Yeah thats right...........
I think balance through soft psychological incentives is a mistake in arcadey action games and ends up being the game design equivalent of technical debt - a low cost, short term solution that ends up costing a lot down the line.
Soft psych incentives are basically just you relying on the average player's preferences or lack of knowledge when balancing a game. For example waving away first order optimal strats because they are boring to perform so most players won't do them, ignoring broken shit cuz its hard for new players to discover, adding farming/grinding thinking players will opt into no grind runs, that type of stuff. If all mechanics need a cost and benefit, then this would be using stuff external to the game system to create cost.
I see 2 big problems with this design approach
#1 It falls apart as games get more difficult
Here's the thing with player preferences - they are not set in stone and they change based on the player's interaction with a game. The harder a game is, the more cost there is to sticking to your preferences. At some point (different for each player, and different based on their current skill level, patience level, knowledge of similar but better games, etc) the cost of ignoring the tedious shit will exceed the cost of engaging with it and that's where everything completely breaks.
And that itself is a problem because not only are you building your game as a kind of one off throwaway experience that doesn't stand up to stress tests, but you're also encouraged to avoid those stress tests entirely. After all, the most obvious solution to players doing boring shit because playing properly is too costly is simply to make playing properly cheaper - making it easy.
#2 It creates a choice between fixing the game or fixing the player
I think this stuff opens up a nasty can of worms because it encourages developers & other players to start thinking about how they can better manipulate players rather than make a better more future-proof game.
Because aside from making a game easier to lower the cost of playing properly, developers can "buy" the player with manipulative tricks like progression systems and such. It subtly shifts design towards marketing. And players themselves adapt the same kind of attitude - instead of asking developers to fix the game they create stupid honor systems and try to create social cost to engaging with games in particular ways. That's how you get some really nasty peer pressure tactics, and self imposed challenge runs being portrayed as "playing the game properly".
So yea, please please please consider this type of shit because nothing in the market will push you into considering this. If you're making a game, run into a busted strat, and think "oh well that's fine it's kinda boring to do" keep this shit in mind and maybe reconsider. Cause as that stuff stacks, it can become a huge issue.
I talked about this stuff before but I thought of taking a slightly different angle on it that might be easier to understand. Here are the previous posts :
Risk reward doesn't scale
Encourage cheesy strats
Also even though I said this only applies to arcadey action games, that's not true at all I think this applies across the board but convincing say RPG fans of it is too much effort so I'm staying in my lane
