What is "challenging" to you?

We haven't had a controversy about this in a while, so I think now is a good time to talk about challenge in more abstract, general terms without always trying to read an agenda in each other's words. As such, please do what you can to avoid using current in-game hot topics as examples as I really want to get to the bottom of the players' perception more so than just critique this particular game.

Now, I'm sure we've all seen the debates and flame wars about what's challenging and what's just frustrating, and I think it's pretty clear that very much everyone has his or her own idea of what constitutes a challenge. That's to be expected. But I want to try and put our individual perceptions into words and see if we can't give them a bit more context, see if we can't make the abstract, amorphous concept of "challenge" a bit more real and concrete, something we can measure, even if we don't agree on each other's measurements. As such, let me ask you this:

What constitutes "challenge" to you, and where do you believe it just becomes frustrating?

Obviously, I can only speak for myself, but to my eyes, the truth lies in untangling challenge from difficulty, as they're not really the same thing, not in my mind, at least. To my eyes, "difficulty" is just a simple measure of how much the game cheats. It's a concept intended to punish the player and make his game time harsher. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, as many games use inflated difficulty to balance encounters such that they're not boring easy. However, in and of itself, difficulty is not "fun," I don't think. Its purpose is hurt the player, ultimately, and that's really not what I play for.

"Challenge," by contrast, I see as a much broader concept than basic "difficulty," as challenge is a state of mind more so than a collection of game settings. Pretty much every game out there gives the player a certain collection of tools to use in beating it. To me, a "challenge" is a situation in the game where all of those tools are called into action, a situation in which the player has no easy way out, no solution that involves just using one tool over and over again. To me, "challenge" isn't about difficulty at all, but rather about involvement. Even the easiest of encounters can feel challenging to me if it required me to be involved with everything I'd brought to it, if it pushed my character's skills and abilities to the limit and they turned out to be JUUUST enough to succeed. "Challenge," to my eyes, is the ability to design encounters that simulate difficulty, but ultimately let the player triumph for that artificial sense of accomplishment.

I also draw a very hard line between challenge for the player and challenge for the character. A lot of games, especially Nintendo-hard games, tend to test the player's skills, reflexes, abilities and so forth, giving him essentially a stand-in avatar to act through in the game world. Personally, as a largely mediocre player, I rarely find that sort of challenges terribly fun, since either it feels like I can never win, or I won by some incredibly cheap tactic. Sure, occasionally I'll find a game I'm good at and beat it like a pro, but that's rare. For the most part, these days I see myself as more of a storyteller than an actual player, so I much prefer to face challenges for my characters, instead.

Especially here in City of Heroes where we're given a corral of different characters with their own powers, abilities, skills and stats, it's sometimes all too easy to see combat more as a Pokemon fight than an "I'm in the game punching things!" type of ordeal. In some sense, I tend to feel like I've made these characters, prepared them, and now I'm sending them into a fight to see how they do. Sure, I'm still at the controls, but it's the character doing the work. As such, I much prefer to see encounters that challenge the character directly, such as requiring that character to use skills that are often not necessary.

I do have a direct example of the above: My old Stone/Stone Brute. Before he had Stamina, he had to fight very slowly. However, when I found myself in a hard situation, I could always just attack faster and compensate with blue inspirations. If that proved to be insufficient and I was still getting hurt, I could always resort to Earth's Embrace to heal myself and become tougher. If even THAT doesn't save me, well, there's always Granite Amour. And when an encounter actually goes as far as that point and then the character wins in the end after all, THAT is what I consider a challenge. The character was pushed to the limit, which is what I count. Sure, it's rarely very difficult for me as the player, but that's rarely what I look for in a game anyway.

But, of course, that's just me. What do YOU find to be challenging?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Totally depends on the toon I am on at the time. There isnt much in the game that is a challenge if you bring the right tools. Considering how many alts I have, there is very little content that I dont have a specific toon that can crack it.

As such, I guess the biggest challenges are personal things like Werners 6 hour solo fight with Nemesis where he took a sub optimal toon and still took Nemesis down. (Sub optimal meaning would have been way faster with a rad) I would be challenged to find the patience for that.

