The Quinquennial (or sometimes more often)

Various thoughts on online gaming, often pulled from articles I've written for other sources.

Author: Quizzical

It is common for players to complain that this or that aspect of a game is too hard, and that it should be made easier. It is likewise common for players to complain that something in the game is too easy. Often, the two groups of players are even talking about exactly the same portion of the game. Still, it is often not the case that the former type of player wants an easy game and the latter wants a hard game.

Most people want to "win", in whatever sense is applicable. People bring different sets of skills to a game, so different people will win depending on what winning is based on. People thus want winning to be based on whatever it needs to be based on to ensure that they personally win as best as is possible. Among the different things that some want winning to be based on:

*having a lot of free time
*being willing to schedule your life around a game
*knowing how to create and run bots
*having good social/organizational skills
*being able to devise a smart combat strategy
*having fast reflexes
*spending a lot of real-life money
*everyone (or no one) wins, without regard to any attribute in particular

Because different people want winning to be based on different things, there are different games made to cater to different types of players. A company has to pick which type(s) of players it will cater to, and stick with it, over the objections of other types of players who want winning to be based on something else. Try to make winning based on everything and you end up with a muddled mess of a game that satisfies no one.

When a player asks for something in particular to be made easier, what he’s picked up on is that winning is based on something that will make him lose. As such, he wants that criterion for winning to be removed, and replaced by something that will give him a better chance of winning.

Conversely, when a player asks for something in particular to be made harder, it means it’s something that will make him more likely to win. He’s not so much asking that the game be made unambiguously harder, as merely that winning depend more on that particular area--and thus, less on others, so that other components of winning be made relatively easier.

Thus, people don’t want everything to be easy. They only want the portions that they’re not good at to be easy. They want the components that they are good at to be hard, so that they can still do whatever it is that is necessary, but a lot of other people can’t.