Braindance: Small essay on why making the game easier is wrong

[Etrigan]

As I've said in another thread:

People who play "casually" (or so they say) don't realize that making things less time consuming, less difficult or even less accessible doesn't benefit them in any way.

Check out this video if you want what is in my opinion, an accurate analysis of why easier/less time consuming isn't better for MMOs. This video has been around for a while, and even had its own topic, so most of you have probably already seen it, but still.

Although the maker of the video right now feels that MoP has been one of the best expansions ever put out, he brings up some valid points about the deeper problems with the game today.

Oh also, currently, and for the foreseeable future I'm not raiding, participating in organized PVP or anything of the sort, just leveling some characters. I would be the one not seeing content or in epics if it suddenly turned into Vanilla / EQ or something. Being as objective as I can here

[MrSerious]

The old game design gave those people the illusion that they were better than the casuals, and at the same time, the hope that after a lot of effort they could be like the "better" players (gladiators, world first guilds).

This guy nailed it. This was me, not causal, not hardcore but I spent time trying to get gear to maybe reach the hardcore level. With blizzard leveling the playing field you no longer needed to grind (and I don't mean grind as in repetitive mind-numbing dailies - plenty of those), gear and sense of achievement is now basically given to you, which therefore removes any sense of achievement at all. Only thing left was fun, and that dried up with everyone I knew leaving.

[Demontjuh]

i been actively raiding in a top end guild from mc to pre-firelandp2, and ever since we had the team break up it is nearly impossible to get such a good team together again with all the easy-quick-to-give-up players that have come over the years.

i agree WoW has taken some wierd easy-peasy turn of events, but i would not want vanilla grind style back, tbc + wotlk were good balanced times tbh.

with that i'd like to say that i like the idea of lfr giving ppl the chance to atleast see content, thesame as anyone can try out pvp to see its content.
but these days it seems the game has to carry them to also give them the idea that they are "good" players even tho its fake (think lfr - its progress but fake progress)

look at it this way, why do casuals NEED to be at the CURRENT content, why cant they just lag 1 patch behind? it used to be like that vanilla/tbc/wotlk
high end guilds were in latest raids and the more casual guilds were in the raids before that BUT STILL PROGRESSING ad eventually reaching end-game BUT at the own PACE.

[RicardoZ]

The game has never been difficult at its core. Merely inconvenient.

And the hardest raid encounters are leaps and bounds more difficult than anything EVER seen in Vanilla or Burning Crusade.

With full guides available (nigh, required) to be viewed on any number of sites months before the content goes live.

Also there now exists all sorts of theorycrafting and BiS lists and tons of other resources that didn't exist back then.

I think that's really the problem: There's no sense of discovery or adventure. Everybody is on WoWhead or here on MMO-Champion months before stuff comes out and knows exactly where to stand, what to do, and when, with a list of gear in hand that they need to get in order to do it.

There's not much thrill in that, to be honest. But the alternative is to simply not take part in it, which will find you blacklisted from any end-game content now that you're expected to know all of these things going in.

[Etrigan]

If the decline started with Wrath, how do you explain the fact that WoW subscribership increased continuously throughout WOTLK?
How do you explain that the quickest drop in subscriber numbers happened during the biggest shift from easy to hard?

Could it be that you're making statements that are totally unsupported by data?

I find it hilarious that you yourself, also, didn't provide any data to support your post. Your statement is exactly as valid as his at this point.

Even if what you say is true (which it's not), It's entirely possible that the reason the subscription drop didn't occur until early Cataclysm, was because the major villain in the previous expansion, was the Lich King (arguably the most well known character in the Warcraft universe) and people were still enjoying that atmosphere, or that players were willing to give Blizzard a chance to wise up, etc. It could be for a number of reasons.

At the same time, by your logic the "data" has nothing to do with anything. If the subscriptions started declining early Cataclysm "during the biggest shift from easy to hard", then why are they still dropping, at the same rate/faster after Blizzard went back on their decision and lowered the bar again? They introduced LFR for God's sakes.

Did it ever occur to you that it may be just because the game is getting really, really old at this point?

[adamvd]

If you think the game is easier now, you're an idiot.

I label you: Braindunce.

Flaming is not tolerated here

It took me 2 months at level 60 until I got my first epic from a raid. I was so excited when I got a BLUE headpiece from UBRS that I was spamming guild chat. Now I can level to 90 and have a full epic honor set in less than a week. In terms of raid difficulty I wouldn't know but just how easy it is to get decent gear as a fresh max level is a little silly.

[Jessicka]

It took me 2 months at level 60 until I got my first epic from a raid. I was so excited when I got a BLUE headpiece from UBRS that I was spamming guild chat. Now I can level to 90 and have a full epic honor set in less than a week. In terms of raid difficulty I wouldn't know but just how easy it is to get decent gear as a fresh max level is a little silly.

You have a full epic honor set. Whoodefucking doo. Go get yourself an Elite Conquest set and I'll be impressed.

Only fools seem to think that an item being purple matters anymore. Even the much maligned casual playerbase know what difference that line of green text and the item level number make.

