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A contrast in shift of Difficulty


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Come three months after the launch of Guild Wars 2, I distinctly remember asking myself, "when do I get to the fun part?" Fast forward about a couple of weeks in and I get to lvl 80, I become excited to finally go do that AC run I failed at a week ago. And as time goes by I keep looking for an answer as to what to do now that I'm level capped.

Normally I thought to myself there would be some secret dungeon or raid I wasn't aware of but no, all you had to deal with was the world, PvP, and WvW, which is something I didn't touch.

So one day in Lion's Arch I'm greeted with the first advertisement for my first WvW guild. I get introduced to the reality of WvW and things like Red Guard, and the challenge was seemingly present in chunks.

However the one thing I've always hated about this game was just how easy it was on the PvE side of things. The most present challenges available during those days were the Ahra, CoF, and CoE dungeons which if given the ability were not actually more than just dungeons.

I wanted to raid and WvW was that thing that quelled my satisfaction. Boredom drove me to quit as ANET pushed out content. Living story season one with Scarlett came, and her character as I recall was really hateable. But the challenge in PvE was there. And after she attacked Lion's Arch, that on its own was challenging to go through.

Sure there were fractals but they were the same ones we've done for an eternity. And they weren't as spread out in options as they are today, in fact there were like only 6 and if you've done them once, at the time you never really wanted to do them again because the reward you have today weren't really there.

And as the waves of living story come out I can't help but notice that the boredom in PvE was still there. As a skilled WvW fight guild player, everything that was PvE was simply too easy, like a walk in the park.

The only thing we had at the time to deal with were massive meat shields which was ANETs brilliant idea at the "harder content we asked for". This was the mordremoth living story stuff. Just mundane massive meat shield.

Come the first raid and this is it, a real challenge, the Vale Guardian. Finally a challenge worthy of the gods. The new expansion too was amazing because enemies stopped being these absurd massive meat shields and in turn turned into mechanic heavy opponents. Things weren't boring anymore. New skills, new specs, gliding, it made the game more interesting on the oven side of things.

However during my first time raiding I greatly underestimated how hard it was going to be. Mind you I really took lengthy breaks from the game because of how boring it was. When I realized what raiding was actually like, a couple of things greatly puzzled me. The first is that there wasn't any back story as to why we were going to kill the Vale Guardian. The story didn't make sense, and there's nothing that told me to go do this task for the special forces.The second thing was the lack of reasonable rewards; see if you raid in another game there would be some sort of special loot or something but instead you get exotics and a couple of gold? No thanks.

This mentality kept me away from raiding even during alot of the longevity of PoF. Why go through this challenge to get really nothing in return? The incentive wasn't really there. I didn't even want legendary armor because I didn't really need it. After all, all I needed was my minstrel and berserker ascended armor sets so why bother doing all of that to inconvenience myself.

And besides it was incredibly challenging to find a raiding guild at the time. You could spend hours and hours spamming map chat to look for one that did any raids with a silent response. And in reality Elitism was rampant in raiding, to the point where you weren't taken in by any guild. I managed after a week of searching to land a training group and practiced a set of training bosses for weeks and I loved it. The problem is that they were the same bosses, the same order, the same strategy, it eventually became mundane. But it gave me joy to fail and fail and fail again for the first time and notice that as I was failing in PvE I made actual progress.

Now that I come back to the game in March 2020, I feel energetic to get back into action and finish what I started, I've even managed to find groups for training and an actual guild that does static raiding. I want to get through the content raids and have downed two new bosses, amazingly enough through much failure. But that's what I want. I want that challenge, it is actually fun to die with a solidified purpose in gw2 and achieve something noteworthy.

Fractals have even become harder and I'm getting into that too, it's actually 10x more rewarding than it used to be 5 years ago. Just like all the new content, just like everything new.

I'm hoping they ramp up the challenge in the metas and everything else. It's a huge shift from the old days where warriors can hop into Arah and clear a wing solo, to now having to focus on stressful mechanics in strike missions and raids.

I really genuinely hope ANET continues to push out more raids and more involvement for the player into the stories leading into them. Like something unique, like say once you finish the living world story, there's another one that builds up so you have an item that works inside of the raid or something unique to say "oh this is why I'm here" the next time I'm in a raid. I love the challenge and it's good to finally have access to a variety. In short terms, more raids!

