I'm coming to this thread a little late, I've read most of it but apologies if I'm restating things that have already been said. I'll try to keep focused on solo content.
1) Players seek path of least resistance.
2) Rewarding failure - does it really encourage people?
3) What about linear progression?
4) What about class imbalance?
5) Is it really a problem?
6) My solutions
I think about difficulty a lot and so I have a lot of ideas about how to increase the difficulty levels without causing problems:
Gradual ramp-up of difficulty - it has been my experience that games suck at increasing difficulty. The MMO is typically trivial from level 1 to cap, it just gives the illusion of difficulty via stat differences. Then, all of a sudden, you hit some genuinely difficult content and you fall apart. MMOs need to get much better at gradually increasing the difficulty over time, rather than that massive cliff-edge you normally get.
Set expectations early - start throwing challenging content at players right from the start. If you create the right mindset right from the start, your community will overcome the challenge. However, if it remains trivial for too long, challenge will just shatter some people and they'll quit.
Separate story/content from progression - I am of the firm belief that quests should be disconnected from progression. If you follow the quests then the nature of completing them will give you xp from kills / exploration, but if you come across a quest too hard to complete, there needs to be a way around it. This way, you can create some extremely challenging content with awesome rewards without having to worry about driving away shit players.
Horizontal progression with scaling content. By going horizontal, you ensure that challenge is actual challenge, and not just a stat imbalance. By scaling content (by this, i mean scale it to group size) you allow players to take on the world as they choose. Quest or grind mobs. Solo, group or raid. Easy or hard.
You're right on (1) that it's common for players to do a game's content rather than focusing more directly on getting high level as fast as possible. But that's a related way that games make PVE easy: they tune it so that if you've done all of the content up to quest X, then you'll be so strong that quest X is trivial. And then do that for just about every single quest in the entire game.
To fix that, you're going to need to make it so that even if you've done all of the quests up to quest X without ever failing, quest X will be pretty hard. But give enough partial rewards for failing quests along the way that quest X will be modestly challenging for most players. The players who have failed more often at earlier quests will be stronger coming in than the players who rarely failed, so the players who simply aren't as good at the game will have that accumulated extra attempts bonus and still have a fair shot at the quest.
The reason rewards for failure are so important is that they automatically compensate for some players being better than others. If player A fails on 1/3 of his attempts and player B only on 5% of his attempts, player A might usually be 3 levels higher than player B when he first tries a typical quest. That mostly compensates for the difference in player skill so that player A can keep making progress and not get stuck.
On (2), there's an enormous difference between: a) failing, seeing what went wrong and how to correct it, and then trying again and succeeding b) failing even after you've done what seems like the best strategy and feeling stuck
The former is essential if a game is to have any semblance of interesting challenge. It is the latter that is lethal. That leads to the combination of (3) and (4), where if questing is completely on rails and quests must be done in some fixed order, you probably do get stuck, frustrated, and quit. Even if failure rewards would mean that after 50 failed attempts that leave you 3 levels higher than when you started, you can finally beat that hard quest and move on, you'll probably quit before then.
This is why it is essential not to have such sequential questing. Have perhaps 5 or 10 things that players can reasonably do at a given time. If one is too hard, go try another instead. That way, if one quest genuinely is too way too hard, it just sits there available to you for a few levels until you're strong enough to clear it.
If a game tries to do this, it's critical that they monitor which quests players are doing earlier and which ones they're doing later. Quests that seem to be done out of order need to have their difficulty tweaked--too early needs to be made harder and too late needs to be made easier.
Another problem is that a lot of games sabotage efforts at switching between content by making travel slow. If it doesn't seem like I can beat quest X now, maybe I could try quest Y. But I'd have to run for 20 minutes just to get there, so I'm going to log off and do something else instead. If I could try quest Y immediately, it's easier to switch.
On (5), yes, I think it is a problem. I've played too many MMORPGs that were fun at first, and seemed like they had the basic mechanics in place to be great, but then I got bored because basically everything was trivial. If I've only died once in the last month, and that one time was because I accidentally crossed a boundary to a high-level zone and got one-shotted, I'm likely to get bored and quit.
I wonder if players are even prepared to experience failure these days.
In Wildstar (at launch), even the low-level dungeons were quite challenging. The positioning aspect was quite new back then, having to stand in the right places relative to enemies and allies. Players needed to fail a few times to learn. This meant having to repeat an encounter 4-5 times.