To me, "challenge" is something that can be overcome with effort and tactics: well-placed controls, proper use of AoE, focus down the hardest hitter. It's also something you can take or leave, by fiddling with the difficulty slider.

"Difficulty" or "frustration" generally lies in creating situations where player effort means nothing. Endurance depletion (Malta sapper, Freakshow in general), stacking debuffs (Nerva ghosts), mez-spamming (too many offenders to list). I cringe every time I see the above, because I know my options are to either down the pull FAST or find myself packed in a barrel with a magnet to attract the bullets. Characters with debuff/mez resists aren't immune - even a tanker's mez protection can be overwhelmed (been there, done that, been rezzed from the inevitable splat). The fact that the devs had to include entries in their RNG consumable drops specifically to deal with these effects means there's too damn many of them.

"Challenging" is the precise moment when all the fun leaves as what was supposed to be a game becomes an effort-driven chore.

Challenging to me is aggroing 3 or 4 8man spawns and seeing how easily i can take them down on my Fire/Emp troller.

Sometimes it is harder than you think, and getting mezzed can be annoying (Tip mission DE anyone?, Malta in general).

Certain groups will *force* me to play in a certain way, because if i didnt i would become superhero paté in about 4 seconds.

Malta mobs do not just "challenging" me to think, but they are also "difficult" to defeat (at least solo) for me, on my main character.

Gamewise, anything above an EB is impossible for me to do, Elite bosses are "difficult" to do, and everything else can be just plain fun to do

Something that's difficult

Well, I play a VEAT (that's where I stop bragging, don't worry), so anything that affects my endurance bar negatively presents a challenge, such as Sappers, Sappers, and Sappers.

I also find DE to be a challenge when Crystals drop their buff pets. The +to-hit tears right through my defense.

Thankfully, +2x3 doesn't present too much of a problem to me as long as I'm not blindly charging into everything, but I think that's where the challenge lies. You know, not rushing everything because I think I'm totally freaking amazing.

If i've used Shadow Meld, Strength of Will and Rebirth all in one sitting on my Kat/WP then whatever I was doing was challenging. Typically something with serious defense debuffs and big burst damage. That is a rare oddity that I usually chalk up to PDD. Cims can hurt if I don't use Shadow Meld to help avoid those defense debuffs. Everything else eats dirt.

Challenge in combat ends somewhere in the mid-30s. After that, most characters can walk through solo missions. Teams are a different problem -- if everyone works together there is no challenge, but there's usually someone who goes Leeroy Jenkins and causes a challenging situation.

I like challenge in character building -- trying to eke as much performance as possible out of an archetype, or finding new ways to play with old powers. Sadly, the challenge of character building has vanished. A blind monkey could build a COH character these days, with inherent stamina and power pools that all do basically the same thing; travel or minor defense. I'm hoping that expanding the power pools will give us a few more choices to make, but I think the devs have decided that character building should be idiot proof. Therefore, not challenging.

Re: What is "challenging" to you?

Assembling a competent team on Defiant.

Challenge is a blend of frustration and reward. Without some degree of frustration, reward loses meaning. Without reward, frustration is arbitrary.

Frustration in this sense is not necessarily the emotion we associate it with, but simply "not IMMEDIATELY getting what you want."

You want some water. In order to get some water, you have to go to the river. In a sense your desire for water is frustrated by the obstacles of time and space until you overcome them by walking your lazy *** to the river.

hmm a challenging encounter to me is something that I don't just walk all over but I have an actual chance of death every so often. This typically changes depending on the AT that I am playing at the time as to what defines a challenge. What makes up a challenging encounter is very different to different people.

For me challenging is typically running between a 4/0 to a 6/1 setting, bosses may or may not be added depending on AT, in higher level play obviously. I really dislike characters that can't handle large groups of mobs weak mobs because in group play it is only going to get harder, and if they can't handle that in solo play how can I expect to deal with it in group play.

