#21 - Choice or Lack Thereof

[Forsooth]

Nice article. However, I think that a game designer is forced to make a choice here.

It's strange, but players will do what the game rewards, whether it's fun or not. That's part of the competitive spirit in a gameworld.

For example, the Skotos game TEC is discussing changes to it's experience mechanic. That's because it encourages repetitive, risk-free play that just isn't fun. Yet even though it isn't fun, many players still worked hard to gain experience - until they eventually quit.

So setting up the rewards craftily can be important. Ideally, a game encourages players to do something different occasionally. I think that's one of the reasons X-COM was such a good single player game. The strategic portion might not have been very deep, but it kept the tactical missions from blurring into each other.

At the same time, the rewards shouldn't keep people from their favorite activity for too long.

[Holliday]

I tend to agree with you. A game that rewards players for doing stuff that is fun for them seems like an excellent design. But since you can't know which activities a player is doing to have fun (as opposed to the reward involved), you have a quandary. Additionally, many players would say that getting the reward is what makes it fun.

In this sort of case, my guess is a good design would be to give out equal rewards based on time actively spent in game. That way, a player can do whatever they feel like and be content in the fact that they are reaping the same rewards. Of course, now your problem is how to make all rewards of equal value (unless they really ARE the exact same reward). Worse, a system like this is especially easy to bypass through bots and trainers.

Perhaps an even better design is to simply give rewards based on paying the monthly fee. You've eliminated power-players, bots, and trainers with one fell swoop. The downside is that the rewards based on in-game behavior is now gone (or at least less important).

[murf]

Originally posted by Holliday
Perhaps an even better design is to simply give rewards based on paying the monthly fee. You've eliminated power-players, bots, and trainers with one fell swoop. The downside is that the rewards based on in-game behavior is now gone (or at least less important).

This decision should be based on what you, as the designer, want players to do: do you want them logged on a lot, or just a little. This is primarily an economic decision. If you're charging a flat, monthly fee, but are paying per user per minute to keep the game up and running, you want to encourage players to spend as little time actively logged into the game as you can. You can do this by building the bots into the game; let the players say "From now until I log in again, my character is going to practice swinging an axe." Then the player logs off, and his character's skill slowly grows. The longer they stay logged off, the higher the skill. Of course, this gets pretty damn boring if you don't give players things to do outside of the game. Chat boards are an obvious choice, but less obvious choices might be single-player games that the player can use to improve their character while logged off, or, better yet, improve the actual player's skills for use in the game.

If, on the other hand, you're getting paid based on the number of eyeballs logged in at any one time, you want players to stay connected as often and for as long as possible. Then you want the old UO model, where players are encouraged to manually build their characters up, clicking on the tree to harvest wood over and over again. Once their minds are lulled into a half-catatonic state, you hit them with subliminal advertising and watch the greenbacks roll in. ;)

- Brian