Please make easy the default for Full Speed Ahead!

Once you know how it works, it's not that difficult to do it first-try on the baseline difficulty... but that isn't really the problem with having it as the baseline. The problem with the quest is how much time people will waste figuring the quest out in the first place, and it's time they won't get back... and it's time they possibly didn't enjoy spending on it, too. The mechanics aren't relevant ever again either, as far as I know, so it's just there to waste your time on something you possibly don't find fun or worthwhile. It's also pretty disrespectful to the player to mandate them to fail the first time unless they've read several guides and watched a video or two on top of that, but~ that may be something subjective to me.

Would you mind just making the quest's selectable 'Easy' mode the baseline or, otherwise, move the difficulty selection to the start of the quest so you don't need to waste ten minutes getting coffee and making a sandwich if you don't want to deal with the quest in the first place? The 'Normal' mode should be kept... but only for the people who want it in the first place. The people who pick Easy don't want to deal with it, and the people who pick Normal like the mechanics of the quest (somehow) so nothing's lost.

Edit#3: You can even rename them to "Give me a challenge" and "Don't waste my time" so they're representative of your mindset and how much you may or may not enjoy the quest, but that may be going a bit too far.

If you want to wimp out, you can immediately dismount after starting the first round, go back to Mapitoto and restart on Easy mode.

If you actually read the quest text, it tells you what to do, so there should be no confusion on what to do even for a first time thru. There is no possible justification for allowing us to skip the quest, and no reason beyond "I'm lazy, so let me be lazier." for changing it. :/

...then what's the difference between letting someone choose the difficulty the moment they start, aside from making it easier for newcomers? I don't see it.

My first experience with the quest was spoiled by a bug (...not that people are willing to admit this game has it's flaws, of course... or it's bugs; They'd rather stroke their ego, just like you!) that despawned every single raptor collectable on the map, which is what encouraged me to make this: there isn't a difference between the two, in reward or in what they teach you. It's that simple. The only difference is that one is completable the first time you do it, the other is not.

I'd have to ask you, whose lazier: the person who wants to make others do the boring shit they do, or the person who wants to skip it? We both sit in our chairs playing a game we shell out $13+/mo for. I get people on Asura (and some who play this game, in general) want to feel good about themselves, but... not everyone plays games because they like an ego-booster. Some just love the FF series.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Orrion

My first experience with the quest was spoiled by a bug (...not that people are willing to admit this game has it's flaws, of course... or it's bugs; They'd rather stroke their ego, just like you!)

---

..and did you report this bug?

The bug you experienced would not have allowed you to complete the quest on Easy either, but I do hope that you reported it. I am very aware that the game has bugs, and actually have made numerous bug reports myself (including one in Accepted Bugs right now due to the path C augments on Lanun Knife actually breaking standard job functions.)

The quest itself is beatable on normal difficulty. It explains everything to you for what to do and how to do it in-game. My main resistance against changing it is there are a thousand things that would be better use of the devs' time than working on making a simple quest easier to cheese purely to allow lazy people to be lazier.

My problem with the quest itself is that it's not usually something people can feasibly finish the first-time, getting used to the trial-and-error involved in when /cheer does what and is worth using. That's made worse by the bug which apparently outright erases some food at random points, and if that isn't a bug and a feature... then it's a really stupid feature because, at least on Normal, there is no margin for "error" thanks to one not spawning where it should.

I understand that a majority of people who play these games are unhappy with the current state of modern MMOs but defending obtuse design isn't going to bring old MMOs back from the brink of development death; If all you do is defend crappy design ('Fetch me AN ITEM please!' Something they even make fun of in SoA when you try for the Rune Fencer class quest) then... well, the many many people who moved forward from old-school MMOs because new ones are less annoying and generally more rewarding in their opinion...? They'll never return.

You guys would just keep living in obscurity without doing anything about the fact older MMOs are losing their touch, which is kind of unfortunate because -- like a lot of people who've played FFXI -- I love it and can see it becoming great, if it focused on updating it's older design and advertising itself as an updated old-school experience in the way most modern rogue-likes do.

The purpose of the post was just to say it'd probably be wise to change the default difficulty so, then, people don't need to worry about certain terrible pieces of that quest -- it being a fetch-quest, most of all... but it also having odd bugs like the blue beams vanishing, the markers disappearing and the food not spawning.

There are a lot of minute bugs that could completely ruin a supposedly-decent experience and annoy you by wasting your time for something (nothing at all, in this case) worth that effort to you, but then again there're very few newbies in the first place. So why fix it, right? Everyone who does it knows how to do it in spite of everything, anyway.

It's not my problem if people want the game to remain exactly as it is just because it's familiar and, possibly, a bit of a boost to their ego. It is my problem if I have to deal with bad design and time-wasting bugs and glitches because people are resistant to change. You're not wrong, though; With a skeleton crew, the time would be spent better elsewhere... but it's still not my problem SE got all wise and decided to drop FFXI all-together instead of trying to improve upon it.