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.
I have to agree with everyone that eventually you'll learn enemy behavioral patterns and master them, making their move sets no longer a challenge to overcome. Single player games have an easier time since people play them for a time and then move on, but MMORPG's exist for decades to be played. So, I have two comments to make for MMORPG's regarding this.
1. Regardless if you can learn and master an open world mobs patterns, as long as they have the ability to kill you I'm happy with that level of challenge. My issue with leveling up, which has always been my most favorite part of the game, is that mobs can never kill you in MMORPG's these days. In older MMORPG's an equal level mob can kill you, because they were balanced to have enough health and damage to overcome your damage and health bar if you weren't paying attention.
2. Why do MMORPG's need to be played without breaks? FF14 has the approach that you complete the story quests, dungeons, and raids then the developers have no issue with you taking a break until the next content patch. To me this is a good thing, because that means you can play other MMORPG's, single player games, or pursue something IRL for a time before the next content patch releases. This gives a player the variety they need by playing other games and/or participating in other of life's activities and keeps the original MMORPG feeling fresh and enjoyable for them when they return for the next patch/expansion. Just look at how bitter players get when they feel forced to play the same MMORPG without breaks for years. WoW forums are an example of players remaining subscribed due to habit and FOMO.
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?
Hundreds of thousands of players enjoyed that level of challenge why leveling during the foundation of this genre, which is evident by the number of players in UO, DAOC, EQ1, AC, Shadowbane, SWG, and COH. I'm sure I'm missing several more, such and Lineage 1 and 2, FFXI and so on. There's an audience out there who enjoys the journey as much so, if not more, than the destination and they desire that journey to feel like an adventure, not like a God slaughtering mere mortals on your way to end game.
I don't understand why people would prefer to slog through mindless braindead enemies for 10's of levels only to sit at endgame to run the same dungeons/raids for months. I think developers can add a toggle to a character at character creation for players to select if they want the open world to be more challenging in exchange for an XP bonus and/or higher drops chances for better gear. Players like you can rush to endgame and jump on the gear treadmill and be happy, while players like me can take our time and enjoy the journey, enjoying the thrill of combat with all the denizens of the world, and experience the story that feels worth experiencing since the journey will feel like a real adventure.
nate1980 said: Hundreds of thousands of players enjoyed that level of challenge why leveling during the foundation of this genre, which is evident by the number of players in UO, DAOC, EQ1, AC, Shadowbane, SWG, and COH. I'm sure I'm missing several more, such and Lineage 1 and 2, FFXI and so on. There's an audience out there who enjoys the journey as much so, if not more, than the destination and they desire that journey to feel like an adventure, not like a God slaughtering mere mortals on your way to end game.
As far as I remember in EQ1, DAOC, and CoH,, most everyone I ran across hated the slog that was leveling, trash leveling mobs being a tedious fight, lack of any ability to solo out some every select classes, and lackluster classes that were not welcome in groups, was about as an unwelcome mechanic as could exist in an MMO.
Which is why players would look for groups that knew their shit, and didn't make every fight a problem.
Logging in, and if you didn't have a static, waiting hours to get a group, was about, IMHO, the absolute worst game mechanic to exist, and yet I see people praise that mechanic these days.
Did someone forget how much it sucked, or were they always coddled with a group of friends and never spent a day alone in game? I have got to wonder that one.
In fact the goal of all groups and players from the start of MMO's right up to today, is to minimize difficulty on every aspect of playing the game, and this has not changed at all, in any way, over the years, in fact, I think it's gotten worse, where players will do everything they can to find the fastest and easiest path to the end rewards.
And yet, I just had someone tell me, they could not handle killing easy mobs to get through the leveling process to end game, and they think I am going to believe them that they would enjoy if it every mob they needed to kill was suddenly turned into a tedious slog with a risk of failure and loss?
No dis, but, I am Not buying that one.
Todays gamers, just like everyone leveling in EQ1 20 years ago, had the same goal, to quickly, and efficiently kill mobs for exp.
in fact ROI of game time was a real thing to a lot of gamers, and no one wanted this to be a "Challenge" in any sense of the word, they wanted a smooth, steady, influx of loot and exp for their game time.
These players would deny classes/builds , because they didn't think it would make their game time easy and profitable enough to group with them, And these are the same people, 20 years later, who are saying "OMG, I need challenge"
I'm no accountant, but something ain't adding up.
As far as exploration went, in EQ1, exploration was not a thing most players did at all, people would band together, and sit in a spot, and grind mobs for hours on end, in general players were not out adventuring, sightseeing, and crawling through the game world, because overall, there was little no advantage to it, and mainly, because players lacked the means to be able to do it effectively.
Mostly players would follow safe paths to and from a farm point, and then farm those idea location.
Now, On the flip side of this, many people praise the exploration in games like ESO, GW2, and the like, because, it's accessible, you can go where you want, see what you want, so players get a thrill from it, and do it.
So I really don't get the fixation, to be limited like that. Where trash mobs block your ability to even travel the game world. Seems counter intuitive to the whole aspect of adventuring.
Explain to me why you would like that, how would that make your game time better.
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.
I don't understand why people would prefer to slog through mindless braindead enemies for 10's of levels only to sit at endgame to run the same dungeons/raids for months. I think developers can add a toggle to a character at character creation for players to select if they want the open world to be more challenging in exchange for an XP bonus and/or higher drops chances for better gear.
Nope.. You either want the challenge for the sake it, or you are using wanting challenge to seek a greater reward.
The former is what I am asking about, players that actually want challenge, the later is just an egotistical loot whore, and, to be honest, I don't need anyone to explain to me why they are a loot whore.
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.
Good challenge for me and why I enjoy it is because I like challenge when there's a dilemma to solve. To use the word in the sentence itself, the content has to challenge my understanding of the game.
IE, certainly establish the core routines and expectations, but don't leave it there. Use that as a framework to pitch unexpected scenarios, mechanics, and threats at players.
A mob is not simply challenging because it has a longer health bar or because it hits harder, because the only way to beat that is ultimately to make your own numbers bigger as well. It's rote.
Having to guess/predict what their next action is, knowing what ability to use to defend, counter, or assault within those predictions, and having to fight against the unpredictability of individual entities acting with individual patterns, that presents a challenge which is in and of itself very satisfying to overcome.
