Should games take us out of our comfort zone?

I agree with everything but the bolded. There aren't much deviations from standard setups for certain types of content. For instance, someone doesn't have to try raiding in every mmo to know that they dislike raiding. There really isn't much difference in raiding from one game to the next. Another example mmo pvp. There really isn't much difference in pvp from one game to the next. If you don't like killing other player avatars it doesn't matter what mini-games or window dressing they put around it, you're not going to pvp.

Suppose someone were to be uncomfortable playing a game where significant amounts of rewards and or content were gated behind objectionable gates. Such a player would be uncomfortable whether they elected to play those gates or not. So the game would be presenting this hypothetical player with a situation in which they were unavoidably removed from their comfort zone.

Which means the question of whether games should remove players from their comfort zone depends greatly on which comfort zone boundaries you're willing to honor.

That's true to a certain extent...but by no means universally so.

On this I can't comment much since I've never really raided in any game.

That's dead wrong. That only applies if what you're looking for in PVP is something akin to griefing.

I can't really stand the PVP in COX. Not because I can't kill other player avatars here, but because it doesn't feel very superheroish to me. Something that is more important than 'balance' in that case. However, I love playing Team Fortress 2. I'm still killing player avatars, but its a lot more fun to me than the mechanics involved in COX PVP. I do very much enjoy PVE in COX though.

My attraction to PVP isn't centered on my liking to waste other players(that's part of the fun, of course, but not the only draw).

In fact, the reason I play any game is centered around how the game PLAYS. Its why I don't only play MMOs and why I can appreciate RTS, RPGs, FPS, 3rd person shooters and action games each on their own merit.

With regard to the OP's question, I don't think the developers should be as concerned with comfort zones as they are concerned with delivering the the type of content that their playerbase wants, and that is good for the game overall.

For some people, being in direct competition with other players in a PvP setting in and of itself makes them uncomfortable. I have friends who will not and never have tried PvP even with friends in the arena. There is no potential for griefing there. They are among friends. But the idea of directly competing against these friends just doesn't appeal to them. It's not the implementation of PvP that turns them off, it's the very concept. They prefer to cooperate with others, not compete.

But does that have to be inherent in the system? I've seen the two new trials in Issue 20 described as 'raiding' but personally I don't see them as such.

What is the definition of Raiding in an MMO? (This is a serious question, I have never actually seen a solid definition). People who don't like raiding in one MMO are unlikely to like it in another because MMOs tend to copy from each other (or more commonly copy from WoW). That doesn't mean that a particular person would necessarily dislike all 'raiding' in all MMOs.

Heck, within the context of a single MMO I've seen people complain that they liked the "old" raiding and dislike the "new" raiding or vice versa (and I've seen this in multiple MMOs.

Again, not really true. For example I have no interest in PvP here but I did do quite a bit of PvP in STO because I enjoyed it. For me it doesn't come down to killing player avatars or not it's about fun gameplay. PvP here is not particularly interesting for me, PvP in STO was. Sure some people will dislike all PvP but there are plenty of people who fall into a middle ground.

Not that I'm saying your friends are being dishonest, but I often question that point of view when I hear it.

You have people who say they'd much rather cooperate with others than ever compete with them in a game. I'm going to assume those same people never play Scrabble, Monopoly, Chess or any other game where they might win and someone else might lose? I mean...they never competed in sports at school and basically live their lives with an unquenchable hunger to never do better than the other guy?

In my experience, most of the time it really comes down to: 'I don't want to lose, I can't guarantee that my skills will let me win so I won't play.' That's just my personal experience though.

I'll agree with this, at least in my case, but with a slight distinction. I will avoid games not where I can't guarantee that my skills will let me win, but where I suspect my skills would preclude me from winning.

If I think I have a fighting chance, I'll fight. If I don't, I see no point at all in bothering.

Traditional board games, no. Not so much. The group of friends I play board games with are largely non-competitive (or if we compete, it's against the game's rules more so than against each other.) I frequently lose, and generally expect to.

