Time to Quit

[AwesomeJr44]

Overcoming the challenge is the reward. If that's not a thing that gives you joy, you don't do it. Simple as that. If there's a material reward, people will play it to get the reward, then stop, and the content will be just as dead.

Regardless of the reward, tangible or intangible, you're still going to have some fraction of players who want to to it for the first time, and some who have the reward but are happy to step in and replay it for the sake of it.

Overcoming a difficult challenge should be part of the reward. Without a tangible reward, content has no lifespan beyond the time it takes to clear it once. If there's some kind of decent incentive, the content will not only be ran by the general population for longer, but it will always be alive in some capacity. People still farm old Extremes to this day because there is a reward worth going for. I don't think that people are going to be doing so with things like Criterion. There just isn't a reason to justify doing so, especially if Criterion can't be unsynced.

To use another example, I'd also assume that people wouldn't bother reclearing Savage if a tangible reward wasn't tied to it. It'd get cleared once and abandoned. Because Savage has rewards, people are willing to clear it for months after their first kill. Criterion needs that carrot on a stick to get people to keep coming back.