People who love to play Insanity modes are few and far between. We just don't want to drool on our keyboard as we watch Game of Thrones on a 2nd monitor because of how easy the MMO we're playing is.
Not playing insane mode proves nothing with regard to wanting challenge out of a game. Most games with an Insanity mode went completely untested and uninspired making it more of an experience in masochism then anything else. "Here's some last minute dungeons where everything is exactly the same except monsters have 10x health and damage." That's pretty much how every EQ expansion in the past 10 years was made as well.....
People who love to play Insanity modes are few and far between. We just don't want to drool on our keyboard as we watch Game of Thrones on a 2nd monitor because of how easy the MMO we're playing is.
Not playing insane mode proves nothing with regard to wanting challenge out of a game. Most games with an Insanity mode went completely untested and uninspired making it more of an experience in masochism then anything else. "Here's some last minute dungeons where everything is exactly the same except monsters have 10x health and damage." That's pretty much how every EQ expansion in the past 10 years was made as well.....
I dont know about EQ, but In the last WoW tier (tier 14), some bosses actually had less health on heroic mode.
I don't really care how hard or difficult the hard modes are in WoW. I played WoW for 5 years with passion and never cared much of raiding. There was always lots of (challenging) stuff to do. You really can't say the same now.
And then, as always, the immersion. There's none left in WoW, nada. Dungeons are disconnected from Azeroth, quests are many, they are easy and grindy (on trial i hit 100 quest complited on level 19), professions are pointless and PvP is for the owners of hairlooms.
So, if some raids are hard as hell that doesn't mean World (why is this word in this game's name anyway) of Warcraft is not easy.
People who love to play Insanity modes are few and far between. We just don't want to drool on our keyboard as we watch Game of Thrones on a 2nd monitor because of how easy the MMO we're playing is.
If you "watch Game of Thrones on a 2nd monitor", that is totally your choosing since you can choose the hard content.
And if you don't choose the hard content, don't complain that there is nothing challenging.
And how would other people choose to play easy mode affect you? You don't even need to play with them. The point of an option is to let people choose.
Is it fairer to judge the difficulty of a game by a handful of difficult encounters or by some overall assessment of the content? I tend towards the latter because it is so easy for developers to tack some impossible content on to a game which is basically very easy.
Yes, if the statement is "challenging content is AVAILABLE" in the game. Is it fair to say it is an easy game when there *is* difficulty content and people avoid it?
In most mmorpg's the "difficult" content is at the end. That means I have to spend 50 hours leveling to ever see it. That's where I have a problem. If I'm still steamrolling the game after 6+ hours of play then I'm bored and quitting.
The leveling up process is where the difficulty needs to be added. I'd much prefer an mmropg where hitting max level is an accomplishment in itself rather then a given if I just put in enough time.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
In most mmorpg's the "difficult" content is at the end. That means I have to spend 50 hours leveling to ever see it. That's where I have a problem. If I'm still steamrolling the game after 6+ hours of play then I'm bored and quitting.
The leveling up process is where the difficulty needs to be added. I'd much prefer an mmropg where hitting max level is an accomplishment in itself rather then a given if I just put in enough time.
The first is a legimate complain although i thought people are complaining leveling is too fast. MMO should add a difficulty setting in leveling like in D3. You can make D3 leveling (not paragon leveling, the original levels) challenging now.
The second point about "hitting max" is an accomplishment ... well .. that is just a matter of personal preference. Some may think that the accomplishment should be downing a difficult raid boss. Accomplishment is an illusion anyway. We are talking abotu games, not real-life.
Solo questing MMOs where every player goes through the same quest-chains are easy because they *have* to be easy.
1) The least solo-able class has to be able to beat the mobs so they'll be easy for most of the other classes - especially the most solo-able classes.
2) The newest, least experienced players have to be able to beat the mobs so players who've played these kind of games for a while will find it easy.
These things are obviously and necessarily true.
Games can get round the first by making all the classes the same but the second will always be true. If all the players *have* to go through the same content then it must be balanced for the least capable players - obviously.
If you got most of your exp from fighting mobs with optional, often class-specific, quests for gear/money/faction then players could pick their own difficulty.
