Defining "challenge" in WoW

Community General Discussion
1

Anyone interested in a discussion where we try to define what is and isn’t a challenge for future development?

I’ve seen a few threads where people have responded to others, claiming the OP ‘asked for single player content and then complained about it’.

What do you consider challenging in this game?

Not challenging:

  1. Pandaria class attune / challenge – tedious
  2. Mage Tower – tedious, boring
  3. Torghast-- boring
  4. Mythics-- tedious, annoying
  5. Raids-- tedious, annoying, boring
  6. Dragonflight courses - uninteresting
  7. RNG stuff like farming RNG mounts

Challenging / fun:

  1. Lucid Nitemare
  2. Riddler’s Mind Wyrm
  3. Hivemind
  4. Some of the Hunter’s special pet/quests
  5. Legion Class Mounts (not really, but you see what I mean)

I think what comes of this: “challenge” for me could be defined as something that requires clues, reasoning, thought, consideration and is story-driven – not things that require you to fail a handful of times to learn a sequence/to get people to coordinate.

It seems like “learning a sequence” (Raids, Mythics) has come to be equated with skill, which really has nothing to do with it. How do we create content that addresses this?

What really was a “challenge” for you?

2

I would love for more solo challenges to come back, especially with an emphasis on your class.

Legion was great for this, but something like the old “Tier 0.5” quest chain would be great to return as well.

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Almost looks like “challenge” is subjective.

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4

The things you consider challenging are the stuff you can just find a guide for and do in 30 minutes?

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You won’t be able to create a list of criteria on what makes content challenging because it will vary between everyone.

What one finds tedious may be a challenge to others and some may take on those tasks with self-implied impediments to make them more challenging (e.g. undergearing the encounter).

There is probably someone out there right now challenging themselves to shave half a second off their best dragon racing times.

6

Doesn’t this statement also apply to raid? Find a guide, do it in 2-3 wipes?

(If you are finding a guide and doing it in 30 mins for the things I listed as challenges, you’re doin’ it wrong? There are entire communities dedicated to finding these things out, which is how a guide becomes possible!)

Also, “almost looks like Blizzard thinks that ‘coordinate 5-10 dopes’ and die 5 times to learn a sequence = content/challenge/fun.”

I’m not sure more people nowadays would define challenge/fun in this manner. It’s been discussed since… TBC? that something other than raid is needed.

Also, no game dev develops content “by thinking fun is subjective”. How trite a thought! If they aren’t developing content that is aimed at what they think is fun for players, guess what? They go bankrupt.

Sounds like we can do better by offering some suggestions?

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Actually playing the game doesn’t count as a challenge? Not sure how someone is supposed to take that seriously.

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The mage tower wasn’t too bad, there were a handful of mechanics that you had to learn and you had to have a decent understanding of your class. A lot of bad to mediocre players raged over this because you had to do it on your own and couldn’t be carried by a group.

I loved how people got so angry over this. It’s funny when a player finds out they aren’t as good as they thought they were.

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Those puzzles are just clicking on stuff, there is no chance of failure or DPS checks/mechanics

So no, a mythic and raid isn’t just read a guide and go in and 1 shot it

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This is either bait, or someone who isn’t the target audience of the MMORPG genre.

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Fun is actually subjective, because different types of players have different ideas about what challenge they would find meaningful. Research needs to determine what sort of players will be engaged by different sorts of challenges. Failing to recognize this means that development will not be targeted toward “players”, but rather toward some idealized player that the devs have decided to serve.

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The only problem with this kind of challenge is it’s easily solvable via google and if you do it that way it’s hardly a challenge and more of just a commitment at that point.

If you are part of the solving community I’m sure they are having fun, but I’ve seen a lot of the solved puzzles and if people didn’t share the answers the vast majority of people would never see some those rewards.

Not really sure why something involving skill doesn’t make it a challenge. What you seem to like it content that you can deterministically works towards completing or solve via puzzles.

Both of these things are challenges in their own rights though, but they’re obviously designed for different playstyles. I like games that challenge me to get better so if Blizzard did lots of mage tower content that required me to play well to beat I’d probably enjoy it.

I also do like deterministic gameplay as well though and tend to try to complete a game as much as possible. I ain’t finishing off all literally all the content in TOTK but I have focused on specific elements of it to tackle before I beat it. It’s less a challenge in terms of technical gameplay, and more of just a matter of figuring out how best to proceed.

Puzzle solving is a thought exercise that is typically not technically challenging so the moment you google the solution you’ve done 95% of the work. Bosses are designed to challenge your ability to do certain things. Simply being told what to do doesn’t result in immediate victory.

You’re right that everyone reads up a guide though, but bosses are also very self contained contrnt. Anyone could be given a boss encounter to work on and should be capable of learning and progressing through the fight. Most people are content to be given a found solution and perfect executing it instead though.

Those open world puzzles Blizzard makes…like they’re cool and all, but they’re not immediately obvious content one can easily come across and then figure out the next logical step. People could play WoW for decades and never know some of those puzzles even exist.

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Defining challenge in anything is easy. The more effort the more challenging. Its challenging to get into a mythic raid guild, its challenging to do a mythic raid with a pug group, its challenging to get rank 1 in pvp on all classes, its challenging to get away from an abusive relationship that you have with a game like wow.

