In Defense of Difficulty

[Caprias]

Please, be my guest and describe what a casual is.

We know from studies and polls that they play less than 15 hours/week(all of their games, not only one), they do not consume much media about their games, especially dedicated guides/discussions, they do not partake in forum discussions or putting their opinions out there, in general they don't think much about xy game outside of 5 minutes before and after playing it.

If you've even a few dozens of comments on this site you're not what Blizzard will consider casual, you might call yourself that, you might play casual hours and you might play "casual content", but you're already way too deep in terms of personal investment to really be one.

Idk. how this is even so hard to grasp, most gaming buddies and colleagues I have played exactly like this or still do, I've played WoW like this for the first few years back in the day as well, you don't just start as midcore/hardcore player once you get a laptop/pc lul.

[Freighter]

I certainly don't enjoy a game like WoW, where "challenging" is more or less tied to your gear level, as being overly challenging. For example, take the difference of Torghast's difficulty at launch (where I felt like it was a struggle and a time sink) compared to now. I found nerfed Torghast much more enjoyable because it was faster and didn't penalize me as severely for mistakes.

Torghast was easy mode at launch and it's just boring now because it's just too easy. Even the supposed challenge wings are easy in regards to difficulty, the hard part of them is RNG powers.

[chiddie]

Finally, a king amongst men

There are some people that were not casual and now are.

When they were dedicated they posted here… and still post now

[Capultro]

No.easy is better.

Dificulty for what???look mage tower!big rabish….

[MrFawlty]

Care to elaborate?

They are missing the Blizzard logo.

[Shinrael]

We know from studies and polls that they play less than 15 hours/week(all of their games, not only one), they do not consume much media about their games, especially dedicated guides/discussions, they do not partake in forum discussions or putting their opinions out there, in general they don't think much about xy game outside of 5 minutes before and after playing it.

If you've even a few dozens of comments on this site you're not what Blizzard will consider casual, you might call yourself that, you might play casual hours and you might play "casual content", but you're already way too deep in terms of personal investment to really be one.

Idk. how this is even so hard to grasp, most gaming buddies and colleagues I have played exactly like this or still do, I've played WoW like this for the first few years back in the day as well, you don't just start as midcore/hardcore player once you get a laptop/pc lul.

Alright, then indeed I do not fall into that category. Let's say that this kind of players forms the vast majority of the millions of players that play MMOs. So what...? Do we have any data that suggests that that kind of players PREFER brainless content? Sure, they have nothing better to do with their time so they just play the brainless content , but who is to say they won't enjoy content that actually engages them to think a little bit? Suramar and Timeless Isle both mark periods in this game that were most successful (5.4 and 7.0).

1) What challenge does Elden Ring lose if they added an easier difficulty that wasn't unlocked by default? It could even be difficult to unlock, for example, by dying 10 times to the first boss in the game. All that would happen is people that were turned off by the difficulty of Elden Ring would know they had a path forward. They could intentionally or unintentionally die 10 times to the first boss and chose the easier difficulty.

2) There's generally four different axioms of what makes a game enjoyable:
Achievers, those are people that tend to favor making progress at something (achievements, gear, mounts, pets, etc.)
Customization (socializers), these are people that enjoy getting different transmog options and experimenting with transmog and other looks.
Competitive advantage (PvP, Raiding), these are people that enjoy raiding not because of the difficulty but because the gear gives them an advantage over other players
Content (explorers) these are people that simply enjoy exploring

3) Challenge doesn't necessarily fit into any of those archetypes, though it is a consequence of competitive advantage (if everything is quick and easy to get, then no one has an advantage over anyone else).

4) I certainly don't enjoy a game like WoW, where "challenging" is more or less tied to your gear level, as being overly challenging. For example, take the difference of Torghast's difficulty at launch (where I felt like it was a struggle and a time sink) compared to now. I found nerfed Torghast much more enjoyable because it was faster and didn't penalize me as severely for mistakes.

5) Often, I enjoy grouping up with a friend and simply doing World Bosses and World Quests. I haven't raided because of how much of a sunk cost raiding is.

1) Elden Ring already has multiple easy mode settings. If you don't know about them, then you have not played the game. You can outlevel all bosses, you can upgrade your gear, you can upgrade and summon spirits, you can invite other players to help you and more. Elden Ring is my first FromSoft game (and I've never been a competitive player in WoW or any other game). I struggled a lot on Margit but I learned and managed to beat him. I struggled on other bosses too. I learned, got better, and beat them. I like exploring the world and ended up outleveling some bosses and when I fought the 2nd hardest boss in the game I killed him on 3rd try without using any summons. I was actually disappointed until I realized I have simply turned on "Easy Mode" by accident. So there you have it. Easy Mode exists. Die 10 times to a boss, go kill a few normal mobs, explore, do a dungeon or something, come back 10 levels higher and boom. Not only does the easy mode exist, it is a so much better implementation of an easy mode than any game has.... It feels so natural and even engages you in the world. "Fuck this guy, fuck him. I will come back when I am 40 levels higher and I will fuck him so hard" and I fucking did Felt good.

2) No? There's a lot more than that. Where did you even take these out of...?

3) No. Challenge is the primary "fun" gameplay element. Everything else stems from it. Challenge does not mean a hard boss fight. Solving a puzzle is challenge. Figuring out how to reach an area in the open world (a.k.a exploration) is a form of puzzle solving challenge. Getting every achievement is a form of challenge (of patience, determination and systemic approach). Creating a matching and good-looking transmog is a form of puzzle solving challenge. All of these things are fun BECAUSE they are challenging. They require you to engage with the game's systems and world. To use your brain, pay attention, interact with things. That is what challenge is. And it is CRUCIAL in games.

