People are not talking about artificially inflated raid difficulties man. They are talking about the game.
Raid *is* part of the game. If you can pick and choose, then WOW is simultaneously a very difficult (doing Sunwell at L70) and a very easy (the first few quests you did) game.
The statement that "WOW is easy" is simply wrong because there are parts which are NOT.
It is much more accurate to pinpoint which part of the game is easy, and which is hard.
Raids are stupid coop rpg features. Would it be better to say 95% of WoW is easy? Or leveling is too easy? Happy?
Raids are stupid coop rpg features. Would it be better to say 95% of WoW is easy? Or leveling is too easy? Happy?
Stupid to you, and enjoyed by MILLIONS.
Sure. leveling is easy. I agree. Actually there are ways to CHOOSE the difficulty to level though (just like choosing hardmode raids instead of normal). If you go level in a dungeon, and enter at the level it just becomes available (thus, level 8 in the first dungeon which is designed for L13), it is a bigger challenge.
Not many groups are doing that (also similarly, not many are doing hard mode raid) but it IS available if you want a challenge instead of leveling fast.
So the MOST accurate statement is that "easy leveling is available to all, but challenges are available".
Originally posted by Cuathon Originally posted by nariusseldon
Originally posted by Cuathon
present and future MMO down hill.
People are not talking about artificially inflated raid difficulties man. They are talking about the game. Raid *is* part of the game. If you can pick and choose, then WOW is simultaneously a very difficult (doing Sunwell at L70) and a very easy (the first few quests you did) game. The statement that "WOW is easy" is simply wrong because there are parts which are NOT. It is much more accurate to pinpoint which part of the game is easy, and which is hard. Raids are stupid coop rpg features. Would it be better to say 95% of WoW is easy? Or leveling is too easy? Happy?
It cannot be simultaneously argued that WoW has easy leveling content, and that the leveling content is most of the time spent in the game. The easier the leveling content is, the less time you'll spend on it.
I know people who have played WoW for 4 years, and I would guess the leveling time would be 6 months total (not for me, but I'm a little slow). For those people, 75% of the game was spent on hard content, and 25% of the game was spent on easy content. That's being generous. Even the slow people like me spent 50% to 75% of game time in hard content versus easy content.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
All successful MMOs started hardcore or semi-hardcore at launch. There hasn't been a successful casual MMO to launch. Hardcore players are the ones that determine the success of a MMO. Casuals only make for big lauches.
All successful MMOs started hardcore or semi-hardcore at launch. There hasn't been a successful casual MMO to launch. Hardcore players are the ones that determine the success of a MMO. Casuals only make for big lauches.
Money isn't a measure of success in an MMO.
Then what is the objective measure? Number of subs? (or active users?)
You know, your opinion does NOT count as an objective measure of success.
All successful MMOs started hardcore or semi-hardcore at launch. There hasn't been a successful casual MMO to launch. Hardcore players are the ones that determine the success of a MMO. Casuals only make for big lauches.
Money isn't a measure of success in an MMO.
Then what is the objective measure? Number of subs? (or active users?)
You know, your opinion does NOT count as an objective measure of success.
Becky, (thats my secretary) I'd like to see that list of 'successful MMOs' and you mean to tell me that they're ALL hardcore??
-okay enough of whatever that was..
SUCCESS..... i wonder if anyone has ever heard of an MMO called Runescape.. not much talked about, unlike WoW, besides to look down upon it from your empire of an ego. However, it's come a very long way, from 2D large world to 3D vast growing world occupied by hardcore raiders, PvPers, merchants and players who simply chat alike. I played for a few years however I never played WoW. I try to take what i can from other peoples' conversations about it.. and really the things said are literally all over the place (Raid's awesome, Raiding sucks, its so simple, there's a lot to know, ETC) but OP asked what do you consider to be easy about an mmorpg? how much effort do you need to put into an MMO for it to be difficult enough. I mentioned Runescape because no one can argue that it isn't easy. point and click -> see what happens. I wonder if anyone amongst you could name specifics to what you want for the game to be difficult enough to satisfy you. Im active in a few games, one being Grand Fantasia and as you level you unlock dungeons. However to face the dungeon in a full party of minimum level requirement is near impossible. is this the difficulty you seek? Maybe you're all really intelligent and managable people who are insulting the game rather than glorifying yourselves. Go on, pat yourself on the back, do a victory dance, scream to the world of your victory. in stead you complain of your unsatiable desire for difficulty.. for shame.
