Too many rewards is not a problem - by Blizzard Dev

[Mad_Murdock]

What choice? If it doesn't have the right stats + a socket then you got an inferior version of what you want. That's not a choice, that's accepting you could have gotten better and could have been happier.

I was referring to choice more specifically in terms of too many raid versions. No such thing, because you choose which versions you want to play and skip the others.

In terms of gear drops with multiple stats levels. So how does the new way actually hurt anything? Before you got an item with X and that was it, you were never going to get better. Now you get that same item that is X, but because you could have got X with sprinkles, you think X is now garbage? That is just the completely wrong way to look at things. And it's still a choice. We had people who raided, got lucky and got all their loot in the first 2-3 weeks and then had no desire to keep playing, cause they were BiS. At least this way, they can choose whether they want to go for the God roll piece

[textz]

a reward is not to be misunderstood as a gift. a reward is the result of a sucessful effort, while a gift is gifted without any effort.

this whole abstract nonsense about too many rewards, too many epics doesnt neither realise the (psychological) theory of gameplay loops nor the whole practical impact (of rewards and is furthermore as every compromised (cuz incomplete) "working hypothesis" nonsense) - there is so much more content than Vanila/Classic.

ergo there r so much more rewards to gain. rewards r not simply the result of successful cleared content, but the integral element, the driving force of RPG is XP. kill XP bags (for XP) to be able to kill bigger XP bags to be able to kill biggest XP bags is the original gameplay loop of RPG (Raph Kostner, UO, SWG). even roguelike r based on this, while Tetris also has direct, aka Player (and not numerical) XP. as rewards have to be earned, more challenges must be created for more rewards. with the evolution of RPG and esp. MMOs the social aspect diversified the reward systems, remember housing in SWG? Mogs r the same - prestige shifted from plain Power Curve to more socio-aesthecial aspects of rewarding content.

so reward structure diversified game design and offered a more broad variety of content to solve - its not longer exclusively combat (and questing as loreline into it), but so much more. every log-off i feel like iam still not even close to the finale (23k AVs).

again - more rewards means more content per se, even if simply the reward (loop) frequency is boosted. more content means more engagement means more game/subtime.
Blizzney wont degenerate retail into Classic, so better get used to the MORE, as there will be much more (rewards).

there is a hierarchy of rewards too, btw. 400 mounts dont come easy, Azshara mythic isnt faceroll, Glad requires serious skill. millions cant be quested etc.

[Zmagoslav]

Diablo dev that is.

Those games are known for raining drops on you... so i see how he could come to that conclusion.

[Kohtra]

I was referring to choice more specifically in terms of too many raid versions. No such thing, because you choose which versions you want to play and skip the others.

In terms of gear drops with multiple stats levels. So how does the new way actually hurt anything? Before you got an item with X and that was it, you were never going to get better. Now you get that same item that is X, but because you could have got X with sprinkles, you think X is now garbage? That is just the completely wrong way to look at things. And it's still a choice. We had people who raided, got lucky and got all their loot in the first 2-3 weeks and then had no desire to keep playing, cause they were BiS. At least this way, they can choose whether they want to go for the God roll piece

I hate to break it to you but if it feels wrong in a video game, it is wrong. We're not perfectly logical machines (we wouldn't play video games if we were). Itemization feels like shit when you have so many different RNG systems to run through to get the item you want. You aren't going to convince anyone who hates it that, actually, it's wonderful! You just aren't logical enough!

[munkeyinorbit]

There is too much.

Take Retail vs. Classic - in Classic you're happy when you get a green or blue item from a quest. In retail you don't even bother with epics anymore unless they titan- or warforge. You throw away more epics in retail than you do with greens and blues in Classic.

That's full of shit. I am level 41 in classic and I have only had 3 items that were a quest reward and green or higher. All other shit I have vendored, and it is shit.

Epics are not an issue anymore. We have been getting epics as world content for a long time now. Everything is basically purple. What IS the problem is the availability of heroic raid gear, the type of gear that you need to do organised content for. I don't like m+ but I can understand it, but warfronts? Quests? That shit should be LFR level. If it was then it would be ok.

E.g. time.
You do 8.0 warfronts and WQ. You get max 340 ilvl + TF. You get very lucky and max out gear. You're 345 by time 8.1 hits. Oh shit. World content drops 370. FUCK YEAH I hear you say. Of course fuck yeah. Most items are still upgrades. Want more? Normal drops 385 and m+ 7s do the same. 8.2 hits and you're 380. Normal raids are achievable right away AND world content (400 ilvl) is still an upgrade. The game is more interesting and you have more options.