4) Gear progression/raids/PvP/etc in WoW are just one single form of "challenge". The problem is that Blizzard has decided that it is the only form of challenge and doesn't invest in other forms (actually they did but only a few times in this game's lifespan). Do not mistake "difficulty" and "challenge". Difficulty is the criteria we use to measure challenge. Challenge can be Easy Difficulty or Mythic Difficulty. Torghast IMO was Normal Difficulty. But that is probably because I picked every single urn and anima power I found (which is how it is intended to be played by the way) and majority of players didn't so their characters couldn't kill bosses and stuff. But EVEN IF it was too difficult.... then the problem comes down to it being the wrong difficulty or not having enough flexibility. Maybe they should have added a few levels below the original Layer 1. Wouldn't you have enjoyed Torghast more if it was just the right difficulty for you? If it wasn't complete steamroll but it wasn't as much of a pushover as outdoor mobs? If your answer is yes - then you like challenge. If your answer is no - please elaborate.

5) Raiding being a time sink has nothing to do with challenge. I am not sure how you relate the two.

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They are missing the Blizzard logo.

You had me there for a moment

[Osmeric]

A casual is a person who is not driven to improve their performance. They may play a lot, but it's not in service to that goal.

[Axaron]

but i'm getting older and am not quite as fast so they have to design games for me

[User517849]

Torghast was easy mode at launch and it's just boring now because it's just too easy. Even the supposed challenge wings are easy in regards to difficulty, the hard part of them is RNG powers.

Torghast was much harder at launch and then they nerfed it significantly. Some of the wings were downright tedious.

That said, yes, a lot of it depended on what powers you got.

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Alright, then indeed I do not fall into that category. Let's say that this kind of players forms the vast majority of the millions of players that play MMOs. So what...? Do we have any data that suggests that that kind of players PREFER brainless content? Sure, they have nothing better to do with their time so they just play the brainless content , but who is to say they won't enjoy content that actually engages them to think a little bit? Suramar and Timeless Isle both mark periods in this game that were most successful (5.4 and 7.0).




1) Elden Ring already has multiple easy mode settings. If you don't know about them, then you have not played the game. You can outlevel all bosses, you can upgrade your gear, you can upgrade and summon spirits, you can invite other players to help you and more. Elden Ring is my first FromSoft game (and I've never been a competitive player in WoW or any other game). I struggled a lot on Margit but I learned and managed to beat him. I struggled on other bosses too. I learned, got better, and beat them. I like exploring the world and ended up outleveling some bosses and when I fought the 2nd hardest boss in the game I killed him on 3rd try without using any summons. I was actually disappointed until I realized I have simply turned on "Easy Mode" by accident. So there you have it. Easy Mode exists. Die 10 times to a boss, go kill a few normal mobs, explore, do a dungeon or something, come back 10 levels higher and boom. Not only does the easy mode exist, it is a so much better implementation of an easy mode than any game has.... It feels so natural and even engages you in the world. "Fuck this guy, fuck him. I will come back when I am 40 levels higher and I will fuck him so hard" and I fucking did Felt good.

2) No? There's a lot more than that. Where did you even take these out of...?

3) No. Challenge is the primary "fun" gameplay element. Everything else stems from it. Challenge does not mean a hard boss fight. Solving a puzzle is challenge. Figuring out how to reach an area in the open world (a.k.a exploration) is a form of puzzle solving challenge. Getting every achievement is a form of challenge (of patience, determination and systemic approach). Creating a matching and good-looking transmog is a form of puzzle solving challenge. All of these things are fun BECAUSE they are challenging. They require you to engage with the game's systems and world. To use your brain, pay attention, interact with things. That is what challenge is. And it is CRUCIAL in games.

4) Gear progression/raids/PvP/etc in WoW are just one single form of "challenge". The problem is that Blizzard has decided that it is the only form of challenge and doesn't invest in other forms (actually they did but only a few times in this game's lifespan). Do not mistake "difficulty" and "challenge". Difficulty is the criteria we use to measure challenge. Challenge can be Easy Difficulty or Mythic Difficulty. Torghast IMO was Normal Difficulty. But that is probably because I picked every single urn and anima power I found (which is how it is intended to be played by the way) and majority of players didn't so their characters couldn't kill bosses and stuff. But EVEN IF it was too difficult.... then the problem comes down to it being the wrong difficulty or not having enough flexibility. Maybe they should have added a few levels below the original Layer 1. Wouldn't you have enjoyed Torghast more if it was just the right difficulty for you? If it wasn't complete steamroll but it wasn't as much of a pushover as outdoor mobs? If your answer is yes - then you like challenge. If your answer is no - please elaborate.

5) Raiding being a time sink has nothing to do with challenge. I am not sure how you relate the two.

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You had me there for a moment

1) Finding gear and leveling up isn't the same as an easy mode difficulty (which would make bosses have less health and do less damage). I'm well aware that in Elden Ring there are plenty of guides on the internet that will walk you through, step by step, of where to get an appropriate gear setup that makes the game much, much less harder. That's not equivalent to switching game modes where the bosses do half as much damage and have half as much life.

My entire argument about that is because Elden Ring is so difficult that players that struggle with the difficulty will go online, do a walkthrough that gives you the most overpowered abilities and then you can finally play the game. You might find that fun, but I'd consider that hindering the game. Plus, who cares if someone turns the game down to easy mode? It's not like it changes your challenge, especially if it requires something like losing to the first boss 10 times.

2) It's an old game developers conference I watched a long time back. They basically talk about those as the four major axioms of players. I'm sure there's more, but those were the four major ones they said to appeal to because they cover the majority of the player base.

3) Those aren't challenges.

4) Gear progression has been the primary challenge in WoW since WoW launched. Most players aren't interested in much outside of power progression and Blizzard has determined that the best way to control power progression was originally raiding. It's now raiding and M+.

What I specifically enjoyed about Torghast was what Torghast looked like on the beta. It started out hard, but you eventually collected so many powers that you could one shot everything. That looked like a lot of fun. That wasn't what we got, though.

With what Torghast ended up being (had to do each wing twice a week), yes, I would've preferred Torghast was a pushover like outdoor mobs. Currently in WoW, I mostly do World Quests. I don't mind how easy they are. I get rep, gold, gear to disenchant, etc.