And I hate competing in online PvP.

It can't be because I hate to lose; I lose all the time, and keep playing board games. So maybe it really is because I don't like competing with people, don't like exercising in zero-sum games where my victory means someone else's defeat (most board games are not zero-sum; someone might have the most points, but other people still have points and still accomplished things too. Being zero-sum is a large part of why monopoly sucks.)

For me, the main reason I never got into PvP isn't just that I'll likely lose - I'm likely to do a lot of things where I'll lose, or even have a losing record. What I'm not interested in doing is competing in something that I'm going to lose at and not have a likely way to learn how to win.

PvP did not harbor a very good environment to learn how to compete in. There was always a lot of vitriol, and between the vitriol, and the fact that the builds I enjoyed playing weren't particularly useful in PvP (although that has likely changed since the last time) I just never had a positive experience in PvP. The community that PvP'd in general weren't very friendly to new players, and even players that wanted to learn. So take that for what you will.

I think it's more of a case of living your life without an unquenchable hunger to do better than the other guy. If you do something well, and I do something well, I don't care who does it better. I just want to do well, and I commend you for also doing well. Some people, that's all they care about, and direct competition goes against that spirit.

I'm afraid that is called "cheating." You say your answer to the question "should games take us out of our comfort zones" is no, but the only reason you can say that is by admitting you don't believe people should have comfort zones that games can impinge on in the first place. But you don't get to decide what people's comfort zones are.

And if nothing in this game mattered to me, I wouldn't play it. Frankly, to me its bizarre to play a game that doesn't matter to the player at all. I cannot imagine performing any task that I literally couldn't care less about. It actually sounds like a form of psychosis.

By that token, it's a game; I play it to have fun. If there's something that isn't fun, there's no point in doing it, unless I need to get past it to get to more fun stuff, and the gain exceeds the pain. There are things I'd be uncomfortable with doing in the game because it wouldn't be fun for me. It would be very non-fun. This includes raids and PvP. There are consequences for me, including boredom and discomfort.

If I buy a game, it's because I know I can get my money's worth of play time while staying in my comfort zone. I might stray out of my comfort zone now and then depending on my mood, but by far most of the time I'll be sticking to my comfort zone. Adding content with cool stuff that's gated by a lot of stuff beyond my comfort zone will pretty much guarantee that I don't do that content. Because it's a game. If I want to do unfun stuff, I have plenty of that available outside of games.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with those statements. If PvP were utterly changed in this game so that every power did the exact same damage as the equivalent power of that level and recharges were all identical, the way they are in FPS deathmatches, then I'd certainly play it. That way I'd get to bring the character I like best and you get to bring the character you like best and no one is inherently better.

But that's beside the point...

I think the whole notion of "being forced to try something" is entirely different from what EG is saying and the exact same thing I mentioned earlier. "Try it, you'll like it" is a different attitude form "at least try it to see if you like it." There's an assumption built into the first one that your preferences are somehow incorrect while in the second there's encouragement to at least step out of your comfort zone.

Using Sam's dislike of the market as an example: right now it's encouraged. You can make your character perform better by buying stuff in the market, you can play the market as a mini-game in and of itself, but you don't really need it to play the game successfully. If the Devs were to change that and tell us we could only get Enhancements from recipes we bought at the market, that would be forcing Sam out of his comfort zone. I would encourage him to try it because maybe he would actually like it, but I would never say to him that he *must* use it.

As I alluded earlier, I think all MMO game design should be that way, so people can find what works for them rather than be forced into a specific way of playing.

One thing I never mentioned is that we might be talking about two different populations here. To keep it simple: newbies and veterans. And I don't just mean in terms of being vets or newbies of this game, or MMOs. I mean all games in general.

As I alluded to there really aren't many different types of playstyles that haven't been tried yet in video gaming history. Thus if you are a new person to gaming "try it you might like it" is very valid. In fact I'd encourage it.

