Game Design and the Pitfalls of "Farm Content"

Taril

So with the recent talk about the upcoming change of content and suggestion of a focus on updating existing zones and the ado surrounding "Overland Difficulty", I wanted to muse about the overall design in the game and the detriment that has been caused by "Farm Content"

What do I mean by "Farm Content"? No, I don't mean farming simulators like from the Mists of Pandaria expansion in WoW, nor do I mean something like grinding Hecklers in Anarchy Online for exp.

What I mean by this is systems that push you into doing specific content. Repeatedly. Namely in the form of Daily quests. This underlying system has tremendous impact on overall content and not in a good way.

For a start, we have several main types of content available in the open world areas of the game (AKA "Overland");

- Delves
- Public Dungeons
- Incursions
- World Bosses

Every zone in the game is made up of several of these (With exception to some DLC zones like Hew's Bane that don't have a Public Dungeon) along with a handful of "Quest hub" areas (That normally only have a single quest for some reason).

However, "Farm Content" has a significant impact on all of these. With the end result being massively hamstringed "Content" that has way more potential than is utilized. Why is this? Because each piece of content is designed to be farmed due to Daily quests.

Even in the base game, starting at level 10 you start getting daily quests from the Mages Guild, Fighters Guild and Undaunted to go do specific Public Dungeons, Dolmens and Delves respectively. While every DLC zone has a daily quest for a specific World Boss, Delve and then just any DLC Incursion.

How does the existence of Daily quests impact things?

For the base game, it nullifies any and all actual interesting game design. Public Dungeons literally give you a tutorial pop up saying how dangerous they are and how you need to group up with other players to tackle them. But they're literally harmless. Delves existence seems meaningless because they're just crappier versions of Public Dungeons (Less loot opportunities and no skill point for beating the last boss). Incursions are pathetic at best or actively farmed (For some reason) with little thought, namely in Al'akir.

None of these pieces of content have any actual weight, they're basically nontent rather than content. Anything that might be interesting about them, such as interesting mechanics like traps, notions of thinking about stealthing through to avoid danger, or any impact on the world is null. Why? Because they need to be farmed for dailies. People don't want dailies to be difficult or time consuming, so the content that is required by them needs to be watered down into nothingness.

In DLC content things change. With the requirements now being a World Boss instead of a Public Dungeon and some differences in overall difficulty (World Bosses and Incursions no longer being an absolute joke and being somewhat challenging for 1-3 players... But still being pushovers when zerged through by a bunch of people - Which happens frequently during events that push people into doing this farm content). Now we see the flip side of the poor decision regarding "Farm Content" whereby content is now prohibitively difficult to complete (Since many older DLC zones are pretty quiet) but yet people are still expected to farm the content because that's how rewards are gated (Be they equipment sets for the stickerbook, leads for antiquities, motifs/styles or even companion Rapport)

Meanwhile, we still have a lack of weight to this content. Since it's all revolving around being farmed, thus being readily available it's all just about things just sitting there. Waiting for people to come deal with it.

Now what do I mean by "Weight" in these contexts? Well, good examples can come from other games and their usage of similar types of content;

- Delves - The way in which these are presented in ESO is that they're supposed to be a sort of "Solo Dungeon" type experience, as a contrast to the Public Dungeons. Many Asian MMO's are very well versed in this sort of content. We also see things in ESO like the Main Story quests as well as things like Heists and Black Sacraments that set up "Solo Dungeons" (The latter still falling into the pitfalls of "Farm Content" and being annoying af as a result)

Pushing these more towards being mini-dungeons would vastly increase their overall gameplay value, giving players access to (More) easily clearable instanced content that can have all the bells and whistles of interesting content so long as they're not made to be farmed by daily quests.

