too many players now want instant gratification. they are not willing to take time and work for something. they dont see the rewards in working hard or long for something (and maybe failing a few times). i would rather take my time and earn something rather than get it quick or by some random drop, i agree i think hard mmorps were better. i dont even want a tutorial i enjoy being dropped into a virtual world with just a few things and figuring it out on my own.
i JUST had this conversation the other day with a hardcore WoW player that i'm related to in real life and how i find that making games easier does not make them better and they dissagreed. they not only approve making MMO's easier but applaud such actions. . .
they are also a female gamer who has, literally, all waking hours of the day to play video games as she is a house wife and they have only a dog. . .
I think a greater challenge makes things that much more rewarding if you win (not in terms of loot but in terms of feeling proud of yourself). Consider it like how a sports league gives EVERYONE trophy's just for participating. Sure no one feels left out, but they also aren't taught that if you suck you don't deserve a reward. And i'm sorry people, but the real world isn't gonna give you a trophy just for showing up. If you suck you are going home alone and empty handed in the real world.
There's a lot of discussion in here about what the definition of "hard" is in the first place. I think nailing that down is pretty important to the comparison about whether or not MMORPG X is better than MMORPG Y, or whether the games of 10 years ago are better than the games of the present.
I don't know what the proper definition of hard is, but I can say that my two cents are that there are really two incomparable camps of players right now, and there's been a lot of discussion about how they ruin each others' games.
The first group is PVP players that insist as others have mentioned here that you can't truly have a "difficult" encounter with predictable mob AI. This is a fallacy, however, depending on your interpretation of difficult. First, the PVE endgame as it stands today consists almost entirely of raids. I personally can't stand this type of gaming, because the difficulty isn't in the operation of the game itself, it's in the difficulties of managing the individual personalities and capabilities of such a large player contigent into a cohesive, cooperative team. NOT ONLY is that difficult, but it's difficult enough that people get paid good money to exercise that skill in "real-life" jobs. Second, even though the AI is scripted, raid encounters have become sufficiently complex that executing the best-known strategy is still difficult-to-perform maneuver. For instance, many people can juggle 3 balls. Even though the body mechanics of juggling 17 balls are more qualitatively similar to juggling 3 balls than doing jumping jacks, there are far more people who can juggle 3 balls AND do jumping jacks than there are people who can juggle 17 balls. The difference in the difficulty of the actual execution/performance of leveling vs raiding in an MMORPG is the akin to the difference in difficulty of juggling 3 balls vs 17 balls.
In summary, PVE is not difficult in terms of strategy and decision making, with the exception being the lead progression teams that actually develop the strategies that are simply read on FAQ sites and executed by the 99% of players that aren't in the lead progression teams. However the difficulty in planning, social engineering, execution, and performance is shared by all 100% of those players. Hell, even figuring out a reasonably fair loot distribution algorithm could be the topic of a game theorist's PHP thesis.
In contrast, PVE players that insist that PVP is not as hard as raiding are failing to understand that in a game that is fair and balanced, PVP provides an infinitely varied set of circumstances and scenarios which require difficult on-the-spot strategy and tactical decision making that simply isn't found in PVE because of the scripted nature of the AI that dictates one side of the battle. One could argue that a game that is fair and balanced doesn't exist right now because the nature of MMORPGs to provide power upgrades to player characters as a reward for "effort" is a reverse handicap that makes the strong stronger and leave the rest behind, but that's another topic.
The critical element in PVP often isn't whether or not your team has more twitch skill with regards to button-pushing (contrary to popular belief), but whether or not your team has faster situational awareness which can adapt to rapidly evolving circumstances. For instance, I used to do martial arts, and I can tell tens or hundreds of little details that give clues how an opponent fights: Which foot is in front? How is each foot turned? Does the angle from heel-to-butt-to-heel face in the same or opposite direction from their face? What do they do when you switch stances? Do they mirror or pivot when you step side to side? Are their hands generally open or closed? Knowing a larger list probably makes you a better trainer/coach, but might not make you a better fighter. What makes a better fighter is being able to quickly observe all of these things, throw out the information not important to the current fight, and adapt according to the rest. The difficulty in doing that is the same difficulty in doing PVP. Often times, a combatant that has this skill can actually survive with very sloppy execution skill, where as sloppy execution skills in a difficult raid would get you killed.
In summary, PVP is not difficult in terms of planning (the best laid plans oft go to waste as soon as the situation changes), execution, and performance as was the case in PVE, but instead is difficult in terms of there not being a specific strategem which can be read from the collective conscious of the internet and executed perfectly to guarantee a win every time. It's also less difficult than PVE in the sense that maintaining a capable team of 25 is far more than 5x as complicated as maintaining a team of 5 (the target number for most E-sport PVP teams at this time). Instead, those important capabilities from PVE must be replaced by one which quickly responds to ever-changing circumstances that may even never have been experienced before.
These are two very different types of games. A company that seeks to create some future "hard" game to satisfy those of us that want such a game will require us as players to determine which of these types of "hard" we're really interested in.
I have the sneaking suspicion that the answer is almost never going to be "both", and that's why PVP and PVE players often don't get along on game forums
I like you. Post more.
Personally I think that aside from arguing what is hard, we can argue whether people want hard.
The majority of people do not want things to be to hard. Or rather they want them hard enough that they feel like worked hard and played well, but not so hard that they lose.
This is different for everyone, and different kinds of hard apply to each person.
For instance I will be able to beat a top SC player in chess because its all macro. Whereas they will pwn me due to their micro skills in starcraft.
@narius, I actually really like to do complex math, or learn interesting patterns in math.
For instance I can solve any multiplication problem consisting only of 9s instantaneously. Its just a parlor trick, but learning how to do it made me happy.
I think that some kinds of games will always be niche games, although we could equalize quite a bit if we removed marketing competition.
I think that youtube has proven with viral marketing that a large majority of success is determined by marketing/brand awareness and such.
Crush the Caslte vs Angry Birds and so forth also.
Warcraft the RTS was wildly popular compared to games like majesty and warlords battlecry. Yet many would argue that these games were better or more interesting. Why then did Warcraft become more popular? Its just a matter of exposure.
While we may not see 10million box sales for a sandbox game, I bet that if we had equal marketing we could get 1 or 2 million as opposed to 300k of EvE.
I think that if we approached this as an experiment rather than a business decision, since no business would ever agree to put their money on the line to test it, and we did a lot of work to produce a highly visible marketing campaign, we could achieve something like this.
In my RINCF capacity I am working on several projects related to this, but its not the highest priority thing I am dealing with.
I just have to tell you about my good old days back in EQ1 and my quest for the ever popular Journeyman boots. It was way back in 1998 .........on vallon zek pvp server.