[melodramocracy]

You can cut the grass with a pair of scissors or use a lawn mower. Does using the pair of scissors really feel more rewarding ? You can walk to school up hill in the snow both ways or you can ride the bus. Does walking up hill feel more rewarding ?

Is taking a tram up to the top of a mountain as rewarding as hiking it? Does driving a car up a long steep hill feel like as much of a challenge as riding a bicycle up it?

[OzoAndIndi]

why making the game easier is wrong

There is no "wrong."

Lets say you create a product, which in turn gets popular. People are paying you money to use your product. Did paying you money buy them ownership of your product or decision making? No, it did not. While your target audience may have some amount of weight in the decisions you make, the product it still yours to decide what you do with and what you envision for it. There is no "wrong," as according to the audience, because the product is not theirs; win or fail it is yours to craft.

[Redmage]

I don't know about 'wrong' but it's stupid as all hell.

[Sarthan]

You chose to play the easy parts. Did you try out heroic scenarios when you weren't overgearing them? Heroic raids? Challenge modes and go for gold timers? Rare-hunting (solo)? There is challenge and difficulty to be found in MoP.

HEROIC SCENARIOS??? lol what?

This game has gotten way to easy it kills the immersion, it kills the atmosphere, and it kills the community. You no longer need to have a good name on a server just hit the LFR button!

Well said sir 10/10 enjoyed the post.

[Normie]

It took me 2 months at level 60 until I got my first epic from a raid. I was so excited when I got a BLUE headpiece from UBRS that I was spamming guild chat. Now I can level to 90 and have a full epic honor set in less than a week. In terms of raid difficulty I wouldn't know but just how easy it is to get decent gear as a fresh max level is a little silly.

I just don't know what to say to someone who thinks that beginner purple gear from running welfare 2s is a big deal.

Because you can get beginner purple gear from the AH or from many other sources.

Does the fact that the letters are purple make it special? You realize it's 2013 and not 2006 right?

[Mormolyce]

Yes yes yes. But the thing is WoW isn't easier than it used to be, just a lot less hideously inconvenient and shitty.

One thing you could argue that I would potentially agree with is that they went too far making the MoP heroics easy. Sure they moved the real difficulty to CMs, but even so I feel like a better balance could be reached.

WoW is a competitive game only if you play it competitively. It's perfectly enjoyable as a cooperative, non-competitive game. If you step back a bit you will see that there is very little competition built into WoW, other than ranked PvP. This whole guild/progression ranking thing, that's something players grafted onto the game.

Yeah. Blizzard doesn't even include a DPS meter! Because they don't want people focusing on that all the time!

[darkwarrior42]

Is taking a tram up to the top of a mountain as rewarding as hiking it? Does driving a car up a long steep hill feel like as much of a challenge as riding a bicycle up it?

In your examples, one is clearly more difficult than the other for reasons other than the amount of time required. The case of the long steep hill is particularly good because that's an example of a task that is difficult to sustain, so increasing the time required actually does make the task more difficult because you cannot sustain it as easily for 30 minutes as you can for 10.

Dailies? Not so much. If you can do it once, you can do it an indefinite number of times. The task doesn't get harder, nor is it difficult to sustain... and you don't lose progress if you stop, so there's no penalty for not getting it all done in one shot. If a daily suddenly requires 50 kills instead of 10, it will take me longer to complete, but no individual step of the process is any harder than it was before, and my character doesn't tire so kill #50 is just as easy as kill #10. Now, if those 10 kills were instead made 5 times as powerful, then the quest would actually be more difficult.

Difficulty levels are a good thing, because they let people play the game at a difficult that is appropriate for them. If people are sad they can't show off to other players because everyone can achieve something now... well, I don't have much sympathy for peacocks without an audience, and in general if you're playing for anyone but yourself you're doing it wrong. As for personal achievement.... well, if you find it more achieving to have a task artificially extended by 50 hours without any increase in difficulty or additional obstacles, I would submit that you have far bigger issues than those tasks being made shorter.

Making the game less time consuming has never equated to making it easier... the only games I can think of where length equates to difficulty all have one element in common: loss of progress when you fail. As an in-game example, look at the Hexos fight in the Brawler's guild. If that fight lasted only 20 seconds, it would be easier than it is now, because it takes only a single mistake to lose the fight and you have to start from the beginning every time you're defeated... so not only do you have to perform, you have to sustain that performance. As an example of something they introduced into WoW that did NOT make it easier but reduced the time requirements, the commendations that grant double rep once you've hit revered. Those have no impact on how difficult it is to earn rep, they just mean you have to do it less often... but again, you can take a break for as long as you want in the middle of earning rep without any negative repercussions.

[Nikusu]

Am I the only one who remembers how WoW players were bashed in Vanilla for being a bunch of casuals? This thread is about how an MMO that built its empire on catering to the more casual player has become more casual. Don't get me wrong, Vanilla and Burning Crusade were time vampires, but in their day they weren't anything radical in terms of difficulty or time commitment.

[Normie]

Yes yes yes. But the thing is WoW isn't easier than it used to be, just a lot less hideously inconvenient and shitty.

