作者：Ramin Shokrizade

美国前奥运举重教练曾经对我说，当他们开始秘密尝试合成类固醇时，结果真的非常显著，他们也收到了许多观察者的疑问。为什么他们看起来会这么大？他们的全新力量训练秘诀是什么？而“静力锻炼法”便是答案。这是指尽自己所能去维持一定的姿势用力。但其实这也是最糟糕的训练方式，因为它将导致非常有限的肌肉力量，并让运动员承担心肌肥大或者患上心脏病的风险。

Frustration(from gamasutra)

不过公众似乎普遍认为这是一种有效的锻炼方式，即使是在今天我也能在健身房看到一些私教在传授给客人这种“静力锻炼法”。这种方法已经诞生50年了。这些教练其实并不清楚为什么自己要传授这种方法，他们只知道自己看过别人一辈子都在健身房做着这样的运动，所以这肯定是一种有效的锻炼方式。

当Zynga在Facebook上大获成功时，它们将这一成功归因于两大元素：“痛并快乐”以及积极的数据收集。我曾在之前的一些文章中提过游戏产业的商业智能（BI）的局限性，我也曾在2011年发表的《Two Contrasting Views of Monetization》简单谈及了“痛并快乐”。

从Zynga获取成功以来这两种理念便渗透到了游戏领域，并且比我所预测的5年时间还长。

开发者到底是如何在免费给予玩家游戏后再让他们去掏腰包呢？这并不是一个容易回答的问题，而Zynga的解决方法便是，如果你不能带给玩家足够的舒服感，他们便不会愿意花钱。而如果你让他们觉得不舒服了，他们便只会选择退出。介于这两点之间的要点便是能让玩家愿意花钱并不断游戏的方法。找到这一要点则是BI的工作。但结果证明这一要点只是虚构的，所以在BI上投入几百万也不能把握住它并且最终的转换率也只是保留在不到2%的水平上。

基于竞争性的“中核”游戏通过牺牲游戏的生命周期和女性目标用户去想办法实现了5%左右的转换率。

也有迹象显示，开发者正逐渐看清现实，即或许可以从那些在玩游戏的时候并未受挫的玩家身上赚取更多利益。这种转变并不简单，因为对于每一个团队成员来说，他们的反应会是：“为什么我们要让玩家受挫？”而只有两个团队成员赞成先受挫机制，因为他们认为“这便是我们要做的事。”

在最近于Steam上体验了《上古卷轴OL》的免费周时我便感受到了这点。这款游戏最初是伴随着古老的“零售+订阅”商业模式发行的，但他们同时也尝试着基于该商业模式去获取一些微交易，即就像Arena.net在《激战2》所做的那样。一年后我们创造了“可选择”的订阅内容，其零售价格也变成了0美元（游戏邦注：虽然在Steam上的官方价格仍为29.99美元）。

我从《上古卷轴OL》中获得了许多乐趣。我非常喜欢探索危险且黑暗的地方并且也热衷于在一些稀奇古怪的地方寻求战利品。而我最喜欢的还是去收集各种漏洞并在之后将其作为鱼饵或炼金术配方。即使是像古老的宝剑或盾牌等无用的道具也拥有自己的价值，因为我可以将其分解并带回城镇去获取经验值。游戏早期的经济设计甚至优于《激战2》。

但是我在这款游戏中所发现的一个问题便是其库存空间非常有限（只有60个袋子的空间和60个储存空间），所以当我选择停止任务并回到仓库去放下道具，我最终将在5个小时后收到“库存已锁定”的信息。即当你想要捡起其它更有价值的东西时，库存便会被锁定，而你则需要去摧毁同样有价值的东西。人们通常都不希望被迫去破坏自己所拥有的有价值的东西，并去选择到底该留哪一个。这是你可能导致玩家最受挫的情况。这就好像删除奖励一样，或者更糟糕的来说，即比起拿掉你刚刚给予玩家的东西，你是在要求玩家去选择该摧毁哪个东西。而那可能是玩家花费了几个小时甚至几天时间才获得的。