The reason I say all of this is to encourage players saying content is too hard to take a closer look at the content from the old days and really question yourself how easy you want things to be. Because I have to tell you, we went from literally not having to dodge roll enemies to be successful to actually having to. There's too many people discouraged by a bad experience but really I implore you to keep trying. And if realistically you're not having fun with a good challenge, then don't do it. But don't go off antagonizing people who actually give them a shot, because given ANETs past, it is a blessing to actually have one.

I see this a lot, people are just spreading confirmation bias amongst each other to not do more challenging stuff because of their bad experiences. And I see this as people agreeing with each other to be bored and not have fun. Maybe look at it from another angle, maybe the person wasn't capable of learning from their mistakes, maybe the person doesn't actually know how to play the game more efficiently. Be skeptical of people trying to remove yourself from actual fun, including yourself. Remember, being given a challenge in Guild Wars 2 is an actual blessing from ANET, so appreciate it and look at it as an angle as if you're to do something great like climbing mount Everest.

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@Dawdler.8521 said:Doing Arah explorable with no guides and people that just got their first character to 80 equipped with mostly green/yellow gear because no one could afford anything else, that was difficult. Today you sneeze at enemies and they die pfff.

Is that a covid-19 joke?

but aye... i do believe some mobs are just too easy in most areas to fight.

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@"Aridon.8362" said:I see this a lot, people are just spreading confirmation bias amongst each other to not do more challenging stuff because of their bad experiences. And I see this as people agreeing with each other to be bored and not have fun. Maybe look at it from another angle, maybe the person wasn't capable of learning from their mistakes, maybe the person doesn't actually know how to play the game more efficiently. Be skeptical of people trying to remove yourself from actual fun, including yourself. Remember, being given a challenge in Guild Wars 2 is an actual blessing from ANET, so appreciate it and look at it as an angle as if you're to do something great like climbing mount Everest.

Telling people to look at it from another angle, while completely disregarding their angle isn't the best thing to do. I'm never going to see instanced low-man content as a "blessing" from Anet. Telling others to see it as a blessing, only because it's content you personally like is just wrong.

You know, there are people that enjoy content that isn't "challenging", or rather instanced content, to be precise, since that's the content you're on about.What you may find boring may not be boring for others. What you might find challenging and fun may not be fun for others.

"And I see this as people agreeing with each other to be bored and not have fun." Is a ridiculous statement to make. If they wouldn't have fun playing the content they play they would just leave, like you did in the past.

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@Smoosh.2718 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:Doing Arah explorable with no guides and people that just got their first character to 80 equipped with mostly green/yellow gear because no one could afford anything else, that was difficult. Today you sneeze at enemies and they die pfff.

Is that a covid-19 joke?

but aye... i do believe some mobs are just too easy in most areas to fight.Its called a common phrase and if you want to get sensetive then I would imagine one would be more offended over the other 300,000+ that die every year in normal influenza, but I digress.

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@"Aridon.8362" said:I really genuinely hope ANET continues to push out more raids and more involvement for the player into the stories leading into them. Like something unique, like say once you finish the living world story, there's another one that builds up so you have an item that works inside of the raid or something unique to say "oh this is why I'm here" the next time I'm in a raid. I love the challenge and it's good to finally have access to a variety. In short terms, more raids!I really genuinely hope ANET does not continue to push this type of content. And, I am not alone: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/101244/strike-wont-make-me-raid

@"Raknar.4735" said:You know, there are people that enjoy content that isn't "challenging", or rather instanced content, to be precise, since that's the content you're on about.What you may find boring may not be boring for others. What you might find challenging and fun may not be fun for others.Exactly so.

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Different players have different preferences, and they're looking to get different experiences out of the game. GW2 started out as a game with mostly casual-friendly content, so that's the kind of players it originally drew in, but then it started leaning into the more hardcore content, and now there's a schism in the playerbase.

Funnily enough, GW1 had this problem figured out before GW2 had even been conceptualized, and the solution is having different difficulty modes.

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@"Aridon.8362" said:~SNIP~

You play the content you like and let the rest of us play the content that we like, not everyone finds the same things as "FUN", everyone has their own fun factor, and for a majority (over 50%) of the player base, Open World PvE is fun for them. It's also less time consuming, allows you to hop in and out as often as you like and take breaks from playing for long periods of time and not get left behind.

