Rift

RIFT has failed.

Okay, that's a bit premature.  To be honest, I'm not a RIFT player, but the press and release seems to have gone off great and I hope it does.  What's got me thinking about RIFT is the comparisons between WOW and specifically how people have been bashing it for being "too easy"/"people will come back to WOW".  What that argument really shows is the schizophrenic nature of WOW as an "easy game"/"hard game".  In LK it way super easy, of course, because Kotick leaned on some heads to get more subs.  I guess he is tooling around more with his next toy Titan, because they've gone back to hard in Cata.  What hard mode really means is:

* Must have lots of time, aka grind, to do something of substance (hpug, raid)
* Big grind to play end game

What easy mode brings is:

* Lower barrier to playing (novices, new players, etc)
* Low or no grind
* Casual play times (1 hour per night, etc)

If we are to infer anything from LK is that easy mode = hordes of players (big subs) and hard mode = a few, elite players (opposite).

Back to RIFT, clearly they are going for easy mode/big subs... which shoots right back at their critics... what is wrong with easy mode?