I like challenge in my video games because it makes winning an accomplishment. That's the issue I have with MMORPG's. I haven't played MMORPG's in years, because of this lack of challenge while leveling up. In old MMORPG's, the leveling up process WAS more challenging. In modern MMORPG's, I can press any abilities and in most cases just auto-attack and I win. That's not satisfying. It's boring.
In old MMORPG's, you could increase the challenge by tackling mobs higher than your level, whether in a group or solo. In DAOC, we would find a pack of enemies with decent respawn rates and were "red to purple" con. When unable to find groups, you could try to take on yellow to red con enemies and work out builds that could handle that.
A lot of the better MMORPG's that are still around with a healthy population has a scaling mechanic in the world, taking away the ability to challenge yourself without having to gimp yourself to do it. The only challenge found in MMORPG's now, come in the form of "group" content in the form of open world bosses, or instanced group and raid content.
Since I have a career, a familiy, and other responsibilities, I'm unable to commit to raiding schedules and the community has gotten so bad in various games that PUGing isn't an attractive option either. So I stick to single player games now.
To flip this around, I don't understand why anyone would enjoy a game where there's no risk to losing. What's the point in deciding on a class and build for your character, and working to get better gear if not to test them with challenging encounters. Without a challenge, who cares which skills you choose, or talents, and who cares about upgrading your gear?
I also enjoy slow rolling content in the game and their stories. I'm enjoying Outriders right now and the ability to scale the world difficulty to my liking. Previous to this I was playing Elden Ring.
Of course, as we grow older and experience more of life, our perception of what is an achievable challenge changes. What we found challenging 20 years ago, we find easy today. This is one of the real problems with the stagnation of the industry - for those of us who've been around for decades, the old challenges are no longer challenging, we needs developers to take the next step, add more complexity, depth and difficulty.....but they aren't doing so. Everything feels easy to us, which is why we end up having to create our own challenges, like soloing group content, deliberately gimping ourselves with crap gear, or focusing on PvP.
But MMORPG's have also gotten easier. In older MMORPG's, you could not auto-attack an enemy of equal or higher level to your character and win. You also needed to worry about agro. In MMORPG's today, you don't die while leveling up, because you can auto-attack and win without any worries. If you use your skills, you can tackle groups of enemies without worries.
Scaling is part of the problem, as is the developers catering their world content to the lowest common denominator of players. Without scaling, a player who desires a challenge can at least fight higher level enemies.
Of course, as we grow older and experience more of life, our perception of what is an achievable challenge changes. What we found challenging 20 years ago, we find easy today. This is one of the real problems with the stagnation of the industry - for those of us who've been around for decades, the old challenges are no longer challenging, we needs developers to take the next step, add more complexity, depth and difficulty.....but they aren't doing so. Everything feels easy to us, which is why we end up having to create our own challenges, like soloing group content, deliberately gimping ourselves with crap gear, or focusing on PvP.
But MMORPG's have also gotten easier. In older MMORPG's, you could not auto-attack an enemy of equal or higher level to your character and win. You also needed to worry about agro. In MMORPG's today, you don't die while leveling up, because you can auto-attack and win without any worries. If you use your skills, you can tackle groups of enemies without worries.
Scaling is part of the problem, as is the developers catering their world content to the lowest common denominator of players. Without scaling, a player who desires a challenge can at least fight higher level enemies.
This is the core issue I see hardcore players bemoan: the world doesn't feel nearly as dangerous or exhilarating when it's filled with easy content.
Absolutely, those folks could just skip all of those overland zones in ESO. But why would they play a game where they have to ignore the majority of the game world to enjoy it? Specifically a genre built around the idea that you inhabit a game world with a bunch of other folks? That doesn't make a lot of sense to them. Rightfully so.
Both casual and hardcore players criticize and insult one another, but it really is the pot calling the kettle black.
I agree with most people here. A challenge is required in order to improve. If there is nothing to improve, why do we keep doing it? It will be fun to a certain point, but after some reflection, a lot of people will question what they are doing.
Better at what?
Legit, I don't see people getting all flex about getting better at Candyland.
It's a game, unless it is a E-Sport game, that you can legit make money off of, it will not give you any serviceable real life skills. You play it for the sheer fun of it, nothing more.
So again, I don't see the obsession with needing more and more challenge.
The skill your developing and practicing in video games is "problem solving." When grouping, you also develop your communication skills, teamwork skills, and other soft skills that help you overcome challenges. When unable to overcome a challenge on your own and you hit the net to figure things out, you're practicing researching skills. When you're the group leader, you're developing the above and leadership skills. Learning how to tackle challenges in the quickest way possible develops your skills in multi-tasking, efficiency, and all of the above skills. You can add the skill of patience and perseverance too. Games are, or used to be, puzzles that you exercised your brain to figure out.
I use all of the above skills in my personal life and my work life and make very good money doing it.
Some of you guys really don't seem to get the fundamental reason why overland content is so easy: players don't come with a generic set of capabilities.
What is mind numbing easy for some of us is not experienced that way by everyone.
The logical developer response to that is segregation of content leaving the generic content that every player of all capabilities has to go through tuned to the lowest common denominator.
We can quibble about how long it takes to unlock content that is challenging and that would be a different design consideration but it's idiotic to bash generic content design for being too easy especially in games that allow you to choose more challenging content right from the get go.
Yes the generic overland content in ESO is dead simple but you can also choose to head to Craglorn right after the tutorial if a challenge is what you want while leveling.
What I find amazing in this thread is the elitist POV that all content should be tuned to competent player capabilities and fuck everyone else.
