I’m not interested in the “thats not what I meant even though thats what I typed” game but lets play anyway. When you say " was posing it to you, and to everyone saying this gear is a bad idea," what does that mean? Well to any rational person it means that you’re saying that I’ve said its a bad idea. I haven’t said that at all. All I’ve said is that it maybe could have been done differently while already making plain that I didn’t think it was a bad idea in my last response to you. Are you even reading what I’m typing?
You have yet to answer my question. To what extent should a game maker make their content “accessible to everyone” at the cost of what couldn’t be anything other than lowering the bar on dare I say skill and or effort to access the content?
(Sorry, I’m trying to read it, but I’m likely to take a walk away because a lot of this is . . . in my head . . . blurring together in what different people have said about this. A break might be in order to try to get a grip on it again. I’ll try to be a bit better for this one, then I’m likely going to go find something else to do for a while.)
To answer your question . . . a game maker’s decision of how “low” to set the average skill is to each developer. If you want more people to play your game and get far in it, you want the bar lower than if you want to make it challenging but possible to be beaten with time and learning the game.
Disclaimer: I am not a game designer. I am not a developer. I’m just a guy who writes stuff and sometimes pulls a bunch of friends together around a virtual tabletop for D&D every half dozen or so months. Anything I say here is not from a position of expertise, only amateur experience. Also, I’m going to be bringing up examples which aren’t MMOs to illustrate my point. Sadly, I can’t think of a way of bringing one into it without all the other baggage each game has with it in other departments.
. . . and to start I might as well go fully to a basic game most of you probably know. Chess. Chess is remarkably easy to learn the rules for, and the rules (generally) are the same world over. But mastery and skill of it is hard; while anyone who knows the rules can pick up a set and find another player, your average person is probably going to get curb-stomped by a Grandmaster who spent years refining their strategies and learning the game. This game is accessible to lots of people, but the skill bar moves depending on who’s at the table . . . and you can’t tell what the bar is until you’re done with a few games.
Card games (deck of 52 cards, not CCGs) also use a structure which often doesn’t change between hands, and are relatively easy to learn but difficult to win based on who else is playing. Sit at an established poker table after reading the basic rules and you’re probably not going to walk away with a lot of money . . . it’s not that the game is unfair, or too challenging, it’s that you put yourself in a position to be more challenged without being entirely aware of it. Also, hustlers can artificially make the bar appear lower than it really is to sucker you in and curb-stomp you when they get bored with you.
Video games. Again, back to basics. Your average NES video game generally wasn’t difficult to learn how things worked but it required you to either get lucky in a distinct progression or work to learn the controls. There are only eight input buttons after all, so it’s not like there was an infinite complexity in how you controlled it. At the same time, Super Mario Bros. was not as complex as . . . let’s say Contra, or I’ll go back to Ninja Gaiden again. Other examples of “easy enough to learn how to play, but requires effort to understand and beat”. However, for video games where there’s only one player or two players not directly competing, the only question of where to set the bar depends on whether you want your game to be beloved and revered or legendary and discussed for ages. (I’m not going to qualify which is which, because it’s a subjective on that anyway. One person may hold one game to be “better” than the other because it was easier and they could beat it, while the other isn’t “as good” because it frustrated them from the difficulty.)
Competitive video games . . . different animals no matter how you slice it. How difficult do you want to make your game? What genre is it? How does the competition work? No matter what the genre . . .
. . . okay, excluding strategy games, because the learning curve on those can be a nightmare.
. . . anyway. Competitive video games have the problem of where to set the bar for comprehension of the game, but “difficulty” is still largely depending on the other players’ skill and experience. Most of them fall into a category where the field is automatically level at the start and only grows unbalanced later. Strategy games are an odd man out, though.
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