the point is to eliminate temptation. Nobody is forcing anybody. This person would willingly be buying this game
By taking out options you are forcing them to play the game a certain way (having the choice not to buy the game doesn't really count as a choice surely).
I don't see what the advantage is to make people avoid temptation? If they want to play the game on a mode that's too easy for them it's their loss.
And not to forget, we are talking about a genre where it is common to out-level or "out-zerg" content to make it easier.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Well you just answered your own question: it's their loss. People will often choose the path of least resistance, often at a net decrease in satisfaction. By not giving you the option to turn down the difficulty, it helps you push yourself when you might not otherwise. Also, games "force" you to do things all the time. People on this site love to use that word as if it means something significant.
Well sure I can say it's their loss because I don't see the point of playing a game in a way that's trivially easy but I suppose some people may actually want to do that.Maybe they are not after a challenge. Can we really say they are wrong and should have a right to make up their own mind about that?
Looking at it from a business point of view, if you're a dev do you want those people to play your game on easy mode and not be challenged at all or drop it in frustration and not buy your expansion/sequel? Not everyone is going to just grin and bear it if they find a game too hard. Especially now with so many game options to play. That's why customizing difficulty is a good idea. People who want hard punishing difficulty can have it and so can people who just want to cruise through the game and those are extremes, most people will maybe learn the game on an easier difficulty and then up the difficulty as their confidence increases.
I suppose you could make the argument in some games the difficulty is an integral part of the game experience but I don't think that is true in most games.
Also, like narius said, nobody is customizing a game for just one person, so there is little point in talking about "ideal solutions".
And we can go around and round in discussions. Facts remain:
Before difficulty slider .. lots of complaint about D3 is too difficult in inferno ...
After difficulty slider ... no more complaints.
Most SP have difficulty sliders.
Even *some* MMOs have them (DDO, WoW ....). There is certainly no reason not to consider it since it solve a big problem ... different people want different level of difficulties.
I believe ... how should I word it that no one tries to twist the words in my mouth..
there should be easy and there should be hard.
For instance, like someone else posted, EQ1 grind to max level. Hell NO. 5 min downtime as a necro, soloing while doing 1 mistake or some undercon mob bam you die, corpse runs, exp loss. Hell no, for what?
But the SWG Jedi grind, Hell YA. That carrot was huge and tasty.
EQ2 2004 doing quests, learning your class, meeting triple ups forming groups, exploring as a group, overland and dungeon, that was awesome. Open dungeons, finding your way around, exploring the dungeons, meeting other groups in there.
EQ2 2009 TSO farming instances for cool gear, easy ones to finally be able to take on guk, 3 hard ones was alot of fun. Not talking about raids, those were also great and the rewards were really interesting gear, unique gear.
EQ2 2011 DoV release, so good hard game, hard group instances, hard raids. Then
EQ2 2012 Gear revamp, consolidation of resistances, attributes. Holy crap that game SUCKS. Everything is easy. Hard mode for raids requires farming easy mode raids. Group content overland non-existant, group content instanced too easy. Questing gives most exp. Everyone soloing or powerleveling, no group action below level cap. No more swapping gear for better resistances of a particular type. Loot being terrible copy/paste boring, no unique items, contested raids too easy. Addition of "public raids", people not grouping anymore, only standing there farming public raids every hour. Boring. Not even exploring the one open dungeon that is left (which sucked too since there were only 2 types of mobs, orcs and giants). Dungeon maker in which you couldn't play your character but some 4 button mob, dungeon finder which built horrible groups. Solo or duo group content. bad bad bad.
Darkfall grind grind grind grind grind more grind, tier based progress... in a skill-based game, fail. t1 too easy, t2 too hard. Everyone out to get you. botters grinding skills and stats afk. After 3 hours of carefully farming a dungeon entrance getting killed by some random guy coming along killing you, looting all your stuff lol too hardcore for me. /quit.
Meridian59 grind was standing in a corner holding down CTRL while picking up loot every now and then. You might think boring but the community aspect came to show. Chat, chat in global, tells, with people farming the same zone, with your send groups, build a network of potential political allies while pressing ctrl easy but opened access to other ways to play the game. I still have contact with some people who played the game and that was 17 years ago. Yeah it was easy but it was fun even when you died and dropped all your stuff. You still had that trusty mace if you didn't take care of stockpiling equipment in your bank or guild hall which could be raided by enemy guilds. You met people and interacted with them and the world was small so you could make a name for yourself. Do I even want to have anything to do with the people of generation fail? Idk, it is what it is. "Yo I played WoW for 6 years" "Good for you now fuck off".
Nowadays WoW clones dominate, everyone wanted a piece of WoW's success, greed made them copy bad concepts. The cartoon graphics. Before WoW there was innovation, better graphics, deeper gameplay. After WoW everything went downhill. Stupid games for stupid people. Yes I'm ranting. But tbh I can't stand yet another grind in another WoW clone MMO. Linear questhub grind, faction grind, for stuff that only exists in some database and isn't real. Fuck that, I'm grinding real life now and became what nowadays MMO consumers call a casual player, logging in once a month, doing a few quests and logging out, of boredom. F2P exists because MMOs nowadays SUCK. Everything is just made to keep you in the game world and waste your life on it. Where is the fun? Hell I even started playing FPS and I never liked those but they're more challenging than any MMO out there right now. Better looking too. And don't get me started on the content of those games. Stories no one gives a shit about. Made up abstract stuff or terribly boring generic quests with generic stories some memes mixed in. Follow the beaten path. Meh not worth getting worked up about. Hope dies last they say. Anyway carry on.