[Lazuli]

I was referring to choice more specifically in terms of too many raid versions. No such thing, because you choose which versions you want to play and skip the others.

Before WF/TF, that could have been true.

[Daffan]

I think a game, where you did things just becasue you like it, is a bit of a dream scenario, from a game like WoW. I think it works for high intensity games like CoD or SC2, but in WoW, its too slow to keep your attention without a drive for rewards.

Like, i think that many people who play WoW, are very reward structured in their gameplay. When they play the game, they, as you pointed out, math out what they are going to do in the next hour or so. I do dailies for X rewards and then do all LFR for Y rewards. Its not because its directly the most fun content, but i have set out what i gain from it and decided that its where the most profit comes.

That said, i think there is a proberly way of designing an element of WoW, which is built upon not rewards, but the enjoyableness of doing the content repeatedly without raising a number or being given a chest after X runs.

Even in games like CoD and SC2 people are going for rewards.

COD has skins, ranks and prestige.

SC2 has ladder and league ranks.

People want games where there is meaningful value, that is part of the fun because of dopamine drip.

[scarletanh]

Before WF/TF, that could have been true.

Not sure how that change your choice, how would a WF/TF make a mythic raider to mandatorily do LFR every week?

[Osmeric]

people minmax even in pokemon games.
Your agenda to make the game braindead makes you the best mental gymnastic athlete ever

What part of the word "need" didn't you understand? Of course some people will minmax anything. That's fine. The point is to not have a design where minmaxing is seen as necessary, and where those who minmax feel the need to separate themselves from those who don't.

[Flurryfang]

Even in games like CoD and SC2 people are going for rewards.

COD has skins, ranks and prestige.

SC2 has ladder and league ranks.

People want games where there is meaningful value, that is part of the fun because of dopamine drip.

I think there is a difference tough between something like CoD and SC2, and then WoW. Like, i can play 50 games of CoD without ever thinking of skins, ranks and prestige, but i can't get myself to do 50 LFD heroics without constantly thinking about the rewards.

Also, i think that when we talk about rewards, we are talking about different rewards entirely. When i think rewards for a game like WoW or Diablo, i think of rewards, that direct player engagment and gameplay. If you want X item, you have to do Y tasks and that is the only task you do. In a CoD game or SC2 game, i don't really see the rewards control that much gameplay. People are not doing something extra ordenary in SC2 to get more points, they just want to win the game. The same with CoD, especially after you hit the first prestige (Have only played up to CoD MW 2, so i might have an outdated view), since the only points you get, are from things you would do anyway to be sucessful in the game

[Drusin]

no because then you would remove epics from the game and inflate even the reward pool more
do you even read what you write?
the reason why people complain about epic (and legendarys, btw. which you get since wod for doing the equivalency of lvl 1 delivery quests) is because the rarirty system just dont make sense.
Didnt you ever play a game beside wow with a system like that?

I never gave a fuck about gear. How about we just remove color from gear all together? Stats and effects are all your after anyways the color serves no purpose.

[Bladesyphon]

Even at max level in Classic you're super happy about a good green or blue item from a quest. That's been the case in TBC and WotLK, too. Devaluating epics began in late Cataclysm/MoP. In early Cataclysm you started raiding with an almost all-blue heroic dungeon gear and it worked that way. Now epics have no worth anymore, they're just there and you get way too much of them from almost every task you do. It's highly problematic and the reward structure is one of the biggest downsides of BfA (and Legion) imho.

This is only true when you're gearing to do your first raid. Once you start raiding, outside of a few particular Blue drops that come from specific one and done quests or a boss in a 58 dungeon, gearing in Classic is more linear than WoW is right now. Everyone's BiS from MC onwards is almost always going to be their Tier sets, and their BiS weapons are always going to come from either a boss near the end of the raid, or in the case of Hunters and Priests - Majordomo Executus' quest drop.

Once you hit 60 and start raiding, Greens and most blues become total trash to you. You aren't "Super happy" about getting a random green - it's vendor trash, and vast majority of blue drops are the same.

