GothicKratos wrote: I'll apologize beforehand if this wasn't what you were implying, but.... raisinbman wrote: Any game I design would be accessible so kids/old people/disabled folks could play it with ease. What the what? It's not accessible to those folks? How? I mean, maybe Evelyn is gifted by the MPQ Gods, but she plays perfectly fine and she's four, just as well as she plays My Talking Angela or Tap Titans or Stick Hero or any of the other mobile games she plays on her tablet/our phones. ==== As for the topic at hand, if you mean 'If you were designing MPQ, would you care [...]', then I would lean toward no. I wouldn't concentrate on evolving difficulty, I would create sets of milestones and obstacles to overcome (harder nodes, different node types, different tiers of characters, etc etc etc). If we're genuinely talking about creating games in an overall sense, I'd say it depends on the game's genre. An FPS? No, probably not, I'd focus on having functional multiplayer content (both online and offline), over functional difficulty. If I'm making a traditional RPG, well, in that case, there's a pretty specific difficulty curve to follow, so I'd do that. Am I trying to make the next Dark Souls? Shooter Hell/Bullet Storm? Difficulty can mean a lot of things. Fire Emblem? Baroque? Lunar? Final Fantasy II? Point being, if you want to talk about difficulty, we have to talk about the different types of difficulty and why they fall into each type of game and why different types work and don't work. There are very few games that are difficult because of reasons other than what are called "artificial difficulty" (think Final Fantasy mega-bosses - it makes you feel like it's an accomplishment by slapping big numbers on a big dragon) or "manufactured difficultly" (think Fire Emblem stacking the deck from the get go with 10:1 battlefields - they pit you in situations that you are not in the odds of winning to begin with), and a lot of people even argue that games like Dark Souls are not "truly" difficult because the obstacle is simply learning mechanics and patterns, then the game is no longer difficult, but a matter of enacting that knowledge (and then there's the argument of whether or not that is "skill" or simply a battle of knowledge and/or reflexes - and applying that same argument to games like Street Fighter and Call of Duty).
raisinbman wrote: Any game I design would be accessible so kids/old people/disabled folks could play it with ease.
firethorne wrote: I would only focus on difficulty as a consideration in PvE. For PvP, difficulty shouldn't be a focus. But, that does come with the caveat the PvP I'm talking about is a match against another player, like Hearthstone. Unfortunately for MPQ, neither "pure" PvP nor "pure" PvE truly exist. They are hybrids, often resulting in the worst of both worlds. In MPQ PvP, you will never fight a human. You fight an AI controlled team selected by a human. This is the biggest problem as it makes the most difficult things not actually playing, but timing when you play and when you buy shields so the computer won't lose your points. In my ideal PvP, the only time you would lose would be if you played a match and lost (to another human). For PvE, MQP has other problems. There, difficulty placing is completely dependent on other players. You can clear every node flawlessly, and still not place anywhere near the top if someone else is grinding. In my ideal pve, your result is in no way influenced by the actions of other players. To be fair, MPQ has a bit more of this these days, like ddq and gauntlet. But, I'd still like to see it become the majority of PvE.
TLCstormz wrote: Update : Losing my team of 94 Ares / Astonishing Wolverine / 2* Daken to 70 DocOck / 71 Rags / 74 Panther in DDQ........ As usual, on the computers FIRST TURN, they got a whopping THREE back to back Match 5s. Well, actually, that's not really "whopping", since Moonstone / Rocket Launcher / Rocket Launcher got 4 on me back to back, last night. But, I digress. Panther ended up doing Battle Plan into DocOck Green strengthening the strikes into Rage Of The Panther. Then a Match 4 blue. Guess what? Mostly PINK left on the board. Yay. I make a pink match, and low and behold a green match 4 sits in wait for them. Blah blah blah, my team dies a fiery death, even after using a team up. I am now sitting around waiting for 3+ hours to use some of my best characters for ANY other game mode, out a team up, frustrated and disappointed, etc etc etc. Again......in what universe is that "fun"? Or fair or sensible or realistic or what a customer wants to experience on a consistent basis, when they boot up this game?
babinro wrote: Generally speaking, I think one of the MAJOR failings in game design these days comes from a fear of providing the player options to customize their game experience. I think just about every game should be like Don't Starve, Civilization 5, or any EA Sports game. These games give players options to customize the game play rules and have tons of sliders for players to make the game mindlessly easy to practically impossible. That's my comment in general....these rules obviously can't apply to COMPETITIVE PVP games like MPQ because of obvious unfair reasons. The way I'd apply this philosophy to MPQ would be to offer a wider array of events for all player types. For example I'd run multiple DDQ style non-competitive events with set difficulty level PvE's. Have one event with most nodes ranging from level 5-50 for the 1* players, have another ranging from 30-75 for the 2* transitioner, have another ranging from 50-100 for the 2* established player and so on. All events would run simultaneously and have rewards suitable for that progression part of the game. These rewards would naturally be less enticing than those in truly competitive events like traditional pvp and pve's but they'd still exist for those who just want to relax and use different characters.