I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game.
Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it.
I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase.
I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.
I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money).
There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.
Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.
Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"
Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia at least) although modern idle games are probably influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well.
I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.
Idle Champions is fun but the numerical scaling on that game is whacky. It only takes like a month before you're doing 1 googol (1^100) damage and little dwarves or gnolls or rats or whatever drop a similar amount of gold. They say it's to differentiate effectively between linear and exponential scaling, but the end result is just whacky.
It's the only game I've ever played where your damage output is most effectively measured by the size of its exponent
Hmm, that's a pretty powerful proof-of-work mechanic you've got there. "DefragCoin", anyone? Now we just need a way to achieve unilateral consensus about whether a given HDD is dead...
Floors need to be tidy for the robots to do their work (no clothes on the ground). There might be places that are difficult for the robot to clean without help - chairs might need to be put out of their way. In my home I put a plank to make a step smaller, if I don't, it can't go to the bathroom.
>There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.
You neglected what's by far the funnest and most important and user-retaining aspect of open world MMOs: player-to-player interaction - be it friendly, neutral, or hostile.
The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had essentially no content. Players forged their own content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and copious communication (propaganda and shittalking, largely). They felt like a completely unplanned, natural simulation of militaristic human societies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Probably not ideal in real life, but very fun for a game.
I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next 20 years will have very little content and very sparse grinding mechanics. The magic is the emergent game and meta-game that springs forth from the bonding and strife between gargantuan numbers of human agents.
> I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next 20 years will have very little content and very sparse grinding mechanics.
Current open world survival games use grind as a main mechanism for driving emergent game-play and creating player differentiation/conflict, so I don't see it ending completely. Game designers have gotten much better at making grind that isn't actively unfun though.
> The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had essentially no content. Players forged their own content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and copious communication (propaganda and shittalking, largely). They felt like a completely unplanned, natural simulation of militaristic human societies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Probably not ideal in real life, but very fun for a game.
What MMO was that? This sounds like a MUSH (a kind of text only roleplay server which is a couterpart of the more combat-focused MUDs)
Eve had a huge grind situation at least when I played it 10 odd years ago. You need to skill up, make isks, buy fancy ships and blow em up. I guess you could putter around in a tiny beginner ship - but considering there wasn’t much dog fighting skills involved, it was lame. You could build a corp - again need isks.
> But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing.
To be clear, I don't think that part is lame at all. That part is great. I'm all for relaxing repetitive games.
But I don't think that is what happens for all of the players in a game with pay-to-skip mechanics, and I think when we talk about the positive aspects of a game like Runescape, we're kind of engaging in a little bit of wishful thinking about how universal that experience was for all of its players. If a game is genuinely optimizing for creating a relaxing repetitive experience, then it (and 3rd parties around it) probably shouldn't also be monetizing getting rid of that experience.
Runescape grinding in theory was a relaxing, great experience for some people. I'm very happy for those people, but in practice, enough people obviously hated the grind enough that they were paying for bots. I am less concerned about the people who genuinely enjoyed chopping down trees, and more concerned about the obvious subset of players who were somehow feeling trapped by the game into spending real-world money to avoid something that was obviously unpleasant for them.
Willing theraputic, relaxing, repetitive grind is great. Hard to monetize with microtransactions though, and when I look at the play-to-earn model more broadly, that model literally doesn't work if people enjoy the grind. The only way the money comes into the game is the grind isn't theraputic or relaxing, a nontrivial chunk of the playerbase has to hate that process or else nobody makes money.
The healthy, relaxing, kind of best-case scenario grind you describe is the opposite of what a play-to-earn game designer wants; those designers have a strong incentive not to allow their games to have enjoyable grinding, because the whole point is that they expect the majority of their players to pay money buying resources from other players. That monetization model only works if people aren't enjoying the grind.
>Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
Reuse of content in new context doesn’t have to be a boring clone.
Disney would regularly reuse animations of characters between animated films to save money. It did not necessarily take away from the wrapping content’s best moments or overall entertainment value.
For example dancing reveries and other sequences in Robin Hood used rotoscoping heavily. [1]
There’s no doubt the reuse was cheap but in some ways that allowed the designers to focus on new characters and scenes.
There's something fundamentally satisfying to the human psyche about understanding a set of rules and optimizing actions against them. I think it hits that 'feeling smarter than something' nerve.
We've probably lost some potentially fantastic physicists to MMOs.
This is the hard part about "value creation." Is something that makes someone happier--even if others see that same thing as pointless waste--value?
