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

[melodramocracy]

That's a very narrow and old fashioned and, basically, incorrect view of what an MMO is.

It's an unimaginative, dead view of what an MMO is.

It's an element of every single successful MMO. So lets hear your plan for a grind-free game that would retain a paying playerbase over a long period of time, far after they've already consumed the content once.

[yjmark]

How is more time not more effort? Doing dailies for 50 charms also takes much less time than finishing challenge modes.

Walk a mile. Then, try running a mile at top speed. Which takes longer? Which takes more effort?

Time and effort are not always the same thing or directly proportional. Sometimes they can be. But not always.

[l33t]

The game didn't became easy, its top achievements are in fact much harder than they ever were.
What really happened to game is that the game became too fractured, loosing in process lots of people who do not want to evolve. Instead of having a tier for everybody, we now have a castrated sub-tier for one massive group of players, a not-so-much-castrated sub-tier for another group of players, and uber-hard-heavy-spec-dependant-and-class-stacking-only-for-FOTM-heroic sub-tier yet for another group of players. And while it is not so bad overall, giving something for everybody, it is hard to deal with a simple fact that if your friends are not FOTMs and have no desire to evolve, your raid will never defeat heroic bosses, so in fact you are forever limited to a sub-tier, designed for that particular group of players. So, if you want to evolve yourself and raid heroic tier, you'll have to leave your friends behind. Which, in result, will lead to some of your previous raid members to leave the game and cancel the sub due to various reasons, such as inability to find a replacement for evolved to heroic players, or drama around leaving a raid group which was good enough to deal with wrath/cata heroics, but all of a sudden unable to deal with MoP heroics, etc etc.
And when yet another sub-tier difficulty appear in 5.4, things will be even worse.

[Absintheminded]

...if for no other reason than copyright violation?

I lol'd. /10chars

[Notos]

There is actually more variety in the types of challenges you can take on now than there's ever been before. Challenge modes, brawler's guild, heroic scenarios for the bonus timers (assuming you don't outgear them of course), and of course there's heroic modes in raids. Plenty of challenge to be had.

[Blufossa]

Nope, it is a game. Who plays a game to feel some sort of achievement? I personally play a game for fun, I mainly play PVP and while I don't play super competitively, I do enjoy good competition. So the sooner I am on an even playing field with equal gear, the better.

This. I play for fun, not for some imaginary acheesement I could brag about to people I don't know. XD

Hell, I just killed Lei Shin in LFR TODAY on my Druid for the first time ever.

[Wafffles]

POST from Braindance:


I ain't gonna argue for 2 reasons:

1) Half the people asking for it started playing in either wrath or cata and simply found the game the way it is right now. The other half are simply old dogs that can't look further than their own micro-society in the game and only care for the short term profit
2) “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Stephen Covey

You explain in (1) that every single person who will disagree with you falls into one of two categories, and both are short-sighted, egocentric, and wrong. Then in (2) you condemn people who do not earnestly listen to other peoples opinions. It's not difficult to formulate an argument that can't be defeated when one of the axioms is anyone who disagrees with it is wrong, and another axiom is that the very act of reading it ('listening') inherently increases your likelihood of forming a misguided opinion. So, I'll just give you the only response you really came here for:

I didn't read the essay, but the opinion it presents is totally accurate, bro!

*Of course, if I had read it, then according to (2), I am less likely to be accurate than before having read it, which means my initial impulse to disagree with it would be more valid than my subsequent agreement with it, which means anyone who is convinced by the essay is in fact disagreeing with the essay, which is a contradiction to axiom (2), which means the essay is paradoxical, which means the essay is really a reductio to prove that the game in fact should be made easier...oh nevermind. I repeat: "er, yeah, this essay is, um, totally on point, dude."

[mistahwilshire]

Going for world first isn't easy at all and has only gotten harder over the years so I guess this thread doesn't apply to me.

WoW is only as easy as you make it. If you're one of those people that complain that LFR is too easy then you need goals beyond clearing LFR. There's a difficulty curve for every possible range of skill out there.

[Kathandira]

This game was never difficult, just time consuming. Getting gear takes time, a group of 25 level headed players can easily take down normal mode without any issues. It's the weak links which cause issues.

I took a break for a year when MoP came out. I had gone back to console gaming. And let me tell you, go play Dark Souls, then come back to WoW. It makes playing WoW feel like Mario. I came back and have been getting geared up decently quickly. Unless there is a 500+ ilvl geared DPS (I am 477) in the group/raid, I remained at the top of the meters with the least amount of deaths and lowest damage taken (out of the DPS)

The best way I can describe PvE in WoW is, doing a waltz while playing a very repetitive version of Simon.

Now of coarse, Hard Modes are difficult, which they should be. But hard modes are small percentage of PvE content. But if you look at every game as, "Hardest difficulty is the true determination of how hard a game is" That would mean that the majority of players are not seeing the game for what it was meant to be. I do not believe this is the case. Normal mode is what the raid is ultimately designed for. LFR subtracts a little for those who aren't up to snuff or don't have the time for organized and scheduled raids. Hard Mode is for those who want an "extra" challenge. Notice the word "extra", it is not required, nor intended for the masses. It is for the elite few who find anything less to not be stimulating enough. Normal mode is what the design was intended for, and Normal Mode is far from difficult.

