That may be true for some, but not for all. Not everyone is driven by reward. Not everyone plays MMOs in order to "max their gear", or "max their dps" etc. Some of us do actually play for fun.

I actually think that early on in daoc the difficulty of getting to 50 was really what made it awesome. It sucked having it so hard when leveling up but having so few archers/assassins in the beginning made it awesome. My assassin could fight pretty much any other class and have a chance of winning (which sadly causes a problem when there are a large amount of that class, which is why I think they were nerfed hard later on). We all pretty much knew each other well and would coordinate who was scouting in which areas etc.

It got out of hand when tons of people started having level 50 stealthers near the end of OF. The original few of us would rarely ever group. Eventually people started farming the stealth gank squads and it became dumb, then NF / ToA just ruined the stealth classes imo. Couldn't help during sieges, no need for me to scout... made me switch to 8-manning .

Like I said, remove the reward and the behavior ceases. Take WoW dungeons. They now give no xp or loot. How many people do you think will do them?

Daily quests no longer provide gold. How many will do them more than once?

I could go on, but the point is that the behavior of the majority of people is dictated by the reward. People do these things because there is a reward, not because they are "fun". Remove the gold / xp / items / achievements / stat tracking (how many times you ran a dungeon, which ones you've run etc), and you would create a wasteland.

My favorite example of this is DAOC. At one point 40 people in the frontier (total) was a zerg. RAs were added in, and now a few hundred people were there every night all night long. Once RPs were bugged, and none were granted. Frontiers at that point? Absolutely empty. The reward was temporarily gone, and so were the participants.

In today's world, yeah you're probably right. However, do you know how many quests I ran in AC just to do it or show someone who hasn't seen it (or 50)? Literally hundreds and hundreds.

 

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Hehe I don't remember how many times I've run Aerlinthe just to run a friend through, or just for the fun of it.

 

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"People often confuse this for fun, but the minute the reward disappears the behavior stops, revealing the actual motivation in play."

That makes soccer or any number of scoring/winning games not fun though, ie Monopoly, Chess, etc etc. Yes they can be played without 'rewards', but the number of people would drop dramatically. Games without rewards are really rarer than ones with, even if they're being played 'socially'.

I dont think your criteria is enough to decide whether a game is being done for 'fun' or not.

Otar

I made a little "beta review" of SW:TOR.
http://vnboards.ign.com/sw_the_old_republic_general_board/b23436/115829083/p1/?0

Yeah, for a Theme Park MMORPG, it's definitely a lot of fun. Better than most crap released lately.

 

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Not the same. There are *many* games that you can play that have no reward. Ever played Tetris? Yeah, your scores are not permanent, there were no achievements, there is no treadmill as you don't "level up". Yet people still played it. There is a subtle difference between a score and a reward. Lets just define a score as not being persistent, and only existing for its own sake.

A reward on the other hand persists. When you get your Epic armor in DAOC from doing a long boring quest chain, its there the next time you log in (which by the way people stopped bothering with when spellcrafting came out...). The sword that you spent 2 months grinding for in L2 is something you use until you can get the next one. The "Loremaster" achievement in WoW has a date so that you can epeen it up about being "one of the first" to achieve it, and you switch your title to show everyone how awesome you think you are. These are "rewards". They persist between gaming sessions.

In your example, there is no reward for winning Monopoly or Chess. The rules of the game dictate when its over, but there is no one that is going to give you $50 for winning.

Now if you were playing a chess game where you could "unlock" opponents by wining, that had "milestones" and gave you achievements etc "Congratulations, Achievement Unlocked: Mate with Bishop + Rook!" then we would be talking about something a little different.

How many people are running the WotLK heroics right now? Or the BC heroics? I'm going to guess as close to 0 is you can actually get without being zero, and that's with 10 million people playing (or whatever absurdly large number you would like to quote).

Why is that? Well, the gold you can make is irrelevant (much better ways of earning gold), the items are outdated and not important, and you only need to run it once if you are an achievement whore. If running H UK was "fun" people would still be doing it.

In DAOC, people didn't run the Kaolinth Dungeons in Hiberna for a long time. Why? They were not itemized. Just another example of a boring in game activity that people needed a reward to convince them to see / do. Oh sure, people went out of curiosity no doubt but they didn't stay there. The place was always empty. You still got xp and gold, but the reward was less for doing that area, so people avoided it.

At the end of the day, so much of what people spend their time doing in a MMORPG is just boring as hell, and the only reason they do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again is because they are "grinding" something.

Rep grind, heroic grind, crafting grind, mount grind, quest grind, achievement grind you name it.

"There are *many* games that you can play that have no reward. Ever played Tetris?"

Tetris has rewards in the form of a score and progress. Simply removing levels or scores would drastically change how long people played it. Soccer has persistent aspects in the form of score tables.

You're trying to argue for an absolute difference where none really exists and trying to refine 'fun' down to a single construct. Just isnt that simple.

Otara

Rewards in their own are fun, hence the whole reward part.

 

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