Artificial difficulty and mechanical difficulty differ in how a game challenges the player. Artificial difficulty arises when the game feels unfair, often because obstacles are created in ways that don’t depend on the player’s skill or knowledge. For example, adding a tight timer to a complex puzzle can create artificial difficulty. The timer forces players to rush through something that would otherwise require careful thought, making the challenge more about fighting the clock than solving the puzzle itself. It doesn’t feel rewarding because failure comes from an external pressure rather than the player’s own mistakes.
Mechanical difficulty, on the other hand, is rooted in fair challenges that rely on mastering the game’s systems. If a puzzle requires logical thinking or precision, players can overcome it through practice and understanding. The game sets clear rules, and success feels earned because it’s tied to the player’s abilities and growth.
The key difference is that artificial difficulty frustrates by introducing external or arbitrary challenges, like a timer, while mechanical difficulty engages players by rewarding skill and effort. WoW refugees asked for Criterion for years. Now it’s here and the FFXIV community hates it. There is a reason for that.
EDIT: I had a rough build on my monk in the mid level 50s so I had a boss take me over 10 minutes to kill where a single mistake could of forced me to restart the fight. It took a bunch of tries and I fixed the hole in my build afterwards, but a timer would of turned that from an extremely rewarding victory to an impossibility not because I didn’t have the mechanical skill to accomplish the feat, but because I would have been artificially blocked from my accomplishment.
So you feel when there is a timer, you don’t have to play well?
Because obviously you don’t have to master the games systems with a timer. Playing well is apparently “unfair” if a timer exists. And a timer existing means any gameplay does not rely on a players skill or knowledge
A timer literally just adds another layer of fake difficulty. It’s not really difficult to understand. Take LetMeSoloHer for example. Bros an absolute mechabical beast soloing some of the hardest content scaled up for multiplayer.
That’s an accomplishment and why people tune in to watch.
The timer adds the fact you need to hit a certain level of throughput to be successful. That’s a challenge, it’s not ‘fake’ outside of the random words you are throwing out that have no meaning. Elden Ring is also, and it is very weird that this needs to be explained, not a tab target combat rpg. You’ll never be soloing a raid boss with perfect parry timing because that’s fundamentally not how the game works. For similar reasons I can’t capture Queen Ansurek in a pokeball and use her to battle Dadghar.