Difficult encounters are when powers just don't work the way they should. . The rules changed.. purple triangles of doom are a great example of difficult when I'm playing my controller. Mobs specifically designed with unreistable damage is another one. Not being able to use your powers without flat out dying over and over again. A great example is an Elec/Fire blaster verses Nemisis Jaegers, The blaster has long animating pbaoe effects verses mobs designed to blow up on death. So you kill then all at once and suddenly are being blown to bits for your reward, because you are in melee with them. So I guess the best way to explain difficult is when your typical playstyle is forced to change drastically from how you typically play.

Finally I will add to the difficult/challenging dynamic... Frustrating.

Frustrating is when challenge is exceeded at the same time that Difficulty is exceeded. So you are expecting lots of deaths, and the rules for normal play are broken at the same time. This is like trying to take on two EB's that both have purple triangles in normal mission play as well as multiple groups at the same time. (like the intro to the incarnate arc). For some characters that is meerly a challenge, for some its a difficult encounter but for those rare few that are under the effects of both and it quickly becomes a frustrating encounter. The chances of winning a frustrating encounter are tiny and you can see it coming down to lots and lots of deaths, auto completion, or requiring a team for your character.

Another aspect of frustrating is when something is designed so that your powers just don't work at all. The BAF escape phase for control and slow effects. Resistance to effects is one thing, flat out immunity is another entirely. During that phase my Grav/Kin/Primal is basically reduced to a Crushing Field, SB, Siggy, and my incarnate pets. Its not challenging as all the mobs are doing is running, Its not difficult as no one dies during that phase. But it is the absolutely most frustrating encounter in the game that I have experienced so far. That absolute helplessness verses the LTs knowing that there is nothing I can do to stop or to personally kill them before they escape, that the entire purpose for your character to exist is meaningless.

Challenge, to me, is the finely balanced point at which an encounter becomes hard enough to be 'tactically interesting' without being 'cheap'. I get most of my enjoyment in this sort of video game from trying to outwit the game. If, in an encounter, I come out the other side with the feeling that I could have *easily* lost but didn't because I made the right decisions and used my character's abilities properly, it probably qualifies as challenging.

That's not to say there aren't subtleties, of course. There needs to actually be some element of decision involved - the correct actions need to neither be obvious nor completely obscure. Also, the solution should require some element of *tactics* rather than merely requiring you to throw powerups at the problem in the form of mass inspirations or similar.

A good example of encounters which do fit my definition are the incarnate trials. While each trial does have its own bits which I dislike and while I don't really agree with the structure of the system as a whole, overall the trials themselves do a decent job of making players actually think instead of just smash.

Something that falls into the completely opposite category of 'cheap', on the other hand, is fighting a PToD EB solo on a dom. It's not that the fight is impossible. It's that it's dumb. There are no particular tactics involved anymore; barring extreme edge cases you die if you don't spam purples and you are fine if you do. It's no longer interesting.

I rarely find challenge in solo play. Occasionally, as I am learning a character I may find myself thinking, "Hmmm. Had I used X power (or inspire or tactic) I would have handled that better. If I see that again in the future, now I know." But normally I do those things by instinct anymore, it just comes from playing the game for so long. It kind of boils down to the same thing you said; I try to use all my tools to keep me playing and engaging enemies. I do not like when a power sits unused, thus why my characters with RotP will die, because if I am not dying, what was the purpose of choosing RotP? I usually set my difficulty slider to the point where I have to use all my tools, but where hospital runs/awakens are rare (but not totally gone).

Normally, I like teaming. Finding out how best for each character to interact with others is great. Even the same players will make different choices or play different characters on each run. Running content while teamed is a huge part of why I can repeat content. Each time is the same, but different enough. Usually each mission/encounter will have a few areas where I can be excited or embarrassed about some of the powers/tactics I chose to use, where I can be impressed or horrified by something a teammate has done, or where just some really cool graphical thing happened due to a combination of powers/positioning.

Seeing a potential bad situation and preventing it before it even gets close to being bad is enjoyable. Seeing that same situation and making the bad happen to see if we are up to it is enjoyable. Causing spawn collapse and watching as a team just hits the perfect spawn melt is fabulous. Needing to pick off scattered spawns that failed to collapse (or were scattered) is occasionally amusing. Assessing the capabilities of a team and trying stuff you think is likely beyond it can be fun, but it is also nice to sometimes choose to stay within safer boundaries.