- Public Dungeons - These have been around since MMO's began. I have fond memories of early days of MMO's such as in Everquest and Anarchy Online which featured Public Dungeons. Which were exciting places. With groups forming outside of them to try and push to the deepest areas for the best loot, while solo players could try and sneak their way in to specific bosses or simply use them as a place to farm enemies (Back in the days where the primary source of exp was... Just killing stuff)

This sort of thing eventually was phased out in lieu of regular dungeons. Which initially had the same premise. People would form groups outside and then go into the dungeon to clear it. Which removed the things regarding the nature of "Public" dungeons, such as multiple groups competing to have a chance to clear the place for loot, random solo players tagging bosses before a group takes it out to steal all the loot rights (This was still before games like WoW implemented easily identifiable markers that someone else had loot rights and well before the implementation of "Everyone who participates has loot rights/Participation based loot distribution" systems) and of course the infamous "Trains" (People who had aggro running back to the entrance to leave and making all enemies start attacking everyone nearby because there was no leashes to prevent enemies from chasing the entire length of the dungeon)

Though even this iteration of regular dungeons eventually was phased out in lieu of "Dungeon Finder" as a more convenient way of forming groups and accessing the content.

Is there still a place for Public Dungeons, given these evolutions (And the existence of Regular Dungeons and the Dungeon Finder tool?) and the presence of Delves? Perhaps. Though it's really hard to find a place for them to have an actual impact. Since if Delves were made to be the smaller scale mini-dungeons and then you have the actual dungeons as the group content then having Public Dungeons as some sort of kinda mini-dungeon but more group reliant is kind of awkward.

One could consider repurposing them into sprawling quest hubs. Whereby you progress through a substantial storyline throughout this more complex sub area.

- Incursions - When it comes to Incursion type content, it's hard to overlook Rift and its uhhh... Rifts. Both the scope and impact of such were a defining feature of the game and was one of the things that made the game actually interesting.

The first thing to note was that the Rifts in Rift were more than just static events that sat there until someone decided to clear it. Enemies spawned from Rifts would actually start to move out and attack settlements and could even take them over. This of course was a little awkward for someone who just wanted to go questing, but it's nothing a little Rift clearing and town recapturing couldn't solve.

This turned Rifts from being yet another static "Public Quest" event into something that had an actual impact on the zone and provided more content than "I suppose I'll go clear the thing up now I have a quest to do so" or "Lets just run around farming these for exp". A Rift appearing was somewhat exciting and could bring people from all over the zone together to clear it out, not just for the loot/exp it provided but to also stop it from interfering with the zone itself.

In addition to this, there was even "Raid Rifts" which were bigger and more dangerous. Requiring a lot more people to complete. But the upside was that it was Raid content... But public. Meaning that anyone could come to it and eke out some participation and grab some loot (However little) even if the bulk of the work was done by the raid group that prepared for it.

- World Bosses - Much like incursions, there's a pretty good example of an implementation of world bosses. That being Guild Wars 2. Whereby world bosses are much bigger and more threatening. To the point of their activation can create a zone wide event in order to deal with them. Of course one of the issues with GW2's WB's is similar to that of ESO's DLC WB's whereby many zones thinning out the playerbase can leave times where a WB cannot be completed due to not enough players (At least with aforementioned Rifts, most regular Rifts could be cleared by a solo player without much difficulty)

It's possible that these such things would be better implemented as "Raid Rift" type events. Players activate them when they have a team set up to tackle them, but other players can flock to the zone and participate in a large scale event of epic proportions.

These are all examples of how content could be more substantial, if it wasn't all designed to be part of silly Daily quests that you do a bajillion times.

Muizer

'Farmable' and 'engaging' content are very difficult to reconcile. ESO tries to do it by leaning heavily on (skipable) story dialogue for engagement. That only goes so far though. I suppose I'm with you in the camp that finds engagement much more important than rewards, but that seems to be very old-school.

Taril

Muizer wrote: »

'Farmable' and 'engaging' content are very difficult to reconcile.

The best way to do it is by separating things.

