Artificial Difficulty

[Deathgiver]

I've seen this term tossed out countless times over the last couple of years, and I'm curious to know what you think constitutes artificial difficulty, and what constitutes real difficulty. Things I've seen mentioned as artificial difficulty in other threads:

• DPS checks aka performing perfect rotations
• RNG
• Twitch Mechanics
• Scripted mechanics aka memorization
• Team jump rope aka finding 8 people who know the fight
• Content gates or lockouts

[Squrilruler]

It's a video game. It is all artificial.

[StrejdaTom]

I never took DPS checks and RNG as an artifical difficulty.
Ability to do a perfect rotation is part of your (mine) job and RNG is imo nice to learn react fast (if RNG doesn't mean stacking mechanics that are unbeatable even with exceptional performance).

[Risvertasashi]

I prefer content that is about playing your class very well over handling a bunch of arbitrary, counter-intuitive mechanics. For example, turn 4 when relevant (and most of first coil really), or A1S while it's new. I also kinda liked turn 5, ramuh ex, and...maybe lev ex, turn 13 a bit too-- because they aren't about twitch handling of mechanics down to the tenth of a second, but rather they require a lot of group coordination and handling things right (adaptability).

Examples that don't follow this would be turn 9. While I do enjoy the challenge, simply stacking a bunch of mechanics... yeah, it takes time to overcome, but I wouldn't call that sort of difficulty as fun. Difficult but kinda boring difficulty, if that makes sense*? Something like T9's elementals would have been fun if the fight was mechanically simpler, but required tanks, healers, and DPS to be exceptional at their classes.

Well, that's my preference and 2 gil, anyways.

Admittedly, fights with lots of mechanics preserve their difficulty better once obsolete, and a lot of players (here on the forums at least) will call any content that doesn't require twitch reactions easy.

*admittedly the visuals did make the fight pretty epic at first, but that gets old after a few hours wiping...

[Lone-wolfe-02]

Normally it tends to mean giving enemies more hp and do more damage instead of actually changing how fights work. HW has done this abit most of the enemies out in the world take longer to kill and do more damage but do nothing else different.

[Colt47]

The difficulty isn't related to the increased damage or hit points directly. Rather, artificial difficulty happens because they make the fights take longer or set a hard cap on how long the fight can last, all the while using mechanics that everyone has seen before in a similar ordering. It's artificial because you know you are correctly addressing mechanics, it's just numbers that prevent a victory.

[Hix]

Looking at the OP list, artificial difficulty is when you can't beat something and the fault obviously can't lie with you, so it must be because of artificial difficulty.

[Allyrion]

The difficulty isn't related to the increased damage or hit points directly. Rather, artificial difficulty happens because they make the fights take longer or set a hard cap on how long the fight can last, all the while using mechanics that everyone has seen before in a similar ordering. It's artificial because you know you are correctly addressing mechanics, it's just numbers that prevent a victory.

Performing up to a standard isn't that artificial unless it's just a hard gear check gating.
Faust, for example, is similar but people cleared him before getting any ESO gear.

If the difficulty goes beyond doing the fight mechanics correctly and pushing the Job mechanics to their limit, then it's artificial.
Though there's usually some great players that show the limit is past where you might think it is.

The only other difficulty in the list I would agree with is RNG.
But then with mostly scripted mechanics, that doesn't happen that much here.

But basically -

It's a video game. It is all artificial.

All of it is artificial. OP sounds like they're just listing types of difficulties they don't like.

[adn]

Actual artificial difficulty is basically when you jack up the health and damage an enemy does without actually making it any more difficult to fight, or possible to defeat using tactics/intelligent play. A good example of this is what they did to the HW overworld where every mob really isn't that different from the mobs you fight from 1-50, they just have massively inflated health pools.

The term "artificial difficulty" has been thrown around since Dark Souls became popular, and basically people just use it to mean "I don't like this mechanic" now.

[Colt47]

Performing up to a standard isn't that artificial unless it's just a hard gear check gating.
Faust, for example, is similar but people cleared him before getting any ESO gear.

If the difficulty goes beyond doing the fight mechanics correctly and pushing the Job mechanics to their limit, then it's artificial.
Though there's usually some great players that show the limit is past where you might think it is.

The only other difficulty in the list I would agree with is RNG.
But then with mostly scripted mechanics, that doesn't happen that much here.

But basically -


All of it is artificial. OP sounds like they're just listing types of difficulties they don't like.

Case in point, all of it is artificial, it's just when people say something feels artificial they really mean that it feels unfair, cheap, or only difficult in a specific way to waste time. Anything that is a heavy "damage" check can be a time waster so a lot of people put that as being artificial difficulty, for example.

For myself, things feel artificial when the mechanics are brain dead simple and the only thing the group is struggling with is running numbers. That is why I hate enrage timers, instant kill after a certain amount of time, etc. If a group takes longer to kill something they shouldn't get punished for it. The point is to learn the pattern and survive it.