From Tobold’s blog on ‘hard’, my random rant on ‘hardness’
http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2010/01/rise-of-leet-king.html
www.mmocrunch.com/2010/01/14/risk/
Read some articles by several notable bloggers on the risk(or lack of) in MMOs, and the corresponding level of challenge.
cmagoun on mmocrunch suggests having the player lose a piece of equipment as the consequence of failing the encounter, but what i feel is an omission in the argument is that risk is not just about the consequences of actions, it’s also about probability of said action occurring. Something is risky if it has a small chance of success. This is why it seems that the challenge in pve encounters decay over time; even if you have read the guides, seen the how-tos, riding a bicycle for the first time is still challenging due to experiencing somethig new for the first time. The same thing can be said of your Type A instance run. But since instances seldom change, you will eventually know the ins and outs of the instance, and then the risk and corresponding challenge, is gone.
Back on topic, what players really risk, in all mmos, be it Darkfall or Wow, is time. Time spent getting back lost xp, time spent corpse running, time spent gathering materials to craft that Chair of sitting +1. All players ever lose in a failed risk assessment(be it a pvp gank, failed ambush, crafting flop (looking at you FFXi) or an ICC instance) is time. Given enough time, you can recover where you were previously and move on. Of course, the time at risk in Wow would be relatively less than the time in Darkfall for a similar encounter say world pvp, but to say nothing’s at risk would be false. The thing is, most people value their time differently, so what to you may be another corpse run, another player might feel that the corpse run’s the worst thing he’s had to experience all day(possibly because he’d rather be having fun rather than retrieve his corpse and waste his time)
In theme park games like Wow or Lotro, why not risk the eventual final reward instead of an existing item on a player character? So instead of having Ragnaros drop the Eye of Sulfaras, if you repeatedly wipe at the encounter, have Ragnaros drop the Obviously Fake and Battered Eye of Sulphur instead, and have the resulting crafted weapon to be less powerful than the true drop. True, the system is still based around time, however it encourages a group to perform well at the encounter instead of just trying continuously and hoping to get lucky. (obviously your number of attempts would be reset if you reset the dungeon and thus have to run the dungeon through again.) This should result in a less frustrating play session where you do not lose an item you’ve spent hours trying to get, creating an artificial sense of time debt in order to ‘recover’, yet it is a sort of challenge for the players to do as well as they can.
But then we return to the problem of creating the unpredictability in an encounter. Why not have bosses that are generated based on the party ? One could imagine having a novelty boss that needs to be hit with a simple attack by a specific class(eg a judgement by a paladin, or a dot by a warlock, only if they are in your party) to end a specific phase to stop the phase from repeating.
I just don’t think that increasing the penalties in a game makes it more challenging. Or harder even. It would make it more frustrating certainly, especially if you were in a pug. To put it in another perspective, let’s take Team Fortress 2 as an example. What is at risk here if you keep dying over and over? It varies from person to person, some would say their ego, their total fun in the game ruined. But ultimately the penalty is much less than even Wow. No durability loss, no loss of items, just 15 seconds in vanilla tf2 before you respawn. But can a TF2 game be challenging? Can it be hard?
Yes.
You have a game here where different types of skills come into play. You have your twitch skill, necessary for fast moving objects. You have to utilise your sense of tactics, of anticipating ambushes and charges dependent on the map. You have to exercise coordination and teamwork in order to take down opponents that are a rock to your scissors. And if you’re playing agains GOOD clan members, does it ever feel cheap? It does not to me, because whenever they gain an upper hand, it’s because they did one of the above better than I did, and it shows me how to improve.
I guess at the end of the day, what i feel is that harsh death penalties used to work. Whilst playing FFXI, gaining a level felt a huge achievement especially since when dying meant you lost experience, AND you can delevel when you die enough (probably explains why my Redmage is only level 35 ). But to me, having seen what I risk most in any mmo of my choosing is time, and that my time’s no longer as ‘free’ as it once was, that to me, factors into what my ideal of a ‘hard’ good game is.
