Tell the bosses to buy everyone lunch today. Those are the rules.

I have provided examples, which you conveniently clip out whenever you quote me. As a matter of fact, you haven't asked a question about any of the examples provided or the videos that were linked to, so I am beginning to wonder if you are even looking at any of the material that has been provided. If you have a specific question on any of the examples provided, please feel free to quote the example and ask your question and I will do my best to answer it. If not, well this isn't Intro to Game Development 101 and I am not your instructor. It's not my job to force you to absorb the material nor to engage in meaningful dialogue with me. For now, I'm just going to assume you are trolling this thread and stop responding to you.

No kidding! I am a programmer myself (before anyone asks I have never worked on video games - I try not to mix my work and my hobbies because otherwise I burn out on both). I completely understand where you are coming from. I myself seem to go in phases where sometimes I am looking for relaxation and other times for challenge. Where I am at on that spectrum at any given time probably depends on whether I am working on something interesting or boring at work.

I'm glad you brought up that you enjoy the relaxing portion of the chart, since several players in this thread have commented that I mis-colored that quadrant by making it green. I've tried to explain that I didn't color it green, the creators of the chart did, but sometimes there is nothing like someone saying "I enjoy that". As for the fact that even games that get this chart right will still not appeal to every player, you're right, and that is impossible to quantify by charts. I think of it like flavors of ice cream. A flavor can be delicious but that doesn't mean everyone will like it. All the chart tries to ensure is that players who would enjoy your game, can enjoy your game. But if they don't like the flavor of ice cream you are serving, then you are both out of luck.

If I understand your point correctly, you are thinking that skill management represents not player skill on our chart, but player challenge. Therefore, making any changes to it would actually reduce the enjoyment of the game for some players. First, I don't believe this is the case. Many of the players who describe themselves as being high skill self describe how they have reduced ability bloat by learning which skills they can safely ignore. This is a one-off challenge that the player never repeats, so it doesn't represent some form of recurring challenge. It is an obstacle that some of the lower skill players are dealing with, but which is by and large irrelevant to high skill players. If my observation is correct, then high skill players won't be affected by removing skills that they were not using in the first place. Second, if players were being challenged by skill management then the challenge was misplaced to begin with. Players should feel very confident in their character, these are after all the best of the best who aren't flailing about trying to remember how to use their attacks. The challenge should be coming from their opponents in the game, and responding with the right action at the right time. As for your point about how the developers are the professionals. One of the tenets of continuous improvement is that you never know where your great ideas are going to come from. Another tenet is that the people who work closest to the problem have the best view of the problem, and therefore understand the problem the best. Which is why user feedback is so incredibly important to projects. Because your users work closest to the problem, and they may just be the source of your project's next great idea. Please feel free to point out any other bullets you feel I have dodged in this thread so that I can do my best to answer them.

In the absence of research that applies universally to everything and everybody, I suppose "most people most of the time" has to do. If it moves the game from being enjoyable by 20% of the players to enjoyable by 80% of the players (and I am not suggesting that my idea would do that, but that the general research properly applied could), then I would call that a win.

You find... scientific research into how the human mind works... to be arrogant and assumptive? Or not the research itself, but the effort to use said research to guide the creation of products? Because this research is used to guide the creation of everything from operating system interfaces to remote controls to washing machines. Beyond that, I'm not sure how you are self diagnosing yourself as being "low skill". You can be low skill relative to other players of course, but within the game system you're at whatever level of skill they have designed the system to start you at. For most games that means you are starting as relatively high skill, which may mean you are in the lower right hand quadrant of the chart (medium-high skill vs. low challenge) where it is also green for Relaxation. Would you describe playing games in your favorite zone as relaxing?

Having a portfolio of different games is great, but it's not really what is under discussion here. Each of those games needs to be designed such that players who play the game hit the "fun" spot of the chart from day one. This isn't to say that every game will be for every player. Some players enjoy twitch, first person shooter style play. Others will enjoy strategic, long thought out moves style play. And others will enjoy an infinite number of points within that spectrum. So to your first point, the flavor of the combat is entirely independent from the player skill vs content difficulty question. And to suggest that any development team would leave their combat system less enjoyable than it could be so they don't steal players from another EA game? Absolutely ridiculous. To your second point, the enjoyment of the combat wouldn't be impacted at all, because we are not talking about getting rid of abilities that skilled players are using. We are talking about getting rid of abilities that are clogging up the unskilled player's bars because they don't realize that they shouldn't be trying to use every single ability that Bioware has given them. At the end of the changes, the skilled player would be pushing the exact same number of buttons that they were pushing before the changes. So this is completely a non-issue.