Big problem I have with many games even outside MMOs is that they a) are extremely static in their mob behaviors, and b) rely heavily on vertical scaling to present a veneer of challenge without any additional complexity.
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?
No, what is tedium on top of tedium is taking content that is designed to be trivial and boring and then mandating that everyone must slog through it in order to continue playing the game. Whatever developers ask players to do in order to play their game, they should try to make it either interesting or as short as possible.
I'm not saying that content needs to be super hard. If a player who is more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless dies once every hour or two, that's fine. But generally clearing the content without dying very much like that should require more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless. Far too many MMORPGs don't even do that.
nate1980 said: Hundreds of thousands of players enjoyed that level of challenge why leveling during the foundation of this genre, which is evident by the number of players in UO, DAOC, EQ1, AC, Shadowbane, SWG, and COH. I'm sure I'm missing several more, such and Lineage 1 and 2, FFXI and so on. There's an audience out there who enjoys the journey as much so, if not more, than the destination and they desire that journey to feel like an adventure, not like a God slaughtering mere mortals on your way to end game.
As far as I remember in EQ1, DAOC, and CoH,, most everyone I ran across hated the slog that was leveling, trash leveling mobs being a tedious fight, lack of any ability to solo out some every select classes, and lackluster classes that were not welcome in groups, was about as an unwelcome mechanic as could exist in an MMO.
Which is why players would look for groups that knew their shit, and didn't make every fight a problem.
Logging in, and if you didn't have a static, waiting hours to get a group, was about, IMHO, the absolute worst game mechanic to exist, and yet I see people praise that mechanic these days.
Did someone forget how much it sucked, or were they always coddled with a group of friends and never spent a day alone in game? I have got to wonder that one.
In fact the goal of all groups and players from the start of MMO's right up to today, is to minimize difficulty on every aspect of playing the game, and this has not changed at all, in any way, over the years, in fact, I think it's gotten worse, where players will do everything they can to find the fastest and easiest path to the end rewards.
And yet, I just had someone tell me, they could not handle killing easy mobs to get through the leveling process to end game, and they think I am going to believe them that they would enjoy if it every mob they needed to kill was suddenly turned into a tedious slog with a risk of failure and loss?
No dis, but, I am Not buying that one.
Todays gamers, just like everyone leveling in EQ1 20 years ago, had the same goal, to quickly, and efficiently kill mobs for exp.
in fact ROI of game time was a real thing to a lot of gamers, and no one wanted this to be a "Challenge" in any sense of the word, they wanted a smooth, steady, influx of loot and exp for their game time.
These players would deny classes/builds , because they didn't think it would make their game time easy and profitable enough to group with them, And these are the same people, 20 years later, who are saying "OMG, I need challenge"
I'm no accountant, but something ain't adding up.
As far as exploration went, in EQ1, exploration was not a thing most players did at all, people would band together, and sit in a spot, and grind mobs for hours on end, in general players were not out adventuring, sightseeing, and crawling through the game world, because overall, there was little no advantage to it, and mainly, because players lacked the means to be able to do it effectively.
Mostly players would follow safe paths to and from a farm point, and then farm those idea location.
Now, On the flip side of this, many people praise the exploration in games like ESO, GW2, and the like, because, it's accessible, you can go where you want, see what you want, so players get a thrill from it, and do it.
So I really don't get the fixation, to be limited like that. Where trash mobs block your ability to even travel the game world. Seems counter intuitive to the whole aspect of adventuring.
Explain to me why you would like that, how would that make your game time better.
I'm surprised that you had that kind of experience in the earlier MMORPG's, because it doesn't match my own. I didn't play EQ1. I chose DAOC and I didn't have issues finding groups and I didn't have issues with inclusiveness. But different communities for different servers maybe. I pugged almost exclusively while leveling and ran across a lot of the same people. So we'd group for hours moving from one camp to another, sometimes getting a spot in a dungeon.
Yes, we all grouped to maximize the experience per hour and would seek out the mob camps and pull speeds to speed things up, but that wasn't to avoid a challenge. The challenge was still there and the threat of dying from re-spawns, over-pulling, and tackling mobs higher level than we can handle were still something we had to be aware of.
I had the same positive experiences in SWG, which was my next MMORPG and CoH which I played after SWG. It wasn't until I played WoW when WoTLK released that I started to see the negative attitudes, elitism, and groups not being inclusive to others. I chalked that up to the game's solo-centric leveling experience and/or the masses that the game drew to the genre that weren't originally into the MMORPG experience of the older games.
Since the late 2000's, I have experienced the community you speak of more than the community I began MMORPG's with in each subsequent MMORPG that's released. FF14 being an exception. Their community has been outstanding, but I couldn't stick with that game long term due to the nerfed over-world content and not being able to customize my character with talents and whatnot.
ESO was pretty fun at release. I still remember doing a Fighter's Guild quest and fighting a snake-lady boss that spawned bubbles that would heal her if they reached her. It took me a few pulls to figure out her mechanic, but once I did I was able to beat her. It felt good having that kind of challenge in the game. So good, that I still have good memories of ESO right after it released, whereas I remember very little in most other MMORPG games that are designed for overworld mobs to fall over if you throw an ability at them.
You've experienced different in the time you've been playing MMORPG's and I can accept that. I just ask that you accept that other people have experienced games/communities differently than you and may have different tastes than you. It's not cool to vaguely call someone that has had different experiences than you a liar because you haven't personally experienced it.
Maybe this helps the OP understand why some people enjoy challenges in MMORPG's. I've always found games challenging since I started playing them with the release of the NES. The sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that comes with overcoming an obstacle is partially why I enjoy video games. But it's become a sad trend in MMORPG's to make the leveling experience very easy without offering any sort of challenge outside of grouped content. Yes, it's probably a net gain for the developers to develop content this way since there are far more people challenge averse than those who like to overcome challenges, but it still feels shitty to be kicked out of a genre you loved to be apart of from 2001-2008sih and to basically be told to STFU when you ask to have your demographic remembered when designing content for a game.
Deathkon1 said: 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?
