Motivation

This is a close look at motivation I performed, which was a part of my original planning for the creation of the blog, but also my play style in WoW. I imagine you, and anyone else who reads this, has had a similar event.

In order to spend our $15 a month, Blizzard Entertainment has crafted for us an immersive, content-rich fantasy world for us to explore. Progressing through it is a reward in itself, and much of the content is as fun the second time around as it initially was. But what happens after that? When a player reaches max level, begins on the 'end game' and repetition encounters. Purists explain that this is the 'real game' and that everything before was just training. Fair enough, but all of that primary content was more enjoyable! It did not include sitting in a major city, listening to twelve year-olds duke it out about who has the most gear. It had no continuous 'Be here at 7PM or die' forced expectation, where you sit in front of your computer for a prescribed 4 hour period to do something you've done repeatedly for the past 3 months. This is the real game, but who want's to play it?

In truth, no one wants to. There are many reasons people raid, but it is not 'enjoyment' directly. They have to make motivators to be able to enjoy this content. It can be as simple as 'We did all of the bosses without dying once' or perhaps it's 'Our guild has the highest rank according to some website that isn't Blizzard owned, that rates these things that everyone respects and agrees with'. These are good examples, poor ones would be 'I want to have better purple clothing that everyone else' or perhaps 'my dps needs to be better than anyone else on recount'. Whatever someone chooses, these are the motivators for doing this horrible, painful, non-enjoyable activity.

In rare cases, additional enjoyable experience can occur that is a side-effect of such horrible activity. The group of people you do this with may be funny, enjoyable to play with, and make the time rewarding in spite of what you are doing. This can be great fun, as long as everyone enjoys the taste of the floor for hours at a time while having fun. This is rare though.

When asked, the average level 80 character will defend their activity fiercely. When presented with the least biased question asking them to rationalize their motivation, their responses consistently fell back to three categories.

• The social environment that raiding guilds offer / camaraderie.
• The fantasy fulfillment similar to a professional athlete at 'end game' content.
• Fun. Many definitions under this category. All violently avoided the point of repetition dungeon clearing.
  

For the purposes of this blog, these motivators are immensely important to understand and predict. Without knowing why people raid, you can't estimate when raiding flasks would be high sellers, versus when they would die down in popularity (see: TotC and welfare no-skill raiding). It makes sense that a Goblin would spend brainpower to understand the market and it's activities as well as possible. If you want to become rich from the Auction House, you must learn how to discover and understand Motivators.

I could (And someday will) go into detail as to how each of these are telling of the person who uses them as a motivator to play the game. Consider this: The average 10 year old player that has a level 24 character receives vastly more enjoyment playing this game than your more common 20-30 year old white collar raider. Disability/special needs players gain incredibly more than that. I believe them when they say Wow is 'fun'. Not the 20-30 year old.

To put this into the simplest of terms, lets look at today's Auction House. If you just scan the main page, it will tell you the total number of items being sold. Today that number is 14,330. Only 50 of these items are priced over 1k. 5k of these are Trade Goods (Farmed, or made from farmed), 3k of these are wearable gear, and both gem and glyph markets are the same at 2k each. yesterday there was 16,800 items. It's safe to assume that some of these auctions have expired, all the same items have been purchased and sold over the past 24 hours constantly.

Thus concludes part 1, next time I'll dig into how these motivators can be directly used for profiting purposes, and how to identify them in our market research.