Difficulty is always a tricky thing to balance in a game in my opinion. I have had times when I start a new game and I hit the highest difficulty from the start. I still remember starting the Witcher on the highest difficulty setting and it was challenging but at some point it became frustrating? Why? Because I probably messed up my skills/stats etc. and it got so difficult to the point that i could barely progress. So my option was to reroll and start over, maybe on a lower difficulty but I couldn't be bothered to repeat the content again.
So nowadays what happens is I play a game on the normal settings to get a feel for it with the idea to play it on the hardest difficulty afterwards. But 99% of the time that never happens. I just don't have the desire to do it all over again. I guess if a lot of people do this then they will complain that games are easy. On Easy/normal settings you can faceroll your keyboard/controller and still win without much trouble.
But yeah I do agree that 99% of the people don't experience games on the hardest difficulty and they usually play on easy/normal so they QQ that everything is so easy. Same for MMOs. Everyone says WoW is dead easy and that a mentally handicapped person can steam roll through the game. But have they actually played the most difficult content the game has to offer? Most likely not. They probably only quested a bit and did a few dungeons.
The only difference, in terms of difficulty, that games in the past used to have is the ability to choose the difficulty. A lot of the old games never actually had difficulty sliders and they were automatically set at a fairly high difficulty level. Now all games I have played you can choose the difficulty and the difference between the two extremes (e.g. easy and difficult) is insane. If you want challenge crank up the difficulty to max and only after steamrolling through a game on super insane difficulty can you say that a game is easy.
But the main point is that making a game super difficult does not make it fun. Brilliant game designers know how to balance the whole difficulty thingie. The easy way out is to either A) make it ultra easy or make it ultra hard. Making a game ridiculously hard can be very counterproductive ESPECIALLY if you are using cheap means to accomplish it and you ruin the fun of the game.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
first ... you list non-MMOs with difficulty settings. I can't really comment on single player games as they bore me to tears.
then you list sunwell. the general theme of the complaint is that mmos have become too easy. there are not many people who thought BT/Hyjal/TK/SSC were too easy. Even if there is a final boss on a hard mode that is very hard, the other 98.923% of most new mmos are still way too easy for my taste. im not saying all mmos have to be hard, but overall I havent been able to find one that I consider to be all that challenging outside of a few bosses on hard mode.
Did you read the article?
I guess not.
So i suppose you have all the achievement on all the hard mode stuff? Care to show us?
Playing a game over and over again to "unlock" harder levels of the exact same game is just something that does not appeal to me. It's a developer copout in place of real content.
How about the game scale up in difficulty as you play it? With oh.. actual new content?
Anyhow, to me the problem is simply that games are made "harder" in a very poor manner. Mobs get more HP and do more damage. Great. They did this back in the 70' with games like Telenguard
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Well, the main idea that we're trying to get at here is that the most hard games to play are more attractive is when we see better players doing "walkthroughs" of the game.
If we can do what they do, or something else maybe even better the game seems more fun. Which is the problem of the games of today, they are too easy, theres no skill etc, walkthroughs are just pointless unless the video commentary is amazing :P
People want to imitate pros, MMORPGS don't have any, but when there are "pros" anyone can say they can do it better but lack videos etc <_< Theres not a big gap between noob / pro except levels and character builds? Or funding through the cash shop o.o
Playing a game over and over again to "unlock" harder levels of the exact same game is just something that does not appeal to me. It's a developer copout in place of real content.
How about the game scale up in difficulty as you play it? With oh.. actual new content?
Anyhow, to me the problem is simply that games are made "harder" in a very poor manner. Mobs get more HP and do more damage. Great. They did this back in the 70' with games like Telenguard
No one says you have to run easy raids. You can jump to hard mode raid right away. And since everyone is complaining about how short the leveling curve is ... that is not an issue.
And who says mobs just got more HP? LFR raids have easier mechanics .. sometimes quite different. than hard mode.
Well, the main idea that we're trying to get at here is that the most hard games to play are more attractive is when we see better players doing "walkthroughs" of the game.
