Originally posted by Lanfea

 i totally agree and want to add that success and the satisfaction to get something done was really hard to get in the pre-wow-time (before 2005). no arrows which lead your way to the location in where you can attend a quest, no circle nor a cross on the minimap that points to the mission objective .... a player had to read the quest-log to get a hint and then went out to search for it. quests with more than 100 (look at eq I or II) different steps that kept players busy for weeks. since world of warcraft and their easy-to-play formula every high budget mmorpg tasted like fast food. it might satisfy your hunger for a short period of time, but you eat something without flavor and flavor you need if you want to enjoy it.

I do remember that as well, When I played Meridian 59 I had a rather undetailed paper map I got in the box just, in Lineage I had a really small one I found on the net.

But that doesnt really work anymore since people will find that info on the net today. In fact I tried not to in EQ2 but far too often were there not enough clues in the quests and in some cases were what I were looking for in another zone even, in the old days you could spend days on a single quest at times.

I think GW2 is on the right way instead. Get rid of static quests all together (including GW2s hearts) and let stuff happen as we walk in the world instead, based on location, time, weather and similar things instead. GW2 is not using that too full effect but seeing bandits torch a village and run in to help is really an awesome thing and any quest with the same point feels a lot lamer. If you go full out and have the right difficulty I think we can get a whole new level of MMO experience.

Because mobs standing still and waiting for you to kill them have always sucked and is the one thing that made MMO gameworlds feel really boring already from the start.

Originally posted by ozmono

I wonder if people look at MMOs at a time when they enjoyed them better and start attributing the inevitable decline of interest with them on things like difficulty. Or in other words are people just wearing nostalgia glasses or is game difficulty really so much worse nowdays and as detrimental to current MMOs as some would have you believe?

No I don't feel it has anything to do with older MMO's being harder to play. Obviously in a sense yes they where actually harder to play but mainly due to the complex nature of this genre when it was just starting, people became overwelmed with the possibilities this genre offered the combat and the none combat player. There were so many options yet you needed to find most of it mainly by becoming very active ingame with it's community as the players were your guide.

Today...the game guides you, the genre became far more limited and much more focus towards a full combat oriented game. Everything you need to know about the game can be found everywhere on the internet. So in a way yes this genre has become very easy.

It's a large part of the problem. And I wouldn't say its just because modern MMOs lack challenge or chance for failure. I'd say its more that modern MMOs treat you like you have a brain disability.

That, and MMOs aren't social anymore.

Or massively multiplayer.

Originally posted by furidiam

There are no more real mmo's now. All this new stuff is catering to the short attention span customers. Look at the success of games that are out on the smart phone/face book. These new games are chasing WOW and these social games looking at the profits.

Games used to be made by gamers for gamers. Now it is corporations going after gamers wallets. This is what made games now a days what they are.

Originally posted by xDayx

Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.

let me give you an example...

Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot  so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers. 

Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.

Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.

Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B.  A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to. 

Harder= no 

More knowledge required= yes

Yep and we all done it without the need of a voice communication tool, because we all knew what we was doing.

When I was a kid, side-scrolling games were really hard. I kept playing them though, and I got used to the general control schemes that went along with the genre. Same goes for FPS and fighting games - once I started learning the general schema to all of them, it just became an issue of learning what was particular to each game. The learning curve isn't as steep when you aren't learning everything from the start.

I don't raid anymore, but I'm sure difficult raid encounters are still developed for games. However, when experienced raiders who are familiar with basic boss mechanics and gameplay control go into them, there are only so many things that can be done differently. People improve along with the genre. I can now jump into any WASD/mouse/numerical key based MMO and shortly obtain a basic understanding of how to participate in the game, and I know it's the same for many gamers.

Now that games have been able to reduce or remove some of the artificial difficulties that were originally introduced due to technical restraints, the weight lies in the developers to create systems of difficulty that are more of choice - basically, they have to decide how high the punishment for failure should be. Too high and people won't play it. Go the opposite direction, and the same probably occurs. Finding that middle ground will still leave a lot of people on either end of the spectrum feeling the game is too easy or too hard.

Very few have been "hard" but a lot of games have been labour intensive. Its not hard if it only requires time. Anyone can have time. If it requires skill, its hard, and not everyone has skill. Additionally, harsh death penalty does not increase difficulty - the skill bar. It is merely a punishment and doesn't add to the challenge imo.

The lamest game imaginable would be grindy with harsh death penalties.

