Instant-gratification, and the "Time Sink Here, Time Sink There" song. VERY LONG

[Rutelor]

I'm going to stand for Frustration!

If this forum was about giving players the impression they had a say in redesigning, say, Soccer, this is how it would often go:

"Can we get rid, please (pretty please!!!) of all that wasted effort, and allow me to just stand anywhere, bypassing the defense, and score a goal, even if I didn't move up the field fighting for the ball against them???" It's just such a time sink that I cannot score whenever I want...!! Please, scratch out that pesky rule about off-sides, nooooowww!!! (And while we're at it, can we please get rid of the goalkeeper? He/She makes things soooo much more difficult and TIME CONSUMING!"

If this forum was about giving them the impression they had a say in re-designing Chess, this is how it would frequently go:

"This SUCKS!!! I demand you enable the ability to checkmate without having to spend 2 or more hours devising a strategy to get through all the moves my idiotic opponent insists on placing against me. Allow for my queen to jump pieces like you already did for the knight, and we'll have a winner, and I'll never look back!!! I only have so many hours to play. I'm a casual, not a hardcore."

And if the devs allow them to keep on getting everything they want in this game, we'll soon be reading their printed yells:

"...I want rewards, rewards, rewards, every time I move. Please add bell, totem, weapon and gear showers to happen after every step I take, even if I'm riding my chocobo."

If we don't want the minimum common denominator to turn this game into a similarly depressing rubble of smoldering ash as the one FFXI became after Abyssea, please stop listening to these people. And let's all try to remember that, besides creating the need for strategy, and cooperation, delayed satisfaction increases desire; and when satisfaction finally comes, it's ten times stronger if you feel you went through what feels like a decently proportionate struggle to achieve it. (Nobody is talking about anything resembling ridiculous levels, like Absulute Virtue did, BTW.)

On these forums, over the months, I've read plenty of definitions of what FF stands for. I know nobody asked me, but as far as I am concerned, when I played any of the FF-branded games, it stood for a serious challenge every time, and the great satisfaction of conquering that challenge. Things have never been readily available to FF players.

Someone out there decided that all limits and deterrents were time-sinks; that a "modern" game's function was to gratify, gratify, gratify without obstacles or difficulties, and that any barrier on your way to endless gratification, was a deviant, passée attempt by the designers to squeeze time out of you for their devious purposes; that contemporary game design is not about obstacles, but rather the satisfaction of our desperate desire for constant reward; that somehow we were idiotically deceived, in olden times, and that we had been granted the light of revelation, only recently. And thank the heavens for that, since because of that revelation we have now become aware of the fact that we could do away with difficulty altogether. After all we don't want to be reminded of real life. Hello Kitty Online had the answer all this time!

What comes out of these demands are nothing but ritualized paths of "fools' pleasure," in which you convince yourself you're fighting, but you're not! Actually, there's no way you can lose the encounter... it's just so that you think you're battling a monster, but you'll beat it no matter what. Don't they see it? Isn't THAT the real time sink?? Why don't we, instead, skip the battles, sign on and collect our rewards for the day, then chat a bit, and log out?

It's a Hyperbole, of course. But what it stands for is not the game I want, and I know neither does the great majority of the legacy FF players; nor the great majority of the legacy MMO buffs anywhere.

I say to the devs:
"Send the minimum-common-denominator players back to Free Realms, where they belong. You'll gather plenty of a following, believe me."

To the immediate-returns players, I say:
"I mean, if you don't have the time, the focus, or the willingness--amidst credit-card-debt woes, parenthood duties and your two jobs--to play chess, I totally understand it... And I truly sympathize with you. Totally. I often stand in your very shoes. But please, stop lobbying for Chess to be modified so that it resembles Parcheesi. Rather, why don't you just go play Parcheesi instead?"

R

[Ilean]

/moarchars

[Zuellni]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the issue isn't so much the difficulty rather than the low rate at which rewards are given. Taking your football analogy into account, imagine if every time someone gets the ball through the goal post, the ref goes on random.org and generates a number to determine if that goal counted. I'm not so sure many players would bother playing football anymore.

[Lyndis]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the issue isn't so much the difficulty rather than the low rate at which rewards are given. Taking your football analogy into account, imagine if every time someone gets the ball through the goal post, the ref goes on random.org and generates a number to determine if that goal counted. I'm not so sure many players would bother playing football anymore.

This is the issue right here, but it very much has to do with what the ORIGINAL POSTER had to say.

