3.2 Mount Changes and the Myth of "Difficulty"

I don't know if you've noticed, but Chess is getting totally dumbed down.

They've made it so that everybody gets to use the same pieces.

I know. It's totally stupid. Garry Kasparov works for years honing his skills and perfecting his abilities, but now they've changed things so that any noob can pick up a chess board and use all the same moves as him.

Just how easy are they trying to make this game?

And don't get me started on the double-move rule for pawns. They totally nerfed the early game. But no, casual players didn't have the skill to make the same pawn move twice in a row.

Umm ... yeah. So in case it's escaped your notice, Blizzard has made mounts easier to get (or will be in 3.2) - regular mounts at 20, Epics at 40, Flying at 60 - with cost reduced accordingly.

Naturally the hardcore community are up in arms about this.

Or rather the "hardcore" community are up in arms about this.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the problem with WoW is not casual players (of which I am assuredly one) or hardcore players (of whom I have met many, mostly very nice people who take the game seriously and aren't dicks about it) but wannabe hardcore players.

Wannabe hardcores are the bane of WoW. These are the douchebags who ask you to link DPS meters in low-level instances. These are the guys that think that DPSing means doing as much damage as possible, completely ignoring party buffs, debuffs, or little things like whether you pull aggro. These are the guys who got boosted through every instance and still think they've "cleared the content". These are the guys who think that their skill at the game is measured by their character's gear. They're the guys who tell you to "hurry plz" in instances, because they don't actually want anything except the loot at the end. They're the guys who say that people should have to "work" for in-game rewards, like playing the game for long enough to hit level 30, or ground enough gold to buy epic flying somehow means you possess anything other than lots of free time.

Wannabe hardcores whine every time Blizzard makes the game "easier". And by "easier" I mean "less time consuming". Apparently getting your mount at level 20 will magically make it easier to heal Razorfen Kraul. Being able to fly in Hellfire Peninsula makes it easier to avoid the bombs in the Blood Furnace.

If the only metric by which you can judge the difficulty of a game is how many arbitrary hoops people have to jump through to get stuff done you suck. It does not take skill to gain XP. It does not take skill to farm gold. All it takes is time. If you don't realise that, it's because you have no idea what a "challenging" game is actually like.