One thing you could argue that I would potentially agree with is that they went too far making the MoP heroics easy. Sure they moved the real difficulty to CMs, but even so I feel like a better balance could be reached.

Yeah. Blizzard doesn't even include a DPS meter! Because they don't want people focusing on that all the time!

But ... I think that's a real thing.

It's the players that have focused on DPS.

Certainly, Blizzard has designed encounters around groups being able to meet enrage timers, and the like, but did 99.9% of the groups that wiped on a hard enrage encounter do so because they failed to DPS hard enough? As opposed to, falling over dead mid-encounter?

[Ferocity]

Hypothetic EQ player's view on WoW when it was released (EQ greatly changed since then, though some moments are still true):

- They click on NPC and get Quest immediately in their quest log. Instant gratification, where is the work of taking vocabulary and spending several hours near NPC trying to talk him out for some hideous quest! We don't even have such cheat as quest log lol.

- Quests are instant gratification. In WoW they give some noticable experience and sometimes even useful gear. In EQ we have less quests, and they actually reward only what they should - lore.

- Gear is raining down in WoW! In EQ we have to hope noone would steal raid bosses and mobs, and loot with 0,01% chance to drop wouldn't be ninjaed/miss-clicked among dozens of other people.

- You die and res in same zone. Instant gratification! Here we sometimes have to spend half of day trying to get to our corpse through whole world, and that's if we don't die along way again while running naked.

- Lol crafting with instant gratification. In EQ we are combining things without knowing in advance what can actually happen, with 99% risk of mats being just wasted.

- Lol you can actually kill non-elite green level mobs in WoW and receive instant loot. In EQ we have to group to kill anything even if it gives only 0,00001% experience. Forget about loot, it will most likely be gone with "master looter/clicker".

- Lol you are handholded with having mini-map. In EQ we have to write all maps on our own. Gives more "challenge" when you find out that you haven't mapped some areas while doing corpse runs. Maps weren't also that useful as we didn't have such luxury as compass in EQ.

Seriously people should stop saying all this "instant gratification" nonsense and to look into actual history. I bet most of them didn't actually play games without "instant gratifications".

P.S.: Oh and UBRS, Karazhan from original post... with most fights being tank and spank... Biggest difficulty was to actually find group, other than that it was slightly "harder" than current LFR if not easier... Whoever wrote it, has zero clue about WoW in general.

[Deleted]

Wall of text for nothing. There is hard content, there is easy content, there is medium content. People have quit for various reasons, doubt anyone quit because they killed a quest mob that used to require a group.

[Deleted]

Classic wow was piss easy, anyone could do it IF they had enormous amounts of time to throw at the game. That's why it was so popular.

Now that wow is more like an arcade game with rpg elements, it's less popular.

Gear caps can be overcome by anyone with time to spend (i.e. fire res gear farming, simple patchwerk bosses that just need more number output to beat etc). Skill caps are naturally exclusionary because if you don't naturally have the skills you are SOL on doing current content. A player who hits a gear wall just thinks "ok I go farm some more and come back" but a player who hits the skill cap goes "oh well, lets find a new game."

[Arainie]

You can cut the grass with a pair of scissors or use a lawn mower. Does using the pair of scissors really feel more rewarding ? You can walk to school up hill in the snow both ways or you can ride the bus. Does walking up hill feel more rewarding ?

Now see, that's where we who liked how gaming was more in the past greatly differ in opinion. I cycle 6km to work and 6km from work every day because I feel good about it. I could take the bus or a car if I had one, money isn't the issue in this case. I rarely even consider taking a bus if cycling is an option, because hell I like the fresh air and the little workout I get every day even though I'm an active football/soccer player and visit the gym regularly.
Translate this in to gaming and you might just understand how some of us feel. I want the ride there to have at least some speed bumps and left turns, because quite frankly it feels completely unrewarding to roll downhills on a straight road and be rewarded for just getting to the end. You could argue that I could build my own speed bumps and turn between the right and left lane to get some action, but that's not really the same thing.

Now, my post is not directed at MoP, it's directed at gaming in general. It's directed at how everything's become so optional (read building your own speed bumps), and how the new generation shun mandatory challenges as a result of this. In WoW, can practically stand in a capital and be teleported to your dungeons and raids all day long, sit half AFK in them and still receive the same reward as those who commit energy and not only time in to it. If you don't force what you may call a challenge upon people, many will take the lazy way with the least effort. In fact, most will since it's in our human nature.

It's great that there are optional things in-game as well for those who don't enjoy raiding and PvP, but when everything's optional even for a Heroic raider (please, don't read hardcore world first competitor) it's gone a bit too far in my opinion. You can boost your chances of loot by coins you get from dailies, and reputation might sometimes be nessecary, but everything else is thrown at you, even money for flasks and food these days. I enjoyed the nature around how raiding was in the past, the ritual of preparation that caused social gatherings in guild chat and on ventrilo. Everyone simply raidlogs these days and you don't see much of people.

Guess why? Well everything's optional, so they say "screw this" and log off!