“Fun” vs. “Grind”
This entry was sparked by a post on the Nerfbat Forums. The question: “What would happen if people were presented with two routes: one involving a bit of effort but also some fun, and one which gets them to their goal faster and with less effort?” (Garumoo). To illustrate the point, check out this video: Piano Stairs. My response after the break.
The focus here is too much on the macro, rather than the micro. Let’s use an example:
I want to get to the other side of a zone called Jigsaw Hills. There are two methods to get from East to West:
- The first option is to teleport instantly to the other side for a small fee. We’ll call this the “Coin Option.”
- The second option is to play a very fun puzzle game for 60 seconds and get there for free. We’ll call this the “Puzzle Option.”
Jigsaw Hills is included in an expansion to the game, and is the last zone players are introduced to at the tail end of the level range.
On the first day that people hit the tail end of the level range, tons of people use the puzzle option. It’s a great, fun puzzle. It’s free! What a wonderful design. Every new wave of people uses the Puzzle Option instead of the Coin Option. Not only is it fun, it’s free!
The Puzzle Option is the “Fun” option, while the “Coin Option” is the “Grind” option.
After the first week, you start noticing more people migrate toward the Coin Option. There are still more people using the Puzzle Option, but it’s no longer vastly more utilized. This is because the people on the front end of the level curve have done it several times each, and now they just want to get where they’re going quickly.
After the first month, almost nobody ever uses the Puzzle Option. Everyone has maxed out and used the Puzzle Option half a dozen times. It’s no longer novel, it’s just an annoying time barrier. Now more than 90% of players going through the zone use the Coin Option–it’s faster, requires no effort, and it’s only a few mob kills of coin anyway.
Now the roles have flip-flopped. The Coin Option is the “Fun” option, and the Puzzle Option is the “Grind” option.
The question is not whether people will choose the path of least resistance over the most enjoyable path–invariably, players will eventually choose the path of least resistance. The question is, is it worth creating the more enjoyable path AND the path of least resistance (both in terms of development cost and in terms of gameplay)?
If you just create the more enjoyable path, will the “enjoyable” sustain? In the example listed above, the answer is obviously “no.” At some point, you’ve done the little game a bunch of times, and now it’s just a pain to have to play it for 60 seconds to get across Jigsaw Hills.
That would argue for only creating the path of least resistance–instant transportation. But, without the “free but takes time” option to complement this one, instant transportation completely trivializes travel and makes the world feel small.
So, what do you do? Most of the time, the answer is to meet the mechanic somewhere in the middle. Something that doesn’t completely trivialize travel and shrink the world, but isn’t terribly boring. Hence, the carefully-crafted flight path. It is designed to give you interesting visuals without significantly shrinking the world.
Does the carefully-crafted flight path ever get boring? Of course it does. You have to find the right amount of time to make it take for it to not utterly suck. In a game like WoW, some of their flight paths do take too long. But, it does seem to be the most attractive option.
To get back to my original point, the focus on that video is on the macro level; yes there are lots of people doing the fun thing. But, each individual (micro level) probably only does it on occasion after they’ve experienced it a few times.
The quick option is always quick. The fun option is fun for some people at the beginning but eventually not fun for anyone. Just out of curiousity, what exactly is the problem with trivialized travel?
I think that the problem with trivialized travel is that reduces the sense of scale in the world. When you can move instantly to any point in the world it no longer feels like a world, but rather a set of unconnected locations for killing mobs. There was a real sense of achievement in Lord of the Rings Online when we hiked from Bree to Rivendell; which would have been lacking if we had just been able to teleport.
I like the idea that initial travel involves moving through the world, but after completion of a quest you can bind there so that the journeys do not become as grindy as the daily commute.
If the rewards for the “puzzle option” (gear, exp, achievements, etc.) outweigh the convenience of the “coin option” , it will always remain a popular choice. I would assume a player who took the Puzzle option would be vastly better equipped to handle the challenges at the end of the zone than would the coin option folks.
In terms of flight paths, I always wished a system was in place wherein each time the player takes a specific flight path, the travel time is slightly decreased. Lets say a player wants to fly between 2 cities. The first time the player takes the flight, it takes 5 minutes to get from city A to city B. Each subsequent time the player makes the flight, the travel time decreases slightly. After X times of taking the flight path between city A and B, the travel time is eventually reduced to 2.5 minutes and capped.
In regard to insta (teleport) travel. Perhaps that is best left in the hands of the player community. Despite is time saving convenience, I remember shelling out good money in EQ to Druids and Mages to travel from gate to gate. Leaving this option in the hands of the players means that prices and compensation will shift with a games economy, always being a pricey choice. Portal casting classes also cannot use these gates as a personal mode of transportation since they need to remain behind to keep them open for their party members and customers.
[...] Nerfbat re: Fun vs. Grind – “The question is, is it worth creating the more enjoyable path AND the path of least resistance (both in terms of development cost and in terms of gameplay)?” [...]
“I like the idea that initial travel involves moving through the world, but after completion of a quest you can bind there so that the journeys do not become as grindy as the daily commute.”
