Reward-driven mentality

Am I odd in that I really enjoy playing most of this game then? I'm pretty happy doing just about everything there is to do in game. Sure, if I farm for ages for a specific thing I'll get bored but go do something else and there's usually a TF to jump on for a while or something else going. A quick change of toon and the focus shifts and it keeps being fun for me.

Believe me, if I wasn't having fun playing this game the way I wanted to play it, I wouldn't, but sometimes the goals/rewards are part of the fun, in achieving them.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

And your approach is fine, nothing wrong with it at all.

Now, if you farmed for ages for a specific thing and got bored, but didn't go do something else for a while, just sat there being bored and not having fun, that would be what I was talking about.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Its very strange, but although a lot of people do say that they do this, they are actually more likely to stop playing for a while, do something else, and then come back and carry on....

Trust me, nothing more boring than mining roids for 16hours

What I observe is that people become offended when what they do for fun does not align with the efficient means to obtain given rewards. (This is a corollary the notion that people will do things they find un-fun to obtain rewards they want. They want what they do find fun to give good rewards.) Incarnate abilities are a great example of this: a great deal of the argument about them arises because teaming and running TFs and trials (a narrow subset of teaming) are the fastest way to get them, but a lot of people like to solo.

People want to know that what they're doing for fun is efficient. It bothers them when they know that what they want to do to have fun and what they need to do to achieve a goal most quickly are not aligned. Most people I know are wired to seek the most efficient means of achieving their goals. IMO, if you meet someone who doesn't seem wired this way, the reality is that you don't recognize that they actually just have different goals.

You get "some" rewards at "some" pace, this is a point to remember. Some rewards you plain do not get in the ways you want to play, and some you get at such a reduced rate it's almost pointless. Examples?

100 Rularuu Overseers for the Rularuu weapons. There's no chance in hell that I'll do enough Rularuu missions that the odd single Overseer spawn per mission will make up the 100 needed. I need to hunt them. I hate hunting one way or the other, so as long as I'm hunting, I may as well pick up on greys and get it over quicker.

1000 Vanguard Merits for the full costume. To get those from just running Rikti missions would take forever. The entire War Zone storyline plus the Organ Grinders plus Division: Line aren't even close to enough. So I either run Borea's paper-equivalent missions, or I do a ship raid. I don't like either, so my only option is to farm (which I don't do), grind (which I don't want to do) or run Mothership raids (which I hate).

The Romulus Sword and/or Romulus Shield. The only way to get that is via running the ITF. I am SICK AND TIRED of running ITFs, and I don't like the TF to begin with, or TFs in general. But what option do I have? So as long as I'm doing an ITF, it might as well be a fast one.

Incarnate Shards: At the drop rate they have now, trying to gain enough solo is next to pointless. Well, unless I want to run at +OVERNINETHOUSANDDD!!!, which I don't. Teaming is an option, which I generally don't want to do, and end-game TFs are an option, which again basically means ITFs over and over again. Either that, or Tin Mage, which sucks big time. As long as I'm grinding for Shards, I might as well get it over with faster.

Hunt 50 Rikti in Abandoned Sewers at level 38. Trial Zone size (aka 8-man size) spawns of level 38 and up in all locations other than the Atlas Park entrance where they're 36 and up. Solo. Yeah, I hate hunting, I hate hunting huge spawns with bosses, and I hate having to go through large spawns of high-level Hydra before I get to what I need. So as long as I'm doing it, I might a well pick the place where they're low level and gank them for a fast mission complete.

Making lots of money. "Just play the Market," they say. "Buy cheap recipes and craft them." "Get things with Tickets and sell them." "Use Hero Merits." Yeah, no thanks. Playing the Market is hideously boring, and playing crafter is even worse, especially when I have to wade through people's horrible fan fiction in the Architect. If I ever NEED to make lots of money via these methods, you can bet your cat that I'll find a way to do it as fast as I can with as little effort.

I would LOVE it if the game allowed me to eat my cake and have it, too, by letting me just play the game as I enjoy it and still get the good stuff, but it doesn't. And suggesting it should only gets people to call me greedy, arrogant, spoiled and so on and so forth. Because clearly if I don't want to put in the hard work, I don't deserve the reward.

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.

I'm in this camp. I find a select few things fun - namely most of the same things I was doing back in 2004 - and would very much like to keep doing those things. However, I realise that those things are badly inefficient. I'd LIKE for the game to account for them and make them efficient, but I know that that won't happen. Failing that, I will just keep on doing what I like doing, keep on complaining that the game no longer supports it and, if worse comes to worst, find a game that lets me have fun AND get rewards rather than constantly making me choose between one or the other.

