Random thought based off an instance run in Rift last night: the easier the content, the worse you play, the worse you feel, spiral downward of doom.
T2 dungeons in Rift are now pretty damn easy, and in a somewhat stupid way. If a trash pull was difficult before (say, the bugs in AP), it’s now silly easy. If a pull was fine before, it’s more or less unchanged. To me that seems horribly off. Same goes for bosses; if a boss was tough pre-1.2, odds are good that they are now silly easy. If a boss was decent before, odds are good that they are at about that level post-1.2.
My issue is that since I know T2 dungeons are facerolls now, I play like it. I mash my one main macro instead of min/maxing my skills, I react just a little slower to stuff because generally I can, and I just expect stuff to roll over after a few minutes because, well, usually it does.
The result is that not only is each run pretty boring, we wipe just as often. Only now we wipe because people are slacking or being lazy instead of playing at 99% when 100 is required. If you want to call that accessible, fine, but I call it sleep-inducing. It’s really, really not fun to still succeed when you know you were just playing at 50%. It’s like someone telling you that you did a great job one something when you know you half-assed it. You actually wish they had told you it sucks, or just said nothing.
I kinda wish Rift would turn around and say “Hey, you want epics?! Super Expert mode bitch, get to wiping!”
That would not be very accessible though, and we just can’t have that.
Hardcore Casual 
Any dev that reads this post is going do a rendition of this
It’s a bit hard toons wipe… people complain
It’s a bit too easy but toons wipe… people complain
everyone’s right they just complain
Sounds like the same ol’ dungeon grind of wow. Why did you say you are you playing again?
Dungeon grind is ok, I mean what else are you going to do in a themepark?
Faceroll dungeon grind, that’s a different story.
Try Greenscales Blight. You’ll need to play well again. ;)
Dungeon grind is only bad if you do it non-stop. But if you only have time to play 5-6 hours a week and a couple of dungeons it is not grindy at all.
The thing is they lowered the amount of tokens you get for each successful run, and increased the cost of equipment. Which means you have to faceroll the same dungeon 4x to get the same reward value you got before running it 2X. So Trion has effectively reduced the gameplay from ‘kinda challenging’ to ‘rinse and repeat’ – which is the gameplay that we were trying to escape by leaving WoW. Heck, I’ve been in my local favorite sushi bar getting drunk, and friends of the chef come in talking about how great Rift is because its hard. Wonder what they are saying now??
My point is that limited playing time changes your overall outlook on the game. If you can only log for a couple hrs on weekends your progression is going to be slow no matter what. And in my experience Rift is still enjoyable. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about WoW.
Yes understood. It affects those who are 50 and enjoy a slow challenging progression path the most. This (hopefully temporary) ‘repetition to succede’ model in general is a bit disappointing as an end game, as its no different then WoW. Added to the broken LFG tool (also hopefully temporary), which currently wont allow our guild to do pre-made 5-man instance groups (the only way to get the bonus tokens), makes for a hugely flawed patch.
I believe we were able to do a guild 5 man random dungeon.
If you “have” to repeat content to progress, that’s a design flaw. If you “want” to repeat content to progress, that’s good design.
Where that sweet spot falls on the curve could be different for every player.
On the substantive point of the post, however, I mostly agree. It’s generally more fun and more satisfying when what you did required you to pay attention. In my opinion, if it goes beyond paying attention and gets to all the muscles in my shoulders aching from tension, then its a worse experience than when it’s too easy.