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