I hate the use of stories in games and I recall the first time I experienced it and had that 'what the hell are they doing' feeling.
it was one of the first D&D computer games made. Was it an electronic compainion to D&D as I had expected? like a tool to make the existing framework eaiser and/or more compelling? no it was a stand alone campaign...
I said to myself 'well someone will figure it out someday'
nope. The only time anyone came close was Neverwinter nights 1 in 2002
I believe the main problem with story is that there are a lot of different tastes. I may not like the story that someone else might and vise versa.
Other issues I can think of are there is too much pointless story. If I wanted to I could probably spend a few hours a day reading quest text that really has little purpose other than isolated minor stories that are often long winded and unneeded.
To me removing quests is part of the answer in a multiplayer experience. There has to be other ways to keep people entertained. Quests often segregate the population by making it hard to group unless you intentionally go looking for one by queuing up. This also limits creativity as two people might find a way to tackle something intended for five by combining certain class skills.
I think its really hard to tell a good and compelling story while asking the 'listener' of the story to take a break and do something every 5 mins. I dont think anything worth saying can be said with that level of distraction. That is my main theory anyway.
I also tend to point out to people that 'stories in games' have always been possible its not just because of the computer its now possible so the question I have for them is why is it that stories havent been in games for thousands of year prior to this snap shot in time
That may be part of my issue. I don't feel like I have time to sit there and read through all the text. I actually do have the time, but even so I just want to go out and do something instead of sitting still reading. I've always been a hands on type of person with learning. I learn some things from reading, but I prefer to learn by using when possible.
that is my view. Its even magnified if the story is good.
When i am watching a really really good TV show I am fixed to that show, I will avoid going to bed at a proper time so I can keep going. Now such breaks are good now and again but having me take a break every 10 mins....absurd as far as I am concerned
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Deivos is right. I'm sorry but you are taking one guys hypothesis (not even theory) and using that as the rule, even though the guy (koster) himself stated that his theory was only one type of fun, or reason for fun.
One type. Therefore the guy you're quoting doesn't even agree with you.
He is a game designer. Not a psychologist, or psychiatrist or specialist of brain, cognitive or behavior development. He is a game designer and he talks about one possible reason or why people may find something fun. Anything he states regarding this topic should be taken with a massive truckload of salt and only given passing credence because he has developed some successful games.
You are stating that pattern mastery is the most common (no evidence of this at all) reason for fun and ignoring all the other possible factors.
That is completely ridiculous, thoroughly illogical and again Koster doesn't even agree with you as he stated it is one type.
Lets put it simply. Pattern mastery may (not is but only may) be one factor (thats it just one factor) among a great many factors in explaining why people find various things fun. Thats it, that is all you have to go on.
This talk about evolutionary adaptions regarding this are very hypothetical, they may be reasonable, they may be full of crap. I don't know. I've taken many many courses on cognitive development and theories of learning, nothing like this ever came up. Neither did evolutionary adaptations to explain this either. I will readily admit I have never taken a course on theories of fun. They may exist, they may not. There may be some decent research on it. There may not. That research is certainly not definitive in any way, shape or form. A game designer having a theory of this is a very very low, if anything at all, source of evidence.
A game releases a new area with lots of content. What do you think happens?
Do most players stick with the old content, because their primary motivator is using the game as a relaxation activity (where new content isn't necessary)?
Or would you expect the majority to flood to the new area, possibly logging in for the first time in weeks or years, in order to immediately begin unraveling the new mysteries?
When new content comes out, you will still find some players in the older areas. This handful of players is motivated more by relaxation than pattern-seeking (at least in that particular moment.)
However the vast majority are going to rush to the new thing, because a fresh pattern is always the most interesting to interact with and figure out. It's the heart of gaming.
It also explains players' tendency to game-hop, as each new game is a fresh pattern.
It also explains players' dislike of too-similar clones, as if the pattern is an old pattern in fresh patterns' clothing it's sort of a betrayal to the player and fails to provide the same fun.
Pattern mastery is a very broad concept:
a player who enjoys exploring is mastering (knowing) the game terrain.
a player who enjoys puzzles is mastering those puzzles.
a player who enjoys combat is mastering the combat puzzle.
a player who enjoys crafting is mastering that game system.
a player who enjoys story is mastering those mysteries.
a player who enjoys socializing is mastering social skills.
So the same root cause applies to a huge breadth of the core reasons players play games.
How do you go from "Axehilt says pattern mastery is the most common way games are fun" to "Koster says this isn't the only way games are fun, and so he doesn't agree with Axehilt"?
You do realize that the reason I call them it "the most common way games are fun" is to implicitly acknowledge there are other types of fun, right? Even before Koster himself mentioned it publicly, I had realized there were more types of fun, but the only other big one is what I call "relaxation activities". But how on earth did you take those two statements and reach the assumption that he disagrees with me when we're both saying the same thing?
But is gaming dominated by relaxation games like FarmVille? Or is dominated by all the other pattern-intensive genres (MOBA, FPS, MMORPG, etc)? It's less black-and-white than that, since if you're repetitively farming the same mobs in WOW your motivation is relaxation rather than game patterns. But that takes us back to the original example up top which shows us just how common and prevalent pattern-mastery fun is, because when that game releases that new area nearly all the players are going to show up there because that's the most interesting part of gaming to the majority of players. Not all players. Nearly all.
So hopefully that sheds light on why this actually is the most common way games are enjoyed by players.
A game releases a new area with lots of content. What do you think happens?
You just repeated the same mistake you've been making this entire time and that's rather disappointing, but not really unexpected.
When new content comes out of course people are going to flood to it. People will login for the first time in years, and then you know what happens? The new content bubble pops and the playerbase goes back to whatever it was doing essentially after the "newness" has been consumed.
Which indeed you're going to have a reasonable amount of players pop in and then pop out as soon as they've played the content. However, why are there still so many playing any of these games after that grace period of an expansion? The answer, because there's other motivating factors that are considerably more important to them in the long run.
This either means that the game is over and done with if it's focus is pattern mastery, or there are other reasons players are invested in the game across a spectrum of entertainment that engrosses them.
You're also slowly twisting what Koster has said about pattern mastery himself. Looking for components to call skills or excuses to call everything under one name that belittles the variety in which they are served by entertainment.
Like exploration because one appreciates well crafted landscapes and the sensation of being the one to "discover new land".
Crafting because it's a very comfortable yet somewhat involved activity where a player may interact with a greater economy and enjoy a second layer to the gameplay in a more casual context.
Story because the players enjoy the narrative, setting, and personalities and are enthralled by the the wonder of it rather than trying to solve every last riddle.
Socializing because they, you know, enjoy interacting with people or as a means to propagate an entirely different from of entertainment through role-playing.
People certainly do flock to "new", but that does not keep them, and when you talk about the overarching quality of a game the only point at which you are going to have one that has staying power and deeper quality, is when the focus is on a spectrum of entertainment forms.
Even in the case of MOBA, FPS, MMORPG, etc. If pattern mastery were truly the core driver of all this content, then games like LoL and CoD would very simply not be so popular. They have to have a reason for players to continue playing after they master the finite volume of content the game provides.
For LoL they pez feeder in some new content in the form of new characters every so often, but not at a fast enough rate for that to be keeping the volume of players. Most of the people that play that game competitively know their characters and skills reasonably well too, and there's a fundamental pattern to play most everyone follows at this point. From the perspective of pattern mastery, that game should be done with. So why does it still remain so popular? Because the entertainment isn't coming from the pattern mastery in the long run, but from the attributes that drives a person's desire for competitive engagement. This applies to CoD as well.
