[Milawe]

This is easy to answer: YES, most definitely.

Remember when death in MU*s involved losing half of your ACCUMULATED xp? That usually took you from level 20 to like level 15. There was no such thing as PK flags. You were fair game, period.

You really can't find big MU*s like that anymore, and I honestly think it's probably a good thing. Unfortunately, we've gone way too far in the other direction, and lots of games are no longer challenging. I don't KNOW why this is, but my guess that it involves two factors:

1) Many people like online games simply for the social factors. They don't want to actually be "gaming" and perfectly happy just to be "chatting". The game exists just to have something to do while chatting. Thus, there's not actual need for a game to be challenging because the "fun" exists in the socializing.

2) The continual complaints against powerful/power-gaming characters and the eternal cries for "fairness" in all aspects of life impact games as much as they impact things like sports, schools, etc.

MMOs have seem to taken this to the extreme that MU* didn't go to. Several of these games have absolutely no death penalty or one that is so negligible they might as well not exist. Nearly all MMOs forums are filled with requests to nerf this or that class or gloats when the nerfs finally come. I don't know where that trend started, but the "nerf" threads seem to dominate almost all discussion forums for those games. My guess is that it's an attempt to make PvP "fair" rather than based on skill.

So, yes, games have definitely gotten easier, but I think it's on the request of players. Unfortunately, I don't think that this is necessarily a good thing. Balancing the game based on the DEMANDS of players is a bad thing. Balancing a game based on the INPUT of players is a good thing. I definitely think that in the case of many games, "easier" is a bad thing. This is why I find myself less and less interested in the graphical MMOs.