The Business: Commercially-Driven Product Design In Action

It is difficult for some people to comprehend what I am talking about when I say that commercial incentives have perverse effects when it comes to game design.

That is why I have to go outside of Tabletop to find comparable examples from time to time, so again I'm pointing to World of Warcraft to illustrate the point.

TLDR: Blizzard's game design for Retail WOW is so bloated that most players can't execute their bloated rotation of abilities to achieve the necessary damage/healing output while staying alive and avoiding mechanics. To rectify this, they are putting that rotation on an in-built macro so that most players--those unable to not stand in the fire and meet the damage thresholds required--can meet those requirements on the two lowest difficulties (because no, you still won't be able to do that on Heroic or Mythic in raids or high levels of Mythic+ in Dungeons).

Why?

Commercial incentives. Specifically, the incentive to maximize player retention by making low to mid-level endgame content participation metrics higher by reducing the barrier to entry present because over 80% of the population cannot perform to standard and execute encounter mechanics competently.

"Really?"

Fuck yes, it is. It's been a problem since Vanilla--Classic, these days--such that there's been PARODIES.

And at the high level, that capacity max out performance while executing mechanics is what wins World First races- and with it, prizes and prestige. PVP is no less a massive filter for attention and execution capacity, which is why those that are hardcore about it are as big on practice as professional athletes.

To keep the participation rates up, they nerfed the requirements to perform in order to beat encounters. Participation rates means retention rates go up, which in turn keeps revenue from subscriptions up and increases revenue from the Cash Shop.

There's your real incentive.

This has nothing to do with making the best possible game. This has everything to do with Line Must Go Up.

You can see this same thinking take place with commercially-driven Tabletop publishers also, like Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop (but this drives so many others), and it is this force that perverts game design away from making a proper game into a Viable Product (and now, the Minimal Viable Product) as the basis for Endless Product Slop.

This is what the Colony Drop ended by killing the commercial viability of Tabletop.

This is why you need to stop bothering with selling product as anything but a self-sustaining hobby; the incentives by themselves are sufficiently corruptive to pervert it into something that cannot meet requirements.

Now consider what would done to actually unfuck WOW if commercial incentives weren't driving everything, but instead the incentive was to refine how the game worked to achieve the promised gameplay experience 100% of the time. That's what Tabletop is again able to do, and should because the money's gone- and with it, the clout.

That's the difference. If you need to be paid to be in Tabletop, you don't belong.