is alive and adventuring, you have already won.

Again--

There are no losers in this game! Enjoy yourselves. Because, after all, YOU CAN'T LOSE.

Interesting responses.

For the record, I wasn't trying to say my way of doing anything was better than anyone else's. I was honestly curious why someone would spend their free time doing something they did not find enjoyable (grinding for shards in this case), complain about how unenjoyable they found it, and do it anyway.

It's also interesting to note that, from what I have inferred from the responses (pure guesswork), a larger number of people than I initially suspected, when given a choice between something not fun that offered a reward and something fun that didn't, would choose the unfun rewarding activity over the fun non-rewarding activity.

I work at a job I dislike because I need the reward from it (my paycheck) in order to simply survive. I don't want to spend what little free time I have feeling like I need to earn rewards in a video game to make it worth my time. I play the game and accept whatever rewards happen to come my way, but I don't do things I find unenjoyable in order to maximize them.

I suppose that's where the disconnect is occurring for me. I don't understand why people would do something in the game they find unfun simply because it gives better rewards. Especially since you get rewards for just playing the game in the first place.