Comment by NickNaraghi
4 years ago
> 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.
> 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.
----
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.
> such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can afford it.
There are a ton of problems bundled up in this sentence, but I'm not sure I have time to unpack all of them.
But this is not an attitude that I think a game designer should ever have. I don't think we should be building experiences that boil down to teaching players that spending money is the equivalent of overcoming a challenge, I think players should be extremely suspicious of any game or experience that has that attitude towards challenge. Spending money is not the same thing as achieving something or earning a reward, I think it's really bad for us to encourage that kind of equivalency in a player's mind.
1 reply →