PS_ am i the only one who noticed the OP said that hardcore MMO heads are ruining MMOs?..
Originally posted by MMOExposed
And I notice this same kinda crying out here from the MMORPG community. these Hardcore players as we call them, seem to be the vocal minority, which are driving the development of present and future MMO down hill.
I'm still trying to figure out what, exactly, "Hardcore" means. Is it spending your entire waking life leveling up toons? Raiding 5 times a week for 6 hour stretches? Playing a game that has full loot ffa pvp? Playing a game with permadeath? So confoooosed.
Lets imagine we rate a game on how hard the game is to play and and how good the game is.
Lets imagine a developer is creating a game. And in a scale out of 100, the game is 80% good and 50% hard to play.
Now, if the developer changed the game making it 30% harder, to make it just 5% better, a hardcore gamer would think its ok, but the casual would think its a bad idea.
A hardcore gamer is willing to play a harder game if this means having a better gameplay, even it this amount of better gameplay is not so huge.
After they add LFR, the raid completion rate jumps to 35%. Thus, it is hard to argue people do not raid. At least 35% do. Why do so few % finish Fireland or Hard Mode? Too difficult of course. Blizz has also stated that they have DATA showing people are trying and stopping because of the inability to progress.
High risk vs reward pvp, very long travel, hours of farming .. none are complex. Just more time sink.
The only thing that CAN BE complex is the mechanics and WOW has some pretty complex combat mechanics. Just take MM hunter as an example. Do you know how many phases are there for their DPS, and when to use what shot? Some even depends on the dynamcis (since haste can be different at different time) of cast times of the shots.
Ditto for mages. Managing mana, burst CDs, procs and a host of other stuff is not exactly "simple".
Not that 35% again, how many of those have "just tryed it out" because its new? How many of those will quit after "seeing the endgame" once ?
What confuses me is that you obviosly like the complexity of combat/raid mechanics, but you are also saying that they have to be easyer, which is achieved mostly by diminishing the said complexity, i mean, how many people do you expect will try to do the "proper rotation" if you can do acceptable dps for that content just by spamming one spell? Wont that be a time sink? Or more apropriately, a hack and slah game you could play for free?
But one thing is close to the truth, "The only thing that CAN BE complex is the mechanics" , for YOU. And that is, i think, the difference, some people do see the complexity or challenge of finding ways to beat something like a grind game before retirement (you can be stupid and level on lv1 goats for 30 years, or not ) , but people like you dont, and i dont mean it in a negative way, what i do see as negative, is that people like you seem to have become the only focus for game companies these days.
I mean, Transformers 2 has its audience, but is that a reason not to at least try to be Avatar, a big budget big effect 3D thing AND a somewhat old-school scifi with something resembling story and characters?
Flame on!
Side note, managing mana on mages... has anything significant changed?
Cause i remember "We do not in general expect DPS to go OOM" and the funny thing that if you dump mana with ab (no other way to dump mana outside aoe), you get less dps than with a proper rotation, so no mana management, if you dont count knowing when to evo.
I'm still trying to figure out what, exactly, "Hardcore" means. Is it spending your entire waking life leveling up toons? Raiding 5 times a week for 6 hour stretches? Playing a game that has full loot ffa pvp? Playing a game with permadeath? So confoooosed.
Lets imagine we rate a game on how hard the game is to play and and how good the game is.
Lets imagine a developer is creating a game. And in a scale out of 100, the game is 80% good and 50% hard to play.
Now, if the developer changed the gamemaking it 30% harder, to make it just 5% better, a hardcore gamer would think its ok, but the casual would think its a better idea.
