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Lost Pages of Taborea: Is Runes of Magic too easy?
It seems things are never quiet in regard to Runes of Magic these days. If it isn't holiday events or new world bosses, it's large-scale balancing issues. Players may still be plugging away at title achievements this Halloween, but the event has been going long enough for people to settle into a daily routine and get back to everyday affairs. In other words: it's something to do, but the shiny is starting to wear off. I took advantage of this lull and decided to do a Q&A on the overall difficulty of RoM. It's not a huge issue; it's more like a constant issue that creeps into other discussions on class balance or the memento system. And after the attempted change to a percentage-based mana cost, it's definitely worth consideration. Is RoM too easy? The question seems like it'd be a quick one-line answer, but there are many ways to view it that would yield different outcomes. What are players' goals? How can a change to one system affect the whole game? How will future updates affect any changes made today? Is there an answer to whether RoM is too easy or not? Well. Let's find out.
The Daily Grind: How easy is too easy?
Difficulty in games is a contentious issue at any point. Brian "Psychochild" Green recently had a musing on the topic of difficulty as it applies to most games, but even that discussion stops shy of discussing MMOs, where multiple difficulty levels are rarely an option. Designers can make harder events, but if the rewards are the same as something easier, no one will bother making life harder on themselves. That makes the "hard mode" more than just an increased challenge, and sets up a hardwired and sometimes arbitrary challenge-to-reward ratio. On the flip side... well, it's not fun to have the game just hand everything to you. We want to feel as if we're accomplishing something when we play. So today, we ask you, what's too far in either direction? What sort of penalties or challenges make something so ridiculously hard it's not worth bothering? By the same token, how simple does something have to be before you're annoyed at the ease of it all? What levels of difficulty can be tinkered with without making the game unpleasant, and what elements of gameplay are best kept at a set level?