EQ had the right design ideas imo. The problem was the implementation e.g. EQ had thousands of optional quests but for 95% of them the cost/benefit really sucked.
in (good) mmos, the difficulty comes from dealing with enemy players in open world pvp
mmos that try make pve challenging are usually frustrating, boring, tedious grinds instead
in single player games i always pick the hardest difficulty and find that it is often the setting most polished and the way the game is meant to be played
in (good) mmos, the difficulty comes from dealing with enemy players in open world pvp
mmos that try make pve challenging are usually frustrating, boring, tedious grinds instead
in single player games i always pick the hardest difficulty and find that it is often the setting most polished and the way the game is meant to be played
Don't say a MMO is bad just because you can't handle the PVE. VERY few games have hard PVE. Don't insult what is already almost dead.
When players talk about ''too easy'' they dont want you to nerf our damage and add 50% HP to the enemies, as developers seem to think. That only makes your game, or difficulty setting tedious and not harder.
the only mmo with decent pve is dark souls but its really not a mmo and does really come down to learning the tricks, though they arent too tedious and its pretty fun, but again the main threat is enemy players
mmo combat is never complex enough to offer ANY challenge. straight easy mode. all it can do is be frustrating instead. group up with a tank , dps, healer, everyone cycle correctly!! yeah, that's difficult. there is no mmo with hard pve. the only good mmos offer open world pvp with bottable pve.
Hard PVE starts with being dangerous. There has to be a detah penalty. That way you have to think about who you're going to fight and who you wont fight. The world should be full of monsters that can kill you if you cross their path. You better pay attention. Then you shouldn't be able to do lots of things without a well coordinated group. The group would include people will well defined roles, not the mass hybrids that plague modern MMOs. A tank will only take damage, dps only deal damage, healer will only heal, and support will only support (buffs or what not). You should have to think about when you will use what skills. No more spamming buttons like you're playing street fighter. If people are not cooridnated you all die and there is a penalty. There are / were MMOs with good PVE but they are VERY rare.
Open world PVP is fine and good in its own right. PVE is another story.
If the game is too hard, no one plays, sales don't go through the roof
People are trying to transform MMORPG's into FPS / Action games with dynasty warrior bullshit where we all run around killing soldiers with our combo attacks -.-
When the main reason people play RPG's was for the storyline, and the mmo is for all the other people out there playing it to make us feel better with ourselves for being on a game for 10+ hours lol
Another thing mmoprgs have been doing is targetting young boys with high graphical titties <_<
Well I play all single player games on hard first and if they are good games I go to nightmare and insanity. I' mhere to tell ya they are to freaking easy. The exception starcraft and most good rts buuuut thats because of the huge skill curve u have to coltivate to beat them on that hehe an once yer fast enough and know the trees u can beat 3 nightmare enemies vs u every time. I will say D3 was freakin hard till the noobed it up, but was it real hard? Na it was only hard do to the fact that it restricted the proper gear needed and the mob str/spd was set so high that no matter your skill level you were ment to die. thats not hard its jsut unfair lol. To head peeps off ahead of tiem I was well into act 4 inferno the second week of release : P not complaining just saying it was an easy game adjusted to seem hard when it wasn't. Because now when I do log in I jus yawn pwn cause I got the gear that made the game EASY AS INTENDED!
Artificially inflating the difficulty of a game doesn't increase its playability. The main reason people find MMOs too 'easy' is because they're too simplistic. They lack depth and are generally designed to placate teenagers with too much time on their hands.
Artificially inflating the difficulty of a game doesn't increase its playability. The main reason people find MMOs too 'easy' is because they're too simplistic. They lack depth and are generally designed to placate teenagers with too much time on their hands.
Indeed, lets gives games (not just MMOs) more complexity. Then look at how much more hard they need to be. This has been a common issue in the past, complex games have been described as hard or difficult.
Crusader Kings 2 on Easy mode is an easy game to play, but it is as complex as CK2 on Very Hard mode.
“Mass Effect 3, shown at last week's PAX East, showed that only four percent of players completed the game on "Insanity" difficulty. The "hardcore" in text don't seem to be all that "hardcore" in practice."
