While I will agree most endgames only offer a trivial challenge it is still a challenge of greater magnitude then "Can you deliver a letter for me?" "Can you kill 10 goblins?" It's a challenge level lowered to a level as to not exclude anyone. Then again though, the most popular multiplayer games pit you directly against other players with no stat advantage (LoL, SC/SC2, COD, Halo, TF2 etc.) so it's really on the MMO industry and single player games that have decided to go with "No player left behind" and they've suffered greatly for it.
So you agree any PvE "challenge" is basically trivial. So why bother? If someone wants a pve challenge, find one in the real world.
Sure .. pvp is like sports and there are always challenges. I am sure no matter how hard i try, i am not going to beat the korean champ in SC2. But that is a whole different discussion.
BTW, who is suffering greatly? It is not like pve games are not selling.
While I will agree most endgames only offer a trivial challenge it is still a challenge of greater magnitude then "Can you deliver a letter for me?" "Can you kill 10 goblins?" It's a challenge level lowered to a level as to not exclude anyone. Then again though, the most popular multiplayer games pit you directly against other players with no stat advantage (LoL, SC/SC2, COD, Halo, TF2 etc.) so it's really on the MMO industry and single player games that have decided to go with "No player left behind" and they've suffered greatly for it.
So you agree any PvE "challenge" is basically trivial. So why bother? If someone wants a pve challenge, find one in the real world.
Sure .. pvp is like sports and there are always challenges. I am sure no matter how hard i try, i am not going to beat the korean champ in SC2. But that is a whole different discussion.
BTW, who is suffering greatly? It is not like pve games are not selling.
There are absolutly pve challenges...holy smokes! at least in the non-mmo universe. I have played some really hard games. sorry to inject just saying.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
I'm doing Blade and Soul high level content right now and it's pretty punishing with its heavy twitch and coordination requirements. I don't think I've ever felt accomplished though because I've been so conditioned by "shinies", with which this game is extremely stingy. The days of personal high scores are over for me, I think.
For today's MMOs you we need to have two difficulty settings. One for single players that cannot be too hard as players are bought up in a world of easymode now. The second harder play could be for guilds, you know you are getting into something that is tougher and rewarded accordingly. You might need to divorce guild rewards from player rewards, rather depends on what rewards are given out.
MMOs are as difficult as the player makes them. Perhaps they should really up the "drop chance" if you are fighting monsters above your level.
That isn't exactly true. You can make things harder, like the time I leveled up a character to max level in starting gear in GW2 and you certainly can pull in many mobs but there is a limit to what you can do.
Also, MMOs tend to punish you for doing harder stuff. Time spent killing harder mobs Vs time spent killing normal mobs Vs time spent killing easy mobs have the Risk Vs Reward all wrong. Killing easy mobs and speedrunning easy quests is the fastest way to level in a modern MMO.
Not that long ago you still earned most XP and loot by doing harder dungeons instead of easy open world events but the last 10 years they actually punish you for doing anything that requires even the slightest player skill besides being fast.
Just increasing the drop rate is not nearly enough to persuade people to actually bother about a challenge.1 hour playing hard content should reward both better drops and more XP then 1 hour playing easy content assuming you don't die in either case (dying does even with zero death penalty slow you down after all).
In fact even if the chance to get rare loot would increase by 25% for hard content you will kill several times the easy enemies still meaning you will earn far more on the easy stuff. Now, a using different loot tables with different loot depending on the difficulty would be another thing, but that is maybe what you meant? If you only could get the good stuff from hard fights people would actually bother.
We could argue if hard or easy is most fun but it matters surprisingly little for people will still go for the fastest way to the endgame even if that mean doing less fun content. MMOs should reward competence, not punish it.
Fixed that for you.
MMOs have always rewarded efficiency with nerfing, only the methods to achieve it have changed.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I remembered playing GW2 and there is this boss only 2 people from the entire game have beaten it solo. Fractal 50 legendary imbued shaman.
Grant it is suppose to be a group dungeon so not many people will try to do it solo.
Difficult can have so much meaning. Difficult can mean combat difficult like dark soul or immersion difficult with harsh world. I think most people want difficult content refer to immersion difficulty.
