In Defense of Difficulty

[NineSpine]

- But you don't have to do the 20 lvls of difficulty. You can choose whatever range fits your respective goals. I wouldn't call myself a bad player and since the introduction of M+, I've done very few +15, and spent my time in the 9 to 12 bracket. One could even argue that, unfortunately, WoW has had hard dungeons for a considerable smaller amount of time than it has had easy ones. Really, if we're trying to be objective, TBC was an anomaly (a good one).

It's not about the challenge. I don't enjoy speed running dungeons like that, and I just enjoy it less when the reward is to become more powerful so that I can do a slightly higher difficulty that negates my upgrade.

- Is it the quality of the gear, or its acquisition?

- I think we'd have to get to specifics here, because I can't imagine how earlier paths of progression, especially reputations, were anymore substantial than their modern equivalent. Reps, both in TBC and Wotlk, were just a matter of getting into the right dungeons, or with the right tabards, and farm away. And if my fading memory serves as anything, it didn't take that long to reach the higher rep echelons. Now, now you just go around doing WQs for rep. And no, I don't like that either. I'd rather they reduced the amount of reputation earned, but bring back all previous ways of earning it, so you can do it the way you prefer.

You had to do dailies for the most part in TBC and WOTLK. It took a solid amount of time for a casual player.

The WQ system punishes you for doing anything but the daily approved reputation you get the bonus for, and the whole system is very bland.

The issue is the quality of the gear and the acquisition.

[oldgeezer]

I guess if you want a 'difficult' MMO, go play Wildstar.

WoW needs to appeal to the widest possible playerbase. It's toast otherwise.

[Kharli]

WoW is doing this right now. Look at the RWF.

Elden Ring has sold well over 10 million copies in a few months. Divinity OS 2 is widely considered the greatest CRPG of all time and made bank.

and NONE OF THEM are a MMO-RPG.

you want hard? GO raid mythic, go do the Mage tower challange, I'm guessing you have done neither.

Elden ring has sold 10 million copies in a few months, yes of course it did because it's widely available on pretty much everywhere.

Divinity, you can't even fucking compare it to world of Warcraft, first of all its not a MMO, secondly the game has a STORY MODE where you can pretty much one-shot enemies, are you for real? sincerely.

and no, for your information, I don't raid mythic, I have not done the mage tower my self, because I don't have the time to dedicate anymore to do those activities.

guess what, both me and you are the Vocal Minority, two camps out of about 26 Million active players as per blizzards Q2 earnings call.


elden ring sold 12 million coppies day 1, cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...lling_PC_games

So if we are going to by how many times a game has been sold, surely World of Warcraft should be like PUBG or Minecraft, both of them easy games.

Let's have fun with this.. name 5.

1.Minecraft
2.Roller-coaster Tycoon 3
3.Euro Truck Simulator 2
4.The Stanley Parable
5. Age of Mythology

there you go, 5 games.

[arkanon]

Lets clear up some of the confusion - OP firmly believes that the current iteration of wow, SL, is "a million times better than wow has ever been". I think that would have been the honest way to start this thread off - by openly stating that you think wow is the best it has ever been, and nothing else has ever come even close to the current game.

The game is a million times better now

When you understand this part, you understand what OP is actually trying to say - "everything is fine as it is, its the best its ever been, anyone who wants the game changed is wrong".

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I guess if you want a 'difficult' MMO, go play Wildstar.

WoW needs to appeal to the widest possible playerbase. It's toast otherwise.

Mainly because that was ALWAYS the intention - it was always designed from day 1 to be a more accessible and simpler mmo to appeal to a far broader audience than its competition, mainly EQ.

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guess what, both me and you are the Vocal Minority, two camps out of about 26 Million active players as per blizzards Q2 earnings call.
.

Just clearing one thing up......you dont actually think wows playerbase is 26m right?

[Kharli]

Lets clear up some of the confusion - OP firmly believes that the current iteration of wow, SL, is "a million times better than wow has ever been". I think that would have been the honest way to start this thread off - by openly stating that you think wow is the best it has ever been, and nothing else has ever come even close to the current game.



When you understand this part, you understand what OP is actually trying to say - "everything is fine as it is, its the best its ever been, anyone who wants the game changed is wrong".

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Mainly because that was ALWAYS the intention - it was always designed from day 1 to be a more accessible and simpler mmo to appeal to a far broader audience than its competition, mainly EQ.

