Excellent points

by kapowaz, Monday, April 01, 2013, 00:09 (4040 days ago) @ Xenos

I think your points were very well made. On a different end of the spectrum I still don't really understand why some people had issues with the progression system in Reach. If you don't enjoy playing the game, which you have to to unlock armor, then why are you playing the game to unlock armor to use in game?

Looking specifically at Halo Reach you can see where the problems might start, and that is the combination of an arbitrary ‘currency’ attached to items, along with a gated ranking system. To earn a given item, you have to reach the prerequisite rank and also earn enough of the currency to buy the item. Usually if you set out to get a given item, these happen together, but depending on the item (and your past purchases along the way) it might require more grinding.

But once you get past the first few trivial item upgrades and set yourself a more lofty goal (the inclement weather effect, for example) the amount of currency required is manifestly so large that any potential shortcuts to reaching that goal become very worthwhile to explore. At this point you're not playing the game itself (Halo Reach) so much as the meta-game of ‘earn 2 million credits’, and so you may end up undertaking less enjoyable paths within Halo Reach's multiplayer (say) to earn the points faster that you wouldn't otherwise do.

Another example of this kind of mechanic is the ‘Insane in the Membrane’ feat of strength achievement in World of Warcraft. To complete this feat of strength you have to earn Exalted reputation with a number of factions who it is very difficult to earn reputation with (or at least they used to be very difficult to earn rep with — I think they changed it to make it somewhat easier since I completed it). Some of the tasks you had to complete (over and over again) to get there were quite mind-numbingly boring, but since I valued completing the achievement I carried on regardless; it encouraged playing the game in a way that might otherwise have not been something players would actively seek out.

The Insane in the Membrane achievement may be a special case (after all, even the name of the achievement underlines the point that this isn't something most people would want to do) but the message is still the same: meta-game achievements or grinds tend to encourage play that players wouldn't actively seek out otherwise, in order to earn some reward. My preference is for rewards to be balanced carefully such that players don't feel compelled to do things just for the reward, but at least in part because they enjoy the activity too.