MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Packetdancer]

It's not true, as has been shown in the past in other games which have tried this. Other games have ramped up the difficulty, with that mindset that by doing so it'll motivate players to get better.... and all they ended up doing was chasing players away.

Or my own beloved and much-missed WildStar.

The early levels were fairly accessible. However, WildStar did not have a smooth difficulty curve; in fact, somewhere around... I wanna say level 40? ...it turned into more of a difficulty cliff. More than a few people I knew slammed into that cliff at high speed; a few decided to climb it, but others bounced off, looked at the cliff, and went "Nope" and vanished back to other games.

I mean, don't get me wrong... I loved WildStar, but I'm under no illusions that the difficulty curve was the only mistake the game made. But it was definitely a mistake, and one that I definitely don't think helped player retention. Since I personally knew like... 8 people who hit that level range and noped out, saying they played games to relax and didn't find that sudden cliff relaxing. Or enjoyable.

[VelKallor]

I mean, don't get me wrong... I loved WildStar, but I'm under no illusions that the difficulty curve was the only mistake the game made. But it was definitely a mistake, and one that I definitely don't think helped player retention. Since I personally knew like... 8 people who hit that level range and noped out, saying they played games to relax and didn't find that sudden cliff relaxing. Or enjoyable.

When 0.05% of your playerbase sees raid content, thats a red flag something is seriously wrong.

[Kamatsu]

When 0.05% of your playerbase sees raid content, thats a red flag something is seriously wrong.

Hmm, here's an interesting tidbit for you: WoW, the "raiding MMO"... as at Burning Crusade only had 6% of it's active player base ever set foot into a raid. Not only that, only 4% cleared the 1st raid, only 1% made it to the penultimate raid, and less than 0.5% cleared it.

This is according to WoW dev's way back when they were working on WotLK and talking about why they were making sweeping changes to the raiding scene - such as moving the penultimate vanilla raid to the base tier in LK, making entry into raiding easier, working on a LFR tool... it was because despite WoW being knowing as a "Raid or die" game... very few of it's casual playerbase wanted anything at all to do with the raids. Why? Too hard... if/when casual players hit the raiding wallblock, they said "nope" and didn't finish them.

Thankfully for WoW there was still plenty of other things for casual players to do, which is why they stuck around there. That and many, many players never even got that far in the game - I admit I played WoW, and it took me something around 3 years to get a 'current' max level character. Now just imagine what would have happened to WoW had they forced players to go through the dungeons in the game (like XIV does, dungeons in WoW were optional to doing it's "MSQ"), while also ramping the difficulty higher and higher... I'd bet money that WoW would not have become the juggernaut and behemoth that it did - this is because ppl flocked to it due to it being Warcraft, Blizzard, and the 1st mainstream MMO that was accessible to casual players who could solo the vast majority of the game.