I have been ranting again, full of prejudice :
What ... does not surprise me ... in this discussion about chain end rewards is that people are exclusively talking about one thing :
Loot.
This implies to me, that greed and selfishness are the most driving factors in people discussing quests - they want loot, not story.
This also implies that Blizzard has fully transformed the whole RPG genre - and MMORPGs as well - into loot games. The impact is 7 was so overwhelming that another form of role-playing games simply do not exist anymore. It's as if fast food had become the norm in restaurants, not French Cuisine.
I don't know whether this is even a cultural phenomenon. I had once heard that the "I want everything and I want it now" is a typical American thing. Hence loot-games : Fastest delivery of something materialistic.
Which might be why Blizzard had so much success. And sold the games they had success with based on cultural phenomenons overseas as wel, thus imposing to everyone that "this is the norm". We are used to internalize this "I want everything and i want it now" thing these days - even if it might originally have come from a different culture - and even although the own inherent, native, autochtone culture says something very different.
But - we have no chance to ward that off or to escape from it : The most successful thing overwrites our own cultural beliefs towards materialistic rewards.
My "inner cynic" says to me that people really don't want to discuss the psychological effects of quest rewards - rewarding that you have actually fulfilled a quest. And your character has survived.
Simple reward lists - like they are all give as reward by the quest-givers - simply do not "sound" as a display of acknowledgement that a player has actually managed to survive a given quest.
Simple reward lists just do not give the same psychological "rewarding" effect like chain end rewards do. Those who don't feel it are either too much hardened now, not sensitive enough, or too greedy.
The reward of having a feast at the very end of having built a house - together with everyone who was helping building it - is so much different than giving a milestone reward of having completed a given part of that house.
There just is a difference between milestones and completion.
Reward lists at the end of quests are milestones.
The chain end reward, however, that would be a feast : A special special reward. A reward so good that it would show that "it was worth it, playing through the whole quest chain".
This feeling, this emotional impact of relief - that "it's over now, we've suceeded !" is not sought by those who want everything, and they want it now.
This might even be a different cultural approach to end rewards - I don't know. I really can't say. What's striking me, however, is the strong difference between
- milestone rewards
- chain end rewards.
Someone who want fast results - and the emphasis is on "fast" ! - does not want any slow approach.
It might even be a thing of Extroverts (fast, strong emotions) vs. Introverts (slow, flower-sniffing), I guess.
If it is true that the U.S. is a rather extrovert oriented society, then : It's a cultural thing again, because there are other cultures which are more introvert oriented.