Eh... Of course the implementation of difficulty sliders varies from game to game. That is my point. What you are doing is bring up only badly implemented difficulty sliders as an example of difficulty sliders as a whole. It is the equivalent of me saying "Mortal Online shows how bad the sandbox design is". It is not fair to bring out the worst to represent the whole.
I don't need to prove anything. You don't know which aspects of the game are adjusted when the developers are setting the difficulty to a game that has no sliders. Some are ruleset changes, some are modifiers, mobs are added, AI behavior adjusted... = likely the same stuff that is adjusted by a difficulty slider.
And no, including a difficulty slider is not a waste of resources because it widens the game's target audience. There's an obvious incentive for it.
No none of this is correct or relevant. I'm not bringing up the worst examples. I'm saying there NO "perfect" examples. There are no difficulty sliders that change everything about the game. Games are DESIGNED around a certain amount of difficulty. Sometimes it's even in the lack of information fed to you. How do you have a difficulty slider that changes that? That changes when certain NPCs will tell you where to go, or how to do something? I'm sure it's possible to do that, but nobody has done it yet because it would be way too much work to redesign the game for different difficulty levels. Tldr difficulty = more than just changing stats, which is what difficulty sliders do.
But I just told you they don't "just change stats"!
It was shorthand. The bottom line is that none of them completely redesign the game. As I said, a great many things go into what makes a game difficult.
But you don't need to adjust everything to adjust difficulty. You are making no sense by insisting that they did.
I'm not sure how you aren't getting this. I'm not saying difficulty sliders won't adjust the difficulty. I'm saying it's not a "perfect solution" like narius claims. Difficulty sliders do make the game more/less difficult. The problem that I'm talking about is that those different versions of the game (the different difficulty levels) are not what the game would be like if it were DESIGNED around that specific difficulty level. Difficulty sliders don't totally redesign the game. And a lot of time the difficulty of the game is inherent in the game design.
But you don't know that they would be different. That is what I was trying to tell you earlier. They could be exactly the same for all we knew.
Say you designed a game with medium difficulty: What is to stop you from simply adding easy and hard difficulties? Medium difficulty remains the same, but hard and easy difficulties might very well be the same settings they would've been implemented if the game had only easy or hard difficulty. There's no way to be sure.
Also, like narius said, nobody is customizing a game for just one person, so there is little point in talking about "ideal solutions".
You're asking me to prove a negative. There are many games that obviously DON'T change all aspects of the difficulty of a game. It's your job to show a game that does.
And what is stopping you from making easy and hard difficulties is the time and resources restraint. Fact is, it's much easier and cheaper to simply change modifiers and stats for the "elite" people that want to beat it on the super mega hard difficulty. Why do you think people LOVE the dark souls games? Because they're not just hard in a fake way. It's not just that you don't have much health, or that everything hits really hard. The difficulty is IN the design of the game. Difficulty sliders don't change that. For the most part they just change stats and maybe how many enemies spawn. I'm sure there are a few that change SOME design elements, but none of them is ever going to change so much that it would end up exactly as it would if it were designed from the ground up for that level of difficulty. This is so incredibly obvious. Sometimes I swear you guys argue just to argue.
Narius' (and now your) point about games being made for more than one person is utterly meaningless. All games are going after a specific target audience. The games with Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty settings aren't going after THREE people, are they? No. So obviously a game with only one difficulty setting wouldn't be going after just ONE person. I really feel like I shouldn't have to explain stuff like that.
Well you just answered your own question: it's their loss. People will often choose the path of least resistance, often at a net decrease in satisfaction. By not giving you the option to turn down the difficulty, it helps you push yourself when you might not otherwise. Also, games "force" you to do things all the time. People on this site love to use that word as if it means something significant.
Well sure I can say it's their loss because I don't see the point of playing a game in a way that's trivially easy but I suppose some people may actually want to do that.Maybe they are not after a challenge. Can we really say they are wrong and should have a right to make up their own mind about that?
It's not just us SAYING they're wrong. I'm not talking about everybody who plays on the easy difficulty. Some people probably legitimately want an easy game. But the fact remains that people will utilize what they have available to them. Some may have the will to soldier on even though it's so easy to just change the difficulty, but a lot of people won't. I'm not sure what to tell you. People choosing the path of least resistance is an obvious phenomenon. Satisfaction being tied to difficulty and achievement is also obvious. This argument pretty much makes itself. There will be times when you wish you could turn the difficulty down, but will be glad that you didn't (or couldn't) once you get past what you were stuck on.
Looking at it from a business point of view, if you're a dev do you want those people to play your game on easy mode and not be challenged at all or drop it in frustration and not buy your expansion/sequel? Not everyone is going to just grin and bear it if they find a game too hard. Especially now with so many game options to play. That's why customizing difficulty is a good idea. People who want hard punishing difficulty can have it and so can people who just want to cruise through the game and those are extremes, most people will maybe learn the game on an easier difficulty and then up the difficulty as their confidence increases.
I suppose you could make the argument in some games the difficulty is an integral part of the game experience but I don't think that is true in most games.