If we can do what they do, or something else maybe even better the game seems more fun. Which is the problem of the games of today, they are too easy, theres no skill etc, walkthroughs are just pointless unless the video commentary is amazing :P
People want to imitate pros, MMORPGS don't have any, but when there are "pros" anyone can say they can do it better but lack videos etc <_< Theres not a big gap between noob / pro except levels and character builds? Or funding through the cash shop o.o
In MMOs there are no pros because MMORPGs have very low skill requirement and a low skill ceiling. But this has always been the case. I might be wrong but I can't think of a single MMO which is competitive and has a pro scene. If we exclude MMOs, there are quite a few games where you just can't get perfect (aka there is no limit to how good you can be). At the moment I mostly play just SC2 and there is no way you can ever achieve perfection (not even what most people consider "good") at that game. There are tons of pros which you can only look at on youtube and admire. OBviously I will never be as good as they are.
When you say "games of today", do you mean that there were actually game back in the past which were different to what we have today? If yes, care to give examples?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Diablo 3 is probably the worst example you could ever give. The difficulty was nerfed repeatedly because only a few classes that had spent hundreds of hours farming an easier difficulty could complete the difficulty. It was literally as easy as
(useless stuff eliminated)
You said it .. nerfed repeated .. why .. because it is too difficult.
And not everyone plays DH, and not everyone plays for hundred of hours.
And now, even with hundred of hours .. unless you are super lucky and have billions and billions of equipment, MP10 is still diffcult.
Gah, you're just trying to strawman this.
It wasn't nerfed because it was difficult, it was nerfed because releveling to the correct class and refarming modes you've successfully and easily beaten is BORING and TEDIOUS. Nobody wanted to do it and they were bleeding active players.
Diablo 3 is probably the worst example you could ever give. The difficulty was nerfed repeatedly because only a few classes that had spent hundreds of hours farming an easier difficulty could complete the difficulty. It was literally as easy as
(useless stuff eliminated)
You said it .. nerfed repeated .. why .. because it is too difficult.
And not everyone plays DH, and not everyone plays for hundred of hours.
And now, even with hundred of hours .. unless you are super lucky and have billions and billions of equipment, MP10 is still diffcult.
Gah, you're just trying to strawman this.
It wasn't nerfed because it was difficult, it was nerfed because releveling to the correct class and refarming modes you've successfully and easily beaten is BORING and TEDIOUS. Nobody wanted to do it and they were bleeding active players.
There are plenty of complaint about how difficult Inferno was ... look it up.
And they are still top 11 on xfire, better than 99% of online games.
To be honest, I'm glad they were able to add a level of complexity to running a handful of dungeons in WoW and that people enjoy it. I personally don't find it exciting but I'm only one man.
I'd prefer to have the difficulty be at every mob (or adds!!) deep in a dungeon somewhere than be racing to see how quickly I can get to the end. To me that's more conducive to an RPG experience which is part of the reason I started playing MMORPGs.
Forum Guy #1 "MMOs are so easy! The quest of ultimate truth was a faceroll!! Give me a challenge!"
Forum Guy #2 "Wow, I thought it was kind of hard. I died twice trying to complete that quest chain. Forum Guy #1 must be a REALLY GOOD PLAYER!"
Forum Guy #1 "Thank you for acknowledging my leetness!"
Basically, Forum Guy #1 just wants his epeen stroked.
It's weird how people can't get very simple logic. If you have a solo quest game that *every* player has to pass through then the level of difficulty *must* be set at the level of the least able.
A class version of the same thing would be if one player is levelling a priest and a second player is levelling a hunter then the level of difficulty *must* be set for the priest to be able to complete which makes the entire levelling game a faceroll for the hunter.
The only way to get round that (what should be completely obvious) *logical* truism is to have difficulty modes like single player games or different levelling routes so players can pick the exact level of difficulty they prefer.
I've found a lot of people who say MMOs are too "easy" are 10+ year veterans who, after this amout of time, should damn well be quite skilled at playing them.
If it is still "hard" after 10 years, you're doing it wrong...
good point this
I am one of these 10+ years veterans (more like 20+ really) and i recently played Bioshock Infinite on 1999 mode (what they call insane) for the first time. I never played it before. The whloe thing can be viewed on my twitch page in the recent broadcasts ( twitch.tv/skyrant ) if you want to see an old man cuss and rage.
The game is hard, really unforgiving, hair pulling hard. But its not unfair or impossible. It is exactly as i remember games from back then (sounds so nostalgic doesn't it).
It's not so much about skill, as it is about adapting and experimenting with possibilites. If something does not work, try something else. Study your enemy and then when you find his weakness, make him pay.
Games today *usually* do not have this learning phase anymore. They are very easy and not challangeing at all. This is mostly the developers fault because they do not give their audience enough credit to figure it out.
