I would actually pay to see you do an animated rant series.

I remember that one of the Legend of Spyro games provided a good example of how NOT to set up the difficulty curve, this time cross-games.

The first level of the second game was harder than the LAST level of the first game, since the enemy counts were about the same, they were faster, they were immune to hit-stun (and you weren't), and (crucially) they changed the nature of respawns. In the original, dying would restore your magic meter, reduce your health from the maximum a little (more with repeated deaths) and render the enemies back up to their current HP bar. If you had killed two enemies of five, then there were only three left. Perhaps a bit lenient, but it was a platformer.
The second game? You didn't get your magic restored, and every enemy in the current area was completely restored back to their starting configuration and numbers. This had the incredibly irritating effect that if you didn't beat an enemy encounter on the first go (and you wouldn't, they would slip a hit in past your defences and stun-lock you to death once your magic ran out) then you had to die about a dozen more times until your Fury meter finally refilled from all the hits you were taking over your multiple deaths. Made the last half of the game a nightmare, since the same thing happened with bosses - and some bosses more-or-less required magic to beat.

Fortunately, the third game in the series was a lot more lenient with magic and so on, including giving you two characters.

I strongly disagree with this. Many reasons, although I will spare a point by point rant and focus on 2 key points.

1- Why WoW is dying. Your comparison to chess and tetris doesn't really work. Chess isn't about quests, exploration, building a character ect. People still play Starcraft and Chess because there is strategy against other players. Plus you don't need a monthly fee and a guild of always active players to play chess, just someone who knows the rules and a board with pieces. There are no AIs to learn and exploit the weaknesses of. ect.

2- The difficulty curve = challenge = fun. Doesn't really work. Some of the best games such as Halo 3, or Ratchet and Clank, have a difficulty curve that is so subtle that most people don't think it's getting harder. You don't feel it getting harder or showing you the ropes, but if you dropped a player in on the last few levels, they would die over and over. Also, putting so much emphasis on the difficulty curve ignores the fact that gameplay and mechanics plays a part. This rant, intended or not, makes it seem like difficulty is all that matters. Sometimes I put Call of Duty or Halo or Resident Evil on easy because I enjoy breasing through it.

I concur with you on the point of sometimes enjoying a game BECAUSE it's easy. But I have to disagree on your use of Halo 3 and Ratchet and Clank as examples to support your argument. Subtle difficulty curves you don't notice are the best, but they're still curves, very good ones, that make the game more enjoyable. Those examples seem to support Endium's rant.

Right, but those games are often used as "games are all easy now" and are assumed to have a flat line as the difficulty curve. While the final battle in Halo is usually the easiest, there is a curve, it's just so subtle that most people don't notice it. In Halo 3 for example, most people don't know that on normal, there are no grenades in the first level and you don't get a vehicle until about a third into the game. Once you know, it's obvious, but most don't notice.

In response to number 1, that's the difference between PvE and PvP. He seems to be talking here exclusively about PvE.

In response to your number 2, that's because the difficulty is tuned in such a way that it's matching the rate at which your skill is rising as you play the game and get experience. Think one of his last two graphs but with the lines on top of each other.

There's different ways to do challenge and that's just one way to do it. Some games have difficulty levels which just throw a flat amplitude gain onto the difficulty curve. Other games like Demon's Souls start the curve massively high and have it stay flat or even degrade a little towards the end, forcing you to skill up immediately or fail to procede.

The issue being that unless at some point the challenge curve exceeds what your skill curve starts at you will never be challenged by the game, which typically ends up with you being bored.

I agree with the dinosaur

Yay. Someone got it right. Most people mistakenly call it a dragon. ^_^

This is true, but there used to always be things in the world I could test my mettle against. Stats I could tweak and resistances I could create. I got to the point where I could take down elites without better gear because I knew their weakness and adapted. Sure, there's a limit, but... They seem to be taking that out of the game. If I can't take it on at first, I can't take it on at all. No different directions, no change up in the order of using skills different per enemy.

But no more. They even literally took out much of the earlier equipment - not just out of the drops table, but out of my inventory. Trophies were gone. And it couldn't even figure out that I'd defeated old Molten Core - while I had a set of tier II on me.

To be fair i loved seeing this and it just made me remember why i hated modern gaming and the constant nannying culture you see with them "Press thi sbutton to open the door" "Dont go down this path or we'll put you back where you were" "Oh you went the wrong way sorry let me put you back the right way" "Oh that enemy hit you but its ok we'll fix that in a few seconds of standing still" nowadays the difficulty curve on gaming just seems to be a flat line to me :( And on games that even HAVE multiple difficulties i find myself completely fast asleep before the games even kick in because of the ongoing fetish for having a longer more dull and unskippable (even if you already beat the game) series of cutscenes than any other game on the market.

Stopped playing WoW about 2 years ago. I enjoyed healing, curiously enough. Now I'm amazed that people still play it.

http://www.lorehound.com/wp-content.....rningcurve.jpg <-- I play EVE. The situation with PvE is essentially graph number three: Eventually you reach a point where you're as good as you can get in hisec. Then the only way to advance is to venture into PvP... which is a vicious, underhanded game in which anything goes to get ahead. At that point it becomes very much a social matter, because success means defending your corps territory, and you can't do that if you can't form into an organised military force.

Hell yeah. I play eve as well. Love that chart. :D

That game requires some intense initial learning, lol. I know they're trying to nerf the initial with these 'new player experiences' but I don't know how well it actually works.

I think this goes for more than just WoW but for all games out today. The difficulty curve is dissapearing and the thought of look good and make simple to play. I just played rage earlier today. It was a two disk game... and i beat it in about a days time. Almost all games now and days are simple easy to play and have no challenge at all or have too much challenge and mean nothing.

Here is a game that tries it best to punish players.

I got to New Game +7, beat that.

http://youtu.be/ylFzJ3wRgHw

I probably died thousands of times along with losing millions of souls (game currency)

Now Monster Hunter has a fantastic difficulty curve, it's HUGE but it's doable.

http://youtu.be/FMOwKf4W6ig

Sadly, NO MONSTER HUNTER GAME ANNOUNCED FOR THE WEST, WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?!!

Guild Wars 2 is the new MMO standards. If you need an MMO fix, this is your game.

http://youtu.be/6SMYW3tvYeE
http://youtu.be/kAh1OHBI4uM

TERA is alright as well but the quest grind is just ungodly bad and the animation locking is so frustrating. Monster Hunter and Dark Souls are vastly better, hard to recommend to anyone.

Have you checked out those games?

Guild Wars isn't an MMO. It's just a multiplayer instance with collectable doll pieces. There's no world or storyline.

MMO

1) (online gaming) A massively multiplayer online game. A computer game in which a large number of players can simultaneously interact in a persistent world.
2) (colloquial) A massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

But Guildwars doesn't have massive players in one place. Nor a persistent world.

It's fair to say it's colloquial, but I think we need different terminology for this. Initial-D had millions of players, online, playing roles, but it was hardly called an MMO either. But it's just as much an MMO as Guildwars is. Or the online ranking and instance games so popular on the consoles now.

Sometimes we have a lack of proper definitions.

I think you're using the term MMO a bit too strictly. What about GW2 makes you think it isn't persistent and that it can't have large numbers of players anyway? Unless theres something I've totally missed about it, the world and players exist much like Rift, WoW, WAR, and whatever other fantasy MMO there is out there.

I find it more like a lobby than a persistent world. x to x communication and interaction is constrained.

If it's an MMO, farmville and football games are mmos, too.

ArenaNet called Guild Wars 1 a CORPG (cooperative online RPG, like Monster Hunter) Even the developers called it 'not a true MMO'

Also, no story? You know nothing about Guild Wars 1. Doll pieces? I'm not sure what you are talking about. The GW1 Human race has more lore in it than most MMO's lore and story COMBINED. It has deeper story than the Mass Effect universe. Unfortunately Guild Wars 1 has aged terribly, like, Everquest has aged bad.

Guild Wars 2 I cannot wait.

Yeah.

...I don't think much of their story, no.

How did I know the first link was Dark Souls before I even clicked on it? :P Incredibly difficult game that absolutely loves to kick your ass - but every time I managed to play the odds and SURVIVE each challenge, I felt significantly more satisfied for doing so!

I think this is why i quit playing WoW myself. played for well over 10 years. now i'm free. wheee

Not the best comparative rant I've seen, but it speaks the same amount of truth. Wish I could relate more, but since I started and ended my terms during the Lich King era, my view my clouded, though no less off-putting in endgame.

Man who has trouble with level 15 on tetris? Fucking scrublords HEH OWN3D

In all seriousness, video games are being released for an entirely different audience now, for better or for worse. We just have to wait every few months for the single game that's actually challenging to come out. Dark Souls is probably the only good sign of this still being healthy, though it was patched a few times to make it easier. This is why most hardcore gamers have switched to directly competitive games, so the difficulty curve is directly proportional to the skill level of your opponents, though I and several others wish this didn't have to be the case.

Define "harder"?

My point of reference is LK and after, but I keep hearing this from all the old players that the old game was "harder". But yet, I never get an idea of HOW.

Is it a matter that the weaponry has gotten so ridiculously overpowered? Did they make the bosses weaker? Was there strategy to taking down bosses? Was it a matter of "we were undergeared and had to think more"? Did you have to coordinate two groups of people to kill bosses in a particular order? I honestly don't get what was "harder"?

I'm not trolling, I honestly don't see it but I keep hearing it. For reference, "Looking for Raid" now has a weekly routine of taking down Deathwing. Since it's a routine thing now, people have done it so many times that it's not hard. It's choreographed, if you will. So once everyone knows it, it's easy. For new players, they DON'T know it, and so it's pretty damned hard until they get yelled at for "sucking" and get kicked out for not knowing the fight (or being undergeared, which is more often the case...) So if it's just a matter of knowing the fights, that's cool and all, but that only means a level of mastery on the player's part, not the game being dumbed down.