I'm definitely not interested in what is going to sell the most copies. That's a different discussion. Many things sell games, and not all of them are directly related to how good the game is. All I'm saying is taking out that temptation has a beneficial affect. There's nothing wrong with being pushed to succeed under tough circumstances. I don't agree that whatever whim the customer has at any moment during his experience is the "right" one. People make mistakes, don't they? Why can't they make a mistake about how difficult they want the game to be?
Also, like narius said, nobody is customizing a game for just one person, so there is little point in talking about "ideal solutions".
And we can go around and round in discussions. Facts remain:
Before difficulty slider .. lots of complaint about D3 is too difficult in inferno ...
After difficulty slider ... no more complaints.
Most SP have difficulty sliders.
Even *some* MMOs have them (DDO, WoW ....). There is certainly no reason not to consider it since it solve a big problem ... different people want different level of difficulties.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
I've already explained why a difficulty slider isn't "perfect" as you claim it is. I guess your rebuttal is some anecdotal observation about a difficulty slider in D3.....? Notice how I never said anything about what people want. I'm making a logical conclusion about what difficulty sliders do. They WILL in fact compromise the quality of your game relative to how it would be if you made it for one specific difficulty level. You haven't said anything to dispute that. Companies put it in because they want a bigger audience. And you could make the argument that it's more cost effective for a person to buy ONE game that has multiple difficulties rather than MULTIPLE games each with one difficulty. I'm not here to make the case that difficulty sliders aren't a cheap way to get different difficulties. Afterall, cheap probably does have a positive correlation with quality. All I'm saying is the quality of the game is worse, which it is.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
All I am gonna say is that most games have difficulty sliders and a lot of them are amazing. Gears of War was great on all difficulties and hard as he'll on insane requiring more skill than easie difficulties. Ninja Gaiden 2 was one of the most challenging games ever made with great combat. So happy it has an easy setting to just enjoy the fun combat and not always play perfectly.
To summarize sliders or settings can work and have worked in the past through proper implementation.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
Just like LFD ... another good feature.
No. Something existing is not an argument FOR it existing.
Also, I see you're up to your old tricks where you ignore people's points and only respond to what you want. I explained why difficulty sliders are sub-optimal.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
Just like LFD ... another good feature.
No. Something existing is not an argument FOR it existing.
Also, I see you're up to your old tricks where you ignore people's points and only respond to what you want. I explained why difficulty sliders are sub-optimal.
Sub-optimal in your opinion, not in factual reality. All you have done is said that you don't like them. I understand that. I accept that. What difference does your opinion make to anyone but you? The very existence of sliders is evidence that people who play these games want them, otherwise they would have been eliminated. You're welcome to your own opinions, you are not welcome to your own facts.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
Just like LFD ... another good feature.
No. Something existing is not an argument FOR it existing.
Also, I see you're up to your old tricks where you ignore people's points and only respond to what you want. I explained why difficulty sliders are sub-optimal.
Sub-optimal in your opinion, not in factual reality. All you have done is said that you don't like them. I understand that. I accept that. What difference does your opinion make to anyone but you? The very existence of sliders is evidence that people who play these games want them, otherwise they would have been eliminated. You're welcome to your own opinions, you are not welcome to your own facts.
Plus, he has not even shown he has an argument ... keep saying it is suboptimal ...
well ... a dev can just optimize for each level of difficulty. Whatever he says can be done in one game, can be done in one game with multiple difficulty level.
He obviously won't listen to you ... but that is ok ... he is known to just spam large amount of text. I won't take him too seriously.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
Just like LFD ... another good feature.
No. Something existing is not an argument FOR it existing.
Also, I see you're up to your old tricks where you ignore people's points and only respond to what you want. I explained why difficulty sliders are sub-optimal.
Sub-optimal in your opinion, not in factual reality. All you have done is said that you don't like them. I understand that. I accept that. What difference does your opinion make to anyone but you? The very existence of sliders is evidence that people who play these games want them, otherwise they would have been eliminated. You're welcome to your own opinions, you are not welcome to your own facts.
No, that's not all I've said. Maybe that's all you've read, or all you've understood, but it is NOT all I've said. I explained why sliders are a sub-optimal scenario compared to a game that would be made for THAT specific difficulty. My point has never been whether or not people want them. You're confused about that, like you're confused about my whole point. You seem to just not understand anything that's going on. That's not my problem.
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
Just like LFD ... another good feature.
No. Something existing is not an argument FOR it existing.
Also, I see you're up to your old tricks where you ignore people's points and only respond to what you want. I explained why difficulty sliders are sub-optimal.
Sub-optimal in your opinion, not in factual reality. All you have done is said that you don't like them. I understand that. I accept that. What difference does your opinion make to anyone but you? The very existence of sliders is evidence that people who play these games want them, otherwise they would have been eliminated. You're welcome to your own opinions, you are not welcome to your own facts.
Plus, he has not even shown he has an argument ... keep saying it is suboptimal ...
well ... a dev can just optimize for each level of difficulty. Whatever he says can be done in one game, can be done in one game with multiple difficulty level.
He obviously won't listen to you ... but that is ok ... he is known to just spam large amount of text. I won't take him too seriously.
I addressed that exact scenario. You must just not be reading my posts. You are consistently just ignoring points. Why would anybody take you seriously?
Here's how you you argue:
I say a lot of things that make logical sense.
You either respond with something that doesn't address anything I said, or you just literally flat out ignore it. Like LITERALLY just cut out that portion of the post and pretend it doesn't exist. You've done it in the past, and you're doing it in this thread.
