Greedy Goblin

Friday, January 22, 2010

Rise of the leet king

Tobold asked a very interesting question: what makes a game hard? His question is aimed to those who doesn't like the "easy and accessible" games. He also offers some alternatives. I first answer his and then I give mine:
  • Slower leveling: long =/= hard. Saying "cheese" is easy. Saying it 10K times is long, but not harder. Yet it would be great if one could finish his questlines without greying out all the quests and monsters.
  • Experience loss death penalty: Definitely yes. Without death penalty all content, regardless difficulty can be brute-forced: you try and try and try until the RNG gives it to you. So without death penalty nothing is hard, just long (need more tries).
  • Item loss: Indeed yes, and both from death and simple wear. The death part is obvious. The wear part is necessary to prevent no-life low-grinding, when instead of killing 1 valuable monster you kill 100 little mobs who all together give the same rewards. With item decay grinding easy monsters would not be profitable.
  • Harder soloing, forced grouping: definitely yes. It would force learning your job, as no one would group with you if you can't do it.
  • Faster reaction times required: It's not a hard/easy issue. It's a different market segment issue. A game where fast reaction is needed and a game where careful planning is needed are both good games, just not the same game. The same for PvP/PvE. None of them are "harder", just different (btw "PvP games" are more or less equal to "fast reaction time games", if we don't count turn-based strategies).
  • No instances, slow respawn times: that's not hard, just annoying, as the outcome depends on time spent and luck, not skill.
As you could see my definition of "hard" means that "success in the game needs skill and not time". For example it doesn't matter how much time you spend in chess directly. That one match depends on your skill and the opponents. Of course more previous time spent help you get more skill, but if you are just naturally talented, that's equally good.

So here come my list what a good hard game has:
  • Randomized or differently evolving worlds: to prevent WoWhead-like databases to form, where recipe for every task is available. Just because someone found mob X here, I won't find him there (of course I don't mean blind searching and camping. The quest text tells where he is, but it's changing with server or time)
  • Adapting, learning monsters: monsters should have lot of basic abilities besides their scripted specials that they can use. For example all monsters have some kind of mitigation method that they can switch to a frost res shield if the team is frost-heavy, so the players must adapt. The bosses should also have interrupts, heals, dispels that the players must counter. These abilities should be in a wide enough variety to make it impossible to have a "follow this and loot comes" tankspot video.
  • zero-sum economy. All resources must be gained by players (either from loot or gathering) and all items must be created from these resources (or looted directly from monsters). Quests should not reward gold or items, just reputation and XP. Any NPC-to-player transfer mechanism holds the promise of welfare to the QQ-ing, as the company can create items out of thin air. So an obvious an rigid line must be drawn.
  • anti-boost mechanics, like players can't get XP and loot if they are in group with someone with significantly higher level or gear level. In current WoW I'd say 5 levels or 25 average ilvl difference should make it impossible to get rewards.
  • endless and sharable /ignore list. If I ignore someone he shall not contact me any way (including alts, or any accounts owned by him or me) or get into my group.
  • No active alts (besides maybe some dedicated banker). Having alts promotes more play instead of better play. If the boss is hard on melee, you should overcome this difficulty and not log to your mage. If someone wants to start another character to experience different side of the game, he shall hibernate his old main. One can have any characters but only one is active and can be switched only once a week.
You could call this post pointless as we all know that this game will never be implemented. However it's just the first part of a post that is crucial to the goblinish philosophy. This part let's just be summarized as "Hard games could be created, the tools and ideas are out there. There is also a significant (10% of WoW = 1 million) playerbase who would subscribe to this game. So captain obvious would say: Blizzard and other AAA MMO makers should make such games, or at least hard servers from their current games". Next time we'll see why do they refuse to follow captain obvious.

33 comments:

Anonymous said...

Want WoW to be hard again? Easy: BAN ADDONS.

I don't need to learn how to do X/Y/Z... I just download an addon that does it automatically. Ban addons, and it's a level playing field all of a sudden. Can't have that.

