If progression is based on participation, what is the role of difficulty?

I’ve been lucky enough to participate in the alpha for Heroes of the Storm recently, Blizzard’s new ‘Hero Brawler’ (Blizz pls, it’s a MOBA) and it’s been a pretty good  experience. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who’s been put off by the daunting learning curve in the past. It streamlines many of the typical MOBA features to the point where they retain much of the fun while sacrificing a lot of the difficulty.

This is no surprise from Blizzard; if there’s one thing they’ve consistently targeted as a company it’s accessibility. Many players see this as a fault, that lowering barriers to entry will somehow taint the pristine waters of gaming, but personally I believe it’s a philosophy vital to the continued success of PC gaming.

This idea shot straight to the front of my mind when it was brought to my attention that the loot distribution in Destiny is not based on the skill of the player or the difficulty of content, a concept alien to those of us accustomed to the meritocratically ‘fair’ progression of MMOs.

This struck me as counter-intuitive at first, not rewarding skill while using FPS mechanics far better suited to creating skill based content and tracking the competency of players. Considering the problem from the other direction, it’s difficult to imagine what the benefits would be outside of PvP matchmaking.

It’s like every reward in Destiny is a participation medal, all that is required is that players show up. From the way some players lament ‘welfare epics’ you’d think the server structure would implode in the presence of such a travesty, crashing into a nightmarish singularity of ‘casuals’.

That’s an attitude we PC lovers could do with shaking off; we can’t act as despotic gatekeepers while simultaneously bemoaning a lack of innovation in a deteriorating genre. One or the other is fine—I know some people like their games super-duper-double hardcore, and while that’s brilliant and should be celebrated we can’t pretend it’s a demographic that embraces change.

Our demographic is older now, and has never been more diverse. The only way we can grow is by being open to the opportunities this presents us. If we keep the drawbridges raised we’ll wither and die while everyone else finds new and exciting ways of being awesome.

Meanwhile, players are still hooked on Destiny and a whole new crop of bright young things are experiencing the conditioning we MMO players love to hate, but without the necessity of following a linear path to climb to the next rung. It looks like the need for progression as we know it is a myth; the carrot doesn’t need to be behind a complex puzzle, we just have to know it exists somewhere.

I like this idea, I like it for the reason I like most things in MMOs—it means more of us can play together more often. I’m so exasperated with leveling and progression mechanics that make playing with friends more trouble than it’s worth. Since the new World of Warcraft expansion launched I’ve barely played with anyone I know; once someone gets a few hours ahead you might as well be playing a different game until the next patch. The person I’ve played with the most is my wife (bawdy jokes aside), and we have specific characters that we only play together, we’ve done exactly the same quests. I’m sure this is a familiar tune for most.

In a game like Landmark it would make sense to have the extrinsic rewards the subject of RNG as opposed to content type, in a game where success is so subjective there’s not really a sustainable ‘fair’ method of distribution that makes sense. Since the value of any one item in the game is only that which an individual puts on it, what would loot progression even look like? If distribution cannot be sorted by content type or linear progression via a power curve, what role does difficulty play in the mechanics of the game? Player made content is another story, of course, but it could be that participation is the only necessity for success in Landmark (for a given value of success, at least).

What could this mean for EverQuest Next? Could a participation based reward structure thrive in a more structured virtual world? If reward structures aren’t based on difficulty, what could we expect instead? Since we know gear and progression are based less on numbers and more on builds, achievements and collections we could very well see a more egalitarian approach to loot drops.

Why not? If endgame isn’t a steady process of acquiring bigger numbers then the value of any particular item becomes more a matter of taste than necessity. If (as we hope) there’s more than a single method of growing our characters, why not open it up to the broadest range of activities possible? If EQN is about making choices based on what is happening in the world, how can we reconcile that with always deciding to pursue content based on its difficulty rather than what furthers our in-game agendas? Perhaps the most difficult content will be that which furthers a specific agenda the most, or maybe the difficulty will be based on our ability to maximize the potential of our characters, allowing us to do more with the same tools.

Maybe I’m just talking crazy, but the nature of accessibility, difficulty and progress via decision making has been playing on my mind. With the little we know about the nature of EQN as a game it’s easy to tumble down the rabbit hole of speculation, so please take all of these ideas with a pinch of salt, but I think the new year will bring revelations that will cause some controversy.

I look forward to discussing them with you, and I hope that whatever they may be, they allow more of us to play together more often.

LockSixTime