User:RevelationOrange/difficulty

Games should not be hard. They should be challenging.

I think alot of people mistake hard for challenging, and there is definitely a difference. Increasing the difficulty of something by making it harder generally means putting some arbitrary restriction on that doesn't really challenge the players. A good example of this can be found in many rpgs, or, at least, rpgs are a good way of explaining my point.

Say you have a boss. When you get to this boss, it is about 15 levels higher than you. You're in for a tough fight. Now, you're doing okay, but at about half health, the boss suddenly uses "Superdivine Judgement". Nothing happens. Whew. You tear into him some more, he uses it again. Suddenly, your entire party is at 1 health, and it's the boss's turn. He uses "Swipe Of Hitting Everyone At Once", and whoops, you're dead. Now say you grind for a while, get your characters and skills up there in level. You go back to the boss, only now, you're 20 levels higher than him. The battle's going fine, until he gets to half health. Superdivine Judgement comes, followed shortly by his Swipe, and your party is once again dead.

Is that challenging? The battle is entirely out of the player's hands. Granted, there was some seriously bad luck going on there, but still, the party could be level 10238912 and that might still happen.

A game should be challenging, it should have some restrictions, but nothing that takes it out of the players' control. Guild Wars does an excellent job with this, forcing you to utilize 8 skills and work with your team. WoW, for example, lets you use as many skills as you can fit on your bars, and more if you get addons that give you more bars. That seems a little unbalanced to me, regardless of how fair they try to make each skill.