Every mmorpg ever made was easy. They always will be. Move buttons to advance a digital doll toward another digital doll and push more buttons until it stops moving. The order in which you push those buttons is the only curve of learning required. Once you learn those simple patterns you just repeat, with some variation, for however many levels or caps the game imposes on you. Creating artificial time sinks to prolong the experience is not creating harder content. The whole point of a video game is to allow you suspension of disbelief. To enjoy your time. Depth is what some here are really talking about and depth is not the same thing as hard. Two separate things entirely.
When Naxxramas was launched in vanilla and Sunwell Plateau in TBC by no means they were easy contents.
Many world's top guilds got disbanded during these contents. They had ALL the possible gear up to those raids. They had all the time in the world. They tried for VERY long hours 5-6 days a week, for months and they failed to clear the contents. Many of them gave up, and MANY of them disbanded.
Even the guilds which had these contents on farm never claimed these were easy contents. They all agreed these were the hardest challenges they had faced in their gaming careers.
These raids, in EVERY sense of the word, were hard contents.
Of course there are more examples in WoW, but then Blizzard introduced the tiered difficulty of raiding so everyone could see all contents. And also nerfed the contents after a couple of months so everyone could clear. But the top tier specially upon release remained hard and wouldn't become doable merely by investing more time.
I can also talk about EVE. Yes EVE is an easy game if you live a pacifist life and don't mind blowing up once in a while. But if you wanted to climb the hierarchy, it is a brutal world and VERY hard game to play.
MMORPGs have various layers. There are easy layers and there are time-consuming layers, true. But a few got actually hard as fuck layers as well.
Still time sink imposed. Remember when Naxx launched? Getting 40 people properly geared was a massive pain in the...well you know. After learning the mechanics, rotations and getting your properly geared 8 tanks it was beaten. In under 3 months time. Again not 'hard' just time consuming to get the gear needed to be ready for it. Raiding is a chain. Follow the chain (and everyone has to follow it the same way) you come to the end and complete it. Grinding and grinding and grinding is not a way to make content hard. Just prolong the time needed to complete it and keep your playerbase subbed. Raiding is a checklist endeavor.
I have to disagree with you mate. Because top guilds had already last contents on farm for months, members had even their third alts fully geared, yet they couldn't clear Naxx or Sunwell (which was a 25-man raid). Because it is damned hard, not time consuming. And grinding couldn't make it easy.
Top guilds never had any problem with the availability of people or people showing up on time. There were so many other elements involved in a running a successful raid and taking down a hard boss. I played this game for 6 years and was always among the world's top 10 guilds. Acted as leader, officer and such. When recruiting new players we rarely cared about gear if we had a couple of weeks before new contents to gear up the applicant.
And a fun fact: as a high-end raiding player, I had to spend less time in game than casual players overall, yet clear all contents way before everyone else. Because when there's difficulty involved, then skill matters as well. It's a mistake to think that top guilds were top guilds because they played more than everyone else.
Yes the whole game is about carrots on sticks. But there were various levels of difficulties involved. And high-end was a complete different beast.
I don't mean to offend you mate , but I don't think you were ever involved in the high-end raiding scene of the WoW.
When Naxx released people were not even done running AQ40. Plus you had to farm an obscene amount of shadow pots. Plus having 8 insanely geared warriors (4 Horsemen) was a pain at the time.All things that created time sinks, then you had to rep then you had to learn the mechanics. All this took time and created headaches, honestly most guilds just waited for Burning Crusade to come out and skipped it and came back later. My guild was 'The Last Watch' our guys cleared it but I was not a raider in vanilla. I was still playing AC more. I raided in BC though. The only thing our guys said about Naxx was how much of a pain it was to check the many boxes of requirement. Content being 'too hard' was not something I ever heard.
Based on your logic guilds which played more then cleared more contents and sooner.
This was never the case of raiding in WoW. There's no evidence for it.
There's much evidence for guilds putting so much time into the game yet fail to clear the contents pre nerf.
Login to game and count the guilds on any server that raid 5 nights a week yet haven't cleared all the contents of the game, at any stage of any expansion's launch.