Anonymous said...

Well, maybe I'm missing the obvious here somewhere, but I believe the reason Game Developers won't make a game as you've described is that the 10% who proclaim that they want exactly that, really don't.

Skeptic said...

"There is also a significant (10% of WoW = 1 million) playerbase who would subscribe to this game."

The metaphorical highway of MMOs is littered with the burning wrecks of games for which this was the 'business plan'.

Anonymous said...

As I see it, the reason why at least Blizzard doesn't make such a game is that they would have to make different content. They are now including that 10% with the content they make for WoW. Why would they want to make their jobs harder by putting a 10% in another group witch needs another game if they are making money anyway?

Plus that such a game would feel like WoW anyway. So why not play WoW then? Just because the other game is a bit harder? I don't think they will. People want rewards for their efford. They will probably choose the game that does this at the fastest rate.

Iiene of Kul Tiras said...

Been there, done that. Seen it all.

I was playing Dragon's Gate in 1992 when ... if you died? You lost levels of skill for EVERY FEW SECONDS you didn't release. Levels that could take WEEKS to replace.

I played Ultima Online, a game with an 'economy' that attempted to mimic the 'real world'. It was TOTALLY BORKED.

I played Everquest. I couldn't get past level 37... the death penalty was that severe. You HAD to be in a group, and kill trivial content to advance. NO ONE risked losing levels by taking chances.

Then I taught myself to program and entered the industry myself. I spent the next 10 years writing online games.

When I started, the industry was LITTERED with idiots that thought a 'death penalty' was a good idea. That leveling should be INSANELY HARD, and that game economies should be so GRIEVOUSLY PAINFUL that no player would ever be able to 'get ahead'.

Once? I assisted a designer that was working on a revolutionary 'economic system'. His MASTER PLAN was that no matter what the hell you did... you COULD NOT POSSIBLY GAIN more coin than his 'perfectly designed amount'. Kill a billion mobs 20 levels lower than you... or 1000 mobs higher than you... it didn't matter. You ONLY got enough reward to BARELY KEEP YOURSELF REPAIRED. I swear to god. His rationale? To prevent a high level character from gifting a few gold to a low level character.

That guy is STILL WORKING in the industry.

WoW has UTTERLY OBLITERATED every other online game for a reason! And it's NOT BECAUSE IT'S TOO EASY! It's because it has polished, attractive systems and ISN'T unnecessarily hard!

Let's look at Gevlon's post:

Experience loss death penalty: Definitely yes.

You lose! All an exp 'death penalty' does is force players to NOT TAKE CHANCES. Where the hell is the fun of not risking?

Harder soloing, forced grouping: definitely yes.

Nope. Anyone with actual experience with actual games would know better.

All of your entries:

These games have ALREADY BEEN MADE! And THEY ALL SUCKED!

Star Wars Galaxies had 'randomized or differently evolving worlds'.

Adaptive, learning monsters? Ultima Online tried. Ultima Online failed. Actually... they never actually tried. They WANTED TO... But couldn't because the concept was just not doable.

zero-sum economy. The ULTIMATE Zero Sum economy would be what I detailed above with the designer I had to assist.

Anti-boost mechanics. Why? To PUNISH PEOPLE for helping others? Yeah, that'll help attract the players.

No active alts. Good luck enforcing that! Did you even think about that?

Winter Seale said...

I've played in games that had true zero-sum economies (all the mobs in the game drew on a fixed pool of money to drop, it decreased as they were killed and increased as players spent money at sinks, eg, buying from vendors, repairing, leveling, etc). They worked great early on but after a few years the top players would accumulate most of the wealth in the game, making drops extremely stingy for later players. Overall, the whole system would become unplayable and would have to be reset.

(This all would be Avatar, which was the first multiplayer graphical dungeon crawl type game. Originally from '79, based on previous multiplayer dungeon crawls from '77.)

Unknown said...

