The secret of MMORPG success is this:
do A to be rewarded with B
If it was fun, increase difficulty slightly, repeat. If fun starts to wane, change A and B. A and B must remain in proportion - so as difficulty increases so do rewards, and as rewards make you more powerful, challenge must increase.
The issue is this… the “fun” of MMORPGs is the journey from A to B. It’s not the crafting, fighting, socializing. It’s doing all these things in order to progress from A to B, in order to see what the next iteration of A abd B are.
Anything you put in the way of me getting from A to B that cannot be looked at and said “Hey, that actively adds to element A or B” is an impediment to fun and must be removed.
When a game has ceased to challenge or reward me, it ceases to be a game and becomes a chat room. Similarly, when a player perceives that the enjoyment derived from progressing from A to B is exceeded by “needless friction” then they’re done with it. The only thing that keeps them around is a feeling of commitment to whatever in-game social group they may belong to.
Diablo seems to personify this formula. Kill monsters to get big enough to kill bigger monsters to get big enough to kill the boss and get to a new area. Repeat.
Your reward is:
micro-reward of each encounter victory and loot.
medium rewards of frequent character advancement, customizing your loot through gems and the cube. Satisfaction of defeating medium-boss encounters and clearing sub-areas.
macro-reward system is simple and yet the most powerful driving force for continued play… seeing lesser rewards added together and making transition to a new area via defeating a major foe.
So any game that can reward me frequently with small tangible gains, and allow me to see all that added up into the occasional major gain works well. Where MMORPG games are seriously broken is that as challenge increases so does the time interval between rewards. Thus, it takes to long to accomplish something and we then start paying more attention to the annoyances than the rewards, get bored with the game and quit. Same deal happens if the reward does not feel appropriate to the challenge, and also if the challenge-to-reward path is not sufficiently varied as to maintain interest, but not so different as to add frustration.
A game should reward challenge, but I think they go wrong when they instead reward “frustration tolerance”. For example… FF XI. In order to advance, I need to do mindless fedex quests and time-sink quests. This has pushed my challenge-to-reward balance way out of whack, and thus I no longer have any desire to play the game. Now, if I could achieve advancement through a more interesting means, I’d still be playing. However, I have no desire to turn in trinkets to aquire fame enough that they’ll give me access to the challenge I really want. At this point it’s frustration tolerance, because the game has built up such friction that the challenge and goal are now merely to “survive” an undesirable advancement system long enough that my “goal” of getting back to the “fun part” is reached.
Now, when this sort of thing happens… that maintaining interest in the game becomes THE challenge, and the game becoming fun again is the reward… would you not say the system is severely broken?
