Ya. I think people just like easier more. I like a bit of a challange myself. I brought many friends from WoW to RIFT and over half of them when back to WoW within a week, simply because it was harder.
It's why there are a lot of people still with TSW but no where near launch numbers. The low income and poor gamers have left, the people who can't think for themselves have left and we have a happy thriving community. I'd be in game right now but I'm checking my morning RSS feeds.
Unfourtunately when MMO's went mainstream, is when they started to cater to most people. And among the most people are a lot of lazy people and low achievers so the devs started to cater to those lowest denominator which lead us to where we are now. This is why I am saying that WoW was a bad thing for MMORPGs because it turned an exotic meal to McDonalds and as such ruined all possibilities for it to become a gourmet meal.
Seriously though, hard please. Not the tedious difficulty btw, legitamently hard and promoting me actually 'working' for stuff. Theres times when people want easy and its fine, but anything actually in the means of doing 'work' should legitamently be difficult to do. Give me a sense of achievement out of it. It sucks too that I haven't felt it lately in MMos. The last place I had that feeling was in HK on Rift (Which is an amazing raid btw ) there hasn't really been a game thats put challenge on me at all since then.
Damn you tera, why do you have to have the best combat system in an MMO and lack everywhere else (but boobs to be fair)! You had all the potential before you and you just tossed it away by being super generic. Heck, even if you had GW2 style of doing things (as bland as it is after the 'new car smell' is gone) it would of been a lot better! Damn you for cutting yourself drastically short of my unrealistic expectations!
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 !!!!!!
So the marketing team is convincing everyone they are enjoying it when they really aren't? I mean, marketing gets it in the hands of the people, but after that the gameplay determines retention. Are you suggesting that marketing is continuing their efforts even after the players have bought the game? Are they doing this through subliminal messaging during quests or something?
Edit: Just noticed who the OP is. nm.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
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.
If you reread my posts, you should see that I'm not arguing that games aren't easier. I'm arguing that games aren't as easy as people rant about.
It's becoming increasingly popular for people to have a go at how everything is being dumbed down, even when they, themselves, haven't actually beaten everything there is to beat.
Players are doing things designed for the lower end of the skill spectrum and working themselves up over that alone. This isn't true for everyone, but I doubt even 70% of the people who complain about things being to easy actually complete the intended difficult content.
Resulting in my poke of... well, have you done the latest heroic 25-man yet with your guild? The difficult raid achievements that award you with the heroic 25-man mount? I'm sure there is one. This is regarding the OP's mention of WoW, but it can be any game.
How many of those complaining about difficulty have actually beaten everything?
Originally posted by aphydork Beaten the Heroic 25-man raids in MoP already, huh?
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.
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?
Where's the challenge in open world though? I buy mmorpgs for huge open worlds with tons of players out there, not for some isolated content where a bunch of people do stuff in a small box apart from rest of the world. Is a game challenging if all the challenge is optional in separate minimal areas compared to rest of the game? I dont think people are looking for optional challenge with no penalty when failing, but rather challenge throughout the experience.
I get why it is like it is now. Mainstream games absolutely just cant be challenging in order to cater to largest possible customer base. I just dont agree with a game being challenging if there's some optional challenge after hitting the max level.
It's like saying some easy mode average shooter that anyone can finish with eyes closed is challenging because after you're through you can choose to play a separate map with ten folds harder enemies.
I heard Dark Souls is a challenging game, as far as I know there's no separate hard mode for the challenging bits. Some people are saying Borderlands 2 is hard, I dont agree, it's challenging in some parts and a bit easier in others, but I cant watch TV while leveling in it like I can with most modern mmorpgs.
Why does a game have to be either bleeding-eyeballs hard or Lindsay Lohan easy? Why not have a mix of content with rewards differenciated by difficulty of content? Dungeons could be stratified into different difficulties, maybe labeled in a way that makes this obvious to the player; like 'normal mode' and 'hard mode' or 'heroic'. That way players can choose content based on thier preferences and ability. Raids could change in difficulty too, perhaps varying by the player numbers taking part ~ for example, 10, 15, 20 or 25 man raids; offerening a different level of complexity each time? Maybe you could do it throughout the leveling process too, with 'normal' enemies, and 'elites' or 'big as monsters' to be tackled by groups, or solo if you want a greater challenge. You could offer quests as a method of structured leveling, or give experience for simply killing monsters allowing players to choose between guided leveling and 'grinding'. Or maybe you could have dungeons available throughout the game, so players can group level the whole way if they want to. At endgame you could gain gear by doing dungeons, pvp, or perhaps have a crafting system that allows players to create equipment by farming materials, rather/alongside doing dungeons.
