Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
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Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#2I didn't read past the 4 or 5th paragraph, but I'll give you the reason: Gamers are afraid of Easy Mode because you alwaaaaays have an excuse for getting killed on the hardest level.
You've got skill. But there is such thing as sheer dumb luck that makes you step out from behind that building at exactly the right (wrong?) instance and you get taken out by that sniper. If you're playing on Easy, that's just embarrassing. Same scenario on "Legendary" and you've got a good excuse :)
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#3I didn't read past the 4 or 5th paragraph, but I'll give you the reason: Gamers are afraid of Easy Mode because you alwaaaaays have an excuse for getting killed on the hardest level. You've got skill. But there is such thing as sheer dumb luck that makes you step out from behind that building at exactly the right (wrong?) instance and you get taken out by that sniper. If you're playing on Easy, that's just embarrassi…
The author posits that hardcore gamers are against the inclusion of an easy mode entirely, not just that they are unwilling to play these modes.
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#4By focusing only on the older fans and locking out the young ones, comics severely wounded itself. By focusing only on the skilled players and locking out the inexperienced ones, pinball killed itself.
Videogames are lucky. They can have it both ways - easier difficulties as a low barrier to entry, and harder difficulties to entertain and challenge the veteran players. This is a great advantage of videogames, and it should be thoroughly embraced.
s/videogames/your_platform|business_model|etc
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#5Easy mode isn't for the hardcore gamers...
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#6This is actually pretty thoughtful: the thrust of the piece is about status signaling, and how easy mode diminishes the status of the people who beat the game when it was hard. He compares it to climbing Everest, which "hardcore" mountaineers claim is being cheapened by making it safer and more accessible to less experienced climbers.
Something which should be good if the ostensible reasons for participation are true (e.g. games have an easy mode so more people can enjoy them, or fewer die on Everest so more people can appreciate its splendor), in reality are seen as bad because the ostensible reasons are false, and we're just signaling.
In that case, making that signal easier to broadcast (I beat megaman or climbed Everest), cheapens the signal of those who have invested in sending that signal before it was cheap to send.
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#7This is actually pretty thoughtful: the thrust of the piece is about status signaling, and how easy mode diminishes the status of the people who beat the game when it was hard. He compares it to climbing Everest, which "hardcore" mountaineers claim is being cheapened by making it safer and more accessible to less experienced climbers. Something which should be good if the ostensible reasons for participation are true…
Another point you could take from the piece is that people love being able to broadcast status signals. For example, adding badges/achievements/status to a social site can boost participation (see Yelp's elite, Stack Overflow badges).
It can be dangerous if you drive away your elite users (who are probably 80% of your activity anyway), but it can also be used to bring in new users and retain customers.
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#8By focusing only on the older fans and locking out the young ones, comics severely wounded itself. By focusing only on the skilled players and locking out the inexperienced ones, pinball killed itself. Videogames are lucky. They can have it both ways - easier difficulties as a low barrier to entry, and harder difficulties to entertain and challenge the veteran players. This is a great advantage of videogames, and it…
The problem is when you include an easy mode, you normally don't have some types of challenges in the game. Take God of War, when you go for "hard mode" all that changes is the hit point pools. It's challenging only in the most limited concept of challenging and in the easy mode you kill gobs of enemies and quickly go though the world, in hard mode you stand around slowly attacking the same AI doing the same things for longer. What most gamers like is close to one hit kills with challenging foes and environment not to feel like you are attacking a brick wall with a ice pick.
Now if you add enemies to hard mode, require some sort of finishing move, or add extra ambushes that's different. But when you build a game for easy mode, and tack on pointless challenges it just feels cheap.
PS: One option would be to have extended death, where you "kill" enemies but they keep attacking for a few seconds but if you walk away they quickly die. It makes the world feel more real and adds more challenge without slowing down the pace of the action.
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#9Easy mode isn't for the hardcore gamers...
Ideally you should read an article before commenting on it.
Re: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode
#10I actually do have a reason for disliking the inclusion of easy-modes in video games. It takes development time away from making a quality challenging gameplay experience. Unfortunately, since the casual market is larger than the hardcore market, it is smart for the developers to focus on the easier modes that cater to this casual base of players. The end result is that hard modes in games generally feel more liked some quick and dirty hack to make enemies super resistant to attacks or perfectly accurate aiming machines, or just throwing more of them at you.
Perhaps if more developers took time to create a well-crafted and challenging gameplay experience it wouldn't bother me so much. More complex objectives or smarter enemies. Maybe that's a tall order, but it seems like in most cases, difficulty is a decision between fun, easy and unsatisfying, or frustrating, hard and maybe (or maybe not) rewarding.