Hardcore Casual has a post up about how easy he says World of Warcraft really is -- just by learning your class, getting the right gear, and theorycrafting a bit, you can roll right through, and get to the point where even yellow or sometimes even red monsters don't give you trouble.

There is one viewpoint here (and it's not one that I necessarily espouse) that HC is just falling into the old "hardcore/casual" trap that Penny Arcade put so well this week -- he thinks that he's casual, when actually, if you're running higher-level-than-you're-meant-to five man instances with your friends (and theorycrafting a bit), you're actually what Blizzard would consider a hardcore player, and thus of course the game is easy for you. But while I think there's a little bit of that going on here, I don't think we need to go that far: the fact is that WoW is an easy game. That's how it's garnered such a big audience. And anyone who has ever beaten Diablo is going to find that yes, if you read a guide or two, run the right instances at the right times, and put some thought into your specs, you'll have an easy time.

So what HC asks for is the difficulty to scale -- instead of just Normal and Heroic, have three or four modes that players can choose to set their own experience. A few games have done this already, and indeed, Blizzard may decide that that's called for in future instances (though it seems unlikely that they'll do this on older content, considering how they've abandoned it so far). But for now, WoW is an easy game, and that's the way Blizzard wants it. After all, you don't get a 10 million subscriber base by beating players up.

Tobold asks the old question of whether or not WoW is "too easy" over on his blog. But he's asking the wrong one-- there's no question at all that WoW is an easy game. Like Bioshock (which I just finished, and in which you lose nothing at all by dying except a short journey from the respawn point), World of Warcraft is really a question of time, not skill. If your character dies, all you need to do is head back out there, find some easier monsters to fight, and sooner or later you'll be much more powerful. You can't lose WoW-- even if your guild gets wiped by Gruul, all you need to do is farm through Karazhan a few times, and then go back, and you'll topple him.

So the question isn't whether WoW is too easy, it's whether that's a bad thing or not. Does it matter that anyone with enough time on their hands can become a raider? Does it matter that anyone, from child to grandparent, can pick up the game and find something to do?

It matters to Blizzard, of course-- WoW's low threshold for involvement is one of the reasons it's done so well. You don't need the reflexes of an FPS gamer or the cunning of a master strategist to get to level 70. But to players, the difficulty of the game overall shouldn't matter. WoW is easy, but Blizzard has gone out of their way to create parts of it that are not-- winning in the Arenas is definitely not easy. And though better gear makes many endgame fights easier, I'd guess that no one would argue against the assertion that endgame fights are getting harder in terms of strategy all the time (sure, like any good puzzle, once you figure it out, it's easy, but figuring it out as a guild is not necessarily an easy task).

There are parts of WoW that don't challenge people who've been gaming for a long time, yes, but there are many other parts that do. The question isn't as simple as whether WoW is too easy or not-- it's more a question of, easy or hard, whether the game is compelling enough to keep you interested.