Perhaps you don't remember, but when this game first launched everyone complained about Orr being too difficult because of mob density, that you couldn't walk two feet without getting stunned, pulled, etc., etc.,...and 3 months or so after release they culled over 2/3's of the mobs there and made it trivial. I think if they had left the original mob count there it wouldn't have been so bad once people realized you actually had to play the game a bit to advance, but no, people wanted to be able to run through Zaitan's doorstep without having to fight your way there.

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It would be a very sad day if the game only catered for the more hardcore players.

Not everyone has an hour or more to play. Not everyone has a level 80 character, not everyone wants to do World completion. Some people just hang out in new player zones just to help people. Some people just do that Role playing stuff (/shrug :) )

I do Fractals with my Guild group. I solo in WvW (yes there are some of us still trying to do it) and I like levelling up characters and gearing them. I love the open world zones. I'm probably a serious casual. Could I do Raids, probably, but that game mode just doesn't appeal.

We are all different - we all have different needs in the game and I respect that some players also want challenging content. Raids obviously cater for this.

However increasing zone / creature / open world difficulty isn't the way forward. People want to be entertained, they certainly dont want to be frustrated.

Many years ago I played the original Everquest. It was 1999 on a dial up modem. They kept raising the level cap and the difficulty of creatures with each expansion. Not just the boss creatures, but the ones that inhabited the zones as well - the 'normal stuff'. I was quite an experienced player with a character of every single class.

I was doing quite well. Then they released one expansion called Underfoot.

It was an interesting expansion. They ramped the difficulty of creatures up a lot. Stuff was killing you with about 3 hits. So you had to take your time trying to kill them, snaring them, slowing etc. Kills slowed down. Limited play time was spent killing less and less. It wasn't fun at all.

At the time the server population was dropping across the board, groups were becoming rarer as people didn't want to play with others who weren't as good as them or slowed them down (sound familiar?).

So after 9 years I quit.

All games age. All lose population. If the content is too hard or frustrating then players give up, this reduces the population. As content gets old people dont want to do it and the whole thing just becomes a snake eating its own tail.

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@Andy.5981 said:It would be a very sad day if the game only catered for the more hardcore players.

It’s a sad day when a developer only caters to a subset of its player base. It doesn’t matter if it’s casual or hardcore.

However increasing zone / creature / open world difficulty isn't the way forward. People want to be entertained, they certainly dont want to be frustrated.

Not for existing maps but future maps and content should continue to gradually get more difficult and challenging. That’s typically how most other games operate. Something being difficult and challenging doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not entertaining.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Andy.5981 said:It would be a very sad day if the game only catered for the more hardcore players.

It’s a sad day when a developer only caters to a subset of its player base. It doesn’t matter if it’s casual or hardcore.

However increasing zone / creature / open world difficulty isn't the way forward. People want to be entertained, they certainly dont want to be frustrated.

Not for existing maps but future maps and content should continue to gradually get more difficult and challenging. That’s typically how most other games operate. Something being difficult and challenging doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not entertaining.

I would agree, concentrating on one at the expense of the other isn't a good idea. GW2 I believe has the right balance.

Whilst I have respect your opinion on your second point, in my opinion you are wrong.

Future maps should not get more difficult. They should be fun to play and provide a reasonable challenge, but if you raise difficulty at some point someone will not be able to complete the content of that map due to lack of players. It is already happening to some people at quieter times. Not everyone lives in Europe or America.

GW2 isn't most other games and has always prided itself on doing things differently. Going the same route as most other games I believe would alienate the vast majority of the player base.

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@Andy.5981 said:

@Andy.5981 said:It would be a very sad day if the game only catered for the more hardcore players.

It’s a sad day when a developer only caters to a subset of its player base. It doesn’t matter if it’s casual or hardcore.

However increasing zone / creature / open world difficulty isn't the way forward. People want to be entertained, they certainly dont want to be frustrated.

Not for existing maps but future maps and content should continue to gradually get more difficult and challenging. That’s typically how most other games operate. Something being difficult and challenging doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not entertaining.

I would agree, concentrating on one at the expense of the other isn't a good idea. GW2 I believe has the right balance.

Whilst I have respect your opinion on your second point, in my opinion you are wrong.

Future maps should not get more difficult. They should be fun to play and provide a reasonable challenge, but if you raise difficulty at some point someone will not be able to complete the content of that map due to lack of players. It is already happening to some people at quieter times. Not everyone lives in Europe or America.

