One way is to define it as average man-hours required for completion. In that sense, raids must be more difficult. Even in the trivial case of a five minute walk across a zone to complete a “raid”, that will require 20x the man-hours if there are 20 people participating than will solo content requiring exactly the same activity. This assessment of difficulty is easy to measure but not particularly meaningful when applied to the comparison we’re trying to make.

Another way is to define difficulty as the skill required for completion per player. There is no solid way to measure this, but we can gauge it subjectively without too much fuss. In raids, specialization rules the day. You have a few people who need to be highly skilled (the tanks, the raid leader), but the majority of people are pounding their DPS rotation into the ground or blasting a single target repeatedly with heals. For most of the players in a raid, they are doing less work than they would do if they were soloing and less is required of them, skill-wise, for success in the raid comparative to soloing success. I don’t think that soloing difficulty and raid difficulty are far away from one another by this measure.

A third way to judge difficulty is to compare the capabilities of monsters per player fighting the monster. Raiding would probably come out ahead in this metric, but the victory might be hollow. Adding a few hundred thousand HPs to a monster doesn’t make the monster much harder if the raid group can handle its dps and keep its healers from becoming mana-starved. The cooperative efforts of 20 players can lead to feedback loops that raise their aggregate power more than in a multiplicative fashion.

If you choose to define difficult as “whatever I think is difficult”, than we have little basis for discussion and might as well not bother.

I feel that you’re missing the heart of my argument but, if it is agreement you want, I will say that mathematically, and technically you’re right. Solo content can be as difficult as group content. In the actual MMO environment and including things like cooperation, you’re just never going to have as difficult a challenge solo as you will in a group or raid. Sure, you can create artificial things like making a tiny jump radius but that is essentially just looking for specifics. You could equally argue that in that case we’re not talking about difficulty either. If there is an exact spot to jump from for success than it is just tedious finding that spot. Once it is found the difficulty is over. I think we’ll just have to accept disagreement here though.

Let’s discuss jumps. In WoW in the Wailing Caverns, just before Lord Serpentis there is a jump. If you miss it you fall and the party has to wait for you to run all around the dungeon so there is some social pressure not to screw up. Unobservant players new to the dungeon sometimes fail to notice there is a jump at all and so fall. Players with poor spatial sense may attempt the jump and hit too early and will fail to cross the distance needed and will fall.

But as platform games go it’s a very forgiving jump. Basically if you are running forward and hit space anywhere in the last 5 feet you will make it.

In games like Tomb Raider jumps are less forgiving. You might have to hit jump within the last one foot of distance. That’s quite precise.

Harder jumps are possible. Basically if you reduce the permissible distance so that hitting space too soon means you won’t have the jump length and waiting too long means you fall off the edge then the distance is effectively an interval of time in which you have to hit the button.

Now a designer could make that distance almost infinitely small. If the correct distance was the last nanometre then players would only have a nanosecond interval in which to activate their jump key. Even someone very good at these games would only make it one in a thousand times.

And of course as you reduce the permissable distance you increase the difficulty towards infinity.

So I hope I have proved to your satisfaction that mathematically that solo gameplay can be as hard as raid gameplay. Solo gameplay can be infinitely hard. You don’t get harder than infinitely hard. If you raid something infinitely hard having to wait for a guy to get back from a disconnect doesn’t mean it’s harder, just more tedious.

I think where you are coming from is not “can solo gameplay be equally hard?” but “should solo gameplay be equally hard?” Obviously as a raid leader you need raids to be more challenging but also more rewarding to motivate people to do them. If there were equally viable solo alternatives to raiding it could make raiding moot.

Incentive structures and content design will vary from game to game but the broad statement that soloing is easier doesn’t stand up.

To give another example Darkfall is a game about killing other players. It’s a lot harder to solo than to gank in big groups. Especially if you take on groups alone.

Solo content can be as difficult as group content.

