I imagined to write a short article about the difficulty in a MMOG since it’s what everyone is talking about after the last patch. Everyone is commenting that the game is now harder, perhaps because of bugs, perhaps because of the design. Some players like this change because they think WoW was way too easy till now. Quoting “El Gallo” from one of the boards I follow:

I will stick to my guns on the “game was too easy” issue (play a warrior as my main btw, and no I was not talking about just 1-on-1 though if you pay any attention you rarely get more than 2 on you except for a few spots and that is still easy to handle). Soloing needed to be a little harder (not more tedius, just harder so you have to think a bit at least once in a while).

Like I said, I wasn’t calling people crybabies in WoW because they don’t want timesinks, I don’t want them either. The problem is that they want a game where it is literally impossible to ever lose no matter how shitty you play, which I don’t want. Godmode isn’t fun.

Other players, instead, are commenting that the game now is too hard and, consequently, not fun as before, in particular when compared with the earlier phases. There’s also another small part of player, more experienced with MMOGs, commenting that this is a good change because the game should aim to incentivate the group play, obviously at the expense of who just wants to solo.

Now I’ll focus in particular on the first two types of comment because the third is too complex and involves more reasoning about the structure of the design. And noone wants to read me babble for a whole page about it.

So, my point is quite simple: the “difficulty” in a MMOGs cannot exist (at least within this model). Why? Because these games are designed after the “Risk vs. Reward” model. This means that there is no “set” environment for the designers to balance the content and its difficulty. The advancement isn’t difficulty-based but repetition-based. That’s why we often talk about treadmills and grind. When WoW was “easy” you simply fought higher levels mobs, often aggroing more than one and still winning. Now that the game is harder nothing will change from the difficulty point of view. You’ll simply have to aim at lower level mobs, one at time.

Eno, what is really important for the game is the “pace” of the levelling. The only difficulty, in fact, is about how fast you are able to advance. How fast you can advance while playing solo and how fast you can advance with a well balanced group. It’s a content-based difficulty where the more the game has to offer, the more the treadmill can be long. The designers of this game should tweak and balance its content by considering two and only two elements:

+ The “pace” of the game
+ The difficulty of the quests

The “pace” of the game is about the compromise between the fun and the sensation of a “grind”. Even if WoW is quest-based often there are insane collect quests that are just masks for the most obvious grind-play. So the difficulty, the experience coming from monsters and the experience coming for quests should be balanced considering the “pace”.

Then they need to consider the difficulty of the quests. They need to check if the game has enough quests to offer for who plays solo and, integrating with the point above, check the difficulty, the reward in experience and the “pace” to determine if the game is well balanced or feels as a grind.

The whole discussion is about the content. What makes EQ (or DAoC) and WoW different is the quest system. In other games you grind, in WoW you follow a story. So, is this “story” well balanced both for groups and for solo players?

My comment (I joined in Beta 2) is that WoW really feels less fun to play.

1- It was more fun to play because the quests had a well-balanced difficulty. They gave way more experience than they do now to the point that now camping and grinding, as in every other mmorpg, is becoming more rewarding than questing, disrupting the MAIN strength of this game. Plus, I find myself involved with more and more quests that I cannot solo and I spend *too much time* searching something I can do, to discover, at the end, that it wasn’t worth the pain because I’m receiving gimped experience and gimped loot.

2- It was more fun considering the combat system. An easier game allowed the players to aim “high” in the Risk vs Reward model. This meant that you were able to aggro and fight more than one monster and still expect to win without dying or fleeing. This resulted in a more fun gameplay where the content was accessible. Killing an high level monster or chaining low level monsters allowed the experience to flow more naturally, excluding again the sensation of grind. Moreover the animation system worked. It was in synch, not perfectly but at least way better than how it is now. WoW’s combat is already too chaotic and having all the animations, the splash damage and the sounds out of synch is making it even more messy and, consequently, less fun to play.

P.S.
Please make the game harder. Read: Not boring
I link this message because this player shares my point of view. He tries to suggest ways to really deal with the difficulty, trying to suggest a different model aimed to utilize the potential of this genre. His design ideas could be weak or silly, surely out the scope of this game, in particular at this point of the beta. But he still tries to explain that in a time-based environment an harder difficulty is simply equal to more grind:

Right now it seems blizzards goal has been to try to make the game harder, by reducing the power of players. This was not needed IMO. Player power was fine before this patch, and continuing to decrease (if they decide to) will bring this game down to the ground with the rest of the boring grind fests.