COZZER'S PROFILE

I'm not sure I like the idea of having numbers that small, but the things you say are VERY true (expecially the ones about random chance and about the players not caring about your super-complex battle system and defaulting to the usual rules-of-thumb).

author=Darken
you earlier made a post saying you couldn't see why anyone would like YM

Which I did NOT conclude with a "oh well, it's just that whoever likes it is some kind of 'lower common denominator'." statement.

The only feeling I wanted to express was my confusion since I didn't find anything enjoyable at all in a game that is praised by pretty much everybody.

author=Max
As for Dark Souls, this is the quote about it I like best. It's really quite a beautifully succinct piece of writing:

"If adventure is to surprise and mystify you and invite you to uncover the secrets of a forgotten world, then Dark Souls is a great adventure game. If entertainment is fun without failure and progress without pain, you'll have to find it somewhere else. But you'll be missing out on one of the best games of the year."

I find it one of the most arrogant thinly-veiled insults I've ever read about a game. (Hyperbole: actually, gamers are a VERY arrogant kind of people and VERY prone to insults; this one probably doesn't even make it into the top 10. Still.)

Yes, if you are not a horrible person, X is the game for you, while if you are a horrible sucky sucker then don't play it because you won't like it; but I'm not judging you or anything!

You know, if I cared about things like these, I'd find "lowest common denominator" a pretty offensive definition for the kind of players you're talking about. (Which at least partly includes me so yeah, it's kinda personal).

There is NO such thing as a "bad player". There are such things as "player inside of your target audience", and "player outside of your target audience".
Either you accept your target audience is smaller than you'd like it (which means your game will receive less attention than it could), or you take measures to enlarge it. Nobody has any kind of "duty" to be in your target audience, nor would it make him a "better player".

For example: in your latest game, people who can't figure out that pressing shift makes them run are outside your target audience. That is not that strange: it's a feature that became common only with RMVX, and not everybody has experience with that (the first time I played an RMVX game, I didn't discover it myself for a while and I was about to stop playing because of the slow walk speed).

So, either you accept it (which is NOT a bad thing: after all, you can't please everybody) or you change your game. For example, you could activate the auto-run by default: one of the basic principles of Human Computer Interaction is making the most used option the default one.
But you never, in any way, shape or form, shift the blame on the player.

(Sorry for the rant, which is actually pretty off topic, but I feel very strongly about this subject)

author=Solitayre
Baron Nefarious probably isn't the final boss in the scene as described above. The point of this scene is that Nefarious is a challenge, but not hard enough to actually kill the player and ruin the scene.

Still, you seemed to set up that scene as some kind of climax; not for the whole story, but for a storyarc.

And I think making a "plot" climax coincide with a "gameplay" anticlimax would greatly hurt player immersion, as LockeZ said.

(I never quite got the difference between Yume Nikki and a bunch of .png files tied to a random number generator. But that's probably just me.)