The Lords of Difficulty

Imagine a million different lords with a million different trials -- "games", if you will. The one thing that every trial has in common is that it must take one thousand players, and from that choose one winner, one "best player".

Now, imagine each trial built around the game "Ms. Pac Man".

There's a trial where you just play Ms. Pac Man, a trial where you see how long you can play Ms. Pac Man, and trials where the first player to reach level 100 or 100 hours first wins. One trial requires players to play and beat one level every two hours, and the winner is the player that can endure this the longest. There's a trial that's just the first level over and over again, faster and faster. One trial measures who can pump in the most quarters, and another trial just assigns players a random score (highest score wins). There's even a trial with 20 ghosts. And so on.

Two of the trials are interesting, together. In one, the players just play normal Ms. Pac Man to see who can score the highest. In the other, the players are instructed for an hour on Ms. Pac Man, and how to be a better player -- then they see who can score the highest.

In one case the players are given no guidance, and in the other case they are given a lot of guidance. So which trial is harder?

They are the same. Both take 1000 players, and pick the best one. In fact, all the trials are, no matter how easy or hard they seem, equally difficult as long as they follow the 1 winner in 1000 players. Ultimately 1000 go in and one comes out the winner.

Syncaine responded to my post the other day, seemingly a little upset. I can't imagine why, all I did was make fun of him for saying vanilla WoW raiding was hard. Blustering aside, he did say that Naxxramas was not completed by a lot of players in vanilla WoW, therefore vanilla WoW raiding was harder than modern WoW raiding. The first part is definitely true, and Blizzard has admitted as much. Now, I don't agree on the difficulty part, I think old raids were easier but also far less accessible -- raids were bigger, required more organization, and the only way to gear new players was to power-gear them through old raiding content.

But let's take the argument as true -- that Naxx 40 was visited more than ICC is today, solely based on difficulty. There is still ample room for differentiation in the heroic raids. I did a heroic ToGC 10 the other week -- that's the "Heroic" version of the previous tier's 10-man raid. My group was just obliterated, despite outgearing the encounters. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in WoW -- much harder than any fight I'd experienced in any of the vanilla raiding dungeons.

As small as the percentage of players that cleared Naxx 40 in vanilla WoW, I'd say the percentage that will clear Heroic ICC 25 will be much lower. By that metric alone, modern raiding is more difficult than classic raiding.