A hardcore gamer is willing to play a harder game if this means having a better gameplay, even it this amount of better gameplay is not so huge.
I read and reread this in an effort to think of an argument. Every time I had one I thought might be valid, I thought of circumstances relevant to something you posted here. Great analogy; there will undoubtedly be detractors to your sentiment, but I won't be counted among those. It's a pretty basic premise, but it works.
And in the end, I think I would qualify as a "hardcore gamer" after all...
A hardcore MMO would bomb so bad. Even the people that cry for a hardcore MMO wouldn't play it. They just like saying those kind of things.
A lot of points in this thread, but this one is probably easiest to agree with. There is still a desire for 'hardcore' MMOs, but it isn't as much as the slew of internet tough guys on this forum claim there is. "WoW is easy" but I haven't seen any armories of 2.4k+ PvPers or people who have cleared Heroic DS. "EVE is hard and the sandbox king" and I haven't seen user contributions from this site that shows them to be some sort of important person in the sandbox or have any real success in nullsec aside from events that get forgotten within a week.
Oddly enough, many people equate difficulty to only one thing: tedium. Just because a game is inconvenient and inacessible doesn't mean it's difficult in any skill-based way - it's just annoying to play.
Difficulty should come in the skill required of the player, not from 'features' designed to inconvenience. "BRO I HAD TO WALK TEN HOURS TO GET TO MY CORPSE THIS GAME IS SO HARD OMG SO HARDCORE!!!!!1!!!1" makes no sense. A game could have difficult combat but drop you right back at your body after you die. Most people would agree health bloat (increasing HP values to lengthen encounters) is not real difficulty, so why would long corpse running or a ridiculously high leveling curve be any more difficult?
A hardcore MMO would bomb so bad. Even the people that cry for a hardcore MMO wouldn't play it. They just like saying those kind of things.
A lot of points in this thread, but this one is probably easiest to agree with. There is still a desire for 'hardcore' MMOs, but it isn't as much as the slew of internet tough guys on this forum claim there is. "WoW is easy" but I haven't seen any armories of 2.4k+ PvPers or people who have cleared Heroic DS. "EVE is hard and the sandbox king" and I haven't seen user contributions from this site that shows them to be some sort of important person in the sandbox or have any real success in nullsec aside from events that get forgotten within a week.
Oddly enough, many people equate difficulty to only one thing: tedium. Just because a game is inconvenient and inacessible doesn't mean it's difficult in any skill-based way - it's just annoying to play.
Difficulty should come in the skill required of the player, not from 'features' designed to inconvenience. "BRO I HAD TO WALK TEN HOURS TO GET TO MY CORPSE THIS GAME IS SO HARD OMG SO HARDCORE!!!!!1!!!1" makes no sense. A game could have difficult combat but drop you right back at your body after you die. Most people would agree health bloat (increasing HP values to lengthen encounters) is not real difficulty, so why would long corpse running or a ridiculously high leveling curve be any more difficult?
Not that i would even want to get into everything you have written, but where are those "successful non-hardcore mmos" ?
Your biggest possible argument went from 0 to 12m players while BEING hardcore by todays standards, after it went non-hardcore it stagnated and even lost a visible amount of players recently, your other possible argument while being hailed as the mmo of the year, is yet to surpass older games in terms of subs, no sub records published, servers going free and/or merged...
The truth is somewhere in the middle, we both want to play
But if the games are becoming easier, than why so few people can beat the contents.
this is when I have to question, what the MMORPG community consider to be "EASY"......
People are not talking about artificially inflated raid difficulties man. They are talking about the game.
this^
mmos are easy mode these days because you can level to cap and get geared up really fast without breaking a sweat, which kills the purpose of having an mmorpg with exploration, in depth lore, good character progression. Now you just log in, mindlessly grind quests / dungeons and poof you hit level cap and to their surprise... theres no endgame. Why not play other genres then? something more immersive and you dont need to rush to the end to have some fun?