ESO is primarily a questing game. It makes sense that players would want to experience the content in the order of release, much the same way players want to play the first game of a series before their sequels or watch the first movie of a series before their sequels. I was unable to get to Craglorn, because I grew too bored with the game due to how easy the overland content was, despite liking the storylines in each zone. I wager that most players who want a challenge AND care about the story will want to play through the quests and zones the way the developers intended, but want some risk of failure.
I refuse to believe that players old enough pay and play these games don't have the intelligence to solve basic challenges overland mobs pose to the player, if there were any. I'm talking basic things like pattern recognition, and reading their abilities and using them. At least in the USA, most people were solving far more complex problems in middle school.
I think the issue with modern gamers isn't a lack of ability to learn to overcome challenges, moreso it's the lack of will to persevere or have the patience to learn. That's not a behavior pattern developers should be catering to. It offers no value to personal development.
As a "guide", if you will, I ask: Are boss fights with telegraphing moves more, or less difficult then boss fights without?
A friend of mine that doesnt play FF14 complained that the raid boss fights in FF14 were too easy because you just move out of the red circles and you win. I showed him some of raid boss fight and he then complained that there was too much going on.
Ive generally noticed that MMOs that use telegraphed boss attacks are more difficult than MMOs that dont use them.
Was DAoC really a challenge though? It was a grind for hours with a group of guildies to level up, but not really any challenge. Only challenge I remember in DAoC (EU) was playing as a Hibbie because the Mids & Albs out numbered you 3 to 1. In modern MMOs a challenge is playing with one hand tied behind your back, and some will still spoon feed you!
No trials. No tricks. No traps. No EU-RP server. NO THANKS!
Most MMOs without level scaling have always allowed you to choose to move to a higher level zone earlier than when the quests lead you there if you so wish. That way of tuning the difficulty to whatever you like is as old as the hills.
Well, yes and some punish you hard for daring to do so. Not because of death penalty but because it goes entirely against the whole game.
For example in BDO, you can try more challenging areas (for fun) but doing so punishes you in term of farming efficiency which is all the game is about.
So, you do it for science, and then go quickly back on the rails.
So what is it you'd want to see BDO be like?
I mean... I played that too and it's not exactly quest based. From what I recall you get very little XP from quests. You level by picking a spot to grind. Hell fightes over choice grind spots is what drives most of the PvP in that game lol.
So how does a pick a spot to grind game go "against the whole game" when you choose to grind at a harder spot?
In fact quests allow you to level up very efficiently in the levels 55-61. There are some very well made guides about it.
In BDO, grinding is the most efficient way to progress. This is why you need to see the group of mobs disappear as quickly as you can. If it is not happening, you are wasting time. And time is all of the essence, since to maximize all this shit, you grind under a time limited booster. If you don't, you're doing it wrong. Dedicated BDO players do grind at least for an hour.
So the grinder challenge is not about difficulty, but optimization.
And in BDO, there are basically two main categories of players, the ones that live in the power race (grinders) and the life-skillers who enjoy chat pvp.
I agree with most people here. A challenge is required in order to improve. If there is nothing to improve, why do we keep doing it? It will be fun to a certain point, but after some reflection, a lot of people will question what they are doing.
Better at what?
Legit, I don't see people getting all flex about getting better at Candyland.
It's a game, unless it is a E-Sport game, that you can legit make money off of, it will not give you any serviceable real life skills. You play it for the sheer fun of it, nothing more.
So again, I don't see the obsession with needing more and more challenge.
The skill your developing and practicing in video games is "problem solving." When grouping, you also develop your communication skills, teamwork skills, and other soft skills that help you overcome challenges. When unable to overcome a challenge on your own and you hit the net to figure things out, you're practicing researching skills. When you're the group leader, you're developing the above and leadership skills. Learning how to tackle challenges in the quickest way possible develops your skills in multi-tasking, efficiency, and all of the above skills. You can add the skill of patience and perseverance too. Games are, or used to be, puzzles that you exercised your brain to figure out.
I use all of the above skills in my personal life and my work life and make very good money doing it.
Eh? This might be a me thing, but I use most of those skills playing Fallout Shelter as well, I mean, the only one I don't use is the Teamwork, and to be honest, if grouping was fun, or enjoyable, people would do it organically.
The reason most people don't group, IMHO, is because in most MMO's, "teamwork" boils down to little more than dealing with assholes to get loot, and, for me, I don't even put up with assholes at work, and I feel bad for people that have to deal with assholes as part of their workday, and I bet we both will be damned if we want to deal with them in our game time.
I am somewhat lucky that I have a static of close friends, but we play shit like Uno and Scribble together, so, challenge is not needed to get us to play together, we just enjoy each others company.
Now, if you have people you like playing with, legit, challenge is not what gets you to group.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
If an MMO allows you to go for decently challenging content nearly from the start, rather than having to slog through massive amounts of stupidly easy stuff and make it all the way to endgame before you can see any semblance of a challenge, then that would be one thing. But most of them don't, at least apart from creating artificial challenges such as by not bothering to equip gear.
Instead, you often get real-time combat that would still be easy if you alternate between closing your eyes for five seconds and opening them for five seconds as you play. I'm not buying that that's much of a challenge for anyone.
Most MMOs without level scaling have always allowed you to choose to move to a higher level zone earlier than when the quests lead you there if you so wish. That way of tuning the difficulty to whatever you like is as old as the hills.
Hell I remember doing that in LotRO at a very low level simply because I wanted to see Rivendell long before the main quest sent me there. I fought what I could along the way but mostly just ran away from red or purple con mobs.
