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This got really bad in World of Warcraft: Legion, when people were deleting and re-creating their characters to try and get better loot. The game had these "Le

by VRay 7y ago

This got really bad in World of Warcraft: Legion, when people were deleting and re-creating their characters to try and get better loot. The game had these "Legendary" items of incredible power you could attain that were insanely rare, but had a sort of "pity timer" where you'd get a higher and higher chance of obtaining one based on how long it'd been since your last item. The problem is that the legendary items were almost inconceivably rare drops through pure random luck, but the escalating chance was really predictable. You were all but guaranteed to never get a legendary item through pure chance alone, but you were basically guaranteed to get one every two weeks if you did all the time-limited content available. (Dungeon raids you can do once per day/once per week, daily chore missions, etc). For the first few months of the system's availability, after 4 legendary items you'd no longer get the "pity timer" bonus to your loot rolls on legendary items, so your character was effectively capped at 4 legendary items. Some of the available items could increase your character's combat effectiveness by a relatively huge margin compared to others, and it only took about a week to power-level a new character and get it one or two legendary items, so for a while people were abandoning their max level, legendary-geared characters with 100+ hours invested into them to try again.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> You were all but guaranteed to never get a legendary item through pure chance alone, but you were basically guaranteed to get one every two weeks if you did all the time-limited content available. Seems like this is a feature, not a bug. You want to reward users who interact a lot with your game consistently over time.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Well, in the case of WoW, most players are attached to their characters because they've invested a lot of time in them. Most people have a "main" character that is the most powerful, the one they most enjoy playing, and they may have one or more "alts" that they typically spend less time with, and those characters are thus less powerful. But this feature meant that through random chance, your alt could become much more powerful than your main. This sucks, because you're now incentivized to spend your time in the game playing a character you don't enjoy as much as your main, and the time you spent on your main making it powerful is simply eradicated. And that increases the chance of you quitting the game.
henrikschroder 7y ago
Speaking of WoW, I got hit by the statistics when they introduced an achievement for the in-game valentine's holiday. Each player got a bag that you once an hour could take a random piece of heart candy from. There were a fixed number of heart candies, the bag worked for a week, and you needed one of each to get the achievement. One random draw once an hour for at max a week is a limited number of attempts, what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement... Statistics is a bitch. (They implemented pity timers for every similar achievement afterwards, as far as I know.)
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement... This extends the time to get the achievement from one year to "for 0.0001% of players, two years". That will annoy those, um, ten people, but "getting the achievement next year" is pretty different from "never getting the achievement".
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Yeah, because the achievement was part of the meta-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It's Been, and if you were one of those ten people, like me, it was pretty damn annoying. (There were actually quite a lot more of us, since very few people drew the maximum amount of candies from the bag, so the realistic odds of never getting it despite your best efforts was maybe one in 100k or something? Anyway, they fixed it retroactively for the first year somehow, so that was nice.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > Yeah, because the achievement was part of the meta-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It's Been This severely weakens the case that it was a problem that needed to be fixed; if you're getting the Valentine's achievement because you want What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, the extra waiting time you suffer from not getting Valentine's the first time around is lowered. (Because you would have had to spend a lot of that time waiting anyway, for the other calendar-based achievements that you didn't already have.)

by VRay 7y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> You were all but guaranteed to never get a legendary item through pure chance alone, but you were basically guaranteed to get one every two weeks if you did all the time-limited content available. Seems like this is a feature, not a bug. You want to reward users who interact a lot with your game consistently over time.

henrikschroder 7y ago
Well, in the case of WoW, most players are attached to their characters because they've invested a lot of time in them. Most people have a "main" character that is the most powerful, the one they most enjoy playing, and they may have one or more "alts" that they typically spend less time with, and those characters are thus less powerful. But this feature meant that through random chance, your alt could become much more powerful than your main. This sucks, because you're now incentivized to spend your time in the game playing a character you don't enjoy as much as your main, and the time you spent on your main making it powerful is simply eradicated. And that increases the chance of you quitting the game.

henrikschroder 7y ago

Speaking of WoW, I got hit by the statistics when they introduced an achievement for the in-game valentine's holiday. Each player got a bag that you once an hour could take a random piece of heart candy from. There were a fixed number of heart candies, the bag worked for a week, and you needed one of each to get the achievement. One random draw once an hour for at max a week is a limited number of attempts, what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement... Statistics is a bitch. (They implemented pity timers for every similar achievement afterwards, as far as I know.)

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> what are the odds of never getting a certain heart piece? About one in a million or so. How many players did WoW have at that time? Over ten million. So you're pretty much guaranteed that even if you never missed an opportunity to draw a piece of candy, some players would never get one of each, and never get the achievement... This extends the time to get the achievement from one year to "for 0.0001% of players, two years". That will annoy those, um, ten people, but "getting the achievement next year" is pretty different from "never getting the achievement".
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Yeah, because the achievement was part of the meta-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It's Been, and if you were one of those ten people, like me, it was pretty damn annoying. (There were actually quite a lot more of us, since very few people drew the maximum amount of candies from the bag, so the realistic odds of never getting it despite your best efforts was maybe one in 100k or something? Anyway, they fixed it retroactively for the first year somehow, so that was nice.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > Yeah, because the achievement was part of the meta-achievement What A Long Strange Trip It's Been This severely weakens the case that it was a problem that needed to be fixed; if you're getting the Valentine's achievement because you want What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, the extra waiting time you suffer from not getting Valentine's the first time around is lowered. (Because you would have had to spend a lot of that time waiting anyway, for the other calendar-based achievements that you didn't already have.)