There's a leaderboard, global rankings, and a global media presence all fueling the notion to these players that achievement = fame. There are quite a lot of people in the world that like big numbers, and they will slog through the most monotonous crap to wear the crown atop shit mountain if they think the crown is shiny enough. LoL has capitalized on this, and most shooters follow suit.
In MMOs this takes up a similar mantle. As a massive user environment and one traditionally dominated by vertical progression and the idea of rare items, gear, etc. They are incentivizing players with a silly amount of reasons to play through much of the same user experience. If it were up to pattern mastery as the dominant trait, the veneer on such would wear thin way too fast, and you'd be hobbling along on whatever reward mechanics you have secondary for players.
This right here can actually be seen as the exact failing of most clone games. They have nothing but the new to offer and they focused too much on being something that is only a skin deep concept. That wears off fast and layers are left to wonder where the rest of the fun is.
And t's back to this point. Koster said it himself, pattern mastery is at best only one of multiple pillars of entertainment in a title, and depending on the type of game, longevity of the game, and intent for engaging the players it may not even be an core component so much as simply the shiny coat over a different form of core entertainment.
Also as usual you have chosen to misinterpret the arguments set against you in order to try and argue something that's not even the problem. As Venge said...
"You are stating that pattern mastery is the most common (no evidence of this at all) reason for fun and ignoring all the other possible factors. "
Our point is that you made a claim about the popularity of one form of entertainment and have driven it above all others when from any other perspective we have seen it as a myriad of equally valuable forms of entertainment. The people referenced and articles that have been linked so far have ended up supporting this point of view in spite of your insistence to the contrary. Why we state "Koster doesn't agree with you" is because not even he says k-fun is the most integral component of entertainment. As pointed out, his 10 year memorandum states his opinion that it's one of many forms of entertainment and that it shares a place with other components to create the game value which then accompanies another layer of content in the story and art, it's a component of a component, not the master key.
And so we're back to the core point of what we, koster, etc have stated that entertainment comes from richly interpretable situations. You can superficially catch a player's interest in something new, but unless they're an idiot that won't hold them for long. You need a game with staying power for long term success, and that only comes if you provide a rich system with a variety of ways in which users are engaged and subsequently entertained.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
You're taking entertainment which is based in emotion and trying to sciencify it. Your industry is over analyzing.
Take something like your standard deck of playing cards. How come cards don't follow your rules?
Not everyone buys into the idea that "I don't understand something, so therefore it must be unknowable."
Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated? Have you ever been to The Internet, where people called Trolls exist?
The cards themselves don't follow my rules because they're just cards. I'm describing the most common way players experience fun in games, and how that motivates them to keep playing or not.
Cards aren't a game until they're associated with rules.
War is a shallow card game. As a result it's patterns are mastered quickly. As a result War isn't very popular because no matter how many new players get introduced to the game those players all master the game in fairly short order.
Poker is a deep card game. As a result it's mastered slowly. As a result it's very popular, because players are always in various stages of learning the game. Put another way: most people feel like they could improve their Poker game, but almost nobody feels they could improve their War game. So on a given day few people are interested in revisiting War, but plenty of people would be interested in a Poker game.
Poker's depth extends beyond the base card mechanics, as without betting the game is actually pretty simple to master (you'd just memorize the probability of winning with various hands, and you'd have a mathematically reliable model of which hands to fold vs. stay.) Instead, the betting involves a social element (as well as the specific rules of the betting itself). In total, it's plenty of dynamic patterns to master.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You're taking entertainment which is based in emotion and trying to sciencify it. Your industry is over analyzing.
Take something like your standard deck of playing cards. How come cards don't follow your rules?
Not everyone buys into the idea that "I don't understand something, so therefore it must be unknowable."
Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated? Have you ever been to The Internet, where people called Trolls exist?
The cards themselves don't follow my rules because they're just cards. I'm describing the most common way players experience fun in games, and how that motivates them to keep playing or not.
Cards aren't a game until they're associated with rules.
War is a shallow card game. As a result it's patterns are mastered quickly. As a result War isn't very popular because no matter how many new players get introduced to the game those players all master the game in fairly short order.
Poker is a deep card game. As a result it's mastered slowly. As a result it's very popular, because players are always in various stages of learning the game. Put another way: most people feel like they could improve their Poker game, but almost nobody feels they could improve their War game. So on a given day few people are interested in revisiting War, but plenty of people would be interested in a Poker game.
Poker's depth extends beyond the base card mechanics, as without betting the game is actually pretty simple to master (you'd just memorize the probability of winning with various hands, and you'd have a mathematically reliable model of which hands to fold vs. stay.) Instead, the betting involves a social element (as well as the specific rules of the betting itself). In total, it's plenty of dynamic patterns to master.
I think if you admit that poker's a complicated game then you have to admit old MMOs were hard.
The difficulty in poker comes from the fact you are facing other real players with something at risk. Some players might be nice and others nasty. If there is something to lose then people may become more hostile and emotions may play into the game.
Old MMOs had direct competition either via PvP or in PvE because the world wasn't instanced. Everything you did in game had risk and reward. Players would compete over spawns and resources in strategic ways (like poker). Loosing had risk (exp penalty and possible lose of items).
New MMOs might be difficult, but there is no lose or risk. There is also no direct competition without a persistent world. Because of this it can never be like poker IMO. In this environment you are setup the best you can to succeed and enjoy yourself. One might argue the point of the game is very different.
Of those four, Poker is the only one that would be considered challenging over the long term. However, it's not simply because of a learning dynamic of the rules. It also has quite a bit to do with the other players, the fact that you are more often than not gambling alongside it for the ante and chance of success, the prestige of winning in competition, and the underlying excitement it brings in squaring off in such a scenario.
When you're talking about lower key gameplay then it's not as often about the challenge as much as it's a tool to facilitate entertainment and socialization. At casinos it's held at tables where you sit down and interact with other people, at home it's with friends over a pint or some-such.
Does learning play a role? Yes.
Is that in many regards something that could be considered ancillary to the other events taking place during the course of play though? Yup.
That you are learning some about the game as you play it is only a fragment of the actual entertainment value being derived in such a game, and may very well be far removed from one's mind during any practical play.
EDIT: This also highlights another problem that if you are gonna start conflating everything as pattern mastery to try and maintain your opinion then it's just gonna degrade the word into something meaningless. It's the same as nariu and his interpretation of MMO. You might be ok with that, but some of us like things to make sense.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
You're taking entertainment which is based in emotion and trying to sciencify it. Your industry is over analyzing.
Take something like your standard deck of playing cards. How come cards don't follow your rules?
Not everyone buys into the idea that "I don't understand something, so therefore it must be unknowable."
Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated? Have you ever been to The Internet, where people called Trolls exist?
The cards themselves don't follow my rules because they're just cards. I'm describing the most common way players experience fun in games, and how that motivates them to keep playing or not.
Cards aren't a game until they're associated with rules.
War is a shallow card game. As a result it's patterns are mastered quickly. As a result War isn't very popular because no matter how many new players get introduced to the game those players all master the game in fairly short order.
Poker is a deep card game. As a result it's mastered slowly. As a result it's very popular, because players are always in various stages of learning the game. Put another way: most people feel like they could improve their Poker game, but almost nobody feels they could improve their War game. So on a given day few people are interested in revisiting War, but plenty of people would be interested in a Poker game.