No, what is tedium on top of tedium is taking content that is designed to be trivial and boring and then mandating that everyone must slog through it in order to continue playing the game. Whatever developers ask players to do in order to play their game, they should try to make it either interesting or as short as possible.
I'm not saying that content needs to be super hard. If a player who is more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless dies once every hour or two, that's fine. But generally clearing the content without dying very much like that should require more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless. Far too many MMORPGs don't even do that.
Isn't requiring people do content they think sucks to get something they want, a part of every MMO?
In any case, some people enjoy that kind of content, exploring zones, killing random mobs, seeing the game world, not needing to worry about dying all the time, etc, and it's a part of leveling, but a part they enjoy, just because you view it as a slog does not mean others don't find it interesting.
I mean, GW2, made the choice to just had everyone a free capped level toon and then told them to fuck off and do what they want.
But none of this addresses the desire for challenge.
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.
I'm surprised that you had that kind of experience in the earlier MMORPG's, because it doesn't match my own. I didn't play EQ1. I chose DAOC and I didn't have issues finding groups and I didn't have issues with inclusiveness. But different communities for different servers maybe. I pugged almost exclusively while leveling and ran across a lot of the same people. So we'd group for hours moving from one camp to another, sometimes getting a spot in a dungeon.
Yes, we all grouped to maximize the experience per hour and would seek out the mob camps and pull speeds to speed things up, but that wasn't to avoid a challenge. The challenge was still there and the threat of dying from re-spawns, over-pulling, and tackling mobs higher level than we can handle were still something we had to be aware of.
Wait, full stop.
No, No.. No.. this was done totally to remove the challenge, in fact, pullers that would over pull would run a high risk of being thrown out of the group.
As far as groups and pugging went, if you did not play a desirable class, you might as well learn to solo the rest of the game. It's been my personal experience the people that tell me they had no problems finding groups often played healers, and thus a very in-demand class.
However, that does not change that the whole point of finding a solid competent group and camping ideal spot was to maximize exp/min, which, is the absolute antithesis to doing challenging content.
No one was there for any kind of challenge, in fact they were there to efficiently grind mobs in as fast a manner as they could achieve, in short, they were there for the exp/min, nothing more. They were there for Mindless, Brain Dead, Safe, Routine, Grinding, Nothing else, and every game was the exact same in this regard, and this has not changed ever, modern games with groups, often doing instanced content, are again, are there for the routine grind, to 100% complete the instance as fast, efficient, with as little issues as possible.
And anyone that started fucking that up, looking for challenge, or some other kind of bullshit, finds themselves without a group, real quick, it was that way 20 years ago, and it's that way today.
No one in those situations is looking for challenge.
So.. why this consent incessant chant wanting it, when in reality, at least as far as I have ever seen, no one actually doing the content wants this so called challenge or risk of failure.
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.
Some of us explained it to you already throughout this thread. We can all only speak for ourselves. I told you why I enjoy the challenge and what I found challenging in older MMORPG's. If you're unable to accept that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on those points.
Some of us explained it to you already throughout this thread. We can all only speak for ourselves. I told you why I enjoy the challenge and what I found challenging in older MMORPG's. If you're unable to accept that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on those points.
The problem is, you contradict yourself.
People group up for grinding exp, purely to eliminate the risk of failure, ergo, remove challenge from the content so they can maximize their exp/min.
You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, so why is there such a desires to deny this.
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.
Some of us explained it to you already throughout this thread. We can all only speak for ourselves. I told you why I enjoy the challenge and what I found challenging in older MMORPG's. If you're unable to accept that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on those points.
The problem is, you contradict yourself.
People group up for grinding exp, purely to eliminate the risk of failure, ergo, remove challenge from the content so they can maximize their exp/min.
You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, so why is there such a desires to deny this.
If you've never played a game that was challenging and derived satisfaction from overcoming that challenge, then I don't think you have the ability to understand why those of us who enjoy challenges want that in our games. Several of us have tried to explain our reasoning in this thread. At this point, I feel like you're just wanting to argue, which is baffling considering we don't know each other and have no reason to care whether or not we see each other's point-of-view. But I have made an effort to explain the reasoning to you and have even accepted that your experiences have been different. So further trying to explain why my experiences were different and why challenge is welcome in games I like to play is pointless.
Some of us explained it to you already throughout this thread. We can all only speak for ourselves. I told you why I enjoy the challenge and what I found challenging in older MMORPG's. If you're unable to accept that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on those points.
The problem is, you contradict yourself.
People group up for grinding exp, purely to eliminate the risk of failure, ergo, remove challenge from the content so they can maximize their exp/min.
You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, so why is there such a desires to deny this.
We also try to remove the challenge by equipping armor and weapons, making a good build, etc.
Teaming up is just one of the tools we use to beat the challenge. It's not a contradiction.
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?
There are PvP players who find it fun even though they lose 50% of the time.
There are also PvE players who find it fun when they die often - and find it boring when there's no risk.
Some of us explained it to you already throughout this thread. We can all only speak for ourselves. I told you why I enjoy the challenge and what I found challenging in older MMORPG's. If you're unable to accept that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on those points.
The problem is, you contradict yourself.
People group up for grinding exp, purely to eliminate the risk of failure, ergo, remove challenge from the content so they can maximize their exp/min.
You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, so why is there such a desires to deny this.
We also try to remove the challenge by equipping armor and weapons, making a good build, etc.
Teaming up is just one of the tools we use to beat the challenge. It's not a contradiction.
See this is really something I don't think any of you truly grasp, but, It is. It's a complete contradiction in game approach.
Look, all of you seek out the strongest build you can get, focus building groups of the best players you can find, with the single minded drive to trivialize the game.
And lets be honest, no one plays a meta build, with the best gear in the game because they are looking for challenge, they do that to eliminate as much of the existing challenge of the game as they can, this is an absolute, everyone does this for the exact same reasons, to trivialize the game as much as they can.
When you do that, and the game becomes too easy, well.. no shit.. congrats, you achieved what you set out to do, make the game easy for yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself for that success.
See, for me, when I am looking to challenge myself (or just looking to play at all TBH), I like to make theme builds, and I enjoy using the uncommon weapon options.