I addressed that exact scenario. You must just not be reading my posts. You are consistently just ignoring points.
blah blah blah ...
Still .. no argument of why a dev cannot optimize each individual level of difficulty? Don't worry ... it does not look like devs are paying attention to your "arguments" anyway.
I will certainly see if i can push up one more level of difficulty in D3 tonight ... great use of the difficulty slider.
I agree, MMO's have simply lost all their challenge.
The only challenge new MMO's even attempt to create is PvP scenarios and raiding... which leaves the entire leveling up process not worth having.
I miss the grind of the older games, the grinding of the zones they created. Forming groups, partnerships, friends etc... battling the zone as if it was life and death. Not soloing the entire game and just grouping to raid for new loot. The MMO's these days are pathetic. Everything is a rush, nobody reads quest text, everyone going to fast and easy route.
Feel sorry for the designers who create wonderful zones for people to just skip through.
Take me back in time please so I can re-live my EQ1 days. Ohh how I miss them.
I addressed that exact scenario. You must just not be reading my posts. You are consistently just ignoring points.
blah blah blah ...
Still .. no argument of why a dev cannot optimize each individual level of difficulty? Don't worry ... it does not look like devs are paying attention to your "arguments" anyway.
I will certainly see if i can push up one more level of difficulty in D3 tonight ... great use of the difficulty slider.
They can, but that's resources that aren't spent on the rest of the game. I already said that before. You're just not paying attention.
You said difficulty sliders are perfect. They're not. You're wrong. You would have to completely redesign the game for each difficulty level, which developers don't do. They don't do that, because it would be a waste of money. Get it? There are a lot of people who don't like difficulty sliders for this very reason. Difficulty sliders work for simple games like tetris, because the only difficulty in the game are things that are easily adjustable. However, like I pointed out before, there are games like Dark Souls that are harder for other reasons besides just numbers.
What do you mean by that? If somebody wants to master all hard mode raids in WoW, he needs to play 30 hours a week for several months.
How many players did have Naxxramas on farm status during vanilla? 0.02 % of all players world wide? How many did just enter Naxxramas? 2% ?
The problem are the items. Because nobody aims at "having fun with difficult encounters", but "getting the BiS ASAP", players just tend to rush through content like 5-man-instances. They do not care about the boss mechanics. They just blame the healer. They do not even try to play the game as it is supposed to be played - "just give me epics!"
2. Casuals
Casuals do not care about goals or gear. They just play for having fun. Because they have less time to invest into an MMO, it would be exacttly the casual players who want more challenging content in MMOs. However, MMOs tend to be very tedious, where you have to do certain dumb tasks again and again and again, until it gets interesting.
As you can clearly see - it is the hardcore players who prefer stupid repetitive gameplay to maintain their elite status over casuals. Please stop blaming the casuals for all the stupid gameplay in MMOs. If skill would be more important than playingtime in MMOs, many "hardcore" players would stop playing MMOs. This is a matter of fact.
3. Endgame Raiding is the "real" game
In FFXIV it was so obvious again: Nobody cared about the gameplay, an open world, good quests or challenging content. Everybody rushed through the game in order to reach the endgame, where "the real" game begins. I read this on these forums all the time. So please stop lamenting over MMOs being easy. You want them to be easy!
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
Originally posted by jesteralways . unless we can create a virtual reality mmorpg where players can truly live, those "glory" days are never coming back.
Even if you can create a virtual reality mmorpg where players can truly live, i doubt those days will come back. It is about players preferences, not technology.
That is why the newer mmo's don't last more that 6 months
I addressed that exact scenario. You must just not be reading my posts. You are consistently just ignoring points.
blah blah blah ...
Still .. no argument of why a dev cannot optimize each individual level of difficulty? Don't worry ... it does not look like devs are paying attention to your "arguments" anyway.
I will certainly see if i can push up one more level of difficulty in D3 tonight ... great use of the difficulty slider.
They can, but that's resources that aren't spent on the rest of the game. I already said that before. You're just not paying attention.
You said difficulty sliders are perfect. They're not. You're wrong. You would have to completely redesign the game for each difficulty level, which developers don't do. They don't do that, because it would be a waste of money. Get it? There are a lot of people who don't like difficulty sliders for this very reason. Difficulty sliders work for simple games like tetris, because the only difficulty in the game are things that are easily adjustable. However, like I pointed out before, there are games like Dark Souls that are harder for other reasons besides just numbers.
We are not seeing difficulty sliders in clean sheet MMOs either. GW2, TESO and Wildstar - none of them have difficulty sliders like Diablo III.
Why? It's because they do market research and discover most people will just go with easy mode for most of the content - robbing themselves of any satisfaction they would get from achieving anything in the game. You might think that this is impossible and that people will just pick the level that's most fun - but real world experience shows us this is not.
If you want a real world non-video game example - its a manual transmission. Manual transmissions are harder to drive then automatics. But talk to almost everyone who has mastered one - and they greatly prefer it for most driving experiences. Its like a mini game in where being in the right gear - or getting the right shift rewards the driver. So the additional difficulty = more fun. But without the prod of having to learn it - manual transmissions are fading away..
