Feldon I saw this post on the EQ2 Forums and just had to share it.
Mikbove asks:
I’ve heard this phrase being bantered around a lot on this forum. However not being technological minded and all that, could someone please explain to me what it means on plain English.
Thanks in advance
Bawango of Antonia Bayle responded:
It goes like this: game designers are a creative bunch and they want to make games which, like a great movie, move the story along at an exciting pace. In come the thugs from accounting who tie them down and whip them until they promise to put countless repetitive and time consuming requirements into the game. The accounting thugs claim the company can’t make any money unless games are made this way. We’re still waiting for the MMORPG game which proves them wrong.
Time Sink – creating the illusion of content by forcing a given activity to take longer than it necessarily should. Ex.: ‘An Eye For Power’, Gryphon quests.
Using the description above…
Time Sink = All of EQ2.
Once your get your grifawn (or however you spell it,) it’s more acurately an artificial time sink. Without the arbitrary lockout timer of 18 hours, we could get the grifs in less then an hour. But we can’t have that, because no one would by the pegasus.
That’s “buy” not “by.”
Some time synch quests (griffawn quest comes to mind) may also have delays to help lore and immersion. I’m sure WoW fanbois just glazed over, but TRAINING an animal to be a mount takes much more than 5 days IRL. They could have let you train them in an hour IF they gave you a 90% chance to get knocked off win hit and 50% chance to randomly flop off (reducing as you gain mount experience flying).
Another, more likely thought, though is that here is no value in something easily and quickly gained. Case in point: if you could do the questline in an hour would $20 seem a lot for a mount you didn’t earn? With the number of people scooping up the mounts I’d say my 10 minutes per day over a few days is worth about 1950 SC. I’ll keep my money, thanks.
There is ppotentially a huge debate over intrinsic and extrinsic value but I’ll save Feldon the headache. 🙂
Personally I think the phrase “Timesink” is also used heavily by people who want things quicker and faster, and almost always do not want to do anything significant to earn it, quite a few mechanics added in to try to make the random number generator fairer or to reward less skilled players are labelled timesinks too…
I believe that MMO’s essentially are there to give a virtual world experience, and echoing the real world things take time to do, but I would like to see the way such things are progessed improved though.
MMO’s today still rely way too much on EQ1’s faction system for example, I reckon something more complex and more interactive could be implemented now.
E.g. gaining the trust of a faction should take time in a game, its just the way we do it that could be improved.
Exactly my point. No one would buy a grif for $20 if you could get one for no effort or cost. But if you’re not twiddling your thumbs for 18 hours, it’s not really a time sink because you could be doing other things with your time.
The Time sink is EQ1 was not so much the factions at first it was the game itself. Took forever to level, worse if you choose say an Ogre SK.
Crafting … is a timesink.
When I think time sink, I usually think of many of the systems from EQ1 like crafting, or faction grinding.
Well, I think what makes something a time SINK instead of time SPENT is how much benefit you get for the time invested. The benefit you get is measured against the time it would take to do other activities you find equally rewarding.
For example, maybe it typically takes you two hours of dungeon crawling to acquire an upgrade. A faction grind option is also available which requires 100 hours to purchase an upgrade. Once you run out of dungeon crawling upgrades and you’re forced to resort to faction grinding for upgrades the huge disparity in time spent for a reward definitely feels like a time sink.
Wikipedia has a good article on time sinks. I like the take it has: DOING something for two hours is a time sink; waiting for 18 hours is a cooldown (I.e. You don’t have to tap a button every 5 minutes for 18 hours, you can sleep).