I pretty much play for fun even though my build may not be the most efficient.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I remembered playing GW2 and there is this boss only 2 people from the entire game have beaten it solo. Fractal 50 legendary imbued shaman.
Grant it is suppose to be a group dungeon so not many people will try to do it solo.
Difficult can have so much meaning. Difficult can mean combat difficult like dark soul or immersion difficult with harsh world. I think most people want difficult content refer to immersion difficulty.
This reminds me of some bosses in Anarchy Online. They were meant to be grouped but some people soloed them. It might take close to 60 minutes to solo some of them. It doesn't require much intelligence, but it does require consistency. Staying alert and not making big mistakes for 50-plus minutes isn't exactly easy for some people. They also had to twink or minmax their character somewhat. It's not hard, but it does require knowledge and a lot of metagaming on item search websites.
It's sort of like some raids. I joined a raid guild. You have to be consistent. You have to be willing to stay alert a long period of time or risk wiping your raid. Your guild will want you to stay active and attend raids. It can be exhausting for some people. This doesn't make it difficult, but it does exclude some people. This is the reason I quit. I got tired of the commitment. It was like being in the military. Not coinidentally, a lot of people in the guild WERE military. That's when I realized the raiding might be favored by military because its rigidity and commitment requirements. I shouldn't fail to mention the guild website also required a lot of skill and commitment. I'd never seen a guild website so organized and maintained. They kept track of attendance and DKP. Had their own forum. Had a voice server. It was home away from home.
MMORPG's don't have to be ridiculously hard for enjoyment. They do however, need to require someone know their class in order to succeed. This is the line that has been crossed in most MMOs. In an effort to make the game more accessible they have dumbed them down to a level that using just a few buttons = beat the game. Boredom sets in quickly with most new games because of it.
Agree, when people can steamroll 90%+ of the games content they wont stay interested for long.
As @Iselin said, this isn't true for PvP even though the gear and level difference between players often makes PvP difficulty impossible to win or lose.
And it is not so much as being to be able to play your class as understanding and using the games tactics. The class thing is part of it just like the group dynamics, speccs and so on are.
The AI is a problem though, hard monsters usually are just as stupid, they just have more HP, do more damage and have nasty special attacks but they generally don't react to the players strategy. A more interesting thing would be if the mob realized that a certain tactic wont work and switch to something else.
If players don't have to react and consider their tactics and can do fine by just standing still and cycle a few skills people will tire of the game way faster. They certainly tire even faster if it is impossible and they just can't win but there are something in between super easy and impossible.
I can of course only speak for myself but I spend more time in any game that offers a little challenge then something I just beat easily, no matter what type of game it is. And a few hard raids and heroics in the endgame just isn't enough to keep many players like me hooked,
People are spending shorter time in the same MMO now then 10 or 15 years ago and I think the difficulty have more then a little to do with that, It is certainly not the only reason but it doesn't hurt either.
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content. Welcome to 2017.
No MMORPG can sustain its casual cash-cow player base (which tends to be the majority of its players) by making the base solo content so difficult that it drives them away.
These are social games, so "difficulty" isn't necessarily the primary objective at that level of gameplay. It's easy to ramp up the difficulty in dungeon/raid content... If you want difficulty in WoW, for example, push Mythic+ Dungeons and do Mythic Raiding.
The biggest issue with most MMORPGs isn't the lack of difficulty, but the fact that they simply aren't that entertaining to play. It's as if some developers forgot that they're developing a GAME.
I found in many games they were as easy or as difficult as I wanted them to be.....Lets say you are level 10....You can grind level 5 mobs all day without breaking a sweat...sure it takes a little longer to level but its easy, or you could try to take on level 20s where if you win at all it takes all you have to do it....Most people never go that route...If they do its because they have something like Kyleran said where they have another toon leveling them or a major buffbot/healer that helps them win.....Also in MMOs, Players try to find the route that maximizes XP but is the path of least resistance.....If you factor in that most games have questing that is easy leveling then that takes away difficulty too.
All of that is true. The thing is this is artificial difficulty players impose on themselves.
