104646-difficulty-vs-time-consumption

== Content ==
			
(My apologies in advance for the long post)I've been enjoying WS and the uniqueness of its design since beta. I'm sure I'm not alone in that, but I wanted to mention it becase I have been noticing a trend in the way this game's design is gradually changing over time and it's beginning to frustrate me, simply because of how my outlook on this game is becoming less and less positive as a result.
 
I'm just going to come out and say this: veteran dungeons and raids in this game are difficult, and everything else is not.
 
Of course I'm speaking solely about PVE content, as I think most of us can agree that PVP content difficulty is controlled almost strictly by the skill of your team and your opponents. The development team can make pvp more or less "fun" by how the game and BG mechanics are designed, but difficulty is pretty much out of their hands.
 
Most of this game is not difficult. What it is, however, is time consuming. Leveling from 1 - 50 is time consuming. Farming elder gems is time consuming. Rep grinds and dailies are time consuming. World bosses are time consuming. Crafting is time consuming. None of these things are hard. Heck, even the attunement process, while it contains a couple pieces that are actually difficult, is mostly just time consuming.
 
Now don't get me wrong, I understand that the game needs to be a welcoming environment to a variety of players ranging from the hardcore to the casual, and I wouldn't be frustrated by the time consuming / casual content if I didn't notice the design choices not only slipping into content that is supposed to be difficult, but also taking up an overly significant portion of the game's development time. Not only that, but the "carrot on a stick" is creeping into these time consuming activities as well, such as some pre-raid best in slot rewards for the Blighthaven rep grind. But hey, I've made my general point enough here, so let me go into some specific examples of what I'm talking about.World Bosses - Hardly bosses at all
 
Has anyone ever failed on a world boss, or is the hardest part of a world boss simply waiting for it to spawn? I haven't fought them all, but the ones I have fought you can pretty much avoid all damage quite easily, and even the bosses' auto attacks are extremly weak and mitigated by a single tank and healer. Are there any DPS checks on these guys? Any abilities that will likely wipe the party if not interrupted? Look, I understand world bosses are hard to properly tune because the team fighting them could be anywhere between 5 people and 100 people, but please put something in these fights that make them more than just a dps grind.
 
Look at scorchwing, specifically. The first time you went to scorchwing, you probably had no idea what to do, and nearly all the players those first few kills had no idea what to do, and he dropped with ease anyway. There was no learning curve. It was just walk in, get your quest done, walk out. Development decided he should be harder, and wanted to bring him in line with the other world bosses, so what did they do? They tripled his max HP.Does making a fight take longer make it harder? No, it does not. Mindlessly wailing on scorchwing for 5 minutes is functionally the same as mindlessly wailing on him for 15 minutes. How about upping his damage so it's actually a strain on the tank, and he might actually need more than one healer? How about making scorchwing's aoe's faster? How about giving him something to interrupt or something that's hard to avoid? Better yet, how about redesigning his egg phase so it's actually a soft enrage? You could make the adds have a manageable amount of HP, but have them stick around after scorchwing pops out of the egg. If they're not dead by the next egg phase, guess what? Now you have 2 add waves up at once!But no, scorchwing got his HP tripled, because apparently the new design paradigm is longer = harder.Rep Grinds - quite possibly the antithesis of actual difficultyThe hardest thing about rep grinds and dailies is staying awake. I'm not using hyperbole here, I literally want to take a nap any time I venture to do dailies. So why not just skip them, you ask? Well, I do. I haven't done dailies in Crimson Badlands since I hit max dominion rep, and I only did the quests in... whatever the other zone is called on the very first day it was available. The problem is the rep grind for the dominion is not skippable. This is an example of time consuming casual content mixing in with "hardcore" content. Why should players who want to do difficult raids be forced to grind rep in order to do so? And yeah, I understand you can get dominion rep by doing veteran runs, but you cannot progress on your attunement until the rep grind is done first. Whatever, that's old news, but I'm bringing it up as an example of my point. I didn't really care that much about this at first.However, then development released 2 more daily zones, one of which has gear rewards for beloved that's BiS - the proverbial carrot on a stick. Furthermore, word is that development is scheduled to release yet another daily zone come next patch.How many new dungeons and raids have been added since release? How many new battlegrounds after the original two? But we're already looking at three additional daily zones only 2 or 3 months after release. This is an example of time consuming content taking up the development team's effort instead of new difficult content, or even fixing the many bugs that still persist throughout the game.Veteran adventures / dungeons - what's hard and what isn't
 