Like for example, I play a dual dagger necro in GW2, I think I am about the only one that plays that kind of build, and I admit, by god it sucks balls, but, I like the theme of it, I got a really cool dagger skin out of a Black Lion chest a ways back, that I think is just the epic shizzles, so, every single character I own in GW2 that can use daggers, is using daggers. Because winning or losing, I look epic fighting, the only exception to this, if if they can use an axe, and since I got a legendary axe, if they can use an axe, they are going to use an axe, even better if they use an axe and dagger. No matter how meta the combo may be. If it's any good, more advantage to me, if not, oh well, I play what I want to play.
Now, if you are not willing to simple basic stuff like that, and we are talking things that filthy casuals do for the shits and giggles of it, they are not even looking for challenge, or whining about it, they do this, because they like theme builds, or want to have a specific look, and here you are, where you can't even adopt to that level of next level of play, and the only way you can think to play is to seek to trivialize the game at any costs, can anyone really take any of your claims of seeking challenge seriously?
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.
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?
Some people do, or at least the genuine possibility of on a regular basis. That which can pose a legitimate threat to you isn't trash. If every thing can there is no trash.
It's a matter of taste. Some prefer trash-lite gaming. There may be some that want to grit their way through each and every encounter.
Different people find different things fun is why, in general.
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?
Some people do, or at least the genuine possibility of on a regular basis. That which can pose a legitimate threat to you isn't trash. If every thing can there is no trash.
It's a matter of taste. Some prefer trash-lite gaming. There may be some that want to grit their way through each and every encounter.
Different people find different things fun is why, in general.
In EQ1, if you were playing a warrior at around 50th level, Gray con mobs, which give little loot and no exp, due to their low con level, could still kill you in a fight.
Now, I am not sure what to call that kind of mob or balance... Stupidly Designed, comes to mind, but I am sure others would have some other words for such.
in GW2, there are a lot of mobs that do not give any rewards, that can in fact kill you, because they swarm attack, I just learned there are rift events in Bloodstone Fen, and due to the fact that the mobs swarm and you can't even rally off them if you defeat them, makes it so, barely anyone does these rift events.
None of the "Oh I love challenge" people do them either, it's always some poor sap that is doing them for some quest or achievement. or like me, that didn't know how much they sucked, saw an event up, went to it, got my ass handed to me, and thought.. fuck that. and now I don't do them either, like everyone else in the zone.
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.
@Ungood isn't wrong about people finding the safest way to navigate to a camp in Everquest. I did that for sure. In fact I used to stick to the wall in zones and never explored any damn thing because I was afraid of dying in the middle of nowhere and forgetting to hit loc and losing my corpse and all my shit. Fat lot of exploration I did.
I would get lost in dungeons all the time and my friends would be forced to come get me or my corpse. So I don't think that I was one of the people who explored much in Everquest. If I found a place I could solo I stayed there for days, yes you read that correctly, days because it took days to get a level the higher you went in that game.
Yet I loved Everquest. It is my all time favourite game. I don't think it was for the reasons most people associate with a reason for liking a game. It's the people I played with that made Everquest great.
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?
Some people do, or at least the genuine possibility of on a regular basis. That which can pose a legitimate threat to you isn't trash. If every thing can there is no trash.
It's a matter of taste. Some prefer trash-lite gaming. There may be some that want to grit their way through each and every encounter.
Different people find different things fun is why, in general.
So pray tell, how do you design a shared world game where "different people who find different things fun" can both have fun?
Even an optional self only difficulty slider wouldn't work because then those who choose to set their slider to max difficulty would bitch about those who choose the easiest setting waltzing through their area and killing everything before they've had a chance to dent them. Kind of makes grouping pointless too when you mix the two types doesn't it?
Seems to me that the only viable solutions are segregation of the two groups by server wide-sliders, as you can do in some survival private servers, or you do it by segregating content difficulty by instanced or non-instanced locations as most modern MMOs do it.
But apparently segregation by location is also bad since the easy crowd is "locked out" of difficult content and the hard core crowd has to "suffer through" trivial content.
What's your solution?
"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
Some of us explained it to you already throughout this thread. We can all only speak for ourselves. I told you why I enjoy the challenge and what I found challenging in older MMORPG's. If you're unable to accept that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on those points.
The problem is, you contradict yourself.
People group up for grinding exp, purely to eliminate the risk of failure, ergo, remove challenge from the content so they can maximize their exp/min.
You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, so why is there such a desires to deny this.
If you've never played a game that was challenging and derived satisfaction from overcoming that challenge, then I don't think you have the ability to understand why those of us who enjoy challenges want that in our games. Several of us have tried to explain our reasoning in this thread. At this point, I feel like you're just wanting to argue, which is baffling considering we don't know each other and have no reason to care whether or not we see each other's point-of-view. But I have made an effort to explain the reasoning to you and have even accepted that your experiences have been different. So further trying to explain why my experiences were different and why challenge is welcome in games I like to play is pointless.
I understand the thrill of challenge, I wager, better then you ever will.
See while you all are off making meta builds, and having LFM's up demanding kill proofs, and specific classes to have some ideal raid makeup, to ensure that you get your 100% completion, every single run.
I am out there running theme raids like All Bard TOD, and "Warforged Only LoB" Now No doubt, this might be something someone like yourself has never experienced in their life, and I get that, I play in a whole other level then you do.
But the idea is rather simple, everyone in the raid group plays that class/race, this means, we do not have any of the traditional makeup of a raid, and are in fact, challenging ourselves to complete said raid, with classes that might be woefully wrong for the task, this adds a metric fuckton of challenge to the whole encounter. it's also something I do, for the shits and giggles of it, to see if we can pull it off.
That's a challenge seeker in my book.
That is some next level meta gaming to me.
At the same time, when I do a normal raid run, with no doubt, people like you, I, like everyone else, I want my 100% completion, and all that.
But I am not also whining about needing challenge in those raids, in fact, like everyone else, the last thing I want in those runs is for things to go wrong.
So when people tell me, they want challenge, but they do absolutely nothing to seek it out, they do nothing to challenge themselves in any way, shape, or form.. I have to ask, do they really want challenge, because they are not acting like they want challenge.