Poker's depth extends beyond the base card mechanics, as without betting the game is actually pretty simple to master (you'd just memorize the probability of winning with various hands, and you'd have a mathematically reliable model of which hands to fold vs. stay.) Instead, the betting involves a social element (as well as the specific rules of the betting itself). In total, it's plenty of dynamic patterns to master.
"Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated?"
People's emotions, most definitely can be manipulated and quite frankly I find the way people's emotions are being manipulated in the Mobile and F2P markets to be quite sickening. Stories are even making their way into the mainstream media.
There is a lot of science and psychology put into these games and not in ways or for reasons that are beneficial for the player. Today it's about making the game that makes the most money and not about making the game that makes the most fun.
Ands it's quite sad really.
As for my reason for bringing up playing cards. Earlier in the thread you had commented to me that player's don't like unpredictability. Playing Card games and Poker in particular are pretty much by definition unpredictable and there is no denying their popularity even when gambling is not involved.
Actually, thinking on it trophy hunting in MMORPGs is a completely seperate activity from questing unless the quest itself has a trophy attached to it. Only a few games I know of do this, among those being World of Warcraft and possibly Final Fantasy XIV.
Trophy hunting isn't the primary thing hurting questing in contemporary MMOs. Right now it's the prevalence of quests that exist solely to give experience and profit to the players as they level up or maintain their characters. These literally aren't quests anymore as much as jobs or tasks. They also tend to over pay the player for the amount of effort they put in, leading to inflation on currency and items that require more effort.
I've seen this happen ever since the Isle of Qael Danas (or as many aptly named it: The Isle of Cash Danas) in World of Warcraft, and in later expansions daily grind quest rewards became joked about as Blizzards minimum wage. This eventually bubbled into every other MMO imaginable since a lot of players liked it and also lead to the prevalent mouse-wheel effect that kept players logging in every day.
OP has a sense of nostalgia, coupled with having no gray area. There are hard quest in some games. The thing is why do a hard quest when in 5 levels you're going to replace it? Doesn't make sense. And most people will do things that makes sense. Even in EQ most people didn't quest. Because the reward usually didn't justify the time involved. I remember one quest took me three days. The reward was a 6/22 ranger only spear, and of course no xp. Frankly, even back in those days it wasn't that impressive for a weapon. Sure some quest were worth it. Wurmslayer, and a few from Luclin that usually involved being in a raid guild.
Quest back then are no comparable to quest now. Its just different animals.
OP has a sense of nostalgia, coupled with having no gray area. There are hard quest in some games. The thing is why do a hard quest when in 5 levels you're going to replace it? Doesn't make sense. And most people will do things that makes sense. Even in EQ most people didn't quest. Because the reward usually didn't justify the time involved. I remember one quest took me three days. The reward was a 6/22 ranger only spear, and of course no xp. Frankly, even back in those days it wasn't that impressive for a weapon. Sure some quest were worth it. Wurmslayer, and a few from Luclin that usually involved being in a raid guild.
Quest back then are no comparable to quest now. Its just different animals.
Honest questions:
1) Leave loot and xp out of the equation for a second. Could you find a quest by itself (if well made to your taste) to be an entertaining experience?
2) If a game had zero levels but had gear and horizontal progression (0% leveling content, 100% endgame content) would that game appeal to you?
OP has a sense of nostalgia, coupled with having no gray area. There are hard quest in some games. The thing is why do a hard quest when in 5 levels you're going to replace it? Doesn't make sense. And most people will do things that makes sense. Even in EQ most people didn't quest. Because the reward usually didn't justify the time involved. I remember one quest took me three days. The reward was a 6/22 ranger only spear, and of course no xp. Frankly, even back in those days it wasn't that impressive for a weapon. Sure some quest were worth it. Wurmslayer, and a few from Luclin that usually involved being in a raid guild.
Quest back then are no comparable to quest now. Its just different animals.
Honest questions:
1) Leave loot and xp out of the equation for a second. Could you find a quest by itself (if well made to your taste) to be an entertaining experience?
2) If a game had zero levels but had gear and horizontal progression (0% leveling content, 100% endgame content) would that game appeal to you?
3) What attracts you to MMORPG's
1) Yes, but that's not why I play MMORPGs. If I wanted to play a game to quest for entertainment I'd play a single player game.
2) Awful, just awful. Wouldn't even download. I'd make an exception for stat leveling games. That is, where there are no levels but you improve your stats through game play.
3) Well, they used to be an opportunity to slowly invest time and effort towards building a unique avatar. Now I don't really play them anymore, I've been to Universal, Disney, 6 Flags, King's Island, as I go to new theme parks I'm getting on the same rides waiting in line behind the same people.
I think if you admit that poker's a complicated game then you have to admit old MMOs were hard.
The difficulty in poker comes from the fact you are facing other real players with something at risk. Some players might be nice and others nasty. If there is something to lose then people may become more hostile and emotions may play into the game.
Old MMOs had direct competition either via PvP or in PvE because the world wasn't instanced. Everything you did in game had risk and reward. Players would compete over spawns and resources in strategic ways (like poker). Loosing had risk (exp penalty and possible lose of items).
New MMOs might be difficult, but there is no lose or risk. There is also no direct competition without a persistent world. Because of this it can never be like poker IMO. In this environment you are setup the best you can to succeed and enjoy yourself. One might argue the point of the game is very different.
Risk in Poker has to do with the social dynamic of balancing the factors of predicting your opponent's reactions, your hand strength, and a few other factors about the current betting pool state. This creates a very challenging environment in which to make decisions, and the social element by itself means that the correct solution for one set of opponents won't necessarily be the best solution with different opponents.
Risk in early MMORPGs wasn't dynamic. It was "if you die, we're going to kick you in the shins". This involved no decisions and was merely excessive punishment.
Also note that all of the factors that make Poker's decision-making challenging exist whether or not the money is real. Real money may add an additional stress factor, but it's not actually the thing creating the difficulty in decision-making.
So the problem with early MMORPGs was the decision-making itself wasn't challenging (in other words: they were shallow games.)
Conversely it means MMORPGs like WOW don't need "real" risk at all to be deep, engaging games (which is why we've seen WOW be so successful for so long.) But they do need to actually offer depth (which has been a significant factor in a lot of post-WOW games failing.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated?"
People's emotions, most definitely can be manipulated and quite frankly I find the way people's emotions are being manipulated in the Mobile and F2P markets to be quite sickening. Stories are even making their way into the mainstream media.
There is a lot of science and psychology put into these games and not in ways or for reasons that are beneficial for the player. Today it's about making the game that makes the most money and not about making the game that makes the most fun.
Ands it's quite sad really.
As for my reason for bringing up playing cards. Earlier in the thread you had commented to me that player's don't like unpredictability. Playing Card games and Poker in particular are pretty much by definition unpredictable and there is no denying their popularity even when gambling is not involved.
All the science/psychology applied to game design is bad for players? Seriously you don't believe that any of the knowledge of how players enjoy games has aided in improving games?
Just with analytics alone I've been able to improve how I balance games, by taking data from how players are actually using the things in-game and using it to help make balance changes to the game to improve things.
While I think Koster's theory is perhaps underrepresented in game design, and a fixation on simplicity slightly overrepresented, the general knowledge of the craft of game design is quite a bit better than when I started in the industry ~16 years ago.
As for the card thing, I'm not sure where you thought you saw me say players disliked unpredictability.