So as I mentioned before, veteran dungeons are hard. Veteran adventures are not. You know what was mildly difficult in adventures? Getting gold so you could have a shot at epic rewards. However, development changed that too! Now instead of having to challenge ourselves and get gold in order to get epic loot - meh! You can just get silver or bronze and get a decent shot at the same loot anyway. Even better, gold no longer has a guarenteed chance to drop epic loot anyway. The result is where before if you messed up and couldn't get gold, you'd reset and try again. Now... just grind it out! There was a greater reward for being good at the game before - you could get your epics significantly faster by getting gold. Now even getting gold takes much longer to get epics than it did before, and if you're too bad to get gold, who cares? You can just grind out the gear on silver. This is another example of what could and should be difficult content getting the nerf bat to make it more casual but at the same time more time-consuming.
 
Speaking of veteran dungeons, you know what makes them hard? Perfecting the boss fights so you don't wipe in order to beat the timer. Know what takes away from that difficulty? Attempting to cheese the timer by skipping half the dungeon content. Yes, the dungeon timer actively encourages players to skip as much content as possible. I understand development is trying to fix this by putting in optionals that involve killing things and by moving packs of mobs around so that they are blocking points in the terrain where players commonly climb walls to skip content. You know what would just completely solve the problem all on its own? Make silver dependent upon number of wipes or deaths in a dungeon, not on a timer. Afraid that players would still attempt to skip content with such a system? Lower the number of trash pulls and then either put them in unavoidable places, or program them to run to the boss when he is aggroed to prevent people from skipping them. You can make the dungeon take the same amount of time as it does now, but instead of hitting that time marker by skipping content, we hit that time marker by clearing content efficiently.I want to give credit where it is due, so thank you for putting a rez point closer to mordechai redmoon. Spending 5 minutes running back to him after every wipe was asinine. This was a good change.Leveling 1 - 50 - baby's first grind
 
This is my final point, and probably a minor one in most people's minds since most of us have long since hit 50, but I have three major issues with the leveling process in this game. First of all, you've got a serious problem of "middle man" in your questing design. I'll explain this by comparing it to dungons.
 
So in dungeons, you walk into a new area, some NPC says at the top of the screen "Light of the Lumenai!" or something along those lines, then tells you "I want you to kill 20 dudes and destroy 6 forges." Sure enough, you look to the right of your screeen, and your quest log displays the new information, meaning you can now move forward and complete the quest.
 
Outside of dungeons, you walk into a new area, see a cave to explore or a new group of enemies to fight, but you say to yourself "I'd better not go that way until I find the relevent quest NPC," and before you can explore that new area, you must first search out any exclaimation marks on your map. Then, you can continue. Otherwise, you run the very real risk of killing things for 15 minutes, only to find the quest after the fact so now you have to turn around and kill the exact same mobs you were just killing.
 
Eliminate the middle man. You've already done this to some extent with the communicator. Go all the way. Guild Wars 2 did this and it was wonderful. It streamlines the questing process. There's absolutely no reason not to do this.
 
Second of all, there's nothing difficult about scavenger hunts - they're only time consuming, particularly when your game has a system that marks everything on your map and gives you arrows pointing to where to go. When you have a quest that says "go find this dude" or "go pick up 10 of these things", the quest essentially says "walk in the direction of an arrow and then click on a thing." This isn't hard. It teaches players nothing about how to play their class or how to efficiently kill mobs.Lastly, this game has a ton of "filler levels" - levels in which no new skills, abilities, or major talents are unlocked. Over half of the levels in this game present nothing new outside of an AMP point (and some of the earlier ones don't even give that). Max level in this game could easily be 25. Every time I level up, I want to be given something new to learn or do, and I would argue that that is good game design. Every time I level up and I don't get a new ability to possibly put into my rotation, or a new aspect of the game to enjoy, it just feels like I'm killing time grinding to a level that does give me something. If you want it to take the same amount of time to get to max level, fine, make the levels take longer, but make fewer of them so as to eliminate these filler levels. Leveling is part of any MMO, it's not going anywhere, and it's how people learn to play their class (or it should be, anyhow). But you can make it feel like an enjoyable part of the game rather than an ordeal we must endure in order to arrive at the enjoyable part of the game.So that's it. These are my concerns with the game right now, and I'm hoping that by voicing these concerns, someone from development will read them and get an idea of where I'm coming from here. I understand that casual and time consuming content are part of the MMO genre, but to summarize, I'm concerned that time-consuming, grinding design is replacing difficult and interesting design. This game had some great, difficult and interesting content when it first launched, and it still does - but I'm noticing it diminish in favor of grinds. I enjoy this game, and more importantly I want to keep enjoying this game.Thanks to anyone who read this far, particularly anyone from development.	
----
			The thread that complained that normal mobs are too difficult for the op top watch television, or the thread that complained about the difficulty of red mobs near quest mobs, or the 200 other threads I have read asking for content to be nerfed, disagree with you.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
The thread that complained that normal mobs are too difficult for the op top watch television, or the thread that complained about the difficulty of red mobs near quest mobs, or the 200 other threads I have read asking for content to be nerfed, disagree with you.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Is that really how we want the game designed though? Cater to the people that want to watch TV while they play?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Is that really how we want the game designed though? 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
As an avid smoke-while-you-game player, I can say with all sincerity, that sometimes not being able to take both hands of the keyboard sucks.
 