Now this was no easy quest line no sire, you had to collect several items from around the EQ world all the while looking over your shoulder for them pesky shorties and darkies and elves(I was a human Paladin). Yessiree it was a fight from start to finish.
FIrst you needed to collect a [shadowed rapier], [ring of the ancients] and 3250 gold(before the quest was changed). Now the first two items were in highly contested lands and were in great deman with limited access to the mobs(rare spawns) that dropped them. The copper well that shit was heavy (encumbrance was a part of the game) and you could not move at more than a walk and that wsa if you were a huge beefy warrior with max str.
Now once you collected all these things you and your team( as many as you could find to help) you went back to the quest giver Hasten Bootstrutter( he was a rare spawn two with a cool down between mission turn ins. Now he was already wearing the boots so he was running really really fast and you had less of a chance of catching him than a snowball in hell. So what you did was you stood in one place and let a frind follow him to you and initiate the convo when he got close to you to make him stop. Then you started the convo and turned in all the goods and you got your Journeyman boots.
Now that is the short and sweat of the story. But to get to that point me and my "friends steadfast one and all" endurred a 6 hour pvp battle before it was all over. The darkies were there and waiting on me becuase I KSed the Ancient Cyclops for the ring for the quest. ))
I was killed numerous times and my precious coppers were looted from my corps every time but as soon as my slayer (usually a caster with no str to speak of) had the coins he could not move or run away and was easy meat for my friends. Now those coins changed hands at least a good couple dozen times during this epic battle. Shoot I was even seen on several ocasions tossing the coins at the enemy knowing he would pick them up and esentially root hikmself in place.But eventually long after my proper bedtime( work the next day was hard) we managed to get the best of the darkies and they fled (probably to their beds) Once my mission was accomplished there was a great celibration and I went to bed for a couple hours before work.
I have not since and probably never will have such an indelible exp in a game again....sad sad sad.
Now that my friends was the good old days. Back then every lvl was an acheivement(7 days per lvl if not more) and every itme gained was cause for celebration. Palladins back then had a 30% exp lose due to the fact they were considered Duel class. I stoped playing EQ( after 18 months) becasue Sony kept screwing with the PVP rule sets and i got sick of it. I went on to play FFXI 7 months, Lineage II 6 months(horrible pvp rule set), I followed Shadowbane for 2 years played in the beta for 7 months never bought the game, didn't think it was developed enough to spend money on it, Followed vanguard for two years in development, was accepted into the beta but game was sold to Soney and I gave up on it, Then wow came out and played it on and off for 4 years, never really liked it but there wasn't anything better and still isn't. Played Fallen Earth for 4 months really liked it but the devs could not really decide on a pvp rule set and the game world was boring as hell to look at so quite. I then went and played several free to play games, Aika 3 months it had some goos points but more bas ones. Played Lords of magic pretty much the same as Aika. now I am playing SWTOR and its no better than anything else i've mentioned its just there. I will say SWTOR has a good crafting system and I like that about it and it is the reason I may sub to it.
Games nowa days jsut give you everything you don't have to earn nothing. I want a game that will take me back to the magical days of EQ. One that is hard to lvl hard to aquire gear and more of a sandbox with rich features like
1) territory ownership
2) super complex player driven economy.
3) Totally skill based development.
4) complex geopolitical social system
5) highly complex trad skill system
6) complex guild structure and control system
7) complex nation alliance system
8) complex territory control and management system
9) quality endgame player crafted gear
10) best of all there were not character lvls.
11) open world pvp only( no BS instanced canned pvp in arenas and BGs0
AMD Phenum II x4 3.6Ghz 975 black edition 8 gig Ram Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
You obviously do not understand that fact that just ATTEMPTING something challenging is not rewarding. You have to SUCCESSFULLY complete it to be rewarding.
Thus, 99% of the players are NOT rewarded by Sunwell because they COULD NOT FINISH IT. Surely it rewards the 1%. That is a very bad design for a game.
If being challenging is enough, we should have games that requries solving differential equations, and all sort difficult math. That is challenging right?
That's not quite true. Every boss individually is a challenge that is rewarding to overcome. If a guild got x bosses in, they certainly experienced the sensation of beating a tough challenge, which is a rewarding sensation.
There's even a little (not much, but a little) reward just to make progress on a boss from prior attempts.
Sunwell may not have been optimally balanced (the current Normal/Hard Mode scheme is way better) but to say it was only rewarding for the 1% is a little misleading because I assume a good percentage of guilds at least passed the first boss and felt rewarded by that (even if they smacked into a wall of difficulty at some point afterwards.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I have said on several occasions that i liked the eq system way more than anything else. (since this is mainly being used in the examples). I think if it got tarted up and a few updates it could make a comeback. The melee system needs an overhaul and the instant travel should go away to make wizzy and druid porting more important. I would give the game a 60/40 group/solo ratio. I do think that having more group oriented playstyle is better but other disagree. for them i would say that they were many classes that could solo and did often. Maybe someone should take eq away from SOE though so it would have a good chance.
But i digress yes the older games were harder and more enjoyable imho. I would love it if they could develop a mmo where if you kill everything in a dungeon it would stay dead, possible allowing it to be filled again but something completely different so that even if you knew the room layout you wont know the capabilities of the mobs inside or the bosses so there wouldnt be youtube strats.
In the end ill just say bring back the need to group more often while making some classes more solo friendly. Maybe increase how many abilities mobs can perform so its not so predictable. do away with the "holy" trinity and bring back support classes.
I have to agree that difficulty adds to that sense of accomplishment and allows communties to strengthen as players struggle and depend on each other to survive. However, it is very important to note that it can become a nuisance warrantable of quitting. For instance, I was playing Minecraft and had literally spent hours working through a cave until I found a large deposit of obsidian. It took forever to mine around 100 of those chunks and when I was about to leave, some jackass monster knocks me back, I fall inside lava, and burn to death. I got so pissed off that I simply could not be bothered to open Minecraft again.
Was it my fault that I died and lost hours upon hours worth of items and XP? Of course, yet I can't help shake that feeling of absolute uselessness. Some are able to get back up, start over, and gather those items and XP all over again. Yet I am willing to bet that most do not cope well with that sentiment of disastrous loss in a game.
Difference with everquest death and minecraft death is with everquest you can get almost everything back with some help from the community, 90-98% rezzerection from a cleric which you could find fairly easy to help you and you could loot everything back from ur corpse so your basicly back where you started with a small amount of time lost in the process which could potention give you fond memory and friendships with the people who helped which i saw was a good trade off for a small amount of time (Alot longer if you forgot to bind your soul : P but its always a funny memory to recall the time you died after traveling to the other side of the contenient and forgot to bind your soul nearby)
When I was in highschool back in 2000 I was playing Everquest fairly hardcore (I slept through classes and my gpa was LOLworthy... but don't worry I do great now). I also played football... why do I mention this?
