Imagine a game of chess or a game with similar rules: a board with pieces that can only move according to strict rules. Now we make this game multiplayer online, and add another rule to it: if you move a piece in a wrong way, you lose that piece and your turn. Also the rules on how to move the pieces aren't written down anywhere. This makes the game hard for newbies, who have to learn the rules by their mistakes. Experienced players have an advantage of knowing all there is to know. And of course soon there are websites with "guides" telling you which moves are legal and which aren't. Now the producer of this game patches the user interface of this game: Every time you touch a piece, all the spots on the board that piece can go to light up. This change makes the game far more accessible to newbies, but the experienced players lose their advantage and complain about the game having been "dumbed down". Welcome to the big "dumbing down" debate that has been making the rounds of the MMORPG blogosphere in the last days.
The reason why I used a chess example is that the dumbing down debate touches several different MMORPGs. On the one side there are people just talking about World of Warcraft, and how patch 2.3 dumbed it down by making it easier to find quests (via the mini map) and quest items, which now sparkle. One of my earliest blog post successes which got thousands of hits over time, on "hidden quests" in WoW is becoming much less relevant now. On the other side there is a debate on whether games like EVE and EQ2, which withhold a lot more information about how the game works from their players are more "intelligent" than WoW. I absolutely love the little image on Keen and Graev's blog entry on the issue, stating that time doesn't equal difficulty. Making things like travel or death more time consuming doesn't really make a game more challenging, it only makes it more annoying.
For the game of chess, hiding the rules to make the game more challenging is stupid. Giving the players full access to all the information they need to play the game lets them concentrate on the actual strategy. Chess is a deep and complex game that doesn't need artificial "challenge" in the form of forcing people to try out how the game actually works. But is the same really true about MMORPGs? For me the real core of the "dumbing down" debate is what remains of the genre once we removed all the artificial obstacles. If it is easy to find all the quest givers, and it is easy to find the quest objectives on the map without using a third-party website, are MMORPGs maybe too trivial?
As far as solo PvE is concerned, I must say that MMORPGs are trivial. And I'm not just talking about WoW, a solo quest to kill 10 foozles isn't any more challenging in Vanguard, EQ2, LotRO or many other similar games. Once you found the foozles, there isn't much challenge in killing them, as long as the encounter has been designed for solo accessibility. The reason why people confuse time requirement with difficulty is that the amount of tactical skill and decision making required in a MMORPG is tiny. And in most cases playing better just means achieving your goals faster. Even the dumbest and slowest player can finish the solo quest, he just needs a bit more time than the most clever player. If intelligent gameplay just means achieving your goals faster, then time becomes the only obstacle and challenge.
I think that World of Warcraft is moving the genre in the right direction by making MMORPGs more user-friendly and layer by layer stripping away the need to gather information from websites outside the game. It is the right direction because it leads to a necessary next step: making the underlying game more tactical, challenging, and interesting. Not more twitchy, I don't think that is the right way to add challenge to a MMORPG in view of the genre's demographics. But there are lots of ways in which combat could be made less repetitive, more interactive, and requiring more tactical skills, decision making and intelligence. We might need this "dumbing down" phase to get to a "clevering up" phase afterwards.
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