I refuse to do things I don't like unless they can be contained to either one isolated "hard push" or otherwise just an everyday minor chore. I still want the bulk of my gameplay to consist of things I want to do. To think that my gameplay will turn into nothing more than a string of compromises is terrifying, to the point that I want nothing to do with that.

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.

I never said the game shouldn't reward people for the time they put into it. After all, that's part of the fun in a game - doing things and getting progress for them. Hell, there's little as hideously demoralising as spending hours doing something that nets NO PROGRESS AT ALL when you could instead do something else in-game that's still fun but also rewarding.

What I am saying, however, is that I don't feel the game should encourage people to WORK HARD in the first place. My ideal game would be one which would let me have fun, with progress and rewards as just a nice bonus, rather than a game which makes us play through things we really don't want to in the hopes of getting paid.

I work a job only because I need the money. I don't want to work a game only because I need the rewards. I want a game to give me rewards because I'm an awesome human being and be nice to me, even if it has to lie to my face about my worth to human kind. That's where I want games to differ from real life - in that it can make those of us who aren't awesome in life awesome in our own little make-pretend world.

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.

If there's ever a Samuel_Tow post I agree with more than this, it'll be a very, very awesome post. Emboldened for effect.

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SUPPORT - IT'S NOT JUST A GROUPING OF ATs
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More Than a Game
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Well, because they like the rewards more than they dislike the "unfun" thing they have to do??

Because they value some of the rewards more than you do?

When you find yourself asking these kinds of questions, it always helps to remember - Other people aren't you, and other people like different things than you do. And as others have said, sometimes you have to do things you don't like to get things you DO. Life is often like that.

While I agree with this in theory, it's my opinion that it's a pipe dream.

Rewards that no one would try to achieve except by virtue of elapsed time doing something else have to be, almost by definition, completely tangential rewards - they have offer zero mechanical advantage in the primary activity. That means the core game must offer zero mechanical reward, because if it doesn't, someone will start looking for ways to obtain the rewards faster. If the game does offer mechanical rewards but doles them out purely based on fixed milestone, I guarantee you someone will be come frustrated over the fact that nothing they can do actually improves their rate of "progress". See: Day Jobs and Vet Rewards.

So we want a game that's so fun, people will play it with no rewards at all except for the very sake of playing it. But I don't believe that there is such a game. Eventually, the novelty of any activity wears off. Most people are going to need some new carrot to keep coming back even though the core activity is no longer novel for them, and thus no longer entertaining enough on its own to keep them engaged.

The difference here is: I don't really CARE that I could be getting those rewards more efficiently.

My priorities have changed quite a bit from when I first started playing (the reason is in my sig).

Some people don't mind doing something they don't enjoy to get something they do. Those people usually have the luxury of spending several hours playing, and can do the unfun part and go on to do what they enjoy.

I, on the other hand, manage to squeeze in an hour or so every few days between working 2 jobs and other obligations. The LAST thing I want to do is spend that hour doing something I don't enjoy just because it gives better rewards than what I do enjoy.

Since my playtime is extremely limited, I COULD have gone off on a tangent about how it isn't fair that I can't get the same rewards in an hour that someone else gets in 6. But I didn't. I adjusted my expectations of what I would be able to do in the game (which I'm fine with, family is more important)

That led me to the question of why getting better rewards leads people to spend so much of their entertainment time not enjoying themselves.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Similarly I didn't want to do those things to get the costume pieces so I chose to not pursue them. I would like to have them but not enough to go through that nonsense for them.

Well I am going to play my 50s anyway so I know over time they will get the shards I want so I can wait.

Also making lots of money I am doing as I play. See I know I am not willing to put in anything I consider hard work so I know I won't get those things quickly. Would I like them? Sure. But I figure I've been playing almost 7 years and I'll be playing many more so these other things will come eventually.

/win.

For the record, I canceled my subscription several days ago in protest of the game's 'new' direction. Bored with the old, annoyed by the new - what's a poor unhappy subscriber to do?

I understand that it's probably not achievable, hence why I said "in an ideal world." I love punching things in the face, and even I'll choose to hop on a team and level faster for, say, an hour if the team is fun. Hell, a lot of the time I'll team BECAUSE I level up faster, at least when it comes to PUGs and TFs. And, seriously, what else would I do, say, the ITF for? It's story is boring and confusing, its encounters are repetitive and "Roman soldiers" really isn't my favourite concept for an enemy faction. That, and people always rush it. But I still do it from time to time because it's a good way to grab a level in a couple of hours in the 40s.

That said, I feel that diminishing returns of some sort are not-horrible way to make a game which encourages doing activities, but discourages overdoing them. "Rested experience," aka Patrol Experience is a step in the right direction, in that it helps speed along people who don't play so much while doing little for people who do. I personally have no problem with people who want better rewards gained faster, so long as there isn't infinite leeway to do so, as all that does is shift the bottom line upwards. A hard or a soft limit on how fast you can go, as it were, would be a good way to control this.