Certainly. Trivialized travel is valuable, it makes a good reward.
There is also the idea that the ‘coin’ option not be available initially, the player needs to do some quests to make it accessible. EQ2′s Horse stations for instance, or the griffons in TS/Nek. Done right, the quests can even been repeatable to speed the ‘coin’ option up as someone suggested. Each time you bring back the food for the dragon mount, it likes you a bit more, so flies a bit faster.
The obvious choice is to program the cost of flight to be directly related to the % of people using the coin option. It’s a natural response. Like the people that manage the teleporter aren’t going to raise prices once they figure out everyone is using it. In a MUD I used to play, people hunted X because X dropped good gold. But then after a while they didn’t drop good loot any more, and the Y’s which had gone reletively unhunted started dropping good loot. And low and behold people changed their behaviors until it of course switched back to the X’s.
It’s always seemed strange to me that virtual world designers sometimes appear to want to emulate the unpleasant features of the real world. I mean if I could open a magical portal to a sunny tropical beach at will when I had some time to kill I’d surely do it. In reality it’s hard, expensive and time consuming to get to such a beach from where I live. I think I do appreciate having to make the difficult journey from virtual zone to zone – once. Forcing me to trudge from point A to B certainly acquaints me with the distances involved and encourages me to experience the varied environments the game has to offer. After that, for god’s sake give me a frickin’ portal.
As for WOW’s flight path system, many’s the time that I’ve sat twiddling my thumbs wondering why that system exists. Does it decrease server load or somehow? Are they so embarrassed about load screens that they couldn’t bear to introduce more of them into the game? Do they feel that it will delay that inevitable moment when the player concludes they’ve finally consumed the last bit of novelty the game has to offer?
Gaming is for many of us about escapism; we’re not online to visit an accurate model of our own mundane existence. If I want to feel like I’m taking a bus I can go do that. I have a feeling it was a lot more interesting to design and implement that flight path system than it is for most players to ride it.
Creating “path of least resistance” will eventually force everything into that path.
You can clearly see how it goes in almost every modern MMO
Paying money to skip content is not a grind so your whole premise is false. :/
Having to do the Puzzle Option 10 times before being allowed to use the Coin option is a grind.
There should be some growth and advancement in the process so that the player can work toward the fast travel.
In the beginning, your character has to run between towns, or use a cobbled-together system of running and fixed teleporting, and the teleportation requires puzzle solving the first few times, until your character has a hang of the system. After that, it’s free to access. Or have a spiralling quest-related increased access to the teleportation network.
Personally, I’d be happy with this feature: safe, off-line travel. If I could log in during breakfast and designate my character to travel to some other city, then log in again after work and have them already arrived and ready for group, I’d have the sense of a large world while still being where I want to be.
On the travel times, I’ve long wished for a standard & “FedEx” option where I pay “10x” the toll and get there “5x” (some multiple) faster, it can fit into the loreLOL (faster birds cost more to maintain). It’s poor design to make getting from A to B take a long time after someone’s done it a few times. It’s bad enough to have to do it in real life commutes.
Besides travel, the same applies to anything in a game. Trash or the first bosses in a linearly-designed zone become an annoying time sink. It’d be great to see a game innovate to allow people who have mastered content to selectively skip it if they so choose. For example, each raid member gets a +1 every time they don’t die to a boss. If a raid consists of enough people with a high enough score, the raid leader can decide to eliminate that boss. Straightforward, allows guilds with new/ returning members to not be required to kill old content if they so choose. It seems to me if one wanted to only kill Yogg/ Algalon, you shouldn’t have to kill most of the zone bosses each week if you’ve done Ulduar multiple times already ‘flawlessly’.
Vald
“The question is not whether people will choose the path of least resistance over the most enjoyable path–invariably, players will eventually choose the path of least resistance. The question is, is it worth creating the more enjoyable path AND the path of least resistance (both in terms of development cost and in terms of gameplay)?” – Ryan
The answer is it depends. I don’t want to play a game were all the fun has been removed and only the path of least resistance is left. As long as the fun part helps the world feel more alive and progresses the story line then I would say yes.
Example. World of Warcraft ToC. When you go in there is dialog and story as the contestants enter the arena. The process takes five to ten minutes. Once you have experienced a few times it becomes a time sink and players requested an option to just skip it, which Blizzard eventually did. So was it a waste for Blizzard to have spent the time to create the entry sequence?
From the developers perspective I would say yes but from the player perspective I would say no. I enjoyed the experience and appreciated the sense of story and the event . Had I never experienced it then the game would have lost something.
I think developers have to pick and choose were it makes sense to make the extra effort and when not to, its a balance.
Vanguard
Realism is what I like to see. I don’t mind seeing random encounters from time to time, but I hate it when the game always feels like a random encounter or an area inflated with mobs or size that it’s difficult to move through the zone. The worst times is when I am trying to get to the meat of the quest line, but it takes me almost an hour to get to goal, only to turn around and wade through the respawn and back again, etc. If it feels like there are obstacles in my way only for combat experience gain or an unnecessary time sink, I hate it. If it feels like there’s realism to it, then I’m ok with it.