Well anyone who's played football will tell you 2-a-days and 3-a-days (fairly intense practices) are not only tedious and difficult, but they also build a team... a community. Why? Shared suffering and shared effort brings people together.
If you talk to people (or even remember it yourself if you're like me) some of the best memories of these older games were when things went bad. We all have corpse run stories and how teams of people came to help; friends were made this way. People spent hours carefully crawling through dungeons; and succeeding or failing TOGETHER.
Today's MMORPGs lack the difficulty. I think because there's that lack of shared effort and shared suffering (don't get caught up on that word.. think shared bad stuff) therefore it stops or impedes a strong community from forming.
Without that shared experience people find it harder to relate to eachother. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the community back in the day was perfect, but people did find it easier to relate to eachother. That made the games better in the end.
Your thoughts?
never gonna happen. There's no money in it.
I dunno bout that Everquest 1 is going for over 12 years now and still makeing a good profit.
I don't see why not attracting many players is a bad thing. WoW attracted alot of new players and the end result was totally dumbing down the genre and releasing of endless WoW clones.
I would pretty much be for going back to the times when the MMORPG genre was nische and for nerds. Don't see anything good coming out of it going mainstream but ofcourse I dont care about bottom line, return of investment, time to market etc. I care only about playing complex, compelling and immersive MMORPGs and they simply are not being produced anymore.
90% of what players consider "dumbing down" is simply removing the stupid inconveniences of the past -- most of which didn't make the game harder in any meaningful or fun way.
Case in point: players whining about fast leveling. Games don't magically become harder or more fun when a developer flips a switch so that leveling requires 10x as much XP. But when the developer flips the switch back off, you have a mysterious contingent of players who insists the game is "easier" and somehow less fun.
Easier isnt the word here, alot of people like to have a sense of achivment when there playing a game in Everquest case the slower lvling case made the player feel like they achived something everytime they leveled. The older games ahd a sense of achivment when you finished something like Everquest epic weapon quest it could take months to finish and was one of the greatest achivment for somone to accomlish, The large zone and no instant travel made playerer feel that they accomplkished somthing simply by traveling from one side of the map to the other, one of my fondest memery was traveling from qeynos to kelethin because i felt like i accompished somthing. Anyways back to the point older games amde you feel you accomplished something while the newers games not so much.
On another note, one thing i feel like in new games is that the world is getting smaller and smaller and restricting people aswell, Thing are getting simpler and simpler (for example quest talk to somone hit accept follow direction on mini map to the location to kill somthing, Everquest hail somone then talk to them following some promts, finding what you need to do, may need to talk to other players/npcs to find what your looking for and when your done you feel like you acualy done something meaningful)
I just have to tell you about my good old days back in EQ1 and my quest for the ever popular Journeyman boots. It was way back in 1998 .........on vallon zek pvp server.
Now this was no easy quest line no sire, you had to collect several items from around the EQ world all the while looking over your shoulder for them pesky shorties and darkies and elves(I was a human Paladin). Yessiree it was a fight from start to finish.
FIrst you needed to collect a [shadowed rapier], [ring of the ancients] and 3250 gold(before the quest was changed). Now the first two items were in highly contested lands and were in great deman with limited access to the mobs(rare spawns) that dropped them. The copper well that shit was heavy (encumbrance was a part of the game) and you could not move at more than a walk and that wsa if you were a huge beefy warrior with max str.
Now once you collected all these things you and your team( as many as you could find to help) you went back to the quest giver Hasten Bootstrutter( he was a rare spawn two with a cool down between mission turn ins. Now he was already wearing the boots so he was running really really fast and you had less of a chance of catching him than a snowball in hell. So what you did was you stood in one place and let a frind follow him to you and initiate the convo when he got close to you to make him stop. Then you started the convo and turned in all the goods and you got your Journeyman boots.
Now that is the short and sweat of the story. But to get to that point me and my "friends steadfast one and all" endurred a 6 hour pvp battle before it was all over. The darkies were there and waiting on me becuase I KSed the Ancient Cyclops for the ring for the quest. ))
I was killed numerous times and my precious coppers were looted from my corps every time but as soon as my slayer (usually a caster with no str to speak of) had the coins he could not move or run away and was easy meat for my friends. Now those coins changed hands at least a good couple dozen times during this epic battle. Shoot I was even seen on several ocasions tossing the coins at the enemy knowing he would pick them up and esentially root hikmself in place.But eventually long after my proper bedtime( work the next day was hard) we managed to get the best of the darkies and they fled (probably to their beds) Once my mission was accomplished there was a great celibration and I went to bed for a couple hours before work.
I have not since and probably never will have such an indelible exp in a game again....sad sad sad.
Now that my friends was the good old days. Back then every lvl was an acheivement(7 days per lvl if not more) and every itme gained was cause for celebration. Palladins back then had a 30% exp lose due to the fact they were considered Duel class. I stoped playing EQ( after 18 months) becasue Sony kept screwing with the PVP rule sets and i got sick of it. I went on to play FFXI 7 months, Lineage II 6 months(horrible pvp rule set), I followed Shadowbane for 2 years played in the beta for 7 months never bought the game, didn't think it was developed enough to spend money on it, Followed vanguard for two years in development, was accepted into the beta but game was sold to Soney and I gave up on it, Then wow came out and played it on and off for 4 years, never really liked it but there wasn't anything better and still isn't. Played Fallen Earth for 4 months really liked it but the devs could not really decide on a pvp rule set and the game world was boring as hell to look at so quite. I then went and played several free to play games, Aika 3 months it had some goos points but more bas ones. Played Lords of magic pretty much the same as Aika. now I am playing SWTOR and its no better than anything else i've mentioned its just there. I will say SWTOR has a good crafting system and I like that about it and it is the reason I may sub to it.
Games nowa days jsut give you everything you don't have to earn nothing. I want a game that will take me back to the magical days of EQ. One that is hard to lvl hard to aquire gear and more of a sandbox with rich features like
1) territory ownership
2) super complex player driven economy.
3) Totally skill based development.
4) complex geopolitical social system
5) highly complex trad skill system
6) complex guild structure and control system
7) complex nation alliance system
8) complex territory control and management system
9) quality endgame player crafted gear
10) best of all there were not character lvls.
11) open world pvp only( no BS instanced canned pvp in arenas and BGs0
Aye some of the best times in gaming right here, your end quote one i use often aswell, a game feel so much better when you earn your stuff that getting everything given to you for free. I remember the very first time i played no tutorial tossed out to figure thing out for yourself and it was the best experience ive had when starting a new game i havant played.
