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11 years ago
Here's that observation for the other thread by LlelanD:
LlelanD wrote:
It all comes down to what it usually does: Game play time per design time.
Quest and task based play takes more design time and does not repeat when completed, if your design team is simple-minded. You can create repeatable tasks and quests but it takes more imagination and design time.
Chance based play takes almost no design time and generates a huge amount of play time. It also frustrates and angers your player base but there are no metrics for that, just for play time. On paper, chance based play looks like the optimal play-per-design solution but history has conclusively shown that it kills games by turning players away. Since policy makers do not pay attention to cancelled games, this metric is also ignored.
Although quest and tasked based play do take more design time, the effect on the player community is far more positive and generates far more long-time players. The longer players contribute and play, the larger and more lucrative the pool of potential paying customers.
Temporal coin (time spent playing as opposed to money spent) is a valuable commodity. It increases the player pool from which you earn paying players and increases the likelihood that free players will consider the product worth real world coin. If you turn away or dissatisfy players who pay temporal coin then they will never consider your product worth real world coin, quit, and advise others that your product is not worth the time to even check out. This is how most of these types of games die.
The event design of Tapped Out is well along the way to killing the game. The utter lack of Customer Service, especially for the long-term problem of freezing, crashing, and UI bugs is already killing the reputation of both this game and EA.
This is not just my opinion, it is a marketing pattern in online games that has been proven over and over again for over 30 years (ever since text online games first went public).
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