@sunnnyfay's post on Artfol
I had to unlearn hoarding items and other consumables in games, and it is shocking how much more fun those games are when you use the items!!
For example, in Splatoon 2 you collect tickets for food and drinks by playing the Salmon Run mode. I didn't use any of them at all for the first eight months! There was no reason not to use them either. Saving them served no purpose; they offered buffs to multiply your earned coins or your level. Some would increase the chance you rolled a specific buff on your gear. You can't sell them and can't do anything with them besides use them. There is zero advantage to saving them up!
This behavior is so common and one game that tried to fight it is Breath of the Wild. The game actively discourages hoarding by crafting scenarios where you have to use your items, and by breaking weapons and tools after using them for awhile. While personally I think most weapons should have lasted a little bit longer, the result was players who used interesting weapons on the fly, and not only is that fun and interesting, but it couldn't have existed without breaking used weapons to make room for new ones.
Game designers probably fight with hoarding as one of their top issues. Consumable items are scary because running out at an inopportune time feels scary. Fighting with players other urge, to play the game efficiently, is another issue that's related. You've probably seen it before, but that's when a player will find an efficient way to do something in-game and inadvertently suck all the joy out of the gameplay by doing it the more efficient way. This is, of course, a much scarier beast because players use games in unexpected ways all the time, and predicting how someone might streamline a part of the game can be tricky.
Some games limit the number of holdable items to avoid item farming, other games will try to make the efficient route actually fun, there's lots of answers to the problem. Pokemon made changes in Legends Arceus that spoke to this concern, in fact. In that game, you earn special "XP Sand" by winning battles and you can use it to boost specific stats of your Pokemon.
Previously, to do the same thing, you had to fight an obnoxious number of specific Pokemon. Each individual Pokemon would give a +1 to a specific stat when defeated, and since the maximum total points you can earn is 510, that means grinding 510 battles. As you might imagine, the company never intended this really specific use of the feature.
But this is a real world example of a major change to the game meant to stop players from interacting with their game in a way that really was not enjoyable. (There's a similar issue with the breeding system that they've somewhat streamlined with the bottle cap system as well, but I think there needs to be a little more fixing on that area before we've really solved that one completely. The bottle caps is still very grind heavy.)
So anyway, you should try using consumable items in games if you have a hoarding tendency, it really does make games better! Excessively hard games might actually be much more balanced when you use items. Don't worry that you might run out at a bad time either, the game developers are very smart and know to offer you the things you'll need to fight the big bad guys! So stop stocking up in front of the boss dungeon, only to never use any of that stock!
And uh, if you did actually read my rant, let me know what you think!Aug 23, 2022
For example, in Splatoon 2 you collect tickets for food and drinks by playing the Salmon Run mode. I didn't use any of them at all for the first eight months! There was no reason not to use them either. Saving them served no purpose; they offered buffs to multiply your earned coins or your level. Some would increase the chance you rolled a specific buff on your gear. You can't sell them and can't do anything with them besides use them. There is zero advantage to saving them up!
This behavior is so common and one game that tried to fight it is Breath of the Wild. The game actively discourages hoarding by crafting scenarios where you have to use your items, and by breaking weapons and tools after using them for awhile. While personally I think most weapons should have lasted a little bit longer, the result was players who used interesting weapons on the fly, and not only is that fun and interesting, but it couldn't have existed without breaking used weapons to make room for new ones.
Game designers probably fight with hoarding as one of their top issues. Consumable items are scary because running out at an inopportune time feels scary. Fighting with players other urge, to play the game efficiently, is another issue that's related. You've probably seen it before, but that's when a player will find an efficient way to do something in-game and inadvertently suck all the joy out of the gameplay by doing it the more efficient way. This is, of course, a much scarier beast because players use games in unexpected ways all the time, and predicting how someone might streamline a part of the game can be tricky.
Some games limit the number of holdable items to avoid item farming, other games will try to make the efficient route actually fun, there's lots of answers to the problem. Pokemon made changes in Legends Arceus that spoke to this concern, in fact. In that game, you earn special "XP Sand" by winning battles and you can use it to boost specific stats of your Pokemon.
Previously, to do the same thing, you had to fight an obnoxious number of specific Pokemon. Each individual Pokemon would give a +1 to a specific stat when defeated, and since the maximum total points you can earn is 510, that means grinding 510 battles. As you might imagine, the company never intended this really specific use of the feature.
But this is a real world example of a major change to the game meant to stop players from interacting with their game in a way that really was not enjoyable. (There's a similar issue with the breeding system that they've somewhat streamlined with the bottle cap system as well, but I think there needs to be a little more fixing on that area before we've really solved that one completely. The bottle caps is still very grind heavy.)
So anyway, you should try using consumable items in games if you have a hoarding tendency, it really does make games better! Excessively hard games might actually be much more balanced when you use items. Don't worry that you might run out at a bad time either, the game developers are very smart and know to offer you the things you'll need to fight the big bad guys! So stop stocking up in front of the boss dungeon, only to never use any of that stock!
And uh, if you did actually read my rant, let me know what you think!Aug 23, 2022
#rant
#games
#splatoon
#botw
#pokemon
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