Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Easy has to go...who asked for easy ? ( Poll )
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
Blizzard made WoW easy. Let me ask you. Do you think mmo players really asked for it ?
My guess !!!.....Blizzard and other Developers are acting on their own on this subject TO PUSH EXPANTIONS. I don't think kids are complaining at all.....It's just a marketing trick.
We have no hart-pumping content at all in mmo's any more. Some would call this " Old School " but hard content has nothing to do with outdated content. We just have easy and I really don't think anyone is asking for it.
Dynamic Events and Rifts - For me they are getting old already. For me this is forced game play,
Auto grouping - Same as above, its getting old already. This makes for solo play with others on your screen.
Personal story - Anything story makes an mmo not an mmo. We have Skyrim for that.
Cool little video clips - Let me ask you. With a group of five new found friends, just entering a Dungeon, are you all really enjoying this crap ?.....Are you really sitting back relaxing for five minutes when you have a group ready to go ?
Why does hard = old school. Who even named it that ?.......What does exploring then finding a Keep, cave, or hole in the ground, with extreamly hard content inside have to do with old school. Remember when stuff like this was not even advertised. You just found it on your own. Players would find it and using word-of-mouth, places like this would become a hot spot. Now it's a major feature.
I guess you have to be 50 and up to enjoy a hard, community driven mmo with a lot of un-advertised, un-knownes. I like an mmo that you better have a large friends list or a good strong guild if your even to think about leaving a popular quest hub. But then I'm 49 years old.
It's my opinion but Blizzards Titin project, and SOE's EQ Next is gonna be crap right out of the gate !....Easy, auto-feature, solo crap. Just another 30 day video game with others on the screen.
Comments
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Thanks, Good topic :
It's easy once stratagy is learned !!!!.......Stratagy is now looked at as old school.
Macroing and third party programs made it the norm.
I remember Asheron's Call was awesome. It was a grind to level in the game. It was hard to find quest locations and items you wanted. But you know it was fun like that imo.
Then people starting macro and a few people reached cap fast then some more then word got out that a hard full of people were jus afk macroing for xp.
Then decal and third party programs became the norm with everyone afk macroing, botting, etc. and game fell apart for those didn't do.
There is no way of making a hard core old school grind game when third party programs and afk macroing take over the old school players can't keep up without it get tired and leave.
The same thing happened in Darkfall. So, many people macroing or glitched to max out characters then stopped the people who weren't. A lot of people left some stayed and joined the macroes. A percentage ground through it but a lot left due to it. Eventually the developed greatly lower the character grind and it will probably help the games population imo.
Once they took character grind out, simplified quests by leading you around with the map everything just snow balled into easy mode.
But things like decal in asheron's call and other third party programs that made the games much easier started to take over developers just built them into the games.
I don't know man, game are becoming more streamlined and content more accesible. I wouldn't say easy.
If you ask me, the mop content is tougher than the cata content in wow.
There was a period of time though where little brats and forum trolls just complained and bitched and whined, they want want want want want and they want it NOW, so developers started implementing tools and systems in games to allow contenet to be more accesible to players who don't want to spend wack amount of hours to achieve these things. In the long run though, which these whiners didn't understand at the time was that these systems and tools would actually dilute the game and "dumb" it down.
Honestly, developers know what they are doing, and sometimes they shouldn't listen to what people whine about. They gotta know when people are being shitheaded brats, and they have to know when something is actually a great idea. Also, gamers, alike, need to chill the fuck out and stop bitching and complaining...so many bratty fuckin expectations from people these days.
Originally posted by Arskaaa
"when players learned tacticks in dungeon/raids, its bread".
I think part of it is a lot of people dont' have the time/attention span/patience any more to figure shit out on thier own.
They want playing the game to be easy and to be led around.
It is also A LOT more competitive then it used to be any everyone wants the best of everything to compete. Therefore, they want it to be easy to get the best gear and max level but with some new cookie always dangling in front to keep them coming back.