GW2 isn't most other games and has always prided itself on doing things differently. Going the same route as most other games I believe would alienate the vast majority of the player base.

Players that play a game naturally get better the more they play. This is true for pretty much all games. This is why the difficulty should increase for newer content. Also please realize that by challenging, I don’t mean Dark Souls level so please don’t take it to that extreme.

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Perhaps in my array of paragraphs my point wasn't clear. I wasn't saying to do harder content. I was just saying to stop antagonizing people who do harder content. Just as you all like to cater yourselves to easier stuff, don't downplay people who do harder stuff.

Just because you like easier content doesn't mean ANET should have to create the game to just let you get by pressing 1 to attack. In fact although a large percentage of posters on this thread is wanting more easier gameplay, there was actually a poll done earlier about the difficulty of the game, and in fact the majority agrees that the level of difficulty of the game is where it should be or could actually be much harder. Here's the poll if you don't believe me.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97399/in-your-opinion-is-gw2-too-hard/p1

In essence I'm an advocate for the majority. Simply to close this off if you don't want to do harder content then don't. But don't yell and scream at ANET for not wanting to push the game in your boring direction.

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@"Aridon.8362" said:Perhaps in my array of paragraphs my point wasn't clear. I wasn't saying to do harder content. I was just saying to stop antagonizing people who do harder content. Just as you all like to cater yourselves to easier stuff, don't downplay people who do harder stuff.

Just because you like easier content doesn't mean ANET should have to let you get by just by pressing 1 to attack. ~

So you don't want others to downplay your "achievements", yet in the same post you downplay players prefering to play easier content as people that "only press 1 to attack". This post mirrors your array of paragraphs, I think your point is pretty clear.

I'm still not going to put you, or any other raider, on a pedestal just because you do instanced content.That aside, I've rarely seen someone actually downplay "players that do hard content", most people I see posting are against the raids, not the ones playing the content. I'm pretty sure they actually don't care a bit about what content you're able to clear or about you personally.

You liking "harder" content doesn't mean that anyone has to admire your "achievements".

@"Aridon.8362" said:In essence I'm an advocate for the majority. Simply to close this off if you don't want to do harder content then don't. But don't yell and scream at ANET for not wanting to push the game in your boring direction.

Funny. Claiming to be the majority, and downplaying the ones that like the "boring direction".

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I think it's pretty safe to assume the vast majority of players don't actually want raid-level challenges, the ones that demand self-improvement. I think most people are satisfied with a much lower level, just enough to feel a sense of accomplishment for winning. You and I (and the rest of us who raid) might relish higher challenges, but there are still a lot of people who play this game who don't even like the idea of dps meters to measure performance.

I could say more, but I'll get right to it - there really seems to be no point in asking people to see challenging content as some kind of "blessing." Those of us who want it, like you, will find ways to do it. The rest have every right to see that level of challenge as a waste of time.

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Guild wars 2 has actually warped my sense of difficulty in games. It's so bad that i'm shocked when I lose in a normal single player game. Or I'm shocked whenever I die in the open world.

Devs have stated in the past one of the core reasons why their content leans on the easy side is because the dps of an experienced (or informed) player vs A
relatively inexperienced/uninformed player is huge. 10x the damage, which is just strait up impossible to balance between the 2.

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@White Kitsunee.4620 said:Guild wars 2 has actually warped my sense of difficulty in games. It's so bad that i'm shocked when I lose in a normal single player game. Or I'm shocked whenever I die in the open world.

Devs have stated in the past one of the core reasons why their content leans on the easy side is because the dps of an experienced (or informed) player vs A

relatively inexperienced/uninformed player is huge. 10x the damage, which is just strait up impossible to balance between the 2.

Well you aren't punished or taught anything for failing even the basic story repeatedly, just revive and continue. Very differnt from GW1 where its git gud or git rekt. Same for any MMO.. the games literally cater to that easy mentality and then its surprise pikachu face when you get anything challenging because you've been conditioned to the opposite. I blame developers. It doesn't take a genius to know you need different difficulty levels of the same content in MMOs nowadays or only a very small minority will do them. I grew up with games being 'hard' so I have alway done that content but I get why casuals don't.

