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Allow me to translate (Gaming)

by MacAddictXIV @, Seattle WA, Tuesday, July 07, 2020, 09:48 (1360 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Move on to the second part, though. "nobody would want to pay money to avoid playing it to get the cosmetics." We've had this conversation, many times. You're wrong. There are lots of people, for lots of reasons, who might choose to pay money instead of playing a game - even a game they enjoy playing! We all make value judgements on a regular basis, and sometimes, the same comparison comes up differently for one single person! Sometimes you want chocolate, sometimes you want vanilla!


Of course they enjoy playing the game… If they didn't, they wouldn't have the game in their console at all. So that's the trick. You make a game that's fun to play, but you add little annoyances. Frictions if you will. Frictions that could easily be designed out. I might say, 'enjoy' playing Crash Team Racing, but not grinding races away mindlessly to slowly earn currency to buy a cosmetic. The solution isn't to let me pay the bypass the grind. The solution is not including the grind in the first place.

And yes there isn't a universal standard of fun… which is why "fun as possible" to me means the best good faith effort a developer can make. As soon as you intentionally design frictions, that good faith is gone, but not if you say, have certain levels that are weaker than others. A lot of people did not like the Library, but Bungie wasn't intentionally trying to add a boring level. But a friction is a deliberate decision to add an annoyance to a game.

What I'm reading is that MTs aren't bad. It's when companies add friction to a game to allow for MTs to be profitable.

If this is true, then what about adding MTs to a game that has no friction to entice you to buy the MTs? Or what about all the people that honestly don't consider what you consider to be frictions? What if the companies never add what you call frictions and they still have MTs? There are so many cases depending on what the company does and what I consider as a player that makes MTs bad or good. I've seen both cases as a player. But to say without a doubt that elminating MTs will always make a game better is, as Claude was saying, overly black and white.


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