For a vet, it nearly borders on insulting. It's making a HUGE assumption that the person you're talking to hasn't ever tried things like raiding or pvp in other games. That's a great mistake to make.

That very veteran may have already tried many different versions of said activity in OTHER settings.

When people say "I hate raiding" or "I hate pvp", I never make the assumption that they've never tried it before. I usually start from why? And usually what a person like Sam comes back with is their experience from OTHER games.

As I said you don't need to "try it" if you've tried it in other mmos or games and know that you don't like it. There really isn't much variation on raiding, pvp, or competitive play that games can try, that veterans of video games haven't seen yet.

EDIT: As some others went further on, many folks don't like competition. There's no need for them to try it in a video game to know whether or not they'll like it, if they've ALREADY been competitive in other aspects of their life and found that they don't enjoy it. Video games are escapism for a many very great many of folks. Trying something you already know in real life you don't enjoy is the opposite of that.

As has been alluded to already many people play games to GET AWAY from things that take them out of their comfort zone in real life. While others try them to GET uncomfortable (be that being challenged via how fast their reflexes are, how much stress they can put on themselves, how much frightening or tense situations they can endure, how much their adrenaline can get pumping). There are two very distinct reasons that people play games.

It's again why I don't get offended when someone says "if you don't like this new activity in this setting, then you might want to try another setting" or variations of the same. I'd rather a person go and have fun in something they like than trying to coax them into something they most definitely don't.

TL, DR: I most certainly DO NOT agree that you need to try everything in a game to know right of the bat you don't like it. Especially if you've play a great number of video games. I don't think Sam (or anyone else who says they don't like a particular aspect of an mmo or game) is some newbie to video gaming.

Even though Arcanaville may think I have a mental problem for saying so, , this is a lot of what I was trying to convey before in my post.

No game can take me out of my comfort zone because there are no real life consequences to any choice in the game I might make.

It's ALL super pretendy fun time to me. That's it, that's all no more. It is entertainment. A pastime.

I cannot do anything in terms of playing a video game, hateful or racist chatting, etc. aside, that has real world consequences.

Killing, or arresting if you prefer, pixels does not have any bearing on my real life.

Personally, even the moral story choices don't phase me for the same reason. In moral choice games I go down the evil path as far as it will let me, as fast as I can, just to see what the developers are willing to do.

As a side example, the character I am most well known for in the PnP games I played for 30 years before City sucked me in, was an evil priest-like guy. His opening story, that I created and played with friends, involved having an imminent Tsunami hit his home island and to survive, he sacrificed every child virgin on the island to his god, then kept the pinky finger of each one and turned them into his most powerful magic items over time. That was just the beginning. The portable magical temple to sacrifice the entire elven population came later. That is pretty much as far from my personal moral compass as it gets, yet it bothered me not all because it is all make-believe, just like a video game.

The idea of a video game making me uncomfortable is so far out of what my brain chemistry dictates, the only way I can even begin to comprehend it is the fact that my wife has shown me how these games can affect other humans.

It's a video game. It's entertainment, but it does not 'matter' like real life does.

This is a point where a lot of the disconnect regarding "competition" occurs. I once said that a lot of viewpoints can be divided into two categories - those who treat games like a sport, seeing them as something to excel at and compete over, and those that treat them as a toy, seeing them as something to be used to make themselves feel better even if they don't strictly deserve it. Now, I'm not saying that all of humanity is neatly divisible in two easily-definable groups, but if you examine PvP-centric arguments, you'll notice many of the people fall in one category much more than in the other.

As for striving to never be better than anyone else, I feel that's a misnomer, in the sense that I, personally, don't do so. At the same time, I don't specifically TRY to be better than other people. Competition has the tendency to make people not just want to be good, but to be BETTER than other people causing both resentment and stress. I, personally, prefer to play games where I can be happy for other people when they're much better than me, not feel bad about it. When I play, say, L4D2 co-op, I welcome good players and enjoy their company. When I play L4D2 versus, good players on the opposing team just make the game horribly punishing. Especially when I'm just trying to have fun shooting zombies, NOT proving I'm better than actual players.