- - - Updated - - -

Going for world first isn't easy at all and has only gotten harder over the years so I guess this thread doesn't apply to me.

WoW is only as easy as you make it. If you're one of those people that complain that LFR is too easy then you need goals beyond clearing LFR. There's a difficulty curve for every possible range of skill out there.

Indeed, going for world firsts is quite difficult. But i do not believe that the majority of players are concerned with that. And the number of those who aim for this, go down every year from players getting burnt out. My old guild was a victim of players getting burnt out on trying for Server firsts.

[Deleted]

WoW has certainly gotten easier in the sense that things take less time now and time management is a crucial (or at least was) part of MMO design. Now there are a lot of reasons why the demands placed on player's time management have lessened not just in WoW over the years and accessibility has become somewhat a dirty word but there is a lot of truth in it. The expectation that players en masse will stick with one game and remain with that game for years as a template for game design just doesn't exist anymore especially for such a huge mainstream game like WoW. Now WoW has never been known, at least in the majority of it's content, as being challenging so when the time demands go they have to be replaced; in WoW's largely by instanced cross realm grouped content . Where the gates in content were once in time whether through multitude or the need to find and maintain a group, now we have the flexibility of caps.
I mean sure the game has changed, can't really argue on that score, but to place the sub decline as a causation of this demands more than a correlation. Can't the reason for the losses be as simple as aged game or the rats getting tired of running through the same Skinner boxes? People keep referencing the devaluation of rewards through easier acquisition as a reason for the decline but what happens when people, in a reward based game, win essentially the same rewards time and after over a period of years?

[Kathandira]

There is actually more variety in the types of challenges you can take on now than there's ever been before. Challenge modes, brawler's guild, heroic scenarios for the bonus timers (assuming you don't outgear them of course), and of course there's heroic modes in raids. Plenty of challenge to be had.

The part I highlighted is noteworthy. As long as you don't out gear them. it is quite easy to out gear most things in the game.

In MoP gear grows on trees. Epic has not been epic in years! I really wish they would decrease the rarity of items in the first raids of an xpac. Not until the first patch should you see epics. Give the feeling of achieving gear back!

I remember back in ZG, you would get blues. In MC, there were blues which were better than some epics as per min maxing. I want that back.

Being in full epics used to be an accomplishment, now it is expected that as soon as you hit max level, that you should be getting epics right away. Blizz needs to learn to slow down.

[Arainie]

Whether the game is easier or harder nowdays than it was before is debatable, and can be seen from a hundred different angles. You can compare it to your individual player skill, the average player skill or any way you like it.

What remains undisputable is the dumbing down of Raid (not encounter mechanics) setup and preparation. Bring the player and not the class, skip the chores and jump right into the action and the massive rewards for little effort compared to the first five years of WoW. Those changes combined completely killed my WoW spark and I doubt I'll ever start playing the game.

I played the game to raid. I logged on to prepare for the raid and after the raid I sorted what I had to get done to be raid ready again. I ran guilds that took most of my time, and the raiders used to return the effort by coming prepared and performing during raids. None of that is nessecary anymore, you even go slightly plus on raiding if you have guild repairs enabled without any farming what so ever. The whole attitude of gaming has changed and it's reflected on raiding as well, and it really doesn't suit me.

With that said, I guess I'm the one that has to go. There's no longer room for games the style of Super Mario Gameboy that doesn't have save points, people want extra lives through facebook and difficulty modes that makes it possible for a 2 year old to beat the game. Ooooooh the old times, what I wouldn't do to bring it back!

[uiemad]

I remember when they made heroics harder in Cata, yeah that went SUPER well for them. MGV was the hardest opening raid we have had in awhile, Heroic Scenarios are a pain at lower gear levels, Challenge Modes, etc. Raids are overall harder than they have ever been. Leveling was also not even that easy at times (depends on your class though).

MoP is not an easy expansion. Not saying it is the hardest ever, but saying it is easy and that is why it is failing is just a wrong point.

Am I the only person who enjoyed how hard those heroics were? That was the most fun Id had since BC.

[Arainie]

Am I the only person who enjoyed how hard those heroics were? That was the most fun Id had since BC.

I completely LOVED them. I had a blast, and I was so disappointed when they started nerfing each and every heroic.
The initial raids were very well tuned as well, at least until they nerfed all the heroic modes.

[Jessicka]

I'm not sure there's anything new hear other than the same misguided crap about making the game hard again, that led to the subscription disaster that was Cataclysm.

There are parts that were right, the lack of content for the mid-class; no grind and such. But there was nothing to work toward other than challenge, and the only path to it was challenge. Character progression stopped at level cap if you didn't want to do challenging raids or dungeons. And that, to be fair is what an awful lot of players had come to expect and enjoy from Wrath when the game was at its absolute peak.

