Shadowlands Game Designers Protecting Us from Covenants

[Argorwal-ysera (Argorwal)]

@Madbeatz-illidan

It was odd that I just watched a video called " How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves" on Youtube.

Here’s the part of video that stood out to me:

There’s a famous story about World of Warcraft - in the story, Blizzard didn’t want people to play the game for too long - so they introduced a system in the beta where the longer you played, the fewer experience points you’d get for killing monsters and whatnot.
But players hated it. They hated seeing the numbers going down. It felt like a punishment for playing the game. So Blizzard did something pretty clever: they flipped the system on its head.

Now, players can build up a rest bonus whenever they’re not playing the game, and then get an experience points boost when they next log in. It’s essentially the same numbers, says Blizzard, but making it a reward rather than a penalty made it much more agreeable to fans.
So, it’s often better to encourage the behaviour you want, than discourage the behaviour you don’t.

This is exactly what I had covered in another thread and where many people gave some great ideas that oriented around a reward system rather than a punishing system:

@Madbeatz-illidan

• Provide discounts on repair bills to players who stay committed; with the discounts possibly increasing the longer you stay committed.
• With the new M+ cache being change to picking from 6 options - committed players could earn an extra choice.
• Players could be given extra Anima out of their weekly chest; perhaps scaling with each week committed to that covenant (capping at some point).
• Consumables could be awarded on a weekly basis; also scaling the longer a players sticks with their covenant.
• Providing additional xmogs/mounts that connect and tie in to the covenant themes.

Blizzard - please avoid punishing systems. Take the ideas from players around rewards and implement them in place of the restrictions and punishments currently planned for covenants and being able to swap them.

This reads like the common players psyche is incredibly fragile.