We don't all want the same things and people want things we don't want, but this also allows us to trade and have both parties come out ahead from their own perspectives.
So there's always a tension between whether people should even be allowed to want some things or they should be forbidden due to being bad or wasteful in some capacity.
But I do think there's a special kind of irony to be complaining about the BS of someone getting money for moving bits and pixels around in a blog post on the internet frequented by a bunch of people, many of whom move bits and pixels around for a living.
Chess (and most competitive games/sports/simulators) has almost 0 content from "the devs". The rest is UGC/PVP challenges. Endless replay value, endless opportunities to practice and study for an advantage, no forced grind.
While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.
I used to play WOW until I realised what I was doing. I still remember the day I quit because I was supposed to show up for some massive raid and just didn’t. I have not logged in since.
The whole MMO and Freemium space is a bit grim if you ask me since you are essentially manipulating the feelings of players with no worthwhile rewards.
I think this is why I have gravitated heavily to board games. You meet up once a week or so. Play against real humans. No grind. And they can help sharpen your thinking.
I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of games that basically punish you until you develop enough skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm willing to do monotonous tasks.
The distinction is that you would never pay someone to learn how to beat the Orphan of Kos for you; the pleasure is in getting your ass kicked to the point where you throw the controller across the room, only to pick it up again a couple hours later. That's exactly the experience these Bullshit Games aren't creating.
I don't think it's true that nobody would pay to learn it. A friend made significant money as a dota tutor, and there's whole sites full of people selling tutoring time https://www.superprof.com/lessons/gaming/united-states/. Similarly, people pay for cheats/unlocks/walkthroughs.
That's true for a lot of players but the problem is that like any real-life skill, many players will hit a low ceiling of mastery in certain skills for whatever reason. Regardless of whether they're unwilling or unable, these low-skill players will not feel rewarded by the game. That's a problem if you're targeting a broad audience of players (which tends to be the most profitable strategy).
> I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real money to turn it off.
I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic projection about player intention that happens during these conversations, because if everyone playing the games felt the way you describe, then the monetization model wouldn't work.
We have games that have chores in them (Animal Crossing springs to mind). And we have repetitive games. And we have MMOs where people like to grind. None of that is a failure of design. But what you notice is that in the best instances of these games where people actually like the grind, they pay money to play the game, not to stop playing it. When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
We can talk about the people who do enjoy the grind or get something out of it, but I feel like we're all kind of lying to ourselves if we say that's the primary experience happening with the vast majority of players. Games wouldn't make money from microtransactions unless a nontrivial portion of their playerbase thought it was valuable to skip gameplay. You won't make very much money giving players ways to skip gameplay unless you're confident that a nontrivial portion of your playerbase won't find that gameplay rewarding.
> When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
Unfortunately, in the scope of Runescape, this misses the point in a big way. Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).
Zooming out, the system is actually incredible if you get a chance to analyze it a bit more. For the hardest of the hardcore players, there's a resource called CrystalMathLabs[0] that shows exactly how much time and gold it costs to max your character. And the devs are constantly optimizing new content around these "max efficiency" rates.
> Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).
I don't think this holds up when real-world money enters the equation. I don't think this can be accurately descriped as player optimization or class specialization if people are paying real money to skip it.
> they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to
If this was actually true, no real-world money would be entering the system, because all of the players would be making enough gold in-game via those other activities to pay for the logs. If they're being forced to spend real-world money, then the other activities they're engaged with are not giving them enough gold to sustainably fund themselves in-game.
The problem isn't having an in-game economy, in-game economies are great. The problem is people paying to get rid of gameplay. People who do that are signaling very clearly that they believe there is monetary value in removing a section of gameplay from the game. Designers should pay attention to that signal.
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I don't doubt that there are people legitimately having fun playing Runecraft. But it can't be everyone, or else people would not pay $10 to remove less than a day's worth of grind.
Like I mentioned earlier: it's not just about fun/enjoyment, it's about being rewarded by the game. In both real life and games, people will overcome challenges they don't enjoy because it is rewarding in a way that isn't necessarily just "fun". Eliminating a day's worth of grind in real life is surely very rewarding as well but it's very difficult and rare to do. In a game like eg Runescape, such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can afford it. If you don't have $10 to spare then you can achieve it with time. The grind is just a challenge to overcome, and that doesn't have to be fun but challenges are often rewarding to overcome.
> such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can afford it.
There are a ton of problems bundled up in this sentence, but I'm not sure I have time to unpack all of them.