But if Blizz DID make the fights easier, then I don't see it becasue I've never, EVER seen that content before. I've NEVER seen LK raids untila month ago when a guild I tagged along with ran some, and I was blown away. Sure, it was easy 'cuz we outgeared the opponents, but that's not my point. Point is that I never saw this content becasue it was an "elitisim" thing. So it's possible that, with 85 gear, people are more willing to run raids and let me see this old stuff.

Ach, I'm rambling, but I still do wanna know. What made old WoW harder? Just gear, or did they really make every fight "spank and tank" or what?

I wondered things similarly, but I think I over expanded my thoughts. See down for my thoughts on the matter, which happen to at least semi-match with yours.

How to explain it clearly yet briefly...

In essence, Blizzard kept making abilities that replaced skill. Easiest example is tanking. Originally tanks had only one threat generating ability, and it was usually single target. Healing also created a fair amount of threat. This created for an entirely different game.

Tanks required skill to tank properly. Poor tanks would only attack one target, and only be able to hold threat on a single mob, this meant aggro would leak and start to attack the healer. This meant that DPS also had to have skill at managing their aggro or end up being attacked by the mobs. Additionally classes were given abilities to manage their threat if they got too much; there were trinkets designed around this reality as well.

Blizzard in the end threw away the concept of threat. Tanks generate so much threat now that there's virtually no risk of aggro being lost. The threat generated by healing has been almost completely removed as well. This completely changed the dynamic of the meta game, so that the focus was entirely on rotations and pumping out huge numbers.

There's a bunch of other things Blizzard did, but let's just say that a lot of things you do for granted in Cataclysm right now, used to take skill to pull off.

Tanks can't have 'too many targets' anymore nor do the tanking classes vary on who has 360 vs ranged vs one on one aggro. All abilities are 360, all are the same range, and all take the same damage. The latter is the only part of the change I enjoyed, the rest... Meant that there was no reason to even the direction you were facing.

All this, and I'm still staring at a big toe during a battle, and I can't watch PvP as an audience member.

The only other way I've heard it described is that Blizzard made things overcomplicated in BC, went WAY over the top in LK, and are now trying to "un-screw" the game.

What you say here makes the most sense to me. But I look at it from my perspective as someone who wants to watch the story. I tried to tank in LK but after being chastised HARDCORE for being a "bad tank" (not the words they said, but I'm being polite here) in vent for 10 minutes I decided that I'd never tank again. Why? I wasn't on, I wasn't perfect, I wasn't able to learn how to do it and damned if they'd teach me.

So recently, I re-tried it as a druid, and I was running into the same problems. I couldn't hold aggro, I couldn't control a mob, I couldn't do anything. It wasn't until someone stopped and said "Oh, ok, you need to do this, then this, then this, and watch for that" when it all clicked and it seemed easier. I don't tank often, but at least now I know it. And even then, I still have problems holding aggro in low level dungeons in the "LFG" thing becasue, well, I'm usually the lowest level guy in the raid and it's neigh impossible to hold it sometimes.

I guess I don't know the skills required for old Vanilla, and probably never will. But I still see tanks unable to hold it, DPS unable to cap it, and healers unable to keep up with groups. That's why I ask things like "how is it too easy?" because I see so many people who can't do it still. And I include myself in this mess because as a tank.... Let's just say that if it weren't for the "HOLY CRAP GROWL!" ability to make someone come after me, we'd wipe more than I care to admit.

But what you say DOES make sense, but I'm not sure that made it too easy. I think it made it more accessible to boor schlubs like myself who still can't play first person shooters effectively.

What? It bugs me that I can't look left or right fast like I do in the real world...

That the thing about WoW, or used to be the thing; not everyone was good at everything. Some people were good tanks, some people were good healers, some people were good DPSers. Tanks were the most important part of the team, and it's the role that is by far the most demanding of the player. Then it's healers, then it's DPS.

Additionally, LK was a really bad time to pick up tanking if you didn't know how to do it; especially near the end of the expansion. The dungeon runs used to take around 45-60 minutes when the expansion was new. By the end of the expansion they would take 15-20 minutes. So of course people would get angry if you were new to tanking, and couldn't manage a 20 minute run.

BC wasn't "over-complicated" it was pretty much the best expansion in terms of players brought into the game, it saw the largest growth in subscriptions. It had very good pacing, overall and a lot of things to do. When it came to the dungeons, they would take around 60+ minutes, this was almost regardless of the gear you had; because tanking was harder to execute, so the pace of the run was set by the tank's skill. DPS weren't allowed to go crazy or they'd simply be ripped apart when they took threat. This meant from the start of BC, to the very end of the expansion it demanded skill from the players. Tanks needed skill to generate threat, DPS needed skill to manage their threat, Healers needed to manage to their mana pools (A good healer would never need to drink, a poor one and you'd be waiting for him to drink after every pull) Essentially every dungeon in BC felt like 5-man raids.

Compare this to current day WoW, in where tanks simply charge in and can hold threat on a dozen mobs and not lose threat. In where DPS can burn all their cooldowns the moment the pull is made without any consequences. Additionally, because everything is rotation-based now; you can write a macro for every class and spec and pretty much play the game by mashing a single button.

Well, the "Global cooldown" won't let ya write macros like that, and I wish that you could on some things... but I get what you mean here too.

And actually, again from my perspective, I don't see that all the time. I mean several times I've been playing DPS and had to NOT do several things because the tank can't hold a mob of 5. I think that's where most of my confusion comes from, because I routinely see groups fall apart because people simply can't do the things that others say makes the game so easy. And I mean that. I re-started a rogue recently and more than one instance I've stopped DPS to protect the healer, or I'm using my "self-heal" ability because the healer is trying to keep up with the tank. That's why I don't see it as "being so easy". If that makes sense.

And yeah, LK.... Seriously, the guy was screaming at me in Vent telling me how much I sucked. I think his words were along the lines of "just sell your account, delete the program and go kill yourself you worthless waste of flesh." Mind you, his wording was MUCH more colorful and probably won't offend people on FA but I'm being polite. After I left, a friend of mine told me he was raging about hos much I sucked for another 30 minutes after that. And this was a L 50 instance, imagine if it were a real end-content raid.

Actually you can write macros like that. You just use /castsequence and it will run through all the abilities you use in the order you type them in. Since things are on a rotation you just keep mashing the button.

And when you say 'more than one instance' of having to do something other than DPS, you have to keep in mind that it used to be 'every time' in WoW. Additionally the things you described is because people are lazy. Would that loose mob be hitting you if you were attacking your tank's target, as opposed to attacking whatever is convenient for you? Would that loose mob be attacking the healer if there was CC on it? There was a time in when time was taken to ensure the stuff you saw happen doesn't happen. Finally, did your group wipe because you were being attacked, or the healer was being attacked? If the answer was no, then the game is much, much easier than it used to be. It used to be that if you were not the tank, you would die in around three hits.

Incoming wall of text:

As someone who's raided since vanilla, I think it's more or less been about the same. The emphasis on what you need to do perfectly is different, but the forgiveness for messing things up on hard modes is the same. For example, the biggest difficulty with 40 man raids back in the day was simply corralling everyone where they needed to be, and getting them to do what they needed to do. When I was a raid leader in BC, it was hard to keep 25 people's attention, when I was a Digital Imaging teacher, it was hard to keep 10 people's attention, and I was in the room with them. 40 people alone is a challenge, and people management is not a challenge that can be controlled by game developers except by the size of the group they require.

But for a lot of the bosses, they had a similar feel to how the bosses do today. They were far more forgiving on mistakes, but at the same time your abilities were more limited. In an opposing view to other statements, having one button to develop threat isn't challenging, it's limiting. These limits can be set to create the challenge. The other option and the route that any MMO has to go down when it becomes as expansive as WoW is giving people more choices to do things. Having four healing spells can be challenging because of the limit of how much healing you can do. Having eight that all have different effects is challenging because you have to judge the right spell for the right situation. Back when Ragnaros was difficult, I had to sit on a section of rock, make sure the tank had Regrowth and Rejuv on at all times, and then just repeatedly start and cancel Healing Touch, over and over, until finally his health was low at the time it was about to go off and I actually spent a heal, because I had to be concerned about mana conservation and overhealing was a major issue. Fast forward to Heroic LK, where mana is in heavy abundance, and so are the death tolls if your healers are unable to pump up the raid back to full health to clear one of the AOE debuffs that blasts out over the raid. If you've burnt your cooldowns early in a moment of panic or because people didn't get out of bad, then you're in trouble. I remember our priests' comments, "Well, we have to get shields on 25 people in a matter of a few seconds, and if any one of them takes damage and loses that shield, we have to be ready to pump that person back up with direct heals or we lose. It's HARD." Or heroic Sapphiron, where, yes, I had a basic rotation I did with heals. I hit Wild Growth and pumped Rejuv on as many people as I could before hitting Wild Growth again. I didn't care about overheals, or mana, but I did care about being quick, being thorough, and paying attention to an environment that was extremely wild and deadly.

And that's another big thing, environment. Back in the MC days, living bomb was a big deal. "OMG, someone has the debuff, run out!" On C'thun, you had to space yourselves appropriately and pay attention whenever the laser wall happened. Four Horseman in the original Naxx, and the revamped Naxx, much the same way. Spacing, positioning, and the occasional response to something. The raid environments have grown progressively more volatile in different ways. So while you may not have to pay attention to threat, or mana as much if you do everything right, standing in the wrong spot, not running away immediately, forgetting a cooldown, all can be a wipe. On regular madness, for example, the Elementium bolts are brutal, and if you're raid isn't across the platform when one lands, the damage they drop requires a planned cooldown that you can't afford to waste elsewhere. Then you have to pay attention to the blistering tentacles, the massive corruption, the bloods, and the ever-increasing damage aura pulsing out. Compare this to the original Rag, where you had an AOE aura, a knockback every now and then, and an adds phase. It was tough, because the resistance gear limited your effectiveness, but not because an elementium bolt was going to shatter you if you stood too close. Or compare it to the original Nefarian, where you have to watch for: 1) his tail, 2) his breath, 3) whatever class call he was going to make limiting your abilities for a temporary period, and 4) his adds near the end. All of these things are very separate and isolated when done right. But the Heroic Lich King, you had shadow traps, diseases, serious AOE debuffs, adds, positioning, the boss himself, then temporary platforms that could fall from beneath you, murderous adds that needed snap aggro-taunts, people getting disabled by multiple adds that had to be targeted down with coordination, debuffs that dropped large AOE zones beneath players if they didn't move, tank swaps on special abilities, solo-sections when you get sucked into a sword and no one can help you, and explosive ghosts that came from a very difficult range to kill. So were you paying attention to threat by that point in time like people had to do up through the end of BC? No. Were you carefully timing and cutting off heals to save mana like people were doing through vanilla? No. Were you safely standing in one place with occasional movement to deal with one of the few, but powerful boss abilities present? No, you were constantly responding to an extremely volatile, and dangerous environment.

