Quote Originally Posted by Levy9 View Post
He said the fact that "players choose efficiency over fun" came as a surprise to him.
But do they really?

IMO, that statement primarily highlights how very badly understood the concept of "rewards" is within the industry. The whole point of rewards is to make people do something they'd rather not do - to make them do something they do not enjoy to get something they 'do' enjoy as compensation for a positive net effect. As such, a reward serves as substitute enjoyment/fun. This fundamental concept of:"Do something you do not want to get something you do want" is widely used not just in MMOs, but in real life as well.

This is also what makes rewards that people do not care about completely useless and people will most definitely not choose efficiency over fun if they don't care for the reward in the first place. The reward itself needs to be enjoyable for the person in question in one way or the other, otherwise the rule does not apply.
Offering people a raise for example does not always make people more motivated or work harder, some would rather have more authority, some would rather have more free time for themselves or whatever. How to properly incentivize people is a big topic in human resource management, misincentives included.

Net fun thus becomes an equation of "Intrinsic Enjoyment + Enjoyment from extrinsic Rewards". It's rarely just either or.

Efficiency becomes such a big topic in MMOs because they are very repetitive by nature and repetition will drag intrinsic enjoyment down fast and the equation will lean more and more on the right side of that equation. That has nothing to do with the MMO playerbase in particular, this is something that happens with just about everything and was a big issue with assembly line work. It was monotonous, repetitive and workers became less motivated as a result, thereby making the learning curve benefits it created void. And that means that these games make heavy use of rewards to make up for this shortcoming, which in turn also puts optimization of said rewards into the forefront. It's an unavoidable necessity, especially in scripted PvE content.

This normal degradation however is usually much slower in PvP than in PvE due to its variable nature. Rewards are ultimately necessary, but generally later and less than in comparable PvE games or content. The big issue for this game is that the starting point of that degradation isn't particularly high for most for various reasons that are probably best debated in a different thread.

Another tricky bit is that games and content compete with each other, as your time in a given day is limited, so choosing one or the other will come down to which you value higher in its net sum. Hence why people often just log out and play a different game instead of bothering with capping tomes - The enjoyment from playing a different game outweighs the enjoyment from the latest tome armor. This goes back to the point that rewards need to be enjoyable for the person to have any effect.
This point is one I am an example of myself - If I want to PvP, I don't play this game's PvP, I play League of Legends. I would get extra tomes from it here, maybe XP marks, whatever - I don't care. I've given it a lot of fair chances, I don't find it enjoyable. I am putting my foot in this game's PvP if there's an exclusive glamour I really want to have.

Now, that was a big rant and only tangential to the topic, so let's close with a simple statement:
I personally think that it should rather be the Regain Feather and Icarus Wing that are buyable with wolf marks. Reason being: They are Frontline exclusive items, where else should they be if not on the PvP vendors?