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[PATV] Wednesday, September 12, 2012 - Extra Credits Season 5, Ep. 4: Energy Systems
Having gone through FarmVille for sixteen months (shut up), I realized that the skinner-box-esque techniques it used just happened to compliment another host of peculiarities that I happened to enjoy about the game. In my mind, I was the farmer. Trust me, I go back all the way to the original Harvest Moon on the SNES. Not only planting my crops, but having to wait for them, made this co-world a lot more compatible, and quite frankly, real. Being able to organize all my "possessions" into an over-all schematic to make a picture or scenery piece look exactly like I wanted was worth putting in the time, the effort, and yes, even the money.
Having spent the amount of dough on it I would a small-scale system, I still look back at my FarmVille time with fond memories. I fully admit that it happened to hit a niche I just particularly enjoyed, and combined that with a meta-game (crafting a World to represent something that its individual items were not intended for - going to so far as to construct three dimensional structures out of two-dimensional set pieces) made it so that as far as I'm concerned, it earned every dollar. The wait-till-you-get-it reward structure, no matter how it may have been built to feast on my weaknesses and tendencies, still did not detract from an overall enjoyable experience, and instead actually added to it. Getting a rare drop is a good feeling in Diablo, just as getting a rare item is a good feeling in FarmVille.
Oddly enough - when I had reached my limit, or simply had enough of the play experience that it provided (and sixteen months is a plenty - for any game), I walked away from it both with no regrets and no withdrawals. A completely clean break.
This all being said, I fail to have picked up in this Extra Credits episode the specific good functions that can be utilized by these devices. It was discussed that the idea itself has pretty much been fully explored, at least offering no real new territory for it to prowl on, and then closed by citing that most of those that use it today absolutely abuse it for a short-term monetary reward. I must be completely honest, outside of wondering how my veggies were doing on the farm, which I still fully admit plays entirely into my susceptibility, I fail to see how preventing someone from playing a game in any way acutely benefits it.
Perhaps by preventing the realization that the same task is being completed ad-infinitum, and thus blowing your mind out on a single play-through (which was stated in this episode), but I cannot see how the real response to this wouldn't be, "Go out and build some actually interesting mechanics!"
Perhaps in the future, when someone attributes some of these design and cool-down styles to actually only being able to influence one of three areas, and if you really manage your time well, maybe you might even complete two, bringing in aspects of reward and punishment based upon your decisions, and in the end still allowing the player to continue playing, while operating within a real-time type scenario.
Either way, tonight, before coming on here to check out the episode, I spent five hours playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms II on the NES with my Dad. It is a game that magically writes and rewrites an epic era of Chinese history, allowing characters to tell their own story, and the whole story as a whole simply based upon which territories they end up occupying. Every battle is a tense struggle between life and death where tactics play the ultimate role, seeing who can out-wit their opponent, read the map, understand the flows and characteristics of certain rulers, and cultivate plans that sometimes take dozens if not hundreds of moves to pull off. This game was made in 1988. For an 8-bit system.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, and we're discussing how treating the majority of gamers like cheese-addicted rats locked in a button box may actually have some workable applications for the future.
If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go visit the grave site of our higher expectations, and have a quiet weeping moment all to my own.
I knew it! Even before your episode on the skinner box I just knew it! < Those jerks! I had my doubts after I found myself waiting the 12mins the first time.
I owned an internet cafe (still do just busy with other things now so less involved)
People would come in and pay upfront for 5 hours. And the only thing they would do is play facebook games. One woman would bring her baby in with her. That kid never got any attention unless he was screaming, and then she would yell at him for making a scene.
Once you hook someone on something, any kind of "limiting" ceases to have meaning as they will simply find their fix elsewhere.
Interesting and definitely something I've thought about in terms of how or why the designer decided to use it. The big examples were zynga and WoW but one of the distinct differences I feel is that WoW's rest / energy system didn't become and game while with almost if not all of zynga's games the energy system becomes the game. A well-done energy system or system based on real-time can really add to the game. The issue is when every part of the game is tied to that energy system.
