(05-20-2014, 05:00 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ma...Difficulty
However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty.
Emphasis mine.
The "difficulty" that existed in early 2000s era MMOs was not challenging. It was not something you could get better at with practice. It was a logistical hurdle. That's not what I define as difficult. Beating a DPS check is no more "difficult" than getting +12 and masterwork and perfect stats on all your gear in TERA. Neither of these things require skill or practice, they simply require grinding. That's not true difficulty.
True difficulty is going up against a chess master. Yes, you're going to get curbstomped and hard. But if you train, play and practice for years, you have the ability to actually get better than that chess master and beat her. Logistical problems don't get better unless they get solved. Practice doesn't fix it, and thus these things are not true difficulty. Having to maintain a roster of 40 raiders isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to grind for resist gear isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to spend weeks ignoring the fifth boss in a raid so you can gear up from the first four that you've got on farm and can kill with half your raid asleep isn't hard, it's fucking annoying.
Annoying and hard are not synonymous!
No, they're not. Â But remember, it wasn't just logistical. Â You may have had enough DPS to beat the raid boss, if one or two people in your group just didn't break their rotations and come back in differently than they did.
It was that squeeze that was most annoying. Â People scouring your combat log and calling out the few drops of DPS we were missing, starting huge fights with people for things like that. Â So you might easily have had the DPS and still couldn't do it because people failed.
On that note, why are people bringing up the gear grind so often? Â I try to avoid it; I don't consider it part of raiding. Â I definitely didn't think MC was hard because beforehand I needed to get a set of fire res gear. Â Mostly I don't think that because getting the fire res gear wasn't even that hard.
