Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

EQ's difficulty was more of an efficiency model--kind of like D2, except far more group dependent. The efficiency model started to be dropped with WoW (Actually EQ, when raid caps were put in), but WoW vanilla actually kept a lot of the components of it up until the end. After TBC though, it was completely gone, all abandoned in favor of a "difficulty" paradigm. And that had a lot of pros, but a lot of cons too--I really think the move away from efficiency based difficulty really hurt, ironically, the accessibility of MMO's--which was the complete opposite of WoW's intention. The fact is, Vanilla bosses in WoW, up until Nax, were VERY, very easy. The difficulty really came from two things, managing large groups of people, in order to maximize group/buff interaction and role execution (Making sure auras were stacked, buffs were done, class types were positioned well) and efficiently dispatching impediments to bosses--IE trash clearing. Even guilds full of mediocre or bad players, as long as they were organized to kill trash very quickly and execute their very narrow set of buffs/auras/jobs, could kill the strongest bosses--because the difficulty wasn't really on them. It was more on a core group of organizing officers, and management.

EQ used that kind of system almost exclusively. Bosses were a joke. But managing people? It took a lot of effort. You could pretty much tell how good a guild was, not by it's foot soldiers (Common members, except for how their gear gave them advantages) but by how they were organized, how their raid leaders could exploit positioning, buffs, pulls, and individual class abilities to really diffuse any personal difficulty in an encounter. Essentially, in EQ, and even in early WoW, as long as you had a strong core group of highly organized officers/management, and then a bunch of warm bodies who were able to show up on demand, when needed, you could raid the most difficult content and be successful.

That's what I refer to as efficiency based raiding--it's not about how well the healers perform, rather it's about how well the healers are managed so they execute simple tasks in an efficient manner. It's about managing time, not so much skill. So becoming better is more about using less time, less people, and being more efficient. You can make things easier by increasing any of those (And lets face it, when it comes down to it? A player can usually find more time, or more people to play with but getting more skill? That's rare.)

That all ended with WoW's swap. Raid groups became smaller, and at first, many officers/management welcomed this, because it was HARD tracking and managing so many different people. And then buffs/auras/debuffs because more generic, less stack-able. They were weakened, made raid wide, and most of all far less exploitable by group composition. And both of these things sound good on paper. But what they ended up doing was decreasing the "fudge" room in any encounter. They transferred the difficulty of encounters from people who managed the raids, down to individual players in raids. (More so than previously).

And I think this really hurt a lot of casual players. The fact was, you couldn't even bring the soccer mom, or the pot head rogue anymore, because their role was too large. If they screwed up, it was too noticeable. You had less wiggle room to let good management and organization make up for their poor play. You couldn't have a slot split between two people who played 50% of the time, you needed a full time raider because there was too much to learn. You couldn't alter the groups and adapt to the specific boss to squeeze out more DPS--that was set in stone. You couldn't slightly stack the raid with more of a specific kind of debuff--that was now all homogenized. You couldn't position people better, to allow for more DPS in X or Y time period--everyone now had to be fluid because of all the variables in scripting. And, perhaps most of all, you couldn't just tell someone "okay, your job is just do X"...Because with less people, everyone had far more responsibilities and with more variables, everyone was required to learn more in terms of reaction, you needed people to be there more often to learn it, too--in the end, ironically, it was far, far less casual friendly, because the bar for being in a decent guild went from "warm body", to "super dedicated player who can execute complex tasks."

And so we got "modes" to change difficulty...but how does activating "super easy loot mode" make everyone feel about the game? Yeah...exactly. They go to get their loot and walk away feeling empty. It was a richer experience when even a bad player, but someone who was socially friendly and could be flexible about what the guild needed, could join a guild, and actually do fights that had some "fame" to them. They didn't have to put an * by their accomplishment and say "I did it...but in derp mode.)

I think early TBC kind of struck a good balance between an efficient raiding model and a difficulty one. But I just wish that a game would go back an really explore a nearly full efficiency based model again. Have tons of dungeons with only minimal scripting, and even if you use instancing--just don't have raid caps. If people want to waste their lock out on only getting 2 pieces of loot for 50 people? Then the inefficiency of their zerg is the detriment, they don't need an artificial cap. If people cheese encounters to kill them? Who cares, the point of an effeciency system is not just to kill the boss, it's more about the loot. A zerg guild gets less.

Also, design encounters that reward social engineering, and management--make designing a raid to exploit the shit out of certain sets of class buffs, and group composition, like a little mini-game of itself (Like stacking a magic card deck). And don't contain those buffs to a few classes, have hundreds of variables. So a Rogue/Shaman/Enchanter could form a ridiculous combo, but at the same time a Wizard/Enchanter/Paladin could form another ridiculous combo. Have buffs change and alter depending on auras, group composition, interactions. Why? Because that kind of difficulty will be tackled by naturally more "hard core" players, the leaders of guilds, the officers, the raid leaders. People who KNOW more about the game. You've siphoned a bit off difficulty off the "lowest" tier player and transferred it to the hardcore--and this allows the lowest common denominator to play with more hardcore players, in the SAME encounters, but with different roles.