5) Sunk cost doesn't mean time sink. In this case, sunk cost, specifically means the amount of resources (gold, herbs, joining raiding guilds, etc.) isn't worth participating in the activity.

6) I'd also add that difficulty and challenge are relative, too. Something you find easy might be really hard for someone else and vice versa.

[kamuimac]

Everyone wants to improve performance in RPGs. And if it is just by getting better gear. You get a new piece of gear, and suddenly you can master the large crocodiles. While they twohitted you before you got that big shield.

You mix that up with overcoming hard challenges without the chance to overgear it, which surely is not something everyone wants to do. Mythic raids are not for everyone. While Diablo literally was playable by everyone simply by going all up the gearing path.

Greg Streets idea of what players want was and is bullshit, simply because players would adapt to a challenge if skill was not the only option. A RPG is always about performing better. You also should have learned that from the covenants in shadowlands, as even casual gamers selected the one which gave better character power bonuses, by simply following a guide from wowhead.

well it depends .unelss by imporving performance you mean solely get more levels and gear that will enable you to faceroll everything . then yes peopel want to improve that way .

they certainly dont want to play their classes better - if they woudl want to do that they woudl play elden ring not wow.

this is the core of mmorpg that blizzard long forgotten because they only listen to toxic elitest people who chase difficulty in game because they usually have problems irl and use online achievements as replacement of achievements irl likegetting regular raises / change jobs to better one - have wife and kids. . buy home , succesfully invest money etc etc. people who do that with succes irl dont need fake chalenges in computer games to feel better about themselves

[Osmeric]

Everyone wants to improve performance in RPGs. And if it is just by getting better gear.

I meant improve THEIR performance, not the performance of their character.

[cparle87]

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nah they failed because they listened to top 5 % and streamers and kept reinventing the wheel .

instead stick to simple working solutions of what wolk/cata had aka

a)badge gear
b)2-3 completly new dungeons each tier.
c)raids decently chalenging but not being a frikkin monster basterd child of action shooter and frogger.

there was never need for reinventing wheel - what there was need for is each tier lasting 7-8 months.

instead wasting time on convoluted systems that nobody needs they woudl rather design raids that have 7-8 bosses and put completly new 4 dungeons each tier.
maybe first tier instead releasing 8 dungeons release 4 and save next 4 for X.1 ? instead hiring woke lgbt enforcer hire more dungeon designers.

viola 90 % of wows problems solved instantly.

you can counter it that elitest nolifers would cry that they run out of content to fast ? i say f.... them - tell them to leave game and go .... themselves. they are the reason we got SL. game should be never catered totop 5% only .

then they would loose 5-10 % each tier but who would be coming back tier after tier. instead loosing 95% who now play FF14 not wow.

SL is unsalvagable but there is still hope for 10.0 if we fight with them hard enough - starting with absolutely nobody preordering on 19th showing them to not mess with players.

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I love the armchair devs who go "do what I think and 90% of problems would be solved".

[Coldkil]

Ok, so it's the usual "WoW should be hard and not cater to filthy casuals".

Guess what, WoW was successful exactly because all that "filthy casual" playerbase paid a sub and generated millions of revenue. Nowadays, people stick to a agme one month then jump on the next new fad, so WoW won't ever be as it was. Just look at its transition towards seasonal gameplay and competitive game modes only a fraction of the players actually have any interest in.

If anything, WoW should just be easier on a broad level, with optional very hard content. M+ model is actually really good, you have a sensibly but not terribly difficult threashold with the 15s that give you gear, then it's all skills. Raids should be more like that.


The real issue is the Blizzard have actually "engineered" a playerbase they don't want and are unable to manage. Everything in the game is solved in a matter of seconds, everyone only cares about numbers and perfomance because it'sjust a paraphrase for "gimme the easiest way to win" and people just go for the path of elast resistance every single time. WFR raid comps are not special, they're just mathematically tailored to be the most effective - it's literally playingwith excel files. And the others parrot this because "it's the best way to play the game".

I fully agree that you cannot possibly cater to multiple playerbases. So either double down on the hard/competitive one and live on the small fraction of people that stays, or change the game design to appeal again bigger masses. To me it really doesn't matter - if i like WoW i play it, and stop when i don't like it anymore.

Just, the constant crusades about how the game should be designed are just boring. The game isn't going to change in any way until it means getting more money.

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The fact you need tons of third-party addons to tackle raid/Mythic contents makes it "difficulty" suspicious at best.

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.

They're not strictly difficult, they're "overdesigned". It's a strongarm competition between devs and addons, where the first try to make mechanics that are not easily "solvable", and the latter try to automate every player based decision for the sake of performance.

[Shinrael]

Torghast was much harder at launch and then they nerfed it significantly. Some of the wings were downright tedious.

That said, yes, a lot of it depended on what powers you got.

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1) Finding gear and leveling up isn't the same as an easy mode difficulty (which would make bosses have less health and do less damage). I'm well aware that in Elden Ring there are plenty of guides on the internet that will walk you through, step by step, of where to get an appropriate gear setup that makes the game much, much less harder. That's not equivalent to switching game modes where the bosses do half as much damage and have half as much life.

My entire argument about that is because Elden Ring is so difficult that players that struggle with the difficulty will go online, do a walkthrough that gives you the most overpowered abilities and then you can finally play the game. You might find that fun, but I'd consider that hindering the game. Plus, who cares if someone turns the game down to easy mode? It's not like it changes your challenge, especially if it requires something like losing to the first boss 10 times.

2) It's an old game developers conference I watched a long time back. They basically talk about those as the four major axioms of players. I'm sure there's more, but those were the four major ones they said to appeal to because they cover the majority of the player base.

3) Those aren't challenges.

4) Gear progression has been the primary challenge in WoW since WoW launched. Most players aren't interested in much outside of power progression and Blizzard has determined that the best way to control power progression was originally raiding. It's now raiding and M+.

5) Sunk cost doesn't mean time sink. In this case, sunk cost, specifically means the amount of resources (gold, herbs, joining raiding guilds, etc.) isn't worth participating in the activity.