If I remember rightly you have to play the game at lower level difficulties before you can unlock the game at higher level difficulties? Not sure if that’s the same for D3? This may reflect more on the games lack of replayability than the desire of gamers to play on hard mode.
There are usually four gradings with names like: easy, average, hard and very hard. I always start out at Hard these days. I did not used to, Average mode ten years ago was hard enough for me, but now Average mode plays like Easy mode.
After all the now Ex CEO (thank god) of EA said, “we want all our games to be games your mum could play.” That’s the vision most of the industry still has in mind, the babyfication of gaming.
Yeah, this isn't true. Games HAVE gotten easier. Especially MMOs. This is fact. I've cleared the nightmare and expert difficulties, I'm not just imagining things. I've owned and played every console since NES pretty much, and have been a PC gamer since '95.
Naturally, your nightmare dungeons are a post-WoW era thing, the games that came before were much more challenging and rewarding and a lot of them didn't have raids or difficulty levels. OP, you're dated by what you know, and I'm gonna have to assume you're too new to gaming to have witnessed a decrease in video game difficulty. So in a "tree in the forest" kind of way, you're right. Overall, you're not.
I think that not enough MMORPG content is difficult. Yes, some of the top-tier content can be very challenging, but the drop off is too steep.
MMORPGs could, in general, use a smoother difficulty curve that allows a challenge that ramps up evenly, or lets gamers have a challenge at all levels, not just top-tier raiding.
Is it fairer to judge the difficulty of a game by a handful of difficult encounters or by some overall assessment of the content? I tend towards the latter because it is so easy for developers to tack some impossible content on to a game which is basically very easy.
Yes, if the statement is "challenging content is AVAILABLE" in the game. Is it fair to say it is an easy game when there *is* difficulty content and people avoid it?
In most mmorpg's the "difficult" content is at the end. That means I have to spend 50 hours leveling to ever see it. That's where I have a problem. If I'm still steamrolling the game after 6+ hours of play then I'm bored and quitting.
The leveling up process is where the difficulty needs to be added. I'd much prefer an mmropg where hitting max level is an accomplishment in itself rather then a given if I just put in enough time.
But the market disagrees with you.
for some, unknown reason, it makes more sense to hand players max level within an hour, and let them wander around the end content.
The entirety of the game is no longer the content, only the last 5% is what gets sold.
Eh, I don't know about that. I think the market is full of bad game design all around. You can't really look to it for what should and shouldn't be done. What you can't do is design a game where the leveling is slow and there are no "good parts" to look forward to at lower levels. I don't think players expect to race to the end as much as they're tired of being jerked around at the lower levels just to artificially extend the life of the game.
This is a nice thread, but as some have said, you need to define difficulty. If you are talking about numbers and gear checks, they can represent difficulty for some. E.g. leveling might be super easy, but if you do everything several levels before, it might not be that easy anymore.
Likewise complexity is oftern interpreted as difficulty. You can introduce complexity at any level and it will be difficult until patterns can be seen or wiki's and other sources are utilized. Randomization will help somewhat, but at least I haven't seen implemented anywhere to the extent that it would truly make 10+ repeats difficult.
Further, different difficulty levels such as diablo or hm dungeons etc. most often simply raise the numbers and maybe put a bit more complexity. Once you pass the gear check and see the patterns, it all boils down to replayability and incentives: whether the players find it worthwhile and fun enough to redo the content. Often hm is actually more simpler as many things become unusable and being forced to always use similar methods outweighs the slight increase in complexity. As such, it get's boring for some.
As to the overall premise of the topic that simply having 1% of game difficult makes the game difficult, well-- I might actually agree with you on that, but not sure if I would ever represent a mmorpg's difficulty with just a single variable.
"This isn't a WoW-specific issue or even one limited to MMOs. Gamers from all disciplines seem to be fond of complaining about games being easy without actually attempting anything to accomplish difficult. Big Huge Games noted in a GDC 2012 talk that "too easy" was a common complaint about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, even though two-thirds of its players completed it on the easiest difficulty setting. BioWare's awesome infographic for Mass Effect 3, shown at last week's PAX East, showed that only four percent of players completed the game on "Insanity" difficulty. The "hardcore" in text don't seem to be all that "hardcore" in practice."
