The Casual and the Hardcore

Bodak, on 24 March 2014 - 07:55 AM, said:   Bang on the money and well worth QFT. For those who don't know- B.F Skinner was a behavioural Psychologist who experimented on animal learning. A Skinner box is a cage with no stimuli and only a simply activated switch for interaction. Pressing the switch dispenses a single pellet of food. The animal inside (usually a rat or a pigeon) activates the switch accidentally at first, but the food pellet acts as a positive reinforcer for that activity so that the animal eventually learns to press the bar when it wants to feed itself.   Here's the relevant part:   Expressed as a graph, switch presses form a sort of bell curve as the animal at first presses the switch only infrequently, then more often. Eventually however, once the connection has been made, switch-pressing declines and occurs only when the animal wants to eat.   Skinner wanted to find out whether switch pressing could be increased further and in subsequent experiments, found that introducing a random element to the switch increased the frequency of switch pressing. In other words- if the animal learned that a press of the switch guaranteed positive reinforcement, it would eventually only press the switch when it wanted food. If however the pressing of a switch didn't always yield positive reinforcement, it would be much more active in pressing the switch.    In the context of WOT- even the best player can't guarantee a good game when they press the battle button and we've all experienced that 'one more game' feeling trying to get the daily double bonus on a tank that just won't win. Let me clarify that: Obviously, only an idiot would expect to win all the time- but its not unreasonable to expect to feel like you've influenced the game in some way. Even in a loss, you can feel like it was a good, close game.  Its clear from the threads on here that this is a rare feeling amongst the bulk of the player-base.   Because performance varies so wildly from game to game, the positive reinforcement of winning (or playing well) can't always be guaranteed. Having  fostered that obsessive mindset in the player, WG then offers short-cuts for cash micro-transactions, in a way that can't be called 'pay-to'win', but at the same time clearly allow the player to advance faster. Put another way- take your favourite, high-tier, elited tank, strip out your consumables and equipment modules, replace the gun, engine etc with stock equivalent and replace your three-skill crew with the a 75% one. Now play a few games and tell me there isn't a massive incentive to use free experience to skip that grind in the hope that better equipment will lead to a greater correlation between pressing the 'battle' button, and the endorphin reinforcement of being in the top five players of a winning team.    Summary: The game is very carefully designed and balanced to reduce player agency and increase player frustration in order to generate revenue streams that rival triple-A titles.