Handicaps

In my D&D group, one of our DMs has a standing practice with character creation: you get to ask for something cool.  Some people go with a perk or a neat history, or even a feature that makes their character unique.

A couple of times, I've passed on the freebie.  And you know what?  Purposely limiting yourself can be a reward in itself.

More after the jump...

One of the common complaints that you hear in certain MMOs is that things are too easy.  "They're catering to the casuals," etc.  The kicker is...encounters don't generally change all that much, from game to game and dungeon to dungeon.  Over the last 10 or so years, we've seen the rise of accessible MMOs with player populations growing at astonishing rates, generally speaking...and the content, on a mechanical level, hasn't been dumbed down much at all.

The difference between doing endgame back then and now is that avenues of gaining information on fights have sprung up and streamlined the learning process significantly.  Used to be, guilds would start up a site to discuss strategies and figure out a way to defeat the Big Bad.  More and more of them popped up, and people combined their efforts.  Repeat this process a few dozen more times and you get sites with a pretty decent following of raiders knocking out a how-to videos and write-ups across the board.  People learn, communicate, and overcome the encounters.

This is not a bad thing.  But, it has taken the "learning the hard way" part out of the equation for raiding.  The result is a much faster process for getting from the first pull to farm mode.  It removes the time element required to tough it out and figure out the mechanics face-first, and that's okay.  It's called progress.

It also makes people bemoan the current state of raiding and slander/libel the current generation of raiders as newbish casuals that never had to earn their phat lewtz.  Not a good practice for community-building or player retention.

So, if you think raiding's too easy nowadays, here's a simple solution: don't read the damn guides.  Don't get any outside help.  Put together a group of like-minded people and go in blind.  Hammer your head against the wall the hard way, like you used to.  I like to do it that way, on smaller group content, and it's pretty entertaining.  But, I draw the line at "will my ignorance cost us an hour's worth of work" and the like...there's "we're gonna just wing it" and then there's "Goddamnit Leeroy."