Topic: [rant] Don't reward the player!

[KDR_11k]

I think this is going to be unpopular but here it goes:

Don't reward good play!

These days games will have loads and loads of bonus items, some of which are really hard to reach ('sup, RPG extra bosses?). Basically the concept seems to be that the better players can take extra challenges and get rewards for completing them, such as health boosts, better weapons, etc. I say that's the WRONG thing to do. Think about it: The player has enough skill (or spent enough time grinding) to succeed at a challenge that is harder than the regular game. Why would he really need to get a reward that makes his character stronger? He could beat the game even with a weaker character! Conversely, the player who is NOT skilled enough to rise to the extra challenge does NOT get the reward and thus has a WEAKER character.

Where should the difficulty in the game go now? Do you make it harder so the player who has a lot fo skill and better equipment is still challenged? Make it easier so the player with less skill and a weaker character still has a chance? Do you make the extra challenge so easy everyone can beat it and just expect they do? The gap between the difficulties the players can handle widens, the good player gets so much strength he doesn't know what to do with it, then complains the game is too easy. The bad player can't even grow his character enough to make up for the lack of skill. Of course games these days tend to be geared so weaker players don't have much trouble but that leaves stronger players wondering why they bothered to get all these bonus things anyway when nothing comes close to being a challenge.

The only solution I see is to remove those rewards entirely. You can reward the player with something like score or an archievement for beating an extra tough challenge, maybe even a plot branch but anything that strengthens his character is unnecessary. Of course the reverse, weakening the player for performing difficult things is silly, noone who knows what will happen would do the extra quests then. Another dumb idea is to simply make everything in the game stronger as the player grows stronger but why do you even have growth then?

Well, another solution would be to make the character harder to use but stronger, e.g. reducing health but increasing the damage so it's a boost that needs skill to be useful but there's only so much you can do with that.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

My initial thought:  what kind of game are we talking about here?  Certainly there's some games where I stand by the idea that it's still the bad player that needs to improve.  Practice can lead to improved skill which can yield the reward.  The "reward" can have little meaning to the already-good player (who's a snob on an internet forum and whose play objective is to collect more junk, hurr), but for the player that goes thru the honest struggle to get the "reward" can still enjoy it as a reward.  Objective vs. Enjoyment is critical here.

Should the "bad" player's enjoyment be greatly affected by the achievements of some other who-cares-who-it-is-player?

[Ceric]

I actually agree.  End bosses can be real let downs.  Though I find with the hidden uber bosses in RPG's that they make the last boss feel inept but are fun themselves.

Why reward people at the top of there game with health increase and like?  What I personally really would want is a different way to play the game and mark to show others that I did it.

[vudu]

I've had this problem with Zelda games for years.  I feel compelled to complete all the side quests, but in doing so, I get so many damn heart containers I never die and the game ceases to be challenging.

The only solution I see is to remove those rewards entirely. You can reward the player with something like score or an archievement for beating an extra tough challenge, maybe even a plot branch but anything that strengthens his character is unnecessary. Of course the reverse, weakening the player for performing difficult things is silly, noone who knows what will happen would do the extra quests then. Another dumb idea is to simply make everything in the game stronger as the player grows stronger but why do you even have growth then?

TWEWY allows you to not only change your character level, but it allows you to change you difficulty level at any point in the game.  I found it worked really well, as I could continuously change the settings to provide a challenge throughout the game.  I probably played 75% of the game on hard difficulty with level 1 characters.  I did this because the higher difficulty levels (and lower character levels) yield "phatter loot".  Towards the end of the game, when the difficulty ramped up considerably, I started bumping my difficulty level down to normal or upping my characters to a higher level accordingly.

The rewards for playing the harder way resulted in better enemy drops (in this case pins) which let me continue to play on hard/level 1.  I really liked it because I was in control of how much challenge I wanted at any given point (which, in most cases, was as much as possible).  The game rewarded me by letting me continue to play how I wanted.  If I stopped playing that way, my drops would suffer and I would have been forced to retreat to normal sooner than I did.

[Morari]

Nintendo already punishes good players in a lot of their games. Just look at Mario Kart!

[KDR_11k]

What's worse is level rankings where high rankings give you more money, equipment or whatever, even worse if you cannot go back and improve your rank. So either you are good right away, get good ranks early on and have a growing pool of equipment to work with or you start of weak and fall behind even more with every level (especially since easy first levels are usually the easiest source of good ranks, if you take until half way into the game to become adept enough to have a chance at good ranks you face levels where you need to be even better than that to actually gain the ranks).

I never got far in Megaman Zero because I had a lot of trouble to maintain an A rank that's needed to get those EX skills and not getting them means no chance to return and get them later...

[UltimatePartyBear]

I have a feeling I'm about to ramble all over the place, so feel free to tl;dr me.