In contrast - truly difficult things in life like Learning icelandic (for a native english speaker) is diffcult no matter what. There is no easy way about it, no shortcuts or anything that will make it easy. Its going to be a bitch no matter what you do and what kind of help you get.
Icelandic is hard, per se, but languages like Russian are harder for Native English speakers than Icelandic. There are still lots of cognates between English and Icelandic. The only thing you have to get used to is the pronunciation and more complex morphology. Most Anglophones will be frustrated most by the pronunciation of Icelandic - it shares some sounds with English, but their articulation is... very different. The morphology isn't really much more complicated than German, to be frank.
Learning another North Germanic language makes Icelandic much easier, too, due to shared vocabulary.
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content.
I agree with the PVP part for obvious reasons: your enemy is much more intelligent and unpredictable than the canned mob AI.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content.
I agree with the PVP part for obvious reasons: your enemy is much more intelligent and unpredictable than the canned mob AI.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
Lol. That definition of something not being difficult fits just about anything. Once you practice it it's easy. Like learning to fly a plane. Tricky with complex steps that need to be learned. But once you learn that it's very simple after you've done it a few times.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I can't speak for PVP but for PVE/raid/dungeon content. Wildstrar is a prime example. It's totally failure. Wildstar try to make the challenge/hard PVE experience that we used to have back in WoW vanilla and it fail hard.
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content.
I agree with the PVP part for obvious reasons: your enemy is much more intelligent and unpredictable than the canned mob AI.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
Lol. That definition of something not being difficult fits just about anything. Once you practice it it's easy. Like learning to fly a plane. Tricky with complex steps that need to be learned. But once you learn that it's very simple after you've done it a few times.
In the case of airplanes are you sure you're not confusing dangerous with difficult?
A group dungeon or raid has the mobs behaving exactly the same way every time right down to the % of a boss' health when they do a power move, spawn adds, or whatever.
Flying an airplane, or driving for that matter, is not always exactly the same.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content.
I agree with the PVP part for obvious reasons: your enemy is much more intelligent and unpredictable than the canned mob AI.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
Lol. That definition of something not being difficult fits just about anything. Once you practice it it's easy. Like learning to fly a plane. Tricky with complex steps that need to be learned. But once you learn that it's very simple after you've done it a few times.
In the case of airplanes are you sure you're not confusing dangerous with difficult?
A group dungeon or raid has the mobs behaving exactly the same way every time right down to the % of a boss' health when they do a power move, spawn adds, or whatever.
Flying an airplane, or driving for that matter, is not always exactly the same.
Danger is there because it's dangerous to your body just as Raids are dangerous to your character. It's all a series of learned behaviors. When encountered for the first time something may appear difficult. Once practiced, becomes easy.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
People are spending shorter time in the same MMO now then 10 or 15 years ago and I think the difficulty have more then a little to do with that, It is certainly not the only reason but it doesn't hurt either.
There are so many games now .. i don't really see a point of spending all my time in one game. In fact, i have tons of steam games i have not finished.
While I will agree most endgames only offer a trivial challenge it is still a challenge of greater magnitude then "Can you deliver a letter for me?" "Can you kill 10 goblins?" It's a challenge level lowered to a level as to not exclude anyone. Then again though, the most popular multiplayer games pit you directly against other players with no stat advantage (LoL, SC/SC2, COD, Halo, TF2 etc.) so it's really on the MMO industry and single player games that have decided to go with "No player left behind" and they've suffered greatly for it.
So you agree any PvE "challenge" is basically trivial. So why bother? If someone wants a pve challenge, find one in the real world.
Sure .. pvp is like sports and there are always challenges. I am sure no matter how hard i try, i am not going to beat the korean champ in SC2. But that is a whole different discussion.
BTW, who is suffering greatly? It is not like pve games are not selling.
I agree that PVE in most currently existing MMOs is basically trivial. Which is why I never play an MMO for the sake of PVE content.
I do not agree PVE is trivial. There are plenty of challenging PVE games on the market. I would like to see some of that level of difficulty at least available as an option in MMOs. Challenges not based on level / gearscore but how good you actually are as a player.
