I’ve been hanging on to a link over at Kill Ten Rats since the month started. Entitled simply, MMORPGs Are Too Easy, Ethic touches on the ease of playing a Massive game after a complainy post in their forums. Says big E,

While I agree that MMOs are pretty simple to play, at first, they do actually get complicated as you gain skills and levels. It’s part of the “easy to learn, difficult to master” theory. The fact is, to the veteran MMO player things are simplified, but to the new MMO player they are struggling just to get the movement figured out. I have always been of the belief that the technical nature of a massively multiplayer online game tends to put some restrictions and limitations on the ability to put a lot of skill requirements in that you might find in a FPS game. I do, however, think there is a lot of room to add more “skill” to today’s MMOs.

The question here is really one of accessibility vs. challenge, I think. As we’ve discussed numerous times around the ’sphere (a term that I’ll go on record as saying I like), WoW’s success can be directly related to the game’s low barriers of entry. It puts the fun up front, and doesn’t make you wait for hours and hours before you’re actually playing the game. Veteran massive players who hear newbies complaining about getting to 60/70 in WoW can’t help but laugh; It’s easily the ‘easiest’ game to reach max level in, across the genre.

Which is why it was great, at MMOGIG 1, to hear the opinion of someone who did find it difficult to play through WoW. Cao was the gentleman’s name, and he was at the meeting primarily for the purpose of networking, getting to know people. Even still, his presence was immensely useful as an outsider’s view. He was a right intelligent gent, with loads of single-player experience under his belt, and he followed our mindless ramblings without a jot of effort.

That view was vastly outnumbered by the ‘hardcore’ viewpoint, of course. It’s a problem I’ve noticed in a lot of our discussions; we simply don’t want the same things as the vast majority of game players. The hardcore have more time, or interest, or are simply crazy. :)

But, in a good way, you know? EVE Online will never be ‘mass market’, but that’s for the best. In the recent discussion of EverQuest 2’s appeal, the phrase “we wouldn’t want them in the game anyway” came up a bunch, discussing the b.net kiddies who swarmed into WoW when it launched.

The truth, of course, is that there are bratty kids playing EVE and incredibly serious groups of players in WoW. The character of EVE, though, requires a level of seriousness at the higher levels that is missing in WoW. You can eventually raid dungeons in WoW simply through sheer effort over time. Skill is an impermeable barrier, of course; the highest-end dungeons require that raiders actually have the strats, experience, and technique to overcome them. That said, WoW puts the vast majority of its content within reach of 5 and 10-man groups.

Is this ‘easy’? Cao would say no. There’s still a great deal of effort required to get to that content. Bioshock is a title coming out this summer on the 360, been in development for years, and it’s highly anticipated. If you take your time with it, it’s slated to be about 25 hours of content. That’s perhaps a fifth of the time it would take you to reach level 70?

That, then, is the only barrier that WoW still hasn’t broken down. Time. It takes a great deal of time to get to max-level in a Massive game, and that’s just not something most folks are willing to do. Until the kids playing Club Penguin grow up and start paying for their own monthly fees, the average American citizen is not going to ‘get’ 20 hours a week of playtime. After all, TV is so much easier. ;)

The ‘mass market’ MMOG that’s been on the mind of a lot of commentators not only won’t be something ‘we’ like … will it have levels? Will it require ridiculous time commitments? Will it have xp?

There are still lots of barriers to drop, believe it or not.