As someone who has long felt that MMO games have been following the path of ease for far too long now, an article posted over at MMORPG.com by former World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern caught my eye immediately. His question is simple: have MMOs become too easy?

His answer is “yes”, and it’s a pretty definitive one. Despite being WoW‘s original team leader, he has no qualm about pointing out its faults. Sure, the game is Blizzard’s pride and joy – it did quickly become the most popular MMO on the planet, after all, and from a business perspective, the game hit the ball out of the park. From a gamer perspective, though, Kern feels that Blizzard effectively “killed a genre“.