Xoie wrote:
svlyons wrote:
Why is RNG a part of everything?
It's because that's how MMOs "program" you to keep playing it. We're all just pigeons in a Skinner box.
Quote:
Skinner's research discovered many fascinating examples of animal behavior. One of the most interesting, perhaps, was Skinner's work on superstition. Instead of giving a reward for a specific action and training a specific behavior, Skinner would take a hungry pigeon and place it in a box that would release a food pellet at random. The pigeons developed all kinds of complex behavioral responses such as bowing, scraping, dancing, and neck turns. [7]
What happened was the pigeon would receive the food pellet while it happened to be performing some action, and rather than attributing the food pellet reward to randomness, it would assume that the appearance of the food pellet had something to do with its behavior. So it started doing whatever that action was, over and over again, and sure enough, it was eventually rewarded with a food pellet again. Since the pigeon is increasing the amount of time spent performing a particular action, it is also increasing the number of times it is "rewarded" for that action, even though the reward is random.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Skinner_box
BUT!
It's even more insidious than that. If you can
expect a reward for something, even if you love to do it, you're actually less motivated to do it, and you tend to do a less inspired job. There's an effect called "Overjustification" in which expected rewards demotivate you even more than not getting a reward at all (when it's something you love to do).
However, when there is an expected reward, no reward, or a random reward, motivation is the highest when, you guessed it, there's a random reward.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/10/how-rewards-can-backfire-and-reduce-motivation.php
So that's why there's so much emphasis on RNG for rewards. It's what motivates humans the most especially when it comes to games.
Everybody is different.
Not everybody thinks along the same lines, etc, etc, etc.
There needs to be some sort of balance between RNG and Rewards -- many games take the RNG way too far, and are not rewarding enough. Some games
might be too rewarding, maybe. Atma in FATEs is stressing the "RNG too far" limits; doing the same boring content hundreds of times on average to get your weapon is borderline ridiculous. However, handing it to you after 8 FATEs is a bit too fast.
It is difficult to find that "sweet spot", though sometimes I'd have to sit here and think "did the devs really think this is fun?" after you do 50, 100+ with no reward.
The best way to do RNG is a "Bad Roll Protection" system (phrase coined by Blizz), wherein each time you fail to get the reward, your chances of getting it from the next are a small sliver better until you are eventually guaranteed to get it if you do it enough times. That way, you don't get the one serially unlucky guy who has done it 10,000 times and still doesn't have it. The likelyhood of that is ridiculously small, but the fact that it is
possible is the focus here: it really should not be possible for that to happen. That just gives the player a sense of dread and a "am I EVER going to see this?" and that is never healthy for a game.
When you get a reward, you should be happy. you SHOULD feel "Yay! I got my reward! That was great!" You SHOULDN'T feel like "Thank GOD that's done with". If you feel the latter, then the grind was simply too much and detracted from the fun.
I think a lot of examples of bad RNG result from insufficient testing by the devs. Like, for Oldtime FFXI... did the devs actually test some of those things out when they implemented them, as in, doing it in a real environment without any sort of dev tools to fast-forward the process? Of course they didn't; they have a job to do and they don't have the time to actually do that and do their jobs at the same time.
Meh, DR popped while I was typing this post, and I forgot the rest of what I was going to say. Ah well, I think I got the idea across decent enough.