I think it's always appropriate to reward skillful play, but the reward shouldn't be something that confers (only) advantages in competitive play or something that is unavailable to unskilled players.

In competitive play, this can often fix itself because everybody guns for the player with the advantage.  For example, when I played Action Quake 2, getting multiple kills on one life would grant you a score multiplier that doubled every so many kills until you died.  In a score based match, this made you the main target.  The mechanic made staying alive more desirable, and since there were no health pickups, it made the game more intense.  I think this is a good way of rewarding skilled play.

For a different example, consider powerups.  If it's possible to grab a damage increasing item or better armor, then it's usually up to the level design to balance things.  If it takes skill to reach the powerup, there's typically a risk involved.  The powerup may be on a narrow beam across a lava pit that someone could easily knock you into, or you may have to hurt yourself with a rocket jump to reach it, or it's simply out in the open and it'll be open season if you try to go for it.  I don't have a problem with this kind of thing.  In fact, I enjoy it.

Then there are rewards that try to combine the above two.  You get four kills in a row, and you get a free powerup.  This is the kind of reward that makes no sense because you get it by demonstrating that you don't need it.  A powerup sitting on a pedestal is available to the guy in last place, too, and can even the odds.  A score bonus gives the player both a benefit and a detriment, since he's got a bullseye painted on his forehead.  Unreal Tournament had the right idea.  When you get multiple kills in a row, the announcer proclaims it in a booming voice, and that's more than enough.  Playing skillfully is its own reward.

I've given a lot of thought to rubber-banding.  I don't mean the way people in the back go faster in Mario Kart, although that's a (poor) case of it.  A lot of games suffer from the snowball effect.  Something that happens in the first five minutes of a game can determine the outcome, but the game may take another hour to resolve.  In an RTS, for example, you might lose a resource gatherer in an early raid, and the amount of resources you're not gathering after that has an impact on everything that happens later.  It might take you another few minutes to get to the next tech level, which sets you back even further because you can't expand as early, so all the resources you're not getting from that expansion you haven't built pushes you further behind.  Essentially, you lost right after that first raid on your resource line.  The game rewarded the player who was able to put together an attack force more quickly, but clearly that player already had an advantage in skill (arguably, depending on the game) and did not need that benefit.  There should have been something in the game to give the weaker player an opportunity to recover.

In noncompetitive play, I've repeatedly argued against locking away parts of the game behind challenges many players won't be able to beat.  I like the way Blast Corps did it instead.  If you got a gold medal on every level, the game challenged you to go for platinum.  The only reward for skilled players was another layer of challenge that weaker players wouldn't get anything out of in the first place.  There weren't any vehicles that made some of the challenges easier.  There weren't game modes that were fun to play around with regardless of skill.  There weren't even any new levels.  And if you got all the platinum medals, your only reward was the game saying "You can stop now."

In RPGs, which I guess is the real point of the original rant, it's trickier.  If there's no reward, some people will still complete the hard side quests because they're there, but most people would feel robbed if they didn't already know there was no reward.  I think there should be a reward, but it needs to be something different.  A little development of a minor character works well.  It could be something like the ability to repaint your airship or redesign your rebel base.  There are really quite a few things they could use as quest rewards that would encourage players to complete the quests but wouldn't unbalance the game.

(I'm more opposed to side quests designed to sell the official strategy guide, personally, but that's a different rant entirely.)

[Bill Aurion]

My biggest complaint on this issue is having certain unlockables that only appear after beating such-and-such on Super Insane difficulty or something like that...I like a challenge if it's fair, but a lot of these extreme difficulty levels are painful and just plain NOT FUN...I do not derive any enjoyment from masochistic behavior... >=|

[Dirk Temporo]

Cry moar, I guess?

Rewarding the player for completing extra challenges gives them a reason to complete the extra challenge. Since I'm not a jackass achievement whore, the promise of a title or some such isn't enough to make me want to go out of my way to do extra work. Also, rewarding a player for completing extra challenges doesn't in any way detract from your or anyone else's experience with the game. However, removing these rewards DOES detract from the experiences of those who may want to try to obtain them.

[Smash_Brother]

I think the simple trick is to make the gameplay fun enough that a player can be steamrolling the game and still have a whopping good time of it.

[Stogi]

So what this thread and it's responses are saying is in fact that developers should make a good game.

Hmm....

[KDR_11k]

Cry moar, I guess?

Rewarding the player for completing extra challenges gives them a reason to complete the extra challenge. Since I'm not a jackass achievement whore, the promise of a title or some such isn't enough to make me want to go out of my way to do extra work. Also, rewarding a player for completing extra challenges doesn't in any way detract from your or anyone else's experience with the game. However, removing these rewards DOES detract from the experiences of those who may want to try to obtain them.

