What is "challenging" to you?

Something challenging?

How about playing a whole week without creating a new alt?
Hell, make that three days. Maybe two...

... Or playing on a single character for a few days straight.

Hard stuff, srs buzness.

To me, "challenge" is a broader concept: "Difficulty" is rather simple: It's "Chance of failure/success".

Eg. the easier a task is to fail, the more difficult it is.

"Challenge" is a broader concept, it's related to difficulty because more challenging tasks tends to be more difficult, but it's a different ballgame. Challenge represent what you need to "put into" a task: Be it time, concentration, various types of investments of limited resources, etc. etc.

Team-tasks tends to be more challenging (although less difficult) than solo-oriented tasks (in general) because it takes time and attention to get a team together, and the chance of the team breaking up adds a further complication, a solo-task can cut through all those things.

Now, personally I'm the opposite of Samuel. I think games by and large are too easy nowadays. I relish having to solve a challenge the way you solve a puzzle, bringing all your tools to bear on it an attempt to find a solution.

EDIT: And I agree that games shouldn't be fair. The reason is simply: The AI is dumb, people are not. The AI needs compensation to be at all challenging.

To me, a challenge is something I have to think and plan out to succeed at. The closest any game I've played comes to being a challenge are strategy games and then it is only a challenge until you reach the point that the AI's stupid decisions have ensured you can't lose. Usually that is well before the game is over.

This game I don't play for challenge, I play for fun and relaxation.

to me challenging is duoing task forces, even with IO'd to the gills toons it can sometimes be difficult (statesman tf for example was tough to duo)

when me and my friend want more of a challenge we add higher spawn sizes or + levels (we ran a +4x8 barracuda sf for the fun of it once lol)


the point when something becomes annoying or frustrating to me is short duration timers like in the trials. timers in general feel like an artificial difficulty to me and dont add any challenge except enforce the "must speed everything" mentality. the other thing thats annoying is stuff like in keyes trial specifically with the massive unresistable dmg pulse every 30 seconds, that also feels like artificial difficulty, i dont mind dying, but when i die 50 times in one trial because i have no heals, that doesnt exactly make me want to do it again

To me, challenging is doing something that was hard but pulling it off. Whatever that hard thing happens to be - a boss that I'm not strong against, overpulling a whole room, some TF events.

Where it gets into "artificially difficult and frustrating" is when I feel I'm trying to win against the mechanics of the game engine, not the NPCs necessarily.

I'll give an example from another game, because that game had more "I'm fighting the engine" moments than any other game I've played. There was a certain boss which you had to fight in a small, locked room divided into 9 grates. Periodically, one of those grates would start to spark up little flames - and a few seconds later the whole grate would be engulfed in a massive fireball that would one-shot most characters who hadn't moved their butts off it. The problem was that any spellcasting (especially healing) rooted you. So if you started getting sparks as you were healing - you were dead. Nothing you could do. You couldn't interrupt the induction and you couldn't move. Also, any amount of connection lag could have you assuming you were safely away, while the game still read you on the wrong grate - boom, dead. And of course, if you were the only rezzer in the group, you had to run all the way back to the dungeon to "punish" you for daring to be doing your job when the flames hit you.

THAT was not fun. There was no amount of skill that could compensate for the ENGINE'S ability to just one-shot you without you being able to do a single thing about it.

CoX only has a few things that come close - the fact that "squishy" ATs have absolutely no inherent mez protection is one of them. You can play a scrapper/brute/tanker, and do good/high DPS and totally ignore things like Carnie Illusionists and CoT mages, but you can be on a defender with nothing close to that amount of DPS and get held-hit-dead without being able to do anything about it if you've already used up your breakfrees on previous mezzers. End drain can be another one of those, though it's much more eglitarian - both scrappers and defenders fear the toggle-drop!

So in other words - challenging is something hard, but that you can live through with determination, teamwork, the right insps, what-have-you. Frustrating is when you just get zorched without recourse.

Hmm, at first, I honestly thought that I'd probably not be able to find my true answer to this question...
But, coming back here now, I think I may have.

I think I find my personal fun challenge when I have to use my powers wisely and in time or I will likely fall.
And I think this is why I enjoy playing my Elec*3 Blaster so much.

I have damage and a good amount of utility to help my cause and prevent me from falling... yet, no defense and few hitpoints.
I like jumping into the middle of things and putting the worst offenders into holds and sapping everyone's endurance and/or knocking them back/down and spreading the wealth of damage and keeping any and everyone else at bay until it is time to deal with them.
If I mess up, I'll likely drop (or have to flee).
Not everything always goes according to plan and sometimes the usual procedure doesn't work well enough to make things safe enough to hang in there... That's when more situational powers get called on... Maybe that third hold thrown onto the Boss (to hopefully lock him down since one of the first two missed), or an EM Pulse to buy some breathing space with my sliver of health and too many baddies ganging up on me... My Nuke recharging just in time for an emergency finishing off of pesky/evasive foes starting to gain momentum in a difficult battle... A surge of endurance just as my blue bar was about to expire against a nearly defeated Elite Boss... Some Break Frees and Respites just in time before a nasty foe was about to finish me off quickly...
All fun examples for me. When things go wrong... But I'm still up and battling!