Perhaps the truest challenge is finding joy and fun in a variety of circumstances. Rather than needing a narrow window of performance and playstyle, for me, playing in a variety of ways is usually what I like. There are some edge cases where I have difficulty. I have played on some teams that stopped between each spawn, not to roleplay, but to talk about tactics for the next spawn. I have trouble finding the joy in standing around not playing and discussing what, IMO, should be the obvious way to handle the next spawn. But I have stuck it out in those situations, trying to see what others might find appealing (and failing). I also have been on teams that were the opposite, not strong enough to blindly charge, but not smart enough to realize it. I usually will stick it out on those as well, although normally we eventually find a method that keeps the team moving, albeit at a slightly slower pace (but at least still moving).

I like having to make mutually exclusive choices.

A challenge does depend on my character obviously, but actually the challenge/frustration Im facing now is with regards to IOing and Incarnate trials.

Not that either is overwhelming. But the general thought in my head is that it's time consuming, and the challenge is actually making something new again, and having that fresh happy feeling I used to get.

I have been spoiled by Cardiac Incarnate on my two toons, and now watching my blue bar drop actually does pose the challenge of...I just don't way to play this alt anymore.

Or rechage times because of IO's.

Or IO's in general. Process of buying, making, selling, finding, looking for salvage etc. It gets the the IO stage of things, and then I lose interest and the challenge is to do my best to actually try and play that toon.

If we are talking about general challenge in a game, I would say that anything not melee has a challenge at the moment, with almost everything geared for most melee toon and Veats to have the hands up easy advantage, because of HP. This is noticeable in Keyes Trials, and other such things, where a pulse takes a squishy down half life.

So I find keyes challenging to the point where the returns of the other trials seem more valuable or at least achievable. I care little about getting two emp merits if I spend all my time dead.

I guess the challenge for me right now, is rekindling my love of low game content. The content is good, but once you have had Filet Mignon, going back to Chuck Beef sometimes just feels annoying.

Pretty much just PVP

Challenge for me is coming up with builds that are effective and powerful that are outside the current min/maxers' line of thought. Or another way to put it is I like to sit and puzzle out builds that are effective and powerful that do not build for softcapped defense.

The following are some of the challenges I face in game, they are mostly trivial things but I have admiration for those who can achieve them

1) The badges achieved for soaring across those bloody slopes in the Christmas event at Pocket D... I must just have incredibly slow reflexes! As soon as winter comes I start dreading the thought of putting myself through doing them haha. It's only a silly little thing but I find it really challenging to get those badges. Which brings me to...

2) Badges in general. I see players (particularly on my home server Defiant) who are veterans and badge hunters and it makes a little envious. Not in a scournful "screw you for showing off" way, but more admiring their patience to collect badges. I'm getting there slowly on my main, but getting badges is a challenge!

3) Task Forces. I find these a challenge especially on speed ones because I hate being rushed and I get all panic stricken when the rest of the team are zooming off and I can't keep up. The leisurely kind I enjoy a lot though!

I realise most of these challenges make me sound slightly slow... I just like taking my time doing things... Its a taurean trait

To me challenge is a combination of the following:

• Thought involved in building your character.
• Thought involved in fights, so that you win most of the time when you actually think about what you're doing.
• A bit of reflexes. Not that much that you have to respond to every single action your enemy takes, but rather clicking that one heal when it's needed.

I dont really like challenge in any game, be it difficulty or in terms of having to leverage all the tools I have at my availability. I prefer to be able to just kick back and relax.

Lewis

Challenging means that I actually get close to dying for once.

Challenge to me mean that careless playing equals defeat, and success usually need attention and readiness to switch tactics. The difficulty settings for this is much higher for my softcaped brute Lenina than soloing with my healing optimized corruptor Trisenox.

Example of good challenges include pvp, keeping a big team alive with a healer, when I need to keep perfect control of my mastermind pets as a Starcraft gamer and when I sometimes have to retreat as a melee.