People want automatics - not because it makes driving more fun - but because its easier and what many people really want is to just get where they are going. Smart game designers have to say - hey we aren't giving you that automatic transmission - you better learn to do it yourself. And bam you get the feeling of mastery from good performance and achievement with your character that you wouldn't get otherwise. If they go around just giving you rewards - you lose massive amounts of your player base.
I dunno if anyone here played FFXIV - but they have a class in there - a monk or pugilitst. The way its set up you can get VERY good performance with a one or two button macro (and some initial inteliigence to set up the macro). So almost everyone will run their character that way but THEY WILL NOT LIKE IT.
The human mind is like this - they want the easy way to get the goal accomplished - but they won't enjoy the journey. Dark Souls owes a lot of its popularity to its uncompromising nature. Its hard. If you don't work at it you won't accomplish anything. Don't give your players an easy way out.
There is a certain norm of reaction speed and intelligence you can design your game for - that will be somewhat challenging for most of your audience. You want this sweet spot for most of your game content - because if you give people they easy way out they will take it and hate you for it.
Originally posted by jesteralways . unless we can create a virtual reality mmorpg where players can truly live, those "glory" days are never coming back.
Even if you can create a virtual reality mmorpg where players can truly live, i doubt those days will come back. It is about players preferences, not technology.
That is why the newer mmo's don't last more that 6 months
I agree, MMO's have simply lost all their challenge.
The only challenge new MMO's even attempt to create is PvP scenarios and raiding... which leaves the entire leveling up process not worth having.
I miss the grind of the older games, the grinding of the zones they created. Forming groups, partnerships, friends etc... battling the zone as if it was life and death. Not soloing the entire game and just grouping to raid for new loot. The MMO's these days are pathetic. Everything is a rush, nobody reads quest text, everyone going to fast and easy route.
Feel sorry for the designers who create wonderful zones for people to just skip through.
Take me back in time please so I can re-live my EQ1 days. Ohh how I miss them.
What "challenge" did those games provide? Early MMOs required a lot of time to level up. They didn't require any special skill or reaction to the situation beyond what current MMOs present to players. The only "challenge" you refer to is patience. Eventually, everyone could reach the level cap of acquire that special loot. The real difference is the level of frustration that those MMOs put players through to reach their goals.
Just look at what older MMOs did and compare them to newer ones. Death penalties have been reduced or eliminated so they are no longer causing significant lost time when you die. Loot systems have been refined so players who participate get credit towards obtaining loot instead of relying solely on a RNG to give them what they need to progress. Boss encounters have been refined to give a "tell" when they are about to perform a move that requires players to react beforehand instead of simply wiping the raid without warning.
None of the things early MMOs presented were actual challenges. They were simply frustrations that newer MMOs have decided to eliminate. Even the level grinds were just a frustration that was eliminated.
If you don't like the direction new MMOs have taken in reducing frustration, go play a frustrating game and tell us how it "challenges" you. At best, a single-player game can add a reactionary element to it which presents a real challenge. The reactionary element is not possible in online games due to latency issues, which would cause players to quit just because they have a ping of over 150.
Originally posted by jesteralways . unless we can create a virtual reality mmorpg where players can truly live, those "glory" days are never coming back.
Even if you can create a virtual reality mmorpg where players can truly live, i doubt those days will come back. It is about players preferences, not technology.
That is why the newer mmo's don't last more that 6 months
They don't last or you get bored ?
I'd be interested in seeing data on player retention actually. I bet people quit modern themepark MMO's more quickly on average than the "oldschool" and sandbox ones.
I addressed that exact scenario. You must just not be reading my posts. You are consistently just ignoring points.
blah blah blah ...
Still .. no argument of why a dev cannot optimize each individual level of difficulty? Don't worry ... it does not look like devs are paying attention to your "arguments" anyway.
I will certainly see if i can push up one more level of difficulty in D3 tonight ... great use of the difficulty slider.
They can, but that's resources that aren't spent on the rest of the game. I already said that before. You're just not paying attention.
You said difficulty sliders are perfect. They're not. You're wrong. You would have to completely redesign the game for each difficulty level, which developers don't do. They don't do that, because it would be a waste of money. Get it? There are a lot of people who don't like difficulty sliders for this very reason. Difficulty sliders work for simple games like tetris, because the only difficulty in the game are things that are easily adjustable. However, like I pointed out before, there are games like Dark Souls that are harder for other reasons besides just numbers.
We are not seeing difficulty sliders in clean sheet MMOs either. GW2, TESO and Wildstar - none of them have difficulty sliders like Diablo III.
Why? It's because they do market research and discover most people will just go with easy mode for most of the content - robbing themselves of any satisfaction they would get from achieving anything in the game. You might think that this is impossible and that people will just pick the level that's most fun - but real world experience shows us this is not.
If you want a real world non-video game example - its a manual transmission. Manual transmissions are harder to drive then automatics. But talk to almost everyone who has mastered one - and they greatly prefer it for most driving experiences. Its like a mini game in where being in the right gear - or getting the right shift rewards the driver. So the additional difficulty = more fun. But without the prod of having to learn it - manual transmissions are fading away..
People want automatics - not because it makes driving more fun - but because its easier and what many people really want is to just get where they are going. Smart game designers have to say - hey we aren't giving you that automatic transmission - you better learn to do it yourself. And bam you get the feeling of mastery from good performance and achievement with your character that you wouldn't get otherwise. If they go around just giving you rewards - you lose massive amounts of your player base.
