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Re:The Door Problem of Combat Design by tomc1985 on Saturday August 10, 2019 @04:01PM (#20664208)
> "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring.

If the player is enjoying themself exploiting these attributes, then how is it boring? Is it boring to the spectator? If so, what does that say about the act of playing a game?

Re:The Door Problem of Combat Design by hombre_fatal on Saturday August 10, 2019 @06:44PM (#20664953)
> If the player is enjoying themself

Well, sure.

But the issue is that optimal gameplay isn't always fun for the player, but it may be too strategically effective to ignore.

The game in the article isn't likely to maximize fun for the player if the player feels obligated to abuse the door in every single combat encounter. Or use the same overpowered weapon and always have enough ammo to ignore the rest.

Save-scumming often suffers from this as well where the advantage of getting a good RNG roll (like which item will appear in the chest) is so good that the player can feel obligated to reload the game 20 times every time they encounter a chest. You could fix this by making a chest contents deterministic, like based on some global seed. Or replace save-files with an autosave-only feature.

Good game design can save the player from themself and force them to have fun, so to speak.

Making games fun is hard.