Originally posted by Rimmersman

Originally posted by furidiam

There are no more real mmo's now. All this new stuff is catering to the short attention span customers. Look at the success of games that are out on the smart phone/face book. These new games are chasing WOW and these social games looking at the profits.

Games used to be made by gamers for gamers. Now it is corporations going after gamers wallets. This is what made games now a days what they are.

 

There are a couple of mmo since WOW that are not hand holding and the old one are still here, if you choose to play these new types of MMO then you only have yourself to blame.

Uh, there's been ONE AAA MMO since WoW came out that was challenging/not a WoW clone.

And no, those old games aren't there anymore, or we'd be playing them.

Originally posted by ozmono

I wonder if people look at MMOs at a time when they enjoyed them better and start attributing the inevitable decline of interest with them on things like difficulty. Or in other words are people just wearing nostalgia glasses or is game difficulty really so much worse nowdays and as detrimental to current MMOs as some would have you believe?

I'll tell you about my experiences in DAoC when I first started playing it in 2002.

1. Even leveled mobs could kill you if you didn't use your skills wisely. A more secure/guaranteed kill would be a mob 1 con (the color of the mob) lower than you. Fights with even leveled mobs would also take a couple minutes, leaving you endurance drained at the end of the battle. You'd have to rest to regain that endurance for a couple minutes before you could fight another mob. We called this downtime, and grouped with others to minimize downtime and tackle mobs several levels higher than us for the best xp. 

In todays MMORPG's, I can tackle mobs several levels higher than me quite easily without any downtime afterwards. The tactics to take down mobs haven't gotten any harder or easier, since the tactics required were always easy. The harder part of knowing how to fight came in groups, and the older games had far more classes to learn in addition to your own, so you can maximize your skills to the benefit of the group. You have less classes to learn in todays games. For example, in DAoC you had over 40 classes you could be, all with 3 different ways they could be built. In todays games you only have a handful, with all classes becoming homeginized.

2. Death penalty. In DAoC, if you died your equipment took damage and you incurred an experience debt. You also took a hit to your stats, which you could cure by visiting a healer. You had to work off the experience debt, which grew with each death before you started gaining xp towards your next level. While this death penalty seems severe to todays standards, it was considered very mild compared to EQ and UO.

3. Getting the best gear was done through crafters. There were special drops in the world, but you almost always got the best gear from crafters. They even enchanted the gear for you, and then spellcrafted it to add stats/effects to them. Glowing, enchanted weapons were extremely rare, unlike in todays games.

4. Getting to max level took a dedicated person a few months of daily grinding to achieve, and that's without trying out alts or standing around socializing. So naturally, it took me a few years before I got my first lvl 50. The journey to max level was fun though, because I was always grouped and socializing. 

5. PvP back then was both easier and harder than todays games. It was harder in the sense that it was balanced around having a balanced group. People were good at working together as a group, without voice communication, because they did it every day while leveling. You got to know everyones class just as good as your own, so you worked well together without having to be told what to do. People knew who to target first, how to assist, and etc. However, combat was slower, which allowed you to use your mouse comfortably to click the next ability you wanted to use. In todays PvP, you have so many situational abilities, people don't work together at all, and classes aren't that balanced for 1v1, plus the combat is so fast that it's hard to win fights without vastly outskilling or outgearing your opponents.

6. Raids were rather unimportant in DAoC and mechanically were easy to do. Just tank and spank 100+ man raids. Far easier than todays raids, which has many different mechanics, and where if even 1 person messes up, it can wipe to group.

So in summary, the only things that got harder as the genre grew in age is PvP, because it is so fast paced now, and raids, because there's so many mechanics and is also the endgame. 

Todays role playing guide v1.13

Follow zerg,press 1,2 /emote "spit" 3,4, (RP) look my mount guys ,i bought it from cash shop,press, 1,2,3.

Originally posted by xDayx

Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.

let me give you an example...

Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot  so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers. 

Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.

Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.

Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B.  A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to. 

Harder= no 

More knowledge required= yes

I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one. 

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Rimmersman

Originally posted by furidiam

There are no more real mmo's now. All this new stuff is catering to the short attention span customers. Look at the success of games that are out on the smart phone/face book. These new games are chasing WOW and these social games looking at the profits.

Games used to be made by gamers for gamers. Now it is corporations going after gamers wallets. This is what made games now a days what they are.

 

There are a couple of mmo since WOW that are not hand holding and the old one are still here, if you choose to play these new types of MMO then you only have yourself to blame.

Uh, there's been ONE AAA MMO since WoW came out that was challenging/not a WoW clone.

