Galefury wrote:If people want to stop playing after a few hundred hours and move on, that's fine. People can, will, and should determine for themselves when the game stops being fun for them, and this point will be different for everyone. There is no one "correct" difficulty, there isn't even one correct difficulty ramp.
Would you believe that this is something I agree with you 100%?
I, for example, am not trying to beat everything with everything because I think everyone shold - I'm fully aware that the task is so time consuming that it goes way past "healty". I'm turning every rock over to see how particular runs will look to people attempting them, and to see if the challenges they pose are the challenges which the player is decently equiped to handle. Or if the hint's of what he needs are solid enough to get him experimenting in a worthwhile direction.
If there are unintended difficulty spikes, and it seems everyone agrees that there are implicitly or explicitly, I'm trying to help determine what's causing them. Not balancing the classes/items/preps, and not smoothing out the learning curve adds more mandatory time to an already very time consuming game - and I don't want anyone to spend, or have to spend, hundreds of hours of pure frustration time on top of the hundreds of hours of exciting gameplay and reasonable "hooking in" learning frustration.
Most people will be happy with only managing the vicious dungeons with 1, or 2, or 3, or 9 classes, but I feel, for reasons of goodheartedness, stubborness and apparently OCD, that someone ought to see what attempting any of those runs would be like for various players before the game is shipped. And I also think that for all the confusion and annoynce me (and some other vets to a lesser degree) can cause - we want a good expirience for all sorts of players with all sorts of ambitions, and we are certain, or we believe that can be achieved.
In other words - yes, I've played it for what seems like forever, but I can, by this time, tell which parts of that forever were enjoyable, which were justifiably frustrating, which were pure glee (I'm not letting Fabulous treasure go either!), and which were a complete waste of time for anyone. I'm sure people will get hooked on this thing, and for awesome reasons, but if measures can be taken to allow players to get to where I'm now skill wise in a more reasonable time - the game would not lose anything. Not HELP in a hamfisted way, just allow in a way that doesn't tax months of their life untill they stumble upon important stuff by accident. Because the game is still challenging, and I'm learning something about it's million interactions every day.
And I still don't have faithless on shifting passages, think about that one.