Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
I won't humor this too much to prevent derailing the thread into a debate about this, but what you said here is actually irrelevant to anything.
Oh, it's extremely relevant to business and what are successful business decisions and what aren't. Games with considerable timesinks are bleeding players across the board, WoW being the most drastic example - games that cut these out are thriving nowadays, from mobile games to MOBAs. That's a fact and not a coincidence either. As such, it answers the rhetorical question why any game should cater to that crowd - it's where the money lies. If you don't, you're already setting yourself up to live in a comparatively small niché away from the main gaming market. A back alley game.

Moreover, calling a MMO(RPG) a natural timesink is short sighted. It's like coming from the counter strike era and claiming shooters are naturally competitive games. The MMORPG currently on the market are indeed all designed with timesinks, but that's not a design necessity, it's a design choice. It's a convention, not a must.

It's furthermore false to claim LoL and other sports style games do not have "carrot on a stick" progression - With the rune system, LoL very clearly was emulating something akin to a character build and progression, the masteries being the talent tree pendant. That is on top the inbuilt progression each and every game has inside - gets levels and unlock abilities, gather gold -> buy items -> become more powerful. That's something you have in every single game. That's not gone, it's condensed into the duration of the game. And you go ahead and claim it doesn't fit the core of the game. Not much I can say to that, it falls under religious freedom at this point.

Finally, you may have missed it, but SE is wiser than you. SE knows that low time players are important and that's why dungeons are designed to be run in around 20 minutes. That's why we have so little content that requires a higher time investment at a time and why a great many rewards are frontloaded into dailies and weeklies. They clearly are aware, to the point Yoshida himself said he couldn't play the game if they were to make it more time demanding. But they have to work with what they're given - the framework of the game is done, I doubt they'd get allowance to change it from the ground up even if they wanted to. Nevertheless, it would do them a disservice to use that as an excuse to ditch those players altogether and go the opposite direction. Hence, jumping potions are being considered with a 7:3 majority so far. Another all too convenient coincidence.