I generally prefer to play WITH other people, not AGAINST them. Preferably with other people against the computer. There's an easy target for you. The computer is always the enemy, always easy to hate and always a convenient antagonist, because no-one can really feel sorry for machine code. When playing co-op in anything, I get to help other people, and I get to fight an enemy that has no feelings and can never feel bad about losing.

An additional factor is that the computer is almost always gimped. Computer-controlled enemies are stupid, they fall into obvious traps, they obey the spirit of the law even against good sense and good judgement, and are generally intended for me to best, thereby making myself feel better. I can keep on playing, knowing that I'm better than the computer by right of birth, pretty much. When I play against other people, that isn't so much the case. Other people are cheap, because other people are smart enough to use the rules and exceptions of any system to their benefit. When I turn on my Unstoppable, the computer will swarm me with enemies that I can take out before it expires. When I turn on my Unstoppable, a smart player will run away and wait for that to expire, then attack me while I'm drained. Other players are regarded as my equals, and they are not dumb enough to respect the system's rules when they're designed to screw them over like the computer will.

Some people are just not competitive, and will simply walk away from activities that boil down to direct competition as the primary motivating factor or primary operational mechanic. I, personally, was never good at sports as a kid, and I never cared to be. I used to be good at Deathmatch FPS games, but mostly because I played with a solid group of friends, and we essentially cooperated to make for a memorable experience much more so than we competed for points. In fact, we valued getting killed in a particularly spectacular manner even more highly than getting a highly-skillful kill. I lost interest in FPS competition when Counter-Strike made it "serious business."

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To go back to topic, "competition vs. cooperation" is a very important aspect of quite a few people's comfort zones, both pro and against. I've gone on about what mine is, but it's been made clear to me by other people that, to them, competing with an actual human being is what they enjoy the most, precisely because real people are smarter, better and more meaningful as enemies than computer-controlled cannon fodder. In fact, catch almost any unofficial chatter about Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and you'll see people talking about how that game is about the "challenge" and the "competition" and the "tournaments" and suchforth. While I don't agree, there is no denying that this is what a lot of people see as that game's greatest selling point.

To be honest, I feel lucky to be in an MMO where PvP is so isolated. Nothing infuriates me more than having to worry about being attacked by other people just going about my business. This isn't the sort of attitude I come to the game for. Survival of the fittest is FAR out of my comfort zone, for the simple reason that I am - to be blunt - not fit. That's precisely why I play games: To get what I can't have in real life. What takes me out of said comfort zone is being told I can't have that because I'm not fit enough. Yeah, I know, but isn't that missing the point? Well, I don't really get much of a say when I get gangbanged just hunting kobolds for livers that most of them apparently don't have, causing my hard-earned items to drop and be stolen by my killers. I've blacklisted games for less.

Which is why I say that City of Heroes is pretty good in this regard. The worst another player can do to me is be a dick over text, which /ignore solves post haste. But I don't have to worry about fighting for my survival in a lawless world. I don't have to worry about my equals stepping up to take my stuff. The only thing I have to worry about is the computer, but the computer will always be a second-class citizen. I will always be better than the computer, even when it cheats. Sure, it won't always be easy, and it won't always be a sure deal, but at least I'll know I'm intended to be able to win. Which is more than I can say for fighting other people.

In City of Heroes, we have a much higher percentage of nice people, I've noticed, and in my eyes that's largely because the game encourages us to cooperate, and it encourages us to want to help others. The more good players there are, the more success everyone has, because every good player can only represent help and can never represent harm.

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.

You could try Fallout: New Vegas, that was made by the Black Isle crew (most of the Fallout 1 and 2 guys even) so the spirit of their ways is there (mostly).

No one is saying that. What they are saying is that THEIR past experiences have lead them to not like pvp. It's irrelevant what those experiences were. All they need to know is that they've done pvp before and for whatever reason don't like it.