On a purely personal standpoint I do have a slight dislike of unpredictability in skill-focused PVP games. But I tend to be a bit less irritated by it than many competitive players (a lot of players whine about crits in TF2, but I know that in the long run they average out, and matches are almost never short enough that randomness decides the match.)
The other way unpredictability can be genuinely negative for all gamers is if your controls just feel unreliable/noisy.
On the flip side, randomness to things like a Magic/Hearthstone deck is a deliberate noise in the system that makes that game's gameplay patterns harder to master as a result, which has the subtle benefit where players of worse skill always feel like they have a chance if they draw the perfect hand and their opponent doesn't. Without randomness, the skilled player would always win (and in doing so would be confirmed as having mastered the game, at which point their interest would decline.)
A game's rewards are another area where randomness is popular, as unpredictable rewards will trigger more dopamine than predictable ones. Of course it's a weird issue to talk about because although dopamine is an enjoyable, players are occasionally fearful of that enjoyment ("give me an enjoyable game, but don't make it too enjoyable or I'll accuse you of being a Skinner Box!"; which is always a bit ironic because that player's favorite game is also enjoyable for the same reason: dopamine being triggered due to hard-to-predict rewards being experienced.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Some games I'm great at pvp, others not so much. But I love to pvp and will pvp even if I'm not doing so great in it.
Not everyone, but I bet a lot don't pvp because they are intimidated by it. Here's some advice... If your intimidated by it. It makes it feel so much better when you try it and are successful then beating an npc.
Seriously you don't believe that any of the knowledge of how players enjoy games has aided in improving games?
EDIT: Getting a little tired of this this post/edit tool not working right.
You can see that Laserit was barking at the practice as it relates to mobile and F2P gaming and more so monetization. He did not say it exclusively applies to negative (though he did point out "and not in ways or for reasons that are beneficial for the player" as a pretty distinct jab that much of it is relatively disconnected from being a benefit).
Besides which, while you can use analytics to optimize a game, that doesn't always mean improving it. Looking at the data about how people are using the game is certainly informative on a Q/A level for fixing the content as it exists, but it is not a creative component and it does not provide a solution to making a broken game good unless the core components of the game are already themselves good. It's a good Q/A tool, not much of a developer tool.
At least you've shifted to prefacing the rest of your commentary as opinion, that's appreciated.
EDIT: Guess for the sake of accuracy I should state that analytics is actually useful when designing a game, but as a reference. If taken as a guide to say "players will totally buy this" you are simply running headlong into the exact problem that is "cookie cutter" game design and the lack of deep gameplay.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Seriously you don't believe that any of the knowledge of how players enjoy games has aided in improving games?
EDIT: Getting a little tired of this this post/edit tool not working right.
You can see that Laserit was barking at the practice as it relates to mobile and F2P gaming and more so monetization. He did not say it exclusively applies to negative (though he did point out "and not in ways or for reasons that are beneficial for the player" as a pretty distinct jab that much of it is relatively disconnected from being a benefit).
Besides which, while you can use analytics to optimize a game, that doesn't always mean improving it. Looking at the data about how people are using the game is certainly informative on a Q/A level for fixing the content as it exists, but it is not a creative component and it does not provide a solution to making a broken game good unless the core components of the game are already themselves good. It's a good Q/A tool, not much of a developer tool.
At least you've shifted to prefacing the rest of your commentary as opinion, that's appreciated.
EDIT: Guess for the sake of accuracy I should state that analytics is actually useful when designing a game, but as a reference. If taken as a guide to say "players will totally buy this" you are simply running headlong into the exact problem that is "cookie cutter" game design and the lack of deep gameplay.
To me I think part of the problem with analytics with MMORPG is that it can be easily be reactionary measure. For example If you took analytics of children eating different candies you will get near 100% that children like to eat candy. This does not mean that you can feed children candy 100% of the time without issue long term.
To me it seems like a lot of developers have taken analytics from that approach. The lack of desire to upset gamers and convenience over everything seems to have run rampant. IMO this why F2P is necessary for many games outside of overall oversaturation.
What I mean is that they have sold out to convenience so much that MMORPG can no longer hold player attentions longer than a few weeks. When they charge monthly fees people choose not to pay for content easily completed. Short term designs do not lend well to games that have long term upkeep and cost. Instead they have focused on short term buys with F2P. F2P while not inherently bad opens up games to negative aspects, oversaturation and lowers the "quality bar." This of course is subjective but I think many players will agree.
That's all part of a trend called "The race to the bottom" if you wanna look up some stuff about it.
Gist of it is that with the onset of mobile gaming and data analytics, developers and publishers found that dropping the price on games and pushing other components to optimize play around simple core gameplay that's feed through developer controllable inputs, there is much greater control over incentivizing players to pay into titles.
The often repeated mistake is that such a strategy makes for better gameplay, which really isn't the case. It makes for more optimized gameplay and it allows a developer to manipulate players more, but in many cases it's been to the neglect of the titles core game features and quality.
This is not to say that analytics doesn't lend towards developing a better game. When a person can place the gathered statistics into context as to why such user trends exist in their game, it can lead to questions about the surrounding game mechanics and if there are ways to improve those features.
It's rare to find a good developer though and more common to find people who are more or less glorified Q/A or maintenance that know how to optimize the content in a game, but not develop something that's going to be particularly deep, complex, or novel.
As said analytics is good to have as a reference, but people need to not mistake it as blueprints to success.
Post edited by Deivos on
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Poker is PvP. Testing your mastery of game mechanics against the mastery of others. I fully see the appeal of Poker. I don't see the relevance to MMO gaming though. People who play poker are much more likely to prefer direct personal contact over mmo gaming.
Poker is PvP. Testing your mastery of game mechanics against the mastery of others. I fully see the appeal of Poker. I don't see the relevance to MMO gaming though. People who play poker are much more likely to prefer direct personal contact over mmo gaming.
The relevance was to explain the most common motivating factor in entertainment. And that's essentially learning.
Poker's card, betting, and social elements are very different things to learn than the set of things (combat, exploration, social) learned while playing an MMORPG, but it's still the same fundamental compulsion.
In an earlier post I described how broad a concept pattern mastery is, by listing many activities that involved learning (like exploration, socialization, and combat.) One thing unsaid there was how any given player isn't going to be as interested in any given pattern. This is why we have explorers, socializers, and killers/achievers in MMORPGs as player archetypes: the learning most interesting to each of them is quite different and they might be totally disinterested in some or all of the other activities, but they're still motivated by learning.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
OP has a sense of nostalgia, coupled with having no gray area. There are hard quest in some games. The thing is why do a hard quest when in 5 levels you're going to replace it? Doesn't make sense. And most people will do things that makes sense. Even in EQ most people didn't quest. Because the reward usually didn't justify the time involved. I remember one quest took me three days. The reward was a 6/22 ranger only spear, and of course no xp. Frankly, even back in those days it wasn't that impressive for a weapon. Sure some quest were worth it. Wurmslayer, and a few from Luclin that usually involved being in a raid guild.
Quest back then are no comparable to quest now. Its just different animals.
Honest questions:
1) Leave loot and xp out of the equation for a second. Could you find a quest by itself (if well made to your taste) to be an entertaining experience?
2) If a game had zero levels but had gear and horizontal progression (0% leveling content, 100% endgame content) would that game appeal to you?
3) What attracts you to MMORPG's
1) Yes, but that's not why I play MMORPGs. If I wanted to play a game to quest for entertainment I'd play a single player game.