And no, those old games aren't there anymore, or we'd be playing them.

Really, so EQ isn't here no more and Ryzom and EVE,DAOC and what is a wow clone?

There has never been a WOW clone, do you know the meaning of the word clone?

Ah, you mean a MMO that has quests and level progression, if that's the case then you need to stop playing MMO because they all have some sort of progression. Whether it's levelling skills or levelling to, gain skills or questing or levelling crafting they all have it.

Time for you to stop playing MMOs.

And what AAA MMO do you think is a challenging.

Originally posted by nate1980

Originally posted by xDayx

Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.

let me give you an example...

Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot  so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers. 

Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.

Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.

Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B.  A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to. 

Harder= no 

More knowledge required= yes

I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one. 

This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.

Unfourtunately when MMORPGs started catering to mass market is when they became easy and casual. That is because the majority in the mass market are lazy low achievers who wants everything on a platter. So the only way to make a hard MMO is to not cater to mass market which means convincing the bean counters, suits and other scum that they will be catering to fewer people, and that is hard.

Originally posted by Rimmersman

Originally posted by nate1980

Originally posted by xDayx

Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.

let me give you an example...

Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot  so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers. 

Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.

Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.

Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B.  A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to. 

Harder= no 

More knowledge required= yes

I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one. 

This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.

I don't know about EQ, but DAoC has changed since WoW became popular. It now has quests the same way WoW does, and you don't need to group to level anymore. Plus, you can level from 1-50 in a matter of days, instead of years.

Originally posted by Rimmersman

Originally posted by nate1980

Originally posted by xDayx

Mmo's of old had more "depth" in my opinion, thus what seemed like being 'harder' wasn't harder. It just required more knowledge in the depth of the game than what today's mmo's do.

let me give you an example...

Lets say I'm a level 50 Bard in EQ1 and I wanted to go into the openworld dungeon Howling Stones. Aside from knowing your class and the fact that you needed certain instruments already (that weren't given to you from doing a quest that got put in front of you), and you know that your brass instrument skill is maxed(because you stayed logged all day in Firiona Vie playing your clarinet just to get your skill up). You are at the entrance and you know from trial and error that you have to wait for the named to circle around so you can twist levitate and invisibility and run just at the right time through one of the 3 holes in the ground and float down to a non-lethal spot  so you can start picking off the mobs one at a time just to get to the outer chambers. 

Today's mmo developers would never create something that detailed again because they assume people don't want to focus on all that and want to teleport people right into instances now. Heck bards don't even use instruments or percussion skill ratings any longer. Developers also think people dont like death penalties or corpse runs any longer.

Of course the people who started with WoW or after will disagree and the people who started with UO, EQ1, or AC will know what I'm talking about. So no they werent harder because of some difiiculty setting. The were harder because they assumed you needed a lot of depth of knowledge of many aspects,, your class, the area, the mob types, immunities, safe areas, zone lines, ex. Nowadays you are teleported in and if you have your spells on your hot bar or roll fast enuf your good to go. And even if you die today it's no big deal, a couple silver and your back to where you died.

Death stung back then. So you didn't die much. You communicated together. You had a plan before the pull, if it started to go south you had a plan B.  A group would stay or 'camp' a room if they felt comfortable there rather than pushing it further because further they almost lost it. You studied maps of dungeons and mobs and drops, and trap door locations(yes death pits) before you even went into a little 4-5 person dungeon because you had to. 

Harder= no 

More knowledge required= yes

I totally forgot about resistances. In daoc you had different kinds of dmg, such as slashing, thrusting, and crushing, then different kinds of elemental dmg. Mobs were resistant to certain kinds of dmg, which made them harder to take down depending on what weapons you used. The game required you to assign points to a certain type of weapon, such as slashing weapons, so you were specialized, unlike jack of all trade games of today. Even the armor players wore affected the damage they received, and not in the way people are used to now. The armor you wore was resistant to 1 of the dmg types, neutral to 1, and vulnerable to one. 

This was the case with EQ but guess what EQ is still here and just had an expansion, no one is stopping the OP from playing or anyone else for that matter.

New EQ1 been changed to EZmode as well. No more corpse retrievals and you can get companions, kind of like swtor. Lol.

Originally posted by Roxtarr
For many supposedly 'hardcore vets' hard = an insane amount of time.  Also, by 'hard' they actually meant confusing (easy, but not obvious).  The only thing that was 'hard' about some of the classic mmo's was coping with having no friends, job or life outside of the game.

Well put.