I have yet to see an outrage by gamers about a game beeing too hard. In fact, some games pride themselves in beeing hard ( DarkSouls).
Anyway, just my 2c
"Give players systems and tools instead of rails and rules"
We have discussed this many times before, players always take the easy route. If you had differant difficulty levels in a MMO it would not work. How do you explain to your guildmates that you are going to be level 25 when they have got to 50? You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
We need MMO's to be harder, the question is how much harder? If players only took on average 10% longer to reach max level that would be a harder game. The problem is do MMO companies want to risk their game by making it harder? No they don't, they make them as easy as they can, this is now seen as the best market stratergy.
This stratergy makes for shallow MMO's with no replayability. MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
We have discussed this many times before, players always take the easy route. If you had differant difficulty levels in a MMO it would not work. How do you explain to your guildmates that you are going to be level 25 when they have got to 50? You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
We need MMO's to be harder, the question is how much harder? If players only took on average 10% longer to reach max level that would be a harder game. The problem is do MMO companies want to risk their game by making it harder? No they don't, they make them as easy as they can, this is now seen as the best market stratergy.
This stratergy makes for shallow MMO's with no replayability. MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
You can't call current MMO's easymode when you don't even play them. You want challenge, you play instanced content. Open world content hardly ever scales, so you can usually out-level the content if you wish to. You can also bring more friends if it feels too hard. Instances, on the otherhand, give you a chance to customize your difficulty and really test yourself (usually for higher rewards) if you wish it. Freedom to the player, eh?
Public quests, rifts and dynamic events are the most recent innovations to open world content which has never offered much challenge (imo). Still, even if the challenge they provide is dictated by how well they scale, it is much better than the arcaic static content of the past. I'd be encouraged to know if iterations like these would become the norm for open world content.
Alas, big part of the posters who cry "easymode" are purists choosing to ignore those advances. They are against instances and many are even against scaling. If you ask me, they're pretty much against any advances and anything new.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
We have discussed this many times before, players always take the easy route. If you had differant difficulty levels in a MMO it would not work. How do you explain to your guildmates that you are going to be level 25 when they have got to 50? You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
Obviously not all of them. Otherwise no one will run hard core raid, or MP10 on D3, or hard core perma mode on D3.
It would not work? It is already working. Use a LFR matching algorithm. Already done in D3. Already done in WOW (three levels to choose from).
We need MMO's to be harder, the question is how much harder? If players only took on average 10% longer to reach max level that would be a harder game. The problem is do MMO companies want to risk their game by making it harder? No they don't, they make them as easy as they can, this is now seen as the best market stratergy.
No. We need difficulty options. More options in WOW would be good. Instead of 3 levels of raid, may be 5 .. with LFR for all.
This stratergy makes for shallow MMO's with no replayability. MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
No replayability? Don't confuse "you don't like it" with no replayability. There are millions raiding every day .. tell me they are not "replaying". Personally i don't like MMO raids anymore .. but i won't say they have no replayability just that i don't like it.
Originally posted by nariusseldon Originally posted by ScotWe need MMO's to be harder...
No. We need difficulty options...
I agree with Narius that players need difficulty options; but I disagree that all difficulty options should exist on the same server.
Originally posted by Scot ...You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
Yes, sadly, to their own peril. I predict EQN will just be another flavor-of-the-month unless it has different server types (easy/hard) to appeal to a larger audience.
Originally posted by Scot MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
I feel similarly.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Originally posted by Phelcher Can anyone explain to me, how an over commercailized (nowhere near as good as the orivinal) Dioblo3 has any bearing on MMORPG's...
It was an arcade game. Far different than what is ArcheAge EQNext, or other mmorpgs.
If someone constantly references WoW.. it is bcuz it's all he knows...
The EQ fanboys are more annoying because for some reason they think that they are superior to the WoW fanboys and they are not
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Originally posted by Phelcher Can anyone explain to me, how an over commercailized (nowhere near as good as the orivinal) Dioblo3 has any bearing on MMORPG's... It was an arcade game. Far different than what is ArcheAge EQNext, or other mmorpgs. If someone constantly references WoW.. it is bcuz it's all he knows...
The EQ fanboys are more annoying because for some reason they think that they are superior to the WoW fanboys and they are not
Initially I thought, hey I don't think that way at all. Then I did the math. A 12 year old can do quite well in Vanilla WoW. A 12 year old would have quite a hard time in Everquest.