Not that i would even want to get into everything you have written, but where are those "successful non-hardcore mmos" ?
Sorry, you're responding to the wrong person I think. My post has nothing to do with the games - just the players, and the meaning of 'difficulty'.
I replyed to both of you, sorry if i misunderstood your point that difficulty exist only in short term and that if we remove all annoyances (and thus the reason to try to avoid them), it does not make the game easyer (why bother with learning to kite if i just respawn and continue) and somehow makes it better and more successful.
I replyed to both of you, sorry if i misunderstood your point that difficulty exist only in short term and that if we remove all annoyances (and thus the reason to try to avoid them), it does not make the game easyer (why bother with learning to kite if i just respawn and continue) and somehow makes it better and more successful.
Oh, sorry bro. I didn't realize that negative reinforcement equals punishment. Gotta put you back a few hours if you can't kite right.
If you have a full raid of people who are competent (meaning they don't stand in fire and know how to play their class), WoW is easy. The problem is that people are freaking idiots and incompetent and want to play with some broken, half-crap build because ... well because they want to.
This information actually confirms what I've been saying a long time, Raids are developed for non-casuals. If you have to sit down with a freaking calculator and do math for 20-60 minutes to optimize gear, you aren't playing a game... yet that is seemingly what developers want.
The concept of "Fun" has been lost in games. Developers want to keep the carrot on the stick just out of reach for as many people as possible, and yet allow some people to finish it to taunt/tease those who have not, while allowing those who do to feel all important and uber.
TBH, I'm SICK of the Engame Raid model, and I've not paid to play an MMORPG since quitting Rift, 5 or 6 months ago. A long time ago I sent feedback to Blizzard asking for multiple difficulties for raids (MAKE THEM EASIER) and they turned around and made Heroic raids. My guild at the time had grandfathers and grandchildren, it would have been very entertaining to actually finish content instead of bashing my head against the wall because a few of the people weren't OMG OPTIMAL. The content we could do, we were WAY over geared for. We all end up quitting because we wanted to play together (but there was no point to because we couldn't actually do anything).
DCUO took a step in the right direction with "Novice" raids. #$^& them for lowering loot drops and gear levels and locking us out of expert raids when we do novice... Keeping people playing >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> F U I HAS UBER LOOT.
If people can't even complete content, why do they bother putting lockout timers on stuff? FFS.
Comments
Raids are stupid coop rpg features. Would it be better to say 95% of WoW is easy? Or leveling is too easy? Happy?
Stupid to you, and enjoyed by MILLIONS.
Sure. leveling is easy. I agree. Actually there are ways to CHOOSE the difficulty to level though (just like choosing hardmode raids instead of normal). If you go level in a dungeon, and enter at the level it just becomes available (thus, level 8 in the first dungeon which is designed for L13), it is a bigger challenge.
Not many groups are doing that (also similarly, not many are doing hard mode raid) but it IS available if you want a challenge instead of leveling fast.
So the MOST accurate statement is that "easy leveling is available to all, but challenges are available".
People are not talking about artificially inflated raid difficulties man. They are talking about the game.
Raid *is* part of the game. If you can pick and choose, then WOW is simultaneously a very difficult (doing Sunwell at L70) and a very easy (the first few quests you did) game.
The statement that "WOW is easy" is simply wrong because there are parts which are NOT.
It is much more accurate to pinpoint which part of the game is easy, and which is hard.
Raids are stupid coop rpg features. Would it be better to say 95% of WoW is easy? Or leveling is too easy? Happy?
It cannot be simultaneously argued that WoW has easy leveling content, and that the leveling content is most of the time spent in the game. The easier the leveling content is, the less time you'll spend on it.
I know people who have played WoW for 4 years, and I would guess the leveling time would be 6 months total (not for me, but I'm a little slow). For those people, 75% of the game was spent on hard content, and 25% of the game was spent on easy content. That's being generous. Even the slow people like me spent 50% to 75% of game time in hard content versus easy content.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
All successful MMOs started hardcore or semi-hardcore at launch. There hasn't been a successful casual MMO to launch. Hardcore players are the ones that determine the success of a MMO. Casuals only make for big lauches.
