I thought it would be interesting to get a conversation going on this as we do have a very diverse community with different expectations and varying playstyles. That said I appologise if it has been talked about in another thread previously.
One of my biggest disappointments in WoW came when they decided to dumb down content to allow others more easy access. It was in one of the first raids designed (I appologize but I am terrible at remembering names in real life as well as in games) where you had to go to the upper level and clear it. The last boss would drop 1 key, and rarely none at all. Everyone going into the instance below needed a key so it turned into a grind to get everyone that item before attempting the instance. Was it a pain... of course but when complete there was a sense of accomplishment. Several months later they changed the content so the last boss would drop up to 4 or 5 keys at a time to make it less time consuming for more casual players to do the content.
I know there are many examples of this and many stories to accompany them. For me it was a letdown in the sense that something we spent so much time on and took pride in the grind of accomplishing it had now been deminished through this action and something that we could take pride in accomplishing as a server first and being the first one in the lower instance was now so much easier and took so much less of a grind to accomplish.
I know and understand this made content more readily available to the casual player but it just never sat right for me.
Pantheon has stated it will be a difficult game with some aspects being more difficult than others and I think it is fair to say that we as a community understand this and are looking forward to it. But how does everyone feel about this aspect of dumbing down a game as it evolves to make certain content easier for the casual gamer.
You're right. There are several threads discussing this
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1681/ea-thinks-games-are-too-hard-these-days
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3204/serious-question-about-easy-mode
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2352/the-biggest-reason-mmo-s-are-easy
I agree with you. EQ did exactly the same thing. Hated that for the same reason you stated
Aradune's blogs are a great source of information with stuff like this. I don't think he mentions it as "dumbing down" but he talks about the wannabe wow killer games and why they failed in many ways or what cause their death.
Thank you to both Durp and Fancy :)
As they have both kindly pointed out, this topic has been discussed quite a bit and still has existing threads open to joining, so I will need to close this one down and direct people over to them to consolidate information and keep within the forum guidelines.