In most single player games, I start difficulty settings in the "middle" or one click towards "harder". Then as the game goes on, I usually have to increase the difficulty to feel I'm having as much fun as when the game started. Why is this? Why do I almost always perceive the game is getting unfairly easier the more I play it? (Those poor computer enemies!)

I suspect it is a combination of:

• Learning the game and personally achieving mastery of the workings of the system
• Developers aiming to create a sense of progression and achievement in games by actually making you the player, more powerful

But, let's pause first for some examples...

In Fallout3, the game starts out top-notch. Unsure of what to expect, I started at the medium difficulty. I have fond memories of scraping barrels and debris for just a few rounds of ammunition and health boosts so I could survive. Oh the sinking feeling in my stomach as my V.A.T.S. sequence would come to a close while seeing I hadn't done CRAP to that creature running towards me at full speed!

In Witcher2, having beat Witcher1, but without any knowledge of mechanics of Witcher2, I jumped into the intro where it tests your skill level. I was promptly defeated and notified I should play at the easiest setting. Pausing for just a moment I thought, "that's nice" as I started a new game on hard.

In SWTOR, as a Sith Inquisitor in the early levels, I was rocking and rolling, mostly going through what I thought was a very easy game when I stumbled upon a quest which nearly killed me. I flawlessly pulled every trick out of the book, and survived with < 10 health. Stellar, I thought! A game with the occasional bumps in difficulty to keep it interesting.

Blizzard definitely has their wits about them in World of Warcraft with the "heroic" concept, but there's room for improvement. I hear since I left a few years ago, they added heroic modes to even the old, pre-80 dungeons with what? An ACHIEVEMENT stamp. Nice. See the whole risk + reward thing and how it works? See the willingness of people to take on additional challenges as they master your game and grow in power and skill, if only for a simple achievement?

What do you guys think?

Is it time for MMO developers to include more tiers of difficulty and challenge for all types of players and reward them appropriately? No matter what type of "casual" or "hardcore" player they are?

I wish they would add a real hardcore mode call perma-death. That is about as challenging as it gets.

Lack of difficulty settings definitely plagues most non-CoX MMORPGs.

It even hurts Diablo.  Let's not kid ourselves about WOW: it labels things as difficulty settings (Heroic mode) but really they're just stretching out the content.

All these games would benefit from letting players experience the challenge they want immediately instead of obscuring it behind an arbitrary timesink of mindnumbing boredom.

Originally posted by Lauski

In most single player games, I start difficulty settings in the "middle" or one click towards "harder". Then as the game goes on, I usually have to increase the difficulty to feel I'm having as much fun as when the game started. Why is this? Why do I almost always perceive the game is getting unfairly easier the more I play it? (Those poor computer enemies!)

 

I suspect it is a combination of:

• Learning the game and personally achieving mastery of the workings of the system
• Developers aiming to create a sense of progression and achievement in games by actually making you the player, more powerful

 

But is this fun to everyone? Not me. It's a combination that, for me, lowers the excitement level of playing the game and takes a bit away from my desire to complete it. Simply pushing buttons with nothing on the line, can become boring to me.

 

 

I don't consider myself morbid, but to put it bluntly, I like to die.

 

When a game surprises me so much, puts challenges in place, or hides objects of power in such a way that if I've not prepared enough by obtaining them prior to a fight, that I simply get my BUTT handed to me... I laugh. I get excited in seeing that I must grow in one of the two bullets I mentioned above before I can progress.

 

Doesn't everyone like this? You go away, come back more powerful, and see if what you've learned is enough to straddle the hurdle and try again? To me, not having something that you desire creates both a stronger desire to have it, and a greater sense of pride once you get it. I normally shy away from dictionary definitions, but this one got me:

 

 

Achievement:

1. The act of accomplishing or finishing.
2. Something accomplished successfully, especially by means of exertion, skill, practice, or perseverance.

 

The failure of a game developer to provide options for both 1 & 2 in ANY game = a mistake in my book. Their only consideration should be in WHAT they provide, reward-wise, for 2 over 1... And the balance decisions, therein. This is especially important in MMO's. 

