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Message: <blockquote data-quote="amysrevenge" data-source="post: 5161305" data-attributes="member: 61298">Whew!  Just read the whole thread to here in one go (and have delayed bedtime by about an hour to do so!)It took about half the thread, but I think I understand the premise of the OP, and can see where some people are arguing things that are not quite what is being aimed at here.Looking at it from a scientist/engineer perspetive, my biggest problem is with the way that the trend of shorter-cycle gratification has been extrapolated.The argument seems to me to be thus:  the reward cycle is shorter now than is was before, ergo it will continue to get shorter until it is effectively infinitely short, or at least is so short as to lose value to a large number of participants (ie. shorter besomes shortest, and shortest is too short).To my eye, that is only one way of extrapolating "shorter".  For poops and chuckles I whipped out a fancy graph to show what I mean.  I realize that this is quantifying what is ultimately a qualitative factor, but humour me - I'm not assuming any sort of actual units here, only a sort of relative measure.  I literally fudged with numbers until I found lines that looked how I liked.<img src="http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j21/amysrevenge/bs.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The blue line represents the "shorter -> shortest -> too short" line of reasoning.The red line, however, represents a sort of "diminishing returns" sort of decay in the duration of the reward cycle.  Sure it's always getting shorter, but the incremental decay is smaller each time, until, if designed well, it reaches a stable "shorter" that might actually result in a fun and marketable game.</blockquote>

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