I get that if you want to play by following quests you're out of luck and are stuck with easy mode but even in the old days when overland content was not as easy as it is these days running a few dungeons was enough to overlevel you to the point where you actually needed to skip quests because the mobs conned grey and gave you 0 XP. I clearly remember that being the case during the WotLK days in WOW where I had to do a lot of skipping.
Level scaled games like ESO are a special case but even there they have the hard zone I have mentioned several times, Craglorn, if overland challenge while you quest and explore is what you want.
As to what you buy or don't buy about what some players find a challenge I couldn't give less of a shit. I see people die to extremely easy overland content in ESO routinely.
That's exactly the sort of artificial challenges that I mentioned in my post that you replied to. It kind of works, but it comes at quite a cost. Among other things:
1) Because you're doing something unintended, things can break in ways that neither you nor the developers anticipated, making the game feel very janky.
2) You'll progress much more slowly than intended because everything takes much longer to do.
3) You'll have to skip much or even most of the game's content. This is especially a deal-breaker for people like me who like doing content for the sake of doing content, not just for the sake of progression.
4) Grouping is completely out of the question as other people aren't going to do the same thing. Quite the opposite: people will show up and one-shot mobs that you were fighting, thinking that they're helping you.
In Vanilla WoW, I once tried to see how high above my level of a mob I could kill. I managed to kill one 7 levels above me. It took 7 minutes to wear it down. I found one eight levels above me that I probably could have killed and several minutes into the battle before someone higher level came along and killed it for me, even though I was in a far out of the way area. Based on how fast its lifebar was decreasing, killing one mob 8 levels above me probably would have taken about 17 minutes.
Making everything really slow is why I hated the Dragon Nest approach to difficulty scaling. Yes, you can make content hard by turning the difficulty way up. It also means that boss battles that have about 20 seconds worth of interesting content take five minutes to slog through.
Perhaps there is some challenge there, but it's not fun to go so slow. And ultimately, the reason to play computer games is for fun. Having a moderate challenge is a means, not an end.
So, Again, I don't get this cry for more Challenge, when every player I have ever met, was always trying to make the game easier.
It is the developers' job to provide a challenge and the players' job to try to beat it.
Grinding and farming are not challenging, for the reasons you describe. But I've long hated grinding and farming, and stayed away from most of the early MMORPGs precisely because they were so heavy on it. Something that is challenging to do once probably isn't still an interesting challenge the fiftieth time in a row that a character does it.
As a "guide", if you will, I ask: Are boss fights with telegraphing moves more, or less difficult then boss fights without?
PS: I recall a post by BadSpock long, long ago that reminded us all that videos games stemmed from Arcade Games that wqnted you to lose to spend another quarter to. Video Games now (consoles to PC) want players to succeed and are programmed that way. Arcade Game players would brag how little (fewest amount of quarters) it took to "beat the game."
What do players want now?
I've rarely liked boss fights much. That's not just about MMORPGs, even. I didn't like fighting Bowser, either, and most of the NES and SNES games that I really liked didn't even have a notion of a boss fight.
I think it's really dumb to have a game have you spend most of your time fighting trash mobs that aren't intended to be interesting, with the real focus on an occasional boss fight. Whatever you're going to ask players to spend most of their time in the game doing, make it interesting.
So, Again, I don't get this cry for more Challenge, when every player I have ever met, was always trying to make the game easier.
It is the developers' job to provide a challenge and the players' job to try to beat it.
Grinding and farming are not challenging, for the reasons you describe. But I've long hated grinding and farming, and stayed away from most of the early MMORPGs precisely because they were so heavy on it. Something that is challenging to do once probably isn't still an interesting challenge the fiftieth time in a row that a character does it.
While this is true, MMO's by their nature are often grind games without end, not single player games that loaded with once and done mechanics.
So it makes even less sense to desire challenge, as almost all content in an MMO, is in fact Grind Content.
I mean, GW2, has this personal story thing, which feels very single player, but it is also a story content, so it's not a challenge. But everything else, from killing mobs in a field, to doing mythic raid bosses, becomes grind content.
So it makes even less sense to want a challenge in an MMO.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
So, Again, I don't get this cry for more Challenge, when every player I have ever met, was always trying to make the game easier.
It is the developers' job to provide a challenge and the players' job to try to beat it.
Grinding and farming are not challenging, for the reasons you describe. But I've long hated grinding and farming, and stayed away from most of the early MMORPGs precisely because they were so heavy on it. Something that is challenging to do once probably isn't still an interesting challenge the fiftieth time in a row that a character does it.
While this is true, MMO's by their nature are often grind games without end, not single player games that loaded with once and done mechanics.
So it makes even less sense to desire challenge, as almost all content in an MMO, is in fact Grind Content.
I mean, GW2, has this personal story thing, which feels very single player, but it is also a story content, so it's not a challenge. But everything else, from killing mobs in a field, to doing mythic raid bosses, becomes grind content.
So it makes even less sense to want a challenge in an MMO.
A certain level of challenge is necessary for folks to enter a state of flow while grinding. If they're complaining that content is too easy, then it's likely too easy for them to reliably enjoy it by immersing themselves completely. This can easily be tested by, say, clicking a mechanical pencil over and over, then playing a musical instrument you're familiar with, and seeing which more easily allows you to lose yourself in the activity.
Devs want you to hit that state playing their games as much as possible. It would make sense they would want to tune difficulty accordingly.