Games now adays just give you everything you don't have to earn nothing.
I agree with the OP, the last 6 years of MMOs have done nothing for me. Sure the MMO population is at least 10x larger now but sadly to get the 10x more $$$ the game devleopers have destroyed the original MMO design and left us with a solo based, anti community, over rewarding, underachieving, special olympics designed for people with the attention span of your standard Saturday Morning Cartoon watcher.
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
Biased thread by a WoW-lover. In fact, EQ...DAOC....SWG...Shadowbane, and even UO were ALL harder than todays MMOs. Please stop trying to troll my friend.
Who's the WoW lover? and the thread that got me the Spotlight poster tag is a troll thread? I think you should take that up with the adminstrators of MMORPG.com becuase they decided to make it a spotlight thread and thanks for the insults really shows what you are all about. That thread was a great discussion between new MMO players, ME and afew others and many vets and I was really surprised with the outcome myself.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
Biased thread by a WoW-lover. In fact, EQ...DAOC....SWG...Shadowbane, and even UO were ALL harder than todays MMOs. Please stop trying to troll my friend.
Who's the WoW lover? and the thread that got me the Spotlight poster tag is a troll thread? I think you should take that up with the adminstrators of MMORPG.com becuase they decided to make it a spotlight thread and thanks for the insults really shows what you are all about. That thread was a great discussion between new MMO players, ME and afew others and many vets and I was really surprised with the outcome myself.
That thread doesn't blow the myth, as you put it, it actually retells how it was harder but mostly how much more time comsuming and tedius it was.
Funny, your 'best memories' are easily my worst. And I've never had a problem relating to people in any MMO. Gamers these days are like kittens that haven't been house trained, do I really need to slap you with a newspaper and rub your face the chat box before you learn to use it?
I'll give you that MMOs these days are a dash too easy, but that has nothing to do with the community. That I spend time soloing doesn't make me or any of the people I talk to less inclined to help friends and guildees, or to team for parts of the game that can't be solo'ed. If you need developers to force you to care about the people around you, that's on you. If anything I've found MMOs more fun since death penalties have been greatly diminished. In fact, some of ~my~ best memories are when a group activity (raid, pvp, world boss, whatever) went wrong and everyone was laughing about it in ventrilo, rather than screaming at each other because now they've lost all their gear/exp/whatever.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
WoW is joke compared to EQ.
EQ had no premade maps, we had XP loss, raids were 4 times as big, we had no guides, we had griefing for static zone raids, you had consequences.
I want to see you do GoD raids in PoP gear and tell me old MMO weren't harder.
The expansion couldn't even be beaten until the end of the next one.
That would be akin to no one beating The Burning Crusade because it was so hard, until the end of Cataclysm. I don't remember that ever happening in WoW.
I did the EQ beast raid 70 times before I first beat it, and each raid took us 3 hours for a single try, and we were one of the lucky ones that actually beat it before they tuned it down, I know some guilds did it 100+ times, for months, without a single win. Try motivating 54 people after you just lost 100 times on the same mob. Try doing it while losing 2-3 people every week who refuse to log in for raids because they're tired of losing, having to recruit just to fill those 54 spots, having to gear them up, just to be able to give it one more try, only to lose again and again.
And after our first win, the next 20 times we lost before we got another win, there were weeks in between.
All of that helps community building, maybe the gameplay is bad, maybe the timesink was bad, maybe it's a waste of time and soloing is awesome for others, what it does do is build a solid community. Because when you finally DO beat that mob after months, you know that every person there with you on that raid, is a person you can trust and it's a person that means everything to your guild. Because it's not about the mob, it's not about the loot, it's about being together with a group of people in a multiplayer game, where you depend on other people.
The player isn't valuable because they're good, or because they're geared, or because they have 10000 AA points, they're valuable because they stick with a guild. No one in EQ cares about what loot you have at the high-end, loot is completely meaningless for recruits, it's about who will stick with a guild and stick with it when you lose, because managing 54 players is a whole lot harder than managing 24 or less like in WoW.
In a harder game a bad player without gear is more valuable than a good player with the best stats who's a slacker. You can teach players how to play, you can get them gear, what you can't do is tell them to log in.
No matter what anyone will try to argue... the simple fact that harder games mean more challenge, thus more reward.
It is only the ignorant & unaccociated who don't understand this. Honestly, what is more rewarding; playing basketball and beating up on grade schoolers..? Or, playing against kids who play high school basketball.. & beating them?
One is just killing time, the other is a real match with real circumstances on the line.
Let's face it, most of the newbies don't play to be challanged, or as an esport, but just as something to do other than tv.
You obviously do not understand that fact that just ATTEMPTING something challenging is not rewarding. You have to SUCCESSFULLY complete it to be rewarding.
Thus, 99% of the players are NOT rewarded by Sunwell because they COULD NOT FINISH IT. Surely it rewards the 1%. That is a very bad design for a game.
If being challenging is enough, we should have games that requries solving differential equations, and all sort difficult math. That is challenging right?
OMG... yes, nearly everyone in the world understand this^ (derp!). That is why the challenge is PERSONAL. It takes personal fortitude to bear,/withstand/circumvent certain things to make your character better, or more like you want him(them) to be.
Playing in the SuperBowl isn't the Challenge, getting there is.
You sound entirely like an adolecent who wants things, but doesn't feel he has to put in the neccessary time, effort, energy, determination, perserverence, etc.. to accomplish, or even attempt anything, because of the possibility of failing and not recieving an award!
"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."
EQ had no premade maps, we had XP loss, raids were 4 times as big, we had no guides, we had griefing for static zone raids, you had consequences.
None of those things are hard. Just incovenience. Hard & consequences are two different thing.
Lich King hard mode fight is hard at L80 gear. Many has wipe after wipe without success. There is no xp loss, it is not big, and everyone has guides. It is STILL hard.
You sound entirely like an adolecent who wants things, but doesn't feel he has to put in the neccessary time, effort, energy, determination, perserverence, etc.. to accomplish, or even attempt anything, because of the possibility of failing and not recieving an award!
In an entertainment product? Sure it is reasonable to expect a person to spend months & years to accomplish his career, but a GAME?
A few hours of learning the mechanics is probably the right balance for most busy people. Surely you need to spend weeks to learn hard mode fights, but that is probably the extreme end of what people want in a GAME.
No matter what anyone will try to argue... the simple fact that harder games mean more challenge, thus more reward.
It is only the ignorant & unaccociated who don't understand this. Honestly, what is more rewarding; playing basketball and beating up on grade schoolers..? Or, playing against kids who play high school basketball.. & beating them?
One is just killing time, the other is a real match with real circumstances on the line.
Let's face it, most of the newbies don't play to be challanged, or as an esport, but just as something to do other than tv.
