Difficulty Inflation and Meta Toxicity

PC General Discussion
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I think this is a generally interesting topic because it happens in every game that I’ve played recently which can be metered in one way or another. First, two definitions, difficulty inflation is the tendency for a game’s playerbase to devalue the difficulty of tasks as more people beat them, and meta toxicity is the tendency for a game’s playerbase to reference a thin range of possibilities as being optimal regardless of how many actual options there are.

One of the best examples of this is a naked, broken sword Dark Souls (or adjacent game) run. It shows true mastery over the rhythm aspect of the game but also has this unfortunate side effect of rendering a fully geared, properly played ‘as expected by the developer’ run of the same game as being “easy mode” despite nothing changing mechanically in the game itself. Beating Melania from Elden Ring naked with a pot on your head becomes the standard versus beating her in your fully geared armor unless you go the other way and beat her without moving because you’ve built a wall build that can withstand all of her blows. See the problem?

This leads to meta toxicity. Playing your way is allowed but why would you do it? Yes, you can beat Amygdulla with a reasonable weapon, but who does that anymore? If it’s not a stick from the backyard are you even a gamer? This behavior is real and this encroachment appears in so many games where feats of mastery become the baseline everyone benchmarks on. I don’t know why it happens so if anyone does, feel free to tell me why, but functionally enjoying a game in the way you want is also admission that you’re somehow not skilled at the game.

Obviously this impacts Diablo 4 but I want to talk about the topic itself as a gamer rather than Diablo 4 itself because it’s obvious; when The Pit came out getting to 80 was impressive and now the inflation is so bad that if you’re not at 140 you’re a scrub despite this being far and beyond anything in the base game at every torment level possible. It’s so silly there’s little to discuss there, but what isn’t silly, is the fact that many more builds can do pit 100, 110 and 120 with much greater ease but are also ignored because they can’t do pit 140 which is an extremely narrow band of success.

In general games start to really suffer, all of them, as this toxicity continues through the system. This has hit every game from Pokemon to Resident Evil. Can you do a no-shooting parry only run? Can you beat the Final Four with only level 1 pokemans? I do understand that the challenge industry is real, that Twitch exists, and that this is big money as entertainment but how do gamers take this information and separate it from reality? I know people will come in and say, “You’re responsible for your own thoughts!” or something aligned, but in truth we’re all humans and we’re all susceptible no matter how strong-minded we think we are so we’re all affected by this phenomenon.

So two questions:

  1. What would you do or like to see done to reduce this impact on gaming in general?
  2. How do you think the future of games will be impacted if this goes on unhindered?

I think there will come a point where the expectation for gaming will become so high it kills gaming itself because no one will be able to make a game that isn’t consumed by the Twitch industry in under 24 hours of release.

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  1. Don’t turn your franchise into something its not.
  2. Some franchises will lean into it, some won’t.

I never thought of Total Diablo Mastery when I engaged with this franchise.
To me Diablo was always a set of accomplishments we all shared, by being unique (builds) in the way we got there.

Did you beat the campaign.
Did you hit level 99.
Did you drop a Shako.
Did you craft the Staff of Herding.
Did you craft your full set.
Etc.

We all did these things our own way with our own builds. To me that was Diablo.

Diablo 4 introduced Total Diablo Mastery, focused on Leaderboards that actively push players into the mindset that you are describing. It’s a design decision. It never made sense to me that the players who call for ‘pinnacle content’ are the same exact players who complain when a boss doesn’t die in 15 seconds. Why are you steering the franchise towards that in the first place? Why are you turning it all competitive, because of content creators? There’s your mistake.

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As an oldschool gamer (born 1979) I would take it even a step further: The problem is not the games but the cottage industry of streamers around it nowadays.

I rarely watch videos of runs or challenges, so I don’t feel compelled to achieve the same feat. And even if I see somebody doing some amazing feat, my first impulse is not “damn, now I need to get to that level” but “good for you”. The person clearly invested a lot of time and effort into gitting that gud, and I’m not willing to invest the same amount of time.

So the question is: Why do you feel compelled to play a game in any other way than the most fun way to you? Sometimes I have the motivation to go to pit 150, sometimes I don’t. If that makes me a scrub, I couldn’t care less.

Sure, I also follow build guides, but for me it’s more about time efficiency. I don’t want to spend too many hours finding out what works best. I want to get to the fun part as fast as possible and then as far as possible. And if the grind gets too long I play something else.

Don’t constantly compare yourself to others without being willing to invest the same time and effort as them. And remember: A lot of gamers just play the game, without watching Twitch and Youtube. They are just having fun until they don’t.

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Who produces the meta builds? The players… Each season there are nerfs and buffs and the the players, centered the streamers AND their followers, work to gamecraft the new paradigm. It is a hive mind approach. The streamers learn from each other often with significant contributions from their followers. This produces various blueprints which are then tested in the following weeks of the season. Each season there is a new cycle with new meta classes and builds. It doesn’t matter if you reach 140 or 150 early or later in the season. Some people have lots of time while other people have professional careers and family responsibilities. Late bloomers may eventually have a superior build to the early bloomers.