But this is not an attitude that I think a game designer should ever have. I don't think we should be building experiences that boil down to teaching players that spending money is the equivalent of overcoming a challenge, I think players should be extremely suspicious of any game or experience that has that attitude towards challenge. Spending money is not the same thing as achieving something or earning a reward, I think it's really bad for us to encourage that kind of equivalency in a player's mind.
Well ok, that's just like your opinion, man. Like I said in my original comment, I avoid it personally but I find it hard to criticize objectively. Like so many things these games do, it's just a cheap imitation of real life where this stuff is everywhere. People can and do spend to overcome challenges in real life all the time while the proles meagerly grind away, there's so many meatspace mechanics like this but it takes a lot more than $10. Since many people will never achieve that kind of substantial wealth in their entire lives, these games offer a fake world where they can. Using fantasy worlds to escape the shitty reality we live in is such an old & boring concept.
Meh, it's a free country and games like Runescape are a known quantity that players can choose. I would say that if you want to change minds then make your case, but clearly you don't have the time to do that.
>They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
For them, personally. There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it. MMO's tend to breed a lot of prestige-seeking behavior.
> There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it.
I'm not sure that having a system that's unpleasant for a portion of the playerbase and letting people pay to pretend that they've gone through it is all that better.
I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but public prestige systems that can be paid to be bypassed are sort of self-defeating. They only work if a very small portion of the playerbase is cheating, which... I still don't think it's good design to set up gameplay incentives or monetization around a minority of the playerbase pretending to the majority of the other players that they've legitimately earned something.
> Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial
It's only artificial in a sense that it's one level deeper than our current economy (and is smaller and subject to the whims of the developers), but in the grand scheme of the universe our current economy is just as artificial.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality.
You could look at the existence of these games as a triumph of capitalism. We have raised productivity to such heights that the real world does not provide enough grind to sate the need for reward, so people literally invent fictional realities to create more opportunities for grinding your way to a reward.
What is missing here is purpose. The reward could be more than just meaningless progress in the game. For example, why couldn’t you have a game were the grind is designing tailored-for-one phone cases, which then get printed and shipped in the real world. People could be ordering an NFT-backed guaranteed unique phone case, and many people would be willing to pay real money for that.
That these games have a grind that amounts to meaningless work disconnected to physical reality seems like a failure of imagination and a waste of opportunity.
The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes.
The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits.
I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest.
I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.
Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real achievement, and it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but if people can pay money to skip something, then I don't think doing it is a public/social achievement. At best, it's a personal achievement, which could hold value for some people. But you're not really signaling anything publicly by going through a grind if someone else can pay to skip it.
This is also why I'm kind of skeptical of NFT games as being about "earning" something in-game, or about showing off status. Why should anyone care about or respect someone for having an asset in a game that can just be bought?
And is that something our society encourages? Are we rooting for prestigious schools to offer more pay-to-enter mechanisms like that, do we have a contingent of teachers arguing that this is the future of schooling? Or do a lot of people get really mad about those bribery scandals, and do those prestigious schools actually loose a small amount of social prestige in the public eye whenever a new scandal comes out?
People aren't happy with Harvard when they engage in nepotism, no one goes around calling that a bold new innovative model for college admissions.
Of course, paying money or hacking your way through an experience doesn't rob other people of the intrinsic personal achievement of doing something hard, and it doesn't mean their experience was less meaningful. But common shortcuts certainly make all of these achievements less valuable as a social signal, which is something that NFT-based games claim that they can provide.
In your earlier comment you write:
> it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend
But no, it doesn't, because those other players don't know if you legitimately got the achievement/asset, they have no idea how much time you spent on it. If you personally find it rewarding to get that asset then great, but in a play-to-earn game or a game with tradable NFT assets, most of the achievements that are publicly displayed by players won't have been earned, so you're not really socially/publicly showing off anything to other players unless you're also adding a text box underneath them saying "don't worry, I did actually earn this."
Ok I see your point now and I agree. If there is no way for others to distinguish between grinding and pay-to-win then social signaling ceases to be a motive and you're only left with personal satisfaction.
> In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin.
It’s not sort of like PoW, it is basically exactly the same. People play games for fun, but they also play for status. Status, like Bitcoin, has a hard supply cap so there is no limit to the amount of energy that individuals might expend in pursuit of it.
Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The things that people are willing to spend money on in games are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all about showing off.
Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off.
So if those things were readily available and didn't require grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a paradox, I guess.
It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.
I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but more of a collection of many things.
What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but that feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry about people wanting to skip parts of your game.
As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.
It's odd that this doesn't come up in other media or other experiences, right? The closest analogy I can think of is unskippable advertising.