Oh, they are. They're just not as numerous as they like to think they are.
Comments
People who love to play Insanity modes are few and far between. We just don't want to drool on our keyboard as we watch Game of Thrones on a 2nd monitor because of how easy the MMO we're playing is.
Not playing insane mode proves nothing with regard to wanting challenge out of a game. Most games with an Insanity mode went completely untested and uninspired making it more of an experience in masochism then anything else. "Here's some last minute dungeons where everything is exactly the same except monsters have 10x health and damage." That's pretty much how every EQ expansion in the past 10 years was made as well.....
I dont know about EQ, but In the last WoW tier (tier 14), some bosses actually had less health on heroic mode.
Ok guys, lets all agree that MMOs are easy and that some MMOs at least offer difficult challenges for those who seek them.
Now lets move on and create another random silly topic to bitch and cry our little eyes out that doesn't really matter to anyone...
I don't really care how hard or difficult the hard modes are in WoW. I played WoW for 5 years with passion and never cared much of raiding. There was always lots of (challenging) stuff to do. You really can't say the same now.
And then, as always, the immersion. There's none left in WoW, nada. Dungeons are disconnected from Azeroth, quests are many, they are easy and grindy (on trial i hit 100 quest complited on level 19), professions are pointless and PvP is for the owners of hairlooms.
So, if some raids are hard as hell that doesn't mean World (why is this word in this game's name anyway) of Warcraft is not easy.
lol
If you "watch Game of Thrones on a 2nd monitor", that is totally your choosing since you can choose the hard content.
And if you don't choose the hard content, don't complain that there is nothing challenging.
And how would other people choose to play easy mode affect you? You don't even need to play with them. The point of an option is to let people choose.
In most mmorpg's the "difficult" content is at the end. That means I have to spend 50 hours leveling to ever see it. That's where I have a problem. If I'm still steamrolling the game after 6+ hours of play then I'm bored and quitting.
The leveling up process is where the difficulty needs to be added. I'd much prefer an mmropg where hitting max level is an accomplishment in itself rather then a given if I just put in enough time.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
The first is a legimate complain although i thought people are complaining leveling is too fast. MMO should add a difficulty setting in leveling like in D3. You can make D3 leveling (not paragon leveling, the original levels) challenging now.
The second point about "hitting max" is an accomplishment ... well .. that is just a matter of personal preference. Some may think that the accomplishment should be downing a difficult raid boss. Accomplishment is an illusion anyway. We are talking abotu games, not real-life.
Solo questing MMOs where every player goes through the same quest-chains are easy because they *have* to be easy.
1) The least solo-able class has to be able to beat the mobs so they'll be easy for most of the other classes - especially the most solo-able classes.
2) The newest, least experienced players have to be able to beat the mobs so players who've played these kind of games for a while will find it easy.
These things are obviously and necessarily true.
Games can get round the first by making all the classes the same but the second will always be true. If all the players *have* to go through the same content then it must be balanced for the least capable players - obviously.
If you got most of your exp from fighting mobs with optional, often class-specific, quests for gear/money/faction then players could pick their own difficulty.
EQ had the right design ideas imo. The problem was the implementation e.g. EQ had thousands of optional quests but for 95% of them the cost/benefit really sucked.
in (good) mmos, the difficulty comes from dealing with enemy players in open world pvp
mmos that try make pve challenging are usually frustrating, boring, tedious grinds instead
in single player games i always pick the hardest difficulty and find that it is often the setting most polished and the way the game is meant to be played
Don't say a MMO is bad just because you can't handle the PVE. VERY few games have hard PVE. Don't insult what is already almost dead.
When players talk about ''too easy'' they dont want you to nerf our damage and add 50% HP to the enemies, as developers seem to think. That only makes your game, or difficulty setting tedious and not harder.
Hard PVE starts with being dangerous. There has to be a detah penalty. That way you have to think about who you're going to fight and who you wont fight. The world should be full of monsters that can kill you if you cross their path. You better pay attention. Then you shouldn't be able to do lots of things without a well coordinated group. The group would include people will well defined roles, not the mass hybrids that plague modern MMOs. A tank will only take damage, dps only deal damage, healer will only heal, and support will only support (buffs or what not). You should have to think about when you will use what skills. No more spamming buttons like you're playing street fighter. If people are not cooridnated you all die and there is a penalty. There are / were MMOs with good PVE but they are VERY rare.