But even after all this, the original Nefarian was challenging because of the limits imposed at the time. However, at this point, the encounter is kind of "just a dragon". Hallion is also "just a dragon", until you count in his killer explosive bombs, vacuum bombs, and the crazy beam cutters he puts out. Then he becomes a spinny carousel of angry death.

I wanna kinda add to my post above in reply to this one.

One of the most frustrating things for me in LK was that I was missing out on 50-75% of the available gameplay. Reason was that I'm not a hardcore gamer, as I said to Endium earlier. I can barely hold my own tanking 5-man LFG dungeons let alone a raid. Because of that (and, well, the 10 minute chewing out I got in Vent on what and how much I suck) I realized I'd never get into a "Raiding guild". And the people I knew that were in raiding guilds were, well, miserable.

You described it pretty well. You have to be on. 125% always. One screw up or one bad placement and you made the 40 man raid wipe. So these guys were VERY serious. So serious that you had to, and still do for some guilds, be recruited, interviewed and for all intents and purposes hired into the guild. But most of these guys I knew in RL were miserable about it, comparing it to working a job. It was too intense, too much. Enough that most of us never saw the fall of the Litch King, let alone know who C'Thun is.

As much as we complain that Blizzard is making it "too easy" I also think they're understanding that a lot of content they created is not even being touched by most of the players. And these days, most of them don't even know it exists. I mean I ran Nax for the first time last weekend, and I was blown away. I've been trying to run other old instances too, when I can sneak into groups, just so I can see the old content and see more of the over arcing storyline. But I don't think it's gotten so easy that you can run a 25 person raid with.... well actually we did Nax with 15 people so....

I think the 25 man raids are still herding cats, as you said, but I'd love to see an epic 40-person instance. I've never done one... well not counting the one time we went for that "For the Alliance" achievement.... But that's not really the same thing.

The fact that very few people were seeing so little of their most worked on content was a reason Blizzard has worked so much with multiple difficulty levels. Compare how many people saw the original Naxx, or even AQ40, to how many have gotten to see Dragon Soul to the end. Back in Vanilla, the effects of Ragnaros bursting out of the lava was so much more awesome than any of the dungeon stuff you got to see. The first time I saw that, I said, "Man, I have to see every raid for this stuff now!"

Recruitment is actually really good for guilds. I know a lot of people who balk, and say, "But it's a GAME. You mean I have to apply to play, like a job?!" But if you take the time, find the right guilds, look at the way they present themselves in their recruitment post, talk to some of the players, and get the feeling, "I like the attitudes these people have!", then you totally turn your play experience around. It's a great way to find guilds who pair people up with more skilled players willing to teach them tips and tricks. I ran a raid group for a while where the guild had a policy of doing that. The difference is what makes the game fun for people, because people like to play it different ways. I really like to play at the top of my game and push myself, so I've tried to find people who do the same, but I avoid groups who think it's okay to disrespect each other. Blunt, "You're not good enough and have to improve" criticism is one thing, but "You suck and you're a terrible player" is not acceptable. Finding the right fit with the right schedule, takes time, but it's really worth the effort.

25 man is still herding cats, 10 is much more manageable, another way Blizzard has worked to make the game more comfortable for people. Comfortable, but not easier, as sometimes encounters on 10 man are actually harder than with 25 people because of your more limited resources. 40 mans were widely criticized because people would go AFK during trash, and there was a lot of leeway for mistakes because you had tons of players to make up for others. When BC came out, there was a substantial feeling that 25 people were better because there was the feeling that 20 people or so usually carried the rest in 40 man raids anyway.

I've raided in a guild that averaged somewhere in the top world 300-400 every tier in WotLK (I pulled back when I started on my Master's degree though), and we only played four hours, three nights a week. I've had times where I've been really torn up about doing poorly, because that's not how I want to play the game, that's not how the people I'm with want to play the game, and I hate disappointing them, but overcoming that and beating a challenge feels so great. Everyone tells each other, "Great job!" and you all celebrate. Even in my more relaxed raid now, it's the same way. We hit a wall, we focus on it, we adjust strategies, we talk about what we can do, and eventually overcome it and cheer.

You pinned it down pretty good

I personally can see where your argument stands, but at the same time, such an argument won't work for everybody. For example, me. I can appreciate a game that's difficult because of a well done difficulty curve. I can appreciate a game where there is basically no difficulty curve to speak of.

I'll take a few examples. Oblivion. Unless you were on a Pc, where you could mod the leveling system into a different form, the difficulty curve was horrendous. It basically amounted to "Unless you pump all your skill ups into damage related skills, the enemies will very quickly destroy you". Made the game a bit difficult in higher levels for those who played multi-class. Bethesda almost fixed it with Skyrim's certain level creatures in certain areas feature, but not completely.

Let's take WoW as another example. I'm going to admit right here that I didn't get the chance to play until the end of Wrath/beginning of Cataclysm. Why? I didn't have the money to afford a subscription, nor a computer capable of handling it. At the time, my computer was maxed out playing Diablo 2, offline.

And, obviously my opinions here are going to disagree with yours on this matter. Whether it's because I wasn't around for Vanilla WoW (which I've heard both good AND bad things about from my gamer friends who did get to play it at launch), or because I obviously play games for completely different reasons than you, I don't know, but I'm just trying to raise my opinion here. I'm quite possibly wrong, and will admit that freely should somebody rebuke my reasoning, but I want to put my thoughts out there.

You're saying the game became broken at Wrath onwards. That would technically extend to the leveling experience from 1-60, due to the fact that those areas were completely redone, as well as the 80-85 areas added in Cataclysm. But, that leaves Outland unchanged. I, however, noticed absolutely no difficulty increase when it came to playing Outland. I did content at my level, played like I normally did. Did the dungeons, and even Black Temple with my guild (admittedly, at level 75, and even then I found it slightly difficult with only 4/5 of us (though they were 85s and 78s)). It wasn't until I hit the level max that I noticed the difficulty curve, like you originally stated about Vanilla WoW, outdoing my skill level, almost. I could still win most fights, at least one on one. It didn't help that I was under-geared. I had to get better gear, as you stated about WoW, for my skills to stand on top of. I'm still trying to get my gear up high enough to take on the final dungeons and raid of the expansion.

But, honestly, I digressed there. My original intention was to make out one point: Not all of us play games for the difficulty curve. I enjoy an easy game just as much as I do a hard one, as long as they keep my interested. Why? One of two reasons: controls or plot. If I can really enjoy one of the two, I will play a game, and if I love one or two, I will play a game more than once.

I'll take a few console games for example first. Final Fantasy X, the supposed start of the downfall of Final Fantasy. Personally, I love the plot. There are elements many people gloss over, the characters are actually well developed, and I'll take it any day over the much more lauded VII with it's white-haired pretty-boy with mother issues for a villain. Admittedly, X has a blue-haired pretty boy with mother issues, but he also just comes off more developed to me than Sephiroth did, no idea why, to be honest. i kind of tuned him out in favour of Sin, though.

Or Kingdom Hearts, where not only do I enjoy the controls, I adore the plot, which, after all the prequels and sequels, is a very big game of Xanatos Speed Chess. It's also fairly dark, if you pay attention.

Whic brings me back to the game this post is about: WoW. I could care less for the game's difficulty curve, nor the game's controls. I play for the plot. I must be one of the few people who reads quest text, enjoys the scenery, and takes his time in the game. I enjoyed the Warcraft games, got invested in teh world, and that's why I play World of Warcraft, the characters and the plot.

Whether the game is easy, hard, gotten easier, gotten harder, I honestly don't give two hoots. Just thought I'd drop in my opinion and state that not ALL games care about the difficulty curve. Yes, it matters, but it's not what always makes or breaks a game. I'd drop a game in a snap if it lacked a good story, or absolutely terrible controls, but a bad difficulty curve? That I can live with.

A game like Tetris has no plot, and really Tetris is close to the heart of what all games are all about: You are presented with a problem, and you are given the tools to solve it. The fun comes from the challenge. Tetris would be an utterly boring game if all you were given was only line pieces. It would be boring because that changes the difficulty curve from a steep cliff to a flat line; which is what I present.

Even in a game like... I dunno Farmville, there's a difficulty curve involved. I assume the curve is to build the 'perfect' farm, and that game would be boring if you could create the best farm possible without any sort of effort.

The important thing that I noted about the difficulty curve is this: It has to cross the skill curve somewhere. If it doesn't the game becomes on a fundamental level broken. Yes a good narrative can carry a broken game, but that doesn't negate the fact the game itself is not fun to play.

Actually, there isn't with farmville - since you can just buy the perfect pieces, and it doesn't really matter how you arrange things, because they don't really interact in such a way that various designs are more or less advantageous to varied goals. It doesn't matter how close things are together or far apart - the time and money spent playing is farm more important than any other factor.

In an open ended game, say like SimCity or Minecraft; the definition of "perfect" is determined by the player; which again still creates a difficulty curve, and a skill curve. If you want to build a grand structure, you're going to have to put time and effort into it. Odds are you won't get it right on the first try, or you'll be tweaking what you're doing as you work on the project. If you are given the solution to your problem with no effort involved on your part, then the game isn't much fun.