MMOs (Real MMOs not "Angry Birds is an MMO!") are the genre that is suffering because:
A. They offer no challenge outside PvP. B. People hate MMO PvP due to level/gear imbalance.
It's the reason there are almost no AAA titles in currently development and the majority of the titles in kickstarter are promising PvP focus, less stat disparity, and less grinding.
MMOs (Real MMOs not "Angry Birds is an MMO!") are the genre that is suffering because:
A. They offer no challenge outside PvP. B. People hate MMO PvP due to level/gear imbalance.
It's the reason there are almost no AAA titles in currently development and the majority of the titles in kickstarter are promising PvP focus, less stat disparity, and less grinding.
nah ... no AAA titles in development is caused by players are attractive to other games now (like MOBAs, or online shooters).
Clearly a challenge is not needed to be financially successful in making games ... otherwise you don't see "easy mode" as an option in so many single player games.
As for "real" MMOs, they are pretty much irrelevant whether there is a pve challenge or not.
Intellectual difficulty is when you are presented with a challenge and have to think your way out of it. In MMOs, this primarily manifests itself in combat by making you choose which skill to use next. For example, a boss does a big AoE and reduces everyones health to 20%. Every player then has to make a choice - do you pop a long CD? use a potion? hide in a corner? just wait for a heal? This is using your brain to think through a problem in a short amount of time. The decision must be meaningful.
Sadly, intellectual difficulty is a rarity in MMOs and has been diminishing over time. The two biggest factors have been action combat and resource management. In an action combat game, you only have a few skills to choose from, so making a decision is a piece of piss. With resource management, too many games have resource pools that regen in 10 seconds. This also makes decision making easier. The only MMO I've played that was intellectually difficult was LotRO, but sadly they have removed that difficulty now.
2) Physical
This is your twitch skills. How fast can you react, and how accurate are you? If you want to increase difficulty, just require quicker reactions and more accurate aiming. I also include concentration within the physical category. Can you physically concentrate on a single fight for 5 minutes? Concentration is usually more important in games with high levels of punishment - make a single mistake and you're dead.
This type of difficulty has been increasing as the genre has largely switched to action combat. With intellectual difficulty, every player has a natural cap they can reach (IQ), but with physical difficulty, most players can achieve everything as long as they don't have a disability. Just play longer. The longer you play, the better your muscle memory becomes. Sure, some people advance quicker than others, but everyone can reach the required level given enough time.
3) Social
The more players required, the harder it becomes. Social skills are a completely different set of skills for playing a game. It takes real skill to navigate the variety of personalities, languages, time zones etc to form a suitable group and then to effectively communicate strategies. For most people, they never need to acquire these skills and so have no appreciation of this type of difficulty, but the guild and raid leaders out there know what i mean. Social difficulty also plays a big role in why PvP is difficult. PvP involves intellectual difficulty (reacting to unpredictable scenarios), physical difficulty (quickly dodging attacks, aiming are unpredictable targets), but a lot of it comes down to understanding how other players think and trying to anticipate their moves.
4) Knowledge
This is where a game requires specific knowledge to beat content, i.e. you cannot just approach the content in the usual way. Without the knowledge, you will die, so you are required to try a variety of approaches, observe the results and then learn a strategy. Acquiring the knowledge can be difficult - identifying triggers and effects can be difficult. Sometimes there may be a lot of knowledge required - perhaps there are 20 phases, each with 5 triggers/effects to remember. Can you remember 100 triggers and how you are supposed to respond with ease? Some people just aren't very good at remembering things, whilst others find it easy.
With the internet, this type of difficulty isn't experienced by many people. Even if you do encounter this type of difficulty and can't progress, the internet will help you out.
This type of difficulty is preferred by developers, because it is an achievable challenge. Your first attempt, you wipe and it seems impossible. How the hell did we die so fast?! Each attempt, you learn a bit more and get a bit further, until finally you beat it. Usually, as soon as you've killed it once, it becomes pretty trivial after that.
My hierarchy of needs goes intellectual -> social -> knowledge -> physical.