In the same vein, a floor on how SLOW you can go would be nice, too. Take Shards, for instance. If you're unlucky enough, you can go days and days without seeing a drop. Some are already suggesting that, if the RNG doesn't give you one in a certain amount of time, enemies taken down or whatever metric, that a "streakbreaker" of sorts would give you one anyway, at least as a pity drop. We already have a streakbreaker for to-hit designed to mitigate precisely that sort of annoyance. There can be systems to speed along slower players in a variety of fields, be they experience, "money" or what have you.

Of course, the more you control it, the more people complain that they can't influence and optimise their own efficiency past a certain point. That, to me, is an acceptable evil, as I see unmitigated optimization as the central problem to any game system. Make the system's scope too great and balancing it becomes a nightmare. Therefore, upper and lower limits can help.

I don't believe "a game that's fun without giving rewards" is a valid construct even theoretically. As I've said before, rewards are part of the game, and thus part of the fun. We may claim to play for the action, but we appreciate rewards as well, and thus play for them all the same. What I meant was a game that's so much fun that we never run out of things we WANT to do, to the point where we have to do things we don't like just for the sake of rewards. In essence, it's a game where gameplay is strong enough to hold people over from reward to reward without actually feeling like a grind.

To a point, this is limited by physical resources and the availability of game content, as well as the natural boredom that comes from playing a game for so long. But a great part of why this happens in MMOs in general and this one in particular is because the developers, whether intentionally or unwittingly, compensate for certain shortcomings of content by hanging rewards at the end of it.

Years ago Jack and other discussed what to do about the old Hamidon and its absurdly powerful Hamidon Enhancements. Many people managed to claim - within the same sentence - that they LOVE raiding the Hamidon and would do so just for fun, and yet that they hated raiding the Hamidon and did so just for the rewards. I said it then, and I've said it many times since: Sticking a big reward at the end of bad content is not good design. It's lazy design. Yes, that will make people play it, but not because they want to, but because they feel they have to. They key to making content good is to make good content first and only then worrying about rewards.

According to Jack, when he and Matt sat down to design the original 40-50 game back in Issue 1, they designed it to take as long as the 1-40 game. Why? Well, he didn't say, but accounting for standard MMO logic at the time, because it's "end game," so it's supposed to be slow, plodding, difficult and painful. That's what end game IS, right? I've said before that there are only three realistic ways to make sufficient end game content: Make it absurdly hard, absurdly slow or absurdly repetitive. Skip all three and you'll never make enough. And I've been proven correct for seven years now, over and over again.

To a point, time sinks and "carrot on a stick" designs are par for the course when it comes to games of this size, that much is a given. But to a much larger extent, developers design these because they're an easy way to save money and effort. And it shows. Our developers seem to have become more aware of this factor in recent years, especially when they started slashing badge requirements. The original thought behind badges was that they would be something you sort of got as you went along, not something you went out looking for. Players proved otherwise, and the developers now seem aware that their players will go out looking for these badges, so they seem to be trying to make them less painful to get. Well, for the most part, anyway. Still, anyone remember defeating 10 000 Rikti Monkeys?

Long story short: You can't design a game that's so fun people would play it endlessly without ever being rewarded with progress, but you CAN do a better job of balancing fun from basic gameplay with fun from progressing through the game, ideally letting people progress to the next step before they're utterly revolted with the previous one.

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.

The stumbling block here is that it is outright impossible to design content that 100% of the playerbase will agree is "good". No matter what you do, there will be some subsection of the playerbase that doesn't like it.

SwellGuy summed up my point nicely, even though I doubt he meant to.

I'm willing to wait for my rewards that I earn through doing what I enjoy doing. I am NOT willing to spend my limited play time not having fun just to get those rewards sooner. I'll get them eventually, there is no need for me to have them RIGHT NOW.

What I've gotten from this thread is that there are a significant number of people playing the game that are perfectly willing to not have fun if it means they can have their shinys now as opposed to later. Which I suppose is okay if that's what they want to do, but I still can't claim to really understand it.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I just manually type in the [ quote ] bit - hit "edit" on something with a quote and you'll see the format - and paste in what's being quoted. *shrug*

See my Guides and Tutorials

It's quite alright to not understand it. Heck, I don't understand advanced thermodynamics, but I know there are people out there who do, and who enjoy understanding it. "It's just not my bag, baby!"

But to repeat, over and over, that you don't understand it, seems to imply a certain level of 'judgment' on your part. (It seems an almost palpable headshaking is implied each time you type it out.) I would suggest that rather than dwelling on those things you do not understand, you might be better served to accept that there are things you may never understand, and move on.

