Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.
It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.
Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.
Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )
Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.
Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.
To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.
If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.
Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.