Which is why I don't really like farmville. The restrictions on time and input of money and farming your friends make you work hard to be part of multi-level marketing scheme instead of exploring a world.

It'd be like hiking in a park but you wouldn't be allowed the best trails unless you brought more people to stand around in the parking lot.

I agree with you 100% Endium. I was a Classic WoW player, and while I wasn't there day 1, I played through Molten Core, Black Wing Lair, up to the Twin Emperors in AQ40, and a few Naxx bosses. While I would contend just a little bit that tanking skills back in Classic were a bit poor and did need some tweaking that they got in TBC (and were much needed, especially cooldowns) it's completely different nowadays and the overall reason I also quite WoW in Cataclysm. It just got to the point that it was boring, that fights were becoming little more than DPS races, rotations, healers slamming AOE heals as fast as they can mash their buttons, and threat becoming absolutely worthless as a dynamic in raids. Fights may have gotten more complex and tools for all classes have certainly gotten better (and to be fair some were desperately needed), but they don't feel more complex or rewarding.

I'm sure burnout and a bit nostalgia are at work here, but when I look back on fights like Razorgore the Untamed, Twin Empeors, Buru the Gorger, Moroes and his dinner guests, Opera event, Lady Vash'j (sp), Al'ar, or even trash pulls in raids...they just seemed so much better. Tanks knew their place, good tanks knew how to generate threat, keep their cooldowns ready even on hard trash mobs, healers had to be mindful and selective of their heals so as not to overheal too much, and DPS...DPS KNEW that you waited for 3-5 sunders before you let even a single auto-attack or DoT go off, and if you did you rightfully got chewed out. It wasn't about flexing your E-Peen on the meters, and quite honestly, I liked fights better when there weren't so many farking enrage timers as well, but that's just me. Also agree on the boss difficulty curve, though I will say that jumping from Molten Core in BWL and facing off against Razorgore and then Vale....there's a reason why those two bosses were known as 'guild killers', and were certainly much harder than Broodlord Lashlayer, or the two drakes after Firemaw (another pain in the ass).

Anyway...yeah...your feelings are very much like mine when it comes to WoW. I think with how the difficulty is, with how easy it is to get gear, the challenge, difficulty, and things to strive for have been taken from the game. I can't tell you how happy and proud I was to stand in Ironforge back in Classic WoW with full Dragonstalker gear on (Hunter main) and wielding my Rhok'delar bow that I earned by myself through the Hunter-Demon-Quest chain. Nowadays...gear no longer has any special value...it's just another purple.

I don't really agree that burnout and nostalgia are that big a factor. I think it just suggests that WoW used to be a better game. Games with nostalgic value are still good even when you go back to playing it again years later. Like say... I dunno, for me it I think it would have to be a game like Super Metroid. Old game, but it's a good old game, cause at it's core the game is just fun.

As I noted, I probably could have gone on forever with the small details, but yeah as you've noticed it doesn't take much skill to play WoW anymore, and at the same time they've toned down the difficulty; so we don't exactly have a very engaging 'game' anymore.

I think if you had continued you would've brought up even more points that I would agree with...we really are very much on the same page with WoW. And I do agree with you on the old game thing...think it's why I like older games more than most newer ones. Felt good to be a Hunter, especially in TBC...being the guy that could double or triple trap mobs in heroics, making the doubting groups watch in shock and awe as I handled bigger packs with finesse, and knew what I was doing. It was FUN being the guy to always be chosen to kite the mortal strike Warrior whenever he showed up in Moroes' lineup, and telling people in Vent, "Listen...let me handle him. If he breaks free early, I'm already aware of it, I know what to do, and I will get aggro back ASAP and re-trap him. Don't touch him, don't try and be the hero, just let me handle it." Heck, a lot of times I'd have him down to half health at the end of the fight and he would be easy to finish off.

But yeah...trip down memory lane...coordination, communication, and fun...just like the first Ragnaros kill I got with my old guild, or the first time we downed Razorgore after a month of wiping on him and just having a practice run on him before our usual MC raid. Did so well that first time and while we ultimately wiped, everyone was in total shock that it went so well and no one spoke on Vent for about a minute. Went from being a farming night in MC to a 40-0 vote for "This bastard dies...TONIGHT! MC be damned, we're staying here until he drops dead!" ...Aside from Ragnaros, I have never heard a more elated shout from a group of people when Razorgore died...and nearly lost my hearing. :P

I think that's probably the biggest thing: That if you knew what you were doing, you could change the dynamic of the whole encounter, and that it was very possible to carry 'dead-weight' in runs. Which was only natural because not everyone of your friends was good at the game.

Not to mention that's how sports works! Sports have team leaders, and skilled 'stars' that the rest of the group works around. If no one is more capable than another, then no one relies on anyone else; everyone just does their own little thing because nothing they do can really positively influence the outcome. In fact the only thing that happens in the game now is you either do your part, or you fail the whole group. The margin for error is so low, and it's virtually impossible to pick up any slack by another player.

The approach to raiding has changed so much, and not in a good way. In the 'good ol' days, you could have half your group wipe, and there'd still be a decent chance you'd be able to finish the fight. When I left, if anyone died in the first 75% of the fight, it was virtually a guaranteed wipe. Hell, sometimes if anyone died in 95% of the fight it was a wipe.

This was a great rant, I'd love to see it animated.

thats hitting the nail on the head in many games now, its getting to the point in the game im playing were its not even the difficulty of the game its more over the fact that everything is to expensive to buy XD and its depending more on how well your armor is made out and that games already getting many to stop playing it as well.

this is the first time i've found a detailed explanation of what exactly is going on with video games today

I thought I stopped playing because they literally took out all the the things I worked so hard to get. They took out those boots I spent days figuring out how to get without guild support. They took out the amulet that had the two-week quest to get.

Then they took out hunting specific places for recipes, and then they made all the gems I'd been collecting no longer be applied to newer items or newer gems to older items, leaving me wonder what the hell I was supposed to do with all this stuff.

world of warcraft was made easier cause people as young as age 5 play it

my cousin started at age 2

I never much cared for wow because enemies can hit you from a mile away, and the combat is based on exchanging hits.

For serious. Heroic Lich King on both 25 and 10 man was sooooo easy. I mean, just look at how many people were flying around on Invincible with their "Light of Dawn" titles. And man, when they released ICC, heroic Anub attempts in TOC went from having less than 1% success rates to having a less than 5% success rate with a whole new tier of gear to make it super easy. Four whole percentage points worth of easy. That shit got nerfed hard. And Heroic Hallion was just a piece of cake, man. So, so easy. So, so, 12 hours a week for four weeks worth of fucking easy. 48 total hours of relentless, punishing, tear-jerking, "You're not good enough" easy, and that was for the US #98 kill, which was 300-something world wide. So of the 12 million players at the time, only ~7500-7800 had downed Heroic Hallion within a month of it being released with any amount of time in that month for those people to play it. Percentage-wise, that's less than a tenth of a single percent of the player base.

And for the most recent raid, Dragon Soul? Why, people find it so easy they don't even bother getting their Destroyer's End title on normal mode, they just do Looking For Raid, and say, "Yeah, this is clearly representative of the demands of the normal and heroic modes." I mean, that's just how EASY it all is. And before that, it was so nice to see all the people without "Defender of a Shattered World" talking about how easy the game is. Yeah, that game is easy. Except playing it, that's too hard. WoW is just about sitting around in trade, talking about how easy it is.

Sorry that this is hostile, but there are sections of WoW which are specifically designed to be quite difficult, but they're also very neat and well designed and Blizzard has adjusted multiple difficulty curves to let people experience the whole story thoroughly. The problem is, people experience the whole story and they opt not to challenge themselves. On the one hand, people don't want to miss out on sections of the game, on the other hand, they don't want to spend the effort to work on the heroic modes available just to have the enjoyment they did something hard. It's like for the FFVII: Crisis Core for the PSP. Everyone was saying it was a one-button game to beat, so I finally asked someone, "It's been really difficult for me. What difficulty setting are you playing on?" "Oh, I put it on easy." "Really? Because I put it on hard. So I wonder why it's so EASY for you then, and so HARD for me." There's also the fact people don't like to spend the effort to get into a raid with other people. It seems to me, the MMO part of an MMO seems to be the most terrifying to many players saying the game is too easy. For Mists of Pandaria, the developers are doing normal, hard mode, and prestige modes for dungeons to try and add a broader difficulty curve for people to attempt without having to have an entire raid schedule to deal with.

Now the important thing is people will have to willingly go out and take on the challenge of not just pushing themselves, but finding other players willing to push themselves as well, just like people who said the re-vamped troll dungeons were too easy, but actually getting the timer in ZA was too hard because you had to get four, competent friends to play with you to do it on many server groups. Otherwise people will write the challenge modes off and pretend they don't exist, that only the people who take the game "too seriously" do them, the same way they do now. The proof is in the achievements, many people haven't completed the meta-challenges to push themselves. It's not that they are too hard to do, it's that you have to have coordination and competence to do them. This is the nice thing about the new, RealID party system, is that if you have four other competent friends to play the game with, so long as they're on the same faction (server no longer matters), you have a party. I've been raiding since vanilla, and to me, the difficulty level has felt fairly consistent and well planned out. When people tell me WoW is too easy, I immediately know that that person is focusing on a different part of the game than what I'm doing, because the parts of WoW that I see are not easy.

I already explained in my image that heroic modes they way they are executed are pointless. When one designs a difficulty curve, it has to intersect the skill curve somewhere along the way; but it doesn't. As I drew out, the difficulty level in WoW currently is a flat line. When it comes to a matter of skill it always tapers out and levels off. This makes it important that the difficulty curve is upwards; however, that's not how WoW raids are designed anymore. Raid difficulty is pretty much a near horizontal line, which means skill is always above the line, or below the line.

