Who Thought Adding Difficulty Levels To Instanced Quests Was A Good Idea?

[Shurrikhan]

Well, I mean, they have a point.

The purpose of gatekeeping is to act like a gate - you allow some people through, and keep others out. That's the current problem with this game - it's not filtering anybody out.

Because an MMO, a game where people pay monthly subscriptions, wants to be as inclusive as possible.

There's a point though where we're being inclusive solely by removing the, for lack of a better word, content within or available to pieces of "content". It's a bit like trying to make Calculus II more inclusive by letting Basic Math students join at will (ultimately to the removal of all subjects past, say, Geometry), rather than making math instruction more inclusive by finding more ways to accelerate and gratify their learning so the average player can experience and enjoy as many subjects as possible, rather than each subject needing to be experienced by as many people as possible regardless of how much they've learned as of yet.

There's a point where it's far more necessary to stretch what a player will be capable of than to squish content to what any and all players can do now.

But, to put this discussion back in the actual context: It truly doesn't matter much what players do with their solo instances for now because even if they were far harder they'd still be poor learning tools due to how different they are from group content. (They're not completely different, by any stretch, but different enough that it's just not worth worrying so much about at present.)

My, my, my aren't you a cute little l33t player here, lolz. I'm sure you showed it all of them with your oh-so-harsh words.

No, I'm sure she used proper condescending baby babble. Can't go treating other players like adults, now, can we?

[linay]

But, to put this discussion back in the actual context: It truly doesn't matter much what players do with their solo instances for now because even if they were far harder they'd still be poor learning tools due to how different they are from group content. (They're not completely different, by any stretch, but different enough that it's just not worth worrying so much about at present.)

The specific mechanics may differ, but the basic principles behind the mechanics are the same: where to stand, when and on whom to focus attacks, when to defend someone, stack with allies, spread from allies, intercept damage, making sure allies remain alive, etc.

But everyone has a hair up their ass that this is going to change players and degrade the quality of players who pass on from that point, blah blah blah. They would already do that once the Echo kicked in. So this changes nothing except said player doesn't have to wipe as much so they might get to the same point sooner.

Plus it's kind of moot for some classes. How I handle a solo instance has jack to do with how I handle healing in a group, for example.

It's about the attitude you foster in players. Instead of people rising up to the challenge, you now have the expectation for the challenge going down to player preference. Something as easy as solo content really doesn't need it. Even in group content, not everything has an echo, and usually it only applies some time after the release of the content.

I'm not losing sleep over this or anything like that, and what's done is done, but I still have my opinion over it. And as long as things like this exist in the game, I will always disagree with people (for example) wanting dungeons to be harder/more complex (even if I'm ok with it), because that's not what this game is about (which is fine by me).