Patch 2.2, Accessibility, Difficulty Levels, and Throwing Away Content

[Susanoh]

What about not having power creep or gated content makes the game good?

As I've mentioned, it means more relevant content that people can and actually may want to participate in. It means the experience that players were able to have with content from months or years ago are still just as good as the day they were introduced.

As for the lack of gear gating, it means players can focus on enjoying content and getting alternative rewards to compliment their current sets rather than watching their current equipment become garbage and needing new equipment to be considered acceptable to participate.

I don't think I'm alone if feeling that the power creep and gated content do far more harm than good.

Well of course if one game has more content it will be better but you're just falling back into this 'good games are better' argument again. If you have a horizontal progression game with absolutely nothing to lock people out of content, how will that game last? By simply having 10 times as much content as competitors? You must see how this line of reasoning is a little unrealistic.

I think it'd be nice if they strive for that too, however people play these games until they die, so I don't know that it's fair to point back and say "People are still playing this online so it must have had lasting power", when you've got people still playing Meridian 57 and things like that. I think the real trick for MMOs is to created a game for less than millions and millions of dollars and slowly grow content and playerbase along these lines. I don't know if a game like what you want can come out and appeal to a niche audience but also have huge AAA levels of content. I don't necessarily disagree with your intent or opinions but mostly your opinions on how they'd be logistically achieved.

Games with no significant power creep can have lasting content that has other restrictions in place to keep people from spamming content and getting everything in a week (see: FFXI). Games can also have no power creep at all and have content that people can do any time on demand, and still have people logging in doing it today (see: Guild Wars). Guild Wars, by the way, sold six million copies and has no power creep whatsoever and still had people doing stuff from the original launch game 7 years after release (possibly still does now), so I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm preaching for a small niche that no significant amount of players could ever get into. I'm not saying anything crazy here. Similar ideas to what I'm suggesting have already been done by other games, and they didn't crash and burn because players didn't get to bump their iLVLs up every six months to a year.