From this perspective there is no such thing as “meta toxicity”, and “difficulty inflation” is irrelevant. It’s about selecting the various blueprints which arise each season, constructing the build while making modifications as new data is found, and testing that build according to the seasons current difficulty level.

People who are averse to study and research and want to “go it alone” may feel anger and frustration at being outclassed. Humans are social. We are pack animals. We learn from each other and knowledge is built upon layer by layer over generations.

The hive mind approach to Diablo is a natural human problem solving reaction and human evolution has benefited from it’s superiority, No matter what you may come up with to deal with “Difficulty Inflation” and “Meta Toxicity” it will be overcome by the hive mind.

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There’s an audience for competitive. There are those who get off on being the best, above everyone else.
I do not think that was ever Diablos majority audience.

When I sift through all of these discussions over the course of the past three years. The endless discussions about balance and this class/build can do it but mine cannot etc. I do believe it all boils down to the audience that Diablo held closest.

Players that want to share in these accomplishments with one another. Not against each other.

Putting this competition in, these achievements that require META builds to accomplish. That’s what players have been pushing back against from the beginning. IMO maybe without even knowing it.

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D3 is the ultimate example of the problem. But it even goes back to D2.

There’s people that love D2 for what it is, but there’s people that love D2 that want more challenge, that its too easy. That absolutely factored into D3 devs putting in Inferno difficulty and then “doubling it”.

Then D3 you have people than think the top level difficulty should be a struggle, while others think it should be farmable on any ol build. So you have this loop where people ask for buffs, get buffed, then as they climb difficulty they realize they can’t survive. Then they ask for monster nerfs or survivability buffs. While others ask for more difficulty to compensate. Then they plateau out and ask for more buffs again. The only thing that stopped the vicious cycle is technical limitations of the game being able to go higher than gr150.

I’m one that gets bored when its too easy. Its already frustrating how trivial t12 is.

One problem is that if they put into the pit system that 150 is possible to choose if you can make there, players believe they should be given the tools to hit 150. If the pull down menu listed pit 200 or pit 300, people will believe they should be buffed to do pit 300 regardless on the effect of the rest of the game.

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Developers have a serious part in this development. Where in “the good old days“ the bragging rights players competed for were just for doing community imposed challenges, not things dictated by the game. Games like D4 nowadays offer very visible goals that are far outside purview of casual play unless the casual player follows the pro players guidance.

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Beating melania naked is the exception, not the rule and that’s because souls games require skill and not gear.

The opposite is true here. Gear and class balance matters more than skill, and because gear and balance matter more, people tend to gravitate to the easier and better paths(classes).

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Maybe not the majority audience but probably the core audience. That is the audience that played D2 for years. It’s the audience that the hive mind is part of. The majority, the casuals, are here on the forum and Blizzard only pays them slight attention. The core audience, which in included the streamers and their followers, is where Blizzard goes to for feedback.

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And they have built a Content Creator Simulator for this core audience that has drove the majority away.

Right now they are having their cake and eating it to.
Millions come back for expansions and the campaign, then leave again.
Everyone else sticks around and purchases content? for seasons.

Question is how long do people keep coming back for a game that wasn’t built for them.

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Going back to the beginning there were people who were like the content creators and their followers they just did not have a YouTube platform. Instead they were on message boards and forums. Casuals would come back for expansions, play for a few weeks, and leave to play other games. Nothing has really changed.

The game was designed to appeal to casuals and serious players alike. There are multiple difficulty levels that casuals can navigate the campaign and leave to play their other games. They have been coming back for decades. There is no reason to think anything will change.

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Well Blizzard has 3 years of data, so they don’t need to think. They will know.

The people who came back for a looting experience with VOH just got a crafting experience with LOH.
So next go around players know to expect a crafting experience. That alone is massive.
Do players want to come back for crafting Diablo or has the experience shifted?

Doubling back to what goals are set in seasons that influence the entire way we play.
When you say nothing has changed, but is has.

Players can’t just come back and join in YOLO.
If they come back they need to get on that bandwagon. Crafting. META.
These are no longer choices, these are the game.

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I think I hear what you’re saying.

But games have always been like this. At least in my perspective.

I remember playing old Call Of Duty or lots of games and it is natural that players will gravitate to the more powerful things. The best Guns, the best Builds.

Nowadays it’s just on your screen all day. Being streamed. It’s more in your face.

You can’t blame the playerbase.

It all comes down to how stuff is designed.

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I feel the same way.

I remember early D3 when stepping into Inferno was a huge difficulty spike and you actually had a reason to grind gear on the previous difficulty just to keep trying and failing and trying again to break into Inferno. Then a few patches later Inferno turned into a casual stroll - beer in one hand, mouse in the other - and it just got boring and stale.