2) Awful, just awful. Wouldn't even download. I'd make an exception for stat leveling games. That is, where there are no levels but you improve your stats through game play.
3) Well, they used to be an opportunity to slowly invest time and effort towards building a unique avatar. Now I don't really play them anymore, I've been to Universal, Disney, 6 Flags, King's Island, as I go to new theme parks I'm getting on the same rides waiting in line behind the same people.
Your answer to number 3 is how I feel. Most MMORPGs right now are taking too much from single player linear titles and worrying too much about what happens at max level, instead of worrying about how to make a game fun while customizing and growing the avatar. Having risky areas to explore and eventually overcome is a big part of that experience as well. Areas with normal monsters vs Elite monsters felt a lot better to run around and explore in than being able to just curb stomp every living thing we come across.
Axehilt
Risk in Poker has to do with the social dynamic of balancing the factors of predicting your opponent's reactions, your hand strength, and a few other factors about the current betting pool state. This creates a very challenging environment in which to make decisions, and the social element by itself means that the correct solution for one set of opponents won't necessarily be the best solution with different opponents.
The same could be said of old MMOs.
You had barter via word of mouth. People were often trying to scheme others for the best deal taking advantage of the fact there was no auction house. This is not much different then trying to bluff in poker.
People would train you sometimes in order to take get at a contested spawn. People would also try to steal your kill before mechanics were implemented to stop it.
You had to organize things a lot more due to having no look for group tools. This was a lot of work for the person involved and the had to deal with a lot of social mechanics that weren't always easy to deal with. You can see that most people want to avoid these.
There are probably a lot of things I'm missing, but there were far more social mechanics that included things like deception, bluffing, and dirty play because of direct competition in a static world.
Risk in early MMORPGs wasn't dynamic. It was "if you die, we're going to kick you in the shins". This involved no decisions and was merely excessive punishment.
This is simply not true. As you pointed out in other posts on this topic many people would alter their play because of the risk vs reward. Many would take the safe route and try to camp the mob that was least likely to result in death. Others would take the risk and get rewarded for it with some decent loot and possible better experience. In poker the games that are most intense are the ones based around weather you are going to win or lose money. If you go into a dungeon or other high risk area there is a lot to lose (items/experience/levels), but there is potentially a lot to gain (better items/experience).
Also note that all of the factors that make Poker's decision-making challenging exist whether or not the money is real. Real money may add an additional stress factor, but it's not actually the thing creating the difficulty in decision-making.
There are actually a lot of factors other than just pushing the button at the right time in older MMOs. It's been gone over before, but there were mechanics like pulling, buffing, debuffing, cc, tank, healing, and more. Much of the combat might have been auto attack for pure melee, but most had to hit abilities at the right time. With the risk of making backwards progress this actually mattered a lot. Your DPS couldn't go to crazy because if they pulled the mob away from the tank they were dead. If you CC or off tank failed to pick up adds you were dead. If your puller made a bad pull and didn't lose aggro you were dead. A lot of this required social aspects in order to get people doing the right thing. As I mentioned in the first part of this post social dynamics are definitely involved because people are able to deceive each other for personal gain.
Conversely it means MMORPGs like WOW don't need "real" risk at all to be deep, engaging games (which is why we've seen WOW be so successful for so long.) But they do need to actually offer depth (which has been a significant factor in a lot of post-WOW games failing.)
The social aspect in older MMOs was actually a lot more deep because of social aspects I mentioned and some I didn't like having to setup up a community based spawn camping order. There is nothing close to that in modern MMOs. The games intentionally take anything you have to think about other than combat out of the game and even combat (as mentioned by you in artificial AI) is intentionally made easy by developers to make people feel they are doing well.
Axehilt
Risk in Poker has to do with the social dynamic of balancing the factors of predicting your opponent's reactions, your hand strength, and a few other factors about the current betting pool state. This creates a very challenging environment in which to make decisions, and the social element by itself means that the correct solution for one set of opponents won't necessarily be the best solution with different opponents.
The same could be said of old MMOs.
You had barter via word of mouth. People were often trying to scheme others for the best deal taking advantage of the fact there was no auction house. This is not much different then trying to bluff in poker.
People would train you sometimes in order to take get at a contested spawn. People would also try to steal your kill before mechanics were implemented to stop it.
You had to organize things a lot more due to having no look for group tools. This was a lot of work for the person involved and the had to deal with a lot of social mechanics that weren't always easy to deal with. You can see that most people want to avoid these.
There are probably a lot of things I'm missing, but there were far more social mechanics that included things like deception, bluffing, and dirty play because of direct competition in a static world.
Risk in early MMORPGs wasn't dynamic. It was "if you die, we're going to kick you in the shins". This involved no decisions and was merely excessive punishment.
This is simply not true. As you pointed out in other posts on this topic many people would alter their play because of the risk vs reward. Many would take the safe route and try to camp the mob that was least likely to result in death. Others would take the risk and get rewarded for it with some decent loot and possible better experience. In poker the games that are most intense are the ones based around weather you are going to win or lose money. If you go into a dungeon or other high risk area there is a lot to lose (items/experience/levels), but there is potentially a lot to gain (better items/experience).
Also note that all of the factors that make Poker's decision-making challenging exist whether or not the money is real. Real money may add an additional stress factor, but it's not actually the thing creating the difficulty in decision-making.
There are actually a lot of factors other than just pushing the button at the right time in older MMOs. It's been gone over before, but there were mechanics like pulling, buffing, debuffing, cc, tank, healing, and more. Much of the combat might have been auto attack for pure melee, but most had to hit abilities at the right time. With the risk of making backwards progress this actually mattered a lot. Your DPS couldn't go to crazy because if they pulled the mob away from the tank they were dead. If you CC or off tank failed to pick up adds you were dead. If your puller made a bad pull and didn't lose aggro you were dead. A lot of this required social aspects in order to get people doing the right thing. As I mentioned in the first part of this post social dynamics are definitely involved because people are able to deceive each other for personal gain.
Conversely it means MMORPGs like WOW don't need "real" risk at all to be deep, engaging games (which is why we've seen WOW be so successful for so long.) But they do need to actually offer depth (which has been a significant factor in a lot of post-WOW games failing.)
The social aspect in older MMOs was actually a lot more deep because of social aspects I mentioned and some I didn't like having to setup up a community based spawn camping order. There is nothing close to that in modern MMOs. The games intentionally take anything you have to think about other than combat out of the game and even combat (as mentioned by you in artificial AI) is intentionally made easy by developers to make people feel they are doing well.
Honestly, you're wasting your breath on this. There are people who simply will not acknowledge older games being harder, especially. If you point out something specific it will be ignored and they will say its just more tedious. Even though it could easily be argued that tedium is added mental challenge because not everyone has the ability to marathon through a game.
Almost any game how much you die is a testament to how hard a game is. Excluding cheese death and of course Everquest. You died in Everquest because it was tedious and so was the death penalty. No way did that make it harder to level.
Honestly, you're wasting your breath on this. There are people who simply will not acknowledge older games being harder, especially. If you point out something specific it will be ignored and they will say its just more tedious. Even though it could easily be argued that tedium is added mental challenge because not everyone has the ability to marathon through a game.
Almost any game how much you die is a testament to how hard a game is. Excluding cheese death and of course Everquest. You died in Everquest because it was tedious and so was the death penalty. No way did that make it harder to level.
I think there are different types of difficulty and EQ had most of them.
Combat difficulty which can be found in all games to an extent.
Social difficulty which is generally just in persistent worlds with no helpers.