People have demanded difficulty without creating a time sink. The problem is MMOs stand very easy to perfect. Not only can you ride on players better than you get a reward but the most easy way of defeating an opponent will be found (found quickly) and taken advantage of by everyone (moogle fight is an EXTREME example that shouldn't even exist). So you can garuntee players will be able to defeat an enemy (and if they made it impossible except by only a few, you'll get people complaining about that too) and take the requirement of time invested, it turns every player into a holder of a reward. The only way they could balance this was by making the drop rate extremely low.

As much as lowering the drop rate DOES balance that problem, we return to the issue that things are time consuming and tack on the issue that attaining anything in this game requires getting eight like minded individuals that has the patience to do the EXACT SAME 5-20 MINUTE GOSH DANG fight 1oo times. Which can be frustrating as everyone gets bored doing the same thing over and over with a random chance of success and you'll end up losing someone with less determination eventually. Causing "stress" (as Yoshida would say).

I understand that all combat can be called repetitive but I'd much more vote for something that requires a long a difficult path to reach, then give the climactic finish a high reward. This increases adrenaline during that final fight because the results are really based on your performance. Okay I'm just going to stop here because there are a lot of reasons why this method makes gaming more fun but I gotta go.

[viion]

Song? I dont see no song WHERE IS THE SONG DAMNIT

[OMEGA_HACK]

Personally, I'd rather have no weapon's drop, instead have 100% chance to drop 1 Totem, and a 45% chance to drop a 2nd Totem, and a 5% chance to drop a 3rd Totem. Require us to trade 10 Totems to get 1 weapon of our choosing from an NPC. From this we'd still need to do the fight at the most 80 times (assuming you are in a static 8-man group), and if you are super lucky only having to do it 27 times (assuming you get 3 Totems each run).

I'd call that a manageable, and understandable time sink. As that would be pretty on par with the Sky endgame (numbers wise) event.

[DevilsAdvocate]

Rutelor, I think I have a man crush on you. Well said. Casuals will be casual.

[Rhomagus]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the issue isn't so much the difficulty rather than the low rate at which rewards are given. Taking your football analogy into account, imagine if every time someone gets the ball through the goal post, the ref goes on random.org and generates a number to determine if that goal counted. I'm not so sure many players would bother playing football anymore.

100% agree. When the OP was mentioning time sinks I was not thinking "difficulty" as it is often times translated to by some members in this community. I was thinking piss poor drop rates. Your analogy sums up the frustrating feeling of the ridiculous randomness of the entire process. I don't translate random drop rates into difficult worthwhile content.

Hell, I'm not even against time sinks per se. Sometimes I'll get into a zen like state when grinding experience points or crafting and I don't think that's really a bad thing but not having anything to show for your time and achievements by defeating the same boss 100 times is an old design approach that's unnecessarily frustrating.

The devs obviously have a difficulty and time goal in mind for the stuff they put into the game. Making it random just seems like a useless filter. I say, drop something every time but increase the amount of those things you need in order to "purchase" the item you're looking for. To confirm that you earned it, make said item untradeable. You can still make the battle as difficult as you want as well.

Time is a resource, an invaluable one at that. A resource that supersedes the confines of the game world. All the gil, levels, and gear in the game amount to nothing in the real world but the one thing the game and real life share in common is time. Give the players the information they need to make an informed decision on whether or not they want to invest that amount of time into any given goal. The crafting achievements are up there in the time sink category but even then, you have some kind of positive reinforcement giving you feedback just by being able to put another notch on your way to achieving your goal. The player will then have the information available to them to make an informed decision about whether or not they want to experience content that will be taking that much time, and success, to complete. Otherwise you end up creating a frustrated player and if the drop rate is too low, they'll eventually just stop the content altogether.

If a dev team puts too much content that results in unknown outcomes players will just eventually put the one real resource available to them, time, into something else entirely.

I don't agree that the people asking for heightening drop rates are entirely focused on making the game "instantly" gratifying but they do, at the very least, want to see that their one real resource, time, is not being wasted in vain and putting checkpoints rather than invisible walls on the way to the goal is a better strategy for everyone involved, developer and player alike.

[Lyndis]

The devs obviously have a difficulty and time goal in mind for the stuff they put into the game. Making it random just seems like a useless filter. I say, drop something every time but increase the amount of those things you need in order to "purchase" the item you're looking for. To confirm that you earned it, make said item untradeable. You can still make the battle as difficult as you want as well.

Yes!

That's why FFXI's endgame worked was because sky linkshells and the like made points that you EARNED. With FFXIV's current system, someone who wins the fight once while dead and afk has an equal chance of the same reward of someone who collects 1o totems.

[Libtech]

OP I can't like your first post enough. I believe the mentality you discuss is a good indicator of much that is wrong nowadays not only in videogames but in a lot of real life. At the risk of going way off topic and starting a political debate I will leave it at that. Keep on keeping on OP. Two thumbs way up.