Post by Morreion on Aug 15, 2014 17:38:14 GMT -5
Working As Intended: It's not the journey or the destination (Massively)
Developers lament feeling that they have to develop content that the bleeding edge playerbase wants, but they've brought it on themselves: Players rush through and demand more endgame content only because the game's vertical and linear design forced them to rush there in the first place. In other words, if you want us to stop and smell the flowers along the way, you have to build flowers, and they have to be worth smelling, and you can't make the flowers at the end 10 times better. You actually have to build a compelling midgame. You can't just blame players for not wanting to spend time in something you spent no development time on, not when they know the good stuff is in a different place. And if you're going to put in a ladder in your game, you need to realize that nothing else you do will stop a certain segment of MMO players from climbing it. They can't resist it because you've trained them to climb, climb, climb. You've trained them to think anything else is a waste of their time. Even roleplaying, an activity that should rightly be the cornerstone of the MMORPG genre, is a timesink that takes players away from prefab progression.
...Please, developers. Don't build hamster wheels, condition us to run in them, and get upset when we do just that. Don't call us tourists when you know you're operating a tourist trap. If you want people to treat your game like a home, you have to build worlds that are more than just journeys and destinations.
Developers lament feeling that they have to develop content that the bleeding edge playerbase wants, but they've brought it on themselves: Players rush through and demand more endgame content only because the game's vertical and linear design forced them to rush there in the first place. In other words, if you want us to stop and smell the flowers along the way, you have to build flowers, and they have to be worth smelling, and you can't make the flowers at the end 10 times better. You actually have to build a compelling midgame. You can't just blame players for not wanting to spend time in something you spent no development time on, not when they know the good stuff is in a different place. And if you're going to put in a ladder in your game, you need to realize that nothing else you do will stop a certain segment of MMO players from climbing it. They can't resist it because you've trained them to climb, climb, climb. You've trained them to think anything else is a waste of their time. Even roleplaying, an activity that should rightly be the cornerstone of the MMORPG genre, is a timesink that takes players away from prefab progression.
...Please, developers. Don't build hamster wheels, condition us to run in them, and get upset when we do just that. Don't call us tourists when you know you're operating a tourist trap. If you want people to treat your game like a home, you have to build worlds that are more than just journeys and destinations.