You can have brainless farming content. While having other actual engaging content.

The trick is to not make all the content farming content - Which is sadly the case with most open world content since it is stuck being farmed for the daily quests.

Muizer wrote: »

I suppose I'm with you in the camp that finds engagement much more important than rewards, but that seems to be very old-school.

The two aren't mutually exclusive though.

Engaging, lengthier content can still be rewarding. It just has to be rewarding enough to equate to "Farm content"'s increased number of runs.

I.e. Instead of doing a mindless daily every day. Do one lengthier but engaging piece of content per week that gives 7x the rewards. Both would give equal rewards over the period of a week.

ESO seems to be relying on that daily cadence to keep people logging in. But there's simply so many daily things these days to get people to log in (Log in rewards, Endeavors, Mount Training, Writs, Daily Dungeon/PvP rewards, Pledges and of course the billions of daily quests) that there's not as much need to put so much emphasis on daily quests to run dull farm content.

Such emphasis on daily cadence rewards is more indicative of all those terrible Live Service games that fail to be interesting and only keep their audience through this daily reward scheme. Meanwhile you have games like BG3, CP2077, BoI, STS, Skyrim that people clock in thousands upon thousands of hours in... Because the game is just fun to play.

SeaGtGruff

I am clocking in thousands upon thousands of hours in ESO, because for me the game is just fun to play.

I love having repeatable content in a game. One thing I dislike about some of the single-player Elder Scrolls games is having a cave or ruin that's a one-off location-- clear it once, and you're done with it for life. I don't necessarily want to see the same quest bosses and "named" NPCs show up over and over again, but I'd like to be able to go back to a cave or ruin after some period of time has elapsed, find that another gang of baddies has moved in, and be able to clear it out again.

As far as what you call "farming" content, I think the main problem is not how it's designed, but how a lot of players choose to engage with it. It seems like a lot of players are primarily interested in rewards, often to the exclusion of doing things just for the fun of it, or grinding content repeatedly in search of some specific reward until they turn it (in their minds) into some kind of unbearable drudgery that ruins any sense of enjoyment they might have ever gotten out of it.

For instance, the daily delve quests and daily boss quests in a zone are intended to be completed once per day-- by which I mean one delve quest per day and one boss quest per day. But due to the fact that the daily quest reward coffers can include occasional bonuses like a page from one of the zone's crafting motif styles, many players take advantage of quest sharing to do all of the different delve quests and/or all of the different boss quests in a single day. And they may do that day after day, week after week, until they finally collect all of the crafting motif pages or other bonus rewards, after which they basically are done with ever wanting to do those quests, ever again. Yet if they would stick to doing but one delve quest and one boss quest a day in a zone, and change it up by switching to some other zone once in a while, they would not burn themselves out on that content until they're absolutely sick if it.

As far as I've been able to tell from reading these forums, the rewards are also the most important thing to a lot of players who've been asking for a difficulty slider. Consider what happened when Necrom was released. Some players complained of the increased difficulty in the content, whereas other players seemed to think it was a wonderful thing-- except-- they also said that the rewards just weren't good enough for them, so despite the difficulty of the content being more enjoyable to them, they would not be continuing to engage with it because the rewards were too lackluster.

The way I read their comments, fun was definitely a second priority, much less important to them than receiving a lot of nice rewards. And players who feel that way do not expect to receive the same rewards for doing more challenging content as they receive for doing easier content; they expect the rewards to be markedly better. They don't want to get the same gear; they want to get a "Perfected" version of the normal gear, or something else that is "more awesome than usual." It isn't about the fun, but rather about the rewards. And I think most of them want the rewards to be something they can brag about or show off to the rest of the players.

I'm somewhat pessimistic about what's going to happen with the "harder overland" experiment, because I'm expecting a lot of players to react just like they did after Necrom's release-- "Gee, this increased difficulty is nice and stuff, but the rewards are just too so-so, so I'm not going to bother with this new content because the rewards just aren't good enough to make me want to engage with this content more than once." Go back and read those old threads after Necrom's release to see what I mean.

