Yet another issue to take me out of hiding, albeit briefly, is the fatigue system in Final Fantasy XIV. If you don’t know about it yet, read up. My comments here are actually based on a response on Massively that asserts that players want a grind, and uses the complaints over the fatigue system as proof. I will only criticize very briefly. First of all, “grind” does not mean “gain experience for putting forth effort.” The grind is simply a state of mind that players get into. It’s negative, and everyone has a different threshold. Nomenclature aside, here’s my main criticism: Players don’t like to grind. What they do like is to be rewarded for their efforts. The fundamental concept of most MMOs is that Effort = Reward, and the fatigue system as defined breaks that paradigm. That is all.

This is a post I didn’t publish about a month ago in response to EVE’s PLEX changes: “I’m curious as to the legal ramifications this may have. I’m guessing they’ve already figured any of those out because you can already sell PLEX, just not outside of the station you got them. Still, it’s $14.95 that can either be taken by another player or destroyed entirely in a blast. The latter is actually the scarier of the two for CCP, I think, because you’re now able to give them $$ for something that they can (be accused of) destroy(ing) via code.” Less than a month later, and someone destroyed more than $1000 of PLEX in one PvP battle. Continue Reading »