Pokémon does kind of the same thing with the daily sidequests and bonuses. Let's say you can go to Mt. Moon for a rare Moon Stone every Monday, or simply, you can battle Red or Morimoto only once per day. You'll want to take advantage of these opportunities because they give you EXP faster than everything else, so if you miss a day you feel like you miss out.
Pokémon does kind of the same thing with the daily sidequests and bonuses. Let's say you can go to Mt. Moon for a rare Moon Stone every Monday, or simply, you can battle Red or Morimoto only once per day. You'll want to take advantage of these opportunities because they give you EXP faster than everything else, so if you miss a day you feel like you miss out.
While you may think of it as habituation, a lot of people refer to it as retention. And yeah, energy systems do help a bit with retention, though there are often bigger components of that such as daily bonuses. Most people include energy systems for their content gating and monetization aspects.
And while it's not my favourite mechanic in the world, evidence would show that it's more than a "short sighted cash grab" that you implied. Data from the biggest social gaming companies in the world show that it's one of their largest cash sinks, and games that are built with pretty much no other sinks are frequently in the top grossing sections of the iTunes App Store. Wooga did a talk at GDC Europe a few years ago that revealed in their games wait mechanics accounted of about 4/5ths of their revenue. And they were the 2nd largest social gaming company.
I don't want to be the advocate of energy systems, but I feel we shouldn't dismiss them as being used wrong. They work alright as retention systems, and extraordinarily well as cash sinks.
While you may think of it as habituation, a lot of people refer to it as retention. And yeah, energy systems do help a bit with retention, though there are often bigger components of that such as daily bonuses. Most people include energy systems for their content gating and monetization aspects.
And while it's not my favourite mechanic in the world, evidence would show that it's more than a "short sighted cash grab" that you implied. Data from the biggest social gaming companies in the world show that it's one of their largest cash sinks, and games that are built with pretty much no other sinks are frequently in the top grossing sections of the iTunes App Store. Wooga did a talk at GDC Europe a few years ago that revealed in their games wait mechanics accounted of about 4/5ths of their revenue. And they were the 2nd largest social gaming company.
I don't want to be the advocate of energy systems, but I feel we shouldn't dismiss them as being used wrong. They work alright as retention systems, and extraordinarily well as cash sinks.
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jackalFuck Yes. That is an orderly anal warehouse.Registered Userregular
After spending months doing WoW dailies and then a couple months resetting my extractors every day in Eve (I should have done 4/2s so I could reset once a week, but eh), and then making sure I won one Tribes game a day I've kind of burnt out on this type of system pretty hard.
@aproctor, I'm trying to understand - what's a cash sink as opposed to a cash grab? Is it something that generates a lot of ongoing revenue, as opposed to a shorter term spike? Are you saying it's a positive thing? Does the fact that it is lucrative mean it's good, or just that it takes advantage of habituation and people's desire to shortcut delayed gratification?
Enjoying the ep so far as usual but one nitpick. WoW's rested system actually *did* get changed. It started out similar to how it is now, but with a true penalty portion - after a break you'd start in rested status, then normal...then if you kept playing past a certain amount of time, you'd actually start getting less xp than normal. They took that part of it out pretty early on.
He did miss one thing:
In some of the old browser games, before social gaming, they were primarily competitive. Many of these browsergames had some function that restricted how much you could do, especially how much you could attack other players, WITHOUT a monetization option to skip those restrictions. In those cases, I think, the time restrictions existed not to make money, or to get the players habitually into the game, but to maintain game balance and prevent people with far too much time on their hands from just dominating the whole game.
Sometimes non-deliberate or "misuse" of energy systems can lead to it not being nearly as manipulative as say, the Zynga games you mention.
Kingdom of Loathing and other older browser games like Urban Dead have the classic regenerating pile of moves that once you spend all your moves you have to weight for 24 hours to get a set number back.
While they have definite limits as to how much they can pile up, encouraging daily play, they are also frustrating to try to play hour by hour throughout the day, even the ones that like Urban Dead regenerate a turn every hour rather than give you 24 or however else many all at once after the set time interval. And because they are set on a single clock for everyone, rather than from 24 hours after your play, you could conceivably play all your day's KoL moves 10pm-11pm, kick back during server downtown, and then play the next day's 12-1, and not be compelled by efficiency to play the game again until the third day; when you could do that doubling all over again and essentially get everything out of the game, leaving nothing on the table, by just playing once every two days.
