You've got to remember, that there are many people turning GW2 down because of the rather harsh character balancing applied to all modes of the game so far, and that's just not cool. By introducing this "on or off character balancing" option, and completely removing character balancing in Trials of Gnomus and Online Boss Hunt, it reduces the unnecessary level of pain people experience when doing both.
Take the Spooky Squash Boss Hunt for example: It's simply way too difficult for younger people to do. There's not enough information and mid-session hints for younger people to follow, therefore making defeating a boss hunt just out of their reach. Characters upgrades were just too underwhelming to say the least. When it comes to earning the particular type of special item in Boss Hunt, just trying to earn it is just near-impossible.
As for the Trials of Gnomus, when it comes to beating a colour-specific boss in the battle area, all Plant and Zombie characters have so much of a hassle actually trying to beat that boss while trying to survive wave after wave of smaller gnomes attacking them.
For all other areas listed in Blue in the Original Post, everyone has more freedom with how they want to play the game.
By doing this, the dev team has more freedom with tuning every character in the game, tailoring their powers for each and every mode in the game, as long as they follow the specific criteria shown in the Original Post.
My apologies but I have to disagree.
Plants vs Zombies might be a goofy sort of silly game which has fun being ridiculous but that doesn't mean that every aspect of every difficulty level needs to be determined by it's prepubescent demographic. If that were true "Crazy" difficulty level for Garden and Graveyard Ops wouldn't exist.
Boss Hunt was obviously designed to be a complex cooperative team play mode and trying to successfully survive it when set to Crazy difficulty is intended to be tough and only the most skilled players are going to get the special prize item associated with that tier of play and if an 8-12 year old simply can't survive at that level of play then they have my sincerest sympathies but at the end of the day it's an optional game mode which has no effect at all on the overall game and Players who simply cannot rise to the challenge can simply ignore the Portal for the 4 days of the month when Boss Hunt is active.
The same can be said about the Trials- there is no requirement that you finish the Trials and it doesn't effect your overall game experience if you don't or can't. Not getting the Torchwood or Hover Goat 3000 is not a game breaking issue unless you're an obsessive completionist, in which case not having every single character and every single one of roughly 8000 ever-expanding customization items eats away at your soul anyway.
My point is that I personally enjoyed the Trials and continue to enjoy each Boss Hunt precisely because they feature an extreme level of difficulty which is a nice juxtaposition against the rather vanilla, "everybody gets a trophy" nature of the rest of the game where every player who puts in enough time and effort can eventually get every character, finish every quest, and earn every item just by showing up.
Having two areas, completely optional areas, which demand that you be more than average and rise to a demanding challenge is not a bad thing. I enjoy my Unicorn Chomper because I worked hard to get him; I can look at the Scrumptious hats that I've earned from Boss Hunts and know that my team and I truly earned those with skill, communication and a lot of time and effort and when I play my Torchwood or Hover Goat 3000 I know that I literally had my skills as a Player tested before I was allowed to use them.
If you want to boost the younger, less skilled players with cheat codes and "God Modes" during single player then that's fine- nobody is going to begrudge that because it's private play but such things need to stay out of the areas which are intended to be difficult and require above average play otherwise you might as well just remove "Hard" and "Crazy" difficulty altogether and insert a "Beginner" and "Easy" mode instead.
I'm still standing by my original post. Agree or disagree, I still want the dev team to take this into strong consideration. Isn't that right, @EA_Andy?
ps4 team balance is sooooo bad
Hmm, i'm with Reality on this one because i don't really see any positives in simplifying a game purely on the grounds of accommodating lesser skilled players. It's quite sad that today's gamers would much prefer to have things presented to them on a plate as opposed blood, sweat and toiling something in order to gain that overwhelming sense of satisfaction in being able to say they've achieved a goal that few have matched.
I sat for almost 6 hours trying to nail a 29.15s lap at Atlanta (NASCAR heat evolution) to gain the final 'elite' ranking and a 20g achievement for a 1000 gamerscore. It was hard beyond belief but in investing the time and effort not only did I beat the time, I completely mastered tuning the car, mastered racing in simulation mode and improved my overall track skills. If that particular challenge would have been somewhat easier (I lost count of the times I wished it was) then there would have been zero benefits in it's completion.
Moments like that are what gaming should be all about.....