So what effect does this create in the end? Only a few people have enough skill to be over the difficulty line; which means many people will simply experience frustration, not fun. You just have a scenario with many people experiencing the last graph: their skill will never get over the difficulty curve. When really the situation should really be more like the first graph, a difficulty on an actual curve. This lets people have a sense of progression and progress.

WoW doesn't have a difficulty curve anymore, it's just a series of plateaus: You have the low easy plateau, the medium plateau, and the hard plateau. Because the difficulty 'curve' is a flat line, there's no sense of progression.

Also, don't kid yourself; the game has gotten easier. There used to be a time in where a tank had to click half a dozen times to maintain threat over a group of enemies. Now? You click once. Healing a group of people? You had to click several times. Now? You click once. Pay attention to your threat as a DPS? Forget it, go crazy go nuts. The bosses are still the same stack/dodge, avoid the fire, and or burst down the ads mechanics like they've always been. The only thing that changed on that front was Blizzard got increasingly lazy with their difficulty curve the moment they introduced the heroic mode toggle in ToC, rather than have it as an innate boss mechanic in Ulduar. The moment they did that, they scrapped the difficulty curve and replaced it with plateaus.

So the specific complaint is you want a better middle ground, where it's neither too easy, nor too hard, but just right. The difficulty even with this is, what is "just right"?

Unfortunately, WoW and Tetris are hard to compare when it comes to difficulty, because Tetris is a time and score based game where the difficulty increases at a set rate based on your score (I think it's exponential, but it could be linear.) The problem with the Tetris example is past a certain point it's impossible to play anyway. It never stays at the perfect point for you to play endlessly. It's difficulty curve too, goes through "too easy" to "medium" to "too hard". Because Tetris is the same activity where the speed is increased to increase the difficulty, the difficulty steps feel more gradual and smooth, and tests your ability to do one thing: place objects. MMORPG's, however, have to have bosses with predictable, reliable abilities for players to respond to. The other thing is, you can't just have the same abilities over and over with bigger numbers or higher speeds, like Tetris, the abilities used and the responses needed to combat them are varied and mixed up, even if "Don't stand in bad things" is still the number 1 rule of WoW. This will make each boss encounter feel like it has a flat line, which it does. Every boss encounter has a specific set of requirements for people to be successful. If you can manage to make those requirements (a certain amount of healing for healers, a certain amount of timing and positioning for tanks, a certain amount of damage and movement for DPS, and some extras for everyone usually), you win. Period. The boss will always die if you do as much damage as its health. The boss will not suddenly level up, speed up and hit harder after you beat it. For that reason, the curve isn't the content, the content in all RPG's is a plateau, the curve is the learning curve for the players.

A learning curve creates a curve because the first times someone does something, they learn a lot each time. Over time and repetition, the amount they learn about the activity decreases each time they do it, until it either plateaus, or becomes an asymptote, though following rises are also available. In encounter design, an easy difficulty should come at the point of the curve where a person just has to grasp the basic concepts to defeat the encounter. Medium means they should grasp those concepts and do them well. And hard should match up just when the player's ability to learn more about the encounter entirely plateaus (with an RPG, you also consider the level of gear in creating the ease of matching this line.)

Because people have different things they're flat out good at, and some things they're bad at, different encounters have different difficulties, so it's hard, if not impossible, to get a smooth transition of difficulty throughout an entire raid or dungeon tier with everyone. This is why Ozruk was hard, but the last boss of his instance seemed easier. I could dance my way to the final phase of Heroic LK, but would repeatedly fuck up on Heroic Hallion. Despite this, progressing through an entire tier at the highest difficulty is a major progression at play skill, as players learn to use various abilities and mechanics in certain ways to the point they can meet the requirements to kill the boss.

The goals, however, are set and easy to see, so as a player you know what to shoot for. The developers never expect players to maintain a specific level of skill, it's expected that with more practice, people get better until there's nothing more to learn. If an encounter can be done with seemingly perfect execution and not be defeated, then Blizzard will adjust the mechanics outright to change the difficulty, otherwise if something seems "hard", that should be a challenge to the player to rise up to it.

Of course, if the problem is that the learning curves (not the difficulty curves) of the encounters are too steep or too broad, that's a bit different. It's more that the tuning of content needs to be adjusted, as well as the pace that it's released at that will be adjusted. The content will never be, "just right", because it's the player's learning curve that continually changes (and in an RPG, the gear the player wears adjusts the difficulty in achieveing the requirements to complete an encounter as well), so content has to be stepped appropriately in its release (because a mob in an RPG will not change unless open play with it reveals it to be broken--like the Hydra, in D&D, which was determined to be too grindy), and the difficulty steps are at best, well estimated, and at worst, flat out subjective. Progression guilds commonly said, "Fuck it, we don't care about 1 or 2 drakes, or 1 or 2 keepers, 3's the only number that matters, we're doing that until our eyes bleed." The more important thing is making sure each encounter contains variety and the challenges are fun to respond to, even if certain challenges seem easy to some people and hard to others (best example ever: the Heigan dance.)

And like I said, if you think that the reduction of threat as a primary mechanic (it is still ubiquitous though, if not at the forefront, ask anyone who's gotten smashed by adds on Cho'gall, Ragnaros, or Spine, or Madness), and the addition of more AOE heals makes things too easy, you are not playing the same section of the game that I am. Sure, I don't have to worry about threat as DPS, and neither does the tank, but the tank has to worry about perfect swaps and positioning, taunting the right add on many fights, hitting the cooldowns for the right abilities, and I just have to worry about perfection. I just have to have my cooldowns ready for the perfect portion so they're not wasted, I have to position myself right for heals or adds, I have to avoid lots of crazy stuff, I have to run places, I have to get out of the group if I have the debuff, I have to control the adds, burn down everything, and hit my defensive cooldown when shit goes boom. When I heal heroic fights, I have to know when we really need Wild Growth, and otherwise I DO have to individually heal people with small heals, I have to practice triage on priority targets, I have to know when to use my big AOE heal, I DO have to watch my mana, and I also have to stand in the right places, do the right things, get the adds to the right people if they're attacking me and defend myself when the shit hits the fan.

That number of mechanics adequately makes up for no longer sweating about the threat ceiling while dancing like back on Gurtogg Bloodboil. Also, compare the number of things you have to pay attention to on Heroic FL Rag, or even Regular FL Rag, to the number of things people pay attention to on the original Nefarian, or the original Ragnaros. Even on regular modes, they're certainly not easy, and Nef wasn't easy at the time when I was doing him as progression--in fact, the complaint back then was, "Less than 1% of your players will have seen Rag, Nef, Oss'rian, C'thun, or Kel'thuzad before Burning Crusade", so the difficulty plateau for the time people look back at with rose colored glasses mainly sat at "too hard" and with less than 1% of players seeing Sunwell, has never even been since then "just right." I wouldn't say it's easier or harder now, but hard for different reasons. 5-mans weren't even easier. Heroic 5-mans at the release of Cataclysm were a bitch until people finally outgeared them by about the time Firelands was released. They're easier now because everyone outgears them. But 45 minute Strat was easy when you were in all Tier 2 as well. It's just that only a few percent of people were that far back in vanilla, but so many people have access to 384's now. The challenge remains in the 410 gear range though, you just have to have the motivation to go for it.

No, you completely misunderstand the whole concept of a skill curve meeting the difficulty curve, and why WoW doesn't do that anymore.

The only thing you're paying attention too is access to content, which is not the same as moving a skill curve up against a difficulty curve. The important thing to note about dungeons and raids up until TOC was that the difficulty was on a curve.

Take the content of BC, you had order of content to go through; as such there was 'progression.' This was what kept people engaged. The level 70 dungeons were moderately challenging, they weren't face roll, but they weren't all that dangerous. The heroic version were dangerous, many pulls had potentials for causing a wipe if people didn't play their part in executing CC, or attracted adds due to a bad pull, or having your healer explode because the tank screwed up, or the DPS screwed up with a CC. If you screwed up fine, whatever; it's going to cost you a minute or two. With enough gear gained from heroic dungeons then you could move on to Kara, or Mag, or Gruul; from that point you could move further on. The point is that there's a path for people to follow, with many small increments. Another thing that was important that every piece of content in BC remained relevant from start to finish.

A lot of those elements are gone now. In WotLK much of the content became meaningless. The only thing that mattered was the current raid, and the previous raid content. Why? Because they took out the difficulty curve. With every new raid they automatically boosted everyone's gear up to the appropriate level to access that raid.

Now here is the really important part:

The main draw of a game is for people to move their way up the difficulty curve; however, this effect only exists for people such as yourself, who are at the cutting edge of content. You get to pit your skill against the content; and really it's a minority of players.

What about everyone else? They get pushed up against a wall instead. This is the reality people face who are not on the cutting edge of progression: They run super easy dungeons for tokens, and get the current level gear. Then what? Most people's skill level don't allow for them to run the current level raid, so they could do the previous raid; but here's the big problem: They have no reason to. The 'free' gear that Blizzard gives out is exactly the same strength as the previous raid, so they have no reason to do that raid. They don't have enough skill to do the current raid, and there's no incentive to do the previous raid; this results in very bored people. This is why the difficulty curve is broken, because it's not a curve; it's a flat horizontal line.

To make things worse, Blizzard is just going to bump everyone's item level up next patch anyways, so there's no incentive to build your character up past running easy dungeons and collecting tokens. If someone rolled a character in BC, they would have to build up their gear from scratch: Collecting gear from the dungeons, then the heroics, then moving through each of the raid levels. If someone rolled a character in WotLK or Cataclysm, all they have to do is run the normal or heroic dungeons until they had enough tokens to be fully geared; they can completely ignore all the content.

For progression guilds everything I said is utterly meaningless. For smaller guilds and people who are less than perfect, it kept older content relevant. It meant grouping up with your friends to power them through older content, and those friends would have reason to be in the older content because they'd have alts they'd want to gear up. It was all about creeping up the difficulty curve.

All of that is gone now because well, Blizzard pushes everyone up the curve every major patch.

