For online games, do you prefer easy to Nintendo Hard, or a Nintendo Hard to easy?

Easy to hard. In MMOs at least, once you've gone through early levels (they rarely give much in the way of resistance), pimped out your character's equips and learned the ins and out, strengths and weaknesses of your class, you'd naturally want something that would test said skills to the absolute limit, just so you know that your character is capable of participating in the game itself after all the effort you put into it. One of the biggest downfalls of Maple in this respect is the lack of non-ridiculous high level PQs/boss fights/content in general. Your choices are HT or PB, area-wise it's chief oblivion guardians/Lyka. One is now considered 'easy', the other is so unbelievably difficult and has such high HP requirements that no-one even wants to try it. The area is just lol-worthy past 14x.

If a game just gets easier the longer you play, where's the sense of achievement and character growth in that? Rather than my skills just getting better and better, mowing down everything in their path, there should be things that actually provide some sort of resistance for high level skills. Once I start 1hkoing skeles (COGs after the updates) with my AMs Ult it's pretty much game over as of current. Once I can 2 Bstep + taunt COGs with my shadower, it's pretty much game over for that too (only thing I'd consider past that point is soloing BF, but even that's just a case of HP). For a game with a level cap of 200, this shouldn't be the case. I continue to play Maple in the hope that some content that actually tests my characters and their skills comes out.

What about when the game adds new content/stuff that incidentally makes acquiring good equipment/training/earning money easier? Example for Maple would be Item maker, lowered EXP curve, and New Leaf City (easier to make good equipment, easier to train, and easier to train with more efficient potions). I can give WoW examples, such as the implementation of daily quests for earning easy money, as well as releasing stronger equipment that can be bought with badges (that's for clearing Hard mode dungeons) that wasn't previously there before; there's also their version of an EXP curve reduction. Then there's the argument that WoW is too easy since everything can be obtained with time, instead of how before it took being in the top guilds, or having a bundle of money to shell out for the most powerful equipment. Now even your worst noob can have similiary strong equipment if he/she plays long enough. Of course it takes longer than actually raiding, but the fact anyone can have equipment of top quality is possible. Maple comparison would be a noob spending say 10-20 hours of game time to get a Zakum Helmet-like hat for free. It's NOT a Zakum Helmet, but the stats say otherwise.

Does feeling like your work is for nothing when in the future there's more powerful equipment released count as making the game go from Nintendo hard to easy, or is it just implementing necessary upgrades to keep the game fresh? Again I'll use a Maple example. Zakum Helmets that used to cost a fortune is now very easily distributable. Some people feel that it diminishes the feeling of accomplishment, since THEY were the first generation or whatever people who took down Zakum when it used to take hours and before Onyx Apples came out. There's then the complaint that Maple is too easy because it's too easy to power up your character: just slap on Weapon Attack everything.