Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

In my mind, this isn’t strictly a gaming link so much as a study in how human psychology can crash and burn against bad design. Courtesy of GameSetWatch comes this link to an analysis of World of Warcraft’s annual Easter Egg hunt. That’s right, every Easter they throw easter eggs all over the place and let people find them. Sounds like fun, right?

Well, veteran MMOG designer Sandra Powers found a few problems, mainly around the rewards for finding the eggs. Most of them give you a handful of cheap food and low-value coins; but 1 out of every 200 eggs contains a special piece of clothing, the Elegant Dress, which you can’t any way except to show up on Easter Egg day and try your luck. Sandra has a detailed, perceptive and – to me – hilarious analysis of what could go wrong, and all the factors that make the holiday so hard to fix.

… Because of these factors, the event quickly devolves into a race for eggs. A low-level character will generally be at a disadvantage: they are unlikely to have any speed-increasing abilities, and they will also have to spend more time dealing with hostile creatures in the area. For higher level characters, it’s all about quick eyes and memorizing the locations where you’ve seen eggs before.

Some low level characters do indeed participate in this event in the manner that we imagined: they find a couple of eggs, enjoy their candy, and go on their merry way. But for many players, the lure of the dress is too strong. They spend hours running in circles desperate to find one more egg. The competition, the difficulty of finding eggs, and the low drop rate of interesting rewards all combine to frustrate many players, and the clear divide between “winning” (finding a dress) and “losing” (finding nothing but candy) makes it easy to feel that you have wasted hours of your life for absolutely no reward except a nasty eye-strain headache.

Frustration? Wasted time? People spending more time gaming the system than enjoying the game for its own sake? Sounds like WOW to me …