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Just clearing one thing up......you dont actually think wows playerbase is 26m right?

no, I don't, it's simple the numbers we have been given by activision-blizzard in the Q2 report.

[Theangryone]

Maybe I’m a unicorn, RWF doesn’t matter and never really has. I worry about what I do and what the people I play with do. I don’t look at other people’s gear to see what they have, what their ilevel is, or io score. I just want to have fun, not use a spread sheet to figure out the game. I only really worry about other peoples gear when the content I enjoy becomes too difficult and unbalanced. This game isn’t about m+ or 4 raid tiers, it’s about the acquisition of gear, which is constantly changing and it’s part of why the cracks are starting to show in WoW.

[arkanon]

no, I don't, it's simple the numbers we have been given by activision-blizzard in the Q2 report.

Nowhere in the report does it imply in any way at all that wow has 29m players.

[Adamas102]

no, I don't, it's simple the numbers we have been given by activision-blizzard in the Q2 report.

That would be the total MAU's for ALL Blizzard games. If you play Overwatch and Hearthstone, you count as 2 MAU's. I myself have at times counted as 3-4. So WoW's number is a small fraction of that 26m.

[bryroo]

You should at the very least google what wildstar was then judge it off a 45 second game add...

Wildstar died because it had terribly clunky combat its servers struggled to keep up with and required massive grinds to simply cap out player abilities at max level. I feel like wildstar would be an interesting psychology subject though. It is the perfect example of how marketing affects perception likely in the same level as what gives diamonds their value.

I played wildstar and the first dungeon had a boss that would wipe a group if a single interrupt was missed that specifically was why my wife wouldn't play it anymore.

If you're going to specifically ignore valid criticisms because they contradict you you're in the right place

Furthermore you seem to be arguing that the developers aren't making the game they want because of your own assumptions which I can only ask why?

[Argorwal]

The old dungeon system was replaced by M+.
PvP rewards are complete garbage unless you play Rated PvP.
Tradeskills and reputations used to be very substantive reward paths.

This conversation can be productive if you at least attempt to understand me. There used to be substantive long term progression paths for casual players. That's what is gone.The progression path for casual players now always falls into one of two categories:

1. Takes about three days before it is over.
2. Required grinding a single system from the current patch, which is typically time locked (ie Nazjatar).

To act like this is how things have always been is either ignorant or dishonest.

I don’t know, right now in TBC classic if I have an alt I don’t want to do raids, dungeons, or pvp on then my progression basically ends as soon as I hit the level cap. Especially since many patterns have BoP dungeon and raid drops.

[Garymorilix]

Earlier versions of wow had very long progression paths for casual players. You are missing the point here. A casual player in Wrath would hit max level and have a really massive hill to climb to max themselves out if they weren't setting foot in a raid. It was a path that could take months of work across lots of different aspects of the game (trade skills, reputations, emblems, etc.). Now, you hit max level and extremely quickly you are maxed out unless you decide to go to M+, normal+ raids, or rated pvp. These are activities which most players don't want to do and don't enjoy.

There is this myth that goes around that it is all about getting good and if you get good you can do the content. If you don't find those systems fun, it isn't about getting good enough to do them. These are three hyper-niche activities, and locking the core endgame loop behind them is absolutely absurd. It is terrible design. I like the most challenging content in Destiny 2 so I do it. I don't like the most challenging content in WoW so I don't do it. It has nothing to do with being good enough. It has to do with disliking the systems or content. I don't like M+. I find it repetitive and boring. I don't like wow raids because they require way too much homework to be good at and groups larger than 10 are frustrating. I don't want to spend an hour wiping on a boss because the stupidest person in my group can't figure something out.

Saying "If you want to upgrade your gear, do these things" is just as interesting as telling me to do a quest where I have to kill 9000 raptors or telling me to go do pet battles and then I get mythic raid gear. It's about the content being niche and uninteresting to most players. It has nothing to do with being good enough for it. I don't want to do M+ for the same reason I don't want to do pet battles: It's boring for me.

The game did not used to be this way. It used to offer very substantive progression paths for people that don't want to do that kind of content. Now, it is do one of those three activities or go fuck yourself. At best, we get some incredibly boring isolated and time locked system to grind out like Nazjatar or the current patch. That's not a real solution.

