I’ve given some thought to the reasons gaming and MMO’s specifically cause such heavy addiction. In this post, I’ll touch on what I believe causes that addiction, and how GW2 may not be targeting it.
Gaming is quickly becoming an incredibly mainstream source of entertainment, and Sony and Microsoft’s dream of having a console in every household is close at hand. Gaming seems to be here to stay. But what makes it so interesting?
As has been stated many times in recent news articles, generation Y looks for instant gratification. They like to see themselves rewarded, and why not? It feels good to cross something off your checklist. It grants a sense of accomplishment, whether deserved or not.
However, its not just Gen Y that seeks this, everyone “would.” It’s only Gen Y that seeks to take advantage of the opportunities out there that gives you that little buzz. Due mainly to the ruination of social norms, like the rampancy of sex in the media contributing to the rise in teenage pregnancy, kids aren’t chastised for looking for the cheap way out. “Don’t worry hunny! You’re not a little dirty slut! We’ll just abort the baby, you look so pretty with your makeup on, remember, dont trust a rubber, take the pill! Bye hunny, im going to work, be home in 8 hours! Dinners in the fridge!”
Rather than seeking to cross out large accomplishments off your list, such as, “getting happily married, raising a successful family, garnering a successful career,” we are instead content with, “getting 3 stars on Angry Birds 8-2.”
As I said before, while not a huge accomplishment, it is roughly the equivalent to taking a big ole sniff of a permanent market. It lasts only briefly and leaves you wanting more. Ever wonder why WoW and Diablo 2 have such horrible communities? Its because the 90% of the players going through withdraw. Either they reached max lvl too fast and have nothing left to do, or an item hasn’t dropped in the last 8 hours of continual play. Their crashing; scratching their necks, eyes red, waiting for their next fix.
Now, this write-up is not about whether this outlook is good or bad for us, the gamer. In the long-term, im almost sure its a bad thing. Either way, this write-up is about how GW2 can benefit with this type of mentality, or seek to change the model by appealing to a broader sense of satisfaction (if thats even possible at this point in time.)
It would be important to discuss what types of gaming accomplishments work the best. To start with, we can look at achievements, since they are essentially the embodiment of a checklist, for gaming.
I tried achievements, and just didn’t get hooked. I was probably too old for it, because when it became mainstream, I immediately felt it was the baby drug. “I’m too old for that, been through too much to start that junk. I didn’t need that stuff when I gamed, I have all my achievements on a 8 mb PS2 memory card!”
Regardless. Its clear achievements have a home for some crowds and work well as a side dish to the main meal. But that’s all it is; potatoes. A game can’t last with just potatoes. Wheres the meat?
In WoW, the proverbial meat became purple items. Epic rarities, whether it was mounts, armors, recipes, or anything else that could be added with 2 lines of code, a piece of art, and require 3 weeks of the players time to earn.
Some may argue that it wasn’t the destination, it was the ride. Grouping up with your friends, learning boss fights and finally downing them. I would say that accomplishment is well founded and well deserved and much more attuned to winning the tri-county softball championship, at least compared to farming a mob for /3 days played until a purple mount drops.
But in the end, the only memento you have of that boss fight is the achievement and the purple item. And while you always remember the first time, all the ones in between start getting a little hazy forcing you to bust out the toys and get into some strange **** that even your perverted Uncle Steve might be embarrassed to talk about. In short, you resort to alternatives…different games, different modes, genres, hell, maybe even PVP.
Bottom line is, no matter how epic the battle, after doing it a few times, it gets stale. I’m looking at you, dynamic events. Players WILL get tired of killing the Shatterer. I hate to say it, because the boss fight looks so damn cool, but it WILL happen. But hey, there’s a very simple solution to this. Just continue to release content at superhuman speed. 3 New dragon fights a week, with completely different mechanics should do it. Sarcasm aside, this is an impossible feat. A developer simply can not pump out content at the speed it takes players to conquer it.
However, Blizzard figured out a trick. “Force the player to replay content to get their items!” Items became the bottleneck and allowed Blizzard to control the length between each expansion.
How is Arena.net going to accomplish this when there is no growth in items? In the PvP side of things, there is no problem. I haven’t even touched on competitive aspect of accomplishment, but its important to note the other side of the coin. Defeating other players offers an unlimited amount of enjoyment and sense of accomplishment and doesn’t need to be touched on in this article. But Arena.net isn’t advertising GW2 as [I]just[/I] a pvp game.
They are severely underestimating players ability to fly through content and severely underestimating players ability to get bored of content. I simply don’t see how PvE can be sustained in a game with no purple items to strive for. Without the need to replay content, people will be satisfied with their first, second, or third kill. Whats going to draw them back for the 4th, 5th, 10th kill? Whats going to keep them around for the expansion?
