Never Make Your Players Have to "Find the Fun"

[Purrfectstorm]

OK, how would you suggest they do that? Drops that have a 0.00000001% chance of dropping from a world boss? Requiring a stack of items that cost a thousand tomes each?

So many people say "this needs to change!" with no suggestions how to do so.

I made suggestions to how it should change. And we don't need anything as extreme as a .000000001% drop chance. I remember Yoshi saying at one point that it was lockouts or RNG. I think this is such a narrow view and it's building the whole game around the people who will play 12 hours a day and have everything in a week. The game design should not revolve around the most extreme players in the population.

So many times, players have come to SE's defense with the "but it slows progression" argument. Like why do we want progression to be slowed down? Oh yeah, so players will "have something to do." How about if the game was just fun, then they would have plenty to do. This only supports my thoughts that this game relies HEAVILY on extrinsic rewards. Every argument is "well players will get everything then unsub." This is an extrinsic rewards argument. Players who think the game is fun apart from the acquisition of a reward don't and wouldn't make this argument because they do things in the game because those things are fun IN AND OF THEMSELVES. That is what it means to be INTRINSIC.

But yes, even if the game remains based only on extrinsic rewards, there are ways of slowing progression apart from time gates (if it is even desirable to "slow progression" which I don't agree with). Yes, RNG is one way. But we don't need .0000001% drop rates. We just need to calculate how much time players are putting in with the time gated content and then convert that into a RNG formula that would produce the same average time cost to players. So let's say that it would take you 10 runs to cap tomes for 1 item. You can make the RNG < 10%. Players then still run the content the same average amount of times.

Yes, players that run it more often would get geared faster. But I can't for the life of me figure out why this isn't desirable from a playerbase that complains people want things "handed to them." The players that work harder would be geared better and faster. What is wrong with this?

And if they would then unsub that tells us something very important: the game is not fun.