Narrowing the gap between casual and power gamers
You know the type.
The minimaxer. The person who sits around with spreadsheets, crunching every possible combination of traits and skills until they've come up with the ultimate class build.
That beloved stereotype from pen-and-paper RPG's is alive and kicking in pretty much every MMO running. Massively's touched on minimaxing and the problems it leads to before and it's a fair assumption that we'll do it again.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with it. It's your game and you can play it however you want. But minimaxing impacts the game in significant ways for hardcore and casual players alike.
Having a large number of players willing to minimax to be as uber as possible in PvP entails a trade-off. All that optimized strength virtually ensures that their PvE suffers -- it's way too easy. No challenge. The end result? They either get bored with PvE content or bored with much of the game itself. To offset this, the devs 'enhance' the PvE content which affects casual players or most anyone else who doesn't minimax.
There's quite a downside for players who don't want to minimax and prefer to make their own more realistic choices (read: those who don't abuse game mechanics and create flavor of the month characters), or are simply casual players. PvE content becomes difficult to handle and not everyone wanted this additional challenge added to their casual gameplay. Thus, the solo player slowly heads toward extinction.
Imposing draconian restrictions on player choices isn't an appealing option, and no one likes the mighty nerfbat. So what's the solution to this problem?
This is a question that Zubon at Kill Ten Rats tackled, by proposing a flexible player-made class system. Indeed, he even went so far as to outline a possible development plan and weighing the pros and cons to his proposed system. He has some great ideas, and even if you don't agree with Zubon, his post will probably make you re-evaluate some of your own views on classes in MMO's.