If by 'superior' you mean more skilled or increased cognitive ability, then yes the average EQ player *was* superior to the average WoW player. Outliers of course exist.
But, those WoW 12 year olds are now very capable adults so that cliche no longer applies.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
We have discussed this many times before, players always take the easy route. If you had differant difficulty levels in a MMO it would not work. How do you explain to your guildmates that you are going to be level 25 when they have got to 50? You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
We need MMO's to be harder, the question is how much harder? If players only took on average 10% longer to reach max level that would be a harder game. The problem is do MMO companies want to risk their game by making it harder? No they don't, they make them as easy as they can, this is now seen as the best market stratergy.
This stratergy makes for shallow MMO's with no replayability. MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
You can't call current MMO's easymode when you don't even play them. You want challenge, you play instanced content. Open world content hardly ever scales, so you can usually out-level the content if you wish to. You can also bring more friends if it feels too hard. Instances, on the otherhand, give you a chance to customize your difficulty and really test yourself (usually for higher rewards) if you wish it. Freedom to the player, eh?
Public quests, rifts and dynamic events are the most recent innovations to open world content which has never offered much challenge (imo). Still, even if the challenge they provide is dictated by how well they scale, it is much better than the arcaic static content of the past. I'd be encouraged to know if iterations like these would become the norm for open world content.
Alas, big part of the posters who cry "easymode" are purists choosing to ignore those advances. They are against instances and many are even against scaling. If you ask me, they're pretty much against any advances and anything new.
Who said I don't play them? I only play some to be with old guild mates, but I still get to see them. I am not saying easyMMO's have nothing to offer. SWTOR snd TSW have both been decent in the last year. But would I have played them more than three months without my guildmates being there? No.
Public quests and dynamic events are new and should be applauded, but they don't solve the basic problems MMO's now have.
We have discussed this many times before, players always take the easy route. If you had differant difficulty levels in a MMO it would not work. How do you explain to your guildmates that you are going to be level 25 when they have got to 50? You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
Obviously not all of them. Otherwise no one will run hard core raid, or MP10 on D3, or hard core perma mode on D3.
It would not work? It is already working. Use a LFR matching algorithm. Already done in D3. Already done in WOW (three levels to choose from).
We need MMO's to be harder, the question is how much harder? If players only took on average 10% longer to reach max level that would be a harder game. The problem is do MMO companies want to risk their game by making it harder? No they don't, they make them as easy as they can, this is now seen as the best market stratergy.
No. We need difficulty options. More options in WOW would be good. Instead of 3 levels of raid, may be 5 .. with LFR for all.
This stratergy makes for shallow MMO's with no replayability. MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
No replayability? Don't confuse "you don't like it" with no replayability. There are millions raiding every day .. tell me they are not "replaying". Personally i don't like MMO raids anymore .. but i won't say they have no replayability just that i don't like it.
I don’t think you quite understood me here. I was not talking about different difficulty levels that yield different rewards. I was talking about the idea that you could have different difficulty levels giving the same reward on the same server. This would never take of as far as I can see. Having raids at different difficulty levels yielding different rewards works fine.
As to modern MMO's having little replayability. Think back to MMO's which started you out in different zones according to race, with different quests to do. Where you were not lead from quest hub to quest hub but could pick up quests from a stranger on road you happened to bump into. That’s part of what I mean, I am not talking about endgame here, I am talking about leveling up a second avatar. You may be shocked to hear some people like to do that Nari.
I don’t think you quite understood me here. I was not talking about different difficulty levels that yield different rewards. I was talking about the idea that you could have different difficulty levels giving the same reward on the same server. This would never take of as far as I can see. Having raids at different difficulty levels yielding different rewards works fine.
Agreed. Different difficulty should be acompanying with different rewards. That is a proven concept.
As to modern MMO's having little replayability. Think back to MMO's which started you out in different zones according to race, with different quests to do. Where you were not lead from quest hub to quest hub but could pick up quests from a stranger on road you happened to bump into. That’s part of what I mean, I am not talking about endgame here, I am talking about leveling up a second avatar. You may be shocked to hear some people like to do that Nari.
Hmm .. there is no replaybaility in either case. You level from 1-max level only once.
And in this case, replayability is not even desired .. at least not from me. There is nothing wrong with one-off non-repeatable quests/zones. In fact, that is content, you do something to level 10, then you do something else for L10-15.
