Is It Possible to Defeat the Time Sink?

[Estellios]

True, but I have a strong feeling that even once this game has been out for 3 years and has much more content, the base of the game will still be a time sink in that most of the activities we will be able to do will be designed for us to spend lots of time doing it. But thats the thing, that's just part of what MMO's are. My question is; if it's possible for an MMO to exist without that design philosophy and still be played as much as whatever popular MMO's that are out now?

It really just depends on how it's implemented. If something takes a long time just because it has a low drop rate, I'd say thats a poorly implemented time sink. If an item takes a long time to get because it requires progress through something like a multi-tiered dungeon, than I feel it's an acceptable time sink since you are making progress towards your means, especially if the dungeon progresses and changes up/gets more difficult somehow. IMO it just boils down to how much repetition you have to go through in order to accomplish what you set out to do that determines whether or not it is implemented well or not.

I don't know if you've played FF11 but I can explain one of the most frustrating time sink gameplay experiences I've ever done: Salvage. At the time, it housed the absolute best gear in the game.

It had a lot of things going for it that made it interesting and fun while masking the time sink aspect of it:

• There were four Salvage zones total, each with different "rules" for progressing through the floors.
• You needed 3 parts to complete each piece of gear, and each part came from a different zone, while one part required an item from the fourth zone to pop a monster that dropped it.
• Zones had branching paths or strict time limits so you couldn't get everything in one go and had to pick what you were aiming for.
• You started off with your stats, gear, and abilities all locked and in some zones you needed to prioritize unlocking certain things before others and going after specific enemies in order to accomplish this.

However this was all brought down immensely by the stupid crap they made you go through:

• Entering Salvage required you to use points from the Assault Missions, of which you got one allowance per day and could hold up to 3 (Technically 4, with some hoop-jumping). These Assault missions weren't exactly easy to complete in most cases and unless you were really high in rank in them you had no surefire-win missions to get these points easily. You had to grind 2-3 of these missions to get enough points for a Salvage run.
• Some things you had to do to access alternate routes or other things were pretty bullshit. Most notably, one zone boss was weakened by killing specific enemies on a previous floor. Without killing 9/10 or 10/10 of them the boss ranged from extremely difficult to impossible. These enemies could see through sneak/invisible, aggro'd against magic, and if they aggro'd they would warp away instantly and not count as a kill. On top of that, if you didn't kill them within a couple seconds they would just warp out anyway. That would honestly be OK on its own, except if the random wind weather showed up by pure bad luck in zone their aggro range DOUBLED and pretty much meant you were SOL. Even worse if your puller is getting ready to grab one, wind weather shows up, they get aggro and you are screwed.
• Drop rates on some parts were beyond abysmal. Each piece of gear had one part that was a rare drop from usually a single enemy in the run, with a drop rate counting in the single digit percents. It's infuriating running a single, difficult event for a few weeks taking an hour-2 hrs each time for a single chance at 1 enemy and never getting what you need from it. Also say goodbye to the chance at pickup groups happening since no one will want to risk this item going to a random person.

I think if content can take some time to complete but completely avoid the idocy of that 2nd list, it would be a meaningful time sink that would feel far away from one.

Reading your Monster Hunter example, I think low drop rate, low effort time sinky stuff might be ok to kill time here or there when you are waiting for people to long on and can give players stuff to do while solo. It's when you have to waste other peoples' time doing these things only to not make any sort of progress at all that it becomes unacceptable.