Quote Originally Posted by Pyree View Post
Right, difficulty is subjective, but it is not in any way correlated to time spent as a lot of people seem to believe.
I'm not one to agree with Answa, but he's right this time.

Now in any other type of game, I would agree that time spent at repetitive tasks is often a poor instrument to mete out difficulty. It's usually a factor that adds frustration, boredom, tedium to what should be a fun moment. (It's not always true, sometimes it can be even be enjoyably relaxing, but in general, it's usually not welcome).

However, MMOs have the problem of content that runs out fast. At some point, if you want rare, valuable treasures in the game that can't be breezed through by just anyone, you're going to have to use time as a way to keep it that way (rare, that is).

Time is the ultimate difficulty in any MMO. How much you have to waste--I mean--spend is the principle currency of any hardcore player.