Telling such a person "if you only try it you'll like it" is pointless when they clearly don't like it having already tried it. Even more so if they are not really a competitive person. It may have NOTHING to do with the other people they were competitive with in other settings. Those folks may have been the nicest people in the world, and the pvp experience still may have sucked . . . because some folks just don't like being competitive.

It also depends on the game. I myself dislike the PVP found in CoH, even dueling with my sweetheart for RP purposes is annoying.

But Team Fortress 2? I enjoy it on occasion. Granted, I never really play any of the combat classes and 90% of my time there is on a Medic (never enough of us Medics), but I still enjoy it here and there.

I prefer Co-op though, even if it's gone the way of the Dodo in most FPS games. One of my favorites was having a Quake 2 co-op game where each of us stuck to a weapon niche; CQB (Shotguns), Fire Support (machinegun/Minigun/Hyper Blaster) and Explosives (Grenade Launcher/Rocket Launcher/BFG10K). It's why Left 4 Dead 1/2 co-op is one of my current favorites; it's a pretty well done co-op game where co-op is the focus.

I just wish my circle of friends were willing to play Civ IV with me.

Back when Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight was brand new, I pretty much got my fill of deathmatch. My friends loved it to no end, but it slowly got more and more boring to me. It got even more boring by the time Quake 3 Arena came out. Heck, a buddy of mine told me that a guy in his college had one MILLION kills in Q3A. I'm not sure HOW someone could like the game that much to play it to that extent. And he had that score back when MPlayer (or was it MSN Gaming Zone?) was around for everyone to see. After being burned out on deathmatch games it took me forever to finally get and try Team Fortress 2.

I have to agree with the above statement. I dislike PvP in CoX, but i *love* PvP in another MMO (maybe because NEW characters can still play a role instead of being meatshields)

Who are you referring to exactly? Eva said that her friends will not compete in a PVP environment even among good friends. I don't recall her saying anything about past experiences.

My argument was that people are seldom honest about why they won't do PVP(not MMO PVP...PVP period).

There were other people's posts debating about Veterans and Newbs and how they respond to the 'try it, you might like it' argument. I wasn't one of them.

And here we come to my point. If you get together with friends to play a type of game that you all like to play, and the ONLY variable in the setting is that you're playing a PVP version of a game you all love, and you come away with the experience sucking, then there are only a few things I can conclude from that.

1) The PVP design of the game sucked and wasn't fairly balanced. (A gameplay issue)

2) One or more of your friends acted like jerks and ruined the game for you somehow.

3) You lost a lot and discovered that you don't like to lose so PVP is not for you. Maybe your skills weren't up to par and you felt embarrassed etc.

The scenario that I find the least credible, as noted in my first post, is the one where a person says they are so non-competitive that the thought of even playing against their friends is terribly uncomfortable. I find it hard to believe because those same people likely play all sorts of other games where they can win and someone else loses or they competed in sports at one time or another or they tried their hardest to get a promotion before someone else at their job etc.

Its human nature to want to do better. Anyone can suppress it, sure. My point is that most of the time people aren't being honest about it and the true problem lies elsewhere.

I can actually say that with at least a bit of authority, because up until a few years ago, my friends and I regularly hosted LAN parties and tournaments here in Barbados.

I've seen the 'I don't want to compete' type come in and get a taste of actually playing with other folks and having fun and turn completely around. And that includes people who have tried PVP before and gotten turned off by it for whatever reason.

Maybe the difference is that our guys, no matter how competitive we got, always found value in teaching the new guys how to play and practicing with them. Again though, that comes down to the people you play with and is less about PVP sucking in general.

I don't like PvP because it's too much pressure. Gritted teeth and frenzied button-mashing are not on my agenda. I keep my difficulty set low and my pace leisurely. I'm here to lower my stress, not raise it.

And that is something that carries over into real life. Stress can kill you.