I dunno if anyone here played FFXIV - but they have a class in there - a monk or pugilitst. The way its set up you can get VERY good performance with a one or two button macro (and some initial inteliigence to set up the macro). So almost everyone will run their character that way but THEY WILL NOT LIKE IT.
The human mind is like this - they want the easy way to get the goal accomplished - but they won't enjoy the journey. Dark Souls owes a lot of its popularity to its uncompromising nature. Its hard. If you don't work at it you won't accomplish anything. Don't give your players an easy way out.
There is a certain norm of reaction speed and intelligence you can design your game for - that will be somewhat challenging for most of your audience. You want this sweet spot for most of your game content - because if you give people they easy way out they will take it and hate you for it.
Comments
And not to forget, we are talking about a genre where it is common to out-level or "out-zerg" content to make it easier.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Well sure I can say it's their loss because I don't see the point of playing a game in a way that's trivially easy but I suppose some people may actually want to do that.Maybe they are not after a challenge. Can we really say they are wrong and should have a right to make up their own mind about that?
Looking at it from a business point of view, if you're a dev do you want those people to play your game on easy mode and not be challenged at all or drop it in frustration and not buy your expansion/sequel? Not everyone is going to just grin and bear it if they find a game too hard. Especially now with so many game options to play. That's why customizing difficulty is a good idea. People who want hard punishing difficulty can have it and so can people who just want to cruise through the game and those are extremes, most people will maybe learn the game on an easier difficulty and then up the difficulty as their confidence increases.
I suppose you could make the argument in some games the difficulty is an integral part of the game experience but I don't think that is true in most games.
And we can go around and round in discussions. Facts remain:
Before difficulty slider .. lots of complaint about D3 is too difficult in inferno ...
After difficulty slider ... no more complaints.
Most SP have difficulty sliders.
Even *some* MMOs have them (DDO, WoW ....). There is certainly no reason not to consider it since it solve a big problem ... different people want different level of difficulties.
I believe ... how should I word it that no one tries to twist the words in my mouth..
there should be easy and there should be hard.
For instance, like someone else posted, EQ1 grind to max level. Hell NO. 5 min downtime as a necro, soloing while doing 1 mistake or some undercon mob bam you die, corpse runs, exp loss. Hell no, for what?
But the SWG Jedi grind, Hell YA. That carrot was huge and tasty.
EQ2 2004 doing quests, learning your class, meeting triple ups forming groups, exploring as a group, overland and dungeon, that was awesome. Open dungeons, finding your way around, exploring the dungeons, meeting other groups in there.
EQ2 2009 TSO farming instances for cool gear, easy ones to finally be able to take on guk, 3 hard ones was alot of fun. Not talking about raids, those were also great and the rewards were really interesting gear, unique gear.
EQ2 2011 DoV release, so good hard game, hard group instances, hard raids. Then
EQ2 2012 Gear revamp, consolidation of resistances, attributes. Holy crap that game SUCKS. Everything is easy. Hard mode for raids requires farming easy mode raids. Group content overland non-existant, group content instanced too easy. Questing gives most exp. Everyone soloing or powerleveling, no group action below level cap. No more swapping gear for better resistances of a particular type. Loot being terrible copy/paste boring, no unique items, contested raids too easy. Addition of "public raids", people not grouping anymore, only standing there farming public raids every hour. Boring. Not even exploring the one open dungeon that is left (which sucked too since there were only 2 types of mobs, orcs and giants). Dungeon maker in which you couldn't play your character but some 4 button mob, dungeon finder which built horrible groups. Solo or duo group content. bad bad bad.
Darkfall grind grind grind grind grind more grind, tier based progress... in a skill-based game, fail. t1 too easy, t2 too hard. Everyone out to get you. botters grinding skills and stats afk. After 3 hours of carefully farming a dungeon entrance getting killed by some random guy coming along killing you, looting all your stuff lol too hardcore for me. /quit.
Meridian59 grind was standing in a corner holding down CTRL while picking up loot every now and then. You might think boring but the community aspect came to show. Chat, chat in global, tells, with people farming the same zone, with your send groups, build a network of potential political allies while pressing ctrl
easy but opened access to other ways to play the game. I still have contact with some people who played the game and that was 17 years ago. Yeah it was easy but it was fun even when you died and dropped all your stuff. You still had that trusty mace if you didn't take care of stockpiling equipment in your bank or guild hall which could be raided by enemy guilds. You met people and interacted with them and the world was small so you could make a name for yourself. Do I even want to have anything to do with the people of generation fail? Idk, it is what it is. "Yo I played WoW for 6 years" "Good for you now fuck off".
Nowadays WoW clones dominate, everyone wanted a piece of WoW's success, greed made them copy bad concepts. The cartoon graphics. Before WoW there was innovation, better graphics, deeper gameplay. After WoW everything went downhill. Stupid games for stupid people. Yes I'm ranting. But tbh I can't stand yet another grind in another WoW clone MMO. Linear questhub grind, faction grind, for stuff that only exists in some database and isn't real. Fuck that, I'm grinding real life now and became what nowadays MMO consumers call a casual player, logging in once a month, doing a few quests and logging out, of boredom. F2P exists because MMOs nowadays SUCK. Everything is just made to keep you in the game world and waste your life on it. Where is the fun? Hell I even started playing FPS and I never liked those but they're more challenging than any MMO out there right now. Better looking too. And don't get me started on the content of those games. Stories no one gives a shit about. Made up abstract stuff or terribly boring generic quests with generic stories some memes mixed in. Follow the beaten path. Meh not worth getting worked up about. Hope dies last they say. Anyway carry on.
