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The pursuit of goals
a short story by eighnuss
copyright 2018
What makes a player, play ddo? This is a hard question to answer. So many different people can have different motivations to do a thing. This tends to even go beyond ddo. Really, what makes a person choose to invest time and effort into a thing? Is it the end result? Perhaps it is not the destination but the journey? Are they doing it JUST to consume time with a distraction, without regard for the outcome or concern for the experience? I hope to allow you to perceive by the end of this post, why players might choose to play in a manner that other individuals may fail to understand.
Some might say, people are just compelled to fill their time with distraction, as a coping mechanism for life's hardships. I can appreciate that a person may have some pretty traumatic life experiences, and as a result might try to fill their wandering mind with great focus on a long, unending, complex game like DDO. Between the raids- flagging mechanics and timers, the myriad of crafting systems; most of which are designed to emulate the timegate applied by timers through limited ingredient type resources, and actual character progression, again time gated in the same fashion through XP curves and distribution, there are plenty of systems that will take a player years to grind through, even in the face of extreme player time and monetary investment. So if these players play specifically to have this persistent unfulfilled set of goals to work toward, I dont believe that they will be affected by the occasional, unintended, exploity methods some players discover to bypass these limitless grinds. This type of player would be hard pressed to stop having fun because of how someone else is playing the game, as the alternative is to go back to reality and think about reallife.
An alternative player archtype may choose to play DDO, encouraged by his love of complex gameplay itself. With no shortage of dissimilar systems, and unique play styles, DDO is rare in the face of todays games, for its ability to allow a character to suck. You are granted enough freedom, enough options, that you can create a completely useless character that would only serve as a handicap to the party. Conversely, you can fine tune and mix previously untried combinations and create unique builds so powerful they become flavors of the month until nerfed. Hundreds of diverse quests with a great variety of scenery serves to help you enjoy every moment of your excursion through this complex virtual world. I find it very unlikely that these players will ever be affected by some of the players and methods that rely specifically on a desire to bypass undesirable, excessive, repetitive gameplay. No other player can deny them access to the features they favor the most in this platform.
Yet one more possibility, is the player who seeks only the outcome, the final chapter, of gameplay. This player wishes to play at the highest levels, maximize all opportunity, play as efficiently as possible. To this player, every timegate is an undesired hurdle preventing their goal. Every overly obnoxious ingredient prerequisite, every raid timer, every XP penalty, the lack of additional players at a level with similar goals- these players are most likely to be impacted by changes to the game. They are also the most likely to actively work toward their goals- efficiency and finality. This can mean finding ways to offset, reduce, bypass, or otherwise avoid the aspects of the game implemented intentionally to combat their style of play. These players can practically be considered a targeted, oppressed, ostracized, underclass of the community, unfairly taxed chronologically by the powers that be, yet acknowledged in some small fashion as an existing group- only through nerfs, pay-to-bypass game mechanics, and bannings. But why would this player RACE to completion, if completion is the end of the game? We can all point at someone who fit this description, and then promptly stopped playing. This is perhaps why these players must have arbitrary gameplay gates constantly placed in their path. But are they all really racing to the end of the game, investing all this time and money, JUST so they can STOP PLAYING? Perhaps this 3rd group really just wants to play "end game" as in just playing the top content with their friends, endlessly, without a constant carrot dangling in their face that is "their individual goals". being forced to constantly pursue endless unobtainable goals shoehorns this whole demographic into solo or limited play as they grind out whatever their immediate goals are, thus isolating them from all their friends of varying levels. Why are these players FORCED to play for 5 years before they get access to stats and items that allow them to play end game with their friends on the maximized build of their choice?
The players who end up leaving the game after "completing" their goals, may infact just be players who were mis-assigned to a group they did not belong to. Perhaps the guy who quit was really into the journey, which ended when he reached end game, with no way to reproduce that initial journey. Perhaps the guy with 150 past lives quit cause he was never eligible to join his friends in their r5 lv 30 raids. Perhaps logging in, getting ship buffs, staring at an empty LFG, and logging back off wasnt enough to free our sad-man archtype from their irl chains. But i would be willing to bet, no one ever quit the game cause someone else was able to achieve their goal. With all of the issues that affect all players of all types, it is frustrating at the least to consider that developer hours are wasted fixing issues that should NEVER HAVE EXISTED in the first place, and hurt no one, when theres endless complaints from the past decade unaddressed that will increase the satisfaction of every single active player from every assumed demographic. Devs should fix the unintended disadvantages that affect us all, before they try to address unexpected advantages that affect a few.
i cant personally speak for anyone else, but i know i am not grinding all this pastlife/gear/characters just so i can quit when im finally done. I want a harem of maximized, perfect toons that can be used to fill whatever roles your party of friends might need in their end game daily runs. But when u need to run 150 lives on each of 10 toons with 60 completions of half the raids in game on each toon just to be able to say in guild chat "Hey you homeboys need a cleric, trapper, or crowd control?" then it becomes very easy to start to wonder if your time spent in DDO will ever result in fulfilling the goals you set for yourself in 2006 as you rolled your first character- not to mention that this endless grind comes packaged with the same fucking bugs that have plagued you for years is one of the greatest motivators to just stop playing.
i hope the hours wasted fixing amber, combined with the hours spent designing it so poorly the first time around, generate enough income to justify the losses incurred by any of the bugs that those man hours should have been spent fixing.
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