就像在《激战2》中，开发团队决定通过让玩家去体验库存锁定并因为受挫而去购买额外的库存空间。如果玩家愿意花5美元去获取10个额外的库存空间，这便能让他们的库存锁定延后1个小时。这款游戏需要至少500个库存空间，如果你玩游戏1年时间，那么你至少需要2000个库存空间。而当我看到这一机制时我便决定退出这款带给了我前几个小时乐趣的游戏了。

这款游戏也让玩家能够独立做所有事，因此这不能有效培养他们的相互依赖性。因为玩家创造了主要的单人玩家环境，所以这便成为了一大问题。

不过这里也存在一个闪光点。开发团队或许已经发现了问题所在并对“《上谷卷轴OL》的锻造包”做出了调整。这是非常出色的反应。它能自动将所有锻造材料（及绝大部分你将捡起的东西）放进你的角色所分享的一个无限库存空间。你并不需要跑到城镇或其它什么地方才能卸下这些道具。当你在锻造某些东西时，你甚至不需要亲自去开启锻造包便能够轻松获得所需材料。

基于这一锻造包，玩家不仅不用再受挫，同时也不需要花大量时间去面对库存管理问题。对于Beyhesda中的“反受挫”派来说这便是一次胜利。我敢保证这是经历了在设计室的激烈讨论所得出的结果。其中的妥协便是让游戏只采用“订阅”方式。所以在库存上所有玩家能免费玩5个小时的游戏，然后玩家需要花钱去订阅才可以不用受挫一直游戏。

如果Bethesda可以不需要订阅方式而更清楚地呈现其游戏玩法的局限性就更好了，但是从当前的产业标准来看，如果消费者愿意每个月花钱去购买高质量的RPG而不是一次性购买，他们便能够获得更多价值。

随着Bethesda的反受挫阵营的胜利，BI团队毫无疑问将获得更好的游戏指标。亡羊补牢为时不晚，现在的游戏更加倾向于玩家友好型了，ZeniMax也决定基于全新市场营销策略“重新发行”游戏。

如果你现在正在工作室创造一款游戏，并好奇“为什么有人让我去让我的玩家受挫？”，你便能从本文中找到答案。如果你不喜欢这么做，那就说出来。也许一开始你会觉得尴尬，但你的意见却有可能成就产品最后的胜利以及更有效的产品推广。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Price of Frustration

by Ramin Shokrizade

A former USA Olympic weightlifting coach once told me that when they started experimenting in secret with anabolic steroids, the visible results were so striking that they got a lot of questions from observers. Why were they so big? What was their new strength training secret? “Isometrics” was the answer. This is where you hold a static contraction as long as you can. It’s one of the worst possible ways to train as it leads to very limited strength gains and puts the athlete at risk of cardiac hypertrophy or even outright heart attack.

But the public bought it and even today when I am in gyms I see personal trainers teaching isometrics to their clients. This is some 50 years later. They don’t know why they are teaching isometrics, but they know that they’ve seen people doing them in the gym their whole lives so they must be good.

When Zynga became hugely successful on Facebook, they publicly attributed it to two things. “Fun Pain” and aggressive data collection. I’ve already addressed the limitations of business intelligence (BI) in the gaming space in previous articles, and I briefly discussed fun pain in my 2011 “Two Contrasting Views of Monetization”.

Both ideas are still intensely pervasive in the gaming space years after the Zynga implosion, and more than 5 years since I predicted this and discussed the real reasons for Zynga’s success in my 2011 “Zynga Analysis” paper which I wrote for 2K Games and later published.

How do you make a consumer pay for something you already gave them for free? It’s not an easy question to answer, and the solution coming from Zynga was that if you didn’t make a player uncomfortable enough, they wouldn’t spend. If you made them too uncomfortable they would churn out. But somewhere in the middle…there was this Holy Grail spot where you could make players spend and they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves. Finding this spot was the job of BI. Well the spot turned out to be mythical so millions (if not billions) spent on BI never found it and conversion rates stayed at a tragic <2% level.