Even if you try Google now you can still find stories how Sunwell had ended basically nolifers top guilds due to sheer difficulty.
When it was released I had 4 tools fully geared from Black Temple and Mouny Hyjal. So did everyone else. We raided 7 nights a week for 6 hours a session for 3 weeks, then switched 2 5 nights a week till we closed down the guild after another month of trying.
We looked at Nihilum played and it was obvious they were just better players. I got in to another guild and finally cleared Sunwell. But my new teammates taught me a lot on what to do and how to optimize my game.
These aren't delusions that I'm talking about. Skill has a role in WoW.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"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
I guess 'easy' at least in MMORPG terms, is mostly associated with the time it takes to achieve things.
WTF - easy is easy. Compare the solo content of any so called MMORPG with DS or Gothic, and it is incredibly easy.
You didn't read or understood my post. When I said "in MMORPGs terms" obviously I meant between MMORPGs, so you bringing up single player games, is totally irrelevant to my post (reading some your posts, you go off topic quite often).
I'm confused. You have played Skyrim, right? It has many official dlcs and mods and that HAS made a ton of money for them. If you're talking about just restricting the developer to making mods/dlcs for the game, that would never work, the community is just too dang giant and they would revolt. You also can't have an open source with a cash shop otherwise the community can just make the items/mods that the developers are making.
Different note: You might want to pick a different genre if all the new mmorpgs you play today are on autopilot for you.
Don't you worry about me. I have plenty of single players game to play. I am not crying, just stating a fact.
About the single/player micro transaction issue. Sure if you try to sneak a cash shop after you launch the game, players will riot, that's what happened when Bethesda introduced the "Creation Club" for Fallout 4. But if a game is built on micro transaction from the ground up, that's totally different.
10 years ago if you said that we would have micro transactions in MMORPGs, players would call you crazy. 10 years after...look around. Only WoW is left standing as the last bastion of the Subscription model. I don't see why this cannot happen with Single Player games, they just need to tweak the formula as a Single Player Cash Shop can't be copy/pasted from a MMORPGs. It won't work.
People have different thresholds and abilities and what allows a person to 'enjoy' a game.
Some folks play games like it is a job and they meticulously go through the game and content including boss mechanics and raids seriously. They are not very forgiving and expect perfection and to them most games might be too easy.
Others find different aspects to 'enjoy' and the combat or game should not be too complicated or difficult for them to advance or they tend to give up.
One cannot simply lump everyone into a category and say they want easy games just because your standard of difficulty is different from theirs. You might be surprised that what you consider 'difficult ' might just be dead easy for someone else.
Based on your logic guilds which played more then cleared more contents and sooner.
This was never the case of raiding in WoW. There's no evidence for it.
There's much evidence for guilds putting so much time into the game yet fail to clear the contents pre nerf.
Login to game and count the guilds on any server that raid 5 nights a week yet haven't cleared all the contents of the game, at any stage of any expansion's launch.
Even if you try Google now you can still find stories how Sunwell had ended basically nolifers top guilds due to sheer difficulty.
When it was released I had 4 tools fully geared from Black Temple and Mouny Hyjal. So did everyone else. We raided 7 nights a week for 6 hours a session for 3 weeks, then switched 2 5 nights a week till we closed down the guild after another month of trying.
We looked at Nihilum played and it was obvious they were just better players. I got in to another guild and finally cleared Sunwell. But my new teammates taught me a lot on what to do and how to optimize my game.
These aren't delusions that I'm talking about. Skill has a role in WoW.
That becomes the typical - my game is not bad. It is dude. Even the hardest boss in a game with non action combat is a question of time (power is just more time with vertical progression) and knowing of the mechanisms - the boss start to glow at that way, we shall move there. This is not hard or challenging, it is grind. Most players do not have so much time, that is why only few do some bosses.
What made the L2 bosses challenging was their ability to react. So the boss attacks the healers, when they start to heal, the player who does biggest damage instead of the tank, and etc. But honestly even these bosses were easy. It was really fun only when we had to PvP for the raid.