Its pretty "out there", but what do you guys think?
Well, I was responding to the rest of the posts, but if you want to talk about challenging all throughout, those games haven't existed for a while.
The last overall challenging MMO I played would have to be FFXI.
You can kind of blame yourselves. So many people wanting challenging content, but you didn't buy Dark Souls. If you don't support the challenging games or complete the challenging tasks developers design with you in mind, they come back with statistics like, "Only 1.6% of players actually completed the challenging content."
The result? Developers believing that there's not as much interest. Why spend your time designing and balancing something that only 1-2% of the playerbase care enough to do? Is it profitable to make the entire game as challenging?
Probably not.
So if you want things harder, prove to the developers that there's interest and a market in it by raising that 1-2%. Demon Souls showed a good amount of interest, so players were rewarded with Dark Souls.
No vote. Easy happened because it's a way to pull your competition's players. Water flows to the path of least resistance. In some cases, it happens with players too.
Come out with a flashy game, position it as hardcore (while in reality it's faster and easier than other games), and watch players jump ship to come play your game. Maybe throw in a few spots that are very difficult so the players feel like they aren't playing something that's too easy.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Originally posted by aphydork Beaten the Heroic 25-man raids in MoP already, huh?
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.
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)
But there wasn't. I have managed a few first world in the past, and I know I will no longer achieve that. The reason? Dedication. Raiding every freaking night like a maniac. I don't do that any longer (it's no longer fun). I don't think I have lost any skill tho. If anything I dare to say I am a better player now than I was then.
Really, when I started, coming across a bad player when building pug groups was rare once you were at level cap. Some players were more talented than others, but you didn't have the average clumsy guy standing on the fire, not managing agro and with close to no spacial awareness. Players needed a while to get to level cap, and went through many challenges during the process, so they were seasoned once at level cap. Now it's all different, and you know that in any average pug group, at least half of your team is going to be the kind of player who does not follow target assist (and probably does not even know the concept), does not control agro and is unable to follow the most basic instructions ala "when the boss does his AOE thing, you hide in that corner and then you come out again". This happens becouse if you can get to level cap soloing easy quests you will not learn the drill properly.
Well, I was responding to the rest of the posts, but if you want to talk about challenging all throughout, those games haven't existed for a while.
The last overall challenging MMO I played would have to be FFXI.
You can kind of blame yourselves. So many people wanting challenging content, but you didn't buy Dark Souls. If you don't support the challenging games or complete the challenging tasks developers design with you in mind, they come back with statistics like, "Only 1.6% of players actually completed the challenging content."
The result? Developers believing that there's not as much interest. Why spend your time designing and balancing something that only 1-2% of the playerbase care enough to do? Is it profitable to make the entire game as challenging?
Probably not.
So if you want things harder, prove to the developers that there's interest and a market in it by raising that 1-2%. Demon Souls showed a good amount of interest, so players were rewarded with Dark Souls.
I'll quote my self: I get why it is like it is now. Mainstream games absolutely just cant be challenging in order to cater to largest possible customer base.
It does not matter what I personally do because of that, mmorpgs will continue to be easy for the most part because the companies want as much customers as possible. I wont run around buying every challenging game that I dont even like just to prove that challenging games would be more profitable.
There's other criteria for me too, and sometimes I like playing relaxing easy games too. I was merely pointing out that WoW for the most part is NOT challenging other than the high level hardmode pockets. There's no rule saying that the game should not have any challenging content in the open world though, will the easymode players burst into tears if they happen to run into an elite that they cant one shot on some parts of the world? I dont know, but it makes the open world boring as hell and predictable.
Originally posted by Roxtarr The only 'heart pumping' excitement an MMO has ever given me is when faced with fighting against another player. PvE combat can be fun, but an MMO really has never been all that difficult to do once the strategy is learned. It's more of a puzzle than a skill challenge. Against other players - that's excitement imho.