It's always amusing for me to read people's discussion of "challenge" when it comes to PvE content.
To me, the only challenge comes from attacking a human opponent, who can do things like learn my behavior, adopt and change their own behavior which in turn will encourage me to seek new strategy in order to defeat that human opponent. THAT is challenge.
Everything else, like bashing any kind of dumb pre-scripted AI bosses, regardless of how many attack buttons I have to press on my toolbars or what ilvl gear I must wear or the HP values and DPS values programmers assign to that boss, is just tedious, boring waste of time, and I wish I could waste as little time as possible on killing such pre-programmed monsters so I can get a reward that interests me and can move onto more entertaining things. Meaning I would be perfectly happy if each and every pre-scripted AI enemy would take me 10 second to defeat them instead of bashing buttons for 1000 seconds while moving in a pre-defined pattern to avoid pre-scripted attack pattern of those dumb AI enemies. That's just my own preference, of course ;-)
It's always amusing for me to read people's discussion of "challenge" when it comes to PvE content.
To me, the only challenge comes from attacking a human opponent, who can do things like learn my behavior, adopt and change their own behavior which in turn will encourage me to seek new strategy in order to defeat that human opponent. THAT is challenge.
Everything else, like bashing any kind of dumb pre-scripted AI bosses, regardless of how many attack buttons I have to press on my toolbars or what ilvl gear I must wear or the HP values and DPS values programmers assign to that boss, is just tedious, boring waste of time, and I wish I could waste as little time as possible on killing such pre-programmed monsters so I can get a reward that interests me and can move onto more entertaining things. Meaning I would be perfectly happy if each and every pre-scripted AI enemy would take me 10 second to defeat them instead of bashing buttons for 1000 seconds while moving in a pre-defined pattern to avoid pre-scripted attack pattern of those dumb AI enemies. That's just my own preference, of course ;-)
You're right, PVP can be more challenging and offers longevity to a game that has it. That's a reason I enjoyed DAOC for as long as I did.
There's varying degrees and different types of challenges. I enjoy having to learn a PvE enemy and over time being able to master it by learning their movesets, adjusting my build and gear loadout. I don't expect every enemy in MMORPG's to be like Dark Souls bosses, but I also think enemies should be a threat to make the moment-to-moment gameplay engaging. In WoW, while leveling up, if I click auto-attack on an enemy and walk away to take a bathroom break, the enemy will be dead when I return, and I would be at full health when I return. The only thing skills and abilities do in MMORPG's these days is to just speed up the inevitable end for a mob. It never had a chance to beat you, not even close. In the beginning, when MMORPG's were new, you would die quite quickly if you just tackled a mob equal to your level solo and didn't pay attention. Even when paying attention, you'd have to stop and rest to regain health and stamina after every 1 to 2 mobs you killed.
I haven't found PvP to be that entertaining since Warhammer Online, except for League of Legends. Players have ruined that over the years as have developers by putting so much power into one character's kit. I don't think a character should be strong at everything. They should need a group to flesh out their weaknesses and PvP should involve more group strategy, like in DAOC. I loved WAR where even tanks had a roll in PvP, such as taunting and knocking players off ledges and such.
It's always amusing for me to read people's discussion of "challenge" when it comes to PvE content.
To me, the only challenge comes from attacking a human opponent, who can do things like learn my behavior, adopt and change their own behavior which in turn will encourage me to seek new strategy in order to defeat that human opponent. THAT is challenge.
Everything else, like bashing any kind of dumb pre-scripted AI bosses, regardless of how many attack buttons I have to press on my toolbars or what ilvl gear I must wear or the HP values and DPS values programmers assign to that boss, is just tedious, boring waste of time, and I wish I could waste as little time as possible on killing such pre-programmed monsters so I can get a reward that interests me and can move onto more entertaining things. Meaning I would be perfectly happy if each and every pre-scripted AI enemy would take me 10 second to defeat them instead of bashing buttons for 1000 seconds while moving in a pre-defined pattern to avoid pre-scripted attack pattern of those dumb AI enemies. That's just my own preference, of course ;-)
Good point, I mean, eventually every scripted encounter will become trivial once you learn the mechanics, so the only actual challenge comes from initial learning of the mechanics, and with group content, finding people willing to play with you as you learn the ropes, once you learned the encounter, then the grind sets in and the original difficulty is meaningless.
Which makes even less sense to hear people chant about how they need difficulty in MMO's.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
It's not meaningless if you had fun. Isn't that what gaming is about? Why is any challenge worth overcoming if you'll just eventually master it and move on? It's ultimately meaningless to somebody, but it doesn't matter what other people think about the challenge you overcame. What matters is what, you, the person overcoming that challenge thinks.
I think it's a waste of time playing games that pose no challenge whatsoever, so I don't. But I don't think it's fair that the genre was made for one type of player and then developers kicked those players to the curb when they realized making braindead games were more profitable. I've spoken with my wallet and haven't invested in a MMORPG for years. We'll see what the future holds.
It's not meaningless if you had fun. Isn't that what gaming is about? Why is any challenge worth overcoming if you'll just eventually master it and move on? It's ultimately meaningless to somebody, but it doesn't matter what other people think about the challenge you overcame. What matters is what, you, the person overcoming that challenge thinks.
I think it's a waste of time playing games that pose no challenge whatsoever, so I don't. But I don't think it's fair that the genre was made for one type of player and then developers kicked those players to the curb when they realized making braindead games were more profitable. I've spoken with my wallet and haven't invested in a MMORPG for years. We'll see what the future holds.