Money isn't a measure of success in an MMO.
Then what is the objective measure? Number of subs? (or active users?)
You know, your opinion does NOT count as an objective measure of success.
Becky, (thats my secretary) I'd like to see that list of 'successful MMOs' and you mean to tell me that they're ALL hardcore??
-okay enough of whatever that was..
SUCCESS..... i wonder if anyone has ever heard of an MMO called Runescape.. not much talked about, unlike WoW, besides to look down upon it from your empire of an ego. However, it's come a very long way, from 2D large world to 3D vast growing world occupied by hardcore raiders, PvPers, merchants and players who simply chat alike. I played for a few years however I never played WoW. I try to take what i can from other peoples' conversations about it.. and really the things said are literally all over the place (Raid's awesome, Raiding sucks, its so simple, there's a lot to know, ETC) but OP asked what do you consider to be easy about an mmorpg? how much effort do you need to put into an MMO for it to be difficult enough. I mentioned Runescape because no one can argue that it isn't easy. point and click -> see what happens. I wonder if anyone amongst you could name specifics to what you want for the game to be difficult enough to satisfy you. Im active in a few games, one being Grand Fantasia and as you level you unlock dungeons. However to face the dungeon in a full party of minimum level requirement is near impossible. is this the difficulty you seek? Maybe you're all really intelligent and managable people who are insulting the game rather than glorifying yourselves. Go on, pat yourself on the back, do a victory dance, scream to the world of your victory. in stead you complain of your unsatiable desire for difficulty.. for shame.
PS_ am i the only one who noticed the OP said that hardcore MMO heads are ruining MMOs?..
Lets imagine we rate a game on how hard the game is to play and and how good the game is.
Lets imagine a developer is creating a game. And in a scale out of 100, the game is 80% good and 50% hard to play.
Now, if the developer changed the game making it 30% harder, to make it just 5% better, a hardcore gamer would think its ok, but the casual would think its a bad idea.
A hardcore gamer is willing to play a harder game if this means having a better gameplay, even it this amount of better gameplay is not so huge.
Not that 35% again, how many of those have "just tryed it out" because its new? How many of those will quit after "seeing the endgame" once ?
What confuses me is that you obviosly like the complexity of combat/raid mechanics, but you are also saying that they have to be easyer, which is achieved mostly by diminishing the said complexity, i mean, how many people do you expect will try to do the "proper rotation" if you can do acceptable dps for that content just by spamming one spell? Wont that be a time sink?
Or more apropriately, a hack and slah game you could play for free? 
But one thing is close to the truth, "The only thing that CAN BE complex is the mechanics" , for YOU. And that is, i think, the difference, some people do see the complexity or challenge of finding ways to beat something like a grind game before retirement (you can be stupid and level on lv1 goats for 30 years, or not
) , but people like you dont, and i dont mean it in a negative way, what i do see as negative, is that people like you seem to have become the only focus for game companies these days.
I mean, Transformers 2 has its audience, but is that a reason not to at least try to be Avatar, a big budget big effect 3D thing AND a somewhat old-school scifi with something resembling story and characters?
Flame on!
Side note, managing mana on mages... has anything significant changed?
Cause i remember "We do not in general expect DPS to go OOM" and the funny thing that if you dump mana with ab (no other way to dump mana outside aoe), you get less dps than with a proper rotation, so no mana management, if you dont count knowing when to evo.
I read and reread this in an effort to think of an argument. Every time I had one I thought might be valid, I thought of circumstances relevant to something you posted here. Great analogy; there will undoubtedly be detractors to your sentiment, but I won't be counted among those. It's a pretty basic premise, but it works.
And in the end, I think I would qualify as a "hardcore gamer" after all...
