anti-fun systems
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@grepman: Yes, choice is great. It's one of the pillars of How To Actually Enjoy Playing Games.
But affordances are one of the pillars of How to Actually Design Enjoyable Games. And as I said much earlier, this isn't the Gameplay Help forum. Don't know what affordances are? Here's a video. As a designer, if you want to encourage choice between multiple options, you do that with relatively even reward regardless of choice. You might give out two different types of reward, but players will seek out the equivalency ratio, so it behooves designers to estimate that ratio to maintain near& equivalency. The keyword here is balance. Balance is an affordance which signals to players that difference of opinion is welcomed. As a designer, if you want to discourage choice between multiple options, you do that by giving one choice a much better reward than the other, or by penalizing one and not the other. Choosing to die, for example, isn't really something most games aim to promote. There's power in using reward this way, because it guides players towards the behaviors design intends them to perform. It's an affordance to guide players away from X and towards Y. You can say all you want that the game isn't forcing you to use Chaos recipe. It obviously isn't forcing anyone. But the affordances do suggest behaviors. The game is basically saying "do this!" and even if resisting that suggestion makes the game more fun for you, the suggestion is still in the design. Should the game be steering players towards such things, or would it be better if the design made players feel like a broader spectrum of choices is encouraged? When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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" I just dont see how chaos recipe is encouraged or pushed. the choice is clear - time vs output. if you clear mid to high level maps in a couple of minutes, chaos recipe is probably an inferior choice. if not- it might be worth to do it. the mere existence of the recipe - which by the way isn't actually communicated at all in-game, just as most of the recipes, - doesn't make it the defacto behavior. there are many recipes that might be somewhat obsolete at this point. there are many that aren't worth the time for most players. and so on. at the end of the day, the possibility of making the inefficient choice is a good thing. in fact, Id venture to say the possibility of making the straight up wrong choice, that doesnt appear as a bad choice at the time, is a good thing (when we talk about buildmaking and build power down the road) so when you say dying in the game is a bad choice I dont agree- dying is not really a choice. its a consequence for an action. for choice to be choice, options need to be close to equivalent and have seemingly equal repercussions - so as you say, balance. the repercussions of not doing chaos recipe over a character's lifetime goes from severe as you might not get much chaos/loot to negligible as you accumulate wealth that is measured by hundreds of chaos. as the game is leaning more and more towards engame, where you a lot of time just dont do the recipe, Id argue its a quite balanced choice | |
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I don't feel the reward difference between Chaos recipe vs no Chaos recipe is particularly bad - or at least, there's a lot of factors at play and it's tricky to evaluate them all. However, I think the reward difference between 1 Chaos recipe and 2 Chaos recipe is particularly bad. Once you've already committed to the stash space and the sorting, there's a pretty strong push to leave items unidentified. It's almost the exact same behavior, so pretty much the only factor at play is "identify or not?"
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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"well, I can say anecdotically that I never did nor will I ever do the 2 chaos recipe (except the one that comes from prophecy, but that one is special) I enjoy id'ing stuff, and especially in rare jewelry, you can find quite valuable items. I think it's fair to assume that in a loot-based arpg, one will be quite tempted to id stuff. so in that sense, it's a pretty good choice imo, as well. the thought of you vendoring a ring that might cost up to several exalts for that extra chaos, is the repercussion. | |
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Not identifying stuff might seem like an interesting choice, but it's deeply unfun to actually choose it. It's also a decent part of the reason why you find that jewellery is worth quite a bit - there's a lot of sheeple vendoring all those rings in unidentified. Add it all together and it's basically a trap.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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" While I love your posts, ScrotieMcB (please don't change!), I think they can be inpenetrable for some players. So allow me to play the role of distiller and simplifier again: The 1-chaos recipe rewards play + inventory management. It's reasonable to assume that ARPG gameplay includes picking up potential upgrades and identifying them to see how they do in that role. So the only extra thing you are doing is saving/organizing those items. The 2-chaos recipe rewards inventory management alone. Unidentified items cannot be equipped, so there is no "play" involved here. It is just work. Game dynamics which reward work noticeably more than play are doomed to push a game in the general direction of failure, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that games are supposed to be fun, and non-fun games without a mechanism to exploit addictive personalities will lose their playerbase quickly. Less obvious is the huge opportunity cost for the publisher and developers. Wash your hands, Exile!
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" it's a bit insulting to suggest I didnt get what scrotie was saying. you make some very broad assumptions here. first, you say inventory management = work I completely disagree with this notion. moreover, 'fun' is a purely and entirely subjective, and so is 'work' there are routines in every mechanical game out there. 4x games, tactical rpgs, arpgs, I already mentioned that. whether or not you attribute the routines as 'work' or 'fun' is entirely subjective. you cant simply go and declare something to be work because its a slippery slope. we can then call any routine that we dont like 'work'. pick up shit ? work. sell shit to vendor ? work. clicking in six linking a chest ? work. grinding a lot of low level areas for currency ? many people call it work as well. there isnt much of a benefit of having a routine just to have a routine, true. however, minimizing routines is also a very dangerous thing as it will lead you to things like auto loot pickup, infinite inventory size, and automatic currency conversion | |
"By the same logic, comedy is purely and entirely subjective, so who's to say what's funny and what's serious? How can one be a standup comic if there's no objective standard for joke construction? Obviously different people will have different preferences, but it's silly to act like all parts of a work of art are equally great. Some jokes in a comedy sketch are more humorous than others, and some parts of a game are more engaging than others. This notion that "fun is subjective, therefore all parts of a game are equal" is nonsense. Some parts are worth showing off, others aren't. Since a game is an interactive experience and doesn't follow a strict chronology (unlike a non-interactive video of a comedy routine), affordances are what game designers use to direct players through the game and towards the parts the designers believe are the best parts. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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" I don't think gibbousmoon was addressing you specifically... it sounded more like he was addressing the General Public Need game info? Check out the Wiki at: https://www.poewiki.net/
Contact support@grindinggear.com for account issues. Check out How to Report Bugs + Post Images at: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/18347 | |
"scrotie I dont do the majority rule thing, and I think you know it. majority of gamers nowadays think very differently from what I think; this doesn't give them the right to generalize shit and lazily label something 'anti-fun'. call it routine, which it is. fun is too subjective. people called grinding in this game as 'not fun'. people called losing rng rolls 'not fun'. people call pyramid map system 'not fun'. people call not getting an upgrade or a good drop in a session of length x 'not fun' I never use 'fun' unless its purely subjective. as in, this map was fun as fuck. because I realize my definition of fun is probably different from others. why cant others do it as well, especially in a pretty damn niche game ? |