If you are not spending money, you are silent. All companies follow the money, that means if you are not spending any, you are not a target demographic to them.
Simple as that.
All MMO's are looking at the people that spend money, and trying to find ways to get them to spend more.
Sitting in the corner, crying that you won't spend one cent till you get your way, has zero effect, and just gets them to move on to the person that says "I like this game, and I spend money on it, but I would spend more if you made it more accessible" and they really tend to pay attention to people who "I used to spend a lot of money on this game, but I don't like what you did, so I am going to go and spend my money on this other game"
But.. "I haven't spent money on MMO's in years.. LOL, No Dis, but why should any Dev bother with you?
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
It's not meaningless if you had fun. Isn't that what gaming is about? Why is any challenge worth overcoming if you'll just eventually master it and move on? It's ultimately meaningless to somebody, but it doesn't matter what other people think about the challenge you overcame. What matters is what, you, the person overcoming that challenge thinks.
I think it's a waste of time playing games that pose no challenge whatsoever, so I don't. But I don't think it's fair that the genre was made for one type of player and then developers kicked those players to the curb when they realized making braindead games were more profitable. I've spoken with my wallet and haven't invested in a MMORPG for years. We'll see what the future holds.
If you are not spending money, you are silent. All companies follow the money, that means if you are not spending any, you are not a target demographic to them.
Simple as that.
All MMO's are looking at the people that spend money, and trying to find ways to get them to spend more.
Sitting in the corner, crying that you won't spend one cent till you get your way, has zero effect, and just gets them to move on to the person that says "I like this game, and I spend money on it, but I would spend more if you made it more accessible" and they really tend to pay attention to people who "I used to spend a lot of money on this game, but I don't like what you did, so I am going to go and spend my money on this other game"
But.. "I haven't spent money on MMO's in years.. LOL, No Dis, but why should any Dev bother with you?
I have 40+ games on Steam I haven't touched, and more on my wishlist. I'm married, with a newborn on the way. I have a good career. I have plenty of stuff to do outside where I live and places left to explore in our country, and others. I'm not worried about whether a developer thinks about me or not. It'd be nice if developers still made games for my demographic, and it seems that some MMORPG's are in the works for my demographic, but we'll see.
Also, companies just don't follow the money, they're also trying to reach those that have spent money in the past and those who never have spent money. I've bought every MMORPG game that's had a sticker price that has released. I'm sure there's many others like me that gives games a chance, which shows that we exist, but don't stick with them, which tells the developers they missed the mark with us. If they choose to take our feedback and create a game for us or make their games more attractive to us, then great. If not, then there's other things in life than playing MMORPG's that are worth spending my time on instead.
My theory is by people asking for a challenge they are indirectly asking for new content cuz they are growing bored of whats currently in the game from a physiological aspect pretty sure I'm right considering half the people who ask for a challenge then get it bitch right afterword's about getting what they want
Challenge to me is just changing the environment and game mechanics for each boss or dungeon and making it so its not so mundane maybe a few traps here and there
Even that gets repetitious and much easier once you've killed the same boss or done the same dungeon a few times.
I think you hit the nail on the head about player gripes though. Boredom is the root of most of the griping and it's seen most often and more viciously in MMOs simply because they are games that get played for years, not weeks.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
You know, when I started playing MMO's, it was with EQ1 and, truth be told, the combat was amazingly simplistic, you hit attack, maybe used an ability here and there, as they came up, it was slow paced, You had to wait for the pullers to bring the mob to the group, you had to stop and rest, allow the casters to get back mana, all the fast paced words said were macro's, often linked to spells or abilities, so people would know what was going on.
and then, we chatted while inbetween things.
Today, I see people talk about rotations, skill stacking, and it's much faster paced, with the expectation that you will be playing With Voice while on Discord, and yet I see people talk of needing Challenge.
Where does this come from?
Honestly, I play a game for fun. I enjoy the journey, and I enjoy the rewards, but, I don't get this whole idea that these games are not challenging enough, as they seem to gotten overall more challenging.
So, what is with this urge? Like do people not have enough normal frustration and trial in their everyday life, that need to add frustration to their game time? Or is something else?
Also, what exactly is challenge to you?
My theory is by people asking for a challenge they are indirectly asking for new content cuz they are growing bored of whats currently in the game from a physiological aspect pretty sure I'm right considering half the people who ask for a challenge then get it bitch right afterword's about getting what they want
Challenge to me is just changing the environment and game mechanics for each boss or dungeon and making it so its not so mundane maybe a few traps here and there
No, that's not it at all. I played WoW for a while in Vanilla, then quit. I tried to pick up WoW again after Battle for Azeroth. I quit because it was stupidly easy. There had been massive amounts of new content added in the intervening 12+ years, but nearly all of it was tuned to be so ridiculously easy as to be dreadfully boring. Parts of the endgame where an exception to this, but I'd have to slog through massive amounts of garbage in order to reach it, and I wasn't willing to do that. So I quit again.
What I wanted was not new content, but interesting content. Adding massive amounts of content tuned to not provide any real challenge was actually worse than adding nothing at all, as it meant a huge pile of misery in order to reach the small portion of the game that the developers still cared about.
What I wanted was content that was challenging enough to be interesting. Oddly enough, the first several levels actually had some of it for some classes, until you got the ability to heal yourself. But from level 10 or so onward, it was just awful as far as the eye could see.
If WoW were to offer something akin to LotRO's landscape difficulty, with the ability to tune content yourself to be a meaningful challenge, I'd give it another go. But so long as I know up front that most of the time that I could spend on the game would be tremendously boring, there's no point.
