Harg Harfardarssen
Cipher
Better do that than just follow research data blindly... I'm quite sure that shit like "Use your tablet to call airstrikes!" came from a retarded suit reading a report on how the youth loves multi-tasking....
Yes, sitting people in a room and asking them leading questions is less productive than masturbation, but that isn't the type of study I was talking about.
It would be interesting to take a combat prototype for an action-MMO and perform a study to determine if playtesters will enjoy the game more due to tab targeting. Will they play for longer before becoming bored/fatigued? etc.
Or to design a study aimed at discovering why players want access to sprawling feat trees that provide only the illusion of choice and the very real chance of bad choices. Why does Billy sit in his MMO beta requesting talent trees and promptly look up a build provided by someone else the moment they are added to the game? etc.
What is the optimal cost of useful in-game items to migrate F2P players to paying players? Where is the data that says a F2P game shouldn't offer a 'subscription' that provided a standardized set of pay items to a player each month? (One of the primary reasons I don't ever put money into a F2P game is that all of the items are either pointless pageantry or feel like cheating.) How much more likely is a player to pay for an in-game advantage if it can be hidden from their opponent? (Science can be evil too)
Apparently, League of Legends has multiple psychology-type PhDs on staff doing research into player behavior, although apparently its mostly directed towards getting the players to stop calling each other fags.
I think there is likely quite a bit of internal research at these companies on the various gameplay elements that will cause players to spend more money or make subscriptions stickier. However, I doubt any of it would be made public because 1) it provides a competitive advantage and 2) it probably has nothing to do with making the games more satisfying and everything to do with making the games more stimulating to the sub-rational elements of the brain in order to facilitate compulsive, joyless play.
I bet in a decade or two the MMO industry will have a minor scandal when some disgruntled employee releases internal memos in which Blizzard execs discuss how to increase the nicotine content in WoW and give quests with pictograms to make the game playable to children too young to know how to read.