One of the best pieces of evidence for this theory is an incident that occurred during the development of online role-playing game World of Warcraft. While the game was in beta testing, its developer, Blizzard, added a “rest” system to the game to help casual players develop their characters at a pace slightly closer to that of the game’s more serious players, who tended to devote much more time to the game and thus “leveled up” much more quickly.
The rest system gives “rested experience” at a gradual rate to players who are not logged into the game. As initially implemented, characters who had available rest experience would acquire experience points for their character at a 100% rate, diminishing their rest experience in the process. Once you were out of rest experience, your character was reduced to earning experience at a 50% rate. Because rest experience accumulated slowly, only while offline, and capped out after about a day and a half, players who logged on to the game every day for short periods of time were able to earn experience points most efficiently, lowering the extent to which they were outpaced by heavy players.
But while the system was achieving its goal, almost all of the game’s testers hated it, no matter how much they played. They felt like they were being penalized for playing too long, which just didn’t seem fair.
Blizzard fixed it by changing the rested rate to 200% and the normal rate to 100%, without changing the actual number of experience points earned.
They just relabeled the percentages, told everyone that that was what they were doing, and then everyone stopped complaining and was perfectly happy with the system.
An alternate hypothesis: people are loss-averse.
One of the best pieces of evidence for this theory is an incident that occurred during the development of online role-playing game World of Warcraft. While the game was in beta testing, its developer, Blizzard, added a “rest” system to the game to help casual players develop their characters at a pace slightly closer to that of the game’s more serious players, who tended to devote much more time to the game and thus “leveled up” much more quickly.
The rest system gives “rested experience” at a gradual rate to players who are not logged into the game. As initially implemented, characters who had available rest experience would acquire experience points for their character at a 100% rate, diminishing their rest experience in the process. Once you were out of rest experience, your character was reduced to earning experience at a 50% rate. Because rest experience accumulated slowly, only while offline, and capped out after about a day and a half, players who logged on to the game every day for short periods of time were able to earn experience points most efficiently, lowering the extent to which they were outpaced by heavy players.
But while the system was achieving its goal, almost all of the game’s testers hated it, no matter how much they played. They felt like they were being penalized for playing too long, which just didn’t seem fair.
Blizzard fixed it by changing the rested rate to 200% and the normal rate to 100%, without changing the actual number of experience points earned.
They just relabeled the percentages, told everyone that that was what they were doing, and then everyone stopped complaining and was perfectly happy with the system.