6) I'd also add that difficulty and challenge are relative, too. Something you find easy might be really hard for someone else and vice versa.

7) What I specifically enjoyed about Torghast was what Torghast looked like on the beta. It started out hard, but you eventually collected so many powers that you could one shot everything. That looked like a lot of fun. That wasn't what we got, though.

8) With what Torghast ended up being (had to do each wing twice a week), yes, I would've preferred Torghast was a pushover like outdoor mobs. Currently in WoW, I mostly do World Quests. I don't mind how easy they are. I get rep, gold, gear to disenchant, etc.

1) Why do you want bosses to have less health and do less damage? What purpose does that serve if there are other ways to reduce the difficulty that are more natural? Why do you need to die to a boss 10 times (I get frustrated on 3rd try) when you can outlevel and kill the boss on 1st try? You do not need a guide to walk you through things. You can just explore freely and find new abilities and weapons on your own. One of them is bound to make a difference and even if it doesn't, you will outlevel the boss, which is the main way to reduce difficulty directly. Also, the more you clash with the enemies and bosses in the game, the better you get. Even if you don't feel it (because the enemy power curve is crazy steep so you get wrecked anyway) but after venturing around the world and coming back to a boss, EVEN if you didn't outlevel it, you would do several times better because you simply got better. I am not saying "git gud" I am saying you WILL get better, without even realizing. This is the beauty of this game. This is why it is so important that it has no difficulty setting.

People who struggle with Elden Ring have one crucial problem - they lack patience. They have been taught that they will be spoonfed everything so they don't have the patience to give up the boss and go explore some more and come back later. And it is not their fault. It is the game developers' fault. Which is why now that there is finally a game that tries to correct the mistakes of 2 generations of game devs, we should support that, not oppose it. It matters to me because people being lazy and impatient leads to a trend in game development and it is why we cannot have (more) nice things like Elden Ring and DOS2. Because big companies try to cater to that without realizing it only exists because they created it.

2) I see. I have not seen it, but as I said, the information there is incomplete and partially incorrect. I would not trust big company devs on anything game design related. Look at the games they create... Strip away the gorgeous work of their art teams and what do you have? Boring uninspired shit grind loops.

3) I've explained why they are challenges. If you want to argue against that, try addressing my explanation and provide your own definition for challenge. If you're going to engage in a constructive discussion, put the effort to explain yourself rather than wasting people's time.

4) Gear progression is not "challenge". It is the goal at the end of a "challenge". The challenge would be overcoming a boss in a raid/dungeon (and the actual challenge is learning your class and mechanics and executing them as well as possible). Gear progression is ONE of the rewards/goals that motivate you to overcome said challenge. Most players are actually not interested in power progression. Which is why majority of players are "casuals". Most people just want to explore/quest/collect cool armor/roleplay/etc. Also, that something has been as it is now does not mean it is correct and does not mean it should remain so. And either way this is irrelevant to the discussion of challenge. I am not saying power progression should not be a focus of the game. I LOVE power progression. It is my personal biggest reason to play RPGs. What I am saying is, Power Progression in WoW is limited to raiding/dungeons/PvP and that is beyond ridiculous. Would you buy a chocolate bar if only 10% of the bar was chocolate and the rest was water or empty air? No, you want to buy a chocolate bar that is 100% a chocolate bar. 100% of a game should be about the core gameplay loop of the game. Not 10%. Leveling, reputations, world/daily quests, patch hubs, legacy content, professions.... all of these and everything else outside raiding/M+/PvP is brainless and boring content that offers no sufficient challenge. Why is only 10% of the game actually enjoyable? And why are you forced to go through the boring 90% to enjoy the tasty 10%? Either make the entire game a raiding/PvP lobby game where you create an account, click login, click create character, you enter the world, click enter raid and boom you raid OR make the game a proper journey that matters and engages the player.

5) I misunderstood then. But what you describe (that in order to enjoy Raiding you must first force yourself to grind materials/gold) is exactly the problem I describe above. In order to get to the tasty part you must first do boring activities. I want to change precisely that. I want the game to either have no activities required in order to do raiding (so you login and immediately hop into a raid) OR the entire game is enjoyable (so make gathering resources engaging). And while I do agree IT WOULD BE HARD. It is not impossible. Other games have done it and thus there is no excuse the biggest game company cannot do it.

6) I didn't say that they aren't related. I said that they indeed are. Difficulty is the criteria by which you measure challenge. Challenge is challenge regardless of difficulty. My mother takes 5 hours to solve a Medium level Sudoku. To her that is extremely challenging. It took me 10 minutes to solve it and I hadn't done a Sudoku in 15 years. To me it was not challenging. I then took an Advance level Sudoku. It took me 45 minutes to solve it. It was somewhat challenging. To my mother it would be impossible right now. The important part is: both me and my mother find Sudoku challenging. But the difficulty of Sudoku we find challenging is different.

The same can be done in WoW and any game. Take World Quests in WoW for example. There is only one difficulty of World Quests. Which means that if my mother does a WQ she will find it quite challenging (considering she doesn't play games and doesn't even know how to move her character). A new player that is still learning how to play their class will find it appropriately challenging - they will struggle once or twice, but they will do it without too much frustration. As they attempt to defeat the Elite Mob, they will learn that their Avenging Wrath CD is a very powerful tool that they must utilize. They will have fun because they learned something new and their effort changed the outcome from Defeat to Victory. Then a player who has been here since Legion will find them very easy - they already know Avenging Wrath is the key to defeating that Elite Mob. They will learn nothing. But they need to kill the mob regardless because its the only way to progress your reputation and get into a raid. They will not have fun and they will be mildly bored. But its okay. It only takes 2 minutes. Except it doesn't. You need to do that and other WQs about a few hundred times to farm the resource/gear/gold/reputation/something you need. That means you need to repeat that action which provides no new knowledge or anything to you for DAYS/WEEKS/MONTHS. And actually years because WQs and dailies haven't changed in terms of gameplay/difficulty at all since their introduction in... Vanilla. Now take me. I have played this game for 16 years. I am not a Mythic raider because I too don't want to invest so much time into it, but I still know the game extremely well. I've been killing this same elite mob that does nothing for 16 years. It only changed its appearance but its still the same brainless mob that just autoattacks you. Where is the fun in that?

