This year we had a parent take her kid off his meds (fetal alcohol) and give him CBD oil. That stuff is poorly regulated and the kid was off, every day… For a while. In the IEP the parent insisted that it was working because his behavior had been so much more docile.
Edit: Made more forum friendly.
Oh lord… hats off to you! I at least get to use the excuse “I have another classroom to visit” to get some time to collect myself but you’re in it all day. <3 Spec Ed.
Some of the weapon quests still do exist. My druid (on live) has a quest for a weapon. I remember some of those fun quests from Classic.
Levelling a warlock, quests for a suit of armor, quests for almost all of your demons. Fun stuff.
I feel for you. Parents hear of “magic cures” and never stop to THINK about the validity of it.
Now there are things that are good for you, but they’re not magic cures. Essential oils CAN be useful for improving your health, but the problem is, people believe they’re some kind of a “magic cure”.
I’m on meds, and I’ve told my doctor that if I can find a natural remedy that does the same thing, I’ll go off the meds. Years later I still haven’t found something that can be confirmed to work. Oh, lots of “this works!” but not enough empirical evidence that it is anything more than “feel good” and the like.
Sorry, that was getting off topic.
But on topic, to a degree, I think that Blizzard is making the change as a placebo. they believe that if they squish the levels down the perception will be that levelling is better and faster. When levelling is only part of the issue that needs to be dealt with.
IE “feel good” cures instead of actual treatment of the core problem.
Since we all agree that a level squish has no impact on total time to get to max level the real concern is why even consider the change?
Every time Blizz makes base core change they disrupt base gameplay. This is seen in bugs, exploits, or issues that prevent their intended goal from being properly implemented. They do eventually get it right, after some time.
The problem is the fallout. Along the way they loose more and more players. So while this may appeal to a small portion of the community the result will be another chunk of players leaving the game.
I think thats part of why they’re doing the survey. To find out how players feel about it. Ie simple market research. If the percentage of people against it is low enough, they’ll do it and call the losses “acceptable”, provided that marketing can use the changes to bring in new players.
Spin doctoring it with lines like “vastly improved levelling system! Faster and better than before!”
And lower the numbers for their time played metrics?
Blizzard only cares about having big numbers to show their investors so it looks like the game is doing well.
The likelihood of them reducing the time it takes to reach max level is abysmally low.
At some point they’ll have to strike balance between behavioral traps, metrics, and fun. They don’t seem to know if metrics or behavioral traps should be a priority. The answer is fun, the game needs more fun.
Fun Factor is something that is hard to define. Behavioral traps are easy to define, plenty of science to back that up. Metrics are easy to define, they can create specific metrics that take advantage of behavioral traps.
Fun Factor? That’s hard to define. That’s hard to quantify. Because everyone defines fun in a different way.
You are correct that a balance does need to be struck, and it does feel like the core problem is simple. They currently aren’t considering the obvious question of “is the game actually fun?” often enough.
That or they’re only going “is it fun for us?” and not “is there something everyone can find fun?”
A player who quits adds nothing to MAUs.
Fun is definitely difficult to measure since it’s such a vague term that is very different for each of us… which is why they’ve come to the conclusions that time /played = fun since the assumption is that if you’re spending lots of time in the game, hopefully that means you’re enjoying yourself.
Unfortunately MMOs cater to masochists. Personally, I’m having a lot of fun but I find collecting things fun so for me, behavioral traps and fun are actually synonymous for the most part. I am confused why they don’t have in game surveys to try and get more responses… I play Marvel Puzzle Quest on my phone and every few months they’ll ask me to fill out a quick survey for a reward. I’m assuming they get a lot of good information out of this. Blizz can just mail us all a survey and make an announcement that completion of the survey will get you a mini pet and some gold or something like that.
The only real way to measure fun is to just simply ask the player base if they’re having fun and use some rating scale to turn it into a measurable metric.
CBD does not make you high, just relaxes you if anything. Read up on it.
But there is no evidence that leveling time will be reduced.
What makes it even worse, about defining fun factor is a simple fact.
What does your typical American player call fun?
What does your typical Chinese player call fun?
What does your typical German player call fun?
You get the picture.
It’s not an easy job.
I mean, look at board games and you’ll see that there are different mindsets culturally about what is considered fun. European boardgames tend to function far differently than say Japanese boardgames.
So yeah, they’ve got their work cut out for them.
There are so many more problems with WOW besides levels and no amount of pseudo science psychobabble can fix it because the man in charge refuses to see whats needed.
Sounds like the oils they were giving the kid had something else in it if the kid was stoned. Which could very well be the case. Or it could simply be some kind of reaction the child had. I mean, my fathers side of the family tend to have weird reactions to medication.
But anyway, back on topic.
I would attempt to approach it more along the lines of a I/O psychologist perspective personally.
what’s the behavioral science of how bored i got
The level squish better make things faster or else
Interesting read OP. Yeah, I feel like Blizz has a real problem with reward distribution concepts.