My game being good or bad is irrelevant. You didn't provide any counter points to the reasons I mentioned regarding how time didn't help people. And funny is how you accuse me of that then bring L2 as a good challenging example in the conversation. Well I don't know mate, if you a say it was challenging then I have to take your word for it because I never raided in L2.
But for the example; besides losing the aggro (which became much easier to maintain in TBC and forward) some bosses had aggro reset, some bosses were immune to taunt, and they went for the healers. Hard bosses weren't all hard for the same reason. Each had nightmarish mechanics.
But how does tab-targetting make it a question of time?
You guys keep repeating how you feel WoW raiding was without providing any reason or evidence for it.
This is a fact: hardcore guilds raided the same amount of time. They had cleared all contents up to the last patch of the game. They kept raiding the same amount of time. But only a small percentage of them managed to clear the final patch content before nerf.
This has happened more than once.
Method has been among WoW's top 3 guilds since release. What, you think these guys' clocks have more hours per day? There's competition for the top spot. Because it means sponsors and monies. How do you think these guys haven't lost the crown for more than 7 years now?
It is easy to label something you haven't done as easy and not challenging. And it is ignorant to believe you would've done it just as good if you just had the time.
There are tools now that you can use to score the efficiency of players in raids. It is possible and not rare at all to see players with lesser gear would score better even at top level.
I feel this is more like a typical WoW bashing argument. Yes, many stuff wrong with that game. But Blizzard was good at making raids challenging. And I've got 14 years of evidence to back this claim.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"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
While WoW had some difficult things, overall it was too easy....You never heard people say the games before it were easy (EQ, DAoC, UO, Anarchy Online, FFXI, etc)
While WoW had some difficult things, overall it was too easy....You never heard people say the games before it were easy (EQ, DAoC, UO, Anarchy Online, FFXI, etc)
Exactly. That's Blizzard's formula of success. A piece for everyone to enjoy.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"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
While WoW had some difficult things, overall it was too easy....You never heard people say the games before it were easy (EQ, DAoC, UO, Anarchy Online, FFXI, etc)
Actually, at least in Vanilla WOW you rarely heard people say it was too easy.
People seemed to enjoy the dialed back tedium and reduction in pointless grinding during leveling that at least some of those games you mentioned clearly suffered from.
The mistake made I think was raiding dialed up the difficulty too much, despite what others would have you believe it was challenging to beat those raids, especially if you were not in one of the top 10 raiding guilds in the game.
The second mistake IMO? In later releases they made it too easy to level, almost pointless really, and everyone became hyper focused on quickly reaching the raiding end game.
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
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
So many "easy/hard" definitions and circumstances.
Most single player games ramp "difficulty" by making enemies damage sponges, not smarter opponents.
Then, as mentioned, some MMOs have "easy", or fast, leveling to cap, then the "difficult" raiding begins. Older MMOs had "difficult", or slow, leveling throughout the game. I use easy/difficult here to illustrate that sometimes, easy DOES equal leveling speed. WoW today has easy leveling to cap. So easy, that many "offers" to get players back give auto-max levels to old characters. Starting off as a noob in WoW sees max level in less than a month, maybe 2 months, tops. Old MMOs like EQ took many months or years to get to max level. The huge difference here was EQ had things to do from level 5 onward. There were dungeons, strongholds like Crushbone or Blackburrow, and lots of interesting things to engage in. WoW today has... raiding. I went into Deadmines (Westfall) in my last foray (a few months back) and strolled through a pathetically empty dungeon. Even the Goblin caves in the Human areas are pathetic. Wow is making their game almost 99.9% raiding.
Then you have the easy/difficulty measure of combat. Is it one shotting like stealth archers in Skyrim? Is it drawn out lunge and parry and riposte and block of better fighting games? Muscle memory games start out difficult then get easy as the memory gets trained.
There are games I want "easy combat" because the story the game is telling is why I play it. There are games where I want deep and difficult combat where decisions matter, not muscle memory and reaction times.
