Good difficulty is important

[RazerXPrime]

13 minutes ago, (NSW)mrEkli said:

DE has done many modifiers and challenges before. They could do them again. Puzzles included with Spy and the old Raids/ Trials.... There would be reasons to do it though. Nightmare mode and stalker acolytes being more common would be nice too.

I've seen some people talking about raids. Were they fun? Why were they removed?

[Loza03]

1 minute ago, RazerXPrime said:

I've seen some people talking about raids. Were they fun? Why were they removed?

I'm not sure about fun, but they were removed primarily because not enough people played them and they broke all the time. Almost every update (not just big mainlines either, the small ones too) would cause a progression-stopping bug. Jordas Verdict was especially infamous for this, I'm told. It was costing DE a great deal of dev time to fix something a number of people comparable to Conclave every time they wanted to add or change something. Conclave, at least, is stable and they can leave it for the one or two percent of people who play it, but it wasn't worth their while to spend that much time on something that few people used.

[(NSW)DracoHouston]

6 hours ago, Genitive said:

It would be easier to tell if steel path was a good game mode. Right now it isn't, so not many people play it, or just play it once to complete all the nodes and never come back.

Part of the problem IMO is that you only get the mod/resource chance boost for running things in Steel Path, and the actual reward comes from doing farm runs in a really boring way. Only reason to pick Steel Path over normal while farming some node is to get bigger pack sizes. You get absolutely nothing in return for the increased demand on your gear, nor your additional time invested on running non-endless missions. And frankly, you'll not even get steel essense doing it. Barely even a trickle, let alone less efficient than cycling spawns through a lootframe killbox.

I really liked Steel Path, but the way it is now is mostly pointless to play. 

[BigKahuna]

On 2020-11-01 at 7:34 AM, Nailclipper said:

What's important is that any game needs to be challenging because it makes people keep playing. That's what I mean by "good difficulty", that the challenge is always there for the players to experience and enjoy. It's by no means "hard", though some could actually be "hard" on disguise (Is Fall Guys actually hard? I don't know since I've never played it).

I dunno.  I like playing hide and seek with my 6 year old niece, even though she once tried to hide behind a lamp pole that was 2 inches thick.  

 

I don't understand how people can't wrap their minds around the idea that things that are easy to do can be enjoyable?  People like watching sunsets, that's pretty easy as long as you have eyes.  People like reading books, watching movies, complaining on the internet.  You don't even need opposable thumbs to do any of those.  

 

I suggest changing your title to "Good difficulty is important to *me*".  

[Loza03]

1 minute ago, BigKahuna said:

I dunno.  I like playing hide and seek with my 6 year old niece, even though she once tried to hide behind a lamp pole that was 2 inches thick.  

 

I don't understand how people can't wrap their minds around the idea that things that are easy to do can be enjoyable?  People like watching sunsets, that's pretty easy as long as you have eyes.  People like reading books, watching movies, complaining on the internet.  You don't even need opposable thumbs to do any of those.  

 

I suggest changing your title to "Good difficulty is important to *me*".  

I think when people say they want more difficulty, they usually mean they want something that's got a higher skill ceiling. The two do have a correlation, but they aren't the same thing. Devil May Cry, for example, still has a high skill ceiling on Human difficulty. It just so happens to also have Dante Must Die, and the game can still be fun at both levels, because its skill curve helps it be so.

It's one thing to casually enjoy an experience, and quite another to try to become better at it. Read books with more complex subject matter, begin analysing film language, learn critical thinking skills. Figure out that Tom and Jerry are not paragons of stealth. But if you can't become better at all, because of a fairly arbitrary limit, then one of the core intrinsic motivations for play is also lost. It's far from everyones, to be sure, but a great deal of people derive a lot of enjoyment from getting good at a game.

Games with high skill ceilings tend to be hard because it allows for it, but it's correlation, not causation, as Steel Path shows. Just doing some numerical tweaks makes a more difficult game, but it doesn't make the game more satisfying to play or learn in and of itself for the most part, because it's just the same cheese strats, except now you can't even goof off or take it easy.

[(PSN)thegarada]

No game you play for hundreds of hours will be hard. What is more important is that it should be engaging. Meaning, you do not semi afk and nothing happens. 

[(PSN)Yggranya]

18 minutes ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

No game you play for hundreds of hours will be hard. What is more important is that it should be engaging. Meaning, you do not semi afk and nothing happens. 

In warframe, some people are "semi" AFK and all the enemies die and they get rewarded. If you ask me, that is even worse and as far from engaging as can be. Of course it's their own choice, but it's too bad they always join a public group to get more enemies. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that most people play solo, and if they group up, they do it with like-minded individuals.

[Nailclipper]

2 hours ago, BigKahuna said:

I dunno.  I like playing hide and seek with my 6 year old niece, even though she once tried to hide behind a lamp pole that was 2 inches thick.  

 

I don't understand how people can't wrap their minds around the idea that things that are easy to do can be enjoyable?  People like watching sunsets, that's pretty easy as long as you have eyes.  People like reading books, watching movies, complaining on the internet.  You don't even need opposable thumbs to do any of those.  

 

I suggest changing your title to "Good difficulty is important to *me*".  

There are many aspects of games or why people want to play them (watching movies is not gaming). You can play MMOs because of the social aspect or because it fulfills your gambling addiction.

But broken down to its simplest form, the universal aspect of games is challenge. Just take a very simple single player game: Sudoku.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

35 minutes ago, Nailclipper said:

There are many aspects of games or why people want to play them (watching movies is not gaming). You can play MMOs because of the social aspect or because it fulfills your gambling addiction.

But broken down to its simplest form, the universal aspect of games is challenge. Just take a very simple single player game: Sudoku.

"A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool.^[1]" 

^{Wierd....I didn't see challenge in there. Only "play" "entertainment" and "fun". Lol}

^{https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game}

[Nailclipper]

5 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

"A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool.^[1]" 

^{Wierd....I didn't see challenge in there. Only "play" "entertainment" and "fun". Lol}

^{https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game}

You don't see it because it's not mentioned.

Let's take a game a lion mother would play with her son. You would argue that there's no challenge there and it's jus a fun activity for both parties. But there actually is, the cub is challenging his mom to see how far he could push her and how she would react. He would then be awarded with knowledge on how a lion should behave.

You could also play Warframe with your niece as an educational tool for her and you can use that as an argument for playing Warframe. But we aren't going there, are we?

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

1 hour ago, Nailclipper said:

You don't see it because it's not mentioned.

Let's take a game a lion mother would play with her son. You would argue that there's no challenge there and it's jus a fun activity for both parties. But there actually is, the cub is challenging his mom to see how far he could push her and how she would react. He would then be awarded with knowledge on how a lion should behave.

You could also play Warframe with your niece as an educational tool for her and you can use that as an argument for playing Warframe. But we aren't going there, are we?

It depends on the person, that's why I understand if someone doesn't wanna do endurance runs or 5x3s. 

There's like 20 to 50 thousand people playing the game, and you can't possibly know what's in all their heads.

[Nailclipper]

29 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

It depends on the person, that's why I understand if someone doesn't wanna do endurance runs or 5x3s. 

There's like 20 to 50 thousand people playing the game, and you can't possibly know what's in all their heads.

Of course, I didn't say otherwise. Challenge doesn't equate hard, which I mentioned in the original post.