Game Theory - "The temple training room is east."

Need before greed (NBG)?

Since the days of boss mob camps in Everquest at the turn of the century gamers have been chasing shinies. Back then, we didn't have mob tagging. The grind ceased, and each member in the group typed /random and hoped for the best. The NBG paradigm applies to those games that don't implement mob tagging features for rewarding everyone who tagged the mob. The question of this post is: Is there any place for NBG in modern MMORPGs?

in favor of NBG in modern MMORPGs:
The real question from a game developer's perspective is whether or not gamers want to take the time to hunt boss mobs when the reward isn't guaranteed to benefit every group member in a permanent way. I think that receiving incremental rewards in a group setting is an affirmation that I am playing a MMORPG where other gamers care, or are at least sympathetic enough, to invest their time in helping someone else. I suppose that some games in the genre are designed to be rapid progression flavors; where gamers don't want to form deeper bonds with their fellow gamers. However, we are looking at this from a developer's perspective which means shouldn't we want our game's players to want to form bonds strong enough for the gamer to consider spending time with online friends rather than real world friends because that should insure that they will continue to use their money on our game rather than on material possessions with real world friends. But I must digress, perhaps modern gamers don't value bonds with online friends as they did 20+ years ago (the social media bubble such as it was).

against NBG in modern MMORPGs:
The modern MMORPG of today has adapted and matured over time. We have quality-of-life (QOL) features that didn't exist 20 years ago. If we did have these features back then would we even be having this debate. Furthermore, maybe we just have much less time than we did, and mob tagging is the way of the future.