A lot of points in this thread, but this one is probably easiest to agree with. There is still a desire for 'hardcore' MMOs, but it isn't as much as the slew of internet tough guys on this forum claim there is. "WoW is easy" but I haven't seen any armories of 2.4k+ PvPers or people who have cleared Heroic DS. "EVE is hard and the sandbox king" and I haven't seen user contributions from this site that shows them to be some sort of important person in the sandbox or have any real success in nullsec aside from events that get forgotten within a week.
Oddly enough, many people equate difficulty to only one thing: tedium. Just because a game is inconvenient and inacessible doesn't mean it's difficult in any skill-based way - it's just annoying to play.
Difficulty should come in the skill required of the player, not from 'features' designed to inconvenience. "BRO I HAD TO WALK TEN HOURS TO GET TO MY CORPSE THIS GAME IS SO HARD OMG SO HARDCORE!!!!!1!!!1" makes no sense. A game could have difficult combat but drop you right back at your body after you die. Most people would agree health bloat (increasing HP values to lengthen encounters) is not real difficulty, so why would long corpse running or a ridiculously high leveling curve be any more difficult?
Not that i would even want to get into everything you have written, but where are those "successful non-hardcore mmos" ?
Your biggest possible argument went from 0 to 12m players while BEING hardcore by todays standards, after it went non-hardcore it stagnated and even lost a visible amount of players recently, your other possible argument while being hailed as the mmo of the year, is yet to surpass older games in terms of subs, no sub records published, servers going free and/or merged...
The truth is somewhere in the middle, we both want to play
this^
mmos are easy mode these days because you can level to cap and get geared up really fast without breaking a sweat, which kills the purpose of having an mmorpg with exploration, in depth lore, good character progression. Now you just log in, mindlessly grind quests / dungeons and poof you hit level cap and to their surprise... theres no endgame. Why not play other genres then? something more immersive and you dont need to rush to the end to have some fun?
Sorry, you're responding to the wrong person I think. My post has nothing to do with the games - just the players, and the meaning of 'difficulty'.
I replyed to both of you, sorry if i misunderstood your point that difficulty exist only in short term and that if we remove all annoyances (and thus the reason to try to avoid them), it does not make the game easyer (why bother with learning to kite if i just respawn and continue) and somehow makes it better and more successful.
Oh, sorry bro. I didn't realize that negative reinforcement equals punishment. Gotta put you back a few hours if you can't kite right.
If you have a full raid of people who are competent (meaning they don't stand in fire and know how to play their class), WoW is easy. The problem is that people are freaking idiots and incompetent and want to play with some broken, half-crap build because ... well because they want to.
This information actually confirms what I've been saying a long time, Raids are developed for non-casuals. If you have to sit down with a freaking calculator and do math for 20-60 minutes to optimize gear, you aren't playing a game... yet that is seemingly what developers want.
The concept of "Fun" has been lost in games. Developers want to keep the carrot on the stick just out of reach for as many people as possible, and yet allow some people to finish it to taunt/tease those who have not, while allowing those who do to feel all important and uber.
Game developers assume that ALL players can actually manage 10+ cooldown, boss mechanics, and play their class optimally. This is why only a small % finish raid content - because most people in these games CAN'T. http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/431/view/forums/thread/323790/Average-player-in-this-game-is-really-stupid.html
TBH, I'm SICK of the Engame Raid model, and I've not paid to play an MMORPG since quitting Rift, 5 or 6 months ago. A long time ago I sent feedback to Blizzard asking for multiple difficulties for raids (MAKE THEM EASIER) and they turned around and made Heroic raids. My guild at the time had grandfathers and grandchildren, it would have been very entertaining to actually finish content instead of bashing my head against the wall because a few of the people weren't OMG OPTIMAL. The content we could do, we were WAY over geared for. We all end up quitting because we wanted to play together (but there was no point to because we couldn't actually do anything).
DCUO took a step in the right direction with "Novice" raids. #$^& them for lowering loot drops and gear levels and locking us out of expert raids when we do novice... Keeping people playing >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> F U I HAS UBER LOOT.
If people can't even complete content, why do they bother putting lockout timers on stuff? FFS.