The problem with Tripling Down on Shadowbringers Job Design

[LianaThorne]

Unsure if related but I watched a video recently on a study: https://quanticfoundry.com/2024/05/21/strategy-decline/ (Title: Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning)

What it basically says is that over the last 9 or more years, the appeal of strategy based games/critical thinking/planning/etc. has decreased more than any of the other 11 motivations they tested (Destruction, Excitement, Competition, Community, Challenge, Completion, Power, Fantasy, Story, Design, Discovery).

A quote: "When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past 9 years. Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past 9 years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change."

It is also something that has been on a downward trend before Covid, the study shows that this has been occurring since as early as June 2015 but suggests it could even be earlier.

They end with the following:
"Even if the underlying cause(s) cannot be identified, it’s clear that gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking over the past 9 years. It implies that gamers are now more easily cognitively overloaded when they play games and are more likely to avoid strategic complexity. This has implications for game design and marketing. Overall, gamers now prefer shorter time horizons to plan for (i.e., the number of steps and branching outcomes they have to think through) and less complex decisions that rely on fewer parameters to consider."
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Basically, complexity isn't what gamers want anymore, at least the 1.7m+ that they tested over the past 9 years. It makes sense to me more now why the game has been "dumbing itself down", because ultimately the people who want complexity are now becoming the minority.