Open world PVP is fine and good in its own right. PVE is another story.
If the game is too hard, no one plays, sales don't go through the roof
People are trying to transform MMORPG's into FPS / Action games with dynasty warrior bullshit where we all run around killing soldiers with our combo attacks -.-
When the main reason people play RPG's was for the storyline, and the mmo is for all the other people out there playing it to make us feel better with ourselves for being on a game for 10+ hours lol
Another thing mmoprgs have been doing is targetting young boys with high graphical titties <_<
Artificially inflating the difficulty of a game doesn't increase its playability. The main reason people find MMOs too 'easy' is because they're too simplistic. They lack depth and are generally designed to placate teenagers with too much time on their hands.
Indeed, lets gives games (not just MMOs) more complexity. Then look at how much more hard they need to be. This has been a common issue in the past, complex games have been described as hard or difficult.
Crusader Kings 2 on Easy mode is an easy game to play, but it is as complex as CK2 on Very Hard mode.
“Mass Effect 3, shown at last week's PAX East, showed that only four percent of players completed the game on "Insanity" difficulty. The "hardcore" in text don't seem to be all that "hardcore" in practice."
If I remember rightly you have to play the game at lower level difficulties before you can unlock the game at higher level difficulties? Not sure if that’s the same for D3? This may reflect more on the games lack of replayability than the desire of gamers to play on hard mode.
There are usually four gradings with names like: easy, average, hard and very hard. I always start out at Hard these days. I did not used to, Average mode ten years ago was hard enough for me, but now Average mode plays like Easy mode.
After all the now Ex CEO (thank god) of EA said, “we want all our games to be games your mum could play.” That’s the vision most of the industry still has in mind, the babyfication of gaming.
Yeah, this isn't true. Games HAVE gotten easier. Especially MMOs. This is fact. I've cleared the nightmare and expert difficulties, I'm not just imagining things. I've owned and played every console since NES pretty much, and have been a PC gamer since '95.
Naturally, your nightmare dungeons are a post-WoW era thing, the games that came before were much more challenging and rewarding and a lot of them didn't have raids or difficulty levels. OP, you're dated by what you know, and I'm gonna have to assume you're too new to gaming to have witnessed a decrease in video game difficulty. So in a "tree in the forest" kind of way, you're right. Overall, you're not.
http://thewordiz.wordpress.com/
I think that not enough MMORPG content is difficult. Yes, some of the top-tier content can be very challenging, but the drop off is too steep.
MMORPGs could, in general, use a smoother difficulty curve that allows a challenge that ramps up evenly, or lets gamers have a challenge at all levels, not just top-tier raiding.
But the market disagrees with you.
for some, unknown reason, it makes more sense to hand players max level within an hour, and let them wander around the end content.
The entirety of the game is no longer the content, only the last 5% is what gets sold.
This is a nice thread, but as some have said, you need to define difficulty. If you are talking about numbers and gear checks, they can represent difficulty for some. E.g. leveling might be super easy, but if you do everything several levels before, it might not be that easy anymore.
Likewise complexity is oftern interpreted as difficulty. You can introduce complexity at any level and it will be difficult until patterns can be seen or wiki's and other sources are utilized. Randomization will help somewhat, but at least I haven't seen implemented anywhere to the extent that it would truly make 10+ repeats difficult.
Further, different difficulty levels such as diablo or hm dungeons etc. most often simply raise the numbers and maybe put a bit more complexity. Once you pass the gear check and see the patterns, it all boils down to replayability and incentives: whether the players find it worthwhile and fun enough to redo the content. Often hm is actually more simpler as many things become unusable and being forced to always use similar methods outweighs the slight increase in complexity. As such, it get's boring for some.
As to the overall premise of the topic that simply having 1% of game difficult makes the game difficult, well-- I might actually agree with you on that, but not sure if I would ever represent a mmorpg's difficulty with just a single variable.
Oh, they are. They're just not as numerous as they like to think they are.