Best posts made by hooby

@Xzoviac said in Best mmo features:

What are your favourite mmo features

• a persistent open world
• ALL the items being player made, plus item degradation. having to repair stuff is slightly inconvenient - but a small price to pay for the wonders this does for interdependency, the economy, and equipment diversity, etc.
• a progression system where veterans and newbies can group up and play together in a meaningful way
• local markets and regional pricing. no auction house pushing prices so low that crafted items are worth less than materials needed to make them...
• in-world player housing
• clan cities, with their own tech progression
• the game world having different regions/biomes that come with different resources. like - every place could have iron, but the iron mined in the north comes with somewhat different attributes than that mined in the south. that would allow every place to craft every item - but for getting specific bonuses you'd have to get the specific type of iron
• player tools for creating your own events. I want barn dances, marriages, bingo nights, theater troupes, music performances, sylvester parties, poetry recitals, cooking contests, harvest festivals... you name it.

I just signed up here yesterday, or the day before.

The game had been recommended by two members of my gaming clan, and since a public alpha test is coming around by the end of the week, I was interested to check it out for myself.

My clanmates had posted regular links - not invitation links - because they wanted their endorsement to be genuine and honest - and not appear self-serving. I knew nothing about the recommendation scheme when I signed up.

After creating my account, I was greeted by a text saying "LEVEL 0" in huge letters, and a list of rewards for higher levels shown underneath. The best rewards for the very high levels, were cosmetics lootboxes/lockboxes.

Normally, at this point, I would have started to browse the website, and read up on a few topics that seemed of interest to me. But not this time. The game had successfully activated my FOMO. You don't have to be a math genius to realize, that the sooner you start collecting daily points, the better.

I spent the next hour and half grinding points. Clicking through the website without reading anything, spamming a post in daily-post thread, pushing some shares on my rarely used facebook and twitter accounts.

Then I had something else to do, and left. I still hadn't learned anything on the game. I was too busy grinding some shallow "daily" quests, which also were a marketing ploy to inflate facebook shares and tweets - so I would not miss out on some lootbox reward later on. But I still knew next to nothing about the game itself.

At least that's what I thought at first. But then it came to me, that maybe I had learned way more about the game, than I imagined.
Account management was pretty slick. The achievement and reward system appeared robust and updated instantly. Forums, news, newsletters - everything was fully integrated. This was convenient and highly polished. Obviously a fair amount of effort went into getting this invitation reward system right.

So, did I learn anything then?
Well obviously a lot of effort has been put into activating my FOMO, making me grind shallow "daily" quests for points by sharing on social media, so I might earn some random lootbox reward.

What are the chances, that someone who uses this strategy masterfully and successfully for their website, will use the same strategy in their game?
Pretty darn good I good reckon!

Therefore I do have learned something about the game:
.) FOMO based grind
.) shallow repeating quests for arbitrary points
.) no engagement with the actual content
.) lootboxes and similar rewards to drive player behavior

And that's actually a lot more than what I might have learned from actually reading some materials on the website - right?

I know, it's only first impressions, and such might always be off or outright wrong. But it's definitely the first impressions I got here.

@maze said in Best mmo features:

but to also buy from that region since rare+ would be harder to find.

When combined with local markets, northern iron would be cheaper in the north and more expensive in the south - and vice versa for southern iron.

Players then could become traders, by building some mule cart or something and transporting goods north to south.

You might have a point there - but for me personally it's the overall first impressions I got of the entire project as a whole - because the website is the first thing I get to see. (Can't try the game without signing up first).

I'm not sure I'd label this stuff as "downsides of gamification".
Gamification of forums typically does not have these specific downsides, if the rewards are for the forum - and not for some separate (but related) game - and if only actions are rewarded, which are actually desirable from a forum point of view.

The dissonance in this case probably stems from the fact that the rewards are for the game - not for the forums, and the rewarded behavior may be desirable for marketing/popularity purposes - but is at least partially not very good for the forums themselves.

If you reward voluntary forum-visitors for showing forum-beneficial behavior with benefits that improve their forum-experience, you can get great results. Because in this example the external reward and the intrinsic motivation would line up.

But if you reward people who just want to play game for showing marketing-beneficial behavior (that's not entirely beneficial for the forums) with benefits that improve their game-experience... - then your external rewards kinda go against the intrinsic motivation... there's some sort of disconnect there.

Not sure how if I'm able to get across what I'm trying to say... I'm trying my best...

I'm very sorry, but there has to be some sort of misunderstanding here.

I feel my first post is a pretty faithful recounting of my personal experience and by no means a bashing of the game.

Yes, so other people did read some stuff before signing up. Yes, so you and your wife singed up and did all the quests in 20 minutes - that's great. Yes, so that stuff was added halfway through development. Yes, so it feels fairly different to you. That's all fine.
But I don't see how any of that is going to change my individual first impressions.

I cannot retroactively change what my first impressions were... and as I wrote - they are only first impressions, they might be off, they might be wrong. I always have been and still am willing to form my actual opinion during the upcoming stress-test - you know while actually playing the game.

Now to clarify that daily quest thing - I put quotes around "daily" on purpose. I am well aware, that only one quest actually is repeatable each day. But if I'm not mistaken, whenever a new news post is written, or a new newsletter is sent, you get another round of that read/share/tweet quest. So those do repeat too, albeit at irregular intervals. But even the non-repeatable quests do feel for me like a typical daily quest, in that they are just time-sink. Mindless filler sort of stuff.

To clarify the 1:30 hours - that's the entire time-span. Signing up, confirming email, figuring out how the reward stuff actually works, going through the news multiple times, because I initially missed some, searching my avatar pick which I couldn't find on my hard drive for some reason, etc. - doing a bit of Discord chatting on the side. I wasn't hurrying, nor being efficient about the order in which I did things.

And to clarify the "that's why it is" part - that was in my second post. A reply to the first answer, and just an attempt to come up with an explanation why I don't think "downsides of gamification" is the right way to put it. But that's entirely separate, not part of my first impressions or anything. And it's just an attempt at a theory... you can just ignore that second post, if you want.

And I really don't think I said it's an reflection on the game. It's just a first impression. I said it seems likely that the game might employ similar strategies - and I still stand by that. This is expertly designed, and whoever that expert is, probably wasn't hired just for a little forum game alone.

And about the FOMO - I didn't feel anxious or pressured or anything. Actually at that point in time I was rather bored, and happy about a little waste of time. It's just that - before I noticed it - it ended up taking a lot more time than I had expected. And then something unexpected came along and I had to cut short - at which point I thought "but I still had wanted to read about the game..."

And to clarify on that "a product you knew nothing about and had no emotional investment in" - two of my clanmates had told me they'd be playing the stress-test, and that's when I made the commitment I'd be playing to. Yeah - I committed without knowing a thing about the game. But you know... the people you play with are more important than the game. And I simply trusted their judgment that the reward stuff was actually worth doing as well.

No need to insinuate anything about my "mentality".