Time, Money, and the Journey

A discussion of the Diablo 3 $AH took place on our TF2 forums, and someone commented:

it all just seems silly to me.. why play the game if you're going to buy your way to the end result? I've spent $4 on tf2.. and I still look at it as a waste.. items will come and go, and there is always trading.. same goes with diablo3, why pay for pixels that you can obtain yourself and they're obviously going to continue releasing bigger and better weapons that you're going to replace said weapon with, and I see it happen in WoW all the time.. people pay for gold, buy the new shiny off the auction house, and the next day they win a drop in a raid thats better.. $20 down for a days' virtual satisfaction. Its all fickle to me lol

The following was my response.

Diablo, like other action-focused computer RPGs, is designed to be very Achievement oriented. The heavy Goal-Oriented-Play coupled with high-accessibility (and very few set backs, i.e. punishment) fosters an environment where the ends of playing the game are the achievements themselves. For many Achievers, there is no longer any fun in the journey--they want as many vacuous trophies as quickly as possible. There is nothing wrong with getting your jollies from virtual shinies, but here is where the contention lies.

Traditionalist gamers have been, I believe, vaccinated from these psychological lures. They have seen leaderboards and Skinner boxes for decades. If they play a game, they enjoy learning the system, assuming that system is complex enough to hold their interest. If they play strategy games, they enjoy complex resource management. If they play RPGs, they like the journey. They are OK with gating content, with stratifying players into Haves and Have-Nots.

They have been trained to believe that Time and Skill equates to Power. To Traditionalists, games are a great equalizer. The Real World does not leak into their synthetic worlds, and each player's reputation (and Power) are built via in-game means only. This is a fallacy.

The person playing the game has a certain amount of real world resources and real world dexterity. Resources come in the form of Time and Money. Dexterity is both Mental and Physical. Different game genres tap these 4 attributes differently. MMORPGs typically require Time. TF2 takes Physical and Mental dexterity, as well as practice Time. What we are seeing in the Game Industry is the incorporation of Money resources.

This transformation is occurring because many Traditionalists are opting for other responsibilities: jobs and families. They no longer have 10 hours a day to throw at Everquest or StarCraft. They can't wait around for 2 hours to get a game started; they need high-accessibility games. Lowering the barrier to entry is also allowing brand new players to enter the scene. This is the explosion of Casual and Social gaming. These players have Money, but no Time. And quite a few of them are willing to trade their Money for Power. Believe it or not, there are markets that enjoy Paying to Win. This makes Traditionalists exclaim, "WTF ARE YOU DOING?!"

The Time-rich no longer have the upper hand, and that makes the status quo feel as if their time isn't as valuable. And they are correct: with the inclusion of Money, it inflates the resource supply. Buying characters, power leveling, and gold was and still is seen as cheating in various online games primarily because it devalues the achievements (i.e. Time) of players.

To more directly answer your question, "why would someone drop $20 for such an ephemeral trophy?" we really have to answer why humans trade resources for ANY status-signalling good. Fashion, competition, self-worth, belonging to a group: all of these are deeply rooted social instincts. The next time you do a farming run for a piece of loot, ask yourself why are you trading your time for these synthetic goods. And then ask if you'd rather trade money instead. If the goal is the trophy, it really doesn't matter how you got it. If you value the story attached to the trophy, then hopefully the journey is worth taking--and that is something money can't buy.

Design Goal: Kill the Boring

When you’re playing a character in a huge 3D world, you want to go to wherever the interesting stuff is happening so that you can have fun. Yes, it’s a trivially true statement, but it lies at the center of many debates in MMO design.

The obvious design decision is to make players walk or ride or float on clouds or fly with their wings (sometimes) through every foot of the world. They have to do this manually, because if they aren’t logged in and staring blankly at their computer screens, bad things must happen.

Bad things must happen, right? Obviously this is the case because no MMORPG allows you to AFK travel. Hell, few MMORPGs allow you to do much aside from various guises of waiting around  (watching progress bars, walking on a safe road, riding on a gryphon, watching your character auto-attack an enemy to death). But what bad things would happen if you let your players skip the boring parts of their character’s lives?

If we’re going to follow the industry-wide pattern of streamlining MMO gameplay, we should take the obvious but oft-overlooked step of allowing the players to be offline or AFK during as many boring or trivial tasks as possible.