At this point, you can still progress at the level cap even if you don't want challenge. I do agree that there is something of a 'wall' at ~510 ilvl which is very easy to reach where you're immediately seperated into raiders and non-raiders. That marks the end of solo play and character progression for a lot of players. I think Flex will fix that, as it offers something more in a social experience, without being too much like hard work and commitment to a guild - that's what 10N used to do, and damn was it popular; you could pretty reliably put a pug together at midnight after main raid and have some level of success. Raiding with people who'd get to know because they did the pugs the same hours as you is what the game and many realms deeply miss right now because it's those players who took those extra steps and got to know raiders who became raiders themselves, if they enjoyed it enough they found the time to make commitments.

Challenge isn't what we lack, we have loads of that if that's what you seek. Those who don't have their reasons for not looking for it, and they shouldn't be blamed for any failures of the game designers - they've been failed by the designers themselves, while we've been blessed with Heroic Modes, Challenge Modes, Heroic Scenarios and so on. For the 'grinders' there's Archaeology and many daily quest hubs, and there'll always be Loremaster. There's even maxing achievement points for the truly mad.

What we currently lack is that bridge between challenge and solo character progression. It's that rift that gives the perception to those who cross over that the game is easy. Flex is aimed at fixing that, as are Heroic Scenarios, and I gather from GC's tweets that a return of non-matchmade Heroic 5 mans could make a return in the next expansion as a part of that.

- - - Updated - - -

I completely LOVED them. I had a blast, and I was so disappointed when they started nerfing each and every heroic.
The initial raids were very well tuned as well, at least until they nerfed all the heroic modes.

They were great in a guild group. A nightmare with a pure LFD group.

[Magpai]

Just because there is easier content available doesn't mean the game too easy. Anyone who is not X/X heroic for the current tier who says the game is too easy is automatically disqualified from being taken seriously, as is anyone who says old WoW was harder because of anything that boils down to a time-consuming grind. Any argument that can be attributed to poor class design in the past is also abysmal for proving this myth that modern WoW is easier than old WoW.

[Deleted]

You do. Unless you enjoy losing matches just as much as winning them.

I don't mind losing if I know I could have played better, or if I got out played so I can go back and think what I could have done better. I guess in a sense that is achievement, but it's not like I want to grind 10 BGs for one bit of gear and be like "Oh i've earned this". Some times i'll play an alt, and play some shit comp in 3s and it becomes more fun, because if you win it's hilarious.

[Orange Joe]

POST from Braindance:


I ain't gonna argue for 2 reasons:

1) Half the people asking for it started playing in either wrath or cata and simply found the game the way it is right now.

Stopped right there. I want proof of numbers before I read further.

[Deleted]

Another point to argue is while some aspects of the game are being diluted to make the game more accessible to newer players, why is it the "game is getting easier" and not the "players are getting better". If you look back at TBC pvp, a lot of people sucked. You watch old raid kills of BWL and people run around backpeddaling doing nothing for long periods.

[Inval1d]

I took the time to read your entire post, I do not have the same opinion as to why the exodus took place. As I remember it the exodus happened during the start of cata, class redesign and sweeping changes to healing as well as people having to know their toon (how to CC , interrupt and dispel) removed a lot of the middles class as you put it.

I looked at it like this, that exodus got rid of a large amount of poor players, the ones that had been carried in 40 mans because all they had to do was push 3 buttons and manage not to die. Cata did what I think blizzard set out to accomplish, it required players to know the class and their rolls, that was a large problem for some and they left the game. This change was a direct answer from blizzard to the player base. They gave us what we asked for, we said we wanted raiders that new their class inside out, had a team mentality (Shamans on interrupt duity at the cost of dpsing) and could run with the big dogs. Only problem was there were a lot of little pups barking like big dogs, but that got sorted out fast enough. They got put on the deck where they belonged, poor little dogs.

So where you are entitled to your opinion so I am. They old days of grinding mats for hours just to be to raid, changing you professions because it gave you a slightly better advantage, being a battery for other players or totem dancing, being the interrupt dummy or going 2 months without getting any loot because RNG is a heartless bitch do not bring back found memories to me. If it does for you, you are welcome to them.

One other thing, I personal find the video you attached to this post offensive, I think you are trying to equate the lost of those men to the loss of players, it is a poor and tasteless parallel. Remember bub that it’s not just a movie, it happened in real life and some of us that served during that time take it personal when that movie is treated in a way that disrespects our brothers. Post a sound clip if you would like but please do not disrespect these mens memories be trivializing what they gave.

I completely agree with you and thank you for putting what I was thinking so eloquently. The difficulty at a top tier level has increased significantly on a technical level. The game hasn't got easier, it's dynamic has changed and adjusted to it's demographic, and in the course of that change a lot of people that were considered "hardcore" for early years of the game were quite the opposite and instead got carried, it just never seemed so apparant. In the current state of the game those players have either stopped playing or atleast raiding because they can no longer keep up, especially as raid spots have become more and more contested with shrinking raid sizes. I also feel the general tolerance for these players has shrunk a lot, people have become more demanding of their raid comrades resulting in a lot of these people being forced out of raiding environments if they didn't want to leave by themselves.