Sometimes I like to ride in a big loop around a zone and fight all of the bosses, one after the other-- not for the daily quests and reward coffers, but just to have fun fighting them. My character's DPS is substandard, so it can take me several minutes (up to 10 minutes or longer, depending on the boss) to solo a boss, and a number of them are beyond my ability to solo. But I don't look at the fights as taking "too long," and don't judge whether the rewards are "appropriate" for the time and effort I've invested, because I'm not doing it for the rewards-- or rather, the feeling of fun I get is my reward.

"Fun" is a subjective feeling, and two different players can do the exact same content and walk away with totally opposite opinions about whether or not it was "fun," so for a player to say that game X is more fun than game Y is largely meaningless, since another player might feel that game Y is much more fun than game X.

In my humble opinion, if a lot of the players would just stop grinding, and stop farming content for the rewards, and would just permit themselves to relax and have fun just for the sake of having fun (regardless of what specific type of content they are most interested in), then they probably wouldn't be so discontented with the game. Attitude can be a real game-changer.

liliub17_ESO

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

As far as what you call "farming" content, I think the main problem is not how it's designed, but how a lot of players choose to engage with it. It seems like a lot of players are primarily interested in rewards, often to the exclusion of doing things just for the fun of it, or grinding content repeatedly in search of some specific reward until they turn it (in their minds) into some kind of unbearable drudgery that ruins any sense of enjoyment they might have ever gotten out of it.

I think there's room for both the OP's and this take on the matter to be correct.

Admittedly, I do not do dailies most of the time. Login, sure. Maybe the daily endeavors depending on what they are and, if the weekly seems doable, I'll work on that a little. It all depends on how the work week goes. My play time is supposed to be an escape, not another mini-job.

For me, delves and dungeons aren't farm fodder, they're parts of the story. But that means that their premise has to connect to the story. And, frankly, more and more I find that lacking or at least hard to decipher. Daily crafting should be the same - all the bajillion of swords and armor and foodstuffs we players have crafted for the war effort over the years ... do we ever see the result or are the armies stockpiling? (hmmmm, that would be a fun little side-quest discovery.)

Games like BG3 and its predecessors have always been popular with a certain group of gamers because decisions and actions do make a difference. In ESO, there really isn't any difference with your choices in quests or dungeons. It's all watered-down gruel with a reward chunk of gristle in the last spoonful.

Apologies for the ramble. I really shouldn't respond before caffeine kicks in fully.

colossalvoids

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

"Fun" is a subjective feeling, and two different players can do the exact same content and walk away with totally opposite opinions about whether or not it was "fun," so for a player to say that game X is more fun than game Y is largely meaningless, since another player might feel that game Y is much more fun than game X.

In my humble opinion, if a lot of the players would just stop grinding, and stop farming content for the rewards, and would just permit themselves to relax and have fun just for the sake of having fun (regardless of what specific type of content they are most interested in), then they probably wouldn't be so discontented with the game. Attitude can be a real game-changer.

As someone wanting vet overland I do recognise that probably the most people who want "the same" thing want a different iteration of it, or want just the rewards part as those are obvious majority of players, not just ones who want a slider or anything - just in general. People want rewards, don't care for the meaning of it or symbolism, just more, better and faster which makes me concerned thinking that implementation might be targeting those players first again, same as pursuits and similar systems that are just a glorified hamster wheel more or less.

Taril

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

As far as what you call "farming" content, I think the main problem is not how it's designed, but how a lot of players choose to engage with it. It seems like a lot of players are primarily interested in rewards, often to the exclusion of doing things just for the fun of it, or grinding content repeatedly in search of some specific reward until they turn it (in their minds) into some kind of unbearable drudgery that ruins any sense of enjoyment they might have ever gotten out of it.