And as you said, what is easy for me is hard for someone else. So the game must cater to the weaker player otherwise they will get frustrated and quit. Right? WRONG. The game does not need to and must not cater to the weaker player. Nor should it cater to the strong player. It should cater to both. How? BY MAKING THE DIFFICULTY ADJUSTABLE FOR TITANS' SAKE. Make the Elite Mob a miniboss. Now even I will struggle killing it solo. But a Mythic raider will be able to deal with it. So I cannot do it on my own, I will invite a friend and boom, dead. And my mother can invite me, my friend and we will kill it for her. But here comes another problem - why would anyone ever do it solo if you can just gangbang the miniboss? And here is a simple solution - only have the miniboss drop 1 or 2 rewards for everyone participating. Now you have a choice - try to kill the miniboss solo and get all the rewards for yourself OR lower the difficulty in exchange for lower chance to get a reward (or fewer materials/currency). This is why Vanilla was so succesful. Rare Elite mobs could not be soloed (unless you were higher level/very geared/very skilled, which most people weren't). So you could call a friend to help you but you risked loosing out on loot. This was the natural first step before raiding. And it made sense. If you want to get into a raid - go kill rares and get loot. And for the people who say "well I don't have friends, how am I supposed to kill it?" then I'd ask "well, if you don't have friends you can't raid anyway, so you don't need to kill it. Do something else or find friends!"

7) That is exactly what we got...? It was hard so you could collect many powers and destroy the last boss? Like, how did you not have that? That is exactly my experience with Torghast. How was Torghast on the live game different from this?

8) So you didn't enjoy Torghast because you had to do it 2 times a week? WHY did you have to do it 2 times a week? I only did it once per week and I had lots of fun. Who forced you to do it 2 times? Oh you wanted a legendary? Why did you want a legendary? Oh you wanted to raid? Well do you see a pattern here? This is ONCE AGAIN the same problem we discuss in 5). You are forced to do X in order to be able to do Y. To do raids you must do irrelevant and not engaging (to you) tasks such as reps/professions/torghast/etc. If you want to do raids, your whole progression path should be raids. Torghast was not challenging enough for Raiders so they did not enjoy it. If Raiders had to kill 2 extra raid bosses per week to get their legendaries, they would not have whined about it. They whined about it because Torghast was not a raid. It was not challenging. It was easy for them. And that made it boring. So they had to do 2 boring activities per week that take 2 hours so they can do Raids. It is unthinkable design. And at the same time it seems that Torghast was too challenging for new players because they didn't have friends to help them in the first place. Do you know why they had no friends to help them? BECAUSE NOWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME DOES THE GAME REQUIRE YOU TO FIND FRIENDS. Then you reach endgame content and suddenly you cannot do anything alone. From what you describe mate, you did not hate Torghast. You hated the Legendary aquisition system (and the whole power progression system) and the fact that to reach the 10% of the game you're interested in, you had to do 90% that you are not interested in.

But please, tell me what you enjoy about "Currently in WoW, I mostly do World Quests. I don't mind how easy they are. I get rep, gold, gear to disenchant, etc."

[kamuimac]

Have you recently checked how successfull Elden Ring is? And have you understood you also can progress in Elden Ring with chosing the right gear and progression path?
.

its not particularly succesfull game .but their PR department sure learned the lesson how to promote game on social media and sites that gamers visit.

their sales are pretty bad as very few peopel are interested in games hard liek that.

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I love the armchair devs who go "do what I think and 90% of problems would be solved".

any arguments there against my opinions besides personal atacks ?

no ?

ye that proves me to be correct thank you

[kamuimac]

In WoW it would simply either need skill, where you could start at a higher difficulty, or effort, where you farmed gear which enabled you to play higher levels.

its completly possible in wow and easily achievable.

all you would have to do is nerf game by 60 % and ignore crying and whining of toxic elitest about how game is too easy then for them

cut the cancer out instead trying to cure it with shamanistic rituals and placebo like wow devs are trying to do for past 6 years.

[Dismayxz]

Trying not to make this too long, but let's run down a few quick points on WoW's difficulty.

There's a lot of talking the talk but not walking the walk presented in the Thread (not surprising, this Thread crops up every expansion and it's always the same mix of bullet points and weird presentation of how both sides have actual [sorry, Mods, don't bonk me Moana] mental retardation flowing into their veins via IV on a daylie basis.

Mythic Raiding is not hard. First and foremost, to both the people defending difficulty AND the people ceaselessly raking on the mild requirement for two working sets of eyes and half a brain: You are not World First Raiders. I am not a World First Raider, you are not a World First Raider. The Mythic Content you play, or on the flipside, at best, observe, is not the Mythic Content a majority of the minority that makes CE Guilds plays and beats. Most rotations, most priority lists for Classes are not hard. We're not looking at strictly static rotations that require insane upkeep or need to constantly be refitted to match the fight you are currently Progressing on a fundamental level, like in some of the other MMORPG's currently on the market (FF14 has a lot of Jobs that work off of strictly static rotations, ESO has both, with the static rotation being easy but still effective and dynamic WoW style rotations, which require a little more upkeep for a mild gain in DPS).

Fundamentally, playing your Class in WoW, inbetween all the resources available and the very basic concept of how things work, is not hard. While difficulty is subjective for sure, this is outside of the idea of subjective or objective difficulty. It is easy. It is very, very fucking easy to be effective on most Classes in WoW. Some could probably learn enough about their class to do basic CE Mythic Raiding, if they spent the time bitching and crying on MMOC actually .. learning what's there to learn instead.