We never have a movie series where people pay extra money to remove scenes. You never go to a restaurant where the owner forces you to eat carrots before you can have your main meal, even though some diners might like carrots. It's basically just games and advertising where we have this model that consumers should either be forced to endure a part of the experience they dislike or that they should pay us money to give them the stuff that they directly do like.
Like, imagine if you were watching a show on Netflix, and you tried to skip a filler episode or fast-forward through a gory section, and Netflix wouldn't let you continue the series until you either watched that content in its entirety or paid them 99 cents.
I don’t know if it is possible to have “pay to skip” not become “pay to win” in an MMO.
The whole point of an MMO is that your character progresses and gets better as they do more things in the game. If you are paying to skip something that makes your character better, your character will be better than if you didn’t pay to skip that.
If what you are skipping is not making your character better, you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
MMOs are be definition pay to win. You either pay with time or pay with money.
People getting around games ToS' will always be a thing - since Runescape is the example being used, it is expressly banned to both purchase and sell gold coins. This is not a problem exclusive to MMOs, it's a problem with any game with a leveling system, currency, or items that are tradable between players.
Examples: FIFA packs, Runescape/MMO gold, League of Legends accounts/boosts (names as well) , Valorant accounts/boosts, CS:GO items (names, accounts and boosts as well), Neopets items and gift boxes, Diablo 3 boosts/accounts, and on and on...
Then maybe it's fine to be "pay to win"? Seems like millions of people are enjoying their time spent, and are willing to spend more time to continue to win.
The presence of aggregate societal harm tends to be the motivator for other regulation around otherwise voluntary behavior such as gambling. So if that harm can be demonstrated then there may be a case for legislating if companies can offer such games and on what terms they can do so.
People play games for all sorts of personal reasons. “Boring” gameplay is apparently in demand. If you don’t like that kind of game, don’t play it. If you don’t understand how anyone else could possibly spend time on it, then maybe you should open your mind and talk to some of these people to try and understand what is undoubtedly a much more complex phenomenon than you believe it to be.
This is ignoring the reality that people are paying to get rid of this gameplay. I do understand why people like boring games, I've sunk my own share of time into therapeutic experiences like Animal Crossing, and even a few pure idle games. I've grinded out 100% soul collections in old Castlevania games. That kind of repetitive action and optimization can be personally rewarding and emotionally satisfying. And I've no doubt that some players of these games genuinely enjoy the minute-to-minute process of chopping logs.
But you're just kidding yourself if you say that's the primary thing going on here. If people enjoyed the grind, they wouldn't pay to remove it. The difference between grinding in a game like Castlevania and grinding in a game like Runescape is that there's not a Castlevania real-world monetary economy based entirely around shortening the game.
We can't really seriously say that everyone playing Runescape enjoyed the grind if there was enough demand for gameplay automation to make botting a reliable income source.
I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated like learn-to-earn. It’s almost like people are rushing headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of extrinsic rewards.
That said a successful game like this will always have a non-trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts of the game. They want the success now not later and aren’t willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun. Most games take this quite seriously though and work against gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set out to make.
Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay to remove it and continue playing.
I agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement:
> [that] gameplay should never have been in the game
How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective?
This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?
There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk about making something so unpleasant that people are willing to pay to get rid of it.
Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a conversation about edification and people choosing to waste their own time. What we have here instead is a system where people are signaling with real money that the experience is unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding what's best for people against their will or forcing art to have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about building an experience that's monetized around players openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to them.
Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value, but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos. It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money.
Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago:
> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :)
The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There’s something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain something that the designer of the game did not intend. The feeling of “I know your game better than you do” is something I shall never forget.
Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life.
Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.
You make it sound so posh but there is other, much more real face to all this - breaking the game for everybody else. You are basically having fun at the expense of literally everyone else involved.
Sure, you achieve it by being clever, and theoretically you report your finding to creators and don't abuse your position of power, but thats not what usually happened.
Behavior like this is the core reason why I don't play online games of any type anymore - the idea of proper fun looks distantly different to this constant 'finding metagame' for which I have less polite names. Plus its a waste of life and ones talents but thats another topic.
> … from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears in the ep:
In my experience, plenty of people will want to skip even the most fun game experiences to get to the farming/grinding endgame just to watch their numbers and loot collection expand.
> I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost.
Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
> And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright side is that society might finally find the gumption to start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling addiction.
At a certain point these look less like games, and more like status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains much more of the economic and social aspect of things like Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.
This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8, WoW, and Maple Story.
Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it.
I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase.
I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.