The limit of moves is essentially a limit to how strong your character can get, how much progress you can make, preventing you from using multis to make all of the things on an alternate character account that has been piling up moves for weeks, which would happen if moves could pile up indefinitely while you were, say, on vacation. And because these energy systems were often designed that way, for in-game balance rather than to compel the player in any specific way, they are far less effective at habituation; with for instance both the games I mentioned relying on the communities built around them to keep you going back rather than a gnawing habit.
One wonders how things would be different if Facebook games actually utilized the fact that they are on on a social network to actually be more effectively and compellingly about the community, allowing people to create their own schedule just as people with a MMORPG clan do. But instead of creating compelling worlds that cause people to build communities around them, they seem instead to simply be mechanisms; and thus instead of early browser games like KoL, their ancestors seem more to be the Vampire and Werewolf and Mafia type bug-your-friends games, almost the exact opposite of the community-building, socially bringing people together rather than annoying and using them for meaningless points and other achievements things like Farmville and so forth.
I never really minded the Energy or Time systems in the games because I recognized it as a form of pacing. What bothered me most was requiring that a certain number of your friends play as well in order for you to be able to complete certain tasks or quests.
At this point, considering how easy leveling is in WoW, I think daily quests would be a better example of this than rested EXP, though the latter was certainly the forerunner.
Seeing Leelee and the "Beeearssss" reminds me of me and Peggle, and while it did not have the type of mechanic mentioned here, that is how most people I know who played it played it.
"I am playing for 30 min or 4 runs at a level"
Then after playing so far it would progress to playing it like any AAA title and hours would fly.
With Farmville and its ilk the equivilent my friends went through was multiple accounts, but then eventually that burnt them out on the game, but being a skinner box/efficiency game they played it long after that for the relationships and habits the game got them into. Peggle never did that for me.
Strange though, I finished all the Peggle games, but they never finshed what they were doing in Farmville.
At the very end of the article is a link to a review of the Sims Social by the same author where he talks about the same themes in more detail, as they relate specifically to that game, since it's one of the most laser-focused examples of that school of game design.
One of the points he makes, either in that article or the review (I forget which) is how with FPSes and other action games, a lot of the numeric balance comes through playtesting and very minute tweaks. Like "This gun feels like it shoots a bit too slow", so they go into the spreadsheet and change it from 15 bullets per second to 17, and find that it "feels" better playing. Thus in action games you tend to end up with a lot of weird, seemingly nonsensical numbers because they were balanced organically. Meanwhile, in social games, you see a lot of nice round numbers, like 5s and 10s. They might be obscured behind other numbers, but when you start looking at ratios like gold:score or something, you end up seeing a lot of very deliberate looking patterns emerging.
The implication there is that social games are designed from the get-go with certain numbers in mind - rather than testing the game and seeing which numbers feel the best, they pick numbers based on whatever they feel will bring in the most return for their effort; whether you define "return" as player retention or money spent per player or whatever, the key is that in these types of games, the game company comes first.
The article I linked explains the more sinister aspects of "monetization" and that skinner box design better than I can, but the point is that it's very deliberate and a LOT of psychological research has gone into it. There's a reason why companies like Zynga are making crazy amounts of money with games whose appeal hardcore gamers just can't understand.
The mechanic didn't start with WoW, it started with games like Kingdom of Loathing, and other web based adventure games with a daily (or other) regenerative turn mechanic. It was also one of the best implementations of that mechanic.
It actually started earlier, with BBS games. They didn't want people using their phone lines all day so there was a turn limit on every game. This was less for the sinister purpose of addiction and more to make it fair to everyone that wanted to play.
Guild Wars 2 also has daily achievement quests that encourage playing certain areas or doing certain things on a daily basis, the thing to notice, however, is that they are ENTIRELY optional, and in no way inhibit a player's ability to play the game. I'll often find myself getting said quests just by playing how I want to play, not realizing I'm working towards some in-game reward.