But, let's pause first for some examples...

 

 

In Fallout3, the game starts out top-notch. Unsure of what to expect, I started at the medium difficulty. I have fond memories of scraping barrels and debris for just a few rounds of ammunition and health boosts so I could survive. Oh the sinking feeling in my stomach as my V.A.T.S. sequence would come to a close while seeing I hadn't done CRAP to that creature running towards me at full speed!

 

But, as the game wore on, I learned the tricks, got more gear and that fun and excitement largely went away. I began to find it odd that the Capital Wasteland, so seemingly devoid of everything else, was a wonderful place to dig up piles and piles of 18 different types of ammo. At some point I realized, it was time to turn the difficulty setting up.

 

 

 

In Witcher2, having beat Witcher1, but without any knowledge of mechanics of Witcher2, I jumped into the intro where it tests your skill level. I was promptly defeated and notified I should play at the easiest setting. Pausing for just a moment I thought, "that's nice" as I started a new game on hard.

And so I died. And died. But I learned and learned. I loved making use of all the systems the game provided in potions, traps, signs and sword fighting just to survive. Act 1's wrap-up came after dying I'd guess, no less than 20 times over the course of two nights of trying to beat its boss. Largely I admit, since I refused to look at spoilers and didn't know what you "need to do" to finish that fight... Plus it was tricky to always get to the end of the fight to even try stuff! But man, was that an awesome experience finally killing it!

 

Half way through Act 2, I started "getting that feeling" that I needed more of a challenge when I realized I couldn't turn difficulty to "Dark" without restarting. And so after beating the game, a second play-through with the Enhanced Edition on Dark was added to the "To-Do List".

 

 

In SWTOR, as a Sith Inquisitor in the early levels, I was rocking and rolling, mostly going through what I thought was a very easy game when I stumbled upon a quest which nearly killed me. I flawlessly pulled every trick out of the book, and survived with < 10 health. Stellar, I thought! A game with the occasional bumps in difficulty to keep it interesting.

 

I don't know if it was the fact that I began skipping every other planet with my MAIN/ALT, so that I could maintain some semblance of challenge... or the night I decided to play with a friend who was 4 levels under me and we decimated a 4-man quest at his level, doing nothing more than just banging on my keyboard... but I realized that this game wasn't for me.  What a disappointment. Oh difficulty setting, wherefore art thou?

 

 

Blizzard definitely has their wits about them in World of Warcraft with the "heroic" concept, but there's room for improvement. I hear since I left a few years ago, they added heroic modes to even the old, pre-80 dungeons with what? An ACHIEVEMENT stamp. Nice. See the whole risk + reward thing and how it works? See the willingness of people to take on additional challenges as they master your game and grow in power and skill, if only for a simple achievement?

 

 

 

 

That all being said, I think of myself as a casual player.

 

That's right. Casual. On average, with the amount of time I am able to play a game, week-to-week, it takes me over a month to get through a single player game. I came from an era of gaming when the distinction between casual and hardcore, only indicated if you had the ability to play almost every night. 

 

 

So first off, let's be careful and start using better terms such as "challenge seekers" and "people who play with limited game time" to avoid confusion.

 

 

And in closing...

I submit any game must find smart ways to present good challenges to the player, and in an MMO where native difficulty levels don't exist, smart ways of offering varying tiers of challenges, with balanced, fair distinctions for each one. Not everyone wants the same level of difficulty and not everyone wants to commit the same play time, but EVERYONE likes to have their actions rewarded, for the way they like to play the game.

 

 

Having challenges important to you are what keep you coming back. If you log off at night and realize you were defeated in a certain fight, or need something to continue the story, you'll be thinking about what you need to do it... to succeed or progress next time. This visualizing of tomorrow's plan of attack, is the excitement that brings you back each day.

 

 

What do you guys think?

Is it time for MMO developers to include more tiers of difficulty and challenge for all types of players and reward them appropriately? No matter what type of "casual" or "hardcore" player they are?

Excellent post...I appreciate the time & thought that went into it.

