That may be true for them–that’s not a generalizable result nor does it approach “holy grail” status. If they love everything about WoW but want some specific things to be tuned harder, then that’s nothing more but exactly what they want. Difficulty being the Holy Grail for WoW would be more like a situation where making WoW extremely difficult would not only solve their problems with the game, but also everyone else’s problems with the game. People who hate WoW now wouldn’t start playing, but they would start trying to date WoW players, or at least sleep with them in a dirty gaming cafe to the folkish strains of Midnight Oil. Playing WoW wouldn’t become a career, but Jewish rabbis would agree that playing WoW is acceptable on the Sabbath, as long as you didn’t work on your professions. You would definitely start playing WoW again though, and you’d reroll priest or paladin, without knowing why.

–Sounds unlikely that some random stranger on the internet is going to convince them to leave WoW. btw. if they love everything about it except one thing, though. which makes your argument not only unclear and widely misunderstood, but also rather futile.

This is like the time when I wrote a blog post that said “Everyone who wants to play a non-forced-PvP mmo should just go play farmville”, caused a huge ruckus, then when pressed on it said “oh, I was just thinking about this one guy I argued with on the bus yesterday who said Eve Online needs more fluffly pink ponies, obtainable by /dance parties in Incarna.” I ride on literally the exact same bus route as Epic Bearded Man in lovely Oakland-town, so you definitely know that was a fictitious tale. But otherwise , it’s the same as yours. Just be careful about telling people to leave your game in the future, you should know that the Noisy Rogue copyrighted that line, and he’s a bit unstable.

then I’d argue WoW already has done those. Players disliked the random encounters, because all it means is that you have to learn every random permutation ahead of time, then the raidleader yells over vent which one it is and every scrambles to the right position. If he means every encounter is truly completely random, then every encounter becomes the same, there’s no sense of progression/completion. You’d have a range of difficulty, the top 5% of encounters would be either skipped or Youtubed (which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid here, right), the other 95% would be faceroll. I can’t call that anything near intellectually challenging, so if that’s your definition then I’ll bow out of a useless semantical debate.

If you say that puzzles and the like are intellectually challenging, then I go back to my “intellectual difficulty is too easily attainable to be a holy grail” position, since puzzles that humans can’t reasonably solve are trivial to computer-generate.

The reason why I don’t agree that it is true, is that difficulty isn’t a reasonable holy grail candidate. It is incredibly easy to make an unbeatable mob/encounter/situation in an MMO. Or require unbearable length of grinding, etc. This situation is therefore both easily attainable and undesirable, rendering it doubly unsuitable for “the holy grail of XXXX” status. So unsuitable, that I doubt you know anyone who regards it as such. Do you?

If anyone remembers EverQuest 1 in its earlier days, much of the game’s difficulty revolved around its forced socialization model. If you had friends, the game wasn’t very difficult (when you died, you always got the best rez from your cleric friend(s); when you wanted a group, you had one; when you need a port, you got one; etc) but if you were a lone wolf type, it could be excruciatingly hard (and slow). But as the genre moved toward “casual” (EQ was considered a hardcore game for its time), soloability and self-sufficiency became the order of the day, eliminating the NEED to socialize. So on the one hand, you were forced to socialize in EQ in order to mitigate much of the game’s difficulty and now, things stand on the other end of the spectrum. I don’t think forced socialization will work anymore (Pandora’s Box) but incentivizing it heavily could work. It’ll be hard, given the proliferation of folks with multiple accounts (guilty as charged!) but it’s still possible. That adds a layer of difficulty, but with a social bent, which could work to form and solidify a game’s community. I know that EQ’s community was MUCH more tight knit “back in the day” (when there were A LOT more people playing btw) than it is today.

So 80 million people play Farmville, 12 (going on 5) million play WoW, 0.3 million play EVE and 0.02 million play Darkfall because they overwhelmingly appreciate how much more challenging Farmville is than Darkfall?

People say they want challenging games, healthy food, sophisticated moves, exercise, and politicians who avoid spin and negative ads. Woe be it to a mainstream business which provides people with what they say they want. IMO, the failure of Cataclysm is an example that what the forum heroes say they want and what the silent majority actually do want are quite different.