Yes, Fun is Subjective. Time is Not

Community General Discussion
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Yes, fun is subjective. Time is not.

When the game went to time played being the metric for quality of the customer’s enjoyment, the game took a quick and steady nosedive in actual quality.

Why is it important for me to spend time in a game? Shouldn’t the reward be not only the fun playing, but the fun questing, seeing the world, seeing the game come alive before me on my screen, rather than,

“Hey, you need to play!”
“Why, the game is a chore, it’s just time sinks that don’t hide that very fact now.”

That I think is the most important thought of all, when it comes to modern WoW. WoW is not hiding the fact that it’s just a time sink well enough.

Make the game fun, make the game a reward to enjoy, and the time of people logged in and playing will come naturally, thanks to the game being actually, you know, fun, again? That’s the problem: yes, fun is subjective. Time is not.

When my time is better spent doing something else, as opposed to noticing that I’m playing a time sink, that’s when WoW becomes the opposite of fun.

How many have stated that they are stuck in a second job playing WoW? Enough to me to warrant a realistic revisit to this game’s current design premise.

So, there’s two ways to really design a game:

1 - Make the game fun, time played will be its own reward
2 - Make the game a time sink, and don’t hide that it is one. Time played will fall off rather quickly, because when the distraction isn’t actually said distraction…

Why care about time invested, when by focusing on fun out, the time in will just get there?

The mind boggles at the current development team. Two times the employees and half the content with WoD, Legion being a hamfisted, “Oh $#!@” moment.

Battle for Azeroth is a story forced, hey, let’s send the two factions at each other, that’ll distract them long enough for us to make the game great again!

Time sink should not be a clear and very obvious time sink.

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I personally loved Legion and had a wonderful time. Wasn’t hamfisted to me at all.

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The gold mine exists, the problem is, the only way to get it to turn any real profit is to reintroduce the RPG elements to the game, and keep the MMO side as a wonderful and rewarding experience.

I will say Legion was fun, but why, as always, is the fun, content, story, the gameplay, second fiddle to every part of the time played metric?

I would like to think that effort in earns time out. Unless I’m missing something…

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Karl Ernst von Baer has entered the chat

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I dunno, I feel like the mark was missed big-time in BfA. I had way more fun in Legion. I did more content in Legion too, it was the first time I stepped into heroic raids. This expansion just doesn’t feel the same.

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I did have some fun in Legion, the problem was that the various parts of it seemed rather quickly thrown together. If WoW has one consistent problem, it is the lack of noticing that the story could become truly fun and epic rather fast, if written well.

The problem is, there’s one driving theme about this game: if it’s cool, do it!

That doesn’t work out every single time. A coherent, consistent, meta story that unites the game as a whole and actually flows like a movie would do better. Possibly not great every single time, but this game is an interactive movie.

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Just do what Ion and Josh said, if you want the good things the game use to have, you’ll just have to “opt in” to that experience with Classic.

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Pure speculation, Ion himself countered this in the last interview…

Entire basis for your post after that quote was misinformed I am sad to say and all conclusions are null.

(9:17 seconds on up for your particular “metric” question)

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So, metrics matter to Dev’s besides the actual feedback these forums are supposed to be the avenue to provide?

Since when has WoW had complaints that Blizzard is listening to them?

I don’t ever recall any.

Edit:

Copy-Paste from WoWHead article:

[quote]You’ve said Fun is the ultimate metric that drives the game forward. How do you measure fun?

If you listen to the Activision Earning Call and you hear MAUs, that’s Investor speak and not what the developers use. All they want to do is as engaging as possible. If there’s something that is over rewarding or has a risk/reward ratio that is out of wack, then they see participation rewards (e.g. The Mechanar Problem: In BC, it was the fastest, easiest dungeon).

Some other metrics are:

How frequently do you log in?
How long do you log in for?
What activities do people do?[/quote]

So if the Dev’s can see that people are logging in less frequently, the apparent average player is logging in for less time per log in, and the activities levels on my server are nearing flatline, what does that sound like?

Certainly not that time played is a bad metric, more that it is a different term that is an extrapolation of the overall time invested by as many players as they can get into the game and doing things at once.

If five players play ten hours, and ten players play five hours, they are the same time metric. If however 200 players log in for five hours which is 1,000 hours, compared to 100 players log in for one hour, that’s 100 hours.

The metric is not sound? Then, by all means, why is it used as a monetary equivalency reference in a call where the people investing in the company are told what the game uses to determine if their investment is valuable or not?

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He answered your question, this is just a case of you not accepting his answer.

It is like trying to tell a flat-earther the planet is actually a round globe. Doesn’t matter how much proof you bring, they will always argue to the counter.

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Unless I’m immortal.

I agree, that artificial “time sinks” basically show the flawed game design.

I should be so busy having a great time, that the only “time sink” is the amount of time I really WANT to spend in the game world. Instead it is spent on the mundane chore of getting somewhere, or of doing X amount of World Quests, or of doing this rather long Warfront for a 400 slot item, etc.

I actually thought Legion did do a much better job of it, especially on Argus. There was often so much to do there that I lost track of time. Even while doing goals, like World Quests, I’d encounter other stuff to do. Like you always WANTED to click on treasure chests, since they might have good stuff, something to mog, or even a Legendary!

BFA is too linear, for me. Go here, to do this thing. While doing that, there is nothing else to do. You see a chest on the map, “Oh yeah, I’m in BFA so that chest is worthless.”

It remains to be seen if “Naga Fun Time Area!” improves things. I don’t really expect much, though.

If Blizzard checked my “metrics” for Legion, VS. BFA, they’d see how lopsided they were (in favor of time spent in Legion.) This would be even though things seem to take longer in BFA, while I seem to want to bother doing them far less.

An Island Expedition, or the Warfront, take a larger block of time. However, as I said, I spent more time total just doing EVERYTHING in Legion, “Oh, I just spent hours mucking about on Argus… while having fun.”