The people that show up to my all Priest or Bard raids, are there to have some fun and challenge themselves to see if they can do it. No joke, these are all raiders to start with, we have done this raid no doubt many times on our mains, but, doing it with all bards, adds fun and challenge.
But I never see the people that cry about wanting challenge doing that, it's always the casuals or moderates that do that kind of shit.. care to explain to me why?
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.
Some people do, or at least the genuine possibility of on a regular basis. That which can pose a legitimate threat to you isn't trash. If every thing can there is no trash.
It's a matter of taste. Some prefer trash-lite gaming. There may be some that want to grit their way through each and every encounter.
Different people find different things fun is why, in general.
So pray tell, how do you design a shared world game where "different people who find different things fun" can both have fun?
Even an optional self only difficulty slider wouldn't work because then those who choose to set their slider to max difficulty would bitch about those who choose the easiest setting waltzing through their area and killing everything before they've had a chance to dent them. Kind of makes grouping pointless too when you mix the two types doesn't it?
Seems to me that the only viable solutions are segregation of the two groups by server wide-sliders, as you can do in some survival private servers, or you do it by segregating content difficulty by instanced or non-instanced locations as most modern MMOs do it.
But apparently segregation by location is also bad since the easy crowd is "locked out" of difficult content and the hard core crowd has to "suffer through" trivial content.
What's your solution?
My solution would be to make the most desirable EXP/Loot from Instance dungeons, with open world being little more than a means to explore, and get to and from the dungeons.
The Group could then pick the difficulty, by vote, and once started, that was locked in, anyone that joins the group after would need to play on that difficulty. They could opt to LFM, or Not. All Loot and EXP is awarded on the Individual level, but all difficulties reward the same type of loot, just in different quantities. IE: You get more coin, exp, and tokens for doing harder difficulty dungeons.
Thus, the players that want challenge, have it available to them, they can set the dungeons on the hardest levels.
Also have it so all dungeons scale players, so no one can over level a dungeon, thus ensuring maximum challenge for those that want it, for those that find it hard, they could set the setting difficulty down.
Perhaps even have a solo/group/squad setting on the dungeons as well, to allow players who want to solo or run in larger groups to have that option open to them, these settings would scale up and down the difficulty on top of the base difficulty setting, to accommodate the proposed additional players.
That way, a player that really wants to challenge themselves, could try to solo a dungeon on the hardest difficulty on the squad setting.
They would still get the same reward tokens as if they did easy on solo, but they would get a lot more of them, so, that's on them if they want to play that challenge/reward system.
Put the choice of personal challenge in the players hands, as opposed to imposing it on everyone else.
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.
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?
Some people do, or at least the genuine possibility of on a regular basis. That which can pose a legitimate threat to you isn't trash. If every thing can there is no trash.
It's a matter of taste. Some prefer trash-lite gaming. There may be some that want to grit their way through each and every encounter.
Different people find different things fun is why, in general.
So pray tell, how do you design a shared world game where "different people who find different things fun" can both have fun?
Even an optional self only difficulty slider wouldn't work because then those who choose to set their slider to max difficulty would bitch about those who choose the easiest setting waltzing through their area and killing everything before they've had a chance to dent them. Kind of makes grouping pointless too when you mix the two types doesn't it?
Seems to me that the only viable solutions are segregation of the two groups by server wide-sliders, as you can do in some survival private servers, or you do it by segregating content difficulty by instanced or non-instanced locations as most modern MMOs do it.
But apparently segregation by location is also bad since the easy crowd is "locked out" of difficult content and the hard core crowd has to "suffer through" trivial content.
What's your solution?
It's not an easy problem to fix at all.
We've seen devs try, like you say. But the market also doesn't create good incentives for these two types of gamers to be served separately: devs want both, producers need both to justify the cost of an MMORPG.
So we usually get MMORPGs that generally consist of easy content for about 90% of the game's "leveling" experience but only only about 10-20% of its endgame experience. The rest is covered by the more challenging content if a player wants to continue progression.
While the problem isn't an easy fix, you can, again, see why that solution actually helps create the pressure points that make casual and hardcore players attack one another and blame each other for any changes they dislike.
Deathkon1 said: 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?
No, what is tedium on top of tedium is taking content that is designed to be trivial and boring and then mandating that everyone must slog through it in order to continue playing the game. Whatever developers ask players to do in order to play their game, they should try to make it either interesting or as short as possible.
I'm not saying that content needs to be super hard. If a player who is more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless dies once every hour or two, that's fine. But generally clearing the content without dying very much like that should require more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless. Far too many MMORPGs don't even do that.
Isn't requiring people do content they think sucks to get something they want, a part of every MMO?
In any case, some people enjoy that kind of content, exploring zones, killing random mobs, seeing the game world, not needing to worry about dying all the time, etc, and it's a part of leveling, but a part they enjoy, just because you view it as a slog does not mean others don't find it interesting.
I mean, GW2, made the choice to just had everyone a free capped level toon and then told them to fuck off and do what they want.
But none of this addresses the desire for challenge.
DDO doesn't force players to slog through something awful before they can get to the "real" game. Want something interesting to do at level 1? Here you go. You could make a case that Guild Wars 1 didn't, or at least to the extent that it did, it was very short. Spiral Knights lets you jump into the game quickly, and to the extent that it takes a while to get access to tier 3 content, it's only because brand new players aren't ready for it yet and would fail miserably if they were thrown into the hard content without a chance to learn the game first. Puzzle Pirates likewise gives players access to most of the game within minutes of creating an account.
My basic thesis is that developers should do one of two things:
1) Make the leveling content interesting, or 2) Skip the leveling content entirely.
There used to be the argument that you had to go through leveling content to learn how to play the game. That argument doesn't work when it's scaled to be trivial so that you can breeze through it and still have no clue how to play well when you arrive at the level cap. If developers are going to knowingly and intentionally make the leveling content awful, then why not just skip it and start players at the level cap, if the endgame content is the only part of the game that the developers actually care about?
And if you think everyone wants trivial content, then why do MMORPG developers feel the need to streamline and remove that supposedly popular content? Has the move to making most MMORPG content trivial coincided with MMORPGs becoming a tremendously popular genre or with the the genre being in decline?