Puzzle need skill too. Dont know why people think these day that skills imply only the one who is faster with is mouse and keyboard.
PVP is not only about fast action either. Chess game is a hardcore pvp game but still you hands dexterity mean nothing. Your head tough mean everything.
In pve, creating a strategy need skills too, of course you got the unimaginative crowd, who will get the strategy on a website. But if you go there without any info, you may find a real challenge. Well not much these days, cause now they make the game, so everyone can beat it without too much efforts.
I agree with you that fast pvp is excited, but most of the time this is just a pew pew feast, where most people just try to zap anything they see.
For answering to the OP, i disagree with you, a lots of people ask for easier gaming, just go on the official forums you will see by yourself. A lots of cry folks out there who just want everything fast and easy without any efforts.
Blizzard made WoW easy because players in MMOs like EQ, UO, AO, AC, DAoC, etc were complaining that their games were too hard and that they couldn't solo very easy.....WoW listened and the rest is history.......Alot of us that really enjoyed these early MMOs never wanted easy but once WoW had its great success we never saw challenging again really until Darkfall (which had rampant cheating to offset the difficulty).
1. The type of MMO players, that is the vast majority, who want easy content do not frequent sites like this one. That poll is like asking if the world likes tacos but only taking ballots from Mexico.
2. Blizzard did not make WoW exclusively easy. They made it easy to get into, hard to master. Go get World First of the next heroic raid tier, and come back to tell me WoW is all easy. They made WoW's difficulty a choice, easy (LFR), normal, and hard. You choose your difficulty.
3. An exclusively hard MMO will inevitably turn out to be a niche game. The problem is that MMOs are the type of game where people spend a lot of time compared to other genres. That inevitable leads to developers needing to implement repetitive content, like grinding. So if you on top of that make the grind not only tedious, but HARD, then say goodbye to the majority of MMO players.
I call BS on the comment that suggests Blizzard looked at other games and decided players need less of a challenge. If you look at how they adjusted the learning curve over the various iterations of WoW you can see they simply dumbed things down to help your stupid uncle play. As others have pointed out, its purely marketing. At the risk of offending people, if you want to have teenage girls, venerable non-gaming dads, and curious moms pay their $15, you have to walk them through the experience in a way that's downright insulting if you have any prior knowledge of gaming.
Looking at the history of gaming in general you can see the "Easying" emerge. Anyone remember how difficult 8-bit nintendo and early PC games were? Games like Contra, pitfall, Ghosts and Ghouls, Sierra's point and click adventures. Sure they lacked the subtleties and design elements we take for granted today, but they were a challenege offered to a select few and created the culture of hardcore players. This was fine in a limited market sense, but as games exploded in popularity, it was your casual gamer whom captured the target-audience spotlight for the majority of game companies.
Edit: And this just occurred to me; coin-ops, the origin of many of the first home games were dificult to keep you pumping in the quarters and coming back for more. A good player was something that would draw a crowd at my local bowling alley growing up. Of course this business model was somewhat surplanted by Street Fighter's two player frenzy and novelty experiences like total immergion shooters and dance dance revolutions, but still there's another lost aspect of gaming difficulty: coin drops.
lol want to try a game thats hard, try WAR Z its hard cause you get killed not only by the zombies but by players looking for your weapons and food.
played M59,UO,lineage,EQ,Daoc,Entropia,SWG,Horizons,Lineage2.EQ2,Vangaurd,Irth online, DarkFall,Star Trek and many others that did not make the cut or i just plain forgetting about.
Originally posted by Theocritus Blizzard made WoW easy because players in MMOs like EQ, UO, AO, AC, DAoC, etc were complaining that their games were too hard and that they couldn't solo very easy.....WoW listened and the rest is history.......Alot of us that really enjoyed these early MMOs never wanted easy but once WoW had its great success we never saw challenging again really until Darkfall (which had rampant cheating to offset the difficulty).
Are you for real?
New mmo players where complaining that the game was too hard... most of them was new to mmo and rpg, and most of them was casual players. They wanted to have acces to everything the game had to offer, but they didnt want to take the time to get it. Its still like that now.
Im from AO and never heard anyone from AO who complaints that wow was too hard, quite the contrary.
1. The type of MMO players, that is the vast majority, who want easy content do not frequent sites like this one. That poll is like asking if the world likes tacos but only taking ballots from Mexico.