Is there any raid challenge that has taken so long to crack after going live?

Yes actually. There have been several over the years. The one that immediately springs to mind is Djinn Master’s Prison. It wasn’t defeated until a few weeks before the next expansion after it was toned down. That said, I completely understand your desire for gated content. I share that desire but, unfortunately, these days that seems to be an untenable case. Everyone wants access to everything or else they view it as a waste. I was a competitive raider for six years. I really enjoyed getting to see and do things only a few people got to do.

I’m also not sure I agree that unlocking a jedi was a solo activity. Yes, it was based on the single achievement of mastering the right random combination of professions but to do that was not just a solo affair. That isn’t the solo content I had in mind. That is something kind out there though that you could argue over for days. I loved the original jedi as well. Market forces however ended that exclusivity.

Semantics really.

What I want to challenge is the notion that content should be open to everyone. One of the features I have most enjoyed in MMOs was the extremely rare Jedi characters in pre-CU Star Wars: Galaxies. That was soloable and extremely difficult. To get a Jedi you had to satisfy an unknown set of criteria that were tuned hard enough so that only a couple of players worldwide unlocked it before they relaxed the difficulty and started giving out hints. Part of the difficulty was that we did not actually know how the Jedi slot was unlocked. Many fanatical players got nowhere close simply because they hadn’t picked the right route.

By gating the content to most of us it made the game fascinating. The first time a Jedi went public everyone in the server scrambled to get to Coroscant to attack him, protect him or just to have a look.

These days of course they’re as ubiquitous as Death Knights and the game is the worse for it.

That’s an example of how solo content can be very very hard. Just about the entire population of what was, in its day, the most popular MMO equal with Everquest were trying for months to achieve something and no one succeeded for about 5 months. Is there any raid challenge that has taken so long to crack after going live?

Now where you talk about exceptions to the rules I’m inferring that the rule you have in mind is that a MMO must be designed around a tank healer dps paradigm. That’s not really a rule, more of a design philosophy intended to encourage group play. There are many MMOs that don’t adhere to it (Eve, Planetside) and I think several others that adopted it when they would be better off without it (Warhammer, AoC).

So I think you can have solo content that is interesting and challenging provided that it is not content intended for everyone to do including bad and lazy players so long as your game doesn’t require some players to gimp their soloing in order to be viable in groups.

I can’t really say I agree with the “if I can make it impossible they are equally difficult” point. Essentially you’re saying that because there are some impossible surgeries and some impossible repairs to a toaster they are equally difficult. I think we can all agree that in general performing surgery is more challenging and difficult than fixing a toaster.

Additionally, I get your point about the solo challenge being solo-able by all classes. In your case you’re right. I am as well, however, as I clearly defined what I meant when I said solo encounter. In most of these games solo means virtually everyone can do it. Darkfall and Guild Wars are more exceptions to the rules. Are there some bad specs or lazy players who will lose? Absolutely so! That isn’t the average though.

First there is an upper measurable limit to difficulty. It is impossible. It’s clearly possible for solo game challenges to be impossible just as it’s possible for group game challenges to be impossible. If a solo challenge can be impossible then that disproves the notion that solo can’t be as difficult than group since both types of challenge can reach the theoretical maximum.

Now that’s not just theorycraft – I have numerous games from the 80s that I abandoned halfway through because I couldn’t finish them and I’m sure there were a few which no one ever finished without hints or cheating. In fact some of the turn-based strategy games had an “impossible” setting, admittedly though in these cases it usually wasn’t quite impossible.

The next fallacy is assuming that making a solo challenge requires making it easy enough for healers to do. In a skill-based game like Darkfall or a deckbuilder game like guild wars it’s certainly possible or even normal to make challenging solo content that some approaches won’t beat since everyone can easily adopt alternate approaches. Even in WoW a healer could use a dps dual spec to beat an encounter that her healing spec was not appropriate for.