Particularly when it comes to matters of what people like and don't like... and there's a reason certain subjects are proscribed from the forums, because rather than try to understand, the Internets seems to be a place where people just come to blather on about their own point of view, not really pausing to consider that other people's differing backgrounds, life experiences, etc., might give them a different take on exactly the same subject.

Not that I ever do that myself. Nope, nothing to see here... move along now. NOW.

Well, I believe the people doing stuff that's not very fun to obtain rewards has the idea of having more fun later in result of the rewards. Like for example, farming for influence and recipe drops in order to IO a charcter quickly. Sure, you can play the regular way and have fun although it will take significantly longer and some people may not want to invest that much time so they'll take the quicker route. Or maybe people just have more fun playing with uber builds that the period of having no fun is an acceptable sacrifice in order to have more time having fun.

Now, I don't find farming the most fun thing to do, but I do it anyways. For example I farm and PL PvP toons. Sure I can level up the character the right way and maybe have fun, but you bet I want my shiny lvl 50 now so I can have even more fun with it.

The catch is that not only are rewards limited to being balanced against acquisition effort, but as a practical matter reward diversity can only be supported by having the different rewards not all acquirable by exactly the same methods. Basically, if you want something other than one-dimensional effort-unlocks, different rewards will have to be earned through different activities. And then you get into the situation where not everyone will enjoy all of those different activities regardless of production quality, but will want the rewards associated with them. That's impossible to avoid.

Um...I'm having plenty of fun. I'm just not very much into alts after my 6th 50. Or was that 7th?

The answer to that, in my eyes, is to simply let multiple activities be about equally good at acquiring one of a multitude of rewards. The general idea of Reward Merits was introduced to do this to TFs - ideally, you wouldn't want to run the fastest TF to get the most shots at a random roll, but could run any which one. Faster ones would be done sooner, but reward less, while slower ones would take longer but reward more. In this way, if you don't like a TF (say, Kathie Hannon), you don't have to feel obligated to do it and could instead do another TF. Of course, that's not always how it pans out, but that was the idea - if all TFs are as efficient in terms of time-to-reward ration, then the only choice is which one you WANT to do, not which one you HAVE to do.

This does nothing for me since I don't want to do TFs to begin with, but that's neither here nor there.

This does run into a bit of what Arcana points out as a problem, in that it's a single-source, single-goal system where all possible activities grant the same resource and all resources can buy the same rewards, otherwise known as "money." I personally don't have a problem with the concept of money, however, in their very basic function in society, which is as "equivalent goods." The point of money is to provide such a trading item which everyone accepts and everyone has, so as not to make traders have to find the precise person who will take their goods AND offer the goods they want.

The concept of money in a game may feel... Odd, at least in the sense I'm describing it (gold has been a staple of RPGs for a long time, but less so in MMORPGs), but what I'm saying is I'd personally prefer a system where everything you did in any variety of activities generated some amount of "money" and everything you could acquire were purchasable with that "money." I can certainly see some reward classes as being gated in other ways, such as by level or unlock. Vanguard Merits are a good idea. Any Rikti you kill and any Rikti mission you do has a chance of dropping Vanguard Merits, and you can buy anything Vanguard with a certain amount of Merits, but you still have to do an arc to join Vanguard and start earning them.

My point is that locking one reward to only one class of activities pushes people to engage in those activities even if they don't necessarily like them. Give these people alternate paths to the same reward, and your chances of letting them have their reward AND via the way they wanted to earn it at the same time.

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There is a persistent idea among MMO developers and a fair few players that you HAVE to make your players participate in EVERY part of your MMO, or else you're wasting resources and hurting player retention. After all, if a player isn't, say, raiding, then that player isn't as invested in the game and therefore isn't as likely to stick around for seven years. Speaking from personal experience, this is not just wrong, but damaging, as well.

Were I forced, or even just coerced into experiencing every part of City of Heroes on a continuous basis, I would have quit this game before even my first game time card was out. I have been here for seven years not by picking things I like, but by AVOIDING things I don't like. I don't like certain ATs, I don't like teaming, I don't like Inventions, I don't like the Architect... I don't like a great many things, probably over half the total content of the game, yet I'm still here and still going strong. Why? Because I never really felt forced to participate in these activities. It never really felt like the developers had designed the game to passive-aggressively punishing me for not playing their way, Jack Emmert notwithstanding.

In short: Allowing people to play the game their way and still earn progress in at least all main areas - within reason - keeps people playing. Forcing people to do things they don't want causes animosity and anger more than anything else.

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.

And I happen to like playing CoH. That's *WHY* I play it.

It sounds like you think there are large numbers of players who grind and farm just to get the rewards for the rewards own sake. I don't believe that to be accurate. Sure, there are plenty of people who farm, and not because they enjoy farming. They want something specific to increase their ENJOYMENT of the game and farming is the fastest way they know to get it.