What earlier progression paths are we talking exactly?
I don't remember a deliberate attempt at a non-instanced gearing progression since... Legion? BfA was better at this even.

Before that? Literally nothing.

A casual player in Wrath could do literally the same thing as we can do now: dungeons, raids and pvp.
Nowadays the systems are just more nuanced: we have many different dificulty types to accomodate to the many different player types.
Nothing changed, it was only expanded.
Nobody was pressured into doing 25-man HC or Ulduar hard mode just cause that would mean better gear. You did it if you wanted to, it wasn't forced on you by Blizzard, even tho those modes had better gear.
Just like doing +20 keys isn't forced on you.

And guess what, you didn't get "good gear" back then if you didn't play grouped instanced content either. In fact, as I said before, Zereth Mortis open world gearing is the most attainable form of non-instanced gearing we ever had, period, there is nothing you can argue on this.
So your argument of "going god mode is fun" is even less relevant in earlier expansions where you literally did not have the option to go god mode at all.

Let's also not pretend, especially since we are basically thru both Classic and Classic TBC, that people cared at all about reputation gear or anything other than the select few profession items that were actually deemed viable until you replaced it as soon as the new raid opened.
Same thing in Wrath.
In fact, speaking of Wrath, after you basically obtained your dungeon items you were done if you weren't raiding or pvp-ing. And obtaining your dungeon items were way faster than maxing out all reps for trivial gear. Which, at the time, you literally did by chain-running dungeons with tabards.
Kinda ironic, right?

Also, you're switching between "I don't like this" and "most people don't like this" literally every other sentence.
It's cool that you don't like something, just don't try to mask your opinion by feeling like you represent some arbitrary amounts of faceless people. I could do the same and it would mean just as much.

The game in fact did not use to be this way.
It was a standing in Dalaran simulator where you logged in to do the raid 1 day, and then logged in once per day to do 1 dungeon for some badges and then you literally had nothing else to do. I was there.

Comparisons only work when you try to give constructive critisism about something.
I personally wouldn't find it fun to pew pew at bullet sponge drones in Destiny 2 for 15 minutes straight with little to zero variation. That's why I dropped Destiny 2 after like 1-2 hours of gameplay.
I find fps games repetitive and boring. Plain and simple.

Destiny 2 is a much more niche game than WoW is, so I don't know why you're comparing D2 to me on a WoW forum where I don't give two cents about D2 telling me that what I like in the game is more niche, even tho more people play it? Wierd.

[NineSpine]

I don’t know, right now in TBC classic if I have an alt I don’t want to do raids, dungeons, or pvp on then my progression basically ends as soon as I hit the level cap. Especially since many patterns have BoP dungeon and raid drops.

In any case, if you don't want to do dungeons you are in rough shape. However, there is a substantive difference between M+ and heroic dungeons.

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What earlier progression paths are we talking exactly?
I don't remember a deliberate attempt at a non-instanced gearing progression since... Legion? BfA was better at this even.

Before that? Literally nothing.

I didn't argue for completely non-instances gear progression, so I will dismiss this.

A casual player in Wrath could do literally the same thing as we can do now: dungeons, raids and pvp.
Nowadays the systems are just more nuanced: we have many different dificulty types to accomodate to the many different player types.
Nothing changed, it was only expanded.

Wrath didn't have rated PvP or Mythic+, so I will dismiss this as well.

Nobody was pressured into doing 25-man HC or Ulduar hard mode just cause that would mean better gear. You did it if you wanted to, it wasn't forced on you by Blizzard, even tho those modes had better gear.
Just like doing +20 keys isn't forced on you.

I never talked about needing to do +20, so I will dismiss this.

And guess what, you didn't get "good gear" back then if you didn't play grouped instanced content either. In fact, as I said before, Zereth Mortis open world gearing is the most attainable form of non-instanced gearing we ever had, period, there is nothing you can argue on this.
So your argument of "going god mode is fun" is even less relevant in earlier expansions where you literally did not have the option to go god mode at all.

This doesn't have anything to do with what I said, so once again dismissed.

Let's also not pretend, especially since we are basically thru both Classic and Classic TBC, that people cared at all about reputation gear or anything other than the select few profession items that were actually deemed viable until you replaced it as soon as the new raid opened.
Same thing in Wrath.

"This gear shouldn't matter to non-raiders because if you raid you can replace it" is such a fundamentally silly point on its face that I'm dismissing this too.