Same thing’s happening now, but it feels way worse because of the broken builds they refuse to fix due to all the whining. My biggest disappointment with Blizzard was when Spiritborn dropped - the gap between it and other classes was so massive and they just did nothing about it, it totally killed my desire to play.

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1: This isn’t a thing that will happen (see below)
2: yes and no (see below)

I’ve written reviews and taken interviews from devs. I have been in PC gaming for decades and started with atari.

What you’re talking about it a cultural thing - yes gamers are very much a subculture. The trait of challenges getting more difficult for bragging rights is just…human. It’s an offshoot of the need to improve on a thing. That it is toxic with a subset of unpleasant people is also…just a human society thing (think about the “what do you do for work?” or “keeping up with the Joneses”)

And really, people who find the things they enjoy will choose to support the things they enjoy. For some, they’ll hide what they enjoy or minimize or lie about it, (you can show yourself as offline if you want in most messaging,k so noone needs to know you’re rocking Hello Kitty Island Adventure, if that’s a thing you think you should be ashamed of).

But generally, as the decades pass, human society, at least western culture, is starting to value less what random strangers judge you for and people are choosing what they enjoy. They’re using the scoffing and nasty comments as a way to proactively curate their social circles. Which is a pretty smart thing to do and fairly efficient.

The kids are doing better than we ever were and I suspect their kids will do better still. We’re a work in progress, remember, and we have millions of years to go.

In summary: Yes, it sucks, but humans do bad things what they shouldn’t. We’re getting better at not doing the bads, but it’s gonna take longer than any of us here will be alive for. Gamers doing it is just because gamers are human and it being tied to game objectives and recreation is because gamers are a subculture that revolves around gaming.

Bonus points to you for asking for a change, that’s great, but your best bet to make a change is to be the example you want and let people follow you. We’ll get there…eventually… it’s just going to be a long road.

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Same year and a lot of your thoughts sound like mine.

Blizzard made a huge mistake to announce a “Last” level. Means pit 150 or leaderboard.
This should all be really open end.
Then there is this crappy math problem. Multiplication everywhere. Exponential increase is nothing you can really control if you think in T1-12 difficulties as the game. And i believe, a lot of devs think of this game in that way.
Which is a good thing per se but not a good thing if you include these bloated activities calles pit and leaderboard.

I also think, that D4 streamers are a cancer for this game and franchise.

And at last we have our playerbase.
In the 90’s not everybody could afford a PC. People growing up with Diablo1 or 2 were people with access to a PC. I would say, more adults/children with maybe academical backgrounds or access to such kind of education. Not in general but overall more of these.

And these games were new. A complete new genre.

Now everybody can play this game and with D3 RoS this franchise got more in line with it’s newer playerbase.

More power, more of everything, faster and much more simple.
And yeah, i would argue, finally Diablo got exactly the playerbase it was made for in the first place.
Reading a guide (or watching a streamer, who tells me what to do (to be king of the hill) and i do exactly this and consider this fun. I have only to follow not to understand, why this is so.
A easy playerbase if you give them what they want.

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Excellent post. I would pressure Blizzard to work more on balance. You can definitely play your way but you could also eat dog turds off the sidewalk in front of the 5 star Michelin restaurant.

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I was born in 1980, and my thoughts are almost identical to yours. I play games to have fun, not to “keep up with the jones’s”

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I think it’s a mix of live service, seasonal games and the usual craziness driven by social media.

Gaming companies have deliberately created pressure to go fast and FOMO for missing out. They make way more money with live service games, selling battlepasses, subscriptions, or mtx. No more box games you can play and repeat at leisure for years. Now the next season/raid release/expansion will render whatever gear or loot you’ve accumulated over the past few months irrelevant.

Once you need to go fast, and your efforts are periodically devalued if not completely erased, meta chasing is natural. How do I get to see and play all the new content when I don’t have a lot of time and my skills are decidedly average? I go check a build guide so I can go farther on a throwaway toon and suboptimal gear.

Gaming companies know average players are their bread and butter and they collect a ton of metrics on which players do which activities. KMMOs are notoriously tuned so average players need P2W, and you can spend thousands for top-tier gear. Blizzard has committed to no P2W so they make the game easier. Once a game is tuned for average players, streamers blast through at light speed. D3 could be face-meltingly hard on Inferno. D4 really can’t right now because of Mephisto at T10. You can’t face him in lower torments so they painted themselves in to a corner. Kind of shockingly stupid really.

Honestly, I don’t think this impacts Diablo or any other single player game to the extent you suggest. The real toxicity is in MMOs, where players get kicked from groups for not being in FOTM builds, going too slow, making mistakes, or even missing a skip in a low key. That’s assuming they’ve got the gear to be invited in the first place. FFXIV cracked down on group chat hard to shut that down. I quit WoW because of the toxicity so I don’t know if they ever got out ahead of it.

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Easy.

Make a game designed as a game rather than a bare minimum joke to sell something.