Comment by danShumway
4 years ago
> I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real money to turn it off.
I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic projection about player intention that happens during these conversations, because if everyone playing the games felt the way you describe, then the monetization model wouldn't work.
We have games that have chores in them (Animal Crossing springs to mind). And we have repetitive games. And we have MMOs where people like to grind. None of that is a failure of design. But what you notice is that in the best instances of these games where people actually like the grind, they pay money to play the game, not to stop playing it. When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
We can talk about the people who do enjoy the grind or get something out of it, but I feel like we're all kind of lying to ourselves if we say that's the primary experience happening with the vast majority of players. Games wouldn't make money from microtransactions unless a nontrivial portion of their playerbase thought it was valuable to skip gameplay. You won't make very much money giving players ways to skip gameplay unless you're confident that a nontrivial portion of your playerbase won't find that gameplay rewarding.
> When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
Unfortunately, in the scope of Runescape, this misses the point in a big way. Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).
Zooming out, the system is actually incredible if you get a chance to analyze it a bit more. For the hardest of the hardcore players, there's a resource called CrystalMathLabs[0] that shows exactly how much time and gold it costs to max your character. And the devs are constantly optimizing new content around these "max efficiency" rates.
0: https://crystalmathlabs.com/tracker/suppliescalc.php
> Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).
I don't think this holds up when real-world money enters the equation. I don't think this can be accurately descriped as player optimization or class specialization if people are paying real money to skip it.
> they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to
If this was actually true, no real-world money would be entering the system, because all of the players would be making enough gold in-game via those other activities to pay for the logs. If they're being forced to spend real-world money, then the other activities they're engaged with are not giving them enough gold to sustainably fund themselves in-game.
The problem isn't having an in-game economy, in-game economies are great. The problem is people paying to get rid of gameplay. People who do that are signaling very clearly that they believe there is monetary value in removing a section of gameplay from the game. Designers should pay attention to that signal.
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I don't doubt that there are people legitimately having fun playing Runecraft. But it can't be everyone, or else people would not pay $10 to remove less than a day's worth of grind.
Like I mentioned earlier: it's not just about fun/enjoyment, it's about being rewarded by the game. In both real life and games, people will overcome challenges they don't enjoy because it is rewarding in a way that isn't necessarily just "fun". Eliminating a day's worth of grind in real life is surely very rewarding as well but it's very difficult and rare to do. In a game like eg Runescape, such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can afford it. If you don't have $10 to spare then you can achieve it with time. The grind is just a challenge to overcome, and that doesn't have to be fun but challenges are often rewarding to overcome.
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>They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
For them, personally. There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it. MMO's tend to breed a lot of prestige-seeking behavior.
> There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it.
I'm not sure that having a system that's unpleasant for a portion of the playerbase and letting people pay to pretend that they've gone through it is all that better.
I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but public prestige systems that can be paid to be bypassed are sort of self-defeating. They only work if a very small portion of the playerbase is cheating, which... I still don't think it's good design to set up gameplay incentives or monetization around a minority of the playerbase pretending to the majority of the other players that they've legitimately earned something.