In fact, speaking of Wrath, after you basically obtained your dungeon items you were done if you weren't raiding or pvp-ing. And obtaining your dungeon items were way faster than maxing out all reps for trivial gear. Which, at the time, you literally did by chain-running dungeons with tabards.
Kinda ironic, right?

I didn't say to clone TBC or wrath, so this point is dismissed.

Also, you're switching between "I don't like this" and "most people don't like this" literally every other sentence.
It's cool that you don't like something, just don't try to mask your opinion by feeling like you represent some arbitrary amounts of faceless people. I could do the same and it would mean just as much.p

When a point applies to me, I say me. When it applies to most people, I say most people.

The game in fact did not use to be this way.
It was a standing in Dalaran simulator where you logged in to do the raid 1 day, and then logged in once per day to do 1 dungeon for some badges and then you literally had nothing else to do. I was there.

I said what it was like to be a non-raider and you responded by telling me what it was like to be a raider. Dismissed.

Comparisons only work when you try to give constructive critisism about something.
I personally wouldn't find it fun to pew pew at bullet sponge drones in Destiny 2 for 15 minutes straight with little to zero variation. That's why I dropped Destiny 2 after like 1-2 hours of gameplay.
I find fps games repetitive and boring. Plain and simple.

I didn't compare Destiny to WoW. I compared my attitude toward each game. Dismissed.

Destiny 2 is a much more niche game than WoW is, so I don't know why you're comparing D2 to me on a WoW forum where I don't give two cents about D2 telling me that what I like in the game is more niche, even tho more people play it? Wierd.

I don't really care about your personal opinion of Destiny 2, but the game has a very comparable playerbase to WoW, if not a larger one. Over 800,000 people played Destiny yesterday. That's just the logins for one day.

[Garymorilix]

In any case, if you don't want to do dungeons you are in rough shape. However, there is a substantive difference between M+ and heroic dungeons.

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I didn't argue for completely non-instances gear progression, so I will dismiss this.



Wrath didn't have rated PvP or Mythic+, so I will dismiss this as well.



I never talked about needing to do +20, so I will dismiss this.



This doesn't have anything to do with what I said, so once again dismissed.



"This gear shouldn't matter to non-raiders because if you raid you can replace it" is such a fundamentally silly point on its face that I'm dismissing this too.



I didn't say to clone TBC or wrath, so this point is dismissed.



When a point applies to me, I say me. When it applies to most people, I say most people.



I said what it was like to be a non-raider and you responded by telling me what it was like to be a raider. Dismissed.



I didn't compare Destiny to WoW. I compared my attitude toward each game. Dismissed.



I don't really care about your personal opinion of Destiny 2, but the game has a very comparable playerbase to WoW, if not a larger one. Over 800,000 people played Destiny yesterday. That's just the logins for one day.

What an absolute joke of a person.

What did I even expect, 10 years badge, just the usual.

[Advent]

No Dev vision and a Niche game produces Anthem.. lol

Uh, no. That game had no vision and barely any work done when it was revealed. That is why it failed.

[NineSpine]

What an absolute joke of a person.

What did I even expect, 10 years badge, just the usual.

I don't know what you expect when you don't engage with anything I said. Let me know if you learn how to be an honest interlocutor.

"WRATH HAD DUNGEONS" as a response to criticisms of Mythic+? Get real.

[Aeula]

Put another way, gaming will be better off for everyone if we let developers fulfill their creative vision. There are plenty of mass market games “for everybody.” WoW has never been that game

Felt the need to pick out this part. WoW has always been as mass market as the MMO genre could possibly be. Being the easier, more accessible alternative is what made WoW so damn popular way back in 2004. Sure Classic is seen as “hardcore” compared todays offerings but it’s really not.

As for the rest, I’m all for developer vision. But difficulty is still a valid thing to criticise and ask for change when it’s not fun. Now I don’t really do Mythic because I hate scheduled play hours (Even when said hours ‘suit’ me. I just hate being tied down). So I won’t comment on Mythic difficulty and whether it’s hard or not. I just felt those two points were important to make.

Personally I don’t feel WoW’s modern combat and game design is capable of being both fun and difficult outside of the heavily scripted encounters we see in instances.

[Biomega]

Personally I don’t feel WoW’s modern combat and game design is capable of being both fun and difficult outside of the heavily scripted encounters we see in instances.