How do you know that? Cause i saw a lots of post made by people who want easy mode, i even saw a thread start that even new game like swotor and gw2 was too hard....
2. Blizzard did not make WoW exclusively easy. They made it easy to get into, hard to master. Go get World First of the next heroic raid tier, and come back to tell me WoW is all easy. They made WoW's difficulty a choice, easy (LFR), normal, and hard. You choose your difficulty.
The big problem is that the hard content is only begin at end game raid, the journey to get there is a picnics.
3. An exclusively hard MMO will inevitably turn out to be a niche game. The problem is that MMOs are the type of game where people spend a lot of time compared to other genres. That inevitable leads to developers needing to implement repetitive content, like grinding. So if you on top of that make the grind not only tedious, but HARD, then say goodbye to the majority of MMO players.
But what about a middle ground? These days there is no middle ground just easy walk in the park.
Blizzard made WoW easy. Let me ask you. Do you think mmo players really asked for it ?
Achiever personalities vs others thread again, so soon? Is it that time of weekend already?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Its not so much easy as that people want instant gratification... People want to clear raids in a week not months. They want to faceroll through heroics. The only games that dont do this are Niche now to many people. Sandbox games where getting that ONE piece of dragon bone armor takes months of farming dragons, rare spawns, world events, ect ect. My first major MMO was wow and even i see that its too "easy" i want everything thing i do to feel like an achievement. I just killed the kobold chieftan down in a cave after days of fighting my way through it. I just build my first shack. All should make you feel amazing but no, its now just i killed hogger on to westfall. The only sense of achievement may come from Heroic raids......
We need more sandboxes, where its not about who has the best gear but who can craft the most unique story...
Playing: FFXIV, DnL, and World of Warships Waiting on: Ashes of Creation
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Where is the medium option?
Seriously though, hard please. Not the tedious difficulty btw, legitamently hard and promoting me actually 'working' for stuff. Theres times when people want easy and its fine, but anything actually in the means of doing 'work' should legitamently be difficult to do. Give me a sense of achievement out of it. It sucks too that I haven't felt it lately in MMos. The last place I had that feeling was in HK on Rift (Which is an amazing raid btw
) there hasn't really been a game thats put challenge on me at all since then.
Damn you tera, why do you have to have the best combat system in an MMO and lack everywhere else (but boobs to be fair)! You had all the potential before you and you just tossed it away by being super generic. Heck, even if you had GW2 style of doing things (as bland as it is after the 'new car smell' is gone) it would of been a lot better! Damn you for cutting yourself drastically short of my unrealistic expectations!
So the marketing team is convincing everyone they are enjoying it when they really aren't? I mean, marketing gets it in the hands of the people, but after that the gameplay determines retention. Are you suggesting that marketing is continuing their efforts even after the players have bought the game? Are they doing this through subliminal messaging during quests or something?
Edit: Just noticed who the OP is. nm.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
If you reread my posts, you should see that I'm not arguing that games aren't easier. I'm arguing that games aren't as easy as people rant about.
It's becoming increasingly popular for people to have a go at how everything is being dumbed down, even when they, themselves, haven't actually beaten everything there is to beat.
Players are doing things designed for the lower end of the skill spectrum and working themselves up over that alone. This isn't true for everyone, but I doubt even 70% of the people who complain about things being to easy actually complete the intended difficult content.
Resulting in my poke of... well, have you done the latest heroic 25-man yet with your guild? The difficult raid achievements that award you with the heroic 25-man mount? I'm sure there is one. This is regarding the OP's mention of WoW, but it can be any game.
How many of those complaining about difficulty have actually beaten everything?
Where's the challenge in open world though? I buy mmorpgs for huge open worlds with tons of players out there, not for some isolated content where a bunch of people do stuff in a small box apart from rest of the world. Is a game challenging if all the challenge is optional in separate minimal areas compared to rest of the game? I dont think people are looking for optional challenge with no penalty when failing, but rather challenge throughout the experience.
I get why it is like it is now. Mainstream games absolutely just cant be challenging in order to cater to largest possible customer base. I just dont agree with a game being challenging if there's some optional challenge after hitting the max level.
