Quote Originally Posted by Kamatsu View Post
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.