Adjusting massively multiplayer online games to casual players has had a draining effect on the genre, according to Red 5 Studios founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern.
In a guest feature on MMORPG, Kern writes about working to make World of Warcraft's user interface, quests and leveling easily understanding to new players.
Blizzard Entertainment has announced the opening of beta registrations for “World of Warcraft: The War Within,” inviting players to explore new subterranean worlds beneath Azeroth.
Danish from eXputer: "Despite Blizzard's attempt to give a fresh new spin to World of Warcraft, some fans still seem to be stuck in the past."
HG writes: "Blizzard is usually pretty bad at keeping secrets, but the company somehow managed to keep this one under wraps until now. Plunderstorm is a special limited-time event that’s basically World of Warcraft’s take on the Battle Royale genre."
Just about everything has become "too easy".
I remember the first time I played Star Wars Galaxies and I wanted to quit because it all seemed so overwhelming.
In SWG you could play a completely non-combat character and achieve the same success as a combat profession. My wife spend her time in the game running a droid business and almost never did any combat. You had to find resources, which were random and shifted every couple days. Then you had to harvest them and maintain those harvesters constantly. Then you could makes the components, which required several factories (factories and harvesters were player crafted, like everything else)
Once you had all that you had to find a place for your store that was easy to get to. You had to actually travel and visit the shop to get the items.
On top of all that, you had to make a quality product. You had to have top quality crafting stations and resources.
Everything was crafted, and crafters were essential to the game. Crafters became well known on your server.
Sadly that started going downhill when WoW came along. And the latest Star Wars MMO is the result (even the SWG NGE to some degree). TOR doesn't even have a pilot profession like SWG.
Not claiming that WoW is the reason or that its a bad game, but its success is what changed the genre IMO.
In terms of "difficulty" I really don't think its changed as much as complexity.