Probably because most people don’t seek out pain in their gaming experience. If you do, fine, power to you… but in the end, it’s just a game, and for all you’ve gotten worked up and frothing over its competitive aspects, you’ve really accomplished nothing in life because of your efforts there.

I can understand being competitive, and wanting opportunities to show off and being rewarded for your efforts, but getting moralistic about it is kind of, um, pathetic? The developers have a fine balance to maintain between the competing forces that favor making content accessible or exclusive. If the outcome isn’t exactly as you like, then you’re free to find a more unforgiving game to play. This doesn’t mean that the playerbase has become pussified or whatever else, though… it means that Blizzard has learned from its many mistakes in pre-TBC endgame content: Consumable requirements, random loot, overly-easy introductory raids, PvE gear curve being much easier than PvP’s, keeping up with mudflation, the lack of casual endgame progression, etc. etc.

Personally, I do play games for both the challenge and the fun, and the best games are those where those two factors go hand in hand. I’m one of those people who pick the Hard difficulty level in games and at least try the Impossible one. However, there are limits. For example, I loathe FPS games were enemies three miles away can turn in a millisecond and plant a bullet into my brain with the flawless accuracy that only a computer can provide. Yes Xaero, I’m talking about you.

The problem is that something challenging for me might be impossible for someone else and trivial to others. Now.. if you factor in envy to that equation, it gets ugly. It’s not that people couldn’t get more out of the same game than you in the offline days, but online games make that difference obvious. It’s not out of sight and definitely not out of mind.

But personally, I like the idea of overtuning content and then gradually nerfing it, for MMOs at least where this is possible.

And there’s also a big difference between rewarding challenges and “challenges” which simply require a ton of grinding. If it makes you feel awesome because you can put in an hour or two for every raid night farming herbs or whatever, I guess that’s good, but challenging…? Not exactly.

I’ve been playing WoW since beta and I used to be extremely hardcore, raiding every night, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. Now, however, I work full-time and go to school, and I just don’t have time to do that anymore. I’ve become a casual player, and I have to admit it’s worked out nicely for me. I feel like I can play every now and then and get some things accomplished, and then take a break for real life or other games if I need to. If you could only get anywhere if you devoted almost every waking hour to the game, then I couldn’t play anymore, and I’d be disappointed. Also, in my opinion, WoW has always been on the easy side. There’s a difference between putting hours into a game in order to accomplish something and trying a level over and over again in order to beat it. The hard levels of Portal that open up after you beat the game are what I’d call “challenging”. Putting hours into a raid is just time consuming.

@Monique: I game for fun and for the escape from real life it provides, not necessarily for the challenge. I enjoy being challenged, yes, but most of the time I just want to sit down and escape into a game after a long day of work. So I don’t think all gamers are in it for the challenge. Take Final Fantasy, for example. Sure, the bosses could be tough, but I played for the story and the characters. I wanted to beat the bosses so I could find out what happened next. Video games can be a medium for storytelling, just like books or movies.

I hope this comment doesn’t come off as mean or hateful. I’m just putting my opinion out there. I still think this is a great article! Definitely something to discuss.

Alyssa, I quit WoW cause of the exact reason you stated. No time really. But I was disappointed that if I played one hour a day, I could get where five hours a day used to. They adjusted the bar a little too much.

For me, as an entertainment source, I tend not to care a lot if having a hard game means 1 std dev of player never experience the game. I really don’t. I’d rather play with competent people than scrubs who want welfare.

I’ve thought about working on building an 3D MUD catering to skilled PvE players; I have the requisite technical ablity, but my art skills are Teh Lame in 3D.

If you don’t like it you have the option to stop paying the $15 a month and find something new with more “challenge”. But until then we’re still paying the same amount of money and expecting the same things with different time to give towards it.

People play games to have fun. For some gamers, that’s about being challenged: the sense of satisfaction & accomplishment which comes from beating a tough game. But most gamers these days - whether you call them “mainstream” or “casual” or what have you - aren’t interested in hard games. Self-professed hardcore gamers have a lot of nicknames for these other gamers - most not terribly flattering - but the simple truth is we don’t drive the industry quite the way we once did. Given the enormous cost of development, trying to chase after the relatively tiny market of hardcore MMORPG players can be a losing strategy: witness Vanguard.

WoW has managed to hit on a magic formula which keeps 10 million people playing it. For better or for worse, though, they’ve watered down the level of challenge to keep it accessible to the most players. That’s good business sense, but it does leave the gamers hungry for new challenges a bit unsatisfied. Ideally, I suppose, Blizzard could come up with custom content to appease hardcore gamers - extra-tough raids and the like - but invariably people will complain about not being able to finish it because it’s too haaaard.

If it makes you feel any better, though, online FPSs are still awash with ultra-competitive ruthless foul-mouthed gamers. So it’s not like there aren’t any good challenges left. :-/

I myself am an arena person. Not for any other reason than that fact that I like PVP. It’s an aspect of the game that I think has now come into it’s own.

I don’t want to detract from the hardcore raiders that are out there. I’d definitely like to see some of the PVE content too. What I don’t want to do is deal with all the drama that comes with some of the raiding guilds I have seen.

That being said, your post struck me more as someone mourning because nobody is striving for excellence anymore. I see this happening irl as well. WoW makes up for it with an xp buff and other various niceties. It’s no different than a real life school lowering it’s standards so not everyone feels left out when the big prices for scholastics are passed out. I say this also in response to what Jennifer wrote.

To quote Syndrome. “Once everyone is super, no one will be.”