While the problem isn't an easy fix, you can, again, see why that solution actually helps create the pressure points that make casual and hardcore players attack one another and blame each other for any changes they dislike.
We've been seeing this in ESO for the past 4 or 5 weeks since they announced what amounts to a hefty overall nerf of DPS and some healing, They tried to sell it on the basis of bringing up the DPS floor and lowering the DPS ceiling but anyone with half a brain saw that a general nerf does not bring up any floors.
It was a ham fisted fix to content difficulty by nerfing all players when they could easily have buffed the overland, delve and public dungeon mobs where the easy content is. Instead, by nerfing all DPS everywhere they actually also made the hard content that many already can't do harder.
5 weeks after the original announcement and post after post calling out the "bring the floor up" bullshit, they finally, 2 days ago, came up with this gem:
"Additionally, for Dungeons and Trials, we’ll be reducing the health of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above in the final PTS patch to account for the overall DPS loss. For Trials specifically, we’ll be reducing the health of all Champions and Bannermen on Veteran difficulty and above. The reduction in health for each boss will vary from encounter to encounter, but the results should be that each Dungeon and Trial boss fight will provide a similar challenge to what is on Live currently. The Trial bannermen and Champions provide a challenge in their own right so we felt additional adjustments were warranted."
The overall difficulty increase in overland content isa good thing and they could have gotten a lot of support if they had honestly said that this was their aim instead of waiting 5 weeks to come up with a plan to not simultaneously also make the current hard content even harder.
They remarkably managed to get both groups of players to unite giving them shit for 5 weeks for their stupidity and dishonest spin of "bringing up the floor."
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Comments
1. Regardless if you can learn and master an open world mobs patterns, as long as they have the ability to kill you I'm happy with that level of challenge. My issue with leveling up, which has always been my most favorite part of the game, is that mobs can never kill you in MMORPG's these days. In older MMORPG's an equal level mob can kill you, because they were balanced to have enough health and damage to overcome your damage and health bar if you weren't paying attention.
2. Why do MMORPG's need to be played without breaks? FF14 has the approach that you complete the story quests, dungeons, and raids then the developers have no issue with you taking a break until the next content patch. To me this is a good thing, because that means you can play other MMORPG's, single player games, or pursue something IRL for a time before the next content patch releases. This gives a player the variety they need by playing other games and/or participating in other of life's activities and keeps the original MMORPG feeling fresh and enjoyable for them when they return for the next patch/expansion. Just look at how bitter players get when they feel forced to play the same MMORPG without breaks for years. WoW forums are an example of players remaining subscribed due to habit and FOMO.
I don't understand why people would prefer to slog through mindless braindead enemies for 10's of levels only to sit at endgame to run the same dungeons/raids for months. I think developers can add a toggle to a character at character creation for players to select if they want the open world to be more challenging in exchange for an XP bonus and/or higher drops chances for better gear. Players like you can rush to endgame and jump on the gear treadmill and be happy, while players like me can take our time and enjoy the journey, enjoying the thrill of combat with all the denizens of the world, and experience the story that feels worth experiencing since the journey will feel like a real adventure.
Which is why players would look for groups that knew their shit, and didn't make every fight a problem.
Logging in, and if you didn't have a static, waiting hours to get a group, was about, IMHO, the absolute worst game mechanic to exist, and yet I see people praise that mechanic these days.
Did someone forget how much it sucked, or were they always coddled with a group of friends and never spent a day alone in game? I have got to wonder that one.
In fact the goal of all groups and players from the start of MMO's right up to today, is to minimize difficulty on every aspect of playing the game, and this has not changed at all, in any way, over the years, in fact, I think it's gotten worse, where players will do everything they can to find the fastest and easiest path to the end rewards.
And yet, I just had someone tell me, they could not handle killing easy mobs to get through the leveling process to end game, and they think I am going to believe them that they would enjoy if it every mob they needed to kill was suddenly turned into a tedious slog with a risk of failure and loss?
No dis, but, I am Not buying that one.
Todays gamers, just like everyone leveling in EQ1 20 years ago, had the same goal, to quickly, and efficiently kill mobs for exp.
in fact ROI of game time was a real thing to a lot of gamers, and no one wanted this to be a "Challenge" in any sense of the word, they wanted a smooth, steady, influx of loot and exp for their game time.
These players would deny classes/builds , because they didn't think it would make their game time easy and profitable enough to group with them, And these are the same people, 20 years later, who are saying "OMG, I need challenge"
I'm no accountant, but something ain't adding up.
As far as exploration went, in EQ1, exploration was not a thing most players did at all, people would band together, and sit in a spot, and grind mobs for hours on end, in general players were not out adventuring, sightseeing, and crawling through the game world, because overall, there was little no advantage to it, and mainly, because players lacked the means to be able to do it effectively.
Mostly players would follow safe paths to and from a farm point, and then farm those idea location.
Now, On the flip side of this, many people praise the exploration in games like ESO, GW2, and the like, because, it's accessible, you can go where you want, see what you want, so players get a thrill from it, and do it.
So I really don't get the fixation, to be limited like that. Where trash mobs block your ability to even travel the game world. Seems counter intuitive to the whole aspect of adventuring.
Explain to me why you would like that, how would that make your game time better.
The former is what I am asking about, players that actually want challenge, the later is just an egotistical loot whore, and, to be honest, I don't need anyone to explain to me why they are a loot whore.
Good challenge for me and why I enjoy it is because I like challenge when there's a dilemma to solve. To use the word in the sentence itself, the content has to challenge my understanding of the game.
IE, certainly establish the core routines and expectations, but don't leave it there. Use that as a framework to pitch unexpected scenarios, mechanics, and threats at players.
A mob is not simply challenging because it has a longer health bar or because it hits harder, because the only way to beat that is ultimately to make your own numbers bigger as well. It's rote.
Having to guess/predict what their next action is, knowing what ability to use to defend, counter, or assault within those predictions, and having to fight against the unpredictability of individual entities acting with individual patterns, that presents a challenge which is in and of itself very satisfying to overcome.
Big problem I have with many games even outside MMOs is that they a) are extremely static in their mob behaviors, and b) rely heavily on vertical scaling to present a veneer of challenge without any additional complexity.
