No argument here. I started MMOs with EverQuest, and had a few friends who were already players. So we had the benifit of multiple people banging our head against stuff til we figured it out. Having previos RPG vanilla experience helps some. But that's not something a game designer should be counting on.
The people who ramble on about easymode, and newbs are usually the people who do absolutley nothing of complexity in the MMO without reading up on the strat. Your top guilds and beta players usually do the real experimentation, everyone else reads the strat and practices executing it. That's no diffrent than a tutorial and, aside from the horendous timesink, I think most MMOs fail to provide a compelling experience for two reasons.
Player attitude: I'm a do-nothing nobody in real life, but I'm a rockstar here. I will make sure everyone knows how beneath me they are, and treat every question, even those not directed at me, as an opportunity to belittle somone.
Now this is not the MMO devs fault. But they can, and often do, make it worse by listening to the top 10& of the player base(progression wise) when tweaking/expanding the game.
Secondly, Unintuitive: Now slow down, I don't mean the clicking and pressing number keys for attacks. I mean the underlying system. I've never played WoW but in everquest there is a stat called Armor Class, or AC. Most single player RPGs will have an easy to understand armor system. Essentially for every 1 point of armor you have, x number of damage is mitigated. In everquest the effectiveness of a particular AC value takes hours of parsing log files, and then once you do, you see that what you have is not a linear progression but a damn near undulating curve. Pile on top of that the mystical "softcap". A point where the game mechanics themselves will let you increase the given stat, we'll stay with AC, however you are getting extremely diminished returns. Often this is not even "intentionally" coded into the game, but rather it is a result of odities in the mathmatic functions, given certain values. Even then, with this knowledge I still felt like I was "winging it" on picking an optimal minmax, between AC and my other stats... and lets take notice of the fact that all that, was for just one stat.
Piled on top of that one are so many more... How much cold resist does it take to shrug off the ice dragons AoE? How much will +10 agility increase my avoidance rate? The game will tell you none of this. In order to explain the stats as they are they would have to shatter the hell out of your roleplaying sense and take you where the game really is, spreadsheetland. Parsers and spreadsheets don't sound very adventurous to me. I've done it... I'm obsessive like that, but it doesnt make it good game design. I'd be a bit embarassed to show you the documentation on my PC for my pokemon team, and berry planting sites, and breeding strategy.
Players like me have something wrong with us, I think where i break out of the downward spiral is I have not turned my quirky willingness to accept the need for disecting a game with third party tools(isn't that kinda cheating?) into a fealing of superiority to those who refuse to put up with that shit. What I do circumvents shortcommings of game design, this is not something a game designer should be betting the farm on.
