Because the mass majority of players want to play a GAME for the purposes of entertainment. Most have challenging lives, difficult jobs, school courses, etc. so when they set down to relax and play a game they really don't want it to be an exercise in frustration. Games with huge learning curves or where the player's character is underpowered are just not what most folks want to play, especially as a big time sink, people want to feel like a hero not be tread on like so many people's real life does. It's escapism and yes some people enjoy a maddeningly difficult experience, most people just want to win.
I for one don't need to repeat the same boss fight 50 times to figure out some one-way to kill them pattern to make myself feel accomplished. I enjoy the games for what they are. If I want more of a challenge I will PVP or log off and take a MENSA test.
This is a very common complaint on the WoW forums... Most of the time done by people who have not done the hard-mode content or have all the achivements. Read in to that what you want.
Beyond that this thread reads like it is the "pat on the back day" at the elitist club for internal admiration...
Originally posted by tixylix It is always the way, something is challenging, people complain on the forums, they make it easier and those people leave any ways. In my case I love the challenge, I love achieving something that puts me in an exclusive club. My heart pumps when I know there is risk/reward and knowing I could lose, that is where excitement comes in. There is nothing fun about going around tanking every mob in the game and just mindlessly killing everything in sight to level up, that is just called a grind. The fun is having to work with other players to complete something that is hard, knowing that you might not be able to even do it with the group you have. I remember even with the early days of WoW, dungeons used to be hard and quite often we would fail because the group would fall apart. Now though you just run through it in 10 mins with no challenge and it is just boring, people just grind them for the loot only now.Playing Operation Breakout on CS:GO, I had a mission where I had to join a death match server and grind away 30 kills with a certain gun. That was just a boring grind and it wasn't fun, yet I bet it is the exact thing people want because they just want to rush to the reward. I have another mission that I have yet to complete which is winning in competitive mode on a certain map. That has been much more exciting, there is something really on the line there, there is no guarantee that I'll ever complete it as I can fail unlike the last mission. I've tried it 3 times now and I've failed each time, that is up to 90 mins a pop. It is fun, it came down to the wire the last time I tried, I was the last man alive and my heart was pounding and my hands were shaking so badly. I lost and felt devastated, but if I succeeded I would have had such a high. Those extreme emotions are things I experienced in early MMOs, ones which were challenging. I don't get that any more, MMOs are made too easy or have been dumbed down over time. You end up going through the content and you just feel nothing but boredom, everything is now a means to an end, when you get to the end you quit the game. I never used to play old MMOs to get to the end, in fact I probably never got to what you could call the end on any of them. I used to play to have fun, to feel those wild swings in emotions. Now though everything is made so everyone can experience it, it is basically just a checklist of easy content that has been designed with one thing in mind and that is levelling up your character and doing it FAST and EASY.This is something that has always pissed me off and the reason why I ended up quitting so many MMOs in the past. I remember SWG starting off as being a hard and harsh game, every patch seemed to be doing something to make it easier though. It got to the point where we had two major game changes in an effort to make it super easy and dumb. It made no sense to me as the skill box system is far more intuitive than the talent tree system, it offered far more variety as well. I just thought it was funny because Jedi used to have harsh death penalties to keep them in line as they were meant to be rare and over powered. People though always claimed server instability killed them and whined on until they lessened the Death Penalty to basically nothing... like funny that, always someone else's fault but yours. When I died all fully geared back when Dayz came out and was a challenging game, I didn't whine on about it being the servers fault and wanting them to take the death penalty away, I just fucking got over it and started again... Developers have become like mini celebs now though, they've all gained big egos now that fans are all communicating with them through social media and forums etc. So developers want their content to be played by everyone, they're making content that satisfies their own ego rather than what is good for the game. I just cringe every time I hear a developer saying "we spend this amount of time making whatever and only 2% of people saw it" and using it as an excuse to why they've made something easier or taken it out of the game. Like ok so just make a boring corridor instead then, make sure everything we see is exactly what everyone else is seeing. I don't get that argument, what makes open world games fun is discovering things other people haven't seen, if we're all sent down the same path each time then it isn't a world any more, besides it makes replayability boring. I'm just so tired of all these excuses around something being challenging to why people are leaving their game. Dumbing down a game has never made it more popular or kept players on, it just satisfies the short term and harms the long term.
players cause this, blame them and weak dev teams with no real strong minds they give always into dumb down. This will not change soon, on all fronts sandbox or themepark 99% devs are weak prolly also because of publishers $$$ is most importend so whiners always win.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
In game metrics and limited resources. Would a developer spend more time and money making content thats available to the majority of their player base or the top preforming (being generous) 15% or so? Assuming all players are spending the same amount of money on a sub.
