The one thing I don’t understand is wanting a game to be hard to play, period. Like you could see hordes of people during the StarCraft 2 beta complaining about such atrocities as being able to select more than 12 units at a time, more than one building at a time or the pathing AI not being a brain damaged zombie that was drunk out of it’s mind. It is the reason the game’s macro crutches - MULEs, Chronoboost and Larva Inject exist at all. Because people cried about basic things being too easy to do and that if basic things were easy skill would suddenly disappear from the game, which is an absurd claim: If that multitasking ability and attention isn’t spent on fighting the user interface, it will eventually be spent fighting the opponent.
Why? Why should things be unnecessarily difficult? Isn’t it much better for the difficulty to come from the opponent?
Consider a simple Bunker rush: Making a Barracks quickly and constructing a Bunker next to the opponent’s expansion and throwing Marines in there is not a difficult task - if you have a brain you can do it pretty much. It’s strong and retardedly easy until the opponent learns to defend it. That’s when the ball game changes: Bunker rushing profitably against a competent opponent is ridiculously hard, probably harder than defending the rush is. Still, the key thing here is where the difficulty comes from: The opponent playing against you, not from the difficulty of translating your thoughts into ingame actions.
Similarily, I cannot really accept how, in current StarCraft 2, Terran is ludicrously hard to play compared to the other races, especially Zerg. The reason this is not okay is because it is a whole faction, not one build. Terran can play a very execution-heavy infantry-based style or a more positioning-oriented mech-based build. Mech is nowadays basically unviable and infantry builds too weak, but playable. This leads to one faction/theme/aesthetic choice out of a total of three to have a huge barrier to playing at all. If both infantry and mech were viable, you could play Terran in a way you see fit, which sounds better for all involved. (The Zerg similarily have multitasking/harassment-heavy styles and positioning-oriented ones with less taxing execution and attention requirements)
Thankfully, we play fighting games with roster sizes that are absurdly huge. When the roster is 40 characters big, is there any reason at all to not basically cater to everyone within reason (like characters being absurdly unfun to play against or not playing the same basic game others are, which I consider a severe design flaw)? I mean, people have their preferences and liking something is far from being a crime.
With rosters that huge, making some characters for the more advanced players (Akuma) or people who just like to master complicated things (Gen) or press a lot of buttons (Ibuki) and so on doesn’t detract from the game like one faction out of three in Starcraft being very hard, because we have ample room to include multiple easy and intermediate options for different playstyles so the “normal person” is satisfied.
Of course, care should be taken to not fall into the trap of making the more advanced characters flat-out stronger: it is probably for the best if the simpler ones end up being better if something has to. This way there is no pressure to play the supercomplicated things - it’s more out of desire and personal taste.
Viable complicated characters/factions/decks/whatever definitely add value to the game - see the Gen players professing they can’t really play other characters anymore, or yours truly playing one quite complicated Magic deck for now three years straight because it’s just so damn fun, despite there being somewhat stronger and easier to play options available in our respective games. I am very thankful that I can play what I like and have fun, fair matches against people who don’t like what I happen to. Someone wants to learn? I can direct him towards those simple, strong options and he can start playing and develop as he desires.
Something about different kinds of learning and fun I wrote on another forum (topic was about games where just playing was a good way to improve):
Komatik on another forum
[details=Spoiler]One thing I noticed (in a more conscious manner anyway) sometime ago is the different kinds of learning some Magic decks took.
There are decks like Cloudpost Control or Infect that you can pretty much play “prima vista”, basically look through the deck once and then start to play relying on your common sense and not fail horribly. There are intricacies there, but most of it is just judging the situation and responding in a common sense way.
Then there’s decks like Storm Combo where you need to hit “training mode” to play against a dummy a bunch 0f times just to learn what kinds of hands are even keepable and to learn lines of play. Quite noninteractive stuff, but learning to pilot these decks is often fun because the things they do are absurd and feel very broken. It’s a nice reward to see 20 goblins on the board turn 2 as a result of playing some Solitaire, fun to see if you can squeeze just that last bit of juice out of your pile of cards. Just how broken can you get? (In practice, these uninteractive kinds of decks may turn out to be unfun to play because the other person sometimes might as well not be there)
The last category are insane synergy cocktails or decision tree monsters like Doomsday (Legacy), Pattern-Rector (Highlander) or Tortured Existence decks (Pauper). With these you want to go through a few common interactions between your cards perhaps, but they’re basically impossible to goldfish due to the absurd amount of interactions. The deck is, in short, a puzzle. A puzzle that needs the context of a gamestate to begin to be comprehended. The only real way to properly pilot these is to just play a ton of real games and start to develop a very specialized kind of intuition for what works. I know I’ve piloted the Pattern-Rector deck for years and every so often find some neat little trick I had completely glossed over previously.
I’ve also just recently started playing Street Fighter and analogues could perhaps be drawn to things like gross spacing (rather intuitive for the most part unless you encounter stupid moves like Cody’s EX Ruffian (in AE anyway) whose graphics are completely misleading). It’s something you can mostly figure out via common sense. Then you have things like learning to play proper footsies. Some training mode, yes, but mostly just a lot of real (perhaps somewhat practice-oriented) play with other people to get used to the nuances of the character’s normals. Generally speaking relatively fun stuff to do.
Then to the infamous training mode. I’ve found that at least for me there is an odd sweet spot where some practice feels good - practicing some stupid link that was thrown there for the sake of it (hello AAB being difficult) is annoying, as is doing canned things like Ryu’s SRK FADC U1. It’s something that is very hard for a beginner, and also very binary. No degrees of success there.
The thing that is fun, on the other hand, is just learning things like Akuma’s bread and butter close fierce, light tatsu into either shoryuken or a sweep combo, or proper jumpin followups and the like. I think a big part of it is that it doesn’t feel like it was made difficult just for the hell of it, that it is actually achievable quite quickly (you then spend more time making it consistent), and that degrees of success are very possible - close fierce is good, close fierce into tatsu is something you want to do. Being a part of the way through is better. The canned intentionally difficult fadc combo actually leaves you in some ways much worse off if you whiff it, which discourages trying to land it in a match if you’re unsure. Not to mention the low(ish considering it’s an ultra) damage from the ultra makes it feel bland instead of exciting and ridiculous, which is the feel things like Oni’s and Evil Ryu’s ridiculous combo strings have.
This is actually one gripe that makes things like Larva Injects much, much more infuriating than they otherwise are: That they were intentionally being made to be a colossal pain.
So, what to take from the above ramble I guess:
Good kind of learning is ideally some combination contested, analogue, logical and broken-feeling.
It should ideally not be difficult just for the sake of making something difficult. And if it is something stupidly difficult, it might be a good idea to provide an altenate solution for dealing with a problem.
A brilliant example is Marine splitting in Starcraft (2) - it is most definitely contested by the opponent, you can improve fluidly at it, unclumping troops vs. AoE is a very logical thing to do, and in addition to constantly increasing efficiency there is an ultimate reward that feels very wrong in an exhilarating way - you can win against banelings with just Marines. If you do not want to put in the time MarineKing put in to achieve that, you can deal with the banelings by using tanks - a unit that requires a completely different skill set to utilize, yet one that has many of the aforementioned good characteristics itself.[/details]