Guild Wars 2

Two pieces of friendly advice for ANet staff:

1. Pop-ups work! MMO players are like hamsters: they’ve learned to click a button and get a reward, and there’s a certain satisfaction and release of endorphins that comes with having your rewards pop up in a dialog box in the middle of the screen that you have to click “accept” to get. Your PvE design bros have realised this, which is why you get a nice bouncy chest whenever you do a boss event, a big lavish popup whenever you do your dailies or map-completion in a zone or a personal story quest. It’s completely fake and manipulative, but giving people things in a popup window that they have to click to accept makes them feel more rewarded than if the reward magically appears in the inventory. My theory is that if you’re forced to click to receive it, it makes the reward more tangible, which is a necessity when you’re dealing with imaginary stuff that only exists in-game.
So yeah, you took away the bouncy chests, gave us a pretty generous reward in gold, plus MASSIVELY increased the rank points, all pretty great! But they’re just listed in tiny print at the bottom of the end-game scoreboard, the money gets added to your wallet automatically, you get kicked back out to the mists, and what is there left? No big splashy pop-up, no endorphin rush from clicking accept, only the adrenaline comedown from the match and a feeling of emptiness… :p

2. Wean people off gradually! The silver rewards we’re getting now are objectively worth more than the contents of the chests we were getting before. But when, until 2 days ago, we were getting the silver rewards, AND the tournament chests, AND the living world rewards. The living world storyline coincidentally ended just as the tournament chests went away, so losing both the chests and the alliance bags makes people think that we lost too much too suddenly. Especially since the silver gets awarded automatically so it doesn’t give that endorphin rush of the pop-up that I talked about above, making people feel like they’ve lost everything. You should’ve kept the glory removal for next week’s patch instead.

tl;dr: put the silver and rank point rewards in a bouncy chest! I know it makes no real difference, but you’ve been training us like hamsters that rewards come in bouncy chests for 2 years now, so when you take them away people run around in blind panic. There’s plenty of studies done by psychologists that confirm what I’m saying, and there are loads of evil slimy toads talking about the “gamification” of corporate culture, which basically means programming cubicle-drones to do repetitive tasks for regular incremental rewards just like WoW taught us we can be hardwired to enjoy doing many years ago. It’s too late to deprogramme us now! Just plug us back into the Borg collective and give people bouncy chests to make them happy! :p

I think the main reason they’re removing the bouncy chests is because of that region transfer bug. You can’t get chests for a while if you transfer between NA and EU and have any amount of tournament wins.