Sure, I could create an artificial challenge of sorts by not equipping gear or whatever. But getting and equipping better gear is part of the fun. I want monsters to be hard enough to have a meaningful shot at killing me in spite of equipping the best gear I can get my hands on.
Part of the problem with "new" content in MMOs too is how much of the new content is bringing new factors to the game loops? If the general mobs don't require anything different, and the bosses are the only things with one or two gimmicks to learn, then the familiarity sets in very fast. It puts a big weight on trying to reinvent things every time, and that's a demand that's not easy nor often met. (edit, typo)
I do enjoy challenge in the context of problem solving for new or unknown factors, which generally has a pretty abrupt plateau from most games having static AI behaviors and ability sets. Even PvP gets crippled by that when you don't have flexible factors to how people match up against each other.
On the end of challenge, always wanted to see some game take the approach to mobs where they have a base behavior set, and then a randomized modifier.
You could generally expect mobs of the same type to behave the same, save for some variance to how aggressive vs cowardly they may be (go for nonstop attacks versus back off to call for help), or even adding different weapons or skills into the mix that are not part of their base kit and behavior set.
You know, when I started playing MMO's, it was with EQ1 and, truth be told, the combat was amazingly simplistic, you hit attack, maybe used an ability here and there, as they came up, it was slow paced, You had to wait for the pullers to bring the mob to the group, you had to stop and rest, allow the casters to get back mana, all the fast paced words said were macro's, often linked to spells or abilities, so people would know what was going on.
and then, we chatted while inbetween things.
Today, I see people talk about rotations, skill stacking, and it's much faster paced, with the expectation that you will be playing With Voice while on Discord, and yet I see people talk of needing Challenge.
Where does this come from?
Honestly, I play a game for fun. I enjoy the journey, and I enjoy the rewards, but, I don't get this whole idea that these games are not challenging enough, as they seem to gotten overall more challenging.
So, what is with this urge? Like do people not have enough normal frustration and trial in their everyday life, that need to add frustration to their game time? Or is something else?
Also, what exactly is challenge to you?
My theory is by people asking for a challenge they are indirectly asking for new content cuz they are growing bored of whats currently in the game from a physiological aspect pretty sure I'm right considering half the people who ask for a challenge then get it bitch right afterword's about getting what they want
Challenge to me is just changing the environment and game mechanics for each boss or dungeon and making it so its not so mundane maybe a few traps here and there
No, that's not it at all. I played WoW for a while in Vanilla, then quit. I tried to pick up WoW again after Battle for Azeroth. I quit because it was stupidly easy. There had been massive amounts of new content added in the intervening 12+ years, but nearly all of it was tuned to be so ridiculously easy as to be dreadfully boring. Parts of the endgame where an exception to this, but I'd have to slog through massive amounts of garbage in order to reach it, and I wasn't willing to do that. So I quit again.
What I wanted was not new content, but interesting content. Adding massive amounts of content tuned to not provide any real challenge was actually worse than adding nothing at all, as it meant a huge pile of misery in order to reach the small portion of the game that the developers still cared about.
What I wanted was content that was challenging enough to be interesting. Oddly enough, the first several levels actually had some of it for some classes, until you got the ability to heal yourself. But from level 10 or so onward, it was just awful as far as the eye could see.
If WoW were to offer something akin to LotRO's landscape difficulty, with the ability to tune content yourself to be a meaningful challenge, I'd give it another go. But so long as I know up front that most of the time that I could spend on the game would be tremendously boring, there's no point.
Sure, I could create an artificial challenge of sorts by not equipping gear or whatever. But getting and equipping better gear is part of the fun. I want monsters to be hard enough to have a meaningful shot at killing me in spite of equipping the best gear I can get my hands on.
So you want to get killed repeatedly while grinding?
That sounds, somewhat wrong. I mean, in GW2, they have things like Pocket Raptors, very easy to kill mobs, that gang attack and do a solid amount of damage, so if you don't kill them first, and by that, I mean, fast enough so they can't get a jump attack on you, they will kill you.
I can't imagine anyone wanting the whole leveling experience to be like that.
In fact, for me, I was doing some Open World content on my Guard, and was dying all over the place, when I realized I was using a Dragonhunter build designed for fractals, so I was glassy AF, and I really can't see anyone enjoying that kind of gameplay, where your build is so weak, or glassy, that you would be constantly defeated by trash mobs while just trying to explore, or grind some exp.
I just don't see how anyone could find that fun, and truth be told, I don't think anyone finds it fun, I mean, can you imagine, needing to gain 10 levels during an expansion, to get back to end game content, and having all 10 of those levels, as opposed to being able to just casually grind, every single damn fight, is a fight?
Sounds like Tedium on top of Tedium.
Why would you want that?
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In old MMORPG's, you could increase the challenge by tackling mobs higher than your level, whether in a group or solo. In DAOC, we would find a pack of enemies with decent respawn rates and were "red to purple" con. When unable to find groups, you could try to take on yellow to red con enemies and work out builds that could handle that.
A lot of the better MMORPG's that are still around with a healthy population has a scaling mechanic in the world, taking away the ability to challenge yourself without having to gimp yourself to do it. The only challenge found in MMORPG's now, come in the form of "group" content in the form of open world bosses, or instanced group and raid content.
Since I have a career, a familiy, and other responsibilities, I'm unable to commit to raiding schedules and the community has gotten so bad in various games that PUGing isn't an attractive option either. So I stick to single player games now.
