please stop make the game easier.

[RiyahArp]

Do you have a single fact to back that up? What game has had an increase in difficulty that resulted in a quantifiable player loss?

While I can't argue that games die because they become too easy (in spite of WoW's decline in player base as homogenization set in as well as raid finder being added) most predominantly due to lack of interest in finding correlation, I can certainly argue that adding additional difficulties has had positive impacts. Terraria, as an example, added 'expert' difficulty to it's game and it was received in a positive light. The game still sits at overwhelmingly positive (whether this is a result of the game being good or not doesn't matter because a harder difficulty was added and therefore we know it did not have a negative impact on the game).

For MMOs, there hasn't been one that started easy and went to hard that I know of. The recent ones that generally have been hard from the start, even if they target that niche, really suffer and fail to keep a large playerbase.

Two I can think of are Wildstar and Darkfall. Wildstar had pretty punishing pve raids, and that was one of the biggest factors in losing player interest. Darkfall was full loot pvp, but even then the time sink and relative difficulty of getting to a good level of play doomed it. I think Aion and in the past Lineage shed a lot of playerbase through punishing difficulty too. Terraria isn't really an MMO and its difficulty is optional and tailored to players who might want to use it when they are bored with the rest of the game. Its not a global change from the start.

I agree with Kamatsu in that not everyone will improve to the same level. I mean, if anything this game shows that they can't; or we'd never had stormblood needing to massively simplify everything.