The whole point of the rant is that these extra challenges DO detract from the game because it's even harder to give the game a difficulty that challenges everybody without being plain impossible for weaker players. The optional content ruins the mandatory content. Hell, often the optional content even fails to be challenging so it's pretty much just extra time investment that then makes the game even less interesting.

I think the simple trick is to make the gameplay fun enough that a player can be steamrolling the game and still have a whopping good time of it.

I think games are already extensively doing that but it still feels shallow to some degree, bringing all your skill together and finally beating a difficult part is massively satisfying, beating a game can still be fun without it but it lacks the feeling of euphoria generated by operating at your very limits. You know the feeling of your heartbeat slowly returning back to normal as the end boss dies and the credits start to roll? Haven't felt that in a long time.

[S-U-P-E-R]

I think about this sometimes. Consider my experience with FF7; I caught onto the materia system and how to optimally level my guys early on, and it made an already fairly easy game even easier for someone who actually wanted something harder. A lot of single player games became an awful treadmill of hurrr-durrrr-finish-the-game, and if it wasn't remarkably challenging, it became completely uninteresting to my pro like myself who has been through plenty of games.

On the other hand, consider the GBA/DS Castlevania games, which I feel do the exact opposite: I smoothly and efficiently work my way through the games, and by doing less aimless wandering, I trash less enemies and build fewer levels, making progression and bosses a little harder and forcing me to adapt to situations faster and play better. I think this is pretty cool.

As a designer, this is a pretty good chin-scratcher. I'd be concerned that enabling really good players to rape my game would mean more copies sold back to Gamestop and cannibalizing sales. My first intuition would be to include a pro-mode, score ranking, some rad Achievements, or something along those lines. I also don't think I'd be caught dead making an RPG; lol.

For competitive multiplayer games, I am firmly against anything that allows retards to win, but I don't know if this is relevant to your post.

[SixthAngel]

I agree with a lot of what you say but don't believe rewards can or should be removed.

Defeating difficult extra bosses or great tests of skill need rewards that confer no gameplay advantage.  Rewards can be small or great and still be of no real gameplay beneift.  Tales of Symphonia had a strange solution.  Defeating the impossible extra boss gives you potentially the best weapons in the game.  At that point the weapons were near worthless to me though since even though my characters were strong I hadn't killed enough enemies. I am sure some people were made uber right away but I liked how it gives you a big reward without giving an immediate huge advantage unless the player decides they want to get the advantage.  Examples of rewards that should be for skill are new skins/clothes for characters/bases/houses and extra story segments (a side story or secondary character development).  Great rewards for skill can be special in some way like the Symphonia swords or they can do something like give you a new playable character (RPG).  A new character need not be the better then anyone else just different.  In fact giving the character to the player at a low or weak level gives the experienced player an even greater challenge.  The new character will give the skilled player new options and new strategies but no power advantage of the nonskilled player.

Gaining a gameplay advantage through exploring is not a problem though.  If a person of any skill can do it if they search enough or are lucky to see something others don't the advantage doesn't benefit those with superior skills, just those who are curious.  In the past these were always called secrets and were generally difficult to spot and find. (Ninja in Shining Force)

[KDR_11k]

I do think exploration should be limited to certain genres too (ones where the levels aren't designed linearly, it's annoying when you have to search everything and have to avoid the next plot trigger to make sure nothing that would really help you is lost forever). Playing an FPS and having to always look out for health increases ('sup, FEAR?) or other permanent bonuses (as opposed to simple ammo and health refills which are only until you spend them) to avoid becoming too weak is annoying. I think I did post a separate rant about that though.

[Bill Aurion]

You mean to limit exploration to games where you can actually go back if you miss it, right? =)

[KDR_11k]

Yeah but also where backtracking isn't out of place. A corridor game with backtracking would be painful.

[Bill Aurion]

...Metroid? =)

[KDR_11k]

Corridor as in "the level is just one long corridor with decoration".

[UltimatePartyBear]

I do think exploration should be limited to certain genres too (ones where the levels aren't designed linearly, it's annoying when you have to search everything and have to avoid the next plot trigger to make sure nothing that would really help you is lost forever).

For some reason, I have a tendency to always go the plot-forwarding way first even though I try not to.  I blame it on bad design.  I think it happens because I avoid the path that looks the most like the way forward in favor of exploration, but level designers try to trick people who are just trying to plow through by making the way forward less obvious.  The end result is that I shimmy through the hidden passage looking for treasure only to find the exit, then turn around and walk through the grand hallway to find the treasure.  But that's another rant, I guess.

For competitive multiplayer games, I am firmly against anything that allows retards to win, but I don't know if this is relevant to your post.

The goal should be to give good players opportunities to recover from early setbacks and remain competitive so that it takes consistently good play to win a match.  Lousy players shouldn't be able to take advantage of such opportunities because they are lousy.  If lousy players can win, then the system is either completely broken or Mario Party.