Jealousy in a game

Anofalye

Normal devs don't have to deal much with jealousy, they have a game which have a lenght varying from 20 hours to a hundred hours for Oblivion.  However, a game which require hundred of hours, if not thousands...or even be counted in days of 24 hours playing...would have to cope and deal with human jealousy.

 

Let's review the basics of jealousy:

 

1- The subject pretend he isn't jealous, try to hide it and try to figure it out...in a normal game, the game is over and completed before this can even be resolved...I mean, you "win" before you can even bypass this setting, so in a normal game, this is also the final step.

2- The subject tries to rationalize his jealousy and see if it is just him beensilly.  When you are expected to play another gameplay (PvP/RvR/Raiding) in order to master your gameplay (solo/grouping), you won't be able to rationalize it long.  Eventually, it will come crashing on you as unrationalizable  (Best groupers have to be groupers)...which would lead to:

3- Join whatever make you jealous (Raid, RvR, PvP).  Or be ill and in physical pain (jealousy lead there, studies display a dog dying because of that jealousy)...or quit the game.

 

There is a lot of wisdom and intrinsect values to all the comments about "raid or die", maybe more than the OP of these comments even envision.  Having a game where players are in it for hundred/thousands+ hours lead to basic responsabilities about making sure that the setting wouldn't lead to any illness.  Rewarding the wrong dog in studies can cause heavy trauma on other dogs...

 

PS: I am no doctor or psychologist, however, I have some crude basics as a teacher...

Samuraisword

Don't confuse healthy competition with jealousy.

Most MMOGs are item centric and designed to be competitive. Therefore the expectaion is that everyone starts off on the same level playing field and has equal access to items with the only determining factors being time invested and how smart you play.

If developers introduce artificial means of limiting access by tagging better items as non tradeable and only offering those items as raid rewards then healthy competition is flawed and playing an item centric game becomes pointless.