You obviously do not understand that fact that just ATTEMPTING something challenging is not rewarding. You have to SUCCESSFULLY complete it to be rewarding.
Thus, 99% of the players are NOT rewarded by Sunwell because they COULD NOT FINISH IT. Surely it rewards the 1%. That is a very bad design for a game.
If being challenging is enough, we should have games that requries solving differential equations, and all sort difficult math. That is challenging right?
OMG... yes, nearly everyone in the world understand this^ (derp!). That is why the challenge is PERSONAL. It takes personal fortitude to bear,/withstand/circumvent certain things to make your character better, or more like you want him(them) to be.
Playing in the SuperBowl isn't the Challenge, getting there is.
You sound entirely like an adolecent who wants things, but doesn't feel he has to put in the neccessary time, effort, energy, determination, perserverence, etc.. to accomplish, or even attempt anything, because of the possibility of failing and not recieving an award!
the content of a raid isn't hard. they're quite pathetic, really. the only thing they do is make a normal dungeon and up the mobs' hit points and damage output to force you to take x number of players in a group, where x was as big a number as the devs could think about.
this was a bad decision, and one which most devs have wisely decided to avoid and tone down.
it's bad because as the guy up there said, only 1% see the content. it's not about finishing it. it's about seeing it.
when you need 40 odd people to work together on the INTERNET, you've got trouble right there. hell, getting 5 is bad enough.
to me, the only rewards raider(p)s should get out of raids is a gold star for having endured the melodrama it took to get there. i for one have hated every single second spent in raiding guilds.
unfortunately, the best lootz is often in raids. this forces people to form raiding guilds and has, again in my opinion, contributed to the cutthroat and mercilessly anti-social behaviour seen in the mmo genre as everyone ends up fighting each other more than the mobs. all for loot.
and THAT is the only difficulty of a raid.
i get very offended by people telling me raids are difficult and that devs are pandering to noobs by cutting back on them, or making content too "easy" by letting a small handful of friends finish a dungeon 20 "pro" raider(p)s want to own as their own so they can have some kind of loot exclusivity. if the raid itself were not a glorified mario-bros boss, i could see the argument. but show me a raid which wasn't just a recycled platformer first.
grrr.
i personally want challenging and difficult content. i want content to surprise and provoke me into sweating as i wear out both my mouse and my keyboard faster than if i was browsing a porn site with a library of all adult movies ever made sinc- uh, i mean, well... you know what i mean. i do not equate effort and difficulty with the number of mates i need to bring with me. i feel for the devs, though. it's hard to think of something which challenges outside of the traditional raid meme.
in all honesty, if you think about it, as with the porn site - the most challenging things you do in life, you do alone.
(this is not a call for solo dungeons, by the way - that was just a giggle to end my rant on...)
Easier isnt the word here, alot of people like to have a sense of achivment when there playing a game in Everquest case the slower lvling case made the player feel like they achived something everytime they leveled. The older games ahd a sense of achivment when you finished something like Everquest epic weapon quest it could take months to finish and was one of the greatest achivment for somone to accomlish, The large zone and no instant travel made playerer feel that they accomplkished somthing simply by traveling from one side of the map to the other, one of my fondest memery was traveling from qeynos to kelethin because i felt like i accompished somthing. Anyways back to the point older games amde you feel you accomplished something while the newers games not so much.
I guess for some players, like myself, my sense of achievement comes predominantly from having accomplished something difficult not having persevered through time-consumption.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Easier isnt the word here, alot of people like to have a sense of achivment when there playing a game in Everquest case the slower lvling case made the player feel like they achived something everytime they leveled. The older games ahd a sense of achivment when you finished something like Everquest epic weapon quest it could take months to finish and was one of the greatest achivment for somone to accomlish, The large zone and no instant travel made playerer feel that they accomplkished somthing simply by traveling from one side of the map to the other, one of my fondest memery was traveling from qeynos to kelethin because i felt like i accompished somthing. Anyways back to the point older games amde you feel you accomplished something while the newers games not so much.
I guess for some players, like myself, my sense of achievement comes predominantly from having accomplished something difficult not having persevered through time-consumption.
If 90% of the population can accomplish it, was it really that difficult for the top 60% of the population though? You still sound, as you always have, like you want to play a coop RPG, most likely with content scaling.
The point of social games is to use social skills. MMORPGs were supposed to be social games. When one poster said that the main difficulty was the player interaction, and then he acted like that was bad, I shit several boulders in rage, and still the pain did not drown out my rage. Of course the hard part is in the social interaction, thats the god damn point.
I am generally not social. I do not like people that much, for many reasons. But I am capable of organizing large groups of players to accomplish a goal. I once ruined the beta for Dungeon Inquisitor by having such a large group of well organized followers that before I quit to do other things, I had completed 100% of the content in beta. Those players who were the most helpful to me received both my strategy for success and a portion of my resources as well as many really powerful creatures, which is the most important part of the game. The top 5 most powerful and most followed players currently in the game are those people. They are still friends and they work together. The remnants of my power block, which is only half as good as it would be if I hadn't quit, are still the dominant power in the game months after I left. Its called leadership. If you suck at it, learn to take orders. Take them really well and demonstrate the value that good organization produces to the rest of the guild, then go on the hardest raid in WoW with your boring cookie cutter specs and your lame hotbar macros and the raid strategy you got off genericwowfansite.com and lol as you complete the raid with no difficulties at all for your guild.
There are many kinds of challenge. Perservering against the odds, when you are angry and frustrated and you need to focus to control your emotions IS a challenge. One that Axehilt apparently fails at. Skills of all kinds are gained through time consumption. You think chess masters are born winners? No they fucking practice every day and they study previous games and openings and play by themselves. You think athletes or people with twitch were born winners? Maybe they had a leg up on 90% of the population but they are competing against the 10% that did also. You know what even highschool sports teams do? 2 a days for months before school starts and practice on weekeneds and also every day after school lets out. You think that is fun? Hell no. And even then sometimes you got unlucky with the talent at your school.
How can you say that you want games to be about skill and not boring time consumption when thats where every god damn skill in the world really comes from? Repeating the same raid over and over till your guild gets it right is perservering through time consumption.
The most purely skill based esports in existence require players to play thousands and thousands of games to be really good. Time consumption. In esports.
Most players in games do not focus on difficulty at all. How could they when games are designed so any random 12 year old can play it? The majority of WoW or any other themepark game contains little to no difficulty. Especially when people look up the ideal specs for their character online instead of figuring it out themselves. You get on people all the time for wanting long travel and exploring, but you are just as much as a niche as any of us. People play farmville in the millions, and there is 0 challenge there. You don't even need real friends to play, people just friend each other randomly as long as both play farmville. You are the minority just as much as sanshi44 but you had to use italics as if he was too dumb to understand your point.
