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[Levy9]

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.

You're assuming that the person receiving the reward must necessarily not enjoy the prerequisite task. Not true. You're oversimplifying how rewards work in reality. Sometimes people enjoy the task at hand, sometimes they don't. However, people get rewarded for things they enjoy doing all the time.

Most professional athletes genuinely enjoy the sport that they're playing. IRL, I sometimes have to be motivated to do things that I actually enjoy and I still enjoy myself.

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

I don't believe I've ever stated otherwise. You've made a lot of incorrect assumptions about the point I was trying to make but it's probably my own fault for not clarifying. My point was not to say that rewards should come before gameplay or that they will serve as a solution to any inherent gameplay issues, which is how you seem to have interpreted my comments based on my interactions with you on other threads. Note that the developer I mentioned never said that the players who chose efficiency enjoyed the game more or that development should be tailored in such a way as to promote efficiency over fun.

"Efficiency over fun" suggests that the players choosing efficiency had less fun. It suggests that the fun content and the efficient content were separate things. My point was to make the fun content and the efficient content one and the same. My point isn't to keep the efficient content and the fun content separate. If PvP is fun, I want it to also be efficient. I don't understand your argument against this position, because if rewards help bad content, they'll also help good content. If PvP was good by your standards it would still benefit from a better incentive structure. It's not the either-or situation you're making it out to be where SE either makes adjustments to PvP or provides more incentive. Other PvP games, including League, have lootboxes, ranked rewards, grindable characters, grindable character mastery, regular events, etc, so I can't for the life of me figure out why you keep arguing for less while Dota/LoL/HoTs compete to give their playerbases more.

You haven't explained to me how it hurts the game or why it shouldn't be done. Just that it shouldn't be necessary, essentially making your argument one of unexplained frugality. The funnest game in the world will still benefit from a better incentive structure because some percentage of people will process incentives as one of the deciding factors in whether they engage with a piece of content and whether they stick with that same content for a long duration.

Rewards are ultimately necessary

This is more or less the point I was making but since you've attacked me for it, I'll reduce it to an undeniable premise. Rewards make fun things better. Everyone knows it, every PvP game does it. Lastly, the grind for an extrinsic reward can become an intrinsic enjoyment when done properly, which is something you've completely discounted. This is a part of the satisfaction in drawing, painting, working on a puzzle, etc. Seeing your individual efforts culminate into a worthwhile final product can be enjoyable.

[Guesswhat]

You haven't explained to me how it hurts the game or why it shouldn't be done.

This isn't meant as a critique or anything; I don't know the "history" (except the one in this thread I guess) behind this post. Simply a comment.

Depending on your angle, an incentive can indeed be hurtful for an activity. For example, if the incentive encourages fast work where careful work is needed, and the pool of potential workers the incentive applies to contains workers who can't work fast and careful at the same time.
In the case of exp reward in PvP, the incentive does not encourage the player to do anything at all (except participate). For those who want to play by the "rules", this can hurt their experience (bots/afkers).

/offtopic