Flea Tinning

I recently patched up runes of magic and had a quick play. Given so many shiny things in the game, coming back after a break is a bit of a treat since you forget all the little things (and they had a few new things, like attacking santas!). Though I quickly start to remember (this happend on a return to wow once, as well).

But the thing is, they patched in one click gathering. Previously you had to click on a node again and again, every five seconds, to get stuff out. Now you click once and it keeps gathering till the nodes empty.

And the weird thing was, I was kind of excited about it!? Like it's an improvement? I was going around using it and kind of going 'yeah!'

And that's BS.

I mean, if it had been there from the begining, I wouldn't have found it exciting. It'd just be standard.

And this is what I call 'flea tinning'. Ever heard of how if you put a flea in a tin with the lid on, it'll learn to jump only as high as the lid...for the rest of it's life? Here it's similar for the player, but after having learnt to jump only so high, breaking out of that previous pattern is 'exciting'. Even though it was an entirely arbitrary limitation and if it hadn't been there to begin with, there would have been no excitement.

It's something to think about in terms of mmorpgs and whats 'exciting' about new patches or buffs to classes. Is it really exciting, or did they just get you used to a constraint then remove the constraint?

Pavlovs grind

The other day I was reading some post about gathering in runes of magic mmorpg. It's been a continual thorn as long as I've been playing or watching ROM. It's that you have to keep clicking to gather all the resources from a node.

Actually that's probably a subject in itself, since some people might say "But it's only a click, don't be so lazy!" to which I would say "Okay, if it's just a click, what if they made it that you have to click five times to get one resource out of a node? How about ten times? Is it starting to feel pointless to do that? Well, it was pointless at clicking once for each resource (it should be one click to gather everything from one node)"

BUT, what I wanted to get at is that some people actually find gathering soothing or calming. And I've heard similar things from people about grinding, before.

Now I'd lay into that, but I'll tell you one thing - if I was going to earn real life money from doing that gathering (or grinding), I would find it quite soothing and calming as well. I genuinely would.

What I'm proposing is that the mmorpg has managed to emulate, for some people, the same reasons they think their job is important - not because of the outcome, but because they think certain repeating actions and rituals matter or advance them somehow. It has the same sort of stimulus of doing an actual job...except it doesn't pay any actual money. But these people associate job == doing an important thing. Even though it isn't important and doesn't lead to making any money.

What do you think? Comments welcome, and sorry for the review before - that'll happen from time to time. As many people do, I would like more income in my life.