It's both.

People wanting their rewards leads to designs where rewards are not gated behind anything that could remotely be considered a speed bump.

So we get things like "Public Dungeons" where the tutorial pop up tells you that they're difficult and you will need a group to deal with things... Then some random level 3 noob can clear the entire thing solo without breaking a sweat.

Design of things becomes watered down because it's being designed with this notion of being grinded repeatedly and so the players who are grinding it repeatedly don't want it to take any effort because it's "Tedious enough" without having actual tangible resistance (In various forms - Traps, difficult encounters, puzzles that are actually puzzling etc)

Like, the issue isn't just "It's repeatable content" but rather "It's repeatable content designed to be repeated en masse" - Thanks to the daily quests tied to them. Even if someone only does 1 Daily per day, that's still them running this content every day, likely as a chore before they go and do something they actually want to do, because the reward is stuck in that stupid daily box rather than from actually doing the content.

Content like Dolmens, Delves, Public Dungeons, WB's have the capacity to actually be cool and interesting designs, where the draw is in actually doing them because they're fun content. But they're held back by being designed as "Farm Content" pushing people to spam them over and over every day because the only way to get X, Y and Z rewards are to do the dailies and open the boxes and as such, overall depth is reduced so people are less irritated by their need to farm these chores.

katanagirl1

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I am clocking in thousands upon thousands of hours in ESO, because for me the game is just fun to play.

I love having repeatable content in a game. One thing I dislike about some of the single-player Elder Scrolls games is having a cave or ruin that's a one-off location-- clear it once, and you're done with it for life. I don't necessarily want to see the same quest bosses and "named" NPCs show up over and over again, but I'd like to be able to go back to a cave or ruin after some period of time has elapsed, find that another gang of baddies has moved in, and be able to clear it out again.

As far as what you call "farming" content, I think the main problem is not how it's designed, but how a lot of players choose to engage with it. It seems like a lot of players are primarily interested in rewards, often to the exclusion of doing things just for the fun of it, or grinding content repeatedly in search of some specific reward until they turn it (in their minds) into some kind of unbearable drudgery that ruins any sense of enjoyment they might have ever gotten out of it.

For instance, the daily delve quests and daily boss quests in a zone are intended to be completed once per day-- by which I mean one delve quest per day and one boss quest per day. But due to the fact that the daily quest reward coffers can include occasional bonuses like a page from one of the zone's crafting motif styles, many players take advantage of quest sharing to do all of the different delve quests and/or all of the different boss quests in a single day. And they may do that day after day, week after week, until they finally collect all of the crafting motif pages or other bonus rewards, after which they basically are done with ever wanting to do those quests, ever again. Yet if they would stick to doing but one delve quest and one boss quest a day in a zone, and change it up by switching to some other zone once in a while, they would not burn themselves out on that content until they're absolutely sick if it.

As far as I've been able to tell from reading these forums, the rewards are also the most important thing to a lot of players who've been asking for a difficulty slider. Consider what happened when Necrom was released. Some players complained of the increased difficulty in the content, whereas other players seemed to think it was a wonderful thing-- except-- they also said that the rewards just weren't good enough for them, so despite the difficulty of the content being more enjoyable to them, they would not be continuing to engage with it because the rewards were too lackluster.

The way I read their comments, fun was definitely a second priority, much less important to them than receiving a lot of nice rewards. And players who feel that way do not expect to receive the same rewards for doing more challenging content as they receive for doing easier content; they expect the rewards to be markedly better. They don't want to get the same gear; they want to get a "Perfected" version of the normal gear, or something else that is "more awesome than usual." It isn't about the fun, but rather about the rewards. And I think most of them want the rewards to be something they can brag about or show off to the rest of the players.