I also agree on most points.  I think many MMORPGs have fallen into the "Gear Grind" trap and try to create difficulty through simple gear checks, instead of having the encounter require the player to display a level of mastery over their toon.

By gear check, I mean they seek to limit the number of people able to complete an encounter by giving the enemy enough HP & MP that would require the players fighting to have a certian level of damage & defense modifiers that can only be found in a certian tier of gear.  The difficulty comes in having to aquire the gear...not effectively playing their toon.

Another pit fall is the willingness of the developers to allow more players to blaze through content, in the name of attracting the highest number of generic gamers that may not neccessarily fall under that "challenge seeker" or "Traditional MMORPG" gamer.  Folks that wouldn't typicall play MMOs because they dont' have enough time now have a venue to put the blinders on for 30-50 minutes and feel like they made a reasonable amount of progression.  (In a traditional MMORPG, it would take you that long to get the group together and at location lol)

Otherwise, great post.  Keep it up!

What's just as bad as the lack of difficulty setting is that many MMOs are designed to prevent or even penalize a player for trying to do content beyond their reach. The level disparity pretty much regulates a lot of that, but some mobs in MMOs even have certain overwhelming attacks that get triggered if you are fighting it too long specifically to prevent a low level player from even trying to whittle away at more challenging mobs or content. 

Sandbox-style MMOs pretty much let you throttle risk and reward through a variety of mechanicsms. For example, Puzzle Pirates allows you to choose your opponents in both PvE and PVP. If you want to push yourself to the limit, there are plentyof ways to do it. EVE Online has various degrees of difficulty in its mobs (called 'rats' in EVE) so a player that wants to casually obliterate waves of rats can do so through most missions and a player that wants to test how well he can hold up in a nightmare environment can take on some of the more lethal mobs in wormhole space. UO also allows you to pick your difficulty level, as well. It's much easier to do when content isn't in such wildly disparate bands.

I agree with everything you said there.

I'm a similar kind of player, myself. Casual, but it doesn't mean I want everything to be stupidly easy. I liked the low level WoW dungeons just when Cata rolled around, but then they nerfed them. :(

This one would not be all that difficult to implement.

There is absolutely no reason why servers have to all be independant.  Some of the FTP games manage to run their games with channels instead of servers.  There is not a lot of reason why you couldnt run a AAA game the same way.

Done that way, resources would be optimally used (you wouldnt have servers with very low populations and ones with very high populations and queues) and you could set them up (even on the fly) for different purposes.

IE you could do something like this:

Servers 1-5 Easy -- Raid Monsters are Group Monsters, Group Monsters are Solo monsters, Solo monsters are easy.  Drop rates and exp are lower.  Some drops do not happen.

Servers 6-10 Normal -- (all things normal)

Servers 11-15 Hard -- Monsters have more hit points and hit harder -- higher drop rates, somewhat higher exp -- Some raid drops can happen on group mobs, and group drops on solo mobs.

Servers 16-18 Nightmare -- Raid Monsters get some new tricks and are harder, Group monsters take on raid monster characteristics, Solo monsters are pretty much Group monsters. 

Server 19-20 Even Nastier.

Server 21-23 PvP Easy World

Server 24-25 PvP Normal World

Server 26 PVP Hard World

Server 27 PVP Nightmare World

Server 28 PVP Nastier World

If you are looking for a game coming up soon that has perma-death and is at least AA, I would say look at Wizardry Online. 

That is going to be the kind of "get lost in a maze, die, and reroll" kind of game.

I think anyone getting over level 25 is going to be an achievement.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/681/Wizardry-Online.html

Sometimes when I'm playing  a game with a good story I'd prefer to just skip to the story scenes and I certainly don't want to mess around several times trying to make it to the story scenes.

That said, I still agree with you that a game must present a challange to be fun. A good example of killing a game because it poses no challange is the effect cheats have on a game. If I cheat in a game I almost always lose interest straight away.

I also think the scaling difficulty in Guild Wars 2 is somehow relevant here and deserves a mention so here is a mention.

---

Originally posted by Lauski
What do you guys think?

Is it time for MMO developers to include more tiers of difficulty and challenge for all types of players and reward them appropriately? No matter what type of "casual" or "hardcore" player they are?

