Re: Turbine pondering to sell gold/items

Gerry Quinn wrote:
What a lot of people are missing is that the situation is no different from other CRPGs such as roguelikes or single-player CRPGs. Or Solitaire. We choose to put ourselves throgh artificial dificulties, so that we will appreciate our artificial rewards. If indeed this is a flaw, it's in human psychology, not in MMORPGs, which are simply designed to cater for this psychological phenomenon.

You wouldn't play Solitaire very long if you had to chop down trees for 10 hours, grind them up, and then spend 36 hours carefully tending the pulp vats, adding in bleaching and strengthening chemicals, dumping the whole lot out, drying it off, and cutting it out to see what card you got and if you can play it.

I think the real argument is the *scale* of difficulties presented, and how the players perceive them. If they see it as an uphill struggle, but nothing insurmountable, it may be initially appealing, until they realize they can do it, but it requires large amounts of time. Some people like that long journey, and will play on regardless of what they actually get in the end. Others want their rewards in a more abrupt timeframe, and if in-game currency is the stumbling block, they will seek out RMT services.

The goal, then, is to provide some kind of variable difficulty gameplay, to placate those looking for apparently-impossible tasks, while making sure that newbies aren't overwhelmed, that everyone can play at their own pace, and that a system of intermittent rewards are available so that players always have tangible proof of their efforts, even if it's just a tiny fragment of the whole reward.

TheSmokingGnu
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Relevant Pages

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