Also, information travels SO much faster now. Quests, skills, items, etc. all get posted on some website some place almost as soon as any new game gets made and new content gets added. It is hard to keep the cat in the bag any more with how fast infromation travels.
Once people see that new quest and new items they want to complete that quest and have that item(s) and notch more the the virtual belt.
But a lot of poeple don't have the time and/or patience to find it on thier own or figure out the quest without it being dumbed down or a walk through.
Plues, death in games is MUCH easier then when i started in mmos.
In AC when you died you lost some random items from your character and bag with NO notation as to where it was. It fell on the ground for anyone to pickup and if you didn't get back in a certain amount of time it was just gone (can't recal how much but it was over an hour). These days people would cry about that until it got patched out. One of the reason most gamers have a hard time with DFO.
Well, part of my point is, I don't think players are really asking for easy as Blizzards devs are telling us.
It's to sell expantions faster.....I really don't think 5 year olds are telling mom to call Blizzard to ease up !!
Marketing !!!!!!
Said thing is, regardless of what this post ends up saying, people continue to reinforce an easy playstyle en masse.
To use a current example, look at what happened w/ GW2's dungeons. While some may think they aren't that difficult (and I would be one of them), there's been a huge outcry from players that they are too difficult, and that you die way too much in the dungeons.
For the average gamer, challenging gameplay has been replaced by the desire to feel powerful. Most people aren't okay with feeling weak in a video game, they want to feel like an unstoppable badass even if it means the content becomes trivial.
You can see this trend outside of MMOs too. Look at games like Devil May Cry, or God of War. Hugely popular, but not known for being difficult games. The same is known in the MMO-sphere. People want the biggest, baddest gear, so they can feel powerful, and stomp noobz.
As much as I wish difficult games were more common, there is a reason they are still a niche. This will remain so as long as enough people are more interested in feeling badass, than being challenged.
+1
Kinda am geussing OP hasn't been around that long with this genre and might have missed all the outcry's in old school MMORPG about them being to complex, to hard...etc.....
So OP yes the new majority of people in this genre did in fact ask for more easy, especially at the time when internet became more mainstream.
Everything you need to know about Elder Scrolls Online
Playing: GW2
Waiting on: TESO
Next Flop: Planetside 2
Best MMO of all time: Asheron's Call - The first company to recreate AC will be the next greatest MMO.
At the end of the Cataclysm expansion, only 22% of all guilds had beat Heroic Dragon Soul. Yep, it was so easy anyone can do it, right?
/end sarcasm
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
Now Playing: N/A
Worst MMO: FFXIV
Favorite MMO: FFXI
You have to take into account that there's a huge discrepancy between the gamers that have been playing video games all their lives--before it was cool--and have played most every MMO and major game to date and MMO players that started playing games when WoW became mainstream.
The difference between the two can be as significant as the difference between a progamer and yourself. So when developers balance, they need to take into account a large range of skill levels.
You might argue that the new gamers just need to get as good as you, but... really, it's almost like asking a beginner to tennis to just get as good as a player who started playing at the age of 4. I mean, you could, but what you're really saying is, "Deal with it," which will more likely than not just make the less involved players quit.
WoW seems to have a decent system going in that there are multiple difficulty levels, and unless you have already beaten the latest heroic 25-man raid, you can't say WoW is easymode. You're just jumping on the "WoW is EZ" bandwagon. Though, it might be. I can't say for certain. I've never experienced it.
2 things, i like having decent armor and weapons from crafting. Does that make me an easy care bear perhaps or maybe I'm not because I'm not asking for legendaries to be easy. hmmm
second, I like a pve challenge and there are quite a few in the game i play. Try soloing a champion in armor ten levels lower then you underwater combat with no abilities to heal you accept 1. that's a challenge. Done that a couple of times. very exciting.
so really, it's a matter of perspective. WoW however i will never return to and not because it's easy but because it's the same boring design we've seen in EQ, AoC, LOTRO, SWTOR etc etc etc...the endless quest for gear, it's basically a fashion show lobby game. Sorry if i offend but I'm agreeing with the OP on how bad it is.