EVE Online lets you queue up manufacturing tasks and log off or do something else while they complete. This is an important step towards automation, but a small one. EVE’s mechanics are based around largely non-interactive fundamental activities: combat involves a lot of waiting and gathering is almost entirely non-interactive. In most combat and gathering activities, less than one-third of the player’s time is spent interacting with the game—and those interactions may not actually involve making interesting decisions.

MMOs will be more fun to play if as many boring parts as possible are stream-lined out of gameplay. Keep travel time appropriate so the world can be big, keep production time appropriate so items can have meaning, but don’t make the player pay for this by making them stare at the screen needlessly.

When you’re addicted to an activity, the most intense moments are usually when you desperately want to fulfill the addiction, not when you’re sating your urge. By that logic, it superficially seems that having a lot of dead time your MMO is justifiable. But if we extend the logic further, we have no answer to the question “why must players be logged at all while their character does mundane and boring tasks?” The more time a player spends bored or disinterested in a game, the more boring the game appears. But if being bored in-game is optional (and actually sub-optimal), players won’t stay in your game to be bored—they’ll stick around to do what’s fun and they’ll only remember that your game is fun.

What would you prefer? Four hours spent in-game where only one is spent having fun, or two hours spent in-game where one is spent having fun? MMOs these days lean towards the 1-in-4 ratio.

So why don’t we ditch the boring stuff?

This suggestion is not one that can be implemented with little change to the theme-park model. It requires a rethinking of how MMORPGs engage players. But if the average player is going to put in 1,000 hours of play time, I’d rather have those hours in concentrated bursts of fun lasting around one hour, not in five-hour slogs.

Boy am I sick of time sinks

My current involvement with EVE is nothing more than a game of Progress Quest. Last week I was running around in my railgun Merlin doing level 1 combat missions, got pretty bored with it, and decided to look for a new ship. I don't know if I should pirate or join a sovereignty-seeking corp, but I'd like to get into null-sec and start playing the real game.

I'm having a bit of an issue getting over the towering barriers to entry in EVE. I think I've been a pretty good sport with it up to now. Using my existing Merlin, I plugged in some Ion Blaster IIs, some Rocket Launcher IIs, and a bunch of other necessities (like a good Afterburner, a webber, a warp scrambler, and some damage control) into EVE Fitting Tool. The loadout is decent for learning PvP. I can afford to trash a few as I get my feet wet.

However, I then used EVEMon to plan a skill progression to use all these modules, and the 14 skills will take over 12 days. All my first tier Learning skills are rank 4 or 5. This is such a complete waste of time. Good thing I don't have to actually grind any of this out, but waiting around for 12 days just so I can begin to learn how to PvP in EVE is ridiculous. (To learn how to just sit in some of massively huge and powerful ships in EVE takes over 200 days of training, and the ISK price isn't chump change either.)

Similarly, it takes weeks in WoW to get to level cap where competitive play starts to exist. FFXI and even older MMORPGs take months or years to get to level cap. Why should I be so upset? I've dealt with these time sinks before. Probably because I'm growing up, and I don't have 10 hours a day to throw at a game.

About a year ago, when I quit WoW for the umpteenth time, I made a note about why I left. It was something along the lines of:

As I'm leveling a new character, I'm not really learning anything new. It feels as if I need to prove myself to the game, once again, that I'm worthy of level cap. While in TF2 or DotA or some other non-MMORPG, I'm already at a level playing field, and the skills I learned through months of playing follow me and will be with me no matter when I decide to join up again. The system doesn't make me prove myself; I prove to myself that I still kick ass.

So here I am in EVE, just waiting to learn how to play the game competently, trying to prove to the system what exactly? That I know how to queue up a bunch of skills, go to work, and come home and play TF2 all night?

How about you let me fly whatever I want to fly, equip whatever I want to equip, and use any ability I want to use without having to prove to you that I have the $30 for 2 months of playtime subscription. (Of course I'd have to purchase these things which would take some time to acquire the ISK/gold/gil/etc.) Instead of making me learn Caldari Frigate 5, Destroyers 5, and Interdictors I (for a grand total of 35 days), how about you make the system complex enough (which EVE combat is) so that I acquire player skill and actual combat aptitude as I pop Interdictors.

All in favor of removing these "I am not worthy!" requirements, say Aye!