I can't believe I'm going to say this

[Oddwaffle]

You forget that casual players get exactly the same thing for their money that hardcore players get for their money. You get access to a virtual world, and that is all your money affords you. It does not guarantee you're going to have the best gear. It does not even guarantee you're going to be anywhere near the best. Would you complain that other guys in the club get more ladies than you even though you paid exactly the same price to get into the club?

We play the game for entertainment. Do you think delve megabosses are any more entertaining than skirmish? Why would you obsess over something that's too difficult for you instead of enjoying something that's just right for you? Oatixur is not a real thing. It's a virtual item which grants just as much enjoyment from obtaining it as any other upgrade your character might obtain.

No,you are wrong. They quit because they are not getting what they paid for. That is entertainment. The game is not fun enough for people who quit. There are many reasons and one of them is the widening gap between players. You need to take some economics reading to understand the difference between value and price. It doesn't matter if it's skirmish, delve or just sitting around playing with mog gardens. Casual people are getting less value than hardcore players. They have no access to delve content and can not participate in events that take more time. Therefore they have no access to better reward equipments. Maybe some people still have fun but FFXI is having people NOT HAVING FUN. That means some people realize they are not getting what they want for their money, time and effort => they quit.

On your club example: that's why some people don't go to clubs. Think about it for a second. Clubs serve a particular class of customers, they know they need to get the men in by getting the ladies in. The ladies attract the men. That's why you get clubs with free entry for hot ladies. Does FFXI serve a particular class of customers like the hardcore players? Should it be a super hardcore like the olden days with LS points, ultra rare drop and sadistic wait timer? OR do hardcore players realize that they actually need casual players to help move the game along and therefore should have SE give free access to casual players (i.e. like free to play games).

If you put effort and time into something then it has real worth no matter what it is. It can be anything from random piece of imagination to the largest construct in the world. Virtual item or no is irrelevant. It does not have to exist for it to have any worth because the value comes from the person placing it, not the item itself.

Stop thinking about 'this is the right thing'. There is no such thing as the right thing in business, only success and failure. Also, what was a success yesterday can be a failure today. Putting hardcore players on top is the failure at the moment and it is showing.

[Oddwaffle]

If you'd like to know why the gap between the competent and incompetent exists at such a high level...it's because Abyssea did exactly what you wanted. Make it as brain-dead easy as possible to do "elite" content, then pat you on the back for your good job because FFXI is going to be dead soon anyway, now that we have FFXIV!

And then FFXIV 1.0 folded and suddenly FFXI wasn't dead, but the "softening" effects of Abyssea continued all the way into Adoulin. And here we are.

If you don't have tough content, you don't get competent players in any numbers. You get mouthbreathers that THINK they're competent and then can't handle the shock of actually having something that takes real effort.

For them, there's plenty of content, even in Adoulin. But if you think that you should be getting the best of the best gear without skill, may you spend the rest of the expansion AFKing in Reives.

Since there is such a gap therefore we should introduce super hard content for players and hope that they will become better and competent? That's the solution you wanted to talk about right? And that's what SE had done. Do you think FFXI is now growing in numbers or do you think people are quitting?

The largest mistake SE made was making content around alliance and hardcore players with lots of play time. They throw out the hard content and hope people will change. Then they rapidly lowering the difficulty so everyone can do it. Well they failed, ever since Abbyssea. They failed even bigger when they put in better rewards for large competent alliance than small party and solo content. Look at what's happening.

Content that can fulfill demands from all customers begins with the one who gets the lowest value from your product. It's like a team marching. You are only as fast as your slowest member. Make the core or largest content for the most casual players. Then make content for people who are less casual after that. Keep the gap between the slowest person and the fastest ones close. Once the fastest people start finishing your easy/casual content, make harder (medium difficulty) content for them. This time give slightly better rewards but at slower rate. Once they start finishing those then you throw in your hardest content. This time you can have even slightly better rewards and can also decrease the drop rate for this content. Casual people would be finishing your most casual content and semi-hardcore players would be enjoying your mid-range content. Finally, release new casual content once you notice casual players finishing your easy content. You can introduce better items here for casual players to catch up to the hardcore players.

Note: I define casual players as people with less than 15 hours per week playing or looking for info about the game. 15-25 hours would be mid-range normal players and more than 25+ hours would be hardcore. Casual players don't mean lower skills but generally they are less skillful and have less understanding of the game than a hardcore player. This is because less time training and studying the subject as well as access to events taking more time and effort than they can afford.

[Xtrasweettea]

I'm sorry, was the object to lose the debate? Am I running the wrong way coach?

I am hoping your goal in this is to persuade others to see your point of view and maybe change their thinking a little. Extremism and forced narrative thinking does not usually assist those in trying to convince an audience who is not already in agreement with the speaker to change their minds. Instead it usually does the opposite.

I am assuming you are trying to get a point across and attempt to change the person’s (whom you are responding to) mind when you respond to a post you do not happen to agree with.

I took the notion that "If anybody is doing this it must be good" and gave an extreme example of how flawed that logic really is. Anything else you read into that is on you.

Extreme examples are usually flawed to begin with. They are outliers. They do not properly reflect what happens in most outcomes.

Also, these examples have different paths and nearly no connections to each other. As a reader of your post, I had to put together the strings that weren’t there in order to make sense of it. Anyone reading it without a proper explanation after the fact would have to “read into it.” That’s another reason why extreme examples really do not work to help get a point across.

