NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9486972" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Agreed! But even approachability is not a 100% unalloyed good. This has been a learning point for a number of MMOs. The pejorative term for making options that require less mechanical engagement is "dumbing down," and much of the time that term is pure insult with nothing to back it up. However, from personal experience, I know that this actually can be a serious problem if it is taken too far. FFXIV's developers (particularly producer-director Yoshi-P) have explicitly said that they went too far in removing the "stress" of gameplay, making it "tasteless." (These are translations of the original Japanese terms, so they may not perfectly convey the intended sense; I know you would know better than I.) I was personally on the receiving end of one of those changes in the previous expansion, where my favorite one went from being arguably the single highest-engagement "job" (=class in D&D terms) in the game to being dramatically the lowest-engagement job, severely outstripping even the two jobs that had previously been held up as the "simple" ones for folks who just wanted to zone out while playing. This was well-received (albeit not by me!)....for one expansion, because the old version really was crufty with some needless elements, so simplifying it SO dramatically was a breath of fresh air for them. But when it went essentially completely unchanged with the launch of the current expansion, people were Upsetti Spaghetti--not because they suddenly wanted an inaccessible class, but because the accessibleness of this job had been mostly by making it vacant. People enjoy achieving mastery, and you can't really get a feeling of mastery if there's nothing to learn. Fortunately for me (and many others who liked the old version of this class), the new caster, Pictomancer, brought back the same overall gameplay experience, even though it uses a radically different aesthetic--so I've almost completely shut up about my complaints, ironically at exactly the same time the fanbase at large has started loudly complaining!Point being: "Accessibility" can be done well or poorly just like any other design goal. And accessibility actually IS a design goal, whereas "make more money" is not. Accessibility really is a very important thing and should be considered for all sorts of stuff. But it should also not be emphasized to the exclusion of other virtues, like players having a feeling of mastery if that's what they desire (and many players do!), or diversity of mechanical engagement, which allows many different tastes to be catered to by a single game.Only up to a point! Which is what the logorrheic sludge above is trying to articulate. Accessibility taken too far actually reduces the breadth of appeal, because it turns off the folks who want to feel like they have mastered skills and proven their abilities. It is very hard to design things that are dirt-easy to learn but a significant challenge to master. It is usually more productive to offer some things that are fairly easy to learn and easy to master, and other things that are somewhat challenging to learn but quite challenging to master.I never said they could be totally separated. My point was that people so often in these conversations treat things like "make more money" or "attract lots of players" as though they were 100% exactly the same sort of thing as "make accessible classes" or "provide diverse playstyles." The previous two are production goals, things the creator certainly wants to achieve and which will feed into their choices of design goals. The latter two are design goals, which may be wise or unwise, and may be fulfilled well or poorly. You cannot design "make more money"--but you can design "make accessible classes," a design goal chosen because it will help pursue the comparatively abstract, non-design goal of "make more money."</blockquote>

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