---

I think difficulty of a game is the number one hurdle a game needs to pass. Everyone defines "difficult" differently. The only way around it is too let everyone set their own levels. City of Heroes has handled this nicely with 5(?) personal difficulty settings. When a full group of heroes gather, many times they set the difficulty to max. Then if you go solo, you can reset it to whatever you desire.

It would be interesting to see how the mentioned server difficulty division would work out. I wonder where the population would fall :)

I do agree with you on the single player game aspect, where something kicks your hiney and you back up and possibly tackle it again later. There is a sense of character growth when I do that.

Originally posted by Lauski
@Archwind: while perma death doesn't run me off by default, it does for a lot of people. Personally, I find perma loss more appealing in broad concept, as it is an easy way to achieve your desire to "have it on the line" while playing, yet still not have all be lost if you are defeated.

However, even though related in some ways, you are speaking towards systems independent from the main topic of this thread.

A game could have perma death and be very easy to play, a game could not and be seriously challenging to succeed at. And regardless of one's opinion of perma death, either would be a mistake were they to not include variety in their difficulty, intelligently incorporated into the game, as per my original post.

Well nothing would stop you from having a permadeath version of the different servers that I listed and giving them added rewards...

Well other than the fact that people would cry like babies when they decided they wanted the extra benefits and died.

Of course one could always have something between perma-death and normal.  I mean if you lost 5 levels and all the items that you were carrying that is a really harsh penalty.  It falls short of perma-death of course but it would certainly have meaning even to the hardest of the hardcore.

Its easy to set your own difficulty in mmorpgs.  If you like it easy, do all the quests and over level for the content.  If you want it hard, skip some stuff do the basics and keep the mobs you fight well above your level.

Originally posted by Axehilt

Lack of difficulty settings definitely plagues most non-CoX MMORPGs.

It even hurts Diablo.  Let's not kid ourselves about WOW: it labels things as difficulty settings (Heroic mode) but really they're just stretching out the content.

All these games would benefit from letting players experience the challenge they want immediately instead of obscuring it behind an arbitrary timesink of mindnumbing boredom.

I agree. The idea that I have to "unlock" the more harder modes by playing through the easier ones first is idiotic. Mass Effect and many ARPGs following Diablo's example come to mind.

It really is about stretching the content.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

What's just as bad as the lack of difficulty setting is that many MMOs are designed to prevent or even penalize a player for trying to do content beyond their reach. The level disparity pretty much regulates a lot of that, but some mobs in MMOs even have certain overwhelming attacks that get triggered if you are fighting it too long specifically to prevent a low level player from even trying to whittle away at more challenging mobs or content. 

Sandbox-style MMOs pretty much let you throttle risk and reward through a variety of mechanicsms. For example, Puzzle Pirates allows you to choose your opponents in both PvE and PVP. If you want to push yourself to the limit, there are plentyof ways to do it. EVE Online has various degrees of difficulty in its mobs (called 'rats' in EVE) so a player that wants to casually obliterate waves of rats can do so through most missions and a player that wants to test how well he can hold up in a nightmare environment can take on some of the more lethal mobs in wormhole space. UO also allows you to pick your difficulty level, as well. It's much easier to do when content isn't in such wildly disparate bands.

The fact that you can throw more money into play whenever you encounter hard content eats away from the difficulty in Eve. Its the same as engaging hard content with a lower level character in a more convential MMORPG.

Eve's content is also open so if something is hard, you can always throw more people at the problem. This is an issue with all open content and dungeons.

The difficulty is voluntary. That is what it boils down to. The content is not hard if you don't want it to be.

Originally posted by Crunchy221

Its easy to set your own difficulty in mmorpgs.  If you like it easy, do all the quests and over level for the content.  If you want it hard, skip some stuff do the basics and keep the mobs you fight well above your level.

 

Essentially.  But that offends some people to their core, for some reason.

Vets always find MMOs too easy, because MMOs are designed so Newbies can succeed too.  But the newbie phase in this sort of game is really short, while the sneer-at-newbies chest-thumping phase lasts forever.