Adapting, learning monsters: monsters have some kind of mitigation method that they can switch to a frost res shield if the team is frost-heavy, so the players must adapt. The bosses should also have interrupts, heals, dispels that the players must counter. These abilities should be in a wide enough variety to make it impossible to have a "follow this and loot comes" tankspot video.


Ever beaten Chromaggus on lvl 60? He was that kind of a pooch. Because of his varying 4 breaths besides his normal abilities, no once could follow a guide at ease...

Dalthalion said...

"Blizzard and other AAA MMO makers should make such games or at least hard servers from their current games". Next time we'll see why they refuse to follow captain obvious."

Simply because they are Goblins. They want to put the least amount of recourses (time=expense) and generate the most revenue.

If they cater to the socials they make more money.

Just like we do on the AH

Nils said...

I agree 100%. And that doesn't happen often with you, Gevlon :)

MarcusMaximi said...

Lots of good ideas there. Except "endless and sharable /ignore list. If I ignore someone he shall not contact me any way (including alts, or any accounts owned by him or me) or get into my group." How does this make the game harder. This should be on a "Wish List" post.

Wildhorn said...

I agree with all that have been said except the no-alt part. Personally, I am an altolic. Not because it allows me to switch depending of content, but because it allows me to experience all the game content and allow me to play what I feel to play when I want. Having to wait 1 week to play sometime different would not be fun.

Animality said...

I'd just like to point out that out of all those ideas I only consider 2 to be useful, those being the randomized world (which whilst stops guides doesn't make the game harder see diablo 2) and the adapting monsters. Oh and changing one of the the previous anony's idea to ban boss addons and questhelper addons (no point messing with add ons that simply make your UI look better or easier to use).

However stopping alts doesn't make the game any harder it just simply forces you to play one character. Which is a hassle if say you've done every single raid with one character for a week. Why not be able to swap to a different character to which hasn't done those raids or you play for pvp.

Plus if we go off what your saying that time =/= difficulty a death penalty doesn't make the game hard either. Simply that instead of killing that mob that is the same level as me i'll go kill 10 of the green mobs which has a lower chance of me dying. Item decay may stop that but then that just means ill do an instance 3-4 times and just ninja the same item if it drops and swap it when the other one breaks. Dying is a part of wow, and dying is a part of most single player and other multiplayer games, simply making people have to regrind the same stuff does not simply make the game hard. The amount of times i have died in a game shouldn't mean anything if i have learnt from it.

Also forced grouping whilst levelling was a nightmare. I levelled 3 80's with 2 of them never setting foot inside an instance before hitting 80 because finding people was often a huge delay, it was a -ve exp/hr loss and the gear was replaced with greens after a few levels anyway.

Though this wouldn't of been such a huge problem during vanilla (and now with the new lfg tool) when levelling did take a while and there were alot more people around your level. Besides with the amount of grouping needed at 80(aka everything other then being a "bg hero") it pretty much is enforced in the end anyway so enforcing it during levelling is useless.

But in saying all this though i do agree with you that the game is too easy from what it was. But implementing these just make levelling in the game more irritating. Which is not where blizzard wants its player base to focus on.

To be honest i'd rather see raids that were much more difficult and pvp that was much more balanced then blizzard spending their time messing with levelling speeds. At the same time I still wish that they hadn't nerfed the level of mounts/exp needed/gold needed for mounts/heirlooms etc. as it is they which made levelling so easy anyway.

Most other games can be difficult without having things such as death penalties, they just make it up in different ways. Whether it be via puzzles, through practice of a skill, strategy. The ability to counter and adapt.

Simply making something more difficult does not mean that it has to be frustrating or require penalties (eg your exp and items), but it should make you think, learn and become a better player.

Green Armadillo said...

I'm not convinced that either exp loss, item loss, or even permadeth fit the criteria of "harder, not longer". All you're losing in any of those cases is stuff that takes time to obtain, i.e. time, albeit in greater quantities than Blizzard currently takes from players.

