The majority of players dont like hard content

After playing poe and lost ark i see people only sign up for groups that get the kill. Lost ark is a ghost town on matchmaking with harder content but 4 secs in que for easy stuff.

I dont understand the business model with these games. Who are they trying to appeal to? Seems minority based, which doesnt make sense as a business model.

Wow classic is super successful because people can play a game, get loot and call it a night. Punishing people like poe does for playing the game is sadistic in nature.

People lose things everyday, when they log in they dont wanna lose more. I think you have forgotten what video games are supposed to do.

Bottom line, harder game play creates less players in the end. Match making is amazing in lost ark, but when you hit a threshold, people no longer que.

I wonder if GGG could retain more players if they made the game fun, instead of punishing. The core of the game is extremely fun, but the end game is super linear (builds for bosses and xp'rs).

You have to remember the majority of people who play video games have other stuff going on in life, you are catering to the 1% instead of 99 and expecting a positive result like its a lotto.

Unless you have a massive whale promoting this demonic influence, you should check yourself before you wreck yourself.

This doesn't make sense. If people want to just play a game casually they wouldn't care about virtual numbers. Calling hard game "sadistic" is also quite funny.

1) Game was slow, no crafting, easier enemies
2) Adding more crafting options
3) Adding in more movement skills
4) Designing game around movement skills so that it better fits console gameplay. (Kitava boss fight)
5) Adding more power creep
6) Zoom zoom playstyle
7) Designing game around it by introducing time limited events (Incursion)
8) Old designers dont like people cruising through the game.
9) Implement wrong solution: overtune monsters. Kill or be killed in less than a second.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

This doesn't make sense. If people want to just play a game casually they wouldn't care about virtual numbers. Calling hard game "sadistic" is also quite funny.

Loss of xp is a punishment, Chris has mentioned many times that he loves to see ppl die (in game). Sadistic imply's intention, which he has stated.

Not saying he isnt one of the best devs in past 15 yrs, but he will look like this if it continues.



Even Rory is trying to kill us now

your initial comparison is false OP players hate failure and matchmaking + hard content creates a responsibility for players to play properly and bring a reasonable level of effort that most simply don't to the detriment of all.

Basically everytime you queue for anything in a team game pve or pvp and get a dunning kreuger on your team the experience goes down drastically and creates a great deal of negative sentiment.

If your game persists long enough this creates a system where people get the digital equivalent of an epeen card to validate that they meet the previously mentioned responsibility to not be shit. This is unbelievably toxic, but it also works perfectly.

Aspirational content is absolutely huge for the success of a game, players require objectives to work towards and as you mentioned WoW its legacy was built on this, its also why there is such strong nostalgia towards classic as people try to reclaim a time before the internet made all mmo content easy unless tuned to maximal values.

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Chadwixx wrote:

After playing poe and lost ark i see people only sign up for groups that get the kill. Lost ark is a ghost town on matchmaking with harder content but 4 secs in que for easy stuff.

This doesn't really mean anything without the big picture, If you want people to farm hard content you have to make it worth their time in some way, either the fights have to be really fun or the loot has to be good.

I mean, very few people really like heist, it's harder than regular content of the same level and the gameplay is hardly appealing. But people do it because the loot is really good, if farming high maps wasn't rewarding we'd still be farming whatever is the equivalent of merciless docks.

Ideally, you want people playing both easy and hard content if the game offers both, and if one of those isn't played, it just means you fucked up. It's one of the good things about PoE, people play it both hard and easy, err... hard and less hard.

PoE isn't particularly "hard" for the most part. It just focuses on a part of the gameplay that a lot of players do not enjoy: Mindless grind. Throw enough time at it and you will succeed. Do I think that is good design? No.

It leads to sub-optimal or straight out bad game design like time-limited events to check your DPS, boss nuking to avoid any difficulty, and the general zoom-zoom oneshot-or-be-oneshot gameplay. I liked PoE 2.x better. But if you want zoom-zoom, at least don't make the path there be super grindy.

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PoE isn't particularly "hard" for the most part. It just focuses on a part of the gameplay that a lot of players do not enjoy: Mindless grind. Throw enough time at it and you will succeed

This is so clueless. You can target farm whatever you want and get currency out of it. You can spec into essences, legion, expeditions, bosses, the different masters, etc. and not only get stuff but also experience the game in a different way. The older versions of the game, especially the one where only Harvest mattered, were the definition of "mindless grind" - doing the same over and over again.

You say "harder game play creates less players in the end", but I feel I should point out there are different types of 'hard'. There's skill based hard, and RNG based hard. I'd suggest that your statement is true for the RNG kind of hard (what AN combo did you roll today?), while it fails when applied to the skill based hard (where positioning and timing are key. Dark souls might be a good example of how hard is appealing to the masses (just an example, people can argue DS difficulties elsewhere :) My thoughts on it anyway. I actually stopped playing 'cause it's moved so far towards the RNG end of the hard spectrum recently, but would come back in a flash if they went back to skill based hard (essentially just removed AN).

Harvest? Harvest wasn't mindless, it was exciting because I could build a character in reasonable amounts of time, without unreasonable amounts of grinding. Upgrades were meaningful and achievable without interacting with a cancerous trade system. Was it perfect? No. Was it significantly better and more enjoyable than the current situation (for me)? Definitely yes. You could even have built meaningful, actually difficult encounters on top of it, because more people had access to the items required.

Now? Not possible, I have to grind for ages to make meaningful progress, even if I am interacting with said cancerous trade system (which I have always avoided as much as possible). It's not hard, it's just not fun.