Ive sort of come to the conclusion that, like Blizzard, Arenanet is conditioning us.
Warning: a bit of a wall.
TLDR; We are conditioned by Arenanet to play only for rewards, and not for the sake of playing. This is because they pump the game full of rewards, checklists, achievements, minis, and shinies. They use this word “reward” often in order to trigger this type of behavior.
Blizzard brainwashed a generation of MMO players into thinking a themepark MMO with endless gear grind, and a paid subscription is the way to go for the MMO industry. Many MMOs tried to follow their footsteps and failed. Miserably. So we come to, what we thought/think, is a unique game in GW2 and people wanted the same thing. They wanted verticle progression. Arenanet gave it to them. They wanted more. They wanted more rewards. Rewards, rewards rewards. We cannot have a patch without being enticed by rewards. You cannot read an article about GW2 these days without the use of the word ‘rewards’. Everything is centered around rewards. If you aren’t being rewarded, why bother? We can attribute a lot of this mentality to WoW, in a sense, because in WoW…we wanted verticle progression, gear grind, and rewards.
Arenanet takes rewards to a whole new level. And this is bad. They reward you for a lot of things. They reward you and shower you in currency. The more rewards you get, the more you want to play, right?
This whole idea that a game must be centered around “rewards” is creating a Pavlonian society where you guys (the playerbase) salivate whenever arenanet uses the word “reward”. If the article doesn’t have that word in it, suddenly it loses meaning. Have we all become the dog in Pavlov’s experiment?
A few months ago I created a thread about instrinsic vs extrinsic rewards. Playing for fun vs playing for reward. A lot of good points in both camps were made. People agreed with me that we no longer play for fun, but for reward. People also said that rewards ARE fun to them. Thats OK. But don’t you think those people are falling into the Pavlonian way of thinking?
For those of you that don’t know who Pavlov is:
Pavlov performed an experiment where a dog encounters food, they begin to salivate. He began to associate this with a bell sound. Eventually whenever he struck the bell, the dog began to salivate even if no food was present.
So..what is my point here? Arenanet has associated every patch and all content with some sort of reward system, and they use the term frequently. So frequently, that whenever they use the word ‘reward’, we as players begin to salivate and want more..and more..and more rewards. Its becoming a vicious cycle.
I believe most of you(myself included) have lost the purpose of a video game…to play for fun. I believe Arenanet definately has lost sight of this. Otherwise they would create content just to have fun. Not to check off achievements, and be rewarded. We would simply be enjoying their content, rather than rushing to complete achievements, or get the next ascended slot.
Its a vicious cycle started by Blizzard, and perpetuated by Arenanet. Blizzard conditioned us in WoW. Arenanet is doing it again with GW2.
Don’t believe me? Try going to another game after you have had your complete fill of GW2 and try not to expect the game to reward you for everything. I bet for a lot of us, it will be difficult.
If anyone responds to this, try to respond by not going to the opposite extreme in the case. Yes, rewards are part of game. I understand that. Yes, we all want some form of progression. I understand that. This isnt the age old verticle vs horizontal progression argument. This is just laying out how we are being conditioned by this company to expect rewards, because without a reward we do not have fun.
Games need rewards at some level, but not to the extent to which arenanet has gone to. They have removed a lot of the fun of the game and replaced it with something “virtually tangible”…if those words could ever go together.