If MMOs increased their intellectual difficulty, I would be extremely happy and would be much more likely to play them. Intellectual difficulty requires a deep combat system, but they are extremely hard to design. It also requires content that allows a large variety of tactics, which is also really difficult to design without accidentally making one tactic too easy.
Social difficulty is also good fun. I prefer playing in groups and love the feeling you get when you find that special group of players to complete the content with. Over time, you learn each others strengths and weaknesses and just play together extremely well. However, as long as devs stick to vertical progression and linear content, social difficulty must remain absent until endgame.
Knowledge can be fun, but not on its own. Breath of the Wild is an example of knowledge difficulty being the only difficulty. You face some bosses or random mobs and they just destroy you. But, the second you acquire the right knowledge (when to dodge/hide, what weapon to use etc), it becomes trivial. I like it when content requires a period of learning, but even once you've acquired the knowledge, it still requires either intellectual or physical skill to execute a strategy.
Physical difficulty....yeh, its not for me. I have nothing holding me back, it doesn't take me long to acquire the skill when picking up new twitch games.....I just don't find it engaging. I'm just bored. You're just going through the motions over and over again until your reactions reach the required level for success.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content.
I agree with the PVP part for obvious reasons: your enemy is much more intelligent and unpredictable than the canned mob AI.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
Lol. That definition of something not being difficult fits just about anything. Once you practice it it's easy. Like learning to fly a plane. Tricky with complex steps that need to be learned. But once you learn that it's very simple after you've done it a few times.
In the case of airplanes are you sure you're not confusing dangerous with difficult?
A group dungeon or raid has the mobs behaving exactly the same way every time right down to the % of a boss' health when they do a power move, spawn adds, or whatever.
Flying an airplane, or driving for that matter, is not always exactly the same.
Danger is there because it's dangerous to your body just as Raids are dangerous to your character. It's all a series of learned behaviors. When encountered for the first time something may appear difficult. Once practiced, becomes easy.
I dunno, I ran my first (and perhaps last) Tough Mudder race on Saturday, and no matter how well you train for it, or how many tricks you learn, I can't see it ever falling into the realm of easy, even if I was 40 years younger.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
MMORPGs are difficult, but the difficulty is in group/raid content and PvP, not solo content.
I agree with the PVP part for obvious reasons: your enemy is much more intelligent and unpredictable than the canned mob AI.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
Lol. That definition of something not being difficult fits just about anything. Once you practice it it's easy. Like learning to fly a plane. Tricky with complex steps that need to be learned. But once you learn that it's very simple after you've done it a few times.
In the case of airplanes are you sure you're not confusing dangerous with difficult?
A group dungeon or raid has the mobs behaving exactly the same way every time right down to the % of a boss' health when they do a power move, spawn adds, or whatever.
Flying an airplane, or driving for that matter, is not always exactly the same.
Danger is there because it's dangerous to your body just as Raids are dangerous to your character. It's all a series of learned behaviors. When encountered for the first time something may appear difficult. Once practiced, becomes easy.
I dunno, I ran my first (and perhaps last) Tough Mudder race on Saturday, and no matter how well you train for it, or how many tricks you learn, I can't see it ever falling into the realm of easy, even if I was 40 years younger.
(Well, unless you dog it of course)
Woof!
This is the image I have in my head. Do not dare to ruin it.
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
Today games are easy compare to the Old days when you had no maps,No Markers N.S.E.W, no light in dungeon, no friend to hold your hand ...Yeah those were the good ol days when you had to use your brain...Today games are a joke and easy...lol
Comments
Sure .. pvp is like sports and there are always challenges. I am sure no matter how hard i try, i am not going to beat the korean champ in SC2. But that is a whole different discussion.
BTW, who is suffering greatly? It is not like pve games are not selling.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
While that is true, dedication should itself get a reward.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Grant it is suppose to be a group dungeon so not many people will try to do it solo.
