It's the journey, not the destination: Really?

I would think it would depend on what that thing is. If you have no money...having it is more pleasing than wanting.

In games, to me, it's not necessarily about the journey or the destination. It's what is fun. If the journey is fun, that's good...if the destination is also fun, that's even better. If the round trip from journey to destination to another journey is good, that's the best.

The goal of an entertainment service is to be entertaining to as many different types of preferences as possible and is fine to focus on segments at a time so long as the focus don't take too long or the rest becomes stale.

Many have found that not to be true. Beyond a certain point (basic comfortable standard of living), having more money can be a curse for a lot of people.

That's why i qualified it as "if you have no money." But don't want this to derail the thread more than it already did.

I didn't bring this up to criticise levelling curves or teaming viability, but more to illustrate an often-cited justification for people's complaints on Controller performance which come up from time to time. Whether people are right to complain and whether they're good players is irrelevant to the larger point at hand - that some can and will justify a horrible gaming experience for a prolonged period of time if it leads to a better gaming experience later on in the game.

This is a stance I find repugnant, and the stuff of horrible games. It loops back into my belief that the worth of something is not just a question of how valuable it is, but also a question of how much its cost subtracts from its value. I don't care how good Controller performance is post level 32, because I will never get a Controller to level 32. It hurts too much to do so, and it horrifies me that some could stomach this. Not for their sakes or for their opinions, but because of what this means for the game. It excuses game design that is simply and genuinely not fun along the way.

No-one sets out to make a game people will hate, but invariably, developers do just that, if just by accident. Gaming history is full of bad games. More often, game developers will make a good game that nevertheless has horrible elements, such as Mass Effect 2 and its planet scanning mini "game." In such occasions, "fixing" these parts of the game could prove impossible, impractical or outright undesirable, but in an MMO, people are still expected to engage in everything, so rewards are put on these activities to encourage people to have some diversity. I hope and pray that one day the Dr. Quaterfield TF with be made the Weekly Strike Target, just to serve as an example of this kind of game design.

More realistically, think back to the old debates about Hamidon enhancements and their percentages. People INSISTED that they raided the Hamidon because they loved doing it, but when asked to do so for weaker enhancements, many explained that it wasn't "worth it." The raid itself is a cost, especially ye olde lag feste, yet many people at the time insisted on putting huge rewards at the end of it to justify the horrible gaming experience.

Players - especially of MMOs - will often seek ways to hurt themselves, because of the trained belief that the more something hurts, the more it should reward. This is a mentality bred in us by game designers who use rewards as compensation for pain, when they should take care not to design pain in their game to begin with.

I feel games, and this one in particular, should be about the "journey," because ideally, there should never be a point in the game where it isn't fun and the only reason I'm playing it is for compensation down the road. These will nevertheless invariably still exist, but slapping rewards on them cannot and should not be considered a fix.

Reward Merits did not "fix" shoddy TFs. They just made them rewarding. And so, people these days do indeed play the occasional Shadow Shard TF. Through grit teeth and with much swearing, because not one of those TFs is good in any sense of the word, but BECAUSE they are horrible (read: god-awful long), they get greater rewards, and so people do them DESPITE the player experience, not because of it.

This is a fundamentally flawed approach to game design, because it "encourages" people to drag their ***** through pain and torment in pursuit of reward, and this has the nasty tendency to build up over time into serious bitterness.

No-one sets out to design a bad game, but bad games keep being designed anyway. Most developers' reactions is to cover their ***** and coerce players into playing said games anyway. I made the mistake of playing Time Shift through to the end, always convinced there was a point, only to be sorely disappointed and swear to never touch that trash ever again. It is an all too familiar feeling.

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're not reading my larger point which is that low level controllers are not intrinsicly unfun. They are to you. They are not to others. I don't "make excuses" for the flaws in low level controllers because I don't see flaws. At least not the flaws you see.

What horrifies me is the notion that many parts of this game have been homogenized over the years to appeal to what only one specific group of people thinks is intrinsicly fun as if fun wasn't subjective, but there was an objective way to quantify it, and they had t he formula.

Whenever someone asks "why can't X be more like Y" my automatic response is "because we already have Y." We have faster leveling things *solo* than low level controllers, for people who cannot stomach low level controllers. But they aren't poorly designed because they fail to meet your requirements for leveling speed.


Full stop. No they aren't.


Sure, poorly designed games are made, but the reason why I said no developer *intends* to do that is because you made an accusation of intent: that there is an actual *philosophy* of game design that game developers follow that says if you bribe players, you don't have to make the game any good. You can in fact intentionally ignore quality concerns. I don't think most MMO devs, and certainly ours, think that.

The fact is, players are at least partially reward-driven, but that's part of the psychology of "winning" that players bring to all games. And this is a game, not a past time, even if there are people that use it as a past-time. And at least part of the fundamental aspect of all games is a sense of accomplishment. Games set goals that players attempt to reach through gameplay performance.