Im not against hard content, I like having a glass ceiling to help keep me motivated to play, something that TOR lacked, but development costs are ballooning and they need to triage and try to make the content available to as many people as possible to give the majority subscribers something to keep them interested.
So they can draw in new players to replace the old ones leaving.
Do you really think a brand new player to an old MMO is going to slog through 90 levels of super hard and super grindy content that no one has played in over 5 years just so they can join the highly insular and bitter veteran players?
Hell no. They'll be gone in a week to some shiny new MMO.
It is inevitable that MMOs will lose people over time(and, yes, that includes WoW) so if they are unable to attract new players then they will slowly die.
You may call it "dumbing down" or "selling out" but Im sure the developer would call it "keeping their jobs".
I am using your DFUW reference to tell a story about the term "hard" has totally different meanings for different people.
When I started playing DFUW over half a year ago it had a strong focus on PVP and allowed to gear up (basic gear, not the good stuff which needed active farming) semi afk. The game was mostly about PVP, which was challenging and fun. I lost a lot of gear, but it was replacable without going through the boredom of actively grinding brain dead mobs for too many hours.
Then the guys on the VIP forum started crying about not being forced to PVE enough. It would make the game a "PVP arena" type of game if you only actively farmed for good gear, food, potions, clan warware items etc. And AV listened to these guys.
During the discussion about these changes that added lots of "content" that has absolutely no challenge in it I was called "easy moder" or similar a lot. And I wondered how someone is an easy moder if he doesn't enjoy dumbed down, boring, bugged content. Took me a bit but then I realized that these guys used the terms "hard" to describe the challenge of bearing with the boredom of killing mobs for many hours constantly.
So yes, everybody has their own definition about what's "hard".
Stop playing monopoly jr and complaining they dumbed down monopoly. There are plenty of games around that are hard. Uncharted waters online, priates of the burning seas, mortal online, and dungeons and dragons online. Make a rouge in ddo, and try to solo everything. Even games like lord of the rings online have challenges , try to make max level with out dieing.
If you want the reason why look at the history channel, it went from teaching people history to reailty tv shows. Btw ulitma online never got dumbed down it got a lot harder over the years. The only thing they did was make it so people could get away from the obnoxious, crazys by going to tram. If uo didn't do that there would be no one playing uo
Being contantly killed by some one who understands the game better, cause he is a jerk is not making a game complex. A shipbuilding system that requires a long hard grind, and ships can be made useless if you dont understand what your doing is hard.
In the same game one has players with tens of thousands (even hundreds of thousands) of experience in either that game or across a genre that is very similar and players that just started.
As you increase difficulty the smaller the number of players can do it.
One can say "look at darksouls".
Sure darksouls did good, but 2.3 millions around all the platforms isn't an amazing number of sales, just when you consider the type of game.
Then there is the type of skill you ask for.
Timing? Hours spent preparing? Social interaction leading to a network of people?
People will complain about any skill requirement that they are bad at and demand that all challenge fit the skill they are good at.
For example, many people complaining about the jumping skill required for the new zone in GW2. Anyone that has no problem at jumping just breeze past it since it is quite easy even compared to medium difficulty jumps already in the game.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Its about MONEY. And no commentary on player base capability, nor culture nor any other little aspect of today's gaming will change that. Anything that facilitates income is in, anything that generates overhead or expenditures is out.
It switched from Fun to Money about 20 years ago. Long enough ago that the thin tendrils of greed were not quite perceptible in the beginning and only now have manifested into Kraken tentacles.
Comments
Because the mass majority of players want to play a GAME for the purposes of entertainment. Most have challenging lives, difficult jobs, school courses, etc. so when they set down to relax and play a game they really don't want it to be an exercise in frustration. Games with huge learning curves or where the player's character is underpowered are just not what most folks want to play, especially as a big time sink, people want to feel like a hero not be tread on like so many people's real life does. It's escapism and yes some people enjoy a maddeningly difficult experience, most people just want to win.
I for one don't need to repeat the same boss fight 50 times to figure out some one-way to kill them pattern to make myself feel accomplished. I enjoy the games for what they are. If I want more of a challenge I will PVP or log off and take a MENSA test.
