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No I didn't I just don't see the point of even trying to make whatever point you were trying to make. How is it interesting that what was once labled normal is now labeled hard when typically that's hard enough for most? Secondly, some people have been playing video games and games since the 70s  (for video games at least). Don't you think that what is easy for you might not be easy for someone new to the hobby?

I just have to point out,  the change in difficulty has largely been because of Publisher's desire to make games "Accessible" by stripping out anything remotely difficult or complex,  not because people actually have difficulty with it.  

Publishers believe that if they just make a game simple enough,  everyone will go out and buy it.  We can look at two case studies...

Mass Effect - If you play the series,  you'll see a steadily decreasing degree of complexity in leveling,  inventory,  healing,  etc.  In the second installment,  EA had virtually everything remotely complex ripped out.  By the third game,  many quests don't actually have you doing anything other than pressing a button to complete it,  no actual gameplay.  If you miss picking up a quest item on one of the very few quests where you actually have to look for something,  you can just buy it later.

The Elder Scrolls - Each game removes more skills,  more attributes,  more complexity.  At this point,  it's really treading dangerously close to Progress Quest with a GUI,  especially with their level scaling.  Don't even get me started on the Magic Compass they use these days either.

 Publishers believe that complexity and challenge prevent everyone from buying their games,  because Publishers don't understand that gamers don't like every type of game.  You can see this trend readily displayed over the last ten years.  It really has far less to do with what Gamers want,  and far more to do with what Publishers think will sell more units.

In fact,  I feel very comfortable in saying that if one were to do a graph,  one would find a strong correlation with rising Publisher dominance and falling complexity and challenge over the past ten years.

Feb 16, 2013 -- 8:28PM, malcapricornis wrote:

A good example is Everquest and Ultima Online vs WoW. EQ and UO had a ton of penalties for messing up, WoW does not. WoW has more #'s then probably it's top 5 competitors combined.  One part of the ascendancy was even though there was a lot of difficulty in WoW, WoW was not overly punitive. See, designers want their games to be played, they want the people playing them to enjoy the game, they want the people playing them to progress so they can offer more content. This is not the quarter gobbling days of the 1980s where it was profitable to make the gaming experience short. 

Just to play devils advocate here...

Everquest and Ultima Online had a ton of penalties for messing up,  and a ton of ways they forced you to mess up,  in order to increase the time sink and keep you playing (Not too dissimiliar from pumping in quarters).  The whole point of MMORPG design is to keep people on a treadmill,  and one of the easiest ways to do that is to include some highly undesirable penalty for dieing,  and a timesink to negate it.

You can find those things throughout the genre.  Asheron's Call made you recover your body,  and gave you a temporary penalty to skills.  Star Wars Galaxies made you sit at a starport for 5 minutes every time you wanted to switch planets to "Wait for a shuttle".

MMORPG design is a highly optimized series of timesinks intended to drag out the amount of time you play.  It's a necessary part of the design,  because without it,  people won't stay subscribed.  Even WoW has carefully designed timesinks.


     

I'm still gob smacked by the death due to jumping a horse over a log.   It sounds like one of those stories of random death that comes up a lot - like our group and "death by icebox".  (Refrigerator).  Of course, that story mostly comes up when people are arguing why never to play Cthulhu as a campaign again.   

But, if we want this thread to be anything more than arguing whether games are easier or not, we should talk about what would make the op happier.  If we doubled monster and environmental damage (using bigger dice and not more, when available), that'd make the game more swingy.   Is that going to make the op happy, or is difficulty something different than swingy?

Feb 17, 2013 -- 4:13AM, MeCorva wrote:

I'm still gob smacked by the death due to jumping a horse over a log. It sounds like one of those stories of random death that comes up a lot - like our group and "death by icebox". (Refrigerator). Of course, that story mostly comes up when people are arguing why never to play Cthulhu as a campaign again. But, if we want this thread to be anything more than arguing whether games are easier or not, we should talk about what would make the op happier. If we doubled monster and environmental damage (using bigger dice and not more, when available), that'd make the game more swingy. Is that going to make the op happy, or is difficulty something different than swingy?

Thanks for helping get back on topic

I'm not in favor of being super swingy, but I think I'd personally prefer that over walking out of most encounters with barely a scratch. Maybe for the fighters in my group, taking away or greatly reducing the MDD usage for Parry would help. Some have suggested making MDD only once per round instead of once for an attack and once again for a reaction using Parry. And increasing, but not necessarily doubling, monster HP or damage could help.