I'm somewhat pessimistic about what's going to happen with the "harder overland" experiment, because I'm expecting a lot of players to react just like they did after Necrom's release-- "Gee, this increased difficulty is nice and stuff, but the rewards are just too so-so, so I'm not going to bother with this new content because the rewards just aren't good enough to make me want to engage with this content more than once." Go back and read those old threads after Necrom's release to see what I mean.

Sometimes I like to ride in a big loop around a zone and fight all of the bosses, one after the other-- not for the daily quests and reward coffers, but just to have fun fighting them. My character's DPS is substandard, so it can take me several minutes (up to 10 minutes or longer, depending on the boss) to solo a boss, and a number of them are beyond my ability to solo. But I don't look at the fights as taking "too long," and don't judge whether the rewards are "appropriate" for the time and effort I've invested, because I'm not doing it for the rewards-- or rather, the feeling of fun I get is my reward.

"Fun" is a subjective feeling, and two different players can do the exact same content and walk away with totally opposite opinions about whether or not it was "fun," so for a player to say that game X is more fun than game Y is largely meaningless, since another player might feel that game Y is much more fun than game X.

In my humble opinion, if a lot of the players would just stop grinding, and stop farming content for the rewards, and would just permit themselves to relax and have fun just for the sake of having fun (regardless of what specific type of content they are most interested in), then they probably wouldn't be so discontented with the game. Attitude can be a real game-changer.

I agree with most of what you said, especially for players coming into the game at some later point. They have dozens of zones to choose dailies to complete and they don’t already have the rewards. For those of us who have kept up with all the chapters and dlc, we already have just about everything from previous zones and the newest thing is all we have left to obtain. We’ve already done all of the dailies in all the previous zones to get the rewards or gotten tired of the repetition and moved on. Older zones also didn’t require so much grinding to get the rewards, up until Elsweyr I think, when motif and style pages started having a cooldown of once per day. I only did dailies on one character up until the cooldown started, then I did them on more than one character for a while just to get a page a day, but that was not fun in my opinion. How many times can you run dailies before they are not fun, though? Not many in my case. So if they are not fun and you are not getting the rewards, then it is time wasted. I am certainly not one who expects instant gratification, my achievements show that I put the time in to get Grand Master Crafter before AWA and Grand Overlord before war tortes.

I think also in these times of less content they really need to be sure that we don’t feel like a good portion of the time we spend is wasted time. The idea is probably to slow us down a bit so we don’t blow through all the new stuff too fast, but too many barriers in front of progression can turn players away. There are always other games that we can play instead of wasting time chasing moving goalposts.

MincMincMinc

Just the years and years of produced content wasted. The shear number of hours wasted making all of the overland content and quests that are just as easy as the tutorial.

I don't know why they ever made the decision to treat every single dlc as if it were a new game that needed to hand hold people through 90% of the content.

Desiato

So after ESO had a bad launch, ZOS scrambled to reinvent the game. This was during the summer of 2014.

I recall Zenimax hosted a stream in which they talked about the adjustments they were going to make.

The one that stuck with me is they expressed a need to create a "constant/endless reward cycle".

This preys on our motivation and reward systems the same way a Skinner Box does.

Years later, we have a playerbase that I think is caught up in this "endless reward cycle" instead of doing things they legitimately enjoy.

It's impossible to enjoy the "end games" of PVE and PVP combat without engaging in these systems, although I do my best to avoid them. Sometimes the rewards are too good to ignore like the 2024 Jubilee, so I got sucked in like many players and resented the game as a result.

The thing is that ESO was a high budget title financed by people who invested in Zenimax and expected a return and was subsequently purchased by Microsoft who surely expects a return, so I don't expect this to change.

With all that said, I hope the devs can figure out a way to lessen the impact and make these things easier to ignore for those looking for a more traditional MMO experience.

I'd like to log into ESO like I did 2014-2016 and think to myself, "what do I feel like doing today?" instead of immediately powering through a list of chores I hate but are necessary for my characters to progress.

For example, consider the PVE script grind.