In fact, there is no reason not to design the leveling game like a SP game (which is how it is done in WOW, and explicitly in STO, and many other games).
Replayability is only desired when you run out of content (at end game)... so you hope like hell that it is fun to repeat. It is always better (for me) to have something new to do.
Originally posted by Phelcher Can anyone explain to me, how an over commercailized (nowhere near as good as the orivinal) Dioblo3 has any bearing on MMORPG's... It was an arcade game. Far different than what is ArcheAge EQNext, or other mmorpgs. If someone constantly references WoW.. it is bcuz it's all he knows...
The EQ fanboys are more annoying because for some reason they think that they are superior to the WoW fanboys and they are not
Initially I thought, hey I don't think that way at all. Then I did the math. A 12 year old can do quite well in Vanilla WoW. A 12 year old would have quite a hard time in Everquest.
You don't know some of the 12-year olds that I do. Let's not make ageist generalizations here; even if they are mostly true, they're still rather dismissive to the outliers who deserve better.
That aside: I seem to recall, back when EQ was the "big game" and seeing flamewars between tje EQ and UO fanboys, that the EQ players *at that time* sounded a lot like the WoW players do today. Among other things, they loved to cite how the relative popularity of their preferred game was defacto proof that it was a better game. (Logic that would suggest WoW is in fact strictly superior to every other MMO, and that Farmville was the best game ever made.)
Of course, back then I was a UO fan myself so I'm *probably* a little biased in my recollection.
Originally posted by Phelcher Can anyone explain to me, how an over commercailized (nowhere near as good as the orivinal) Dioblo3 has any bearing on MMORPG's... It was an arcade game. Far different than what is ArcheAge EQNext, or other mmorpgs. If someone constantly references WoW.. it is bcuz it's all he knows...
The EQ fanboys are more annoying because for some reason they think that they are superior to the WoW fanboys and they are not
Initially I thought, hey I don't think that way at all. Then I did the math. A 12 year old can do quite well in Vanilla WoW. A 12 year old would have quite a hard time in Everquest.
If by 'superior' you mean more skilled or increased cognitive ability, then yes the average EQ player *was* superior to the average WoW player. Outliers of course exist.
But, those WoW 12 year olds are now very capable adults so that cliche no longer applies.
I don't know if people who play EQ are more skilled or have increased cognitive ability. It is extremely difficult to make such generalisations and also if you look at WoW's PvP it does require skill and cognitive ability more so than most of the stuff in EQ. But from what I have seen most EQ players base their comparisons solely on the leveling experience. EQ leveling more difficult than WoW's leveling (presumably) and so EQ is more difficult. That's how the logic seems to go, completely ignoring the fact that WoW's raids and PvP (especially WoW's PvP but then again EQ never actually had PvP ) may actually require more skill.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Comments
Difficulty is always a tricky thing to balance in a game in my opinion. I have had times when I start a new game and I hit the highest difficulty from the start. I still remember starting the Witcher on the highest difficulty setting and it was challenging but at some point it became frustrating? Why? Because I probably messed up my skills/stats etc. and it got so difficult to the point that i could barely progress. So my option was to reroll and start over, maybe on a lower difficulty but I couldn't be bothered to repeat the content again.
So nowadays what happens is I play a game on the normal settings to get a feel for it with the idea to play it on the hardest difficulty afterwards. But 99% of the time that never happens. I just don't have the desire to do it all over again. I guess if a lot of people do this then they will complain that games are easy. On Easy/normal settings you can faceroll your keyboard/controller and still win without much trouble.
But yeah I do agree that 99% of the people don't experience games on the hardest difficulty and they usually play on easy/normal so they QQ that everything is so easy. Same for MMOs. Everyone says WoW is dead easy and that a mentally handicapped person can steam roll through the game. But have they actually played the most difficult content the game has to offer? Most likely not. They probably only quested a bit and did a few dungeons.
The only difference, in terms of difficulty, that games in the past used to have is the ability to choose the difficulty. A lot of the old games never actually had difficulty sliders and they were automatically set at a fairly high difficulty level. Now all games I have played you can choose the difficulty and the difference between the two extremes (e.g. easy and difficult) is insane. If you want challenge crank up the difficulty to max and only after steamrolling through a game on super insane difficulty can you say that a game is easy.