Excluding PvP, that would be hard for almost ANY game.

Part of why instanced content is a thing is precisely the fact that a controlled environment is often a necessary component of satisfying difficulty - with too many variables involved there's also too many ways in which things can go into an unfun direction. This is true for PvP, too, by the way; world PvP has some fun moments, but is also rife with extremely unfun elements as a direct result of its uncontrolled setting. Your level 17 character is not getting ganked by two 60s on the prowl inside a Battleground, but that's a daily reality of world PvP that's majorly unfun.

It's not impossible to make difficult world content, but GOOD difficulty is more complicated to pull off there. And to add on top of the inherent balance problem, world content is also not as stratified as instances - I can choose to go into an m+5 dungeon or an m+15 or an m+25, but if world content is always at the m+15 level then it isn't satisfying to anyone but the people who happen to fall into the right bracket for it at the right time.

I think diversity is the key. Maybe a world difficulty setting can help, I don't know. I know games like SWTOR have experimented with difficulty settings for quest content, with mixed results; those these are instanced, too. With sharding perhaps we do have the technology of allowing people to choose their outdoor content difficulty, but whether or not that will truly make for a satisfying experience is far from guaranteed. It could just degenerate into doing the usual abusive and borderline exploitative stuff - that's just the almost inevitable result in any environment lacking the rigid controls of an instance.

[Jastall]

What an absolute joke of a person.

What did I even expect, 10 years badge, just the usual.

That's what he does, going on about how the game used to offer so many progression paths, but then aside from complaining about M+ he'll dismiss all questions as to the specifics of his argument through this sort of "well ackshually" time-wasting nonsense instead of expounding on his points and explaining what he wants and means. I've bothered before but I don't anymore.


As to the OP, the wide swathes of difficulty is one of the things I like about the game. On some of my alts I don't care and just do quests, lower M+ and Normal raiding, max. On my main I push keys and do Heroic, sometimes Mythic. It can be relaxing or challenging as I want it. I have issues with the way it's implemented, for example I'd like more challenging and rewarding open world content, but it's a lot harder to balance than instanced content and sections of the playerbase complain a lot when they can't faceroll through the open world, such as the elite district of Suramar back in 7.0.

[cparle87]

Either the content is too hard without addons, and then it needs to be toned down, or the very existence of addons drives the difficulty level, and therefore developers need to start block and forbid raid-help addons.

It's the second one. They design raids with addons in mind. They've straight up admitted it at least as far back as WoD, particularly the mythic Archimonde fight. There were range addons and weak auras for his mechanics. It's why they broke the full power range radar in DBM in instances and just made the list of people within said range.

[catalystical]

Maybe read the post? I am defending the current WoW developers vision for the game, even if it is not my vision. They clearly want to make a game like it is now - a game where the RWF is important and there is a lot of very difficult content. A game where it takes the biggest nerds in the world a month to clear the Jailer. A game that does not make as much money as it conceivably could because it is not trying to be everything for everyone.

This is a rebuttal to the endless nonsense we get on these forums from people who apparently want Activision executives to take a more active role in game development and water down the game to where the highest difficulty is normal mode.

To bring it back, my argument is their vision for this expansion is simply bad. The game they want to make is not the game we want to play.

And the thing with Elden ring is there's a quote the director said to embrace dying.
https://www.gamesradar.com/elden-rin...embrace-death/

With WoW and MMOs in general, we're incentivised to do the opposite. When we die in group content, we either don't get to get back up until we get a brez or until the encounter is over. We become a liability to others and we get crap tossed our way more often than not for being a scrub. And as a MMO, mob respawn timers is a thing.

Take the mage tower for example. We were limited in the number of tries we can do when it's up, and it's only for a limited period of time to do it. They took in the lesson of embracing dying and we finally got mage tower come back with unlimited tries, and to come back for perpetuity.

I'm not against difficult and challenging content but they need to stop conflating difficulty and punishment. Challenging content lets us want to play and come back and try again. Their philosophy for Shadowlands is to keep us from trying or to punish us for trying. Like when we are penalized like dropping renown when we're swapping covenants and then lose progress that we've made to things like not being able to mount in the Maw.

The good thing is they're learning the decisions they have been making were bad and are making steps to correct them. The thing is we don't have the confidence that they keep those lessons and that they will continue to make bad decisions.