Do I like easy? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I just want to take part in a game and not have to stress out about it. Other times, I want XCom and rage
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Well it depends on what you are used to, what your interests are and what genetics and nurture have given you to master any activity.
So when I went for hardcore FPS to MMOs I thought MMOs were easy time sinks, but they interested me a lot so the time sink was irrelevant. As I got to raids I started to see difficulty in complexity, mostly in organisation of guilds more than the raid in fact. Running a guild event showed me how complex and frustrating MMOs could be.
So difficulty does not have to be skill, or complexity, or time where the difficulty comes from finding enough of it.
We have very different opinions about how difficult certain games are and why they are difficult, as usual I try to look at what our views have in common, as you tend to find truisms when those who can't agree on detail, do agree on a wider picture.
Who here thinks games have not been getting easier and easier? Who thinks that cannot be anything other than damaging to range of gameplay, the satisfaction of a tough learning curve, any features beyond the basic needed for play, catering to minorities like role-players, hardcore players, players who like story, the list goes on and on.
When Naxx released people were not even done running AQ40. Plus you had to farm an obscene amount of shadow pots. Plus having 8 insanely geared warriors (4 Horsemen) was a pain at the time.All things that created time sinks, then you had to rep then you had to learn the mechanics. All this took time and created headaches.
I would replace the word 'headache' with 'orgasm'. This make your point redundant as it it's based on your personal, biased, impression of what people like/dislike.
Easy for me is less grind and less time-consuming progression. I prefer that because I am ADHD and I need goals when I play, it's difficult to keep focus during grinding. Grind makes me lose interest quickly and I have only so much time to play games per week.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
When Naxx released people were not even done running AQ40. Plus you had to farm an obscene amount of shadow pots. Plus having 8 insanely geared warriors (4 Horsemen) was a pain at the time.All things that created time sinks, then you had to rep then you had to learn the mechanics. All this took time and created headaches.
I would replace the word 'headache' with 'orgasm'. This make your point redundant as it it's based on your personal, biased, impression of what people like/dislike.
Since only 1% of the player base beat Naxx I am just speaking about the other 99% of the paying players
But your reasoning can be applied to the rest of the game as well.
You forgot to say that the other 99% of people, still had to 'painfully' go through hours of Dungeon delving, since in vanilla WoW an average Dungeon run lasted on average 1 hour, while today dungeons take 15 minutes. Same for open world leveling. In those days it was unthinkable to kill more than 2 mobs solo, nowadays if you can't kill 10 mobs at once it's already considered too hard.
So you can argue that an hour dungeon was 'painful' or that slowly killing 1 mob at a time was 'tedius', but that's just your opinion. What's painful for you, can be an orgasm to others.
But your reasoning can be applied to the rest of the game as well.
You forgot to say that the other 99% of people, still had to 'painfully' go through hours of Dungeon delving, since in vanilla WoW an average Dungeon run lasted on average 1 hour, while today dungeons take 15 minutes. Same for open world leveling. In those days it was unthinkable to kill more than 2 mobs solo, nowadays if you can't kill 10 mobs at once it's already considered too hard.
So you can argue that an hour dungeon was 'painful' or that slowly killing 1 mob at a time was 'tedius', but that's just your opinion. What's painful for you, can be an orgasm to others.
Since when challenging is equal to time wasting? 5 minutes or 5 hours, the challenge is not the grind, but the risk you take with your character. So in general a game where you lose nothing cannot be challenging.
Like you explain WoW it is made terribly wrong. So it puts the carriage in front of the horse. You must give time to reach a guaranteed win. The right way is - you risk your time to win. Anyway to lose gear/experience/skills means to lose time. But instead the risk of loss WoW just demands your time for illusion of a win with a chance of reward. There is nothing challenging in such a design.
Seriously dude. I will stop replying to you if you don't start reading my post and understand the context.
Where did I said that time sink is equal to challenge? I didn't even mention the word challenge in that post.
It was about the fact that, while for some people a feature can be 'painful' for others can be 'orgasmic'. Try to understand the context dude, before replying.