You're asking me to prove a negative. There are many games that obviously DON'T change all aspects of the difficulty of a game. It's your job to show a game that does.
And what is stopping you from making easy and hard difficulties is the time and resources restraint. Fact is, it's much easier and cheaper to simply change modifiers and stats for the "elite" people that want to beat it on the super mega hard difficulty. Why do you think people LOVE the dark souls games? Because they're not just hard in a fake way. It's not just that you don't have much health, or that everything hits really hard. The difficulty is IN the design of the game. Difficulty sliders don't change that. For the most part they just change stats and maybe how many enemies spawn. I'm sure there are a few that change SOME design elements, but none of them is ever going to change so much that it would end up exactly as it would if it were designed from the ground up for that level of difficulty. This is so incredibly obvious. Sometimes I swear you guys argue just to argue.
Narius' (and now your) point about games being made for more than one person is utterly meaningless. All games are going after a specific target audience. The games with Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty settings aren't going after THREE people, are they? No. So obviously a game with only one difficulty setting wouldn't be going after just ONE person. I really feel like I shouldn't have to explain stuff like that.
It's not just us SAYING they're wrong. I'm not talking about everybody who plays on the easy difficulty. Some people probably legitimately want an easy game. But the fact remains that people will utilize what they have available to them. Some may have the will to soldier on even though it's so easy to just change the difficulty, but a lot of people won't. I'm not sure what to tell you. People choosing the path of least resistance is an obvious phenomenon. Satisfaction being tied to difficulty and achievement is also obvious. This argument pretty much makes itself. There will be times when you wish you could turn the difficulty down, but will be glad that you didn't (or couldn't) once you get past what you were stuck on.
I'm definitely not interested in what is going to sell the most copies. That's a different discussion. Many things sell games, and not all of them are directly related to how good the game is. All I'm saying is taking out that temptation has a beneficial affect. There's nothing wrong with being pushed to succeed under tough circumstances. I don't agree that whatever whim the customer has at any moment during his experience is the "right" one. People make mistakes, don't they? Why can't they make a mistake about how difficult they want the game to be?
Lol the existence of difficulty sliders isn't an argument for difficulty sliders.
I've already explained why a difficulty slider isn't "perfect" as you claim it is. I guess your rebuttal is some anecdotal observation about a difficulty slider in D3.....? Notice how I never said anything about what people want. I'm making a logical conclusion about what difficulty sliders do. They WILL in fact compromise the quality of your game relative to how it would be if you made it for one specific difficulty level. You haven't said anything to dispute that. Companies put it in because they want a bigger audience. And you could make the argument that it's more cost effective for a person to buy ONE game that has multiple difficulties rather than MULTIPLE games each with one difficulty. I'm not here to make the case that difficulty sliders aren't a cheap way to get different difficulties. Afterall, cheap probably does have a positive correlation with quality. All I'm saying is the quality of the game is worse, which it is.
It is .. it is called market response to what people like. I get that you don't like it .. but hey .. it solves a problem for many and make games more fun.
Just like LFD ... another good feature.
To summarize sliders or settings can work and have worked in the past through proper implementation.
No. Something existing is not an argument FOR it existing.
Also, I see you're up to your old tricks where you ignore people's points and only respond to what you want. I explained why difficulty sliders are sub-optimal.
Sub-optimal in your opinion, not in factual reality. All you have done is said that you don't like them. I understand that. I accept that. What difference does your opinion make to anyone but you? The very existence of sliders is evidence that people who play these games want them, otherwise they would have been eliminated. You're welcome to your own opinions, you are not welcome to your own facts.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
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Plus, he has not even shown he has an argument ... keep saying it is suboptimal ...
well ... a dev can just optimize for each level of difficulty. Whatever he says can be done in one game, can be done in one game with multiple difficulty level.
He obviously won't listen to you ... but that is ok ... he is known to just spam large amount of text. I won't take him too seriously.
No, that's not all I've said. Maybe that's all you've read, or all you've understood, but it is NOT all I've said. I explained why sliders are a sub-optimal scenario compared to a game that would be made for THAT specific difficulty. My point has never been whether or not people want them. You're confused about that, like you're confused about my whole point. You seem to just not understand anything that's going on. That's not my problem.
I addressed that exact scenario. You must just not be reading my posts. You are consistently just ignoring points. Why would anybody take you seriously?
Here's how you you argue:
I say a lot of things that make logical sense.
You either respond with something that doesn't address anything I said, or you just literally flat out ignore it. Like LITERALLY just cut out that portion of the post and pretend it doesn't exist. You've done it in the past, and you're doing it in this thread.
I agree, MMO's have simply lost all their challenge.
The only challenge new MMO's even attempt to create is PvP scenarios and raiding... which leaves the entire leveling up process not worth having.
I miss the grind of the older games, the grinding of the zones they created. Forming groups, partnerships, friends etc... battling the zone as if it was life and death. Not soloing the entire game and just grouping to raid for new loot. The MMO's these days are pathetic. Everything is a rush, nobody reads quest text, everyone going to fast and easy route.
Feel sorry for the designers who create wonderful zones for people to just skip through.
Take me back in time please so I can re-live my EQ1 days. Ohh how I miss them.