Marathon difficulty where you have to have the persistence/drive/focus to continue even when you are exhausted.
Exploration difficulty where you have to piece together obtuse clues or use your environment to find things.
No labels difficulty where you have to be able to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn't without labels/text telling you exactly what something is or what it is for.
Risk vs reward difficulty where it's risky content grants better rewards and better items.
I don't really want to go over why death penalties make things harder, but here it goes. Mathematically speaking if you lose a large chunk of experience for each death then if you suck and die a lot you will never level up.
Axehilt
Risk in Poker has to do with the social dynamic of balancing the factors of predicting your opponent's reactions, your hand strength, and a few other factors about the current betting pool state. This creates a very challenging environment in which to make decisions, and the social element by itself means that the correct solution for one set of opponents won't necessarily be the best solution with different opponents.
The same could be said of old MMOs.
You had barter via word of mouth. People were often trying to scheme others for the best deal taking advantage of the fact there was no auction house. This is not much different then trying to bluff in poker.
People would train you sometimes in order to take get at a contested spawn. People would also try to steal your kill before mechanics were implemented to stop it.
You had to organize things a lot more due to having no look for group tools. This was a lot of work for the person involved and the had to deal with a lot of social mechanics that weren't always easy to deal with. You can see that most people want to avoid these.
There are probably a lot of things I'm missing, but there were far more social mechanics that included things like deception, bluffing, and dirty play because of direct competition in a static world.
Risk in early MMORPGs wasn't dynamic. It was "if you die, we're going to kick you in the shins". This involved no decisions and was merely excessive punishment.
This is simply not true. As you pointed out in other posts on this topic many people would alter their play because of the risk vs reward. Many would take the safe route and try to camp the mob that was least likely to result in death. Others would take the risk and get rewarded for it with some decent loot and possible better experience. In poker the games that are most intense are the ones based around weather you are going to win or lose money. If you go into a dungeon or other high risk area there is a lot to lose (items/experience/levels), but there is potentially a lot to gain (better items/experience).
Also note that all of the factors that make Poker's decision-making challenging exist whether or not the money is real. Real money may add an additional stress factor, but it's not actually the thing creating the difficulty in decision-making.
There are actually a lot of factors other than just pushing the button at the right time in older MMOs. It's been gone over before, but there were mechanics like pulling, buffing, debuffing, cc, tank, healing, and more. Much of the combat might have been auto attack for pure melee, but most had to hit abilities at the right time. With the risk of making backwards progress this actually mattered a lot. Your DPS couldn't go to crazy because if they pulled the mob away from the tank they were dead. If you CC or off tank failed to pick up adds you were dead. If your puller made a bad pull and didn't lose aggro you were dead. A lot of this required social aspects in order to get people doing the right thing. As I mentioned in the first part of this post social dynamics are definitely involved because people are able to deceive each other for personal gain.
Conversely it means MMORPGs like WOW don't need "real" risk at all to be deep, engaging games (which is why we've seen WOW be so successful for so long.) But they do need to actually offer depth (which has been a significant factor in a lot of post-WOW games failing.)
The social aspect in older MMOs was actually a lot more deep because of social aspects I mentioned and some I didn't like having to setup up a community based spawn camping order. There is nothing close to that in modern MMOs. The games intentionally take anything you have to think about other than combat out of the game and even combat (as mentioned by you in artificial AI) is intentionally made easy by developers to make people feel they are doing well.
Honestly, you're wasting your breath on this. There are people who simply will not acknowledge older games being harder, especially. If you point out something specific it will be ignored and they will say its just more tedious. Even though it could easily be argued that tedium is added mental challenge because not everyone has the ability to marathon through a game.
Almost any game how much you die is a testament to how hard a game is. Excluding cheese death and of course Everquest. You died in Everquest because it was tedious and so was the death penalty. No way did that make it harder to level.
All great points
I want to know what the heck is stopping MMORPG developers from making say... Easy - Medium - Hard servers. Just like PvP vs PvE servers.
Why not use those expensive art assets to cater to all preferences. Make three games out of one.
Honestly, you're wasting your breath on this. There are people who simply will not acknowledge older games being harder, especially. If you point out something specific it will be ignored and they will say its just more tedious. Even though it could easily be argued that tedium is added mental challenge because not everyone has the ability to marathon through a game.
Almost any game how much you die is a testament to how hard a game is. Excluding cheese death and of course Everquest. You died in Everquest because it was tedious and so was the death penalty. No way did that make it harder to level.
They were only "harder" because they required more time, not more thinking/intelligence.
For example what's harder, painting for 10 minutes or painting for 1 hour?
Comments
When i am watching a really really good TV show I am fixed to that show, I will avoid going to bed at a proper time so I can keep going. Now such breaks are good now and again but having me take a break every 10 mins....absurd as far as I am concerned
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
You're sounding like a Vulcan
You're taking entertainment which is based in emotion and trying to sciencify it. Your industry is over analyzing.
Take something like your standard deck of playing cards. How come cards don't follow your rules?
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
When new content comes out of course people are going to flood to it. People will login for the first time in years, and then you know what happens? The new content bubble pops and the playerbase goes back to whatever it was doing essentially after the "newness" has been consumed.
Which indeed you're going to have a reasonable amount of players pop in and then pop out as soon as they've played the content. However, why are there still so many playing any of these games after that grace period of an expansion? The answer, because there's other motivating factors that are considerably more important to them in the long run.
This either means that the game is over and done with if it's focus is pattern mastery, or there are other reasons players are invested in the game across a spectrum of entertainment that engrosses them.
You're also slowly twisting what Koster has said about pattern mastery himself. Looking for components to call skills or excuses to call everything under one name that belittles the variety in which they are served by entertainment.
Like exploration because one appreciates well crafted landscapes and the sensation of being the one to "discover new land".
Crafting because it's a very comfortable yet somewhat involved activity where a player may interact with a greater economy and enjoy a second layer to the gameplay in a more casual context.
Story because the players enjoy the narrative, setting, and personalities and are enthralled by the the wonder of it rather than trying to solve every last riddle.
Socializing because they, you know, enjoy interacting with people or as a means to propagate an entirely different from of entertainment through role-playing.
People certainly do flock to "new", but that does not keep them, and when you talk about the overarching quality of a game the only point at which you are going to have one that has staying power and deeper quality, is when the focus is on a spectrum of entertainment forms.
Even in the case of MOBA, FPS, MMORPG, etc. If pattern mastery were truly the core driver of all this content, then games like LoL and CoD would very simply not be so popular. They have to have a reason for players to continue playing after they master the finite volume of content the game provides.
For LoL they pez feeder in some new content in the form of new characters every so often, but not at a fast enough rate for that to be keeping the volume of players. Most of the people that play that game competitively know their characters and skills reasonably well too, and there's a fundamental pattern to play most everyone follows at this point. From the perspective of pattern mastery, that game should be done with. So why does it still remain so popular? Because the entertainment isn't coming from the pattern mastery in the long run, but from the attributes that drives a person's desire for competitive engagement. This applies to CoD as well.
There's a leaderboard, global rankings, and a global media presence all fueling the notion to these players that achievement = fame. There are quite a lot of people in the world that like big numbers, and they will slog through the most monotonous crap to wear the crown atop shit mountain if they think the crown is shiny enough. LoL has capitalized on this, and most shooters follow suit.