I've raided extensively in Vanilla and TBC, and the hardest part? Coordinating a large group of people, by far. Not the mechanics, not the gesr, but everybody doing what they are supposed to do, in tandem. That is why you will NEVER find single player difficulty in MMORPGs when it comes to mechanics.
Latency, unstable connections, miscommunication, it all added tremendously. Actually hard content no, difficult to act and play like a proper team? Most definitely.
Everything else is a timesink, Kano is spot on when talking about them old games and how they wanted you to stay subbed for as long as possible.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
When Naxx released people were not even done running AQ40. Plus you had to farm an obscene amount of shadow pots. Plus having 8 insanely geared warriors (4 Horsemen) was a pain at the time.All things that created time sinks, then you had to rep then you had to learn the mechanics. All this took time and created headaches.
I would replace the word 'headache' with 'orgasm'. This make your point redundant as it it's based on your personal, biased, impression of what people like/dislike.
Since only 1% of the player base beat Naxx I am just speaking about the other 99% of the paying players
I may return to vanilla WOW just to finally try to beat Naxx.
One of the long unfinished tasks Ive been denied from completing since the hated (by me) release of BC ruined any reason to play WOW . (my guild was working through Twin Emps at the time.)
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
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
You keep insist how challenging are the bosses in WoW. I never played WoW. But as I know they even do not have real AI - so they do not react to the players, who attack them. So how can be challenging?
"I never played the game, but I know it's easy... Cause... Reasons."
Terms like easy are subjective. What one person thinks is easy someone else thinks is hard. Personally I wouldn't play an MMO if it was like Dark Souls for instance. I play MMO's to relax and have fun, not to butt my head against a wall because the difficulty is ridiculous. I also don't want a second job as a player/customer either. Having some things that are harder and take time is fine, but if that is the entire game then that is a no from me. That's just my feelings though.
I prefer easy in MMO's and single player games. Most times I wont even purchase a single player game unless there are built in godmode cheats or a trainer is available. For MMO's, the more complex mechanics, fast paced, skill based it is, the less likely I will play. I enjoy playing casually, though by casual I mean at my own pace. I easily game 12-16 hrs a day. In MMO's I am more interested in the RP community, the variety of outfits and toys, the quality of life stuff. As for reasons why, just preference. I'm an older gamer. I don't game to deal with stressful play, or for competition. I have hand tremors, so some things are simply beyond what I want to deal with.
True challenging MMOs based on player skill (examples): -EVE Online (a noob in the starter rookie ship can kill an expert player and also contribute to a pvp group if the noob is skilled enough) -Planetside 1 and 2 (true player skill required)
True challenging games in other genres: Dark Souls, skyrim heavily modded to be like Dark Souls, any fps game)
Easy MMOs (examples) -Any MMO based on heavy grinding (not challenging, just bad design. Its just a rat in a maze style gameplay. No skill required. You'd get the same exact experience out of one of those infinite clicker games like Clicker Heroes) -Any PVP MMO that is based on being overpowered to win (not a challenge, and definitely more in the lines of carebear PvP. Unlike EVE or Planetside for those two examples where its truly about skill, a noob in these can't kill an expert player. This is the easiest PvP that one can do and offers no real challenge
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
When Naxx released people were not even done running AQ40. Plus you had to farm an obscene amount of shadow pots. Plus having 8 insanely geared warriors (4 Horsemen) was a pain at the time.All things that created time sinks, then you had to rep then you had to learn the mechanics. All this took time and created headaches.
I would replace the word 'headache' with 'orgasm'. This make your point redundant as it it's based on your personal, biased, impression of what people like/dislike.
Since only 1% of the player base beat Naxx I am just speaking about the other 99% of the paying players
I may return to vanilla WOW just to finally try to beat Naxx.
One of the long unfinished tasks Ive been denied from completing since the hated (by me) release of BC ruined any reason to play WOW . (my guild was working through Twin Emps at the time.)
Comments
This was never the case of raiding in WoW. There's no evidence for it.
There's much evidence for guilds putting so much time into the game yet fail to clear the contents pre nerf.
Login to game and count the guilds on any server that raid 5 nights a week yet haven't cleared all the contents of the game, at any stage of any expansion's launch.