Then again, a pug that wipes twice on every boss of a five man before killing it will easily spend three times as long to clear the instance, effectively being penalized by losing the opportunity cost of what they could have done instead (clear the same dungeon twice more in a no-wipe group.

If anything, harsh death penalties make players risk averse, lowering the difficulty they're willing to subject themselves to.

Anonymous said...

@Iiene of Kul Tiras

I played both Ultima Online and EverQuest too.

Ultima's economy was something I never really took a look at. To me that game was all about griefing and PvP. Granted in the begining it was GM Mage/Swords/etc etc running around in plate 3 shotting players dumb enough to come to X-roads, or any of the dungeons. Otherwise money was easy to obtain. That game was the "best" pvp game once it evolved to say "stage 2" (Feluccia/Trammel), however it took away the murdering of noobs.

EQ I played as well but I never found it hard to level I had multipule characters 60+. It was all about getting in a group and killing monsters that could only be killed 1 at a time by 6 people working together. If you were fighting trivial monsters in a group then you were doing it wrong and there's a reason you never made it above level 37.

Tonus said...

I get the impression that WOW was developed by people who enjoyed games like UO and EQ, but wanted to remove or reduce the parts of those games that they didn't like.

EQ (especially early EQ) had a number of the things that Gevlon lists at the start of the post. Leveling was slow and tedious. Dying meant experience loss (potentially level loss) and probably a risky corpse recovery. Soloing was difficult or impossible for all but a few classes. There was no instanced content. Etc etc.

WOW changed that, and became wildly popular, so they continued down that road, making the game more accessible to even the most casual solo player. Other developers have tried to go back to the EQ model, and so far they're not having much luck. I don't think that there are 1 million WOW players who want to play EQ. There may be 100,000 who THINK that they want to play it, but would be right back in WOW after a week.

There does not, at the moment, seem to be a market for an MMORPG that is as punishing as EQ used to be. And I think that "punishing" is the right term. Not "difficult" or "challenging." Everquest punished players. WOW is 180 degrees from that, to where many people feel that it rewards players excessively. And it has become a very popular MMORPG. It may be a while before we see a return to a more balanced MMORPG. And I think part of the reason is that even the people who talk about how easy WOW is, would not want to play a more punishing game.

Anonymous said...

I'm also against 'No active alts'. I think alt brings re-playability to the game. To some people - me included - end-game is rather boring. At some point you're stuck - whether you are only on naxx or have cleared all content - you're stuck. Alts let you run around and explore a completely different game.

There are about 8 games in wow: melee dps, ranged dps, healer, tank ... times horde+alliance as they get their own quest hubs, and used to have their own dungeons (how many alliance has ran rfc before?).

It also lets you revisit all the old places you've seen.

I do agree that if your purpose in life is to be the best at end-game, than you should have no alts (beside bank ones), but a game can't be your purpose in life. Game is just there to play however you want whenever you want.

And 'hard' game shouldn't be the goal of any game company. If you want a hard game, get yourself a chess computer, and play at hardest level. That's hard, and there are hard-chess games without a long list of pre-defined moves, there are ones (at least I know of 1) which played at master level (not grandmaster though) which only had about first 5 moves predefined.
There's no RNG in chess - in hard games, I believe you need to not have RNG. So you may have a wowhead-like database but to get to that 1 npc you need to kill, you'll need tobe 100% accurate while fighting other mobs around. If you click wrong button - you die - now that's hard.

Unknown said...

Are you talking an MMORPG? I don't see it mentioned so I'm not sure. Constantly changing content in a multiplayer environment might not be a good thing. Updates yes, but quests that change depending on the time of day? What happens if the mob moves just before I get to him, and have to search again? What is to keep people from searching over and over and keeping track of all locations? Having quest items as a random world spawn would not be a good idea. Also, think of patch days, and all the server instability. The more people you add when you update or change content, the worse it gets. It strains the system and makes it hard to troubleshoot.

