Is World of Warcraft Too Easy?

Games have become far too easy to play over the last decade and World of Warcraft is no exception. Do you remember a time when you actually had to participate in the games plot or use your brain to solve mysteries in games?

Take the Final Fantasy series for example. Final Fantasy 1 gave almost no direction and left people guessing and figuring stuff out on their own. Final Fantasy 3 presented unique challenges. Final Fantasy 7 was a lot easier but still had some challenges in it. Final Fantasy 10 basically played itself out like a movie as people playing the game sat and watched cinemas with limited input required on their part. It keeps getting easier and easier.

In the MMORPG line of games, let's start with Everquest, a game I consider created the popularity of MMOs (yes I know there were other games before and during that time).

In Everquest there were forms of permanent progression, no voice chat, and a lot more players in a raid (as many as 72). In Everquest not everyone was entitled to experience a majority of the content or receive superior items in the game unless they earned it.

A player might hit max level, but then you didn't automatically go collect epic gear from raids players didn't earn the right to participate in and then reroll an alt and do it again. There was an entire alternative experience system where players could still group and gain experience points to apply toward their character to improve it.

Players couldn't immediately access all raid content either, they had to go through several lines of progression, flagging, and keying. Kind of like how WoW started off with attunements but way more difficult.

Here is an example of how one of Everquests expansions worked for progression:

To access the next tier of content players had to complete tasks which required anywhere from 1 group of 6 to full on raids which was either 54 players or 72, I forget but that's not the point.

any player first had to earn access to the zone and then had to beat the bosses which were severely more difficult than those in WoW.

The bosses at the top were reserved for elite guilds and Sony didn't feel everyone was entitled to all of the content and items like Blizzard does, but Blizzard likes their money and wants to keep players interested, which is its most serious flaw that's probably unavoidable.

Top guilds would spend months trying to beat the lower level tiers in Everquest, whereas, all of WoW content from release was beat in 2 weeks on my server. Guilds in Everquest wouldn't even have access to those zones in 2 weeks, let alone be done with it. So people say Ulduar is coming out and it's going to be hard.....right. If Ulduar isn't beaten within the first month of its release you can slap me up and call me Susy.

Then there's World of Warcraft, no one knows if it's a PvP or a PvE game and when they balance classes for one they mess the other up, there should be two different versions of the game, imo.

Once a player hits level 80 they aren't required to get anymore experience, the worst thing they have to do is farm reputation which took me a week to get exalted with Argent Crusade, Knights of Ebon Blade, Kirin'Tor, and Wyrmrest Accord.

Then there are side factions with daily quests, like Sons of Hodir, but now they made tokens that can be purchased from the Auction House. So once the initial quest is done, all that's left is to go purchase tokens and be done the same day.

Then I took my 80 and got it all of its heroic gear, reputation gear, and badge gear (220 EOHs), that took a week, DONE.

From there, I joined 10/25 man pick up groups, did you know you can get the best armor in game from 25 man PUGs for Vault and Obsidian Sanctum?

So then all that's left is Naxxramas and Malygos, which are PUGable, but the desired items don't always drop.

What happens is the game is basically over at this point and maybe a player is lucky enough to not have one of their items drop and can farm it indefinitely so there's a purpose to playing.

So I just spent a month and my character is done. Sorry, I spent 5 weeks, it took a week of casual play to go from 70-80. What would I have accomplished in the Planes of Power expansion? I quite possibly could be flagged to go to Tier 2 content. I'd still be working on Alternate Experience because improving your character via experience after max level was a requirement for raiding.

Another terrible thing World of Warcraft does related to their resistance of allowing permanent progression to exist in game is completely null out their previous expansions.

They do this by making the new gear 2x as powerful and raising the level cap by 10. In Everquest, expansions raised level cap by 5 if there was an increase, added a bunch more alternate advancement, and a bunch of new raid content.

When guilds progressed they couldn't start off in the new expansion without farming some of the items from the old ones. Our raid schedules oftentimes consisted of raiding the latest 3 expansions because upgrades could be found in all of them, there were only minor increases in gear from expansion to expansion.

Sure, the newest expansion had the best gear but the older expansions had gear that was really good and usable in the new expansion.

Imagine how fun the game would be for new players if they could raid Molten Core, Mount Hyjal, and Naxxramas while collecting gear that would still be good, ie, Molten Core epics would still be better than Heroic 5 man gear.

In summary, most of us aren't challenged enough in real life, so we go to games for a challenge. The games are no longer challenging and everything is given to us like welfare and everyone has the same opportunities in game regardless of how much effort they put into the game.

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