Quote Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams View Post
While I admittedly haven't had the time to read each post in this thread, I just wanted to chime in and say that I'm not sure that making MSQ content easier in order to not exclude older players is a good thing. Why would someone in their late teens or early 20s want to play a game that was also designed to accommodate for the reaction times of someone significantly older? I do think that having a set target demographic in terms of age is a good thing, especially in terms of difficulty level.

Difficulty is also indeed capable of being measured objectively by way of damage output and attack speed/frequency. There should be a good balance of both in order to make sure that content is fun and engaging. Again, it is probably to the game's benefit to tailor these aspects around a young adult demographic while providing the necessary accessibility tools in order to account for disabled players within that age range (text size, color options, and so on).
You should look into the actual demographic for MMOs. It's very short sighted to assume they need to cater to teens. The younger they are, the less likely they are to play and stick around. Even in the early days, it wasn't limited to teens. EQ1 likely has the oldest population with people playing into their 70s.

When I talk about reaction time, I'm talking more about ping, not age. Don't doubt that anyone older can still have decent reaction time if they've been engaging with computers for years.