As for single player games, things you look for are very possible, you just need to get away from Blizzard games.

Anonymous said...

I played EverQuest for many years when it first came out and eventually just got sick of it.

There was simply too much crap to deal with to sustain the "fun".

Quests were horrible and it took way too long to level (a week if you worked constantly at it, longer if you died.).

Even at low levels you had to group with others to gain any XP, and that dealing with that sure was fun.

Gaining gold was limited to killing monsters or sitting in a common zone and shouting out your wares or skills for hours.

I quit EQ and swore off MMO's.
A year and a half ago I decided to give WoW a try and it was a hugely different experience.
- Dying once did not mean you lost a days worth of "work" (and yes, EQ sometimes felt like work).
- Quests were worth doing making the game something more than just going out and killing monsters for hours on end.
- For 90% of the quests, it could be done alone.
- No once a month/day/hour spawns that sometimes had place holders.
- Every class could level solo.
- Rested XP for those who couldn't play as often.

Generally the system you are talking about Gevlon almost abuses the customer from day one. Granted, casual and mindless socials won't play that game, but that cuts out a lot of potential player-base, which creates a downward spiral of interested players.

WoW does have a harder game, but you have to work to get there by joining a group of like-minded and skilled individuals.

WoW didn't get to 11+ million subscribers by Blizzard not knowing their customer base.
They supply a single game that allows multiple styles of play to account for many tastes (PvE solo, PvE group, raids, heroic, PvP, simple social interaction, etc.)

Quicksilver said...

Iiene of Kul Tiras said:
"And it's NOT BECAUSE IT'S TOO EASY! It's because it has polished, attractive systems and ISN'T unnecessarily hard!

Let's look at Gevlon's post:

Experience loss death penalty: Definitely yes.

You lose! All an exp 'death penalty' does is force players to NOT TAKE CHANCES. Where the hell is the fun of not risking?"

This! Let me emphasize: "ISN'T unnecessarily hard!"

There is a fine balance where difficulty has to be overcame in order to give out satisfaction.

Unnecessarily hard: imagine a boss that takes you 4 moths of daily wiping until you down him. And when he goes down he drops like 1 or 2 items... for a raid of 40 people. Some will stay in this grind, most won't.

For me personally, there is a limit to which I wanna invest my time into perfecting an ongoing challenge. I cannot conceive spending 3 hours each evening, looking at the same boss' ass, pressing the same buttons for 4 months or so... maybe others would...

The challenge must end at some point, because in the end we all play games for the feeling of accomplishment once the task is done. There is a fine line here.

so the first reason for why making the game uneccessarily hard is a bad idea, is the fact that people have different levels of commitment in mind when it comes to games. and you will capture always a segment of those people.

Usually you wanna capture a large one, because of financial reasons.

Rob Dejournett said...

My first MMO experience was EQ after it was out a few years. Let me tell you, I am really surprised i went back to MMOs at all.

Granted, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but somehow the interface was bad enough to make that pretty hard.

But yeah I got to level 30ish or whatever then realized that I was actually losing XP/levels the more I played.

And dont forget the player economy, which seemed pretty bad to me.

And the lack of addons. Nothing screams 'fun' like not knowing where the hell you are going, having to click on every single grey to sell it, etc.

And as a bonus, you have a game infested with 12 year olds, kinda like WoW is now, but moreso. At one point I had to plead for an hour for some 12 year old to give me my corpse back since there was no way I could get to the area it was at. It was a horrible horrible experience.

Oh, lastly, the EQ endgame? Grind for weeks, wipe a few times on a boss, grind for weeks (a WoW friend told me this, he raided actively in EQ).

EQ: Really sucks, really hard.
WoW: Lots of fun, simple, straightforward.

There are 'hard' games out there, they have niche audiences. I'm thinking of EVE online and EQ.

Honestly there is nothing stopping Gevlon or anyone else jumping to these other games. Go ahead. You may even have fun.

Nielas said...