To flip this around, I don't understand why anyone would enjoy a game where there's no risk to losing. What's the point in deciding on a class and build for your character, and working to get better gear if not to test them with challenging encounters. Without a challenge, who cares which skills you choose, or talents, and who cares about upgrading your gear?
I also enjoy slow rolling content in the game and their stories. I'm enjoying Outriders right now and the ability to scale the world difficulty to my liking. Previous to this I was playing Elden Ring.
But MMORPG's have also gotten easier. In older MMORPG's, you could not auto-attack an enemy of equal or higher level to your character and win. You also needed to worry about agro. In MMORPG's today, you don't die while leveling up, because you can auto-attack and win without any worries. If you use your skills, you can tackle groups of enemies without worries.
Scaling is part of the problem, as is the developers catering their world content to the lowest common denominator of players. Without scaling, a player who desires a challenge can at least fight higher level enemies.
Absolutely, those folks could just skip all of those overland zones in ESO. But why would they play a game where they have to ignore the majority of the game world to enjoy it? Specifically a genre built around the idea that you inhabit a game world with a bunch of other folks? That doesn't make a lot of sense to them. Rightfully so.
Both casual and hardcore players criticize and insult one another, but it really is the pot calling the kettle black.
I use all of the above skills in my personal life and my work life and make very good money doing it.
ESO is primarily a questing game. It makes sense that players would want to experience the content in the order of release, much the same way players want to play the first game of a series before their sequels or watch the first movie of a series before their sequels. I was unable to get to Craglorn, because I grew too bored with the game due to how easy the overland content was, despite liking the storylines in each zone. I wager that most players who want a challenge AND care about the story will want to play through the quests and zones the way the developers intended, but want some risk of failure.
I refuse to believe that players old enough pay and play these games don't have the intelligence to solve basic challenges overland mobs pose to the player, if there were any. I'm talking basic things like pattern recognition, and reading their abilities and using them. At least in the USA, most people were solving far more complex problems in middle school.
I think the issue with modern gamers isn't a lack of ability to learn to overcome challenges, moreso it's the lack of will to persevere or have the patience to learn. That's not a behavior pattern developers should be catering to. It offers no value to personal development.
In modern MMOs a challenge is playing with one hand tied behind your back, and some will still spoon feed you!
No trials. No tricks. No traps. No EU-RP server. NO THANKS!
...10% Benevolence, 90% Arrogance in my case!
And in BDO, there are basically two main categories of players, the ones that live in the power race (grinders) and the life-skillers who enjoy chat pvp.
The reason most people don't group, IMHO, is because in most MMO's, "teamwork" boils down to little more than dealing with assholes to get loot, and, for me, I don't even put up with assholes at work, and I feel bad for people that have to deal with assholes as part of their workday, and I bet we both will be damned if we want to deal with them in our game time.
I am somewhat lucky that I have a static of close friends, but we play shit like Uno and Scribble together, so, challenge is not needed to get us to play together, we just enjoy each others company.
Now, if you have people you like playing with, legit, challenge is not what gets you to group.
1) Because you're doing something unintended, things can break in ways that neither you nor the developers anticipated, making the game feel very janky.
2) You'll progress much more slowly than intended because everything takes much longer to do.
3) You'll have to skip much or even most of the game's content. This is especially a deal-breaker for people like me who like doing content for the sake of doing content, not just for the sake of progression.
4) Grouping is completely out of the question as other people aren't going to do the same thing. Quite the opposite: people will show up and one-shot mobs that you were fighting, thinking that they're helping you.
In Vanilla WoW, I once tried to see how high above my level of a mob I could kill. I managed to kill one 7 levels above me. It took 7 minutes to wear it down. I found one eight levels above me that I probably could have killed and several minutes into the battle before someone higher level came along and killed it for me, even though I was in a far out of the way area. Based on how fast its lifebar was decreasing, killing one mob 8 levels above me probably would have taken about 17 minutes.
Making everything really slow is why I hated the Dragon Nest approach to difficulty scaling. Yes, you can make content hard by turning the difficulty way up. It also means that boss battles that have about 20 seconds worth of interesting content take five minutes to slog through.
Perhaps there is some challenge there, but it's not fun to go so slow. And ultimately, the reason to play computer games is for fun. Having a moderate challenge is a means, not an end.
Grinding and farming are not challenging, for the reasons you describe. But I've long hated grinding and farming, and stayed away from most of the early MMORPGs precisely because they were so heavy on it. Something that is challenging to do once probably isn't still an interesting challenge the fiftieth time in a row that a character does it.
I think it's really dumb to have a game have you spend most of your time fighting trash mobs that aren't intended to be interesting, with the real focus on an occasional boss fight. Whatever you're going to ask players to spend most of their time in the game doing, make it interesting.
So it makes even less sense to desire challenge, as almost all content in an MMO, is in fact Grind Content.
I mean, GW2, has this personal story thing, which feels very single player, but it is also a story content, so it's not a challenge. But everything else, from killing mobs in a field, to doing mythic raid bosses, becomes grind content.
So it makes even less sense to want a challenge in an MMO.
Devs want you to hit that state playing their games as much as possible. It would make sense they would want to tune difficulty accordingly.
To me, the only challenge comes from attacking a human opponent, who can do things like learn my behavior, adopt and change their own behavior which in turn will encourage me to seek new strategy in order to defeat that human opponent. THAT is challenge.