It's like saying some easy mode average shooter that anyone can finish with eyes closed is challenging because after you're through you can choose to play a separate map with ten folds harder enemies.
I heard Dark Souls is a challenging game, as far as I know there's no separate hard mode for the challenging bits. Some people are saying Borderlands 2 is hard, I dont agree, it's challenging in some parts and a bit easier in others, but I cant watch TV while leveling in it like I can with most modern mmorpgs.
Why does a game have to be either bleeding-eyeballs hard or Lindsay Lohan easy? Why not have a mix of content with rewards differenciated by difficulty of content? Dungeons could be stratified into different difficulties, maybe labeled in a way that makes this obvious to the player; like 'normal mode' and 'hard mode' or 'heroic'. That way players can choose content based on thier preferences and ability. Raids could change in difficulty too, perhaps varying by the player numbers taking part ~ for example, 10, 15, 20 or 25 man raids; offerening a different level of complexity each time? Maybe you could do it throughout the leveling process too, with 'normal' enemies, and 'elites' or 'big as monsters' to be tackled by groups, or solo if you want a greater challenge. You could offer quests as a method of structured leveling, or give experience for simply killing monsters allowing players to choose between guided leveling and 'grinding'. Or maybe you could have dungeons available throughout the game, so players can group level the whole way if they want to. At endgame you could gain gear by doing dungeons, pvp, or perhaps have a crafting system that allows players to create equipment by farming materials, rather/alongside doing dungeons.
Its pretty "out there", but what do you guys think?
Well, I was responding to the rest of the posts, but if you want to talk about challenging all throughout, those games haven't existed for a while.
The last overall challenging MMO I played would have to be FFXI.
You can kind of blame yourselves. So many people wanting challenging content, but you didn't buy Dark Souls. If you don't support the challenging games or complete the challenging tasks developers design with you in mind, they come back with statistics like, "Only 1.6% of players actually completed the challenging content."
The result? Developers believing that there's not as much interest. Why spend your time designing and balancing something that only 1-2% of the playerbase care enough to do? Is it profitable to make the entire game as challenging?
Probably not.
So if you want things harder, prove to the developers that there's interest and a market in it by raising that 1-2%. Demon Souls showed a good amount of interest, so players were rewarded with Dark Souls.
No vote. Easy happened because it's a way to pull your competition's players. Water flows to the path of least resistance. In some cases, it happens with players too.
Come out with a flashy game, position it as hardcore (while in reality it's faster and easier than other games), and watch players jump ship to come play your game. Maybe throw in a few spots that are very difficult so the players feel like they aren't playing something that's too easy.
But there wasn't. I have managed a few first world in the past, and I know I will no longer achieve that. The reason? Dedication. Raiding every freaking night like a maniac. I don't do that any longer (it's no longer fun). I don't think I have lost any skill tho. If anything I dare to say I am a better player now than I was then.
Really, when I started, coming across a bad player when building pug groups was rare once you were at level cap. Some players were more talented than others, but you didn't have the average clumsy guy standing on the fire, not managing agro and with close to no spacial awareness. Players needed a while to get to level cap, and went through many challenges during the process, so they were seasoned once at level cap. Now it's all different, and you know that in any average pug group, at least half of your team is going to be the kind of player who does not follow target assist (and probably does not even know the concept), does not control agro and is unable to follow the most basic instructions ala "when the boss does his AOE thing, you hide in that corner and then you come out again". This happens becouse if you can get to level cap soloing easy quests you will not learn the drill properly.
You want heart pumping action from an MMORPG?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There is something called MOTORSPORT and EXTREME SPORTS. Take your pick; if you get an adrenaline rush from an MMO, you REALLY need to get out more.
I'll quote my self: I get why it is like it is now. Mainstream games absolutely just cant be challenging in order to cater to largest possible customer base.
It does not matter what I personally do because of that, mmorpgs will continue to be easy for the most part because the companies want as much customers as possible. I wont run around buying every challenging game that I dont even like just to prove that challenging games would be more profitable.
There's other criteria for me too, and sometimes I like playing relaxing easy games too. I was merely pointing out that WoW for the most part is NOT challenging other than the high level hardmode pockets. There's no rule saying that the game should not have any challenging content in the open world though, will the easymode players burst into tears if they happen to run into an elite that they cant one shot on some parts of the world? I dont know, but it makes the open world boring as hell and predictable.
