Citing Lost Ark wasn't a difficulty flex, (although after reading your cope, I'm glad you misinterpreted it) it was clearly to point out that you're just plain wrong when over numerous posts here you've tried to "diss" the people who want to play it by claiming they're terrible at video games and they're just attracted to M&M because the only challenge to be found in the game is in the "tedious systems" that only "shut-ins" on "disability checks" could thrive on.
You're trying way too hard to sound like you're winning an argument I'm not even having. Nobody's "coping," man. I'm just not buying your self-insert fanfiction about what qualifies as "difficulty" or "challenge." You brought up Lost Ark to flex about playing a "hard" game, then pivoted to claiming it was just an example. Pick a lane.
You've completely missed the core point anyway: I'm against
fake challenge - the kind that mistakes friction and punishment for meaningful design. You keep pretending I’m "coping" because I don't confuse tedium with difficulty. That's the crux of it. I'm not allergic to challenge, I'm allergic to design laziness being rebranded as "old-school."
And let's kill this whole "dissing" strawman right now. I'm not "dissing" people for not wanting challenge, I'm dissing bad game design that hides behind nostalgia and calls boredom a feature. There's a difference between not wanting to sweat through every encounter and pretending that slow, clunky, punishment-heavy systems equal depth. They don't.
What I've been criticizing isn't necessarily the players, it's the mindset that "tedium = authenticity." If your idea of challenge is jogging across three zones to recover your corpse or alt-tabbing for ten minutes while your mana bar refills, congratulations, you've confused patience for skill.
I'm not gatekeeping anyone. I'm saying developers should respect the player's time. That's not "hating casuals," that's recognizing that the entire world has changed since 1999. People aren't sitting in dorm rooms with unlimited hours to kill anymore. You can design a world that's social, difficult, and rewarding without leaning on systems that exist purely to waste time.
And if you can't separate critique of mechanics from critique of people, that's on you, not me. I'm not shitting on players for wanting an escape; I'm shitting on the idea that wasting time somehow makes a game profound.
The irony here is that half the people defending this stuff talk like they're crusading for "challenge", but the moment you mention modern difficulty done right (tight mechanical design, risk-reward balance, iterative mastery), they recoil because it means they'd actually have to engage with the
game instead of just sitting around "feeling immersed." You’re not defending difficulty; you're defending inertia.
If that reads as me "insulting" people, maybe it's because deep down you know the design you're defending doesn't hold up outside of nostalgia goggles. I don't want games to be easier. I want them to be smarter.
Your part about boxing doesn't really address what I said either. I already told you why they wouldn't. Because they can box to their hearts content on the boxing-allowed server and not risk a ban. I'm not saying there won't be the oddball that tries it just to see if he can get away with it, but the vast majority of boxers will go where they're allowed to be and it wouldn't make sense to do otherwise. Unless you think bot armies are going to rise up for a game that you've clearly made it well known that you think almost nobody is going to end up playing.
You think people won’t abuse systems if they can? I don't know if it's because you've spent so much time in Lost Ark and have never played on TLPs/EMUs, but this requires a TON of naivety to accept.
MMO players are famous for their moral restraint and community spirit
. I'm sure all the boxers will politely queue up for the "boxing-allowed" server, shake hands, and enjoy their quiet little ghost town while the actual population, economy, and raids, and PVP scene are happening somewhere else. Sounds totally plausible.
Come on. You don't have to be a cynic to know how this goes. The "why wouldn't they just go to the other server" argument sounds like something written by someone who's never seen an MMO in the wild. Boxers go where the population is. Always have, always will. The "boxing-allowed" server will be a ghost town within a month, while the "no-boxing" server has the actual economy, raid scene, and social ecosystem. And that's exactly where the boxers will quietly set up shop. And they'll box quietly, subtly, using macros, VPNs, and windowed setups, just like they always have. Enforcement will be reactive, inconsistent, and largely symbolic. The devs simply don't have the manpower or infrastructure to monitor it seriously.
The "they’ll just play where it’s allowed" argument only works if all servers are equal, and they never are. The boxing-allowed server will always have fewer players, worse market circulation, and a weaker social ecosystem. Boxers don't want to box in isolation, they want to box in traffic. They want the economy, the grouping opportunities, the raid competition, and the prestige that come with playing on the "main" server.
It's nice to imagine that rule enforcement is some iron wall. In reality, it's more like a screen door. The devs can't even afford a proper marketing budget or a Steam launch, and we're pretending they'll have the resources to actively police multiboxing? Please. The only people who'll get caught are the idiots streaming their setup on Twitch with “NoBoxGang” in their guild tag. Everyone else will get away with it just fine.
Players are too good at gaming the system. EQ's "truebox" code was supposed to be the silver bullet, yet anyone who plays those servers knows it's a glorified placebo. Project 1999 was overrun with stealth dual-boxers before Kunark even dropped. Even Blizzard couldn't stamp it out in Classic; all they did was drive it underground. The illusion of enforcement lasted about as long as it took for someone to realize you could run VMs or spoof hardware IDs.
The only reliable way to minimize boxing is to design systems that make it
unnecessary. But pretending it's a solvable social problem through "rules" and "honor" is exactly how every past MMO fell into the same trap. "No boxing" sounds noble on paper, until you realize it's just another purity test no dev team has ever passed.