Even if you try Google now you can still find stories how Sunwell had ended basically nolifers top guilds due to sheer difficulty.
When it was released I had 4 tools fully geared from Black Temple and Mouny Hyjal. So did everyone else. We raided 7 nights a week for 6 hours a session for 3 weeks, then switched 2 5 nights a week till we closed down the guild after another month of trying.
We looked at Nihilum played and it was obvious they were just better players. I got in to another guild and finally cleared Sunwell. But my new teammates taught me a lot on what to do and how to optimize my game.
These aren't delusions that I'm talking about. Skill has a role in WoW.
When I said "in MMORPGs terms" obviously I meant between MMORPGs, so you bringing up single player games, is totally irrelevant to my post (reading some your posts, you go off topic quite often).
Furthermore I said:
But I guess you missed that too.
I have plenty of single players game to play. I am not crying, just stating a fact.
About the single/player micro transaction issue.
Sure if you try to sneak a cash shop after you launch the game, players will riot, that's what happened when Bethesda introduced the "Creation Club" for Fallout 4.
But if a game is built on micro transaction from the ground up, that's totally different.
10 years ago if you said that we would have micro transactions in MMORPGs, players would call you crazy.
10 years after...look around. Only WoW is left standing as the last bastion of the Subscription model.
I don't see why this cannot happen with Single Player games, they just need to tweak the formula as a Single Player Cash Shop can't be copy/pasted from a MMORPGs.
It won't work.
Some folks play games like it is a job and they meticulously go through the game and content including boss mechanics and raids seriously. They are not very forgiving and expect perfection and to them most games might be too easy.
Others find different aspects to 'enjoy' and the combat or game should not be too complicated or difficult for them to advance or they tend to give up.
One cannot simply lump everyone into a category and say they want easy games just because your standard of difficulty is different from theirs. You might be surprised that what you consider 'difficult ' might just be dead easy for someone else.
Really quite a senseless thing to try and gauge.
But for the example; besides losing the aggro (which became much easier to maintain in TBC and forward) some bosses had aggro reset, some bosses were immune to taunt, and they went for the healers. Hard bosses weren't all hard for the same reason. Each had nightmarish mechanics.
But how does tab-targetting make it a question of time?
You guys keep repeating how you feel WoW raiding was without providing any reason or evidence for it.
This is a fact: hardcore guilds raided the same amount of time. They had cleared all contents up to the last patch of the game. They kept raiding the same amount of time. But only a small percentage of them managed to clear the final patch content before nerf.
This has happened more than once.
Method has been among WoW's top 3 guilds since release. What, you think these guys' clocks have more hours per day? There's competition for the top spot. Because it means sponsors and monies. How do you think these guys haven't lost the crown for more than 7 years now?
It is easy to label something you haven't done as easy and not challenging. And it is ignorant to believe you would've done it just as good if you just had the time.
There are tools now that you can use to score the efficiency of players in raids. It is possible and not rare at all to see players with lesser gear would score better even at top level.
I feel this is more like a typical WoW bashing argument. Yes, many stuff wrong with that game. But Blizzard was good at making raids challenging. And I've got 14 years of evidence to back this claim.
People seemed to enjoy the dialed back tedium and reduction in pointless grinding during leveling that at least some of those games you mentioned clearly suffered from.
The mistake made I think was raiding dialed up the difficulty too much, despite what others would have you believe it was challenging to beat those raids, especially if you were not in one of the top 10 raiding guilds in the game.
The second mistake IMO? In later releases they made it too easy to level, almost pointless really, and everyone became hyper focused on quickly reaching the raiding end game.
But thats just me.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
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
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
Most single player games ramp "difficulty" by making enemies damage sponges, not smarter opponents.
