The causals though don’t like it, because easymode is seen as second class, and no one likes to be second class. In an offline game no one cares if you can only beat guitar hero on medium, but online the peer pressure will make casuals get squawky and want measures so they are seen as players.

It’s really hard, because both sides are right in this.

People advertise that they’re looking for players to do dungeons of a certain difficulty. As a bonus, you need to finish Normal to unlock Hard, and then finish hard to unlock elite. So there are always groups looking for the different tiers.

One thing I did notice is that quest rewards for finishing the dungeons DO NOT vary based on the difficulty you completed them on… you do, however, accrue more favor (faction, kinda) which is much sought after.

To play devil’s advocate, a drawback could be that as the game (re-)matures, players will complete all the lower difficulty settings and only want to run “elite” mode. (Then again, maybe not – DDO has more alting than I’ve seen in any game on the market.)

Boiled down to the basics, it is supposed to adapt the game to your skill set. If you are killing enemies too easily, it ramps up the HP and AI of the baddies until you are getting slaughtered, then in ramps it back down. Its a never ending fine tuning process. Even if you select easy, and you play exceptionally well, you will find yourself being forced into the “Hard” mode of the game. If you select hard, you may be let back down to easy if you cant hack it.

I don’t think that way lends itself to MMO’s very well. It works great on the solo level, but the minute you are in a group, how does the AI adjust? It would have to account for not only the skill set of each player, but the gearset, and class representation. I think that is too many variables to run smoothly.

I think WoW does some hardmodes just right – let the players (and in somecases, gearset) decide.

FL is a good example – select whatever towers you want to leave up, that dictates the hardmodes.

XT is another good example – if you want to activate the hardmode, you have to prove you have the chops to do it – kill the heart. You cant kill the heart – you aren’t ready for hardmode.

Crafting, on the other hand, would be interesting. WoW has an (imo) overly simplistic crafting system, and it could do with some sprucing up. I proposed a way to spruce up and give some flavor (no pun intended) to the food crafting system on my blog. Im fleshing out ways to make changes to other crafting systems as well.

DDO has a pretty good system: for every dungeon you can choose to play it on one of four difficulty levels: Solo, Normal, Hard, and Elite. This lets players experience the story (and earn rewards/experience) and then optionally ramp up the difficulty to whatever level they personally want to challenge.