"Without death penalty all content, regardless difficulty can be brute-forced: you try and try and try until the RNG gives it to you. So without death penalty nothing is hard, just long (need more tries)."

I am really suprised that you used this argument since it clearly is non-applicable for non-trivial content in WoW. You simply cannot 'brute-force' any significant content in WoW unless you actually mean 'after many tries actually do it the right way'. You have to improve your strategy and tactics or you will keep failing forever.

Was Ulduur relatively easier than Naxx or vanilla Molten Core simply because you had all those teleports that let you get back to the boss that wiped you without runnign through the cleared areas?

Quicksilver said...

Second of all, I liked the comment I quoted because if shows the big discrepancy between how the devs think about their game and how ppl play it.

As a rule, when designing something, the question should not be "how would I play it?" but rather "how can this be abused?"

It is a good illustration about how the game creators' vision of difficulty and challenge differs from the way the game is played. And I have seen it multiple times, enough to understand the effects.

Your suggestions Gevlon even though poiting towards a more challenging game would be the reason of demise of such game.

Why? Simple. Because the majority of people playing game are simply idiots. It cannot be stopped simply because humanity is filled with examples of utter stupidity, not to mention video games skew this ratio even more by attracting a group of especially retarded individuals (like kids and no lifers).

The point where you are wrong is in that you think about how you would react to the game rules and not the most dumb player out there. You must always bring things to their common denominator.

Lets take a few of your suggestions and expand.

Death Penalty. Wonderful idea. An intelligent person like yourself would be thrilled. Play carefully, strategically. Plan your moves. Use the eventual death to learn from it and benefit after.
To the idiot:
"lol I'll just grind boars for 80 levels...
This game is boring ffs...
*dies somehow* (because he's a moron)
omg I died now I have to do it all over again...
this game sucks ballz... /quit"

Item loss.
HardFucka the Level 80 Undead Rogue will just camp outside ZF or any other nice frequented instance and kill all players getting in our out and disenchant the items he looted from them whole day long. The socials who just like to have fun, quicky QQ and quit the game.

The need for grouping.
There just aren't enough people to do it successfully. Immagine that all quests are group quests and finding a group is similar to what it was to put together a group for a heroic, pre LFD tool.
Plus as there are so many morons in this game, if you find yourself needing them in order to even get into the game (as in level) it will be hopeless.
Immagine standing all alone at level 3-5 in a deserted Elwynn Forest and all mobs and quests are like the hogger one. Even more the people who login once in a while are drooling morons with no idea what to do... yeah....


Lets see more of these impacts already existant in the game.

Hybrid classes.
The developpers thought it would be fun to have some classes who would fit multiple roles and have awesome utility, at the expense of lesser specialization in any of the fields. For example, take Ret paladins: a dps class who can heal pretty good. Initial design was they do lower damage but help out with healing and defensive cooldowns, so you get a half healer/half dps kinda class for your raids. Result: doing both was too hard for the average moron. Even more, people looked at recount and not at utility and the raid setting. You all know the result.

Really really hard hardcore, attunement requiring, instances.

Hey, its fun, you work your way up to the new content... in reality... after being in a Toc25 pug last night who wiped 4 times at beasts for random reasons and then after the kill all the ones being dead starting begging for the drops, I think I know why they did these changes.

No gear resets.
Wonderful idea. You must see all content and enjoy it the way it was designed at the difficulty it was designed.
In reality, if you reached level cap 1 year after the release of the content, you were hopelessly alone, because nobody ran those instanced any more. Except maybe retards who cant clear them anyway. Thus no progress.

Simply put if you dont cater to the morons, they will stop playing it. if they stop two things will happen:

a) the hardcore are too few to group up and do the challenges
b) you lose the main source of funding.

Anonymous said...