TL;DR: WoW “sticks” in the game because of the carrot-on-a-stick system, thus Blizzard have time to develop further content. How will ArenaNet achieve this with GW2? you’ll run out of content before they release more.
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Blizzard figured out a trick. “Force the player to replay content to get their items!” Items became the bottleneck and allowed Blizzard to control the length between each expansion.
How is Arena.net going to accomplish this when there is no growth in items?
I’m pretty sure that it’ll take you more time to experience all the possibilities of all the DEs, than it’ll take ArenaNet to release new content. Also, story mode dungeons and dungeons with different paths (3, to be exact) in the explorable mode, with some DEs inside too, triggered by players or other things. Personal Story, WvWvW (not PvP at all, you can help your server without having to kill directly a player, although you won’t stay there arms-crossed if they attack you, obviously).
Perhaps in WoW you had that “bottleneck” for players, with the epic reward system based in a random number, but sure people get bored of raids too, they repeat them week after week, as well as they repeat daily quests, day after day… and dungeons… imo, people repeat more content in WoW than they’ll in GW2. Heck, many WoW players log in only to raid. What kind of game is that? You pay 15 $ a month to play just a day a week, raid during 2 hours, doing the same raid over and over until they release more…
Also: explorable dungeons aren’t an easy feat. And defeating all of them with all of their possibilities shouldn’t be easy.
Also: rolling an alt in gw2 is gonna be a lot of fun, new personal story and get to experience new DEs in different stages… how many time are they going to take to release more content? 6 months? And you’ll spend 2 months leveling, more or less (unless you play 24 hours a day).
GW2 has more content than it seems.
Anyway, I’m a PvP boy myself, so I’m not worried at the slightest
Also, completing DEs give you karma which can be used to purchease “purple items”, if you wanna call them. They don’t give better stats but are better-looking and grant the same “e-peen” feeling, if you want to call it like that…
But you DO get cool items from PvE. Why do you think Guild Wars 1 still has such a large player base? Hell, I still play, and I don’t even PvP!
Since GW2 doesn’t have a subscription fee, Arenanet doesn’t need you to stick around til the next expansion. It was this way in GW1 and it will be in GW2.
1) You play the game.
2) You (inevitably) get bored (wether this is after a week or after 2 years depends on the player entirely)
3) You go play a different game
4) Arenanet adds an expansion and back to 1) you go.
Arenanet doesn’t want you to kill the Shatterer 10 times in a row. Not only is this impossible because of the dynamic event system, but there’s no real reason to do it. Why would you want to kill him 10 times in a row? There isn’t some úber-rare item that’s gonna drop. There isn’t a quest that requires you to kill him 10 times.
Like you said yourself “In short, you resort to alternatives…different games, different modes, genres, hell, maybe even PVP.”
Thanks for the article! This will be kind of a TL;DR, but I disagree with you about underestimating players. In this whole “PvE” experience of Guild Wars 2, going through the dynamic events is only part of the experience.
Although it is true that any PvE content is potentially outplayed faster than new updates that developers try to pump out, you are forgetting about the “MMO” aspect in such online games. Why do certain people like playing MMOs? Why do certain people enjoy sitting around in town socializing? It’s the human aspect that creates part of the “addiction”. It’s the realization that you can simply be with so many avatars in a virtual world. So while I agree with you that dynamic events would burn out in the unlikely event that Anet stops updating the game, they will “last” much longer due to the way game play works in Guild Wars 2.
It’s an entirely different philosophy that has made Guild Wars 2 so different and unique from all other MMOs. It’s the idea that everyone in the world works together. There is no two faction open world PvP. Everyone is automatically contributing to the goals of everyone else. Kinda like torrenting
In most traditional MMOs, many quests force players to work independently, often times resulting in fighting over loot and various mobs.
It’s because of this flaw, that players start to speed through areas of content and never look back. Why? Because there is no reason to. These players know that going back to that one level 30 area only means looking at the same static mobs with a few determined players trying to level so they can get on to the next area. There is no reason to interact, or to help, as the whole questing system discourages the act of working together to accomplish a quest.
This is why I think Guild Wars 2 will shake the foundations in which many MMOs relied upon.
I think many people will enjoy the fact that no matter where they go, there will always be something unexpected, even if it’s a dynamic chain that they’ve experienced before, it will be a part of the chain that they could not have foreseen. And along with this experience, the players will also understand that every player they see in this world is there to help them, to support them, to socialize and interact with them.
It works and we’ve seen proof from the demos. Small bands of players moving from one event chain to the next without ever partying up. I recall a cool review of the Shatterer fight where some people were getting pretty smashed, and suddenly they saw another wave of players charging down from the hill towards the Shatterer. The reviewer said that he felt “goosebumps” when he saw the backup.
So TL;DR, Guild Wars 2′s innovative game play encourages social play, working together, and supporting each other, and these aspects will benefit both the enjoyment, depth, and life of the 1500+ dynamic events (and possibly counting).