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By that definition, any game you play that you can't master on day one is a shitty experience. That's an exceedingly hard customer expectation to meet: a custom

By that definition, any game you play that you can't master on day one is a shitty experience. That's an exceedingly hard customer expectation to meet: a customer who doesn't like difficult challenges or learning curves.

micheljansen 13y ago
There is a difference between offering a challenge and letting players get completely stuck. There is an optimum (the mythical "flow").
- Isofarro 13y ago
  The difference is the $8 purchase price. That's the optimum. And the players are not completely stuck, they are at the local optimal of their current gaming model - a plateau. That doesn't stop them from taking a different path towards a different optimisation strategy and find one where the localised high point is better than this one.
  - micheljansen 13y ago
    Did you read the original post? The players that get stuck are not playing the same game as the players who paid $8. They are playing a version that is deliberately frustrating and almost impossible to play due to rampant piracy in the game. The normal version does not have this frustration built in and is probably a lot more optimised towards an optimal challenge / reward balance.
b0rsuk 13y ago
And that's correct. When my brother played Hexen years ago - a DooM engine game with extreme switch hunting - he got stuck halfway through. He got a shitty experience. Maybe he wasn't good enough according to your judgement, but in the end he had a shitty experience nonetheless. It was not necessarily Raven's (developer) fault, but it happened. An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it. The difference here is the developer makes the game a shitty experience by design. That's the definition of shooting himself in the foot.
- Isofarro 13y ago
  > An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it. That seems to hold very little replayability value. A better prospect is to make the game just a little more difficult that the current player's skill level, and adapt to that, so the game gets progressively more difficult as the player's skill improves, and the rewards/achievements are in line with that path. (It's quite a oft-given piece of advice for players wanting to get better at chess, that they play people a little stronger than themselves, and they gradually adapt and start winning more than losing) I guess that's what's changed in gaming since the eighties. Back then the challenge and difficulty of games was a feature. Only a small crop of people completed them, the rest of us enjoyed the challenge of trying to get there. Where the journey to improvement is of more value than reaching the credits at the end.

micheljansen 13y ago

There is a difference between offering a challenge and letting players get completely stuck. There is an optimum (the mythical "flow").

Isofarro 13y ago
The difference is the $8 purchase price. That's the optimum. And the players are not completely stuck, they are at the local optimal of their current gaming model - a plateau. That doesn't stop them from taking a different path towards a different optimisation strategy and find one where the localised high point is better than this one.
- micheljansen 13y ago
  Did you read the original post? The players that get stuck are not playing the same game as the players who paid $8. They are playing a version that is deliberately frustrating and almost impossible to play due to rampant piracy in the game. The normal version does not have this frustration built in and is probably a lot more optimised towards an optimal challenge / reward balance.

b0rsuk 13y ago

And that's correct. When my brother played Hexen years ago - a DooM engine game with extreme switch hunting - he got stuck halfway through. He got a shitty experience. Maybe he wasn't good enough according to your judgement, but in the end he had a shitty experience nonetheless. It was not necessarily Raven's (developer) fault, but it happened. An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it. The difference here is the developer makes the game a shitty experience by design. That's the definition of shooting himself in the foot.

Isofarro 13y ago
> An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it. That seems to hold very little replayability value. A better prospect is to make the game just a little more difficult that the current player's skill level, and adapt to that, so the game gets progressively more difficult as the player's skill improves, and the rewards/achievements are in line with that path. (It's quite a oft-given piece of advice for players wanting to get better at chess, that they play people a little stronger than themselves, and they gradually adapt and start winning more than losing) I guess that's what's changed in gaming since the eighties. Back then the challenge and difficulty of games was a feature. Only a small crop of people completed them, the rest of us enjoyed the challenge of trying to get there. Where the journey to improvement is of more value than reaching the credits at the end.