Its funny you make this vid because recently I quit an online game (Digimon masters online) because of the very subject you discuss here. Basically short version in unlike Pokemon where you catch monsters in this game you have to hatch them with data. In order to do well in the game you need to have at least a medium size digimon. Problem is more data you insert into an egg greater chance IT WILL FAIL and break, so medium is very hard to hatch. The only way to avoid this is to buy an egg with real world money that has a 100% hatch rate. Problem with that egg is it has limits on the size you can hatch and 70% when you buy one its a small digimon rather then medium or large.
So either you have to spend 20 hours of gameplay and 100000s of in game money trying to have a medium digimon without spending your cash or risk $7 a pop trying to get a medium egg from the cash store. usually you either end up spending 20 hours or $20 on a single in game monster which is bloody freakin' INSANE.
So after realizing the absolutely gawd awful waste of time this game was because Joymax (the most misleading game company name ever) is run by greedy morons that don't know how to host a decent MMORPG I uninstall the game. Its only too bad the hatch rate is so bad combine with how overprice eggs are because I'm a big digimon fan but can't honestly as an adult waste my time or money like that for virtual creatures. Its pretty bad when one of the biggest digimon fans in the western world ragequits a digimon game because of greedy poor gaming bullshit.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot another part of it. In order to maximize your monsters you need an item called "evoluters" which again are extremely hard to get ingame so you usually end up spending $20 getting enough to fully strengthen your monster so you can actually get far in the game.
So to recap it will probably take you 40 hours or $40 or some combination of both to get a SINGLE MONSTER to the point where its useful on a game that's suppose to be free to play. Its as big of bullshit as it sounds.
I always thought WoW's rest system was designed to placate the misplaced outcries against MMO "addiction".
But if it's really just a tool to create gaming habits, then why do you have to log out in an inn, cantina, etc in order to take advantage of it?
"At times I think that I am a Halloween pumpkin, and that so many of my inner virtues have been scooped out to make room for an illuminated face. Too often, though, those who call themselves my friends continue to open the top, trying to scrape what they can from what remains. And yet, they are somehow surprised when the face collapses."
I always thought WoW's rest system was designed to placate the misplaced outcries against MMO "addiction".
But if it's really just a tool to create gaming habits, then why do you have to log out in an inn, cantina, etc in order to take advantage of it?
For the same reason you had to stand in the zone outside an instance spamming LFG for hours originally. The design was predicated on unnecessary delays being a part of content extension.
I saw an interesting take on the energy usage in a web game recently. This might be.....a little odd and/or sciency. However I found it both engaging and entertaining. It's a little web game dealing with stars, earthlike planets, and habitable zones. So for those of you who enjoy you some science try it out. http://www.alienearths.org/mystar/
I saw an interesting take on the energy usage in a web game recently. This might be.....a little odd and/or sciency. However I found it both engaging and entertaining. It's a little web game dealing with stars, earthlike planets, and habitable zones. So for those of you who enjoy you some science try it out. http://www.alienearths.org/mystar/
This reminds me of the old Legend of the Red Dragon BBS games. So little content that they couldn't let us do too much in one day, but we were sure to come back the next one.
I was in the WOW beta, and pretty early at that. But as near as I can recall, the rest system was never actually a penalty. Leveling in WOW was a much slower process back then. The devs came out and said that one of the problems they saw with previous MMOs (EQ, DAOC) was that hardcore players would often and quickly outlevel their more casual friends. So to make the game more casual friendly, they implemented rest exp for all those casual people who could maybe only play weekends.
It was the hardcore players who cried and claimed that this was a penalty for them. Why should they earn exp half as fast as someone who only plays on the weekend? The base exp rate that they had already been working with didn't get changed (to the best of my memory).
Ultimately like any game mechanic in beta testing, the rest system got changes and tweaks to improve it. The biggest change was that they allowed players to earn rest exp in different places. Originally you only gained it while logged out inside of an inn. You can now earn a little while logged in, by simply standing idle in a city. If I am not mistaken, you even earn it at a very slow rate when logged out anywhere in the game world. Rest became more accessible to the players who played daily, even if it wasn't quite as much as people who were logged out for days at a time.
Perhaps this could be further improved. Maybe allow players to "buy a room" from an innkeeper to instantly gain a big chunk of rest exp. That would make for a great way to bleed some of the gold out of the economy.