Then, as mentioned, some MMOs have "easy", or fast, leveling to cap, then the "difficult" raiding begins. Older MMOs had "difficult", or slow, leveling throughout the game. I use easy/difficult here to illustrate that sometimes, easy DOES equal leveling speed. WoW today has easy leveling to cap. So easy, that many "offers" to get players back give auto-max levels to old characters. Starting off as a noob in WoW sees max level in less than a month, maybe 2 months, tops. Old MMOs like EQ took many months or years to get to max level. The huge difference here was EQ had things to do from level 5 onward. There were dungeons, strongholds like Crushbone or Blackburrow, and lots of interesting things to engage in. WoW today has... raiding. I went into Deadmines (Westfall) in my last foray (a few months back) and strolled through a pathetically empty dungeon. Even the Goblin caves in the Human areas are pathetic. Wow is making their game almost 99.9% raiding.
Then you have the easy/difficulty measure of combat. Is it one shotting like stealth archers in Skyrim? Is it drawn out lunge and parry and riposte and block of better fighting games? Muscle memory games start out difficult then get easy as the memory gets trained.
There are games I want "easy combat" because the story the game is telling is why I play it. There are games where I want deep and difficult combat where decisions matter, not muscle memory and reaction times.
Do I like easy? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I just want to take part in a game and not have to stress out about it. Other times, I want XCom and rage
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Well it depends on what you are used to, what your interests are and what genetics and nurture have given you to master any activity.
So when I went for hardcore FPS to MMOs I thought MMOs were easy time sinks, but they interested me a lot so the time sink was irrelevant. As I got to raids I started to see difficulty in complexity, mostly in organisation of guilds more than the raid in fact. Running a guild event showed me how complex and frustrating MMOs could be.
So difficulty does not have to be skill, or complexity, or time where the difficulty comes from finding enough of it.
We have very different opinions about how difficult certain games are and why they are difficult, as usual I try to look at what our views have in common, as you tend to find truisms when those who can't agree on detail, do agree on a wider picture.
Who here thinks games have not been getting easier and easier? Who thinks that cannot be anything other than damaging to range of gameplay, the satisfaction of a tough learning curve, any features beyond the basic needed for play, catering to minorities like role-players, hardcore players, players who like story, the list goes on and on.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
This make your point redundant as it it's based on your personal, biased, impression of what people like/dislike.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
You forgot to say that the other 99% of people, still had to 'painfully' go through hours of Dungeon delving, since in vanilla WoW an average Dungeon run lasted on average 1 hour, while today dungeons take 15 minutes.
Same for open world leveling.
In those days it was unthinkable to kill more than 2 mobs solo, nowadays if you can't kill 10 mobs at once it's already considered too hard.
So you can argue that an hour dungeon was 'painful' or that slowly killing 1 mob at a time was 'tedius', but that's just your opinion.
What's painful for you, can be an orgasm to others.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I will stop replying to you if you don't start reading my post and understand the context.
Where did I said that time sink is equal to challenge?
I didn't even mention the word challenge in that post.
It was about the fact that, while for some people a feature can be 'painful' for others can be 'orgasmic'.
Try to understand the context dude, before replying.
Latency, unstable connections, miscommunication, it all added tremendously. Actually hard content no, difficult to act and play like a proper team? Most definitely.
Everything else is a timesink, Kano is spot on when talking about them old games and how they wanted you to stay subbed for as long as possible.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
One of the long unfinished tasks Ive been denied from completing since the hated (by me) release of BC ruined any reason to play WOW . (my guild was working through Twin Emps at the time.)
"I need to finish."
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
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
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
-EVE Online (a noob in the starter rookie ship can kill an expert player and also contribute to a pvp group if the noob is skilled enough)
-Planetside 1 and 2 (true player skill required)
True challenging games in other genres: Dark Souls, skyrim heavily modded to be like Dark Souls, any fps game)
Easy MMOs (examples)
-Any MMO based on heavy grinding (not challenging, just bad design. Its just a rat in a maze style gameplay. No skill required. You'd get the same exact experience out of one of those infinite clicker games like Clicker Heroes)
-Any PVP MMO that is based on being overpowered to win (not a challenge, and definitely more in the lines of carebear PvP. Unlike EVE or Planetside for those two examples where its truly about skill, a noob in these can't kill an expert player. This is the easiest PvP that one can do and offers no real challenge
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul