waylon

One good thing to note--efficiency is an ambiguous term in some sense. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use it, nor does it mean that I think efficiency is bad. But efficiency is about making trade-offs to achieve desired ends. What do you want, and what cost are you willing to pay to get it? You can be efficient with time, with money, with materials, with experience point gain, or with mouse-clicks. Usually, you can't be perfectly efficient with all of them at once. So you pay the costs you're willing to pay in order get the goal you want. In general, the common tactics or strategies are based around a concept called "maximal average"--or perhaps "minimal average" if we analyze things in terms of cost. What's the least I can pay in terms of time or money or materials or mouse-clicks in order to maximize my financial profits or my experience points? It's a balancing act of juggling multiple cost factors in order to get the greatest exp or gp gain. It's a ratio.

If you're referring to me, yes, I did copy and paste my previous post to here from another thread that was locked. I thought this would be a good place for people to discuss the ideas involved, since the other thread pretty much seemed to have devolved into an empasse. Has anybody read the book I mentioned? Drive?

I quite enjoyed the Efficiency Wars article. It reminds me a lot of a previous article about a time when some friends decided to hold a woodlands camp-out within Runescape. While I might not participate in something like that, I very much appreciated that there are people who want to do such things and who create and find such opportunities within the system. It makes me wonder how much the "emergent gameplay" tools sold by Faruq in Al Kharid are really used. The Efficiency Wars and the campout article have some similar themes that are also found in Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. I just bought the book and began reading it. I'm only 30 pages into it, so far, but it's about intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic motivation. The "efficiency wars" in some ways seem to work very much off extrinsic motivation, whereas "emergent gameplay" seems to match intrinsic motivation more closely. Yeah, I grind, and when I do, I feel like a slave, even though nobody is forcing me to play this game. But I definitely grind because I want the rewards of profit in terms of gp or the exp needed to gain additional abilities within a Skill. I ought to credit Frederick Winslow Taylor. He was an engineer in the early 1900's who invented "scientific management," the concepts of using rewards to encourage desired behaviors and using punishments to discourage undesirable behaviors. I learned this from the book. That's a quote from pages 19-20 of Drive. "Motivation 2.0" is just Pink's term or metaphor for the system of rewards and punishments that motivates human beings to be productive in society. I don't remember when or where it was posted by Jagex, but at one point they said something about developing a style of leveling up skills that didnt revolve around endless repetitive meaningless tasksor perhaps it might be more accurate to say tasks that become meaningless in and of themselves if they are only performed to gain a long-term extrinsic reward. Im not sure if Daemonheim was meant to be this new system or whether Daemonheim is merely a prototype experiment to find other means of exp leveling. If so, Daemonheim can certainly be a grind, too, but the randomness involved does make it less straightforwardly repetitive and simplistic. This new system, whatever it is or looks like, is supposed to be a part of Jagexs sci-fi MMO Stellar Dawn. I wish them well, and I hope it works. I also hope, if it works and proves to be more fun than the usual model, that it will be ported over into Runescape in some ways. It's an interesting concept, regardless, that extrinsic reward causes people to devalue work or that extrinsic reward turns play into drudgery. And efficiency is just another way to minimize "necessary" (?) drudgery. Isn't it interesting how so many of you (and me) enjoyed being a new player, even though we were doing things "inefficiently." Maybe it's only when we have to compete against others for rank or reward that stategizing for minimizing our labor is part of what takes the fun out of it.

I quite enjoyed the Efficiency Wars article. It reminds me a lot of a previous article about a time when some friends decided to hold a woodlands camp-out within Runescape. While I might not participate in something like that, I very much appreciated that there are people who want to do such things and who create and find such opportunities within the system. It makes me wonder how much the "emergent gameplay" tools sold by Faruq in Al Kharid are really used. The Efficiency Wars and the campout article have some similar themes that are also found in Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. I just bought the book and began reading it. I'm only 30 pages into it, so far, but it's about intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic motivation. The "efficiency wars" in some ways seem to work very much off extrinsic motivation, whereas "emergent gameplay" seems to match intrinsic motivation more closely. Yeah, I grind, and when I do, I feel like a slave, even though nobody is forcing me to play this game. But I definitely grind because I want the rewards of profit in terms of gp or the exp needed to gain additional abilities within a Skill. I ought to credit Frederick Winslow Taylor. He was an engineer in the early 1900's who invented "scientific management," the concepts of using rewards to encourage desired behaviors and using punishments to discourage undesirable behaviors. I learned this from the book. That's a quote from pages 19-20 of Drive. "Motivation 2.0" is just Pink's term or metaphor for the system of rewards and punishments that motivates human beings to be productive in society. I don't remember when or where it was posted by Jagex, but at one point they said something about developing a style of leveling up skills that didn’t revolve around endless repetitive meaningless tasks—or perhaps it might be more accurate to say “tasks that become meaningless in and of themselves if they are only performed to gain a long-term extrinsic reward.” I’m not sure if Daemonheim was meant to be this new system or whether Daemonheim is merely a prototype experiment to find other means of exp leveling. If so, Daemonheim can certainly be a grind, too, but the randomness involved does make it less straightforwardly repetitive and simplistic. This new system, whatever it is or looks like, is supposed to be a part of Jagex’s sci-fi MMO Stellar Dawn. I wish them well, and I hope it works. I also hope, if it works and proves to be more fun than the usual model, that it will be ported over into Runescape in some ways. It's an interesting concept, regardless, that extrinsic reward causes people to devalue work or that extrinsic reward turns play into drudgery. And efficiency is just another way to minimize "necessary" (?) drudgery.