This thread might be of interest to OP as it seems to blow the myth that older MMO's were in fact harder than todays MMO's.
WoW is joke compared to EQ.
EQ had no premade maps, we had XP loss, raids were 4 times as big, we had no guides, we had griefing for static zone raids, you had consequences.
EQ also had sites like Allakhazam and EQ Atlas with entire zones mapped out, player guides for every encounter -- up to and including raids and every epic boss -- and detailed bestiaries for every critter you ran across.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that EQ was somehow magically cut off from the rest of the world and that you had to figure it all out on your own. All it took was printing out the maps and putting them in a binder and being able to read a web page before you went into an encounter and EQ was just like any other MMO.
I wish a MMO came out with a 9 on the 1-10 hard scale. Unfortunately, WoW has ruined MMO's for a few years now... Although it does look like some 2012 titles are going back to the roots of real games.
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too many players now want instant gratification. they are not willing to take time and work for something. they dont see the rewards in working hard or long for something (and maybe failing a few times). i would rather take my time and earn something rather than get it quick or by some random drop, i agree i think hard mmorps were better. i dont even want a tutorial i enjoy being dropped into a virtual world with just a few things and figuring it out on my own.
i JUST had this conversation the other day with a hardcore WoW player that i'm related to in real life and how i find that making games easier does not make them better and they dissagreed. they not only approve making MMO's easier but applaud such actions. . .
they are also a female gamer who has, literally, all waking hours of the day to play video games as she is a house wife and they have only a dog. . .
I think a greater challenge makes things that much more rewarding if you win (not in terms of loot but in terms of feeling proud of yourself). Consider it like how a sports league gives EVERYONE trophy's just for participating. Sure no one feels left out, but they also aren't taught that if you suck you don't deserve a reward. And i'm sorry people, but the real world isn't gonna give you a trophy just for showing up. If you suck you are going home alone and empty handed in the real world.
I like you. Post more.
Personally I think that aside from arguing what is hard, we can argue whether people want hard.
The majority of people do not want things to be to hard. Or rather they want them hard enough that they feel like worked hard and played well, but not so hard that they lose.
This is different for everyone, and different kinds of hard apply to each person.
For instance I will be able to beat a top SC player in chess because its all macro. Whereas they will pwn me due to their micro skills in starcraft.
@narius, I actually really like to do complex math, or learn interesting patterns in math.
For instance I can solve any multiplication problem consisting only of 9s instantaneously. Its just a parlor trick, but learning how to do it made me happy.
I think that some kinds of games will always be niche games, although we could equalize quite a bit if we removed marketing competition.
I think that youtube has proven with viral marketing that a large majority of success is determined by marketing/brand awareness and such.
Crush the Caslte vs Angry Birds and so forth also.
Warcraft the RTS was wildly popular compared to games like majesty and warlords battlecry. Yet many would argue that these games were better or more interesting. Why then did Warcraft become more popular? Its just a matter of exposure.
While we may not see 10million box sales for a sandbox game, I bet that if we had equal marketing we could get 1 or 2 million as opposed to 300k of EvE.
I think that if we approached this as an experiment rather than a business decision, since no business would ever agree to put their money on the line to test it, and we did a lot of work to produce a highly visible marketing campaign, we could achieve something like this.
In my RINCF capacity I am working on several projects related to this, but its not the highest priority thing I am dealing with.
I just have to tell you about my good old days back in EQ1 and my quest for the ever popular Journeyman boots. It was way back in 1998 .........on vallon zek pvp server.
Now this was no easy quest line no sire, you had to collect several items from around the EQ world all the while looking over your shoulder for them pesky shorties and darkies and elves(I was a human Paladin). Yessiree it was a fight from start to finish.
FIrst you needed to collect a [shadowed rapier], [ring of the ancients] and 3250 gold(before the quest was changed). Now the first two items were in highly contested lands and were in great deman with limited access to the mobs(rare spawns) that dropped them. The copper well that shit was heavy (encumbrance was a part of the game) and you could not move at more than a walk and that wsa if you were a huge beefy warrior with max str.
Now once you collected all these things you and your team( as many as you could find to help) you went back to the quest giver Hasten Bootstrutter( he was a rare spawn two with a cool down between mission turn ins. Now he was already wearing the boots so he was running really really fast and you had less of a chance of catching him than a snowball in hell. So what you did was you stood in one place and let a frind follow him to you and initiate the convo when he got close to you to make him stop. Then you started the convo and turned in all the goods and you got your Journeyman boots.
Now that is the short and sweat of the story. But to get to that point me and my "friends steadfast one and all" endurred a 6 hour pvp battle before it was all over. The darkies were there and waiting on me becuase I KSed the Ancient Cyclops for the ring for the quest.
))
I was killed numerous times and my precious coppers were looted from my corps every time but as soon as my slayer (usually a caster with no str to speak of) had the coins he could not move or run away and was easy meat for my friends. Now those coins changed hands at least a good couple dozen times during this epic battle. Shoot I was even seen on several ocasions tossing the coins at the enemy knowing he would pick them up and esentially root hikmself in place.But eventually long after my proper bedtime( work the next day was hard) we managed to get the best of the darkies and they fled (probably to their beds) Once my mission was accomplished there was a great celibration and I went to bed for a couple hours before work.
I have not since and probably never will have such an indelible exp in a game again....sad sad sad.
Now that my friends was the good old days. Back then every lvl was an acheivement(7 days per lvl if not more) and every itme gained was cause for celebration. Palladins back then had a 30% exp lose due to the fact they were considered Duel class. I stoped playing EQ( after 18 months) becasue Sony kept screwing with the PVP rule sets and i got sick of it. I went on to play FFXI 7 months, Lineage II 6 months(horrible pvp rule set), I followed Shadowbane for 2 years played in the beta for 7 months never bought the game, didn't think it was developed enough to spend money on it, Followed vanguard for two years in development, was accepted into the beta but game was sold to Soney and I gave up on it, Then wow came out and played it on and off for 4 years, never really liked it but there wasn't anything better and still isn't. Played Fallen Earth for 4 months really liked it but the devs could not really decide on a pvp rule set and the game world was boring as hell to look at so quite. I then went and played several free to play games, Aika 3 months it had some goos points but more bas ones. Played Lords of magic pretty much the same as Aika. now I am playing SWTOR and its no better than anything else i've mentioned its just there. I will say SWTOR has a good crafting system and I like that about it and it is the reason I may sub to it.
Games nowa days jsut give you everything you don't have to earn nothing. I want a game that will take me back to the magical days of EQ. One that is hard to lvl hard to aquire gear and more of a sandbox with rich features like
1) territory ownership
2) super complex player driven economy.
