Shade4x, on 03 December 2013 - 10:35 PM, said:
I'm assuming you are asking to name games that are balanced around new and casual players (I.E. PUG players in this game)
World of warcraft
Dark ages of camelot
Warframe
Modern Warfare
Modern Warfare 2
Modern warfare 3
Quake
Quake 2
Rift
Champions Online
Planetside 2
World of Tanks
... I can go on.
The whole reason why WoW was as sucessfull as it was, was because it was accessable to the middle aged house wife mom and the 15 year old kid. Balancing your game based on elite players only works if it doesn't make the game worse for the casual players. This is common sense. Believe it or not there are ways to balance the game for both. This debate gets brought up in every game that wants to pretend it will be the next E-Sport. What people have a hard time remembering is that Halo and Starcraft had their balance done before the game was launched, and it was soley with the intention to make the game as fun to as many people possible. Their are a slew of games that tried to appeal to the elite player and disregard the casual player. None of those games have servers up.
Since some of the devs / consultants came from EQ that worked on WoW, that is the reason they made the game more accessible to casual players. If you played EQ you know about spawn camping and how hard it was to get gear weekly. Also Plane of Fear break ins, lol.
Rift is probably harder than most especially when you get into the higher level areas. Unless you have a nice high damage AoE build, you could die if over whelmed in some areas. Also, not many classes could solo major rifts through stage 5.
MW2 and MW3 definately with some of the noobiest weapons. CoD4 or MW1 still took some skill though there were exceptions.
DAoC, not really, Warframe from listening to friends playing.
Yes, if you don't cater to the casual crowd now, you'll sink unless your game has a good enough niche. I like this game over BF series or CoD series because everyone doesn't run around with 100 perks and sprinting with easy head shots.