Hard games? No sorry. I don’t see hard games. Being logged for 11 straight hours isn’t an hard game, it’s simply stupid design.

The difficulty implies the possibility to *learn*. If learning a game is fun you have a winner. It doesn’t matter if that process asks you millions of hours, the more the better. That’s gameplay, you can go through the gameplay with your own pace. Slowly or fast depending on your resources.

The fact is that “uber” designed mmorpgs have nothing to do with the difficulty, nor the gameplay. They are just timesinks to put a limit between a part (casual players) and the winners (your uber players). The difference is that if you are lucky you have access to a part of the game, if you are unlucky you cannot. And that “feeds” the fact you are uber and others aren’t.

You cannot build a game where everyone can do that or the difference between you and others will be wiped, the fact of you being uber could be revealed in its idiocy. The game will break.

“Uber” designed games are the plague of the genre along the grief-PvP. They exploit a part of the playerbase to make the other part feel powerful and important. Boost the egos, nourish the catasses.

It’s exactly the unhealthy meaning of competition. Fighting against each other for an empty value.

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It’s not even about the opportunity.

The basic idea of being “uber” is that someone can, someone else cannot. They CANNOT offer the possibility to everyone, they need a way to prevent that. For now the path to produce this, in the RPGs, has been the *time*.

The time is the gameplay element that makes someone powerful and someone else not.

Other games, like FPS, don’t use the time but use your skills at moving the mouse, the power of your videocard and so on.

I consider both lame.