Sometimes while reading posts and writing posts several come ideas come together, by coincidence or the design of some higher power, and it just makes sense.
Today I posted about Vanguard’s vet rewards and the fact that Devs seem to take for granted prior knowledge a lot when designing post-launch content. This linked up nicely with a comment I’d posted on Bio Break’s post today on deeds in LoTRO. I think LoTRO’s deed system is a typical example of a great system, nice crunchy RPG-stat-goodness, that is badly explained *within the game*. Sure there are guides galore online but you have to go out of the game to get them! This also reminds me of the overwhelming need to have a wiki open to get almost anything done in Guild Wars 1.
Then there’s the trend for games to remove or shy away from RPG complexity nowadays as highlighted in a post by Keen recently. I actually think at the heart of this it isn’t just that vast hordes of FPS or strategy gamers have entered and are still coming into hobby with no RPG background and that they are being turned off by the complexity; though that may in part be true. In reality I think game designers are not doing well at building easy to understand user interfaces (UIs) or at explaining systems to new players. It’s not a new problem of course, hence the references to Vanguard and LoTRO, but I do think players are perhaps used to seeing better UIs these days and simply relying on a community-fed wiki for understandable instructions is lazyness.
As I’ve said before, DDO is actually ironically a good example of this phenomenon. It takes very complex character development ( i.e. leveling) and offers choice: it can be as easy as click ‘ok’ to auto choose skills, feats and new spells. Or you can go through a guided path with a few tweaks, or you can DIY the whole process. So why are designers and developers moving the genre away from its RPG roots towards much simpler core systems? Complexity is perhaps to blame for this trend, not because it scares away players, but because it scares away investors…
GamingSF 
I think dev’s are shying from complexity because it seems companies are more willing to sell a bunch of boxes then not have many subs. Might just be me, but low complexity games are awesome short term fun, while high complexity games are the ones I’ll play for a long time.
Sounds plausible, especially if it’s more the pressure for quick return on investments from publishers that is driving this trend.