Playing: Nothing
Played: EQ1, EQ2, VG:SoH, WoW, AoC, LoTRO, Aion, L2, DF, WAR.
Favourites: EQ1, VG:SoH, Original WoW.
Waiting: Pantheon: ROTF
They can, but that's resources that aren't spent on the rest of the game. I already said that before. You're just not paying attention.
You said difficulty sliders are perfect. They're not. You're wrong. You would have to completely redesign the game for each difficulty level, which developers don't do. They don't do that, because it would be a waste of money. Get it? There are a lot of people who don't like difficulty sliders for this very reason. Difficulty sliders work for simple games like tetris, because the only difficulty in the game are things that are easily adjustable. However, like I pointed out before, there are games like Dark Souls that are harder for other reasons besides just numbers.
1. Instant gratification
What do you mean by that? If somebody wants to master all hard mode raids in WoW, he needs to play 30 hours a week for several months.
How many players did have Naxxramas on farm status during vanilla? 0.02 % of all players world wide? How many did just enter Naxxramas? 2% ?
The problem are the items. Because nobody aims at "having fun with difficult encounters", but "getting the BiS ASAP", players just tend to rush through content like 5-man-instances. They do not care about the boss mechanics. They just blame the healer. They do not even try to play the game as it is supposed to be played - "just give me epics!"
2. Casuals
Casuals do not care about goals or gear. They just play for having fun. Because they have less time to invest into an MMO, it would be exacttly the casual players who want more challenging content in MMOs. However, MMOs tend to be very tedious, where you have to do certain dumb tasks again and again and again, until it gets interesting.
As you can clearly see - it is the hardcore players who prefer stupid repetitive gameplay to maintain their elite status over casuals. Please stop blaming the casuals for all the stupid gameplay in MMOs. If skill would be more important than playingtime in MMOs, many "hardcore" players would stop playing MMOs. This is a matter of fact.
3. Endgame Raiding is the "real" game
In FFXIV it was so obvious again: Nobody cared about the gameplay, an open world, good quests or challenging content. Everybody rushed through the game in order to reach the endgame, where "the real" game begins. I read this on these forums all the time. So please stop lamenting over MMOs being easy. You want them to be easy!
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
That is why the newer mmo's don't last more that 6 months
Read my blog http://sanmonocobra.blogspot.com/
We are not seeing difficulty sliders in clean sheet MMOs either. GW2, TESO and Wildstar - none of them have difficulty sliders like Diablo III.
Why? It's because they do market research and discover most people will just go with easy mode for most of the content - robbing themselves of any satisfaction they would get from achieving anything in the game. You might think that this is impossible and that people will just pick the level that's most fun - but real world experience shows us this is not.
If you want a real world non-video game example - its a manual transmission. Manual transmissions are harder to drive then automatics. But talk to almost everyone who has mastered one - and they greatly prefer it for most driving experiences. Its like a mini game in where being in the right gear - or getting the right shift rewards the driver. So the additional difficulty = more fun. But without the prod of having to learn it - manual transmissions are fading away..
People want automatics - not because it makes driving more fun - but because its easier and what many people really want is to just get where they are going. Smart game designers have to say - hey we aren't giving you that automatic transmission - you better learn to do it yourself. And bam you get the feeling of mastery from good performance and achievement with your character that you wouldn't get otherwise. If they go around just giving you rewards - you lose massive amounts of your player base.
I dunno if anyone here played FFXIV - but they have a class in there - a monk or pugilitst. The way its set up you can get VERY good performance with a one or two button macro (and some initial inteliigence to set up the macro). So almost everyone will run their character that way but THEY WILL NOT LIKE IT.
The human mind is like this - they want the easy way to get the goal accomplished - but they won't enjoy the journey. Dark Souls owes a lot of its popularity to its uncompromising nature. Its hard. If you don't work at it you won't accomplish anything. Don't give your players an easy way out.
There is a certain norm of reaction speed and intelligence you can design your game for - that will be somewhat challenging for most of your audience. You want this sweet spot for most of your game content - because if you give people they easy way out they will take it and hate you for it.
They don't last or you get bored ?
What "challenge" did those games provide? Early MMOs required a lot of time to level up. They didn't require any special skill or reaction to the situation beyond what current MMOs present to players. The only "challenge" you refer to is patience. Eventually, everyone could reach the level cap of acquire that special loot. The real difference is the level of frustration that those MMOs put players through to reach their goals.
Just look at what older MMOs did and compare them to newer ones. Death penalties have been reduced or eliminated so they are no longer causing significant lost time when you die. Loot systems have been refined so players who participate get credit towards obtaining loot instead of relying solely on a RNG to give them what they need to progress. Boss encounters have been refined to give a "tell" when they are about to perform a move that requires players to react beforehand instead of simply wiping the raid without warning.
None of the things early MMOs presented were actual challenges. They were simply frustrations that newer MMOs have decided to eliminate. Even the level grinds were just a frustration that was eliminated.
If you don't like the direction new MMOs have taken in reducing frustration, go play a frustrating game and tell us how it "challenges" you. At best, a single-player game can add a reactionary element to it which presents a real challenge. The reactionary element is not possible in online games due to latency issues, which would cause players to quit just because they have a ping of over 150.
I'd be interested in seeing data on player retention actually. I bet people quit modern themepark MMO's more quickly on average than the "oldschool" and sandbox ones.
Well said.