In MMOs this takes up a similar mantle. As a massive user environment and one traditionally dominated by vertical progression and the idea of rare items, gear, etc. They are incentivizing players with a silly amount of reasons to play through much of the same user experience. If it were up to pattern mastery as the dominant trait, the veneer on such would wear thin way too fast, and you'd be hobbling along on whatever reward mechanics you have secondary for players.
This right here can actually be seen as the exact failing of most clone games. They have nothing but the new to offer and they focused too much on being something that is only a skin deep concept. That wears off fast and layers are left to wonder where the rest of the fun is.
And t's back to this point. Koster said it himself, pattern mastery is at best only one of multiple pillars of entertainment in a title, and depending on the type of game, longevity of the game, and intent for engaging the players it may not even be an core component so much as simply the shiny coat over a different form of core entertainment.
Also as usual you have chosen to misinterpret the arguments set against you in order to try and argue something that's not even the problem. As Venge said...
"You are stating that pattern mastery is the most common (no evidence of this at all) reason for fun and ignoring all the other possible factors. "
Our point is that you made a claim about the popularity of one form of entertainment and have driven it above all others when from any other perspective we have seen it as a myriad of equally valuable forms of entertainment. The people referenced and articles that have been linked so far have ended up supporting this point of view in spite of your insistence to the contrary. Why we state "Koster doesn't agree with you" is because not even he says k-fun is the most integral component of entertainment. As pointed out, his 10 year memorandum states his opinion that it's one of many forms of entertainment and that it shares a place with other components to create the game value which then accompanies another layer of content in the story and art, it's a component of a component, not the master key.
And so we're back to the core point of what we, koster, etc have stated that entertainment comes from richly interpretable situations. You can superficially catch a player's interest in something new, but unless they're an idiot that won't hold them for long. You need a game with staying power for long term success, and that only comes if you provide a rich system with a variety of ways in which users are engaged and subsequently entertained.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated? Have you ever been to The Internet, where people called Trolls exist?
The cards themselves don't follow my rules because they're just cards. I'm describing the most common way players experience fun in games, and how that motivates them to keep playing or not.
Cards aren't a game until they're associated with rules.
War is a shallow card game. As a result it's patterns are mastered quickly. As a result War isn't very popular because no matter how many new players get introduced to the game those players all master the game in fairly short order.
Poker is a deep card game. As a result it's mastered slowly. As a result it's very popular, because players are always in various stages of learning the game. Put another way: most people feel like they could improve their Poker game, but almost nobody feels they could improve their War game. So on a given day few people are interested in revisiting War, but plenty of people would be interested in a Poker game.
Poker's depth extends beyond the base card mechanics, as without betting the game is actually pretty simple to master (you'd just memorize the probability of winning with various hands, and you'd have a mathematically reliable model of which hands to fold vs. stay.) Instead, the betting involves a social element (as well as the specific rules of the betting itself). In total, it's plenty of dynamic patterns to master.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The difficulty in poker comes from the fact you are facing other real players with something at risk. Some players might be nice and others nasty. If there is something to lose then people may become more hostile and emotions may play into the game.
Old MMOs had direct competition either via PvP or in PvE because the world wasn't instanced. Everything you did in game had risk and reward. Players would compete over spawns and resources in strategic ways (like poker). Loosing had risk (exp penalty and possible lose of items).
New MMOs might be difficult, but there is no lose or risk. There is also no direct competition without a persistent world. Because of this it can never be like poker IMO. In this environment you are setup the best you can to succeed and enjoy yourself. One might argue the point of the game is very different.
Those are the four highest ranked card games.
Of those four, Poker is the only one that would be considered challenging over the long term. However, it's not simply because of a learning dynamic of the rules. It also has quite a bit to do with the other players, the fact that you are more often than not gambling alongside it for the ante and chance of success, the prestige of winning in competition, and the underlying excitement it brings in squaring off in such a scenario.
When you're talking about lower key gameplay then it's not as often about the challenge as much as it's a tool to facilitate entertainment and socialization. At casinos it's held at tables where you sit down and interact with other people, at home it's with friends over a pint or some-such.
Does learning play a role? Yes.
Is that in many regards something that could be considered ancillary to the other events taking place during the course of play though? Yup.
That you are learning some about the game as you play it is only a fragment of the actual entertainment value being derived in such a game, and may very well be far removed from one's mind during any practical play.
EDIT: This also highlights another problem that if you are gonna start conflating everything as pattern mastery to try and maintain your opinion then it's just gonna degrade the word into something meaningless. It's the same as nariu and his interpretation of MMO. You might be ok with that, but some of us like things to make sense.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
"Are you suggesting you don't believe the emotions of people can be predictably manipulated?"
People's emotions, most definitely can be manipulated and quite frankly I find the way people's emotions are being manipulated in the Mobile and F2P markets to be quite sickening. Stories are even making their way into the mainstream media.
There is a lot of science and psychology put into these games and not in ways or for reasons that are beneficial for the player. Today it's about making the game that makes the most money and not about making the game that makes the most fun.
Ands it's quite sad really.
As for my reason for bringing up playing cards. Earlier in the thread you had commented to me that player's don't like unpredictability. Playing Card games and Poker in particular are pretty much by definition unpredictable and there is no denying their popularity even when gambling is not involved.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Trophy hunting isn't the primary thing hurting questing in contemporary MMOs. Right now it's the prevalence of quests that exist solely to give experience and profit to the players as they level up or maintain their characters. These literally aren't quests anymore as much as jobs or tasks. They also tend to over pay the player for the amount of effort they put in, leading to inflation on currency and items that require more effort.
I've seen this happen ever since the Isle of Qael Danas (or as many aptly named it: The Isle of Cash Danas) in World of Warcraft, and in later expansions daily grind quest rewards became joked about as Blizzards minimum wage. This eventually bubbled into every other MMO imaginable since a lot of players liked it and also lead to the prevalent mouse-wheel effect that kept players logging in every day.
Quest back then are no comparable to quest now. Its just different animals.
1) Leave loot and xp out of the equation for a second. Could you find a quest by itself (if well made to your taste) to be an entertaining experience?
2) If a game had zero levels but had gear and horizontal progression (0% leveling content, 100% endgame content) would that game appeal to you?
3) What attracts you to MMORPG's
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
2) Awful, just awful. Wouldn't even download. I'd make an exception for stat leveling games. That is, where there are no levels but you improve your stats through game play.
3) Well, they used to be an opportunity to slowly invest time and effort towards building a unique avatar. Now I don't really play them anymore, I've been to Universal, Disney, 6 Flags, King's Island, as I go to new theme parks I'm getting on the same rides waiting in line behind the same people.
Risk in early MMORPGs wasn't dynamic. It was "if you die, we're going to kick you in the shins". This involved no decisions and was merely excessive punishment.
Also note that all of the factors that make Poker's decision-making challenging exist whether or not the money is real. Real money may add an additional stress factor, but it's not actually the thing creating the difficulty in decision-making.
So the problem with early MMORPGs was the decision-making itself wasn't challenging (in other words: they were shallow games.)
Conversely it means MMORPGs like WOW don't need "real" risk at all to be deep, engaging games (which is why we've seen WOW be so successful for so long.) But they do need to actually offer depth (which has been a significant factor in a lot of post-WOW games failing.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Just with analytics alone I've been able to improve how I balance games, by taking data from how players are actually using the things in-game and using it to help make balance changes to the game to improve things.
While I think Koster's theory is perhaps underrepresented in game design, and a fixation on simplicity slightly overrepresented, the general knowledge of the craft of game design is quite a bit better than when I started in the industry ~16 years ago.