3) Totally skill based development.
4) complex geopolitical social system
5) highly complex trad skill system
6) complex guild structure and control system
7) complex nation alliance system
8) complex territory control and management system
9) quality endgame player crafted gear
10) best of all there were not character lvls.
11) open world pvp only( no BS instanced canned pvp in arenas and BGs0
AMD Phenum II x4 3.6Ghz 975 black edition
8 gig Ram
Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
Maybe you're just not playing the right games.
That's not quite true. Every boss individually is a challenge that is rewarding to overcome. If a guild got x bosses in, they certainly experienced the sensation of beating a tough challenge, which is a rewarding sensation.
There's even a little (not much, but a little) reward just to make progress on a boss from prior attempts.
Sunwell may not have been optimally balanced (the current Normal/Hard Mode scheme is way better) but to say it was only rewarding for the 1% is a little misleading because I assume a good percentage of guilds at least passed the first boss and felt rewarded by that (even if they smacked into a wall of difficulty at some point afterwards.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I have said on several occasions that i liked the eq system way more than anything else. (since this is mainly being used in the examples). I think if it got tarted up and a few updates it could make a comeback. The melee system needs an overhaul and the instant travel should go away to make wizzy and druid porting more important. I would give the game a 60/40 group/solo ratio. I do think that having more group oriented playstyle is better but other disagree. for them i would say that they were many classes that could solo and did often. Maybe someone should take eq away from SOE though so it would have a good chance.
But i digress yes the older games were harder and more enjoyable imho. I would love it if they could develop a mmo where if you kill everything in a dungeon it would stay dead, possible allowing it to be filled again but something completely different so that even if you knew the room layout you wont know the capabilities of the mobs inside or the bosses so there wouldnt be youtube strats.
In the end ill just say bring back the need to group more often while making some classes more solo friendly. Maybe increase how many abilities mobs can perform so its not so predictable. do away with the "holy" trinity and bring back support classes.
Difference with everquest death and minecraft death is with everquest you can get almost everything back with some help from the community, 90-98% rezzerection from a cleric which you could find fairly easy to help you and you could loot everything back from ur corpse so your basicly back where you started with a small amount of time lost in the process which could potention give you fond memory and friendships with the people who helped which i saw was a good trade off for a small amount of time (Alot longer if you forgot to bind your soul : P but its always a funny memory to recall the time you died after traveling to the other side of the contenient and forgot to bind your soul nearby)
I dunno bout that Everquest 1 is going for over 12 years now and still makeing a good profit.
Easier isnt the word here, alot of people like to have a sense of achivment when there playing a game in Everquest case the slower lvling case made the player feel like they achived something everytime they leveled. The older games ahd a sense of achivment when you finished something like Everquest epic weapon quest it could take months to finish and was one of the greatest achivment for somone to accomlish, The large zone and no instant travel made playerer feel that they accomplkished somthing simply by traveling from one side of the map to the other, one of my fondest memery was traveling from qeynos to kelethin because i felt like i accompished somthing. Anyways back to the point older games amde you feel you accomplished something while the newers games not so much.
On another note, one thing i feel like in new games is that the world is getting smaller and smaller and restricting people aswell, Thing are getting simpler and simpler (for example quest talk to somone hit accept follow direction on mini map to the location to kill somthing, Everquest hail somone then talk to them following some promts, finding what you need to do, may need to talk to other players/npcs to find what your looking for and when your done you feel like you acualy done something meaningful)
Aye some of the best times in gaming right here, your end quote one i use often aswell, a game feel so much better when you earn your stuff that getting everything given to you for free. I remember the very first time i played no tutorial tossed out to figure thing out for yourself and it was the best experience ive had when starting a new game i havant played.
Games now adays just give you everything you don't have to earn nothing.
I agree with the OP, the last 6 years of MMOs have done nothing for me. Sure the MMO population is at least 10x larger now but sadly to get the 10x more $$$ the game devleopers have destroyed the original MMO design and left us with a solo based, anti community, over rewarding, underachieving, special olympics designed for people with the attention span of your standard Saturday Morning Cartoon watcher.
Who's the WoW lover? and the thread that got me the Spotlight poster tag is a troll thread? I think you should take that up with the adminstrators of MMORPG.com becuase they decided to make it a spotlight thread and thanks for the insults really shows what you are all about. That thread was a great discussion between new MMO players, ME and afew others and many vets and I was really surprised with the outcome myself.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
That thread doesn't blow the myth, as you put it, it actually retells how it was harder but mostly how much more time comsuming and tedius it was.
Funny, your 'best memories' are easily my worst. And I've never had a problem relating to people in any MMO. Gamers these days are like kittens that haven't been house trained, do I really need to slap you with a newspaper and rub your face the chat box before you learn to use it?
I'll give you that MMOs these days are a dash too easy, but that has nothing to do with the community. That I spend time soloing doesn't make me or any of the people I talk to less inclined to help friends and guildees, or to team for parts of the game that can't be solo'ed. If you need developers to force you to care about the people around you, that's on you. If anything I've found MMOs more fun since death penalties have been greatly diminished. In fact, some of ~my~ best memories are when a group activity (raid, pvp, world boss, whatever) went wrong and everyone was laughing about it in ventrilo, rather than screaming at each other because now they've lost all their gear/exp/whatever.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
WoW is joke compared to EQ.
EQ had no premade maps, we had XP loss, raids were 4 times as big, we had no guides, we had griefing for static zone raids, you had consequences.
I want to see you do GoD raids in PoP gear and tell me old MMO weren't harder.
The expansion couldn't even be beaten until the end of the next one.
That would be akin to no one beating The Burning Crusade because it was so hard, until the end of Cataclysm. I don't remember that ever happening in WoW.
I did the EQ beast raid 70 times before I first beat it, and each raid took us 3 hours for a single try, and we were one of the lucky ones that actually beat it before they tuned it down, I know some guilds did it 100+ times, for months, without a single win. Try motivating 54 people after you just lost 100 times on the same mob. Try doing it while losing 2-3 people every week who refuse to log in for raids because they're tired of losing, having to recruit just to fill those 54 spots, having to gear them up, just to be able to give it one more try, only to lose again and again.
And after our first win, the next 20 times we lost before we got another win, there were weeks in between.
All of that helps community building, maybe the gameplay is bad, maybe the timesink was bad, maybe it's a waste of time and soloing is awesome for others, what it does do is build a solid community. Because when you finally DO beat that mob after months, you know that every person there with you on that raid, is a person you can trust and it's a person that means everything to your guild. Because it's not about the mob, it's not about the loot, it's about being together with a group of people in a multiplayer game, where you depend on other people.
