The fault of that misunderstanding is that in an MMO as you gain levels your passive abilities are increased (IE your hitpoints are in-line with your level).

These changes in passive ability mean that the zero-point is effectively being moved. When your skills are removed from the equation you can only fall so far (So the Level 50 Enemy vs a Level 50 Player who has been disabled is not the same as a Level 50 Enemy fighting a Level 1 Player).

However your Abilities and powers cannot be used during this time which is reducing your effective skill significantly below that of the enemy thus increasing the difficulty of the situation.

During Flow the Challenge faced is equivalent to the Players Skill. Thus the difficulty of the encounter is approximately zero.

However when you remove the Players ability to interact with the game or reduce it in other ways their Skill is artificially reduced making the Difficulty of the encounter Greater even though the enemies haven’t gotten any more powerful.

EDIT: And a Level 50 Enemy is intrinsically more powerful than a level 1 because they are not Level 1. A Level 1 Player fighting a Level 50 Enemy is going to get owned. The Level of an enemy is itself an indicator of how Challenging it is overall. This is why Diku-style games have systems that show you the enemies difficulty relative to your level.

If you’re always fighting enemies of the appropriate level in an MMO, with both you and the enemy’s power increasing at similar rates, then for the purposes of Flow, the background numbers of the power of that enemy are irrelevant. That stuff is all too far behind the scenes and removed from the player’s experience to be important to their Flow.

Look at City of Heroes, where a level 50 enemy isn’t intrinsically any more powerful than a level 1 enemy (or more challenging, by your terminology) – it’s damage and accuracy is only determined by the difference in level between it and the player. Other mmorpgs use different systems for this, but the effect is the same.

To me how Difficult a Task is depends on the Challenge the task poses minus your Skill at the Task.

The Challenge offered by climbing a Rock Face might be fixed as the Rock Face doesn’t change.

However as you increase in Rock Climbing Skill the Difficulty of Climbing that Rock is reduced. The Rock Face hasn’t changed but you have.

Following this same logic when a Player gains a Level in a videogame they are being made more powerful. The Enemies they face haven’t been changed at all so the Challenge remains the same. The Difficulty of overcoming that Challenge is however reduced because the Players Skill has been increased.

Challenge and Difficulty can be used interchangeably so Challenge may not be the best word but in this post Challenge is the Challenge offered by the game while Difficulty is relative to the Players Skill.

In the Progression vs Level Graph Progression is essentially “Time”. As you progress through the games content the Challenge is increased. When you gain a Level your Skill is increased reducing the Difficulty.

None of the graphs take genuine Player Skill into account as it is far too subjective. These are plotting the known artificial changes in Skill resulting from the Games Mechanics.

And I don’t understand your progression vs level graph. What is progression there, and how is it different to level? What is challenge, and how is it different to difficulty?

@Naurgul The reasons Designers still add Disables to games is that a Disable from a numerical point of view is damage mitigation and they balance it around this.

There is plenty of Crowd Control in games that isn’t as frustrating as a straight Disable. This might be because the Player being disabled has an opportunity to counter or nullify the Disables effects (IE Their own Skill matters as to whether and to what degree they get disabled) or because the Crowd Control is only reducing their effective skill a little not completely negating it.

Guild Wars handles Crowd Control quite well as there are a huge number of potential counters and blocks that are situational (The next attack will miss and cause damage back type powers).