Competitive “midcore” games managed a slightly less tragic ~5% conversion rate by sacrificing game lifespan and the female demographic.

There are signs that developers are waking up to the reality that perhaps you can actually make more money from players that are not frustrated while playing their games. This transition is not easy, because for every team member who says “why do we want to frustrate our players?” there will be two team members who will champion a pro-frustration mechanic, because “that’s what we do”.

I saw this struggle play out as I was enjoying the recent “free weekend” for Elder Scrolls Online on Steam. The game originally launched with the archaic “retail plus subscription” business model, but they tried to also capture some microtransactions on top of that, much in the way Arena.net did with Guildwars 2. A year later they made the subscription “optional”, and the retail price is inching towards $0 (but officially still at $29.99 on Steam).

I had a lot of fun playing ESO. I love exploring dangerous and dark locations and being rewarded by finding loot in really weird places. I most enjoyed collecting bugs which I could later use for either fishing bait or for alchemy recipes. Even junk items like old swords or shields had some value because I could break them down for materials and craft xp back in town. The early game economy was much better designed than what was done for Guildwars 2. If you are curious how I analyzed the Guildwars 2 economy, you can read that here.

The problem I ran into was that the inventory space is extremely limited (60 bag spaces and 60 bank spaces), so even with stopping quests and running back to the bank (tripling the time to complete quests) to offload items, I ended up being “inventory locked” after five hours. Inventory lock occurs when you have to destroy something valuable every time you want to pick up something else that might be more valuable. People don’t like being forced to destroy their own valuables, and having to choose which one survives and which doesn’t. It’s one of the most frustrating things you can subject a person to. It’s like reward removal but even worse because instead of just taking away something you just gave the player, you make the player have to choose what to destroy. It might be something the player has been lugging around for hours or days.

And it is there by design.

Just as in Guildwars 2 the dev team decided to frustrate players by offering them a game where they would experience inventory lock and then be frustrated into buying additional inventory space. Spending more than $5 for 10 more inventory spaces would have delayed inventory lock by perhaps another hour. This game demands at least 500 inventory spaces, and if you play for a year I can imagine needing over 2000. When I saw this mechanic I was ready to quit a game that I was really enjoying for the first few hours.

The game also allows the player do everything themselves, and thus fosters no interdependency. This is a problem because it creates a Massively Singleplayer environment. More detail on why that is bad can be found in my Star Wars: TOR review.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel here. The development team must have seen the problems and reacted with the “ESO craft bag”. This is quite brilliant and player friendly. It automatically sucks all crafting materials (which is the vast majority of what you will pick up) into an infinite bank space that all your characters share. You don’t have to run to town or anything, it happens instantly and automatically. When you craft something, it draws from this craft bag without you having to open it.

Now with the craft bag, the player is free to actually play and enjoy the game without spending most of their time frustrated while they deal with inventory management issues. This is quite liberating and clearly a victory for the “anti-frustration” faction at Bethesda. I’m sure it was hotly contested back in the design room. The compromise that allowed it into the game was to make it “subscription only”. So yea you can play the game for free for about 5 hours until inventory lock, and then you have to pay for the subscription to keep playing without constant extreme frustration.

It would be nice if Bethesda was more transparent about how limited gameplay is without the subscription, but by (current) industry standards, this product now gives a lot of value to the consumer if they are willing to pay every month for an epic high quality RPG instead of paying once.

Following the victory of the anti-frustration camp at Bethesda, the BI team is no doubt reporting much better metrics coming out of the game. These are the numbers they were hoping for at launch. Better late than never, and now that the game is player-friendly, ZeniMax has decided to essentially “relaunch” the game with a new round of marketing funds.

So if you are in a studio right now making a game, and wondering “why am I being asked to frustrate my players?” Well now you know. If you don’t like it, say something. You might get shamed at first, but your voice could lead later to product success and a nice promotion. This is perhaps a selfish suggestion on my part, because when I talk to studio heads and they ask me for the game equivalent of an “isometrics coach”, this is a really awkward situation for me that I have not figured out a politically correct solution for.(source:gamasutra)