 :lol:
----
			
It can be looked at this way
 
Walking isn't hard right?  Or even Jogging.  You just put one feet in front of the other and even a 5 year old can do it.
 
Walking or Jogging 23 miles is a lot more difficult - but it really is just a repetition of very simple acts for a long period of time.
 
Is jogging a marathon difficult or challenging?  Vast majority of people would think it is.   Because most people do not have the physical and/or mental fortitude for such a task - even though the individual steps in the process is incredibly simple.
 
Repetition/Duration can make simple things difficult.  I don't think it should be considered in black and white terms that "because it is an easy thing, required to be done for a long time, it means it is not difficult or challenging".
 
What it is not, is that it is not fun for 99.9% (IMHO) of people.  
 
A fine line need to be reached with enough carrot to justify the stick.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
It can be looked at this way
 
Walking isn't hard right?  Or even Jogging.  You just put one feet in front of the other and even a 5 year old can do it.
 
Walking or Jogging 23 miles is a lot more difficult - but it really is just a repetition of very simple acts for a long period of time.
 
Is jogging a marathon difficult or challenging?  Vast majority of people would think it is.   Because most people do not have the physical and/or mental fortitude for such a task - even though the individual steps in the process is incredibly simple.
 
Repetition/Duration can make simple things difficult.  I don't think it should be considered in black and white terms that "because it is an easy thing, required to be done for a long time, it means it is not difficult or challenging".
 
What it is not, is that it is not fun for 99.9% (IMHO) of people.  
 
A fine line need to be reached with enough carrot to justify the stick.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I would point out a flaw in your analogy, and that is that running is a physically taxing activity whereas playing a computer game is not. If I run 23 miles, that's a huge endurance test. Playing a game online should not be an endurance test, though we seem to agree on that point.
 
The fun in running a distance race comes from overcoming your own physical limitations. Much of the fun from a videogame comes from learning to overcome complex obstacles. We're talking about a physical challenge versus a mental one.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
There is little difference between mental and physical repetition.
 
The ability to focus applies to both physical and mental tasks.
 
The reward for breaking previous limitations is not all that different between physical accomplishment vs mental ones as well.
 
Like Meditation, everyone can close their eyes and try to think of nothing or focus on very specific things - like trying to keep your fingers as lightly touched as possible.
 
But doing that for 5 hours straight is pretty difficult and definitely challenging.  But it is not physical exhausting (since you don't have to be sitting).
 
Getting a perfect run in Super Mario's cannon level is not physical demanding, but it takes long hours of practice and memorization.  But the feeling of success when you pull it off is every bit as real as finishing a physically challenge task.
----
			
How does the op not already have a broken like button?!?
 
You basically summed up many of the problems I noticed with the game, but couldn't bring myself to articulate and post. I really do hope carbine reads this and takes it to heart.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
How does the op not already have a broken like button?!?
 
You basically summed up many of the problems I noticed with the game, but couldn't bring myself to articulate and post. I really do hope carbine reads this and takes it to heart.
----
			
I actually said I couldn't bring myself to PLAY. There's a difference between that and giving up on the game completely. I still have hope that the devs can actualize the potential of the game, and threads such as this one are invaluable to that end.
 
Now, back to the topic at hand.
 
It surprises me that anyone would look at the repetative daily content being released and say to themselves how much they look forward to it. While there's something to be said for turning your brain off and going onto autopilot, these activities don't appear to be in line with a game that is, by all claims, meant to be about difficult and challenging content.
 
An argument can be made for what challenging actually means. Continuing the above analogy, it seems fairly clear to me that most players expected a difficult obstacle course like the ninja warrior challenge on TV, not a straight line marathon.	
----