Most people hit a wall somewhere when playing a game. For progression guilds that wall is at heroic modes. For other people it's further back down, the problem is that Blizzard keeps pushing people up against a wall every patch, leaving them with nothing to do or strive for. It makes the game utterly interesting for those people.

The problem with that setup is time limited relevancy to the content. It's just how an MMO is going to work. If players are forced through progression from the first tier of raiding to the last every time, then numerous players will just never, ever, ever see the last tiers of content due to the expansion cycle. This happened with vanilla (to the point that Blizzard was so disappointed they moved Naxx to WotLK so people could actually SEE it), and with BC. This is the content accessibility issue.

But to ignore the difficulty progression within a tier itself, from the less complicated beginning bosses, to the more complicated end bosses (and the "can you heal/damage this much?" gear check that occurs usually halfway through), especially with easy > normal > hard now is to try and simplify an evolving MMO into a more static game like Diablo II, where the original content of the game was just as important when the expansion was released due to the linear experience of the content. While MMO's have a mostly linear experience, endgame content is no longer part of that experience when it no longer occupies the endgame level, so there's a development take that endgame experience should not be considered totally linear if players are to fully experience it.

WoW had a long period where people did have to go through the successive tiers to get the content for the next one. It was determined to be undesirable and dated by the end of BC. The step from one tier to the next is also not the only difficulty progression throughout an expansion. The focus of game development should be on variety and fun, with difficulty being a considerable aspect of the fun, but not the only aspect. I think the difficulty in the step from SSC/TK to Hyjal/BT was quite skewed. SSC/TK, you had extremely complex mechanics, from a vast array of mobs to tossing tainted cores that rooted you in place; then you went to Hyjal which was a heavy gear and stupid check (along with the first boss of BT being a check to see if you had enough gear to have 12k health), and BT where Reliquary and Gorefiend had the most confusing mechanics before Illidan. Doing SSC/TK only prepared you for the content in terms of the gear, knowing how to toss a tainted core or steal a legendary weapon from Kael'thas did NOT prepare you to kite ghosts on Gorefiend, dance on Bloodboil, or hit your magical tears on Archimonde. I wouldn't say a player needs to know how to kill Cho'gall to have the skills to kill Shannox. Anyone who says you have to kill Cho'gall to have the experience with difficult gameplay necessary to kill Shannox is going to be laughed out of the game. I think the more a person has raided, the better in general they can be expected to do, but the skill training itself is not directly linear from one tier to another due to the wide set of concepts players have to master within each tier. To have something that linear, well, that's just not going to be an expanding, ever-evolving MMO game. It's going to be something like Diablo.

If a player feels outclassed by the content available, I think the best thing they can do is find players willing to teach them. Even in competitive progression guilds (as well as casual guilds, like what I play in now), many of them have atmospheres of respect and courtesy, and many players enjoy assisting other players with upping their game, which is what you describe with more experienced players leveling less experienced players through previous tiers of content on alts. I certainly don't think it's necessary to do previous tiers to gain the skills to do the current tiers, just more experience makes the concepts come more quickly. I wouldn't say that someone who's never raided before can't come in and start doing Normal Dragon Soul right away and have fun if they have at least spent the effort to get the right gear. They would need the right group of understanding people willing to help them learn the fights, and that's part of the social experience of an MMO. I saw this happen plenty when I ran a raid group myself, an app that said "I don't have any raiding experience, but I really want to try, and I've worked hard to gear myself." One member we had like that went from dismal, to fantastic, started coaching and encouraging other new players with no experience, and eventually started his own raid group.

The nature of an evolving MMO and the time limited relevancy does make it unfortunate that it becomes harder to experience an expansion from start to finish the later you come in, but that's part of the Massive Multiplayer experience, which is finding the variety of players you need to have the game experience you want. Because I've been working on my Master's, I was lucky to find a group that was doing BoT/BWD/To4W before they did Firelands, since I wasn't able to get back into raiding before Firelands was released. Granted, the valor that let us buy FL gear early made it easier, but we still did the progression because we wanted to experience the content that way, not because Blizzard told us we had to (like they did in BC.) Blizzard gave us a choice in how to experience the game, and we made our decision. The option to have the progression you say every player is supposed to have is still there, it's just that heavily enforcing it restricts accessibility, and for what reason? Why shouldn't a player who joined late in Cata not get the chance to kill Deathwing at all, despite doing 65 levels worth of quests that involve dealing with the effects of the Cataclysm? They may miss out on the previous dungeons, but they would also likely miss out on them in the BC/Vanilla, strict progression setup as well. Difficulty progression is handled within tiers themselves, in both gear, boss complexity, and optional hard modes. Skill is a player trait that all players should work to raise, there is never a "just right", a challenging encounter should always start out with a flat line above your skill level. The tiers are also major story elements which bring relevancy to playing the game at all, moreso than they are a necessary level progression. So why is it so much more fun to entirely lose out on the accessibility to content for a difficulty progression that is reset within each tier anyway?

Content accessibility never really was a huge issue, Vanilla and BC was where the subscription base grew. WotLK and Cata (in where "end" content was easily assessable) had subscription losses. On that alone suggests that people having access to the end content wasn't what drew people into the game. To continue to argue the point that having access to end game content as 'important' when subscribers have voted with their wallets that it's not should tell you something: It's not important for most of the player base.

Blizzard pushing people to do raid content at the expense of the rest of the game hasn't worked for the last two expansions, and has alienated people from the game. A sense of growth, progression, and achievement is important; but again, with the game in it's current state only progression guilds get to experience that. People who don't raid are given free items and stupidly easy content, so those people get bored fast.

All sorts of people play this game, and most people play the game with their friends. Most of the time with 1-2 other people that they know, this means that raids don't suit most people, because most people don't have 9-24 good friends to go raiding with. This is just another reason for the success of Vanilla and BC: because dungeons were plentiful and challenging. The mistake Blizzard made was when they put all of their focus in creating raids. There's no game for people to play in WoW if they aren't raiding.

Now that's flat out post hoc. WotLK had the highest record of active subscription of any MMO at any period at 12 million, and it's leveled out with ~10-11 million players at any time from there. Subscriptions fluctuate based on a wide number of things, and although it's a large number of subscriptions fluctuating, there's multiple factors being at work. For one, WoW is now a seven year old game, and attrition is naturally going to happen after some time. The past year saw the release of Rift, Starcraft 2, Skyrim, SW:ToR, and now ME3, and throughout WoW's history there have been players fluctuating away when major games are released, and back after the newness wears off or whenever a new patch is released. There's also a subscription lull prior to an expansion as players take a break and experiment with other things before coming back for the expansion to see what's new. It happened in vanilla, BC, and WotLK, and it's happening again in Cataclysm. 12 million is also a clear peak, people didn't even think WoW would reach 1 million subscribers at first, and it's natural for any business to rise up until it hits a peak, then finally settle out at a certain plateau with a much slower rise from thereon out. Finally, WoW is an 85 (soon to be 90) level game, the focus is the endgame. If the focus was on a long leveling experience like it was during vanilla, it'd take an entire expansion cycle for a new player to get to the level cap, and then they'd likely miss out on the majority that expansion has to offer.

Vanilla is naturally going to have a lot of growth in comparison to any other period, as that's when it was new, as well as a runaway success. BC was considered expansion of the year, and also had various reasons to have considerable growth, including the fact it was the expansion to the biggest MMO of all time. WotLK pulled the game to its highest peak, but since it's calmed down to an average 10-11 million players since then, I don't think it's anywhere near dying, nor doing any one thing fantastically wrong, or a fantastic amount of things wrong. BC had a considerable drop off of players doing dungeons as raiders ran out of reasons to run them. There was a lack of skilled players entering them so they didn't seem as easy, it also became more difficult to level an alt. Vanilla had the same drop off, as once most people in my guild had T1, what purpose did we have to do Strat again? Or BRD? Or LBRS? Or UBRS? Let all the other people who need the gear do those. WotLK gave me reasons as a top percentile raider to continue doing heroic dungeons, Cata gave me reasons as a casual player to keep doing dungeons and improve my gear even after I had collected all the prime heroic items by the end of my winter break, and by that time those dungeons felt easy because I outgeared them, AND outplayed them.

Star Wars itself is experiencing massive retention problems because their endgame is so weak. People get to the max level and are bored to tears because of a lack of content. Players are dumping it to go back to WoW, or try try other games for a while until Mists of Pandaria.

All sorts of people do play the game, and because of that it's not that hard to find a decent guild you enjoy playing with to get access to the endgame. If people desire to play the endgame, it's there. If they don't, there's a wide variety of achievements to do, professions, and leveling an alt is quite possibly more enjoyable now than it ever has been.

There is recognition that the game is pretty raid heavy, and there's a shift in focus for things to do in Mists of Pandaria, with mini-games even being added in, and various other ways to progress your character outside of raids. Raids are also more accessible, it's not only progression guilds who experience them, more casual guilds are able to reach end content, but at a slower pace, which is always the case for people who aren't as concerned about their speed of progressing through a game. I don't think any MMO will reach a point where 5 player dungeons are the primary endgame structure. I think that's just an impossibility for the genre, or even contrary to the idea of a Massive Multiplayer game to focus on a Mini-Multiplayer element.

If the frustration is the endgame raiding is a primary focus rather than what it could possibly be, then that's entirely different from things being too easy or too hard. There's always a way for players to challenge themselves, and always a way to achieve that challenge through both gear acquisition and finding more people you enjoy playing with through the social nature of MMO's. It's not like Skyrim, where the options are outplay, or outlevel content. If there's no desire in a player to take advantage of the MMO element of the game, then there's really no point to play an MMO beyond the leveling and dungeon experience. So for that purpose, a player levels a character, does everything at least once, cancels their sub, and waits for new stuff. A multiplayer game may be more appropriate for that player, but Massive Multiplayer is not going to be a long term game for anyone who doesn't want to participate with a massive amount of players.

WoW hit 10 million in January of 2008
WotLK was released in November of 2008
WoW hit 12 million in October of 2010

You overstate the effect of WotLK because it didn't do what Vanilla or BC did, and that was bring in a wealth of new players. Cataclysm has lost 2 million players in the span of a single year.