Second, most CE Raiders over the course of a Tier do not play the original, hard versions of the Bosses. My guild is currently on Halondrus. In this Tier, this places us somewhere in the general WR 150-250 range, depending on when we kill it. We have no ranking goal and we just skipped a raid day because of IRL related noshows. Let me tell you, that the one remaining hard thing on Halondrus, compared to what we saw on WF Streams, is playing the bombs. A mechanic that at this point boils down to 1.) Not dying 2.) just kind of generally knowing rough times for when you want to swap the bombs.

The concept of consistency during Progression is still something that most Mythic Raid Leaders probably loose sleep over, because I can tell you half their rosters don't even know what they are doing and the Content still eventually falls. If you want to boil it down to numbers such as 1% and 99%, let me tell you that the difference between most of the supposed "1%" and the supposed "99%", is that the former spends their time halfheartedly trying to do something, rather than spending their time ceaselessly and insufferably bitching and whining into the vacuum of space, subsequently putting more time into said bitching than into actually trying something in the game for once.

If you are fine with not trying, you should probably not have much to bitch about and thus, for the sake of stating the obvious, probably aren't actually being adressed by this point or.. well, most of them, actually.

Every other mechanic, we have seen in some shape or form before. Beams of death going around a boss arena, isn't new. A spread mechanic, isn't new. A raidwide damage burn, is not new. This is raiding 101. Ladies and gentlemen: A "wall" boss... by the way.

Please go ahead and bring out the ages old excuse of "Elitism", or on the flipside, "BUT BUT BUT" from all the "Semi Hardcore" Mythic Raiders, valiantly defending the "difficulty" of the Content, while ceaselessly pursuing a goal with their guild, for which only a minority even remotely once think about the idea of "Oh, maybe if I stop dying to things I did a million times before, maybe we could actually start hitting our goal", before resorting to "Too hard, wee woo, fuck this boss, I have to actually play a mechanic". You're both ironically, really not that different, my dudes, if you are part of one of both camps. You both share a love for not wanting to engage with the content you complain about, one while doing it, the other without even touching it.

Noteworthy mentions of things nobody ever says in Raiding, since the birth of time, in MOST "Hardcore" guilds: "Oh sorry, I was greeding." "Ah, you know what, I don't care about my parse." "Oh,... I fucked up, I'll do better."

If you have some mythical (no pun intended) idea of Raiding in this Game being so hard to grasp, politely and respectfully: Fuck off and at least be genuine about your agenda here. You don't want to learn, you don't want to spend a single moment using a brain cell, otherwise you would. And that's fine.


The cosmetic angle is also a fair point to make, but let's be real here as well. While it is a fair point to make, some people wouldn't be sitting here (and some definitely would) complaining about Mythic only Tier cosmetics or animations, if any of the actual casual content in the game actually had halfway decent cosmetic rewards. But please, let's not keep this farce going when we're slowly but surely approaching the 20 years of WoW and still come up with shit like the content needing nerfs, when you know perfectly well that you are coping hard, when you say you could definitely do it and still sit here not doing anything. "What, I'll have to farm the transmog next expansion instead? The world is ending in fire and flame. WEE WOO WAAH." A very, very thrilling discussion, I'm sure.


Bringing Elden Ring into the discussion doesn't do anything either. Talking about Elden Ring being a PR success is the funniest take yet. Souls games are souls games. If you don't like what they offer and the game is still too hard with Summons, overleveling and everything, the game is not for you. Get the hint or keep wasting your time complaining about it, if something in a game not being for you is a huge deal or problem that needs fixing, I'd try to get your ego and narcissism in check first and foremost. It has no relevance in a WoW Discussion about difficulty. The difference between WoW and Elden Ring that fundamentally makes the point moot, is that both the Devs and the Players of Souls Games know what they want to offer and consume, respectively and have done so for way too long for people to still keep bringing it up. It's getting fucking weird.


Touching on another point, that Moana sort of made. I wonder who here remembers the time (Ghostcrawler, I believe?) a WoW Dev straight up and very clearly said, that the reason they were moving away from evergreen content and systems, was because it was unsustainable to keep adding and adding and adding things onto the Game every expansion at the rate everything was going. It's not like people were particularly fine with them pruning and reshuffling things either, to accomodate new additions, especially on the Class side. Every single time, the forums got flooded with bitchy whiny idiots, because they lost the button nobody but them pressed once in a blue moon or because they somehow managed to get attached to that one square on their bloated ass action bars. Pray tell, which portion of the playerbase generally runs to the forums whenever something new comes around, since time immemorial, and then ask yourselves "why the fuck nobody is listening at Blizzard".

Ironically, for a different example, FF14 has recently had Yoshi P say that.. they'll have to figure out stuff like bloat at some point as well, since they are still in the era of the game's life cycle where the evergreen content loop is sustainable. Even they are aware that eventually, they gotta find a solution or switch gears. The difference between their solutions and Blizzard's solutions is, that they just do what they think works, while still trying to find a satisfactory conclusion for their playerbase. WoW, for a long time now, has unironically just acted on player Feedback and engagement numbers, and designed their way into a corner, trying to satisfy the outstanding graduates of the Armchair University of Game Design, Florida. Otherwise known as, "Whoever currently isn't satisfied, among the XY amount of different splinter groups saying 'this is what my WoW needs to be or I'm gone'."


The game doesn't need shit in terms of difficulty adjustments. What the game needs, plain and simple, is some deterministic additions to the reward structure and a return to offering the little, fun things you can do on tight schedules. The problem isn't that existing content is too hard, the problem is that the people who don't want to engage with the "hard" content, have nothing feasibly meaningful to do outside of that content to progress their characters properly, which means that the usual whiny, bitchy crowd runs around aimlessly, calling for the only content there is, to get nerfed so they can still suck at doing it just a little more effectively.

Adding more options for Normal-to heroic iLvL gearing from casual-oriented variety content, benefits everybody, at the end of the day.

Nerfing harder content doesn't benefit anybody, because the people doing it and that it's designed for, get fucked and the people calling for the nerfs will keep bitching and moaning until the content is irrelevant, whilst still not touching it with a mile-long prod stick if they can avoid it, whilst simultaneously gloating over the fact that it's worthless now, because their little e-wiener finally isn't getting hurt by the notion that the Content exists, just as, ironically, people seem to get hurt by the fact that another Souls-like hypetrain release isn't catering to their needs.