Help support an artist and gamer who has lost his tools to create and play: http://www.gofundme.com/u63nzcgk
simpleton
This is a very common complaint on the WoW forums... Most of the time done by people who have not done the hard-mode content or have all the achivements. Read in to that what you want.
Beyond that this thread reads like it is the "pat on the back day" at the elitist club for internal admiration...
This have been a good conversation
players cause this, blame them and weak dev teams with no real strong minds they give always into dumb down. This will not change soon, on all fronts sandbox or themepark 99% devs are weak prolly also because of publishers $$$ is most importend so whiners always win.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
In game metrics and limited resources. Would a developer spend more time and money making content thats available to the majority of their player base or the top preforming (being generous) 15% or so? Assuming all players are spending the same amount of money on a sub.
Im not against hard content, I like having a glass ceiling to help keep me motivated to play, something that TOR lacked, but development costs are ballooning and they need to triage and try to make the content available to as many people as possible to give the majority subscribers something to keep them interested.
So they can draw in new players to replace the old ones leaving.
Do you really think a brand new player to an old MMO is going to slog through 90 levels of super hard and super grindy content that no one has played in over 5 years just so they can join the highly insular and bitter veteran players?
Hell no. They'll be gone in a week to some shiny new MMO.
It is inevitable that MMOs will lose people over time(and, yes, that includes WoW) so if they are unable to attract new players then they will slowly die.
You may call it "dumbing down" or "selling out" but Im sure the developer would call it "keeping their jobs".
I am using your DFUW reference to tell a story about the term "hard" has totally different meanings for different people.
When I started playing DFUW over half a year ago it had a strong focus on PVP and allowed to gear up (basic gear, not the good stuff which needed active farming) semi afk. The game was mostly about PVP, which was challenging and fun. I lost a lot of gear, but it was replacable without going through the boredom of actively grinding brain dead mobs for too many hours.
Then the guys on the VIP forum started crying about not being forced to PVE enough. It would make the game a "PVP arena" type of game if you only actively farmed for good gear, food, potions, clan warware items etc. And AV listened to these guys.
During the discussion about these changes that added lots of "content" that has absolutely no challenge in it I was called "easy moder" or similar a lot. And I wondered how someone is an easy moder if he doesn't enjoy dumbed down, boring, bugged content. Took me a bit but then I realized that these guys used the terms "hard" to describe the challenge of bearing with the boredom of killing mobs for many hours constantly.
So yes, everybody has their own definition about what's "hard".
Stop playing monopoly jr and complaining they dumbed down monopoly. There are plenty of games around that are hard. Uncharted waters online, priates of the burning seas, mortal online, and dungeons and dragons online. Make a rouge in ddo, and try to solo everything. Even games like lord of the rings online have challenges , try to make max level with out dieing.
If you want the reason why look at the history channel, it went from teaching people history to reailty tv shows. Btw ulitma online never got dumbed down it got a lot harder over the years. The only thing they did was make it so people could get away from the obnoxious, crazys by going to tram. If uo didn't do that there would be no one playing uo
Being contantly killed by some one who understands the game better, cause he is a jerk is not making a game complex. A shipbuilding system that requires a long hard grind, and ships can be made useless if you dont understand what your doing is hard.
In the same game one has players with tens of thousands (even hundreds of thousands) of experience in either that game or across a genre that is very similar and players that just started.
As you increase difficulty the smaller the number of players can do it.
One can say "look at darksouls".
Sure darksouls did good, but 2.3 millions around all the platforms isn't an amazing number of sales, just when you consider the type of game.
Then there is the type of skill you ask for.
Timing? Hours spent preparing? Social interaction leading to a network of people?
People will complain about any skill requirement that they are bad at and demand that all challenge fit the skill they are good at.
For example, many people complaining about the jumping skill required for the new zone in GW2. Anyone that has no problem at jumping just breeze past it since it is quite easy even compared to medium difficulty jumps already in the game.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Its about MONEY. And no commentary on player base capability, nor culture nor any other little aspect of today's gaming will change that. Anything that facilitates income is in, anything that generates overhead or expenditures is out.
It switched from Fun to Money about 20 years ago. Long enough ago that the thin tendrils of greed were not quite perceptible in the beginning and only now have manifested into Kraken tentacles.
Money. It's literally the only reason.
Appealing to Joe Turd and his inability to press a single key without fat fingering half the keyboard every time he uses a skill.
If you make the game so simple a small dog could play it, that's more money to be milked from consumers.
Currently Playing: ESO and FFXIV
Have played: You name it
If you mention rose tinted glasses, you better be referring to Mitch Hedberg.