Puzzle need skill too. Dont know why people think these day that skills imply only the one who is faster with is mouse and keyboard.
PVP is not only about fast action either. Chess game is a hardcore pvp game but still you hands dexterity mean nothing. Your head tough mean everything.
In pve, creating a strategy need skills too, of course you got the unimaginative crowd, who will get the strategy on a website. But if you go there without any info, you may find a real challenge. Well not much these days, cause now they make the game, so everyone can beat it without too much efforts.
I agree with you that fast pvp is excited, but most of the time this is just a pew pew feast, where most people just try to zap anything they see.
For answering to the OP, i disagree with you, a lots of people ask for easier gaming, just go on the official forums you will see by yourself. A lots of cry folks out there who just want everything fast and easy without any efforts.
1. The type of MMO players, that is the vast majority, who want easy content do not frequent sites like this one. That poll is like asking if the world likes tacos but only taking ballots from Mexico.
2. Blizzard did not make WoW exclusively easy. They made it easy to get into, hard to master. Go get World First of the next heroic raid tier, and come back to tell me WoW is all easy. They made WoW's difficulty a choice, easy (LFR), normal, and hard. You choose your difficulty.
3. An exclusively hard MMO will inevitably turn out to be a niche game. The problem is that MMOs are the type of game where people spend a lot of time compared to other genres. That inevitable leads to developers needing to implement repetitive content, like grinding. So if you on top of that make the grind not only tedious, but HARD, then say goodbye to the majority of MMO players.
I'm having a hard time following this right now, or maybe I just don't want to because it has a passive aggressive tone that implies certain things.
I call BS on the comment that suggests Blizzard looked at other games and decided players need less of a challenge. If you look at how they adjusted the learning curve over the various iterations of WoW you can see they simply dumbed things down to help your stupid uncle play. As others have pointed out, its purely marketing. At the risk of offending people, if you want to have teenage girls, venerable non-gaming dads, and curious moms pay their $15, you have to walk them through the experience in a way that's downright insulting if you have any prior knowledge of gaming.
Looking at the history of gaming in general you can see the "Easying" emerge. Anyone remember how difficult 8-bit nintendo and early PC games were? Games like Contra, pitfall, Ghosts and Ghouls, Sierra's point and click adventures. Sure they lacked the subtleties and design elements we take for granted today, but they were a challenege offered to a select few and created the culture of hardcore players. This was fine in a limited market sense, but as games exploded in popularity, it was your casual gamer whom captured the target-audience spotlight for the majority of game companies.
Edit: And this just occurred to me; coin-ops, the origin of many of the first home games were dificult to keep you pumping in the quarters and coming back for more. A good player was something that would draw a crowd at my local bowling alley growing up. Of course this business model was somewhat surplanted by Street Fighter's two player frenzy and novelty experiences like total immergion shooters and dance dance revolutions, but still there's another lost aspect of gaming difficulty: coin drops.
played M59,UO,lineage,EQ,Daoc,Entropia,SWG,Horizons,Lineage2.EQ2,Vangaurd,Irth online, DarkFall,Star Trek
and many others that did not make the cut or i just plain forgetting about.
Are you for real?
New mmo players where complaining that the game was too hard... most of them was new to mmo and rpg, and most of them was casual players. They wanted to have acces to everything the game had to offer, but they didnt want to take the time to get it. Its still like that now.
Im from AO and never heard anyone from AO who complaints that wow was too hard, quite the contrary.
Achiever personalities vs others thread again, so soon? Is it that time of weekend already?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Its not so much easy as that people want instant gratification... People want to clear raids in a week not months. They want to faceroll through heroics. The only games that dont do this are Niche now to many people. Sandbox games where getting that ONE piece of dragon bone armor takes months of farming dragons, rare spawns, world events, ect ect. My first major MMO was wow and even i see that its too "easy" i want everything thing i do to feel like an achievement. I just killed the kobold chieftan down in a cave after days of fighting my way through it. I just build my first shack. All should make you feel amazing but no, its now just i killed hogger on to westfall. The only sense of achievement may come from Heroic raids......
We need more sandboxes, where its not about who has the best gear but who can craft the most unique story...
Playing: FFXIV, DnL, and World of Warships
Waiting on: Ashes of Creation