Everything else, like bashing any kind of dumb pre-scripted AI bosses, regardless of how many attack buttons I have to press on my toolbars or what ilvl gear I must wear or the HP values and DPS values programmers assign to that boss, is just tedious, boring waste of time, and I wish I could waste as little time as possible on killing such pre-programmed monsters so I can get a reward that interests me and can move onto more entertaining things. Meaning I would be perfectly happy if each and every pre-scripted AI enemy would take me 10 second to defeat them instead of bashing buttons for 1000 seconds while moving in a pre-defined pattern to avoid pre-scripted attack pattern of those dumb AI enemies. That's just my own preference, of course ;-)
There's varying degrees and different types of challenges. I enjoy having to learn a PvE enemy and over time being able to master it by learning their movesets, adjusting my build and gear loadout. I don't expect every enemy in MMORPG's to be like Dark Souls bosses, but I also think enemies should be a threat to make the moment-to-moment gameplay engaging. In WoW, while leveling up, if I click auto-attack on an enemy and walk away to take a bathroom break, the enemy will be dead when I return, and I would be at full health when I return. The only thing skills and abilities do in MMORPG's these days is to just speed up the inevitable end for a mob. It never had a chance to beat you, not even close. In the beginning, when MMORPG's were new, you would die quite quickly if you just tackled a mob equal to your level solo and didn't pay attention. Even when paying attention, you'd have to stop and rest to regain health and stamina after every 1 to 2 mobs you killed.
I haven't found PvP to be that entertaining since Warhammer Online, except for League of Legends. Players have ruined that over the years as have developers by putting so much power into one character's kit. I don't think a character should be strong at everything. They should need a group to flesh out their weaknesses and PvP should involve more group strategy, like in DAOC. I loved WAR where even tanks had a roll in PvP, such as taunting and knocking players off ledges and such.
Which makes even less sense to hear people chant about how they need difficulty in MMO's.
I think it's a waste of time playing games that pose no challenge whatsoever, so I don't. But I don't think it's fair that the genre was made for one type of player and then developers kicked those players to the curb when they realized making braindead games were more profitable. I've spoken with my wallet and haven't invested in a MMORPG for years. We'll see what the future holds.
Simple as that.
All MMO's are looking at the people that spend money, and trying to find ways to get them to spend more.
Sitting in the corner, crying that you won't spend one cent till you get your way, has zero effect, and just gets them to move on to the person that says "I like this game, and I spend money on it, but I would spend more if you made it more accessible" and they really tend to pay attention to people who "I used to spend a lot of money on this game, but I don't like what you did, so I am going to go and spend my money on this other game"
But.. "I haven't spent money on MMO's in years.. LOL, No Dis, but why should any Dev bother with you?
Also, companies just don't follow the money, they're also trying to reach those that have spent money in the past and those who never have spent money. I've bought every MMORPG game that's had a sticker price that has released. I'm sure there's many others like me that gives games a chance, which shows that we exist, but don't stick with them, which tells the developers they missed the mark with us. If they choose to take our feedback and create a game for us or make their games more attractive to us, then great. If not, then there's other things in life than playing MMORPG's that are worth spending my time on instead.
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Beyond the shadows there's always light
I think you hit the nail on the head about player gripes though. Boredom is the root of most of the griping and it's seen most often and more viciously in MMOs simply because they are games that get played for years, not weeks.
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What I wanted was not new content, but interesting content. Adding massive amounts of content tuned to not provide any real challenge was actually worse than adding nothing at all, as it meant a huge pile of misery in order to reach the small portion of the game that the developers still cared about.
What I wanted was content that was challenging enough to be interesting. Oddly enough, the first several levels actually had some of it for some classes, until you got the ability to heal yourself. But from level 10 or so onward, it was just awful as far as the eye could see.
If WoW were to offer something akin to LotRO's landscape difficulty, with the ability to tune content yourself to be a meaningful challenge, I'd give it another go. But so long as I know up front that most of the time that I could spend on the game would be tremendously boring, there's no point.
Sure, I could create an artificial challenge of sorts by not equipping gear or whatever. But getting and equipping better gear is part of the fun. I want monsters to be hard enough to have a meaningful shot at killing me in spite of equipping the best gear I can get my hands on.
I do enjoy challenge in the context of problem solving for new or unknown factors, which generally has a pretty abrupt plateau from most games having static AI behaviors and ability sets. Even PvP gets crippled by that when you don't have flexible factors to how people match up against each other.
On the end of challenge, always wanted to see some game take the approach to mobs where they have a base behavior set, and then a randomized modifier.
You could generally expect mobs of the same type to behave the same, save for some variance to how aggressive vs cowardly they may be (go for nonstop attacks versus back off to call for help), or even adding different weapons or skills into the mix that are not part of their base kit and behavior set.
That sounds, somewhat wrong. I mean, in GW2, they have things like Pocket Raptors, very easy to kill mobs, that gang attack and do a solid amount of damage, so if you don't kill them first, and by that, I mean, fast enough so they can't get a jump attack on you, they will kill you.
I can't imagine anyone wanting the whole leveling experience to be like that.
In fact, for me, I was doing some Open World content on my Guard, and was dying all over the place, when I realized I was using a Dragonhunter build designed for fractals, so I was glassy AF, and I really can't see anyone enjoying that kind of gameplay, where your build is so weak, or glassy, that you would be constantly defeated by trash mobs while just trying to explore, or grind some exp.
I just don't see how anyone could find that fun, and truth be told, I don't think anyone finds it fun, I mean, can you imagine, needing to gain 10 levels during an expansion, to get back to end game content, and having all 10 of those levels, as opposed to being able to just casually grind, every single damn fight, is a fight?
Sounds like Tedium on top of Tedium.
Why would you want that?