What's your explanation for why few people joined for WotLK, and why people are leaving in Cata?

Why are you insisting that people go and find a guild to raid? I already explained to you that people run around with only 1 or 2 friends. Hell, some people run around solo because they don't really like grouping with people all that often. I already explained how there's no game to play if you don't raid, and you're pretty much agreeing with me.

The only thing you've been nattering away about is "raid or gtfo" Well people have been leaving for the past year, and really there's no reason for people to keep playing WoW if they aren't raiding. Hell, I was raiding and I left because I found myself only logging in one day a week to raid. At that point it just wasn't worth the $15 a month anymore.

Market saturation is a good reason for not getting massive number of new subs. No market goes up continuously, it has to peak, and WoW peaked. It still manages to maintain the same amount of players, and slightly more than BC did. So as you point out, the same amount of people that have joined two years ago is about the same amount that have left over the past year. So there are likely some new players coming in and going out, and some old players going out.

And the original complaint put forth was that WoW is either too easy or too hard, and WoW's curve needs to be more like Tetris where it comes to meet you (but don't forget that it then surpasses the ability for any human to play it) rather than present a series of challenges for you to surpass, when that doesn't seem to be the real issue, as challenges are both present and achievable for a wide variety of skillsets through gear and practice.

The real issue seems to be that those aren't the types of challenges you want. You'd prefer challenges that take 1-3 people, which is a different question, it's "Where is endgame solo and small group play?" Because you're right, there is very little there, and hopefully that's adjusted for MoP. But go back in your comic and tell me where it specifies that the challenge for solo and small group play isn't there as opposed to there just being no challenge or too much challenge in the game. In your replies, you blamed the proliferation of advanced gear with each patch for ruining the difficulty curve, whereas it evens out the curve for less advanced players and sets up the new curve for more advanced players...But that's only for raids. If you're looking for solo and small group play, yes, the proliferation of advanced gear does wreck the challenges if solo and small group content is not also updated to match the gear level, or if the gear level isn't restricted and more difficult to obtain.

But saying, "There's not enough challenging solo and small group stuff" is TOTALLY different from saying, "The game's too easy or it's too hard." Like I said in my first post, if you think it's too easy, you're not playing the same part of the game I am, and you've admitted to that as well. It's not your fault or my fault the challenges I enjoy aren't the challenges you enjoy though, but it's flat out not true that there are no challenges present, or that they're too hard. If you did a comic lamenting that the solo and small group stuff gets ruined by the emphasis on raiding and the proliferation of gear for it, then I'd totally agree. But I cannot agree that overall it's too easy or too hard, or that it should (or even could) have some difficulty curve like Tetris.

I already explained how it relates the situation of WoW. Repeatedly.

Games being fun is dependent on a skill curve meeting a difficulty curve. If you don't raid, the skill curve is way over the difficulty curve, the "This is boring" section; because there's no content that challenges or engages people. For some people who do raid the difficulty curve becomes the last graph, again where there's no intersection between the skill curve and the difficulty curve. It's important to note that just because you were able to burn through all the vanilla and BC dungeons and run them for the hundredth time doesn't mean everyone else did. For many people that's where their level of skill met the difficulty curve, that dungeons were what the vast majority of people would get 'stuck' at. You get 'stuck' on heroic raid content.

The problem here is the only thing you talk about is raiding. When WoW experienced it's greatest periods of growth in vanilla and BC, something like 5% of the population raided. It was an engaging game because the difficulty curve was well structured from normal dungeons up to the raids. It's a moot point that very few people raided, because people found all the other content challenging and engaging.

The mentality that you hold that raiding is everything that's important about an MMO simply isn't true when you break down WoW's history by the numbers. Greatest subscription increase when few people raided. Subscription growth slowed down as access to raiding increased, and then subscription growth turned into subscription losses as access to raiding continually increased.

Cutting edge raiding simply wasn't the reason why WoW got up to 10 million subscriptions by the end of BC.

It is well spoken.

well said, endium!

I liked this. If you want to more like it, Egoraptor has a series of his own where he talks about game design. it's called "Sequelitis." look into it, you might get some ideas. he actually covers a little bit about your frustrations too, in a good way. :)

I took a bit of inspiration from that, but I doubt I'd be able to do it anywhere near as he could.

Honestly it's about the delivery. half the reason why most of his jokes work is because he cuts out of them mid sentence.

It's actually more due to the 'anger' part of the delivery. Lewis Black has the same kind of style, and he's one of my favorite comedians.

I dunno. He doesn't come off as angry as much as he does...passionate. but when he expresses frustration it's about on par with how I would see him act when he's playing a game.

When it comes to difficulty curves with WoW i think it could use some improvement but the problem is that because WoW has become so huge that your literally getting people from to huge an age group to be effective. Ive actually been in PUG (randomly generated groups across many severs) where some players are brand new, or very experienced, very young or older and i think the problem is, your not meeting groups of people that are at the SAME or SIMILAR skill level as yourself. Nowadays it is completely possible to get any dungeon or raid acheivment as long as you WAIT and get LUCKY enough for a good group. At some point it doesn't matter what skill level you have, you could be a master strategist for all we care, but its a question of do you have to "gear to hang?" To me now it seems that people try things they really shouldn't for there skill level, tanking does require skill, healing requires skill, and even being a DPS requires skill but it seems that because Blizzard has to make an attempt of making the game simple (not sure if this is the best word) enough for even novices to enjoy endgame content. I think the largest problem is how we live, very few people nowadays bother to gain the skill required to be good, they just want to get to the end and and be done with it. While others who actually take the time to think, read a few dialogs, and enjoy the content you are given at your level develop the skills to to be able to become better players in the long run. Its to often that people get lashed out in dungeons and raids because its there first time and screw up.

i very rarely see "you should try this" or "this might work better in this situation". instead the first thing that usually comes out of peoples mouths is a big o'l "F**K YOU NEWB". a big part is patients, sadly but true people have lost there ability to slow down and smell the roses and because of that people don't bother to learn and with people who already know and are impatient there seems to be "i know" or "i don't know" the important "i'm still learning" seems to be missing. And another thing with your challenge curve, what if it was challenging your first time? what happens if you play it a 2nd time? 3rd? even 4th and on. The game maybe have been perfect for you your first time though but the 2nd. you know things you didn't know before, the difficulty is the same but the game is less appealing because you know what to do already, you know whats going to happen, you just want to skip the beginning to when it gets more fun. with your example of chess the game will always be different, Tetris, your game will always be different. With WoW the game is the SAME with very few changes with the main changes being where you start your game. With me my problem is that once those first 10-15 levels are over the game does get pretty boring until you reach cataclysm, that's where the fun things begin, you've got dailies, dungeons, raids achievement hunting, world events, feats of strength, plus the ability to go back and do the low level quests that you missed. from 15-(80-85) the opportunity to change up the game is fairly limited it seems to be a question of how long can you stand grinding quests and dungeons before you get bored. Sure you can do the dailies of end vanilla, BC, and LK but the work required to do them for the rewards, when you finally finish them, is useless because your overleveled now, besides the fancy achievement you just earned yourself.

(side rant)
and i just thought of this but HOLY CRAP WITH THE REALLY LONG QUESTS. doing a little math, but to get Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest, it will take me NO LESS THEN 11 WEEKS TO OBTAIN IF YOU OBTAIN EVERY REQUIRED ITEM EVERY TIME YOU RUN FIRELANDS!!! 11 weeks minimum. and thats if your group is able to do the raid completely. and if they cant, guess what, your fucked until next week. maybe this is one of the reasons people think WoW is hard. but even then its not overly hard, its just a grind. the last time i had that kind of patience was when i played phantasy star online for the gamecube. good o'l memories.

in case i'm just spouting nonsense here's my points
-to wide a skill range and age group to please all
-our ability to take the time to learn and improve
-patience
-to much grinding for skill level
-YOUR DEALING WITH OTHER PEOPLES SKILL LEVELS NOT JUST YOUR OWN

Wiser words have never ever been spoken in this world or any world beyond this.

Vanilla was fine, BC was fine, Wrath was okayish... Cataclysm... Hurrr...

See, the thing is Blizzard does what any other damned company on this planet does; and that is maximise revenue. Dumb down content, make it more accessable to a broader audience... but they do not foresee the inadvertant loss of players who have already been there for about 4 years.

WoW was my sweet sweet passtime, my hobby... I knew so many people on there. But alas, Blizzard / Activision couldn't see past their bottom line and notice the at-one-time-12-million players grabbing their heads in frustration and going WHY.

Could not have said it better myself. They simply became too greedy and ruined the game.

I do believe this is a huge part of why they are losing subscriptions. Yet I also believe it has to do with the player environment.

When WoW first came out it wasn't super well known, at least not outside the already existing fanbase. So the people playing it were those who actually liked the game and its characters. The forums and gameplay were saturated with heavy RP elements which made it a unique experience for those who already enjoyed the warcraft universe. As the game became better known it attracted the more common MMORPG crowd(we will use the word common to refer to these gamers, who try a wide variety of MMORPGs from across the net). These people were only concerned with their DPS and the overall performance of everyone else which made them rather unpleasant to play with. This group also attracted the infamous gold sellers since they cared little for gameplay and simply wanted to advance quickly. So as the game became saturated with these people it drove the loyal warcraft series players out, thus losing Blizzard steady subscriptions. So it was that WoW became a generic MMORPG....which there are hundreds of. The common MMORPG group tends to be rather fickle and move on as soon as something becomes boring. That is where your formula comes in.The game became so easy and pointless that the common group began to move on, as they do once a game becomes too boring.

So in all Blizzard became too greedy and has shot itself in the foot. The original warcraft series players were driven out by the desire to expand and earn more money, and the common group is moving on to new MMORPGs.

Well said. But it's not just WoW that it applies to. Many games fail to adopt this ideal when they make their games nowadays.