You don't advertise an extremely casual game then add some 1 difficulty raid level content expecting casuals to do it in organized groups. That just alienates your casuals and only makes the minority happy which are the only ones to see that content then devs see it as a waste of time I'm sure. I wish they would just cater to both sides and add easy/norm in every raid, like the strike public version with daily reward. In GW1 basically every area had the same difficulty curve at least that's how it felt to me. Sure dungeons were harder but it wasn't much you haven't seen before. By that time you know if you don't pull a group correctly or make a big mistake you are screwed.

You use same strategy in your starter zone than in end game, the GW1 learning experience was really good. GW2 devs thought 1 was too hard and wasn't friendly to casuals which I disagree with but this is what happens when you remove the most basic prefrontal cortex requirement in most of your game. 1 was still very relaxing and quite easy in many areas, you just weren't encouraged to run in all rambo style and pwn everything spamming 1 skill. Casual design has owned MMO development for many years now, we are just dusty relics of the past.

I think the difficulty is fine in instances personally, but overland is just all over the damn place it goes from ez to 1shot back to ez back to 1shots all the time like you never know what to expect in GW2 maps and it doesn't seem to be teaching anyone anything. I think the downed state is too much of a carry. And yes you have a big point with dps, that is the fault of their stat system I mean anyone can be running around in t/v/h gear and do 0 dmg. They should have stuck with GW1 attributes and not bother with stats, that was a horrible idea and why GW1 was able to be balanced much better.

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Before they waste money and developer time to create more raids for the maybe top 5% of the playerbase, they should change accessibility to currently existing raids by adding multiple difficulties.Some people won't bother getting better or physiologically can't get better. Those people should not be deprived of content.It's unfathomable how Arenanet didn't even bother to consider multiple difficulties.Even WoW, the (sometimes hotly debated) prime example of raiding, added multiple difficulties to increase raid participation and justify spending so much money on creating the arguably best content of the game.

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@Fueki.4753 said:Before they waste money and developer time to create more raids for the maybe top 5% of the playerbase, they should change accessibility to currently existing raids by adding multiple difficulties.Some people won't bother getting better or physiologically can't get better. Those people should not be deprived of content.It's unfathomable how Arenanet didn't even bother to consider multiple difficulties.Even WoW, the (sometimes hotly debated) prime example of raiding, added multiple difficulties to increase raid participation and justify spending so much money on creating the arguably best content of the game.

There has to be a reward or something that's taken away in that case. Like for example, in the latest story the part where you know who dies, you don't get to do that. Instead you take the elevator out and don't actually see that part of the story.

I say this because I'm letting you know that casuals are actually a minority. The people who actually do harder content like WvW and PvP, Fractals, and other said content heavily outweigh casuals as a whole. If you're going to make the game unfair something has to be taken away by those who don't try. In wow, it's viable gear that's taken away, in PvP you'd be a free kill, and so on. There's literally hundreds of thousands of people who would spend hours doing the Istan farm just to get what they want, and even that isn't entirely casual on its own.

Saying that only the top 5% actually do challenging content is a delusion that is cultivated on this forum. Do you truly believe in every update people just cross their arms and leave content alone after losing one time?

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@Aridon.8362 said:

@Aridon.8362 said:I say this because I'm letting you know that casuals are actually a minority. The people who actually do harder content like WvW and PvP, Fractals, and other said content heavily outweigh casuals as a whole.Citation please.

Go to Lion's Arch and literally ask all the people sitting at the bank.

That's not proof of your statement.

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@kharmin.7683 said:

@Aridon.8362 said:I say this because I'm letting you know that casuals are actually a minority. The people who actually do harder content like WvW and PvP, Fractals, and other said content heavily outweigh casuals as a whole.Citation please.

Go to Lion's Arch and literally ask all the people sitting at the bank.

That's not proof of your statement.

And all people are just standing in place at EotN and all the people in the aerodome and in front of the fractal portal, and all the people making queues for the battlegrounds in WvW they're just there doing nothing? You think they're there to just roleplay? Look at all the people in Heart of the mists, are simply just standing there to do nothing, just admire the scenery? Even the most mundane of all the guilds I've been in, in the entirety of my time playing this do fractals. Just acknowledge that you're actually the 5% who want easier content. You can play the game however you want but at the end of the day, the majority of players aren't playing for the theme park aspect you're thinking you're playing in.

Literally you can go to an aerodome and you'll see it full of players. It's not as minute as you think it is. In fact a lot of those players have effects to their armors that often cause them to be walking lag spikes.

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