Hint: With both, the content exists exactly for people that probably aren't "You", and no that is not a infringement on unwritten cosmic law pertaining to the planet sized ego, of little casual dude on a one hour a month schedule and no interest in the fundamental idea behind the content.

[Private Matters]

Trying not to make this too long, but let's run down a few quick points on WoW's difficulty.

There's a lot of talking the talk but not walking the walk presented in the Thread (not surprising, this Thread crops up every expansion and it's always the same mix of bullet points and weird presentation of how both sides have actual [sorry, Mods, don't bonk me Moana] mental retardation flowing into their veins via IV on a daylie basis.

Mythic Raiding is not hard. First and foremost, to both the people defending difficulty AND the people ceaselessly raking on the mild requirement for two working sets of eyes and half a brain: You are not World First Raiders. I am not a World First Raider, you are not a World First Raider. The Mythic Content you play, or on the flipside, at best, observe, is not the Mythic Content a majority of the minority that makes CE Guilds plays and beats. Most rotations, most priority lists for Classes are not hard. We're not looking at strictly static rotations that require insane upkeep or need to constantly be refitted to match the fight you are currently Progressing on a fundamental level, like in some of the other MMORPG's currently on the market (FF14 has a lot of Jobs that work off of strictly static rotations, ESO has both, with the static rotation being easy but still effective and dynamic WoW style rotations, which require a little more upkeep for a mild gain in DPS).

Fundamentally, playing your Class in WoW, inbetween all the resources available and the very basic concept of how things work, is not hard. While difficulty is subjective for sure, this is outside of the idea of subjective or objective difficulty. It is easy. It is very, very fucking easy to be effective on most Classes in WoW. Some could probably learn enough about their class to do basic CE Mythic Raiding, if they spent the time bitching and crying on MMOC actually .. learning what's there to learn instead.

Second, most CE Raiders over the course of a Tier do not play the original, hard versions of the Bosses. My guild is currently on Halondrus. In this Tier, this places us somewhere in the general WR 150-250 range, depending on when we kill it. We have no ranking goal and we just skipped a raid day because of IRL related noshows. Let me tell you, that the one remaining hard thing on Halondrus, compared to what we saw on WF Streams, is playing the bombs. A mechanic that at this point boils down to 1.) Not dying 2.) just kind of generally knowing rough times for when you want to swap the bombs.

The concept of consistency during Progression is still something that most Mythic Raid Leaders probably loose sleep over, because I can tell you half their rosters don't even know what they are doing and the Content still eventually falls. If you want to boil it down to numbers such as 1% and 99%, let me tell you that the difference between most of the supposed "1%" and the supposed "99%", is that the former spends their time halfheartedly trying to do something, rather than spending their time ceaselessly and insufferably bitching and whining into the vacuum of space, subsequently putting more time into said bitching than into actually trying something in the game for once.

If you are fine with not trying, you should probably not have much to bitch about and thus, for the sake of stating the obvious, probably aren't actually being adressed by this point or.. well, most of them, actually.

Every other mechanic, we have seen in some shape or form before. Beams of death going around a boss arena, isn't new. A spread mechanic, isn't new. A raidwide damage burn, is not new. This is raiding 101. Ladies and gentlemen: A "wall" boss... by the way.

Please go ahead and bring out the ages old excuse of "Elitism", or on the flipside, "BUT BUT BUT".

Noteworthy mentions of things nobody ever says in Raiding, since the birth of time, in MOST "Hardcore" guilds: "Oh sorry, I was greeding." "Ah, you know what, I don't care about my parse." "Oh,... I fucked up, I'll do better."

If you have some mythical (no pun intended) idea of Raiding in this Game being so hard to grasp, politely and respectfully: Fuck off and at least be genuine about your agenda here. You don't want to learn, you don't want to spend a single moment using a brain cell, otherwise you would. And that's fine.


The cosmetic angle is also a fair point to make, but let's be real here as well. While it is a fair point to make, some people wouldn't be sitting here (and some definitely would) complaining about Mythic only Tier cosmetics or animations, if any of the actual casual content in the game actually had halfway decent cosmetic rewards. But please, let's not keep this farce going when we're slowly but surely approaching the 20 years of WoW and still come up with shit like the content needing nerfs, when you know perfectly well that you are coping hard, when you say you could definitely do it and still sit here not doing anything. "What, I'll have to farm the transmog next expansion instead? The world is ending in fire and flame. WEE WOO WAAH." A very, very thrilling discussion, I'm sure.


Bringing Elden Ring into the discussion doesn't do anything either. Talking about Elden Ring being a PR success is the funniest take yet. Souls games are souls games. If you don't like what they offer and the game is still too hard with Summons, overleveling and everything, the game is not for you. Get the hint or keep wasting your time complaining about it, if something in a game not being for you is a huge deal or problem that needs fixing, I'd try to get your ego and narcissism in check first and foremost. It has no relevance in a WoW Discussion about difficulty. The difference between WoW and Elden Ring that fundamentally makes the point moot, is that both the Devs and the Players of Souls Games know what they want to offer and consume, respectively and have done so for way too long for people to still keep bringing it up. It's getting fucking weird.


Touching on another point, that Moana sort of made. I wonder who here remembers the time (Ghostcrawler, I believe?) a WoW Dev straight up and very clearly said, that the reason they were moving away from evergreen content and systems, was because it was unsustainable to keep adding and adding and adding things onto the Game every expansion at the rate everything was going. It's not like people were particularly fine with them pruning and reshuffling things either, to accomodate new additions, especially on the Class side. Every single time, the forums got flooded with bitchy whiny idiots, because they lost the button nobody but them pressed once in a blue moon or because they somehow managed to get attached to that one square on their bloated ass action bars. Pray tell, which portion of the playerbase generally runs to the forums whenever something new comes around, since time immemorial, and then ask yourselves "why the fuck nobody is listening at Blizzard".