I'm not saying that content needs to be super hard. If a player who is more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless dies once every hour or two, that's fine. But generally clearing the content without dying very much like that should require more or less paying attention and not being gratuitously reckless. Far too many MMORPGs don't even do that.
Yes, we all grouped to maximize the experience per hour and would seek out the mob camps and pull speeds to speed things up, but that wasn't to avoid a challenge. The challenge was still there and the threat of dying from re-spawns, over-pulling, and tackling mobs higher level than we can handle were still something we had to be aware of.
I had the same positive experiences in SWG, which was my next MMORPG and CoH which I played after SWG. It wasn't until I played WoW when WoTLK released that I started to see the negative attitudes, elitism, and groups not being inclusive to others. I chalked that up to the game's solo-centric leveling experience and/or the masses that the game drew to the genre that weren't originally into the MMORPG experience of the older games.
Since the late 2000's, I have experienced the community you speak of more than the community I began MMORPG's with in each subsequent MMORPG that's released. FF14 being an exception. Their community has been outstanding, but I couldn't stick with that game long term due to the nerfed over-world content and not being able to customize my character with talents and whatnot.
ESO was pretty fun at release. I still remember doing a Fighter's Guild quest and fighting a snake-lady boss that spawned bubbles that would heal her if they reached her. It took me a few pulls to figure out her mechanic, but once I did I was able to beat her. It felt good having that kind of challenge in the game. So good, that I still have good memories of ESO right after it released, whereas I remember very little in most other MMORPG games that are designed for overworld mobs to fall over if you throw an ability at them.
You've experienced different in the time you've been playing MMORPG's and I can accept that. I just ask that you accept that other people have experienced games/communities differently than you and may have different tastes than you. It's not cool to vaguely call someone that has had different experiences than you a liar because you haven't personally experienced it.
Maybe this helps the OP understand why some people enjoy challenges in MMORPG's. I've always found games challenging since I started playing them with the release of the NES. The sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that comes with overcoming an obstacle is partially why I enjoy video games. But it's become a sad trend in MMORPG's to make the leveling experience very easy without offering any sort of challenge outside of grouped content. Yes, it's probably a net gain for the developers to develop content this way since there are far more people challenge averse than those who like to overcome challenges, but it still feels shitty to be kicked out of a genre you loved to be apart of from 2001-2008sih and to basically be told to STFU when you ask to have your demographic remembered when designing content for a game.
In any case, some people enjoy that kind of content, exploring zones, killing random mobs, seeing the game world, not needing to worry about dying all the time, etc, and it's a part of leveling, but a part they enjoy, just because you view it as a slog does not mean others don't find it interesting.
I mean, GW2, made the choice to just had everyone a free capped level toon and then told them to fuck off and do what they want.
But none of this addresses the desire for challenge.
No, No.. No.. this was done totally to remove the challenge, in fact, pullers that would over pull would run a high risk of being thrown out of the group.
As far as groups and pugging went, if you did not play a desirable class, you might as well learn to solo the rest of the game. It's been my personal experience the people that tell me they had no problems finding groups often played healers, and thus a very in-demand class.
However, that does not change that the whole point of finding a solid competent group and camping ideal spot was to maximize exp/min, which, is the absolute antithesis to doing challenging content.
No one was there for any kind of challenge, in fact they were there to efficiently grind mobs in as fast a manner as they could achieve, in short, they were there for the exp/min, nothing more. They were there for Mindless, Brain Dead, Safe, Routine, Grinding, Nothing else, and every game was the exact same in this regard, and this has not changed ever, modern games with groups, often doing instanced content, are again, are there for the routine grind, to 100% complete the instance as fast, efficient, with as little issues as possible.
And anyone that started fucking that up, looking for challenge, or some other kind of bullshit, finds themselves without a group, real quick, it was that way 20 years ago, and it's that way today.
No one in those situations is looking for challenge.
So.. why this consent incessant chant wanting it, when in reality, at least as far as I have ever seen, no one actually doing the content wants this so called challenge or risk of failure.
People group up for grinding exp, purely to eliminate the risk of failure, ergo, remove challenge from the content so they can maximize their exp/min.
You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, so why is there such a desires to deny this.
Teaming up is just one of the tools we use to beat the challenge. It's not a contradiction.
There are also PvE players who find it fun when they die often - and find it boring when there's no risk.
Look, all of you seek out the strongest build you can get, focus building groups of the best players you can find, with the single minded drive to trivialize the game.
And lets be honest, no one plays a meta build, with the best gear in the game because they are looking for challenge, they do that to eliminate as much of the existing challenge of the game as they can, this is an absolute, everyone does this for the exact same reasons, to trivialize the game as much as they can.
When you do that, and the game becomes too easy, well.. no shit.. congrats, you achieved what you set out to do, make the game easy for yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself for that success.
See, for me, when I am looking to challenge myself (or just looking to play at all TBH), I like to make theme builds, and I enjoy using the uncommon weapon options.
Like for example, I play a dual dagger necro in GW2, I think I am about the only one that plays that kind of build, and I admit, by god it sucks balls, but, I like the theme of it, I got a really cool dagger skin out of a Black Lion chest a ways back, that I think is just the epic shizzles, so, every single character I own in GW2 that can use daggers, is using daggers. Because winning or losing, I look epic fighting, the only exception to this, if if they can use an axe, and since I got a legendary axe, if they can use an axe, they are going to use an axe, even better if they use an axe and dagger. No matter how meta the combo may be. If it's any good, more advantage to me, if not, oh well, I play what I want to play.
Now, if you are not willing to simple basic stuff like that, and we are talking things that filthy casuals do for the shits and giggles of it, they are not even looking for challenge, or whining about it, they do this, because they like theme builds, or want to have a specific look, and here you are, where you can't even adopt to that level of next level of play, and the only way you can think to play is to seek to trivialize the game at any costs, can anyone really take any of your claims of seeking challenge seriously?
Some people do, or at least the genuine possibility of on a regular basis. That which can pose a legitimate threat to you isn't trash. If every thing can there is no trash.
It's a matter of taste. Some prefer trash-lite gaming. There may be some that want to grit their way through each and every encounter.
Different people find different things fun is why, in general.