But, I just can't agree with this idea that WOW's rest system is one of these "hook the player" energy mechanics. I have never felt that the game was forcing me to only play on the weekend.
On the other hand... Final Fantasy 14 last I was aware had this mechanic where you can only gain exp for something like 8 - 16 hours per week. THAT should have been mentioned in this video.
i've played since wow launched, and i never felt rested system was a thing that kept me going, i was a pretty HC gamer so to say, u had to afk for a week to build up enough rested exp to hit the cap, so it never felt like i HAD to log in to the game, so if i wanted to maximise my efficiency i should've logged on every week only for a few hours? naah sure on few vacations i felt like ohh i'm gonna hit the cap before i head back, but it was more like YEAH i have full rested xp bar when i get back not like ''ohh im missing xp'' i felt it as an response to the outcry of having to ''farm'' daily, u could leave the game and only log in few days and gain extra experience, even if wow wasnt really casual friendly before wotlk or tbc
edit: but as for the facebook ones, i agree. they sucked my soul for 2-3 months till i realized how similar every single game is, and how boring that shit is.
last minute edit: wow rested xp being a penalty, i have no idea how giving free xp for being offline can EVER be an penalty, i mean comeon, free thing for not playing?
actually, they *did* change the leveling system in regards to it being a penalty. Originally, if you played too much, it reduced your exp gain to at most 50%. normal was 100%, and rested was 200%. so they just got rid of the penalty.
Dead trigger's gold is easy enough to get that I can keep playing to earn it, but I can also use shortcuts that pay the developers to get gold as well.
The KoL system was originally more about limiting how much bandwidth people can use each day in a free-to-play game, a use for energy systems they didn't cover.
It's evolved over time, particularly after methods were added to get more turns if you give them money.
Posts
Having spent the amount of dough on it I would a small-scale system, I still look back at my FarmVille time with fond memories. I fully admit that it happened to hit a niche I just particularly enjoyed, and combined that with a meta-game (crafting a World to represent something that its individual items were not intended for - going to so far as to construct three dimensional structures out of two-dimensional set pieces) made it so that as far as I'm concerned, it earned every dollar. The wait-till-you-get-it reward structure, no matter how it may have been built to feast on my weaknesses and tendencies, still did not detract from an overall enjoyable experience, and instead actually added to it. Getting a rare drop is a good feeling in Diablo, just as getting a rare item is a good feeling in FarmVille.
Oddly enough - when I had reached my limit, or simply had enough of the play experience that it provided (and sixteen months is a plenty - for any game), I walked away from it both with no regrets and no withdrawals. A completely clean break.
This all being said, I fail to have picked up in this Extra Credits episode the specific good functions that can be utilized by these devices. It was discussed that the idea itself has pretty much been fully explored, at least offering no real new territory for it to prowl on, and then closed by citing that most of those that use it today absolutely abuse it for a short-term monetary reward. I must be completely honest, outside of wondering how my veggies were doing on the farm, which I still fully admit plays entirely into my susceptibility, I fail to see how preventing someone from playing a game in any way acutely benefits it.
Perhaps by preventing the realization that the same task is being completed ad-infinitum, and thus blowing your mind out on a single play-through (which was stated in this episode), but I cannot see how the real response to this wouldn't be, "Go out and build some actually interesting mechanics!"
Perhaps in the future, when someone attributes some of these design and cool-down styles to actually only being able to influence one of three areas, and if you really manage your time well, maybe you might even complete two, bringing in aspects of reward and punishment based upon your decisions, and in the end still allowing the player to continue playing, while operating within a real-time type scenario.
Either way, tonight, before coming on here to check out the episode, I spent five hours playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms II on the NES with my Dad. It is a game that magically writes and rewrites an epic era of Chinese history, allowing characters to tell their own story, and the whole story as a whole simply based upon which territories they end up occupying. Every battle is a tense struggle between life and death where tactics play the ultimate role, seeing who can out-wit their opponent, read the map, understand the flows and characteristics of certain rulers, and cultivate plans that sometimes take dozens if not hundreds of moves to pull off. This game was made in 1988. For an 8-bit system.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, and we're discussing how treating the majority of gamers like cheese-addicted rats locked in a button box may actually have some workable applications for the future.