This is something that gets ignored often when people talk about "enjoyment" of games. They sometimes focus on some abstract continuous stimulation of pleasure centers of the brain as the model for how people should enjoy games. But many games don't have that kind of enjoyment within them. Many appeal to players' sense of accomplishment: they enjoy the memory of accomplishment, even if the actual gameplay was not conventionally enjoyable. People also say they enjoy running, but I suspect its a different kind of enjoyment than eating chocolate ice cream. We don't assume that someone that claims to enjoy running is a psychological masochist: that's just a different sort of enjoyment. Same for games, particularly MMOs.

And the paradox of enjoying accomplishment is that no one enjoys accomplishment that is effortless. There has to be a balance between effort - pain if you will - and the pleasure of satisfaction.

"Carrot on a stick" isn't an example of bad game design principles, its just the extreme case of a good design principle gone bad: making accomplishment either too monotonous, too trivial, too ludicrous in difficulty, or too unrewarding. Its bad only like most cases of extremes are.

No, I see your point and I don't disagree with it. Which is why I said that I won't get a Controller to that level. I'm only using this as an example, since you seemed to ignore the Final Fantasy XIII one (was it FFII? The one that has you run down linear corridors). I wasn't even bringing up the example as an accusation of game design, since it's mostly people making it.

The developers have never claimed that Controllers were in any way intended to be good at solo play at all, much less before level 32. The addition of Containment may have implied intent, but I don't believe it proves it, nor do I believe that intent exists. Controllers are what they are.

However, when a player exposits that his Controller cannot solo, the playerbase response is ALWAYS at least in part "It gets better at level 32." Again, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It makes no difference when a player likely to complain about this isn't likely to have the iron bladder to make it that far.

Perhaps not officially, but you wouldn't know it listening to players. I've had low-brow insults tossed at my face over refusing to come out of my comfort zone and try something new for the past seven years, since long before this current situation existed even as a possibility.

You can't get all players to like all aspects of a sufficiently large MMO (by which I mean one which has many aspects), but you can't deny that developers still like to try to encourage us to do so anyway. Sometimes with more taste than other times. Whether OUR developers do or not... Probably not. Positron has told me that "If you don't like it, you don't have to use it." pretty much in those words, on those forums (well, the old ones), so I don't have reason to believe he's hell-bent on making me play something I don't want to.

Not confining ourselves to MMOs, developers do that all the time. This is most of what EA do these days, and most of what EA have done for some time now. Aggressive advertising on the one hand, Skinner box games on the other, shoving in money and RPG elements in games that don't merit those, all draped over the husk of a mediocre game. We've all been there.

Do our developers do that? I want to say "no," but given the quality of polish of the last few additions, I don't know. They've certainly been pushing for rewards over content for quite a while now. I know rewards are an important part of gaming, but they are not THE most important part. They just seem to be one of the cheaper ones to make.

Take achievements, for instance. You make a game, all spick and span. So what do you add onto it at the end? Achievements for random tasks, like not disturbing any witches, or killing 100 000 aliens or what have you. Does this add to the game? To some, yes, but fundamentally, it doesn't constitute any more game. It constitutes more reasons to play the same amount of game. Surely you can see that.

I don't disagree with you, and I've said as much in the past, myself. Rewards are a vital part of gaming, because they represent progress. Without progress, a game is only a gimmick - a novelty toy which quickly grows boring. Progress gives us a goal and keeps us focused, offsetting the waning lustre of novelty with the satisfaction of fictional achievements. There's nothing wrong with that. But this really isn't "carrot on a stick."

The phrase "carrot on a stick," as I'm sure you already know, refers to that old caricature of tying a carrot on a stick and holding it in front of the donkey you are riding, with the belief being that the donkey will walk forward, chasing the carrot. However, like a dog chasing its own tail, it will never reach it, because the carrot hangs on a stick which is held by the man sitting on its back, so it never actually moves closer.

It is an approach to game design which is, in my own opinion, evil in its inception, because it goads people with promises of achievement and progress, but never actually delivers to any satisfactory degree. Yet still it conditions people to try ever harder for ever less reward, all because it's an underhanded way to keep people playing longer.

A game without rewards is an empty sandbox - fun for a while, but ultimately fleeting. A game of all empty reward chasing is boring and tiresome, and ultimately just as pointless. The purpose of rewards, as I see it, is not to make the player play, but rather to offset and enhance the enjoyment of the act of playing, itself.

Take the original Soul Reaver, for example. This is a very fun game with a good story, but there's only so far that gameplay and story can take it. So, instead, the game relies on rewards and progress to rejuvenate the fun of playing the game from time to time, as well as to give people the satisfaction that "Good, good. It looks like things are improving."

One cannot afford to allow rewards to overtake a game, to the exclusion of good gameplay, just as one cannot design a game with no rewards in it and expect it to last. And far too many contemporary game developers rely on this "carrot on a stick" approach to goad people into playing their bad games. MMOs are particularly susceptible to this, because contemporary developers seem to see them as a collection of reward structures with some kind of game attached to them to be decided after the fact. And that collection of reward structures always ends up suspiciously like that of WoW.

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.