The player isn't valuable because they're good, or because they're geared, or because they have 10000 AA points, they're valuable because they stick with a guild. No one in EQ cares about what loot you have at the high-end, loot is completely meaningless for recruits, it's about who will stick with a guild and stick with it when you lose, because managing 54 players is a whole lot harder than managing 24 or less like in WoW.
In a harder game a bad player without gear is more valuable than a good player with the best stats who's a slacker. You can teach players how to play, you can get them gear, what you can't do is tell them to log in.
OMG... yes, nearly everyone in the world understand this^ (derp!). That is why the challenge is PERSONAL. It takes personal fortitude to bear,/withstand/circumvent certain things to make your character better, or more like you want him(them) to be.
Playing in the SuperBowl isn't the Challenge, getting there is.
You sound entirely like an adolecent who wants things, but doesn't feel he has to put in the neccessary time, effort, energy, determination, perserverence, etc.. to accomplish, or even attempt anything, because of the possibility of failing and not recieving an award!
"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
None of those things are hard. Just incovenience. Hard & consequences are two different thing.
Lich King hard mode fight is hard at L80 gear. Many has wipe after wipe without success. There is no xp loss, it is not big, and everyone has guides. It is STILL hard.
In an entertainment product? Sure it is reasonable to expect a person to spend months & years to accomplish his career, but a GAME?
A few hours of learning the mechanics is probably the right balance for most busy people. Surely you need to spend weeks to learn hard mode fights, but that is probably the extreme end of what people want in a GAME.
Wasn't there already a thread about this recently?
the content of a raid isn't hard. they're quite pathetic, really. the only thing they do is make a normal dungeon and up the mobs' hit points and damage output to force you to take x number of players in a group, where x was as big a number as the devs could think about.
this was a bad decision, and one which most devs have wisely decided to avoid and tone down.
it's bad because as the guy up there said, only 1% see the content. it's not about finishing it. it's about seeing it.
when you need 40 odd people to work together on the INTERNET, you've got trouble right there. hell, getting 5 is bad enough.
to me, the only rewards raider(p)s should get out of raids is a gold star for having endured the melodrama it took to get there. i for one have hated every single second spent in raiding guilds.
unfortunately, the best lootz is often in raids. this forces people to form raiding guilds and has, again in my opinion, contributed to the cutthroat and mercilessly anti-social behaviour seen in the mmo genre as everyone ends up fighting each other more than the mobs. all for loot.
and THAT is the only difficulty of a raid.
i get very offended by people telling me raids are difficult and that devs are pandering to noobs by cutting back on them, or making content too "easy" by letting a small handful of friends finish a dungeon 20 "pro" raider(p)s want to own as their own so they can have some kind of loot exclusivity. if the raid itself were not a glorified mario-bros boss, i could see the argument. but show me a raid which wasn't just a recycled platformer first.
grrr.
i personally want challenging and difficult content. i want content to surprise and provoke me into sweating as i wear out both my mouse and my keyboard faster than if i was browsing a porn site with a library of all adult movies ever made sinc- uh, i mean, well... you know what i mean. i do not equate effort and difficulty with the number of mates i need to bring with me. i feel for the devs, though. it's hard to think of something which challenges outside of the traditional raid meme.
in all honesty, if you think about it, as with the porn site - the most challenging things you do in life, you do alone.
(this is not a call for solo dungeons, by the way - that was just a giggle to end my rant on...)
I guess for some players, like myself, my sense of achievement comes predominantly from having accomplished something difficult not having persevered through time-consumption.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If 90% of the population can accomplish it, was it really that difficult for the top 60% of the population though? You still sound, as you always have, like you want to play a coop RPG, most likely with content scaling.
The point of social games is to use social skills. MMORPGs were supposed to be social games. When one poster said that the main difficulty was the player interaction, and then he acted like that was bad, I shit several boulders in rage, and still the pain did not drown out my rage. Of course the hard part is in the social interaction, thats the god damn point.
I am generally not social. I do not like people that much, for many reasons. But I am capable of organizing large groups of players to accomplish a goal. I once ruined the beta for Dungeon Inquisitor by having such a large group of well organized followers that before I quit to do other things, I had completed 100% of the content in beta. Those players who were the most helpful to me received both my strategy for success and a portion of my resources as well as many really powerful creatures, which is the most important part of the game. The top 5 most powerful and most followed players currently in the game are those people. They are still friends and they work together. The remnants of my power block, which is only half as good as it would be if I hadn't quit, are still the dominant power in the game months after I left. Its called leadership. If you suck at it, learn to take orders. Take them really well and demonstrate the value that good organization produces to the rest of the guild, then go on the hardest raid in WoW with your boring cookie cutter specs and your lame hotbar macros and the raid strategy you got off genericwowfansite.com and lol as you complete the raid with no difficulties at all for your guild.
There are many kinds of challenge. Perservering against the odds, when you are angry and frustrated and you need to focus to control your emotions IS a challenge. One that Axehilt apparently fails at. Skills of all kinds are gained through time consumption. You think chess masters are born winners? No they fucking practice every day and they study previous games and openings and play by themselves. You think athletes or people with twitch were born winners? Maybe they had a leg up on 90% of the population but they are competing against the 10% that did also. You know what even highschool sports teams do? 2 a days for months before school starts and practice on weekeneds and also every day after school lets out. You think that is fun? Hell no. And even then sometimes you got unlucky with the talent at your school.
How can you say that you want games to be about skill and not boring time consumption when thats where every god damn skill in the world really comes from? Repeating the same raid over and over till your guild gets it right is perservering through time consumption.
The most purely skill based esports in existence require players to play thousands and thousands of games to be really good. Time consumption. In esports.
Most players in games do not focus on difficulty at all. How could they when games are designed so any random 12 year old can play it? The majority of WoW or any other themepark game contains little to no difficulty. Especially when people look up the ideal specs for their character online instead of figuring it out themselves. You get on people all the time for wanting long travel and exploring, but you are just as much as a niche as any of us. People play farmville in the millions, and there is 0 challenge there. You don't even need real friends to play, people just friend each other randomly as long as both play farmville. You are the minority just as much as sanshi44 but you had to use italics as if he was too dumb to understand your point.
EQ also had sites like Allakhazam and EQ Atlas with entire zones mapped out, player guides for every encounter -- up to and including raids and every epic boss -- and detailed bestiaries for every critter you ran across.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that EQ was somehow magically cut off from the rest of the world and that you had to figure it all out on your own. All it took was printing out the maps and putting them in a binder and being able to read a web page before you went into an encounter and EQ was just like any other MMO.
I wish a MMO came out with a 9 on the 1-10 hard scale. Unfortunately, WoW has ruined MMO's for a few years now... Although it does look like some 2012 titles are going back to the roots of real games.