Comments on: How will we know if a MMO is too hard?

By: Veneretio

Veneretio — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:06:42 +0000

I agree that it’s impossible to balance content and what people have to realize is that WoW is always going to be balanced the exact same, but as players we’ll always be getting better and as such, eventually the game will seem “too easy”.

That said, I don’t agree that the heroics were too hard before as I felt they were equivalent to Karazhan at the time. If anything, I think what was really missed this time around was the heroic grind. There was no reason to do regular instances when I hit 80. I literally learned instances on heroic. To me that’s a broken model. I loved back in the day that I really had to struggle my way through heroics and that even once I had strong gear that I still had to try. I really miss most of all actually haven’t to CC stuff. The AOE spam-fests we deal with these days as tanks are so boring that whereas once I loved doing 5 mans whenever I could … now I could care less and never do them ever. It’s just boring. (tl;dr the bosses are fine, the trash is too easy in heroics)

By: Simon Jones who is blogless

Simon Jones who is blogless — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:46:42 +0000

Though something that struck me about some of the old raids when I was thinking about them recently, is how some of them, particuarly the pre-BC ones, were hard for ridiculous reasons rather than their being especially complicated fights. Things like farming resistence gear or bizarre raid make ups tended to put a crimp in things more than anything else. So it leads me to wonder what exactly does constitute ‘too hard’?

By: mordiceius

mordiceius — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:41:48 +0000

I think step one to designing good raids is to just forget about the top 3% of guilds when initially designing the content. The top 3% of guilds will spend 10 hours a day to chew through any content you give them and then they will always complain.

I like Ulduar. While it is a step up from Naxx, there is no boss in there that should take more than a day or two to learn.

That top 3% have Algalon and the hard modes which are no joke for the most part.

The current trend of Blizzard is about nerfing the standard fight while buffing the hard modes. I think this is a good direction.

By: boatorious

boatorious — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:56:49 +0000

You can’t tune an encounter to be the right difficulty for everyone. Hardcore guilds are too much better than casual guilds, and on top of that they raid four or five (or ten) times longer.

What Blizzard used to do (can’t comment on if they still do it, I haven’t been around) is make the raid dungeon quite hard at the beginning, and then gradually nerf it as time goes on.

This allows everyone to enjoy the content while still rewarding the best players with gear months and months before casual players.

Hardcore players always like the idea of gear only they can get, but in reality making such weapons is a huge waste of development time.

By: Gevlon

Gevlon — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:49:52 +0000

If no one can kill it for a month, it’s too hard. If more than 10-20% of the players kill it, it’s too easy. Between the two it’s OK.