But the main point is that making a game super difficult does not make it fun. Brilliant game designers know how to balance the whole difficulty thingie. The easy way out is to either A) make it ultra easy or
make it ultra hard. Making a game ridiculously hard can be very counterproductive ESPECIALLY if you are using cheap means to accomplish it and you ruin the fun of the game.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Playing a game over and over again to "unlock" harder levels of the exact same game is just something that does not appeal to me. It's a developer copout in place of real content.
How about the game scale up in difficulty as you play it? With oh.. actual new content?
Anyhow, to me the problem is simply that games are made "harder" in a very poor manner. Mobs get more HP and do more damage. Great. They did this back in the 70' with games like Telenguard
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Oh look, everyones talking about difficulty now.
Well, the main idea that we're trying to get at here is that the most hard games to play are more attractive is when we see better players doing "walkthroughs" of the game.
If we can do what they do, or something else maybe even better the game seems more fun. Which is the problem of the games of today, they are too easy, theres no skill etc, walkthroughs are just pointless unless the video commentary is amazing :P
People want to imitate pros, MMORPGS don't have any, but when there are "pros" anyone can say they can do it better but lack videos etc <_< Theres not a big gap between noob / pro except levels and character builds? Or funding through the cash shop o.o
No one says you have to run easy raids. You can jump to hard mode raid right away. And since everyone is complaining about how short the leveling curve is ... that is not an issue.
And who says mobs just got more HP? LFR raids have easier mechanics .. sometimes quite different. than hard mode.
In MMOs there are no pros because MMORPGs have very low skill requirement and a low skill ceiling. But this has always been the case. I might be wrong but I can't think of a single MMO which is competitive and has a pro scene. If we exclude MMOs, there are quite a few games where you just can't get perfect (aka there is no limit to how good you can be). At the moment I mostly play just SC2 and there is no way you can ever achieve perfection (not even what most people consider "good") at that game. There are tons of pros which you can only look at on youtube and admire. OBviously I will never be as good as they are.
When you say "games of today", do you mean that there were actually game back in the past which were different to what we have today? If yes, care to give examples?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Gah, you're just trying to strawman this.
It wasn't nerfed because it was difficult, it was nerfed because releveling to the correct class and refarming modes you've successfully and easily beaten is BORING and TEDIOUS. Nobody wanted to do it and they were bleeding active players.
There are plenty of complaint about how difficult Inferno was ... look it up.
And they are still top 11 on xfire, better than 99% of online games.
WoW raids have modes, because the game itself, poses no threat, no challenge. The exact same reason people sit in lobbies lfd...
10 instances... no matter how many times done, on whatever mode doesnt make a game hard, it makes it easy.
For comparison... getting to a dungeon in EQ was an adventure...
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Maybe the games aren't easy...maybe it's just that we are all so pro...
I'd prefer to have the difficulty be at every mob (or adds!!) deep in a dungeon somewhere than be racing to see how quickly I can get to the end. To me that's more conducive to an RPG experience which is part of the reason I started playing MMORPGs.
It's weird how people can't get very simple logic. If you have a solo quest game that *every* player has to pass through then the level of difficulty *must* be set at the level of the least able.
A class version of the same thing would be if one player is levelling a priest and a second player is levelling a hunter then the level of difficulty *must* be set for the priest to be able to complete which makes the entire levelling game a faceroll for the hunter.
The only way to get round that (what should be completely obvious) *logical* truism is to have difficulty modes like single player games or different levelling routes so players can pick the exact level of difficulty they prefer.
I am one of these 10+ years veterans (more like 20+ really) and i recently played Bioshock Infinite on 1999 mode (what they call insane) for the first time. I never played it before. The whloe thing can be viewed on my twitch page in the recent broadcasts ( twitch.tv/skyrant ) if you want to see an old man cuss and rage.
The game is hard, really unforgiving, hair pulling hard. But its not unfair or impossible. It is exactly as i remember games from back then (sounds so nostalgic doesn't it).
It's not so much about skill, as it is about adapting and experimenting with possibilites. If something does not work, try something else. Study your enemy and then when you find his weakness, make him pay.
Games today *usually* do not have this learning phase anymore. They are very easy and not challangeing at all. This is mostly the developers fault because they do not give their audience enough credit to figure it out.
I have yet to see an outrage by gamers about a game beeing too hard. In fact, some games pride themselves in beeing hard ( DarkSouls).