Now, I am not sure what to call that kind of mob or balance... Stupidly Designed, comes to mind, but I am sure others would have some other words for such.
in GW2, there are a lot of mobs that do not give any rewards, that can in fact kill you, because they swarm attack, I just learned there are rift events in Bloodstone Fen, and due to the fact that the mobs swarm and you can't even rally off them if you defeat them, makes it so, barely anyone does these rift events.
None of the "Oh I love challenge" people do them either, it's always some poor sap that is doing them for some quest or achievement. or like me, that didn't know how much they sucked, saw an event up, went to it, got my ass handed to me, and thought.. fuck that. and now I don't do them either, like everyone else in the zone.
I would get lost in dungeons all the time and my friends would be forced to come get me or my corpse. So I don't think that I was one of the people who explored much in Everquest. If I found a place I could solo I stayed there for days, yes you read that correctly, days because it took days to get a level the higher you went in that game.
Yet I loved Everquest. It is my all time favourite game. I don't think it was for the reasons most people associate with a reason for liking a game. It's the people I played with that made Everquest great.
Even an optional self only difficulty slider wouldn't work because then those who choose to set their slider to max difficulty would bitch about those who choose the easiest setting waltzing through their area and killing everything before they've had a chance to dent them. Kind of makes grouping pointless too when you mix the two types doesn't it?
Seems to me that the only viable solutions are segregation of the two groups by server wide-sliders, as you can do in some survival private servers, or you do it by segregating content difficulty by instanced or non-instanced locations as most modern MMOs do it.
But apparently segregation by location is also bad since the easy crowd is "locked out" of difficult content and the hard core crowd has to "suffer through" trivial content.
What's your solution?
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See while you all are off making meta builds, and having LFM's up demanding kill proofs, and specific classes to have some ideal raid makeup, to ensure that you get your 100% completion, every single run.
I am out there running theme raids like All Bard TOD, and "Warforged Only LoB" Now No doubt, this might be something someone like yourself has never experienced in their life, and I get that, I play in a whole other level then you do.
But the idea is rather simple, everyone in the raid group plays that class/race, this means, we do not have any of the traditional makeup of a raid, and are in fact, challenging ourselves to complete said raid, with classes that might be woefully wrong for the task, this adds a metric fuckton of challenge to the whole encounter. it's also something I do, for the shits and giggles of it, to see if we can pull it off.
That's a challenge seeker in my book.
That is some next level meta gaming to me.
At the same time, when I do a normal raid run, with no doubt, people like you, I, like everyone else, I want my 100% completion, and all that.
But I am not also whining about needing challenge in those raids, in fact, like everyone else, the last thing I want in those runs is for things to go wrong.
So when people tell me, they want challenge, but they do absolutely nothing to seek it out, they do nothing to challenge themselves in any way, shape, or form.. I have to ask, do they really want challenge, because they are not acting like they want challenge.
The people that show up to my all Priest or Bard raids, are there to have some fun and challenge themselves to see if they can do it. No joke, these are all raiders to start with, we have done this raid no doubt many times on our mains, but, doing it with all bards, adds fun and challenge.
But I never see the people that cry about wanting challenge doing that, it's always the casuals or moderates that do that kind of shit.. care to explain to me why?
The Group could then pick the difficulty, by vote, and once started, that was locked in, anyone that joins the group after would need to play on that difficulty. They could opt to LFM, or Not. All Loot and EXP is awarded on the Individual level, but all difficulties reward the same type of loot, just in different quantities. IE: You get more coin, exp, and tokens for doing harder difficulty dungeons.
Thus, the players that want challenge, have it available to them, they can set the dungeons on the hardest levels.
Also have it so all dungeons scale players, so no one can over level a dungeon, thus ensuring maximum challenge for those that want it, for those that find it hard, they could set the setting difficulty down.
Perhaps even have a solo/group/squad setting on the dungeons as well, to allow players who want to solo or run in larger groups to have that option open to them, these settings would scale up and down the difficulty on top of the base difficulty setting, to accommodate the proposed additional players.
That way, a player that really wants to challenge themselves, could try to solo a dungeon on the hardest difficulty on the squad setting.
They would still get the same reward tokens as if they did easy on solo, but they would get a lot more of them, so, that's on them if they want to play that challenge/reward system.
Put the choice of personal challenge in the players hands, as opposed to imposing it on everyone else.
We've seen devs try, like you say. But the market also doesn't create good incentives for these two types of gamers to be served separately: devs want both, producers need both to justify the cost of an MMORPG.
So we usually get MMORPGs that generally consist of easy content for about 90% of the game's "leveling" experience but only only about 10-20% of its endgame experience. The rest is covered by the more challenging content if a player wants to continue progression.
While the problem isn't an easy fix, you can, again, see why that solution actually helps create the pressure points that make casual and hardcore players attack one another and blame each other for any changes they dislike.
My basic thesis is that developers should do one of two things:
1) Make the leveling content interesting, or
2) Skip the leveling content entirely.
There used to be the argument that you had to go through leveling content to learn how to play the game. That argument doesn't work when it's scaled to be trivial so that you can breeze through it and still have no clue how to play well when you arrive at the level cap. If developers are going to knowingly and intentionally make the leveling content awful, then why not just skip it and start players at the level cap, if the endgame content is the only part of the game that the developers actually care about?
And if you think everyone wants trivial content, then why do MMORPG developers feel the need to streamline and remove that supposedly popular content? Has the move to making most MMORPG content trivial coincided with MMORPGs becoming a tremendously popular genre or with the the genre being in decline?
It was a ham fisted fix to content difficulty by nerfing all players when they could easily have buffed the overland, delve and public dungeon mobs where the easy content is. Instead, by nerfing all DPS everywhere they actually also made the hard content that many already can't do harder.
5 weeks after the original announcement and post after post calling out the "bring the floor up" bullshit, they finally, 2 days ago, came up with this gem:
The overall difficulty increase in overland content isa good thing and they could have gotten a lot of support if they had honestly said that this was their aim instead of waiting 5 weeks to come up with a plan to not simultaneously also make the current hard content even harder.
They remarkably managed to get both groups of players to unite giving them shit for 5 weeks for their stupidity and dishonest spin of "bringing up the floor."
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED