Having been trapped in the Hell that we call flood recovery SLASH redecorating over here in noble Caledonia, I have had precious little time to play anything this past week other than 'World of Pry the cat free from the slowly drying gloss paint Craft', so forgive me is this week's column is a little unfocused. Still, as I was slopping on the third coat of paint on one particularly irritating wall, something MMO-related managed to penetrate the paint fume-induced fog in my brain, and I began to wonder about how the ease and difficulty of accomplishing certain tasks in MMOS – how hard are they really, and should they be easier of harder than they are?
Lots of single player games offer you a choice in difficulty rating and there are different ways of varying the difficulty of a game; usually by altering one or more factors – amount and/or toughness of enemies, availability of supplies (health packs, ammo, etc.), perhaps even shortening the length of levels within the game. Of course 'Easy' in one game can have absolutely no correlation to the same mode in other games – Ken Levine famously instructed the team developing Bioshock to make Easy mode beatable by his grandmother, but we've all played games where the Easy mode was clearly designed by a crack team of Sadomasochists, e.g. almost any Japanese vertically-scrolling shmup.
When you break it down, most of the tasks required of us in the average modern-day MMO are time consuming but not difficult, and require little more than a few button presses. How do you measure difficulty in an MMO? By the amount of time it requires to accomplish a task? The danger that failure will result in a loss of the materials used in the process? If your task is a crafting one, do you measure difficulty by the chance that failure will result in the loss of raw materials? Does the long trudge across the globe to collect the herbs you need to skill up Alchemy a few more points denote difficulty, or just time-wasting?
In World of Warcraft, the process of saving up 5000 gold to buy your Epic flying mount is familiar to many. I'm currently doing it for the third time, and it's no less fun this time around, but could you really class it as difficult, or hard?
I wouldn't have said so, no; it's more irritating than anything else. In theory, the process is simple – spend less, earn more, repeat until the desired result is achieved. While it can be a long process, even accounting for all the daily quests available now, there's nothing particularly difficult about it. There's no game mechanic there to steal your cash away if you're not careful or you don't play 'the right way'; you're not going to hand over your gold and see the NPC run off with it because you've been scammed. Assuming you can avoid the temptation of the Auction House, you'll get there eventually.
We live in a different world now that we did when Everquest and Ultima Online were released, and there's no way that a developer would include some of the gut-wrenching game mechanics employed in the past. XP loss on death has been done away with, and corpse runs are an inconvenience now as opposed to the torture they once were; but I wonder if some things should always be a proper challenge. Epic rewards are available to anyone who chooses to grind reputation with the many factions in WoW, but even then those grinds are just a time-sink – spend enough time doing the bare minimum of effort each day, and you'll get there eventually; there's little challenge there, and it's not exactly difficult. I understand the reasoning behind this, of course – companies don't want to frighten away players by making things too difficult, but there's a fine line between too difficult and difficult enough.
Is this the kind of thing you want to see more of in games? Are you happy with easier challenges, or would you like to see things made harder? I believe that rewards should scale with effort, but at what point does 'challenging' become 'unreasonable', and 'difficult' become 'unfair'?