The game doesn't need shit in terms of difficulty adjustments. What the game needs, plain and simple, is some deterministic additions to the reward structure and a return to offering the little, fun things you can do on tight schedules. The problem isn't that existing content is too hard, the problem is that the people who don't want to engage with the "hard" content, have nothing feasibly meaningful to do outside of that content to progress their characters properly, which means that the usual whiny, bitchy crowd runs around aimlessly, calling for the only content there is, to get nerfed so they can still suck at doing it just a little more effectively.

Adding more options for Normal-to heroic iLvL gearing from casual-oriented variety content, benefits everybody, at the end of the day.

Nerfing harder content doesn't benefit anybody, because the people doing it and that it's designed for, get fucked and the people calling for the nerfs will keep bitching and moaning until the content is irrelevant, whilst still not touching it with a mile-long prod stick if they can avoid it, whilst simultaneously gloating over the fact that it's worthless now, because their little e-wiener finally isn't getting hurt by the notion that the Content exists, just as, ironically, people seem to get hurt by the fact that another Souls-like hypetrain release isn't catering to their needs.

Hint: With both, the content exists exactly for people that probably aren't "You", and no that is not a infringement on unwritten cosmic law pertaining to the planet sized ego, of little casual dude on a one hour a month schedule and no interest in the fundamental idea behind the content.

I literally made an account on this website for the first time in 17 years just to say this is a great take, but just for the sake of differing views, I would say for people like me, I don't want mythic/heroic content to be easier, I want the barrier for entry to be less steep. I don't have time to farm up reps for 1% dps increases anymore, I gotta do the best I can do with the time I have. Now before I was happy with just getting AotC but the challenge itself is the arbitrary time gates just for getting catch up items like the Unity Memory or 239 conduits for example has made it literally cost weeks of play just to get to a level where I can even start looking into harder content if I wanted to.

[facefist]

It's a bit funny that he took all that time to write the post, which is completely thwarted by one stupid assumption; assumption that he thinks the game is created based on what the developers want to make the game into instead of what they (or the management) think is going to sell. Truth is we have no idea how much emphasis is put into the need to fit their vision into making the game as profitable as possible.

This is a bad outcome for developers and players. While there is obviously nothing wrong with making a product for a wide audience, but if we lived in a world where that was the only thing every company did, there would be no restaurants in your town except fast food, no books except romance and thrillers, no movies except billion dollar blockbusters (we’re already close to this and it is a horrible phenomenon that is depriving us of amazing content), and so on. Books actually remain one of the best forms of creative and interesting content precisely because writers are able to focus on niche audiences.

Don't talk business if you don't understand business. It's not as simple as "everyone would do X because if it caters to the largest audience, it is also most profitable". In the largest audiences there is also most competition which often leads into worse profits. Niche is sometimes extremely profitable, and usually the profits are much easier to get. It's harder to beat McDonalds in the fast food sector than creating a restaurant that doesn't try to compete in the largest restaurant sector.

Niche sector companies are not for the most part doing it for the love of their product, but because they think they are better off working in niche than against mass competition.

[Dismayxz]

ESO, SWTOR and FF14 are all easier than wow, leveling and endgame - that's 3 MMOs right there

Some quests in WoW you can certainly die/ fail if you're a newer player - some of the icecrown quests come to mind

Not to mention in ESO and SWTOR you can easily solo group content/quests, you really can't in WoW unless you're playing a specific or overgeared character

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WoW is not a hard game if you are capable of the most basic form of problem solving, the most difficult solo content was the mage tower and mechanically they were all very simple

The difficulty comes from getting 20 people not to make a single mistake over a 5-15 minute fight

If you could solo mythic raids it would be significantly eaiser for obvious reasons

Can't speak about SWTOR, but at the peak, I do think ESO and FF14 require mastery a lot more than the raw pull count difficulty in WoW. You can brute force a lot of Encounters and they get nerfed a lot over the course of a tier. Rarely see Encounters in ESO or FF get hard nerfs (in FF, Echo kind of does that on it's own when it kicks in). The current content in both has the same sort of "Don't make a mistake" idea, but it requires a lot more attention to do things, especially because those games work very differently rotationally and in terms of addon involvement.

Completely agree with the latter half.

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Ok, so it's the usual "WoW should be hard and not cater to filthy casuals".

Guess what, WoW was successful exactly because all that "filthy casual" playerbase paid a sub and generated millions of revenue. Nowadays, people stick to a agme one month then jump on the next new fad, so WoW won't ever be as it was. Just look at its transition towards seasonal gameplay and competitive game modes only a fraction of the players actually have any interest in.

If anything, WoW should just be easier on a broad level, with optional very hard content. M+ model is actually really good, you have a sensibly but not terribly difficult threashold with the 15s that give you gear, then it's all skills. Raids should be more like that.


The real issue is the Blizzard have actually "engineered" a playerbase they don't want and are unable to manage. Everything in the game is solved in a matter of seconds, everyone only cares about numbers and perfomance because it'sjust a paraphrase for "gimme the easiest way to win" and people just go for the path of elast resistance every single time. WFR raid comps are not special, they're just mathematically tailored to be the most effective - it's literally playingwith excel files. And the others parrot this because "it's the best way to play the game".

I fully agree that you cannot possibly cater to multiple playerbases. So either double down on the hard/competitive one and live on the small fraction of people that stays, or change the game design to appeal again bigger masses. To me it really doesn't matter - if i like WoW i play it, and stop when i don't like it anymore.

Just, the constant crusades about how the game should be designed are just boring. The game isn't going to change in any way until it means getting more money.

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They're not strictly difficult, they're "overdesigned". It's a strongarm competition between devs and addons, where the first try to make mechanics that are not easily "solvable", and the latter try to automate every player based decision for the sake of performance.

Agree with the earlier half, on why the game was successful and the ending of your post. The take about WFR Raid Comps is kinda meh, considering people like Max have come forward and admitted (I believe it was after SoD's Race?) that they would have been better off running the best players on their best picks instead of going for the mathematically best compositions.