As for the card thing, I'm not sure where you thought you saw me say players disliked unpredictability.
On a purely personal standpoint I do have a slight dislike of unpredictability in skill-focused PVP games. But I tend to be a bit less irritated by it than many competitive players (a lot of players whine about crits in TF2, but I know that in the long run they average out, and matches are almost never short enough that randomness decides the match.)
The other way unpredictability can be genuinely negative for all gamers is if your controls just feel unreliable/noisy.
On the flip side, randomness to things like a Magic/Hearthstone deck is a deliberate noise in the system that makes that game's gameplay patterns harder to master as a result, which has the subtle benefit where players of worse skill always feel like they have a chance if they draw the perfect hand and their opponent doesn't. Without randomness, the skilled player would always win (and in doing so would be confirmed as having mastered the game, at which point their interest would decline.)
A game's rewards are another area where randomness is popular, as unpredictable rewards will trigger more dopamine than predictable ones. Of course it's a weird issue to talk about because although dopamine is an enjoyable, players are occasionally fearful of that enjoyment ("give me an enjoyable game, but don't make it too enjoyable or I'll accuse you of being a Skinner Box!"; which is always a bit ironic because that player's favorite game is also enjoyable for the same reason: dopamine being triggered due to hard-to-predict rewards being experienced.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Not everyone, but I bet a lot don't pvp because they are intimidated by it. Here's some advice... If your intimidated by it. It makes it feel so much better when you try it and are successful then beating an npc.
You can see that Laserit was barking at the practice as it relates to mobile and F2P gaming and more so monetization. He did not say it exclusively applies to negative (though he did point out "and not in ways or for reasons that are beneficial for the player" as a pretty distinct jab that much of it is relatively disconnected from being a benefit).
Besides which, while you can use analytics to optimize a game, that doesn't always mean improving it. Looking at the data about how people are using the game is certainly informative on a Q/A level for fixing the content as it exists, but it is not a creative component and it does not provide a solution to making a broken game good unless the core components of the game are already themselves good. It's a good Q/A tool, not much of a developer tool.
At least you've shifted to prefacing the rest of your commentary as opinion, that's appreciated.
EDIT: Guess for the sake of accuracy I should state that analytics is actually useful when designing a game, but as a reference. If taken as a guide to say "players will totally buy this" you are simply running headlong into the exact problem that is "cookie cutter" game design and the lack of deep gameplay.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
To me it seems like a lot of developers have taken analytics from that approach. The lack of desire to upset gamers and convenience over everything seems to have run rampant. IMO this why F2P is necessary for many games outside of overall oversaturation.
What I mean is that they have sold out to convenience so much that MMORPG can no longer hold player attentions longer than a few weeks. When they charge monthly fees people choose not to pay for content easily completed. Short term designs do not lend well to games that have long term upkeep and cost. Instead they have focused on short term buys with F2P. F2P while not inherently bad opens up games to negative aspects, oversaturation and lowers the "quality bar." This of course is subjective but I think many players will agree.
Gist of it is that with the onset of mobile gaming and data analytics, developers and publishers found that dropping the price on games and pushing other components to optimize play around simple core gameplay that's feed through developer controllable inputs, there is much greater control over incentivizing players to pay into titles.
The often repeated mistake is that such a strategy makes for better gameplay, which really isn't the case. It makes for more optimized gameplay and it allows a developer to manipulate players more, but in many cases it's been to the neglect of the titles core game features and quality.
This is not to say that analytics doesn't lend towards developing a better game. When a person can place the gathered statistics into context as to why such user trends exist in their game, it can lead to questions about the surrounding game mechanics and if there are ways to improve those features.
It's rare to find a good developer though and more common to find people who are more or less glorified Q/A or maintenance that know how to optimize the content in a game, but not develop something that's going to be particularly deep, complex, or novel.
As said analytics is good to have as a reference, but people need to not mistake it as blueprints to success.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Poker's card, betting, and social elements are very different things to learn than the set of things (combat, exploration, social) learned while playing an MMORPG, but it's still the same fundamental compulsion.
In an earlier post I described how broad a concept pattern mastery is, by listing many activities that involved learning (like exploration, socialization, and combat.) One thing unsaid there was how any given player isn't going to be as interested in any given pattern. This is why we have explorers, socializers, and killers/achievers in MMORPGs as player archetypes: the learning most interesting to each of them is quite different and they might be totally disinterested in some or all of the other activities, but they're still motivated by learning.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You had barter via word of mouth. People were often trying to scheme others for the best deal taking advantage of the fact there was no auction house. This is not much different then trying to bluff in poker.
People would train you sometimes in order to take get at a contested spawn. People would also try to steal your kill before mechanics were implemented to stop it.
You had to organize things a lot more due to having no look for group tools. This was a lot of work for the person involved and the had to deal with a lot of social mechanics that weren't always easy to deal with. You can see that most people want to avoid these.
There are probably a lot of things I'm missing, but there were far more social mechanics that included things like deception, bluffing, and dirty play because of direct competition in a static world.
This is simply not true. As you pointed out in other posts on this topic many people would alter their play because of the risk vs reward. Many would take the safe route and try to camp the mob that was least likely to result in death. Others would take the risk and get rewarded for it with some decent loot and possible better experience. In poker the games that are most intense are the ones based around weather you are going to win or lose money. If you go into a dungeon or other high risk area there is a lot to lose (items/experience/levels), but there is potentially a lot to gain (better items/experience).
There are actually a lot of factors other than just pushing the button at the right time in older MMOs. It's been gone over before, but there were mechanics like pulling, buffing, debuffing, cc, tank, healing, and more. Much of the combat might have been auto attack for pure melee, but most had to hit abilities at the right time. With the risk of making backwards progress this actually mattered a lot. Your DPS couldn't go to crazy because if they pulled the mob away from the tank they were dead. If you CC or off tank failed to pick up adds you were dead. If your puller made a bad pull and didn't lose aggro you were dead. A lot of this required social aspects in order to get people doing the right thing. As I mentioned in the first part of this post social dynamics are definitely involved because people are able to deceive each other for personal gain.
See above ^
The social aspect in older MMOs was actually a lot more deep because of social aspects I mentioned and some I didn't like having to setup up a community based spawn camping order. There is nothing close to that in modern MMOs. The games intentionally take anything you have to think about other than combat out of the game and even combat (as mentioned by you in artificial AI) is intentionally made easy by developers to make people feel they are doing well.
Almost any game how much you die is a testament to how hard a game is. Excluding cheese death and of course Everquest. You died in Everquest because it was tedious and so was the death penalty. No way did that make it harder to level.
Combat difficulty which can be found in all games to an extent.
Social difficulty which is generally just in persistent worlds with no helpers.
Marathon difficulty where you have to have the persistence/drive/focus to continue even when you are exhausted.
Exploration difficulty where you have to piece together obtuse clues or use your environment to find things.
No labels difficulty where you have to be able to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn't without labels/text telling you exactly what something is or what it is for.
Risk vs reward difficulty where it's risky content grants better rewards and better items.
I don't really want to go over why death penalties make things harder, but here it goes. Mathematically speaking if you lose a large chunk of experience for each death then if you suck and die a lot you will never level up.
I want to know what the heck is stopping MMORPG developers from making say... Easy - Medium - Hard servers. Just like PvP vs PvE servers.
Why not use those expensive art assets to cater to all preferences. Make three games out of one.
It just seems like such a no brainer.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
For example what's harder, painting for 10 minutes or painting for 1 hour?