Win Sum, Lose Sum

aka Are players too used to a steady stream of rewards and other 'score' increases?

Should I blame WoW for this? Or progress-bar heavy games like WoW and LOTRO and its ilk? Or does the phenomenon move further back even into games like EQ or UO or the MUD?

I seem to recall in the good/bad old MUD days that there were less clear pathways of progression. Ok, you had your xp to next level, a max level 50 to strive for, and after that, the 'real game' of equipment amassing by killing all run mobs in sight, looking for the most prestigiously stated equipment and so on.

But surely there were days when very little got achieved. One just logged on to chat, explore a new area, or maybe just tried to kill a new run mob and got pasted for one's troubles. And certainly, not everybody was aimed towards achieving the same thing at once. Everyone had their own private sandbox goals.

I would extend an enlarged sandbox space to UO, simply based on the stories and legends that surround it, since I've not played it personally.

Even EQ, well, perhaps that was the start of the 'keeping score' era? Who knows. Maybe the mindset started to enroach that every second you had not been logged on and earning/grinding efficient xp, then you were sort of 'losing' at the game? There must have been the socialites still, but perhaps this is where the hardcore achievers started getting the notion into their heads of an ever-increasing score?

Well, personally I know where that leads. I blame my crazy notion of pleveling 5 clerics at once in RoD. I researched all the leveling spots. I worked out maximum xp gain efficiency over time. I did that 5 times a row in heavy succession with only Tiggs keeping me company and chatting with me to maintain my sanity.

Here's something I do wonder about. If this quickest way to max level had never been changed and nerfed, would I have lost interest in leveling? Let's try and extrapolate. I would probably have tried to level a lot more of my alts in the same fashion. The repetitive cycle might have done me in. Perhaps the buzz of having a slew of level 50s, and pleveling for other people level 50s would have offset it. I would forsee more people finding out about it and using most efficient path. This would have increased competition for the same resource and slowed all of our leveling down, killing our buzz at max efficiency. The increase in people would encourage a dev nerfing of the route. Or if ignored by the devs, it would eventually have become the 'commonly accepted' path to use, and everything else would be ignored and derided as too slow.

Of course, what really happened was that the imms wrecked a few key mobs along my path to max xp, and then I suddenly couldn't take the new overall decreased speed of leveling because it got harder than I remembered. Kinda like KoL and NS13. I can't really cope with the tedium anymore cos NS11 had been so much easier.

I wonder if the same thing is happening with WoW and WAR.

WoW is, imo, a Monty Haul campaign. There are ways to plevel quick, gain lots of booty in an endless chase to get better and stronger and stronger and better. It's about selfishly incrementing -something- about yourself. If that was achieved, yay, time not wasted logging in.

WAR meanwhile is a little schizophrenic about this. It tries to dangle WoW-style goodies. Especially in PvE. You can barely do anything without working towards some tome unlock or other. And it's attempting to drop heaps of carrots into RvR.

But I also suspect that by its very nature - RvR involves PvP, and thus you get the unpredictable player element - that you can never code a constant stream of 'progression' feelings.

Otherwise you end up with the travesty that is WoW BG PvP, where people don't care so much about killing other players, as trying to grind out the next carrot - be it tokens for new tiers of PvP gear (*eyeroll*) or achievements.

So anyhow, I'm assuming that WAR wants a little bit more war. More of that PvP zero sum element. I win, you lose. Hardy har. Plays on the elitist superiority complex mixed with schadenfreud, be it on an individual scale or on the largest scale of realm (aka realm pride.)

Once you mix that unpredictable PvP element in, you get the potential for stories and drama. Narratives, perhaps, would be a better word. Today, we did this, and we lost. Dammit. The other day, we did that and haha, we salted the earth with their wimpy asses. Unsoweiter.

Except we seem to have attracted a sizeable majority of the WoW mindset crowd (and why shouldn't we? Everyone and their mother has played WoW and thus have a certain entrenched mindset) and they're twitching at the thought that they cannot achieve 'progression' in RvR.

The best and most obvious path of 'progression' is in scenarios. Big number xp and renown for all - if you win, that is. Nice scoreboard listing out exactly how much you made out like a bandit. So everyone queues up for the same scenario that ends fast and lets people get good scores and the losers whine about imbalance and the winners keep repeating the same scenario ad nauseam because it is fast progression, wot.

And then they hit max level of 40, and run out of content (aka obvious paths for progression), and whine that the game is boring.

Or they never reach that mythical number and start feeling the self-inflicted grind of chasing maximum efficient xp - and they whine about it some more. And nitpick on things that are dulling their happy boost progression-fun factor.

Sigh.

CoX has an interesting spin on things. They make it practically too easy. Any combination of classes will work. Just go on in and have shooty fun. And if you get bored with that, then yeah, the game will get shallow and boring, bye! Because it's really easy to calculate max xp/time with Herostats and just farm mobs over and over to hit 50, and then, alright, now whut? Huh? I get to do it all over again?

Yes. If you didn't like the gameplay experience from 1-50 and want to try variant spinoffs on that, you're not cut out for CoX. Or WAR (I figure they give 10 characters slots per server for a reason.)

I wonder how many people actually notice the gameplay experience. The journey. Or are they all just addicted to the feeling of the next achievement buzz?

No wonder they are feeling let down and suffering withdrawal if they experience a few nights of setbacks.

(PvP comes with a myriad of them. Order is toasting Destruction on our server lately. I'm trying to learn how to stick it out and wait for the tide to turn. I dunno if many others are willing to do so, or just decide it got too hard and tedious for them and quit.)

Pfft. I suppose that is why PvP games will always be lower population than PvE ones.