Quote Originally Posted by Xoo View Post
We, as humans, feel most alive when faced with danger and threat. This equates fun for anyone. If there is little danger of failure or 'death', we can safely assume that 99% would not find the event fun.

Right now, I can say that I only play XIV because it's just slightly better than doing nothing at all in my spare time.
Sounds a little creepy... I can't say I look forward to "feeling alive" with someone shooting at me or teetering on the edge of a skyscraper. I also don't think feeling alive from danger equates to bad UI design and flow, slow game responses or ridiculously low drop rates that end up having players do the same task hundreds of times for only a random chance at reward (in that regard I would ask if you'd ever take a job where at the end of the day your boss rolled a dice and if it hit 6 you got your paycheck?).

While I understand the philosophical point behind the OP's quote, I don't think it's some magical bullet to shoot down arguments against bad design. A large problem I see is that many old games had terrible addictive design only put in place to force more play time out of players in order to generate more money... in all honest, they were (and are) essentially software drugs designed to addict players and sustain revenue. Players became so addicted to these games they made and make excuses and sometimes literally trick themselves into thinking they enjoyed something that was brutal and completely unenjoyable. Then, the fear of change causes players to stick to these old ideals even though they are often times completely outdated.

I truthfully would take words from designers of older MMOs with a grain of salt as they were essentially the guys making the drugs (though I would imagine the 'drug' design aspect was more or less pushed upon them by the company actually paying them and funding the project).


All that said, I love challenges, but tedious time-sinks are not a challenge like a difficult fight is a challenge. .0001% drop rates are not a challenge as is avoiding all damage from an enemy to cause a chest to spawn. People seem to forget what actual challenges are because they've been fed fake ones for so long.