I wish you did have another selection in the voting tho, likes a challenge but prefers PVE challenges. That would have been great.
Fighting a world notorious monster for over an hour with a group of 6 people and barely making it had my heart pumping. PvP is usually over in a couple minutes. My heart doesn't even start
For sure. Aesperus is correct too. The games are made for [mod edit] masses who want nothing more than to feel powerful and they turn to MMOs where they can show off their gear, challenge people to PvP, and then talk trash to them. If they can't run around killing everything in sight then they wont play it. I can't believe there is no a single MMO where you do something besides this. MMOs are now synonymous with running around and killing everything in sight......because you're such a badass right from the get go.
+1
MoP raids are actually kinda hard, about half the bosses are pretty hard, and a few bosses in heroic are omgbbqsauceandlazerzpewpewpew hard lol.
It used to take months before the latest raid boss was downed for the first time.
Nowadays sometimes it does not even take a week.
Actually people did ask for Easy mode. If you go back to 2004 and look at the MMO scene there were games like Everquest producing expansion after expansion where each zone was harder than the next eventually something had to give. By the time Gates of Discord had come out the dificulty was just off the charts. At the same time WoW was introducing a new forumula for easy mode gaming.
People voted with their dollars that they wanted Easymode. The hard games of the early MMO generation lost their player base as everyone flocked to play WoW and the various WoW clones. If people wanted hardmode people should have stayed with Everquest 2, Vanguard, or even Lineage II.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
While I'm positive the new raids are easier than the Vanilla or BC raids, I still wouldn't consider the time it takes the top competitive raiding guilds--who have had years of practice and years of consolidating the crème de la crème of skilled players--to clear the newer raids as indicative of their ease overall.
I am more interested in the ability of the average player, such as the OP, yourself, and myself, and our ability to clear it. Maybe they are easy. Who knows?
I was not talking about WoW but about MMOs in general. Still, yes, comparing old WoW to nowadays WoW ilustrates my point.
The ability of the average player has dropped down insanely all along with the challenge in the games. If you know Carlos Mencia, check his monologue about how the education system has been lowering the standards to suit the less skilled kids, so next generation of kids is even less skilled, so they bring the standards down just a little bit more, and on and on until we have a generation of...
Something similar applies to MMOs. When we started playing, having somebody standing in the middle of a pool of fire not noticing that he/she was dying was something unthinkable. Now it happens so often that when I play healer I even make macros to tell players to get out of the fire/acid/poison/whatever pool. Now we all see level cap players who know nothing about agro mechanics, buffing/debuffing routines, or the most basic gameplay elements for that matter. It happens becouse these players have not been challenged not even once during the whole leveling process and they have soloed all their way to level cap in a couple of weeks. And even if they are clumsy enough to manage to die, there is no death penalty other than getting back to where you died.
Some call it "streamlining" and others "dumbing down". However you call it, anyway, trying to argue that the average old game was not more challenging than the nowaday's average game seems futile to me.
Soo... In this day and age there are also people who get paid to be the first in the world to beat content X unlike when i was young and the idea that someone would get paid to play computergames outside of a developerstudio or a magazine was completley alien.
As someone pointed out there is a huge gap between world first players and "good" players.. and an even larger gap between those two rather small groups and the broad mass that is what game companies live on.
Edit: Also maybe it is not so much that the individual skill level have gone down but that we see more and more "non-gamers" comming in to the niche we know and love. In fact most bosses to day in WoW are way more complex mechnics wise then the old raids. Not necissary more difficult but complex. (after all if you want hard you only need to calculate what is the optimal DPS is for the encounter and then set a enrage timer that is just shy of that so any mistake made leads to a wipe.. That is hard.. not fun but hard)
This have been a good conversation
Its a interesting point you have OP. Me and some friends were playing Swat 4 a few weeks ago and we realized that it wasnt as easy to finish the maps. We discussed it a little and we thought about how these days all FPS have a auto save point/ chekpoint every 5 seconds. So if you would fuck up its just to start where you fucked up.
The old days were better imo.