Reward and Punishment

I used to play Maplestory a lot. I loved the visual style, and as a fan of action RPGs the game-play appealed to me, but the game's pacing was rather upsetting. There are many points in the game where you have nothing better to do than to grind for levels. Many of the quests that are offered do not properly reward you for the effort invested in them, and due to this I have come to a sort of realization.

The way games should work is that the player is rewarded according to how much effort they invest in a particular activity. The way games actually work is that the player is rewarded arbitrarily according to how the designer felt. I have seen many RPGs hand out ultimate weapons for merely chatting up random NPCs while simultaneously burdening them with the irksome task of slaying 1,000 monsters for a handful of potions.

Many games also seem to resist punishing players for failure or for obviously bad judgement. Many games also like to throw in the "you thought you were doing good, but no! You've done evil and now I'm going to punish you" events. Don't punish a player for having good intentions! If I want to save the old man from the raging inferno, I shouldn't be told I've just saved the world's most wanted rapist and then thrown in prison for helping him. But don't tell the player that everything will be alright when they get their heads handed to them when they start their game by wandering into the Dungeon Paved with the Corpses of Level 1 Adventures. If a player shows bad judgement, tell them!

Punish failure, reward success. It's not hard.