[Eveningforest]

Of course too many rewards are a problem. Apply it to real life. You shower one child with an exorbitant amount of gifts for Xmas and another child gets 2-3. It doesn't take much guessing which child learns to appreciate things more.
Moderation is key, we say it about most things in life. Surely, video game rewards are no exception. When shinies are being continuously dropped into your lap, there isn't much excitement left after a while.
(The only thing left to do then is to put a higher number on an item. Apparently, that works for some people. )

[Wingspan]

But in the end, what is the point of rewards? Some might say, that it is to keep you playing, and they are half right in that, but it is also to push you into some sorts of content. Content that will promote increased dedication and a deeper emotional dive into the game. You have to some point stop the rewards of "lower tiers" and point the player to the "higher tiers" to keep the flow of rewards coming. That way you can create more dedicated players, i believe.

This kind of assumes that “higher tiers” of content naturally promote increased dedication, which is probably not really true. Some people dig that, sure, but many people are really happy just playing the small game.

My own brother played for around three years and never even managed to make it to max level. He was more than happy doing some quests and profession stuff when he had a few hours to kill, two or three times a month. I don’t imagine that there are a huge percentage of players like him, but I am sure it’s a lot more than you would think.

And then there is the player that goes in the other direction... focusing on Arena or Rated Battlegrounds as a “higher tier” and then rage quitting when their class gets nerfed (sadly I have a friend that has done this 4 or 5 times in the last 15 years). His deeper emotional ties to the higher tiered content are exactly was causes him to leave... and I have known MANY like him over the years.

I don’t know. The point is that Blizzard should definitely provide options but NEVER seek to push you into things (making you feel like you “should” be there)... because it rarely works out well.

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Of course too many rewards are a problem. Apply it to real life. You shower one child with an exorbitant amount of gifts for Xmas and another child gets 2-3. It doesn't take much guessing which child learns to appreciate things more.
Moderation is key, we say it about most things in life. Surely, video game rewards are no exception. When shinies are being continuously dropped into your lap, there isn't much excitement left after a while.
(The only thing left to do then is to put a higher number on an item. Apparently, that works for some people. )

Fundamentally you are correct but WoW (in particular) does not match your example as well as it could because it involves money... and like anything involving money, people need to feel they are getting value for it.

If someone that’s paying to play does not feel rewarded enough, they are probably going to stop being a customer... that’s just the give and take of financial transactions and it’s perfectly normal. So it becomes a designers job to throw some easily attainable rewards (that are worth having) around. The hard part I imagine is determining where the line is drawn.

[Flurryfang]

This kind of assumes that “higher tiers” of content naturally promote increased dedication, which is probably not really true. Some people dig that, sure, but many people are really happy just playing the small game.

My own brother played for around three years and never even managed to make it to max level. He was more than happy doing some quests and profession stuff when he had a few hours to kill, two or three times a month. I don’t imagine that there are a huge percentage of players like him, but I am sure it’s a lot more than you would think.

And then there is the player that goes in the other direction... focusing on Arena or Rated Battlegrounds as a “higher tier” and then rage quitting when their class gets nerfed (sadly I have a friend that has done this 4 or 5 times in the last 15 years). His deeper emotional ties to the higher tiered content are exactly was causes him to leave... and I have known MANY like him over the years.

I don’t know. The point is that Blizzard should definitely provide options but NEVER seek to push you into things (making you feel like you “should” be there)... because it rarely works out well.

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Fundamentally you are correct but WoW (in particular) does not match your example as well as it could because it involves money... and like anything involving money, people need to feel they are getting value for it.

If someone that’s paying to play does not feel rewarded enough, they are probably going to stop being a customer... that’s just the give and take of financial transactions and it’s perfectly normal. So it becomes a designers job to throw some easily attainable rewards (that are worth having) around. The hard part I imagine is determining where the line is drawn.

That surely depends on how much you demand for these "higher tiers" of content There is nothing wrong with playing the small game, but i think from dev point of view, you really want to have as many dedicated/players who engage with higher tier content, as possible. If you are "forced" to understand deeper elements of a game to interact with some forms of content, it tends to lead players to not only create non-ingame content, but also pushes people to seek it out. The reason why places like Icy Veins and Elitests Jerks rose up, was becasue people found a game barrier to higher content and had to seek out help to come over it. If WoW had not a tier of "higher content", the community sphere around the game would without a doubt have been smaller, since there were fewer things to seek interaction for.

This idea is ofcourse focused on not gaining players, but keeping them around and increasing their engagement with the product. There is proberly a connection between the amount of "higher tier" content and the amount of players who get scared away from the game, but when i think back, i think it is also possible that "higher tier" content might actually improve the amount of players playing without them even playing the content. Having something to reach, even if you actually won't try to reach it, is interesting. I think the entire myth about impossible Sunwell can somewhat be an example of that, where it was a raid better remembered by players who never got past the first few mob packs than the people who completed the raid when it was current.