Anyway, just my 2c
We have discussed this many times before, players always take the easy route. If you had differant difficulty levels in a MMO it would not work. How do you explain to your guildmates that you are going to be level 25 when they have got to 50? You could have servers with differant levels of difficulty, but I would not expect a company to go to such expense.
We need MMO's to be harder, the question is how much harder? If players only took on average 10% longer to reach max level that would be a harder game. The problem is do MMO companies want to risk their game by making it harder? No they don't, they make them as easy as they can, this is now seen as the best market stratergy.
This stratergy makes for shallow MMO's with no replayability. MMO's are easymode today, call that a myth if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore what has happened.
You can't call current MMO's easymode when you don't even play them. You want challenge, you play instanced content. Open world content hardly ever scales, so you can usually out-level the content if you wish to. You can also bring more friends if it feels too hard. Instances, on the otherhand, give you a chance to customize your difficulty and really test yourself (usually for higher rewards) if you wish it. Freedom to the player, eh?
Public quests, rifts and dynamic events are the most recent innovations to open world content which has never offered much challenge (imo). Still, even if the challenge they provide is dictated by how well they scale, it is much better than the arcaic static content of the past. I'd be encouraged to know if iterations like these would become the norm for open world content.
Alas, big part of the posters who cry "easymode" are purists choosing to ignore those advances. They are against instances and many are even against scaling. If you ask me, they're pretty much against any advances and anything new.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
No. We need difficulty options...
I agree with Narius that players need difficulty options; but I disagree that all difficulty options should exist on the same server.
Yes, sadly, to their own peril. I predict EQN will just be another flavor-of-the-month unless it has different server types (easy/hard) to appeal to a larger audience.
I feel similarly.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
It was an arcade game. Far different than what is ArcheAge EQNext, or other mmorpgs.
If someone constantly references WoW.. it is bcuz it's all he knows...
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
The EQ fanboys are more annoying because for some reason they think that they are superior to the WoW fanboys and they are not
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Initially I thought, hey I don't think that way at all. Then I did the math. A 12 year old can do quite well in Vanilla WoW. A 12 year old would have quite a hard time in Everquest.
If by 'superior' you mean more skilled or increased cognitive ability, then yes the average EQ player *was* superior to the average WoW player. Outliers of course exist.
But, those WoW 12 year olds are now very capable adults so that cliche no longer applies.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Who said I don't play them? I only play some to be with old guild mates, but I still get to see them. I am not saying easyMMO's have nothing to offer. SWTOR snd TSW have both been decent in the last year. But would I have played them more than three months without my guildmates being there? No.
Public quests and dynamic events are new and should be applauded, but they don't solve the basic problems MMO's now have.
I don’t think you quite understood me here. I was not talking about different difficulty levels that yield different rewards. I was talking about the idea that you could have different difficulty levels giving the same reward on the same server. This would never take of as far as I can see. Having raids at different difficulty levels yielding different rewards works fine.
As to modern MMO's having little replayability. Think back to MMO's which started you out in different zones according to race, with different quests to do. Where you were not lead from quest hub to quest hub but could pick up quests from a stranger on road you happened to bump into. That’s part of what I mean, I am not talking about endgame here, I am talking about leveling up a second avatar. You may be shocked to hear some people like to do that Nari.
You don't know some of the 12-year olds that I do. Let's not make ageist generalizations here; even if they are mostly true, they're still rather dismissive to the outliers who deserve better.
That aside: I seem to recall, back when EQ was the "big game" and seeing flamewars between tje EQ and UO fanboys, that the EQ players *at that time* sounded a lot like the WoW players do today. Among other things, they loved to cite how the relative popularity of their preferred game was defacto proof that it was a better game. (Logic that would suggest WoW is in fact strictly superior to every other MMO, and that Farmville was the best game ever made.)
Of course, back then I was a UO fan myself so I'm *probably* a little biased in my recollection.
I don't know if people who play EQ are more skilled or have increased cognitive ability. It is extremely difficult to make such generalisations and also if you look at WoW's PvP it does require skill and cognitive ability more so than most of the stuff in EQ. But from what I have seen most EQ players base their comparisons solely on the leveling experience. EQ leveling more difficult than WoW's leveling (presumably) and so EQ is more difficult. That's how the logic seems to go, completely ignoring the fact that WoW's raids and PvP (especially WoW's PvP but then again EQ never actually had PvP
) may actually require more skill.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.