Unfortunately, most companies will refuse to use the system you show where difficulty overtakes skill to make the game impossible to complete like Tetris. Because nowadays, making games easy to complete is a key part of making a game 'fun'. I guess that's why some people hate some games because you never need the skill or patience to be challenged at any point and just breeze through it all to complete a game in record time.

I don't think the difficulty changes are the major issue. They've certainly turned off some of the old-school raiders (myself included; I finally quit about a year ago), but that was never as big a group as nostalgia would make it.

I think the major issues are the homogenization of the various classes and roles, the easy availability of epic gear, and the lazy rehashing of old content.

Back in vanilla, I was a raiding shadow priest. Possibly the only raiding shadow priest on my server, as conventional wisdom at the time was that shadow priests were bad and they should be healing instead. But I ran my numbers, I saw that with the right gear I could stand up with the other dps, and more importantly I could bring things to the table that nobody else could. This wasn't unique to shadow priests; at the time, there were a number of specs with access to buffs that nobody else got. And of course horde didn't have paladins and alliance didn't have shamans, so only alliance got blessings, and only horde got totems.

In BC, they gave each faction access to the other's exclusive class. Later, they streamlined and homogenized the buffs, so that specs A, B, and C provided, say, +10% melee damage, while specs D, E, and F provided Replenishment, and G, H, and I provided a spellpower buff. None of these buffs stacked any more. Now you only had to have one of the three specs in your raid in order to get a buff -- and they were distributed so that it was pretty easy to get most if not all of the buffs into any given 10-man raid, and almost assured in a 25-man.

At the same time, they did other things that made playing a particular role easier. Stacking HoTs, for instance, changed the way people healed. DPS casting rotations became easier. Threat and mana management became less and less of an issue. Tanks gained lots of AoE threat (aside from paladins, who always had it).

At the same time, gearing up became easier. One of the entry-level vanilla raids, Zul'Gurub, didn't even offer guaranteed epic loot drops on some of its bosses. Starting in BC, you didn't have to raid for epics; crafting, reaching Exalted and running heroic dungeons would get you some. Shortly before and proceeding through Wrath, they would get you higher-level epics, on par with mid-range raiding... and you no longer had to get a dungeon key to access them. Wrath added daily dungeons for even more emblem rewards, plus much easier epic PvP gearing.

But all of that might have passed if it hadn't been for the rehashing. Good grief, the rehashing.

I was actually relatively happy with the revamp of Naxxramas in Wrath. Sure, it was no longer the meat grinder that my guild had (barely) delved into in vanilla, but my guild was one of a few that ever saw it, and there was some good stuff in there. Why shouldn't more people have a chance to experience the Safety Dance? And the next instance, Ulduar, stood up to anything in the previous expansions, I thought.

But then... Onyxia. Onyxia? The Onyxia I'd killed at level 60 so many times? Yep. The same fight with the same mechanics. Well, okay, it's a special occasion thing, right? A bit of nostalgia for the veterans now that we're level 80.

Fast-forward to Cataclysm. We're fighting... Nefarian? Really? And Onyxia again? Well, surely we'd get some new raids. Like... Zul'Gurub. And Zul'Aman. And Ragnaros. Really? I mean, sure, I enjoyed raiding all of those instances and fighting all of those bosses... five years ago. By this point, I'd been sticking around mostly because I liked the people in my guild, but that finally bored me into leaving. Re-run the same content I ran five years ago, in a raid with fewer people, on my simpler-to-play character, so I can get some gear that will in three months be available to everyone who runs heroic dungeons? I mean, they're not even presenting a new story any more, really. It's just the same old stuff.

Bleah, this is long and ranty. Sorry.

I'm fine with rerunning old content, the problem was when they reworked the old content; they made it far too easy.

With the remake of Zul'Gurub I was sorely dissapointed that they removed bosses, and made the bosses easier. When you face roll something that used to require skill, time, and planning in the past, it really does kill the fun of actually beating them.

ZG was the first raid I ever really participated in, and it was an experience and a challenge. The revamp? Forgettable because it was... well.... easy. It was just there to be an item booster so people could get to the raiding content easier.

Warning, large post!

It's interesting listening to the various arguments, but there is also a key component to WOW that lacks in several other games. WOW is, essentially a highly glorified social Slot Machine for equipment. I know this because of a combination of reading the lore without actually playing it, blizzard's marketing reports, and discussions with other game developers. You're right about them changing several fundamental parts of the game, but when you break it down, What is wow?

You play the game, either killing critters and hoping for a good random equipment drop, or farming for that one 'special item' or pet you want. once you've achieved this, you get a certain amount of glory or such, unlock a new portion of the game, and can continue advancing. Just like a slot machine, except you're getting digital equipment, pets, and gaining levels, rather then earning money. And like any good Casino knows, you have to change things, keep them fresh, to keep attracting customers.

With WOW, they're changing the game, but they also have to try and maintain story integrity, while increasing it's appeal to new audiences. Having gotten most of the more 'skilled' gamers, their only choice was to make things easier, so people who have never played an MMORPG before can get hooked. Thus, the changing difficulty curve. It's not that they're trying to fix the game; they simply want more players plunking down a monthly fee. Case in point, Mists of pandaria: a patch with no real story evolution, simply more options, graphics, and now the ability to *choose* alliance or Horde for your character. In the end, it's all marketing. And changing the difficulty curve is the only other way besides new shinies for them to attract more people.

As for modern video games, some do ramp up the difficulty, some it's a flat line. Some make it obvious(like, say, Fallout: new Vegas) with experience levels and such, others do it on a more visible but less obvious curve(Like Skyrim) and on some it's totally hidden, Like Say Duke Nukem. But you can still feel the curve. Case in point, in the new Duke Nukem I can utterly P*wn the octo-king on easy or standard difficulty, but on high difficulty I am routinely getting my delphic butt handed to me. All it took was a couple more enemies, some changes in speed, fractions of a second, but enough there is a very obvious difference.

A lot of game makers are 'dumbing' down games to appeal to a broader audience, but then leave multiplayer as their bread and butter, leaving short campaigns that feel artificially difficult, like they don't make the enemies tougher, just throw more of them at you. The failure of this kind of work is easily visible in games which are receiving poor reviews, like Resident Evil: Raccoon City.

Hope I don't unleash a bomb with this:

I completely agree with you on how companies make multiplayer there bread and butter and leave offline... incomplete. it makes me sad because when i chose to play xbox its not online with strangers. its with friends that i know and are around me and that is what makes a game so much fun i get to hang out with the people i know and just have some fun. Its gotten to the point where some times i have to will myself to finish a single player game because im like "wtf? is this all it is?"

The ironic thing is that everything they've done to increase their subscription base has resulted in subscription loss.

Blizzard's mistake was measuring their replay optics based on the number of players experiencing the cutting edge of the content. In Vanilla subscriptions were going up despite so very few people raiding, many people were satisfied with the 5-10 man dungeons. They were designed like raids, having insane amounts of trash to work through (similar to Molten Core) This format remained mostly intact in BC as well. Very few people experienced the cutting edge raids of that expansion as well, yet subscriptions continued to rise.

Instead of looking at what the majority of their players were doing most of the time, they looked at what their players weren't doing. In doing so they started pushing their players to do things they weren't doing on their own, and does that really make any sense? It doesn't to me. So what Blizzard was doing was pushing their player base towards content they didn't really participate in on their own, and at the same time started dumbing down or eliminating the content players spent most of their time doing.

So all Blizzard ended up doing was making things simultaneously too easy, and too hard for many players. Yeah there's still players who feel it's 'just right' but that's mostly people who are able to run raids, and for players who only play a few hours a week. For people who don't raid, but play a couple of hours a day; there's no engaging or challenging content for those individuals.

I agree with you on that; My last two Managers played WOW, so I learned about the social aspects. The community aspect is being curtailed because rather then having people of different kinds meet up, you've now got stratification among the guilds, and an 'us vs them' mentality, which spoils raids. Add in the massive raids where you need so many people you almost certainly get at least one jerk among them, and it becomes so much like real life it's turned many players off.

If I want to get yelled at for my lack of skill, I can go do a class on a life skill, instead of getting a nice UV tan in front of my PC screen. And Blizzard seems to have failed to realize people *like* small intimate groups, rather then masses of people only organized by a banner who can scarcely agree on tactics, let alone how to work together.

If you're getting bored of WoW when running heroic raids/dungeons, I accept it is not difficult enough for you.

WoW used to have giant difficulty jumps between content, so if your skill was low, you couldn't try it and it was hard to gain skill without practice at it. Now it has a very low "entry" level (LFG), a "normal" level where you need -some- skill and the Heroic modes which always needed skill (until your gear makes it less skill and more routine).

Particularly ironic that the lesson Blizzard is somehow getting from this is that they made it too hard, so they need to make the game easier. No...

When Cataclysm came out, I was actually happy. The new dungeons could kill you if you did it wrong, and while my friends and I could get through the heroics, they actually required effort. The raids were also harder and required more attention, flexibility, and skill. I was optimistic. If this was the first tier of content, maybe all the later stuff would be even harder!

Then Firelands came out, and... Well, when you spend almost half the final boss alt-tabbed out to browse the web, as the tank, due to that being all the attention you need to give the fight, something is seriously wrong. What's even worse is when they decide it's still too hard, and nerf it into the ground with months left before the next content patch. And then that content follows the same ideology. How bad did they screw the difficulty curve? The final end-boss of the entire expansion, the big baddie you've worked towards this whole time, is easier to kill than the final heroic end-boss of the first set of raids, despite that being two full tiers earlier. More than twice the number of people have managed to kill the final boss, introduced a year into the expansion, than have killed the big boss that had been in the expansion on the day it launched.

I was already getting thoroughly bored of the game and its lack of challenge. Gutting the top difficulty left me nothing to play for.

you want to get a difficulty curve, try learning how to kill a creeper using melee. in-fucking-sane to try, but the reward is "holy shit, did i really just do that?" and damn, i'm good." they blow up if you happen to be in range, see you through walls, and tend to be right where the "ooh, shiny!" is. this is in minecraft, by the way.