>Why reward tiny segments of active players for living unhealthily
Spending the effort to gain high-tier rewards in a game and living healthy are not mutually exclusive.
Spending the effort to gain high-tier rewards in a game and living healthy are not mutually exclusive.
There are those who are willing to play an MMO for 16 hours a day, so if you make them rare enough these are the only people who will be able to achieve them.
I remember Star wars galaxies, I didn't play it much myself but I remember "play as a Jedi" being a big selling point and apparently this was in reality only possible if you were literally willing to devote your life to the game.
They changed it some years later so just about everyone could become a Jedi and there was much uproar from what I remember.
I believe there are ways to cater to casuals while still keeping the achievements unique.
But even past that, you seem to be saying that all MMO's should be designed for the lowest common denominator.
Why make guild raids when casual players can't get into top tier guilds?
Why make 40 man dungeon raids when casual players can't find groups larger than 5?
Why make the game have 80 levels when casual players, on average, will only reach 60 of them?
My real question is: Why punish avid gamers by condescendingly referring to their passion as unhealthy?
It seems to me that attempting to force every player into one paradigm is a great way to alienate everyone except players who that paradigm was designed for.
If you make a game that appeals to casual gamers -- do not be surprised when hardcore gamers skip it!
This is the beauty of the MMO: content for everyone and theoretically, the hardcore gamer's contribution to the game world will ripple out and affect other gamers, not only psychologically (I want to be that good) but materially, as they affect economies and other systems...
The GGPs point was that by creating incentives to play the game a lot and by that I assume meaning 10+ hours per day you are incentivising what any sane person would class as unhealthy behaviour.
The GP suggested that a balance could be struck and I mentioned what I perceived the difficulties to be.
I am not suggesting dumbing anything down.
After listening to this kind of argument from World of Warcraft players for ages, I have a serious problem with equating time investment with being more deserving of having fun. It's about taking pride in the ability to put up with arbitrary timesinks that serve the game in no way but to prolong it, and that rhetoric is ultimately justifying game design that is designed to waste the player's time as much as they will put up with.
Somehow Blizzard managed to brainwash people into rationalizing their sunk time, and now they really believe that having to spend hours not having fun before you can have fun is necessary to make a game rewarding, because there's no other element of the game that is rewarding to them anymore.
Seriously just because you don't like something doesn't mean people who do are brainwashed. That's extremely pretentious and offensive and I really have nothing more to say to you.