More incentive talk

by Xenos , Shores of Time, Thursday, July 11, 2013, 10:59 (3945 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I'd suggest you're keeping to too obvious a definition of a replay incentive. If you want an example that falls under perhaps a subtler definition, look at Trials. Friend leaderboards and ghost support are two things I'd say are great incentives to replay content - not integral to the second-to-second gameplay mechanics but wrappers around it that tease you to go again and again. That's replay incentives applied unobtrusively and to great effect.

Those things are simply there to measure your skill at the game, so all that is is someone replaying the game because they desire to improve their skill.

See to me that counts as an incentive. Just putting scoring as an option in Halo 3 and Reach made me replay so I could compete against friends in campaign. I replayed Halo 3 more times in the first month than any other Halo game before it, probably about 5x as many times, just because I had something like scoring. This is the kind of reason I like to replay a game: it's fun and replaying it is MORE fun because I can improve or compete in a quantifiable way.