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Anything “story driven” is mechanical. Go to WoWhead, look up the quest, follow the guide. While no doubt there’s a small fraction of people that will do it blind, most won’t. They’ll just do it.

That means for anything to be at all “challenging”, it has to be up to the player executing the tasks involved, not simply checking of boxes a curse RP that takes too long.

Skill is absolutely a “thing”. Simply evident by watching videos of folks doing the Green Fire boss at 460 iLvl, but myself, after at least 200 tries, unable to do it even though I was over 530. I know there are better players than I am. The M+ World Firsters are not successful because they’re “try hards”, they’re actually accomplished players at this video game.

The steps may be mechanical, you may well know what’s coming, but combined with RNG elements, you still have to be able to deal with all of the distractions and things happening all at once (“cognitive load”) while trying to get your rotation and DPS up and effective.

Losing to these encounters is absolutely frustrating. More so than just killing some boss and you mount not dropping, but because you’re there, you consider yourself capable, you know it can be done, but apparently not by you – since after several tries, it’s not done.

Those are the only challenges in the game, where you need to kick you gameplay up a notch, know the timing of things, be in the right place and the right time and know how to get there, and keep the damage ticking on the mobs before they kill you.

Reading a guide and running around the world, is not challenging. And not everyone likes puzzles (I have not tried the Lucid Nightmare – it doesn’t honestly sound appealing to me). Puzzles are a different skill set.

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Sounds like you prefer puzzle games over games that require skill and practice.

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I think a lot of the responses in this thread misunderstand what skill is.

  1. Several people mentioned DPS checks = skill, which is laughable and has nothing to do with skill in the state of the game today. Get gear, face roll, pass DPS checks. (How many Mythics have you been in where someone was yelling at someone else to “just push buttons you ”?

  2. Skill isn’t wiping 10 times to learn a boss. Skill would be one-shotting it based on everyone’s advanced expertise in your class. The real question: why is content created on the basis of the former not the latter? Wiping 10 times to learn an encounter by trial and error (think LFR) is tedium. Not really complaining about this but making a point: putting in excessive mechanics doesn’t challenge skill. It forces you to die. Do you understand that this creates artificial timegating? The content lasts longer due to your willingness to die excessively, which is why raids have been trite since TBC. Shouldn’t we ask for better? Isn’t this timegating old and stale? Yes, we all understand that we’re stuck in a place where that drives the gear hamster wheel, but that doesn’t mean this approach to game dev can’t and shouldn’t change!

If you are part of the solving community I’m sure they are having fun, but I’ve seen a lot of the solved puzzles and if people didn’t share the answers the vast majority of people would never see some those rewards.

  1. Well, yes, this is the point. Multiple people here said “just look up a guide” and then say it isn’t skill because you can. (lol Imagine you didn’t have a raid guide!)

Anyway, think of it like this:

If you could stop the game now and make changes – what would you recommend as “fun” and as “challenge”? In what new ways can the hamster wheel be driven?

There is considerable and old evidence this is being struggled with, and lots of different and “alternative content” were attempted:

  1. Garrisons
  2. Class halls/quests
  3. Pet dungeons
  4. Visions of Org/SW
  5. Secret mounts/quests
  6. Toghast (ugh)
  7. Covenants and that content (ugh)
  8. Dragonriding
  9. Forbidden Reach 1.0. 2.0. 3.0 / Key Vaults

Recommendations to your boss at Bliz are required.

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Just because something requires repetitive practice and a lot of trial and error doesn’t make it not challenging. It’s actually the opposite. You have a strange definition of challenging OP.

Learning the piano is challenging. It doesn’t matter that people before you have written guides on it and “you just need to play these notes, simple” doesn’t make it any less challenging. The fact that it requires repetition and practice doesn’t make it any less challenging. Some players have more skill than others and they may find certain instruments or pieces easier than others, but it’s still challenging.

Likewise learning a specific boss fight or dungeon run takes a combination of planning and practice to pull off correctly. I don’t see how someone could consider that not a challenge. Some will find certain fights easier than others based on their individual skill level, but really it’s still technically a challenge no matter what.

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Just because something requires repetitive practice and a lot of trial and error doesn’t make it not challenging.

Loled, thanks for that and proving multiple points. You mistake challenge for skill, etc.

Anyone can ‘play’ the piano with enough repetition (tedium). But if you know music, you know that some people just cannot make it – they might depress the right keys on the piano, but they don’t do it with skill or talent. See the difference?

Challenge literally refers to competition or contest, e.g, your expertise vs someone else’s. A challenging piano piece is one that confronts the pianist’s skill – not one that requires a user to hit two keys as fast as they can 180 times without making a miss. See the difference?

Thus in a lot of content, raids, mythics, etc. you aren’t measuring skill or challenge – you’re banging the piano 180 times. I’m astonished people equate that with fun, skill, challenge – anything but tedium.

Trial and error isn’t challenge. It should not be a challenge and it should not take skill not to stand in the fire!

Anyway, I’d prefer to discuss the point, not your semantics. Got anything to contribute to making the game better?

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I don’t see how raids are “hitting the same key over and over” but following a wowhead article to get the worm mount is somehow “composition”

I just think you don’t understand what skill actually is, and that’s making you make these terrible analogies.

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Play with mittens.

There, a universal definition.

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