The Mystery of Designing Difficulty

Back in the heady days of mid-2005 there was an interesting exchange on the official WoW forums. Some players began posting about the upcoming raid, Blackwing Lair, and how, well, the players were good enough to beat anything the devs could throw at them.

A blizzard poster responded in disbelief : did players really believe that the existing raid content was an unsuccessful attempt to best the players? It's not difficult to beat the players if that was the intent. It's hard to challenge the players, and of course that's the goal of Blizzard's raid designs.

Yet, the same exchange takes place every time Blizzard reduces the difficulty of an encounter.

Forum Poster : Blizzard changed the difficulty of encounter X from 9 to 6! 9 wasn't that hard, but blizzard had to make it 6 because of all the noobs crying.

Blizzard Poster : The difficulty of encounter X was supposed to be a 6 (or at most a 7) like every other boss in the raid instance except the last one. It was 9 only because we forgot to change a variable.

Forum Poster : Blizzard just wants to make it easy so every noob can walk in and do raid dungeons.

I recently started raiding and I think Blizzard is getting very good at setting the difficulty of the bosses. We're an average guild and we've not spent more than three nights on any single boss. They avoided violating one of my biggest game design pet peeves (a challenge can be different or hard, but not different and hard) and the "different" fight (Blizzard calls them "gimmick" fights) is fought on rocketpacks across two airships, which is a nice change of pace, but it is not too difficult.

I just wonder why it's so difficult to understand, that Blizzard might like to tweak difficulty to get it right just like they do with everything else in the game.