I agree, that forcing players to do "higher tier" content to engage in the game is a bad idea, but i think there is a fine line between pushing/forcing and promoting content. You can lure players into this by simply providing a unique experience, like WoW Vanilla did with big group content with boss fights, that lasted more than 3 minutes, which was something you could not get outside the raid enviroment.

[infinitemeridian]

I don't know why they haven't added a M+ currency yet, similar to dubloons for islands. You could use that to buy cosmetics like sets / mounts / pets. They could add new stuff every season, and the more season there are, the more people are to gravitate towards M+ to buy previous season rewards.

On top of that, they could have like a seasonal reward that is season-exclusive. M+ is far too unrewarding right now, since it only gives gear, which is the same appearance since the expac launched and gear is meaningless as a reward in this day and age anyways.

[Wingspan]

Ultimately, I guess what drives everything is based on metrics and cost analysis that we (you and I) don’t have but Blizzard does.

It’s easy to believe that higher tier play keeps people around longer, because it does make a certain amount of sense... but we really don’t know if it does. On one hand you have the fact that the still put a lot of resources into raids, so that leans in favor of it... and on the other, they go out of their way to keep LFG (and things like it) around, so that goes against the theory.

The general ease of the game itself (outside of raiding and PvP) kind of goes against the idea of it too.

Things seem so diametrically opposed that it could simply be that Blizzard believes that neither style of play is more financially sound than the other. There could literally be no difference (dollar-wise) in the two play styles (low tier and high tier). This would be a logical assumption based on their game design for a number of years.

It would be really interesting to see those kinds of stats.


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I don't know why they haven't added a M+ currency yet, similar to dubloons for islands. You could use that to buy cosmetics like sets / mounts / pets. They could add new stuff every season, and the more season there are, the more people are to gravitate towards M+ to buy previous season rewards.

On top of that, they could have like a seasonal reward that is season-exclusive. M+ is far too unrewarding right now, since it only gives gear, which is the same appearance since the expac launched and gear is meaningless as a reward in this day and age anyways.

They could probably stand to add some other rewards but based on lackluster previous incarnations of non-gearing hard dungeons (like MoP Challenges), I think it’s safe to say that a HUGE hunk of the Mythic+ community are driven almost exclusively by gear.

[Drusin]

ok then people just gonna say "there is too much good gear free" instead.
Hope i could answer our question.

If you want to argue about catering to those people then you should just go into every single thread people make about changes and copy and paste it because no matter what change occurs someone will have a problem with it.

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I don't know why they haven't added a M+ currency yet, similar to dubloons for islands. You could use that to buy cosmetics like sets / mounts / pets. They could add new stuff every season, and the more season there are, the more people are to gravitate towards M+ to buy previous season rewards.

As an ATT collector, you're right.
As an ATT collector, you're somewhat wrong lol.

One day I will go and pvp for cosmetic rewards (not a big pvp fan btw) after I have literally everything else in game and there's nothing for me to do lol. The same would be true for M+ (not a big fan of either).

[Lazuli]

Not sure how that change your choice, how would a WF/TF make a mythic raider to mandatorily do LFR every week?

I was more talking along the lines of heroic/mythic both being done for gear because lottery forging.

[melodramocracy]

Here is something i think the MMO-C community would be interested on.

A Blizzard dev gave a lecture on "Rewards in videogames" (2017) and the lessons he learned as a developer along the years.
I found it quite interesting.

He was asked the question:
Do you think players will always ask for more rewards? So at what point do you stop?

Answer:
Honestly...i dont know if there is a too much...

Full answer video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urijgWXLYck&t=56m19s

And before the question was asked he made it clear this was his BIGGEST lesson and also the one that took him the longest to realize:
-No design is perfect, we will always have problems to solve. It's better to solve the problem of players having everything they want than trying to solve the problems caused by players being frustrated with stingy reward systems.

full quote here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urijgWXLYck&t=46m50s

-------

And who am i to disagree?
I know this has been a point of discussion in MMO-C, so do you guys agree or disagree? And Thoughts?

Stockpiles of rewards simply go unnoticed or unchased by players once the "wow, look at all this shit" phase ends, which normally doesn't take long. While there is certainly a balance to be found, retail leans towards the 'too much' side of the playing field.

It's also worth considering that many rewards in WoW are flat out worthless entirely, or quickly become worthless as you progress. Solving that is another ball of wax.