Hypothetical - Guardian Trainer (Destiny)

by Durandal, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, 14:26 (3815 days ago) @ stabbim

I absolutely hated Mass Effect 3's random loot. Why, because it gave me Baterians every time. No matter what pack I got, Baterians. It only gave me other classes or weapons once I had maxed out all the Baterian classes.

Now, I didn't like those classes, and did not want to play them. All that repetitive play was for naught and it irked me greatly.

Borderlands 2 also had some issues with drop rates and randomness. To get some of the cooler skins you had to kill bosses with low spawn rates compounding low drop rates, so the time investment is enormous. Thankfully Bungie fixed the other side of the coin with private loot streams. I can't tell you how many times people would ninja loot the item I had ground that boss 20 times for and leave.

High randomness equals high repetition in most MMOs. Repetition is the "grind" that really makes the game less fun. Stand in line, kill all the enemies, wait for them to respawn, for 4 hours, for a 50% chance at that feathered hat or some such. By the time I got the some of the weapons drops I wanted in BL2 I was already too high a level to use it, so what's the point?

It is easy for game designers to use the grind to substitute for content in game. CoD is notorious for this, lock out weapons and tags so people have to start over repeatedly. For the over 25 crowd that I game with we don't have the time to invest in such schemes.

Free to play games are worse. I was once in a World of Tanks clan that owned land on the world map. You had to play nightly for 2-3 hours to maintain it, and every time you fired a shot it cost a nickel because you had to buy the super ammo from the real money store or the other teams who did would roll over you. Sure, you made like 2=3 dollars from owning some parcels of land, but it never matched the costs unless you were in one of the top 3 groups.

Worse, investment time to level up a top tier tank was a year of steady play, and the developers changed or released new tanks every three to six months that would totally change the end game balance and make that investment moot. For those interested, I had all the top tier US tanks and the Russian heavies.

I'm really holding out that I can get interesting and cool stuff just by exploring with my friends or going on cool strikes and such. I don't want to have to beat a strike on legend twenty times just so I can get one cape, by that time it isn't fun, it is a chore.

In short, killing 100 rats in the same room one at a time is poor game design, killing 100 rats in different ways in different rooms is fun.