Disagreeing with you is NOT dodging bullets. Also, two players of different skill levels cannot be placed at the same point on the chart by simply varying the difficulty of the content they are facing. To think so demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of what the chart, and the scientific research behind it, represents. You may want it to work this way. You may have always believed it works this way. But it is simply not how the human mind works. Which makes it very difficult to have a conversation about your ideas when you don't understand the basic premise of my post.

There are two kinds of fast combat, fast combat where the enemies die quickly, and fast combat where the actions must be executed quickly. If I understand it correctly, SWTOR is supposed to be a hybrid of a real-time and a tactical combat system. The system has some delays built into it (the global cooldown) where players can consider what move to execute next. I'm not sure if it really achieves this, as most of the time you are not really reacting to what the enemy is doing (apart from an interrupt and the occasional CC), but are instead acting (using your memorized rotation). Can the system be sped up? I guess it depends on your preferences. In terms of how quickly mobs die, in my opinion the enemies already die too quickly in SWTOR. Since rotations are a core part of the combat system, personally I would like more combat where I get to use at least part of my rotation. In terms of how quickly the combat is executed, I'm off two different minds about it. If Bioware reduced ability bloat then they could probably turn around and reduce the global cooldown a bit. On the other hand, if they condensed abilities but created a situation where a player had to react more to what the enemy was doing, then they should probably leave the GCD right where it is. This sort of change, ironically, would reverse how I feel about how quickly mobs die. If the system moved from a memorized rotation to a more tactical "use skill 'A' when enemy does 'B' because they will be vulnerable to it", then the speed of killing mobs could actually be sped up and combat would still be fun for me. But like you said in your post, these are simply MY preferences. I don't think it is too late for Bioware to tweak the combat system. Especially if they do good internal testing and follow it up with putting different builds on their test servers to see how players like the changes. The test server builds would need to be available for a while, however. Long enough for players to get a good feel for the system. Also, small steps. If they have ideas to raise the combat skill of the average player, these should be tested incrementally and separate from larger changes to the system. I suspect that many of these types of changes would be game changers for the lower skill players and largely unnoticed by the higher skill players.

I'm not talking around anything. In this thread I have talked about everything from basic gameplay in Super Mario Bros, to the driving system in Halo, to this being the #1 guiding principle in the development of games such as World of Warcraft (go look it up, they have been very vocal about it). I also provided specific examples of how this principle has already been applied to the combat system in SWTOR in ways that elevated the gameplay for every player. Another poster even provided links to videos that explain the principle and provide more examples than I ever could. If you watch the videos and have questions then feel free to come back and I will do my best to help you understand them. But at this point it feels like you are either unable or unwilling to understand the concept in play.

The mantra is "Easy to play, difficult to master". According to our chart, players should be started at a medium-high level of skill, and then take the long path to mastering the combat system while engaging in high challenge content. I would say that your description of "under heavy odds" could be translated to "high challenge" encounters, which would mean that your description of improving skills under "high challenge" conditions would fit this mold to a 'T'.

Internal usability testing is watching a random sampling of players actually play the game in a laboratory type setting. Many studios will monitor everything down to recording the player's eye movement during the test to ensure the player isn't spending too much time focusing on their buttons instead of the action. These types of tests would allow Bioware to determine first hand where the actual combat is at for different types of players, which in turn would help them sort out when players are having problems.

The problem is, the first time the player dies on a heroic, they may think that they need to include all of those PvP skills in their PvE setup. "If only I had used every skill offered to me, I probably would have won." And the truth is, I don't know if that is what Bioware is thinking when they describe heroics as medium challenge or not. Does high challenge mean a player knows when to use their skills, or does it mean they have mastered keeping 35 abilities mapped simultaneously? Either way, I consider it bad design. A player's interface and setup should feel like an extension of themselves. The challenge should come from the enemies they are attacking, not because their supposedly heroic Jedi can't remember how to execute one of their basic attacks (find the button in the clutter).

Shush now, the adults are trying to have a conversation here.