Difficult can have so much meaning. Difficult can mean combat difficult like dark soul or immersion difficult with harsh world. I think most people want difficult content refer to immersion difficulty.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
It's sort of like some raids. I joined a raid guild. You have to be consistent. You have to be willing to stay alert a long period of time or risk wiping your raid. Your guild will want you to stay active and attend raids. It can be exhausting for some people. This doesn't make it difficult, but it does exclude some people. This is the reason I quit. I got tired of the commitment. It was like being in the military. Not coinidentally, a lot of people in the guild WERE military. That's when I realized the raiding might be favored by military because its rigidity and commitment requirements. I shouldn't fail to mention the guild website also required a lot of skill and commitment. I'd never seen a guild website so organized and maintained. They kept track of attendance and DKP. Had their own forum. Had a voice server. It was home away from home.
As @Iselin said, this isn't true for PvP even though the gear and level difference between players often makes PvP difficulty impossible to win or lose.
And it is not so much as being to be able to play your class as understanding and using the games tactics. The class thing is part of it just like the group dynamics, speccs and so on are.
The AI is a problem though, hard monsters usually are just as stupid, they just have more HP, do more damage and have nasty special attacks but they generally don't react to the players strategy. A more interesting thing would be if the mob realized that a certain tactic wont work and switch to something else.
If players don't have to react and consider their tactics and can do fine by just standing still and cycle a few skills people will tire of the game way faster. They certainly tire even faster if it is impossible and they just can't win but there are something in between super easy and impossible.
I can of course only speak for myself but I spend more time in any game that offers a little challenge then something I just beat easily, no matter what type of game it is. And a few hard raids and heroics in the endgame just isn't enough to keep many players like me hooked,
People are spending shorter time in the same MMO now then 10 or 15 years ago and I think the difficulty have more then a little to do with that, It is certainly not the only reason but it doesn't hurt either.
No MMORPG can sustain its casual cash-cow player base (which tends to be the majority of its players) by making the base solo content so difficult that it drives them away.
These are social games, so "difficulty" isn't necessarily the primary objective at that level of gameplay. It's easy to ramp up the difficulty in dungeon/raid content... If you want difficulty in WoW, for example, push Mythic+ Dungeons and do Mythic Raiding.
The biggest issue with most MMORPGs isn't the lack of difficulty, but the fact that they simply aren't that entertaining to play. It's as if some developers forgot that they're developing a GAME.
Icelandic is hard, per se, but languages like Russian are harder for Native English speakers than Icelandic. There are still lots of cognates between English and Icelandic. The only thing you have to get used to is the pronunciation and more complex morphology. Most Anglophones will be frustrated most by the pronunciation of Icelandic - it shares some sounds with English, but their articulation is... very different. The morphology isn't really much more complicated than German, to be frank.
Learning another North Germanic language makes Icelandic much easier, too, due to shared vocabulary.
But I wouldn't call group or raid content difficult. They're tricky and often have complex choreography that needs to be learned. But once you learn a particular dungeon or raid there's very little difficulty involved.
You do have to pay more attention than when soloing. There is that. But they're very simple after you do it a couple of times.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
A group dungeon or raid has the mobs behaving exactly the same way every time right down to the % of a boss' health when they do a power move, spawn adds, or whatever.
Flying an airplane, or driving for that matter, is not always exactly the same.
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I do not agree PVE is trivial. There are plenty of challenging PVE games on the market. I would like to see some of that level of difficulty at least available as an option in MMOs. Challenges not based on level / gearscore but how good you actually are as a player.
MMOs (Real MMOs not "Angry Birds is an MMO!") are the genre that is suffering because:
A. They offer no challenge outside PvP.
B. People hate MMO PvP due to level/gear imbalance.
It's the reason there are almost no AAA titles in currently development and the majority of the titles in kickstarter are promising PvP focus, less stat disparity, and less grinding.
nah ... no AAA titles in development is caused by players are attractive to other games now (like MOBAs, or online shooters).
Clearly a challenge is not needed to be financially successful in making games ... otherwise you don't see "easy mode" as an option in so many single player games.
As for "real" MMOs, they are pretty much irrelevant whether there is a pve challenge or not.
