A common criticism for live service games at the start is that they give too few rewards. When you hear this criticism, how do you go about fixing the issue?
Usually, those kind of complaints come from not having enough to do in the elder game - the max level, end game content - and the designers deciding to time-gate rewards in order to maintain engagement and keep players from burning out while grinding all rewards and then quitting. This also tends to be self-selecting since those complaining are usually the hard core players who consume content at a rate much faster than the median user. Hard core players are also the ones most likely to post about the game online, which often causes an amplification of the sentiment that isn’t necessarily representative of most of the player base.
These kind of complaints usually sort themselves out as we release more content for players to engage with. New content brings new and different rewards for players to chase. If players still want the old rewards in addition to the new, they’ll have more things to do when playing the game. As they finish consuming the content, the complaints will return as well. Whenever a live service game has a notable new content drought (typically more than 3 months), players will start complaining. The longer the content drought, the more common the complaints become and the higher the player churn rate climbs. We address these issues the same way - adding more new content. This is, of course, different from complaints that the new content isn’t good or engaging. That’s a different kettle of fish.
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