That mention of a "hard mode server" sounds very interesting... @Iiene of Kul Tiras I can't say I really agree with you, these are all good ideas, its just that most of all the games out there have gotten a few points right, and so many more wrong. It is near impossible to create the perfect game that includes penalties like that. Why is it so hard, people might ask? Because the perfect game can not be made through trial and error, nor can its specifications be defined. That one game that we are waiting to see can only happen.

Anonymous said...

Have you played anything else? I've played 5 other MMORPGs if you think wow is easy what do you think of them? They are all easier or not fun.

I haven't been able to find an MMORPG that is as fun as wow.

SirFWALGMan said...

I am an Alt Aholic too. I would have stopped playing a long time ago if all that was left was daily grinds on my 80. ug.

I can see why you added this in. My main can give my alt a ton of cash and weapons and make things easier not to mention leveling gear with XP bonus's... but Alts keep a game interesting for me at least.

Degini said...

The best games have always been ones where you cannot have alts. Eve and pre NGE SWG to name 2.

I approve of this entire list, except I don't think loot should be dropped at all. All final items should be player crafted. If the mob has to drop something, it should be a component, not a finished good.

Nielas said...

@Degini
EVE does not need alts because every character can be everything so in essence every 'main' is also an 'alt'. Also let's not forget that even with this most serious players have multiple accounts in the game anyway.

Pre-NGE SWG lost a lot of players because of its no-alts policy. The game was just not interesting enough for people to be satisfied being locked into a narrow role where the only way to experience different roles is to give up on all the progress you made so far.

Unknown said...

reading this post inmediately reminds me of EVE Online

a lot of the things you said are already in the game, the death penalty is insane, you could lose weeks of training (that's XP in EVE) if you died, the battle system depends a lot of your skills and in just 1 big server with more than 100k the economy system is very much like you said.

Samus said...

One thing you should add to your list Gevlon:

De-leveling for instances.

If it is a level 20 instance and you bring your level 30 character, it automatically de-levels you down to 20. CoH does this for task forces, although that game is very easy in other ways. You cannot come back when you're higher level or bring a level 80 to run you through it, either you can do it or you can't.

You could also do it for gear. Use the same mechanic as heirlooms, reduce the ilvl to something appropriate for the dungeon.

Anonymous said...

You made a mistake:

- Exp loss / gear loss / death penalty. You claim it makes the game harder, but it does not. Because in the end, it only requires the person to farm some more gear / exp / gold against grey mobs to regain what they lost. Therefore it solidly falls into the "say cheese ten thousand times" category.

Losing all your stuff does not make the game harder and require more skill. It only requires more time.

Wiggin said...

These suggestions are more penalties for stupidity, not actually making a game more difficult. In Gevlon's eyes, anything to remove the stupid is ideal, so I totally understand these suggestions.

But why can't content be both difficult and forgiving? These suggestions seem to be both difficult and unforgiving. There are alternative to penalties, for mistakes or stupidity, to try and improve skill.

I feel TBC was a better balance of these ideals, when wow wasn't about over gearing content and cleaving through instances.

But perhaps we are all simply jaded. The longer wow is out, the more likely we see the "same thing." It is hard to measure this variable, but people definitely seem to be becoming jaded with the gameplay itself.

Blizzard knows this, which is why every expansion has something pretty innovative, and Cataclysm has perhaps some of the biggest changes to the core of the game.

cheesewhiz said...

I disagree here.

The game that you are suggesting simply punishes people for taking risks or trying new things.

Fable 2 attempted to put a death cost into the game. While testing it they discovered player would turn their computer off if they were about to die rather than paying such a cost. Simply put deathcost's are not a 'fun' playing mechanic and smart developers avoid them and smart players find ways around them.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon believe's that making a game take longer does not make it harder, I don't in any way believe with that but isn't taking away level boosting and making the world randomised just making the game take longer? Just because I can not be 100% sure a mob will be in a certain location doesn't mean that when I find it, I will have any more trouble killing it. I will just need to wonder around for a longer amount of time. Also the ignore list point, I did not understand, it seemed to make the game easier actually, except for morons who can now be more easily spam ignored.