1) Intellectual
Intellectual difficulty is when you are presented with a challenge and have to think your way out of it. In MMOs, this primarily manifests itself in combat by making you choose which skill to use next. For example, a boss does a big AoE and reduces everyones health to 20%. Every player then has to make a choice - do you pop a long CD? use a potion? hide in a corner? just wait for a heal? This is using your brain to think through a problem in a short amount of time. The decision must be meaningful.
Sadly, intellectual difficulty is a rarity in MMOs and has been diminishing over time. The two biggest factors have been action combat and resource management. In an action combat game, you only have a few skills to choose from, so making a decision is a piece of piss. With resource management, too many games have resource pools that regen in 10 seconds. This also makes decision making easier. The only MMO I've played that was intellectually difficult was LotRO, but sadly they have removed that difficulty now.
2) Physical
This is your twitch skills. How fast can you react, and how accurate are you? If you want to increase difficulty, just require quicker reactions and more accurate aiming. I also include concentration within the physical category. Can you physically concentrate on a single fight for 5 minutes? Concentration is usually more important in games with high levels of punishment - make a single mistake and you're dead.
This type of difficulty has been increasing as the genre has largely switched to action combat. With intellectual difficulty, every player has a natural cap they can reach (IQ), but with physical difficulty, most players can achieve everything as long as they don't have a disability. Just play longer. The longer you play, the better your muscle memory becomes. Sure, some people advance quicker than others, but everyone can reach the required level given enough time.
3) Social
The more players required, the harder it becomes. Social skills are a completely different set of skills for playing a game. It takes real skill to navigate the variety of personalities, languages, time zones etc to form a suitable group and then to effectively communicate strategies. For most people, they never need to acquire these skills and so have no appreciation of this type of difficulty, but the guild and raid leaders out there know what i mean. Social difficulty also plays a big role in why PvP is difficult. PvP involves intellectual difficulty (reacting to unpredictable scenarios), physical difficulty (quickly dodging attacks, aiming are unpredictable targets), but a lot of it comes down to understanding how other players think and trying to anticipate their moves.
4) Knowledge
This is where a game requires specific knowledge to beat content, i.e. you cannot just approach the content in the usual way. Without the knowledge, you will die, so you are required to try a variety of approaches, observe the results and then learn a strategy. Acquiring the knowledge can be difficult - identifying triggers and effects can be difficult. Sometimes there may be a lot of knowledge required - perhaps there are 20 phases, each with 5 triggers/effects to remember. Can you remember 100 triggers and how you are supposed to respond with ease? Some people just aren't very good at remembering things, whilst others find it easy.
With the internet, this type of difficulty isn't experienced by many people. Even if you do encounter this type of difficulty and can't progress, the internet will help you out.
This type of difficulty is preferred by developers, because it is an achievable challenge. Your first attempt, you wipe and it seems impossible. How the hell did we die so fast?! Each attempt, you learn a bit more and get a bit further, until finally you beat it. Usually, as soon as you've killed it once, it becomes pretty trivial after that.
My hierarchy of needs goes intellectual -> social -> knowledge -> physical.
If MMOs increased their intellectual difficulty, I would be extremely happy and would be much more likely to play them. Intellectual difficulty requires a deep combat system, but they are extremely hard to design. It also requires content that allows a large variety of tactics, which is also really difficult to design without accidentally making one tactic too easy.
Social difficulty is also good fun. I prefer playing in groups and love the feeling you get when you find that special group of players to complete the content with. Over time, you learn each others strengths and weaknesses and just play together extremely well. However, as long as devs stick to vertical progression and linear content, social difficulty must remain absent until endgame.
Knowledge can be fun, but not on its own. Breath of the Wild is an example of knowledge difficulty being the only difficulty. You face some bosses or random mobs and they just destroy you. But, the second you acquire the right knowledge (when to dodge/hide, what weapon to use etc), it becomes trivial. I like it when content requires a period of learning, but even once you've acquired the knowledge, it still requires either intellectual or physical skill to execute a strategy.
Physical difficulty....yeh, its not for me. I have nothing holding me back, it doesn't take me long to acquire the skill when picking up new twitch games.....I just don't find it engaging. I'm just bored. You're just going through the motions over and over again until your reactions reach the required level for success.
(Well, unless you dog it of course)
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