I don't like forced (the computer cheats) situations that generally only have one solution (although, I don't detest them if they are handled rather well), but I do like situations where different powers used at the right times can be the difference between victory and failure.

I don't like to constantly be challenged while playing a game, as sometimes I just want to mindlessly beat up the enemies, but I do enjoy that level of challenge when I want it.


Hope that made sense!

I'm fine going against something that might beat me (us) once or twice. Anything more than that and any fun is lost.

My son and I were doing the Blast Furnace morality mission last night on our peacebringers. We ran up against a red-con Night Widow boss (not one of the bosses guarding the three captives). We'd already been defeated once by another boss, and were defeated by her at least twice more (she ripped through the purples I brought after the first hosp trip). At that point, we just wanted the mission over.

Trying to beat my fastest times on a TF is my Challenge.

Not every mission should be challenging, but they should all be interesting and fun (also very subjective words).

When a mission presents itself as particularly challenging, and it doesn't send me to the hospital once, or at least make me think "hmmm...how to go about this...", then it's a bit disappointing.

"Cheating" doesn't bother me in this game. Not every fight is supposed to be Superman vs Doomsday. Most are Captain America versus A.I.M goons (Cap is not being challenged), and some are X-Men versus Magneto (Magneto cheats), with a few in-between.

Sure, a lot of missions should be mindless button pushing, but at least once per story I want to have that moment of "Here comes the tough part."

What the actual challenge IS should vary, but it's all on the table: Marathons against mountains of hp, attacks that can one-shot me, 'puzzle' attack and defense patterns...(just not all on the same guy in a solo mission, please)

The thing is:

- At all times I should feel like I CAN win if I do the right thing (and the right thing can be recruiting general assistance once in a while, but making me hunt down a specific build is a no-no), and
- At all times the foe's tactics, powers and cheats should fit the story

I think a lot of people forget that around 5-20% of the "solo" missions in the game are actually intended to be team content (and labled with the 'you should bring friends' disclaimer. And of course, any content that is labelled team content such as TFs should range from challenging to outright impossible to solo.

"Challenge" in my mind amounts to a difficult task that is doable with what abilities one has, but requires effort/skill to complete. The BEST challenges play to both the strengths and weaknesses of a player, but in such a way that it takes practice and thought to overcome. What I mean by playing to both the strengths AND weaknesses: If the player is smart/coordinated/etc, the game deliberately leaves an opening/easier route that the smart player can use their abilities to exploit and attain victory more easily. Likewise, it does things that penalize the player for not paying attention or not thinking things through in such a way that deliberately targets the weakness of the player for maximum effect.

Where "Bad" challenges come in: when a 'challenge' does things that disregard skill/forethought. When it ignores both strengths/weaknesses in ways trivialize what the player is good at, making their strengths insignificant, and do not teach or reward the player for avoiding their weakness.

Of course this is something that is necessarily tougher on an MMORPG. In a single player game with very limited abilities and checkpoints, it's easier for the designers the plan around what abilities to expect. Here we have hundreds of powers in a bevy of classes, all sporting a myriad of primary/secondary powerset combos, different inventions, different power pools, and now very different incarnate powers. What strengths/weaknesses can be assume and worked off of to make a good, fair challenge?

I could see how making enemies with overpowering damage, autohit attacks and unmezzable resistances would be the "straightforward" way to make something challenging. Counter what the players can do to pose an unmitigatable danger. But where this runs afoul is that it trivializes a player's strengths along with their weaknesses in ways that do not reward the character for being doing a good job at what they've been trained to be good at. It's a sideways progresses that changes the rules to present a challenge rather than abiding by those set up previously.

My personal opinion? In this game, it is better to build toward the strengths and weaknesses of a player than those of the enemy/encounter being designed. What do I mean? Rather than figuring out how to make an enemy immune to something, find what powers the players is 'supposed' to be using, and purposefully make them vulnerable to that. Likewise, no 'blank slate' powers that become overwhelmingly potent to overcome on characters' strengths but completely obliterate another for whom that is a total vulnerability. Example: you have a control character on the game. The encounter then has portions of the encounter that are easier to complete with control. Not necessary, but having someone who is good at control adds to the team's ease of victory. Likewise there's another optional element that is far easier to take down at close range, or in the reverse, is best shot at. adding portions that play to strengths make the player seem capable and valuable, rather than pointless. Making such things optional also relieves stress, and overlaying different portions of a challenging encounter with different weaknesses gives variety of strategy, allowing people to adapt to what present abilities they or their team have.

Sadly, finding time to actually play regularly has been the biggest challenge I've encountered as of late.