I've always been a person who is competitive with themselves. If I fail at something, I find it fun to rethink the approach and try again, hopefully doing better next time. I have no problem whatsoever with doing multiple attempts at something. In Wildstar though, 80%+ of my groups fell apart after 2-3 attempts.
I believe people have a different mentality these days. I'm only 25, so I'm not saying it's a generational thing. But perhaps it's a by-product of the excessively streamlined game design people are used to. If they fail, they don't think "I need to improve. What can I do better next time?" Instead, they think "This did not work out. There must be something wrong with the group or with the product."
With the exception of games like Dark Souls, which make it explicit that failure is part of the "fun", I'd argue the majority of people don't expect to fail at all.
I'm not saying it's a desirable state. But encouraging failure-seeking behavior would need to go hand in hand with some serious market priming.
Rewarding failure will only lead to failure. Failure itself is rewarding enough if a player gained some worthwhile knowledge from the mistakes they made. If failure is not rewarding, then it is a problem with the game itself.
Comments
To fix that, you're going to need to make it so that even if you've done all of the quests up to quest X without ever failing, quest X will be pretty hard. But give enough partial rewards for failing quests along the way that quest X will be modestly challenging for most players. The players who have failed more often at earlier quests will be stronger coming in than the players who rarely failed, so the players who simply aren't as good at the game will have that accumulated extra attempts bonus and still have a fair shot at the quest.
The reason rewards for failure are so important is that they automatically compensate for some players being better than others. If player A fails on 1/3 of his attempts and player B only on 5% of his attempts, player A might usually be 3 levels higher than player B when he first tries a typical quest. That mostly compensates for the difference in player skill so that player A can keep making progress and not get stuck.
On (2), there's an enormous difference between:
a) failing, seeing what went wrong and how to correct it, and then trying again and succeeding
b) failing even after you've done what seems like the best strategy and feeling stuck
The former is essential if a game is to have any semblance of interesting challenge. It is the latter that is lethal. That leads to the combination of (3) and (4), where if questing is completely on rails and quests must be done in some fixed order, you probably do get stuck, frustrated, and quit. Even if failure rewards would mean that after 50 failed attempts that leave you 3 levels higher than when you started, you can finally beat that hard quest and move on, you'll probably quit before then.
This is why it is essential not to have such sequential questing. Have perhaps 5 or 10 things that players can reasonably do at a given time. If one is too hard, go try another instead. That way, if one quest genuinely is too way too hard, it just sits there available to you for a few levels until you're strong enough to clear it.
If a game tries to do this, it's critical that they monitor which quests players are doing earlier and which ones they're doing later. Quests that seem to be done out of order need to have their difficulty tweaked--too early needs to be made harder and too late needs to be made easier.
Another problem is that a lot of games sabotage efforts at switching between content by making travel slow. If it doesn't seem like I can beat quest X now, maybe I could try quest Y. But I'd have to run for 20 minutes just to get there, so I'm going to log off and do something else instead. If I could try quest Y immediately, it's easier to switch.
On (5), yes, I think it is a problem. I've played too many MMORPGs that were fun at first, and seemed like they had the basic mechanics in place to be great, but then I got bored because basically everything was trivial. If I've only died once in the last month, and that one time was because I accidentally crossed a boundary to a high-level zone and got one-shotted, I'm likely to get bored and quit.
In Wildstar (at launch), even the low-level dungeons were quite challenging. The positioning aspect was quite new back then, having to stand in the right places relative to enemies and allies. Players needed to fail a few times to learn. This meant having to repeat an encounter 4-5 times.
I've always been a person who is competitive with themselves. If I fail at something, I find it fun to rethink the approach and try again, hopefully doing better next time. I have no problem whatsoever with doing multiple attempts at something. In Wildstar though, 80%+ of my groups fell apart after 2-3 attempts.
I believe people have a different mentality these days. I'm only 25, so I'm not saying it's a generational thing. But perhaps it's a by-product of the excessively streamlined game design people are used to. If they fail, they don't think "I need to improve. What can I do better next time?" Instead, they think "This did not work out. There must be something wrong with the group or with the product."
With the exception of games like Dark Souls, which make it explicit that failure is part of the "fun", I'd argue the majority of people don't expect to fail at all.
I'm not saying it's a desirable state. But encouraging failure-seeking behavior would need to go hand in hand with some serious market priming.
This is also why a lot of MMO players are looking for solo content, it's not the game, it's the players.
Good luck fixing that problem.