If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go visit the grave site of our higher expectations, and have a quiet weeping moment all to my own.
People would come in and pay upfront for 5 hours. And the only thing they would do is play facebook games. One woman would bring her baby in with her. That kid never got any attention unless he was screaming, and then she would yell at him for making a scene.
Once you hook someone on something, any kind of "limiting" ceases to have meaning as they will simply find their fix elsewhere.
STEAM
And while it's not my favourite mechanic in the world, evidence would show that it's more than a "short sighted cash grab" that you implied. Data from the biggest social gaming companies in the world show that it's one of their largest cash sinks, and games that are built with pretty much no other sinks are frequently in the top grossing sections of the iTunes App Store. Wooga did a talk at GDC Europe a few years ago that revealed in their games wait mechanics accounted of about 4/5ths of their revenue. And they were the 2nd largest social gaming company.
I don't want to be the advocate of energy systems, but I feel we shouldn't dismiss them as being used wrong. They work alright as retention systems, and extraordinarily well as cash sinks.
And while it's not my favourite mechanic in the world, evidence would show that it's more than a "short sighted cash grab" that you implied. Data from the biggest social gaming companies in the world show that it's one of their largest cash sinks, and games that are built with pretty much no other sinks are frequently in the top grossing sections of the iTunes App Store. Wooga did a talk at GDC Europe a few years ago that revealed in their games wait mechanics accounted of about 4/5ths of their revenue. And they were the 2nd largest social gaming company.
I don't want to be the advocate of energy systems, but I feel we shouldn't dismiss them as being used wrong. They work alright as retention systems, and extraordinarily well as cash sinks.
In some of the old browser games, before social gaming, they were primarily competitive. Many of these browsergames had some function that restricted how much you could do, especially how much you could attack other players, WITHOUT a monetization option to skip those restrictions. In those cases, I think, the time restrictions existed not to make money, or to get the players habitually into the game, but to maintain game balance and prevent people with far too much time on their hands from just dominating the whole game.
Kingdom of Loathing and other older browser games like Urban Dead have the classic regenerating pile of moves that once you spend all your moves you have to weight for 24 hours to get a set number back.
While they have definite limits as to how much they can pile up, encouraging daily play, they are also frustrating to try to play hour by hour throughout the day, even the ones that like Urban Dead regenerate a turn every hour rather than give you 24 or however else many all at once after the set time interval. And because they are set on a single clock for everyone, rather than from 24 hours after your play, you could conceivably play all your day's KoL moves 10pm-11pm, kick back during server downtown, and then play the next day's 12-1, and not be compelled by efficiency to play the game again until the third day; when you could do that doubling all over again and essentially get everything out of the game, leaving nothing on the table, by just playing once every two days.
The limit of moves is essentially a limit to how strong your character can get, how much progress you can make, preventing you from using multis to make all of the things on an alternate character account that has been piling up moves for weeks, which would happen if moves could pile up indefinitely while you were, say, on vacation. And because these energy systems were often designed that way, for in-game balance rather than to compel the player in any specific way, they are far less effective at habituation; with for instance both the games I mentioned relying on the communities built around them to keep you going back rather than a gnawing habit.
One wonders how things would be different if Facebook games actually utilized the fact that they are on on a social network to actually be more effectively and compellingly about the community, allowing people to create their own schedule just as people with a MMORPG clan do. But instead of creating compelling worlds that cause people to build communities around them, they seem instead to simply be mechanisms; and thus instead of early browser games like KoL, their ancestors seem more to be the Vampire and Werewolf and Mafia type bug-your-friends games, almost the exact opposite of the community-building, socially bringing people together rather than annoying and using them for meaningless points and other achievements things like Farmville and so forth.
Steam: pazython
"I am playing for 30 min or 4 runs at a level"
Then after playing so far it would progress to playing it like any AAA title and hours would fly.
With Farmville and its ilk the equivilent my friends went through was multiple accounts, but then eventually that burnt them out on the game, but being a skinner box/efficiency game they played it long after that for the relationships and habits the game got them into. Peggle never did that for me.
Strange though, I finished all the Peggle games, but they never finshed what they were doing in Farmville.
At the very end of the article is a link to a review of the Sims Social by the same author where he talks about the same themes in more detail, as they relate specifically to that game, since it's one of the most laser-focused examples of that school of game design.
One of the points he makes, either in that article or the review (I forget which) is how with FPSes and other action games, a lot of the numeric balance comes through playtesting and very minute tweaks. Like "This gun feels like it shoots a bit too slow", so they go into the spreadsheet and change it from 15 bullets per second to 17, and find that it "feels" better playing. Thus in action games you tend to end up with a lot of weird, seemingly nonsensical numbers because they were balanced organically. Meanwhile, in social games, you see a lot of nice round numbers, like 5s and 10s. They might be obscured behind other numbers, but when you start looking at ratios like gold:score or something, you end up seeing a lot of very deliberate looking patterns emerging.
The implication there is that social games are designed from the get-go with certain numbers in mind - rather than testing the game and seeing which numbers feel the best, they pick numbers based on whatever they feel will bring in the most return for their effort; whether you define "return" as player retention or money spent per player or whatever, the key is that in these types of games, the game company comes first.
The article I linked explains the more sinister aspects of "monetization" and that skinner box design better than I can, but the point is that it's very deliberate and a LOT of psychological research has gone into it. There's a reason why companies like Zynga are making crazy amounts of money with games whose appeal hardcore gamers just can't understand.
So either you have to spend 20 hours of gameplay and 100000s of in game money trying to have a medium digimon without spending your cash or risk $7 a pop trying to get a medium egg from the cash store. usually you either end up spending 20 hours or $20 on a single in game monster which is bloody freakin' INSANE.
So after realizing the absolutely gawd awful waste of time this game was because Joymax (the most misleading game company name ever) is run by greedy morons that don't know how to host a decent MMORPG I uninstall the game. Its only too bad the hatch rate is so bad combine with how overprice eggs are because I'm a big digimon fan but can't honestly as an adult waste my time or money like that for virtual creatures. Its pretty bad when one of the biggest digimon fans in the western world ragequits a digimon game because of greedy poor gaming bullshit.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot another part of it. In order to maximize your monsters you need an item called "evoluters" which again are extremely hard to get ingame so you usually end up spending $20 getting enough to fully strengthen your monster so you can actually get far in the game.
So to recap it will probably take you 40 hours or $40 or some combination of both to get a SINGLE MONSTER to the point where its useful on a game that's suppose to be free to play. Its as big of bullshit as it sounds.
But if it's really just a tool to create gaming habits, then why do you have to log out in an inn, cantina, etc in order to take advantage of it?
For the same reason you had to stand in the zone outside an instance spamming LFG for hours originally. The design was predicated on unnecessary delays being a part of content extension.
It was the hardcore players who cried and claimed that this was a penalty for them. Why should they earn exp half as fast as someone who only plays on the weekend? The base exp rate that they had already been working with didn't get changed (to the best of my memory).
Ultimately like any game mechanic in beta testing, the rest system got changes and tweaks to improve it. The biggest change was that they allowed players to earn rest exp in different places. Originally you only gained it while logged out inside of an inn. You can now earn a little while logged in, by simply standing idle in a city. If I am not mistaken, you even earn it at a very slow rate when logged out anywhere in the game world. Rest became more accessible to the players who played daily, even if it wasn't quite as much as people who were logged out for days at a time.
Perhaps this could be further improved. Maybe allow players to "buy a room" from an innkeeper to instantly gain a big chunk of rest exp. That would make for a great way to bleed some of the gold out of the economy.
But, I just can't agree with this idea that WOW's rest system is one of these "hook the player" energy mechanics. I have never felt that the game was forcing me to only play on the weekend.
On the other hand... Final Fantasy 14 last I was aware had this mechanic where you can only gain exp for something like 8 - 16 hours per week. THAT should have been mentioned in this video.
edit: but as for the facebook ones, i agree. they sucked my soul for 2-3 months till i realized how similar every single game is, and how boring that shit is.
last minute edit: wow rested xp being a penalty, i have no idea how giving free xp for being offline can EVER be an penalty, i mean comeon, free thing for not playing?
It's evolved over time, particularly after methods were added to get more turns if you give them money.