The fact that a few people are doing X content is only good if your goal is to exclude almost everyone.

I did not know my goal of doing this content was to exclude other players. I thought the goal was me making the most out of the money I spend on the game and the cost of opportunity associated with playing the game. Usually the job roles I play the most often have to include others for their more effect monster slaying skills than I would do.

I also believe that most players who participate in such content are on purposely excluding almost everyone.

Why would any sane person who is trying to make a fun exciting game purposely make content that most of their paying customers will not use? Does that really sound like a rational way to conduct business?

Most of SE’s paying customers from which region: NA, JP, or EU? I explained before that there is a strong possibility that SE is tailoring the game for their native audience (JP). We as US and EU audience members were invited along for the ride. JP culture strives more on team work and less on individuality than we do here in the US.

There is a point to where the fault of SE for how they make the content stops and the point where fault of the player begins for not participating in events. Players do have a choice to participate in the events. Players also have the choice for how long they play, what they do, if they change off of that DD job that is like the other thousand DDs on their server, etc. How they choose to spend their time and what tools they use the game provides them is where the fault of the player starts. You cannot keep blaming SE for everything without removing all the faults that the playerbase creates through their decision-making.

You can’t blame SE for the social barriers created by the playerbase. Most of these social barriers are created because of the amount of which jobs the players have most of versus what is needed. In the average plasm party, there are only 8 DD spots (6 DDs, 2 THFs). The 10 other spots are for support jobs (including tanks and sacrifices). The shouter will want to get the most plasm per hour, so he or she will try to get the best DD for the least amount of effort. The shouter then puts up that barrier of “Delve DD only, RankX.” The shouter can do that because the +85% of the playerbase are DD. There is a high demand for what little spots there are for the run for DD. The shouter is practicing what is called “progressive credentialism.”

Is it morally wrong? It can be, yes. Progressive credentialism can exclude DDs with real skill and know-how but lack the credential that the shouter is looking for.

It is not wrong in the sense of cost: the cost of the shouter and the 17 other people he or she will eventually group with (whether the cost be time, opportunity, gil, etc.). It is easier to use progressive credentalism then it is to interview and question every DD that sends to a /tell.

Which would you rather do with your three hours of game play: be morally straight and not progress, or progress at the cost of possibly excluding others? Keep in mind, you joining a run that the shouter is using “progressive credentialism” does count as not being morally straight.

Forget that you just want to have special gear that's better than everyone else for a minute […]

[Sarcasm] Yup, I just want that special gear to show around town to everyone to gloat. I have no intention of using it for the benefit of others. That Tamaxchi that I use to cure and help land enfeebles will never see the digital light of Vanadiel, and I will not use it to benefit the other players who I may one day want to team up with to reach a goal. You are correct. You found me out! [/Sarcasm]

Wait, I think this may be a better response to that quote:

[Sarcasm] You are correct. I shouldn’t be selfishly focusing on getting better gear. I feel guilty for my actions. I have “progressive guilt.” I will add that guilt to my “male guilt”, “white guilt”, and “American guilt” I have to carry around with me every day to remind me of my privilege. Thank you for showing me the errors of my way. I will toss all of my gear I earned by playing support jobs, jump onto DRK, and sit and in town like the rest of the oppressed. I am so sorry for oppressing you and others! [/Sarcasm]

[…]and explain to me how making joey the pink ninja lose hope of ever reaching a satisfying level of gear and quit is good for the game beyond the prospect of you not having to talk to him in a game that you so adamantly claim is about social skills.

Am I explaining to you how to prevent Joey from losing hope with the use of social skills?

Am I explaining to you how my lack of social interaction with an unknown ninja is good for the game?

The question doesn’t make sense. Am I trying to not talk to him? Is he full of hope and wants to reach a specific goal but can’t because I won’t talk to him?

Explain.

I know what he was talking about and it's exactly the opposite of what most of these shells use to conduct themselves. There are a few that are made up up close friends who happen to be very good at the game. The majority of them are not. Go google LS applications and read some of the crap these people say to prospective members. I would venture a guesstimate and say that most people won't / can't join these shells because of things that have absolutely nothing to do with their skill which makes the idea that "The best players should have the best gear" absolute BS. It's really about who is in the cool kids club and joining that club has nothing to do with being a good fair decent person.

I have looked at LS applications before. I didn’t join many because of their barriers of entry. I got into two endgame LSs prior to Abyssea because I had RDM. I didn’t sign up at all, I got invited for the jobs I had and the game-play skills I had.

You might be correct about the amount of players that may not be able to join a shell. Though, if the owners of the shell have taken the time to create the shell, they can set the standards. If the players looking do not have what is needed for that shell, if they really wanted to join, they would aim to get what the shell is asking for.

The idea isn’t “The best players should have the best gear,” the idea is “What players’ sets of skills, jobs, and gear that would work best for the shell as a whole in order to reach the shell’s goal and benefit the members at the same time?” The idea of the shell is to reach the goal in the most efficient manner effectively. It is what real life businesses do (you know, that business point you keep bringing up). There are shells with a “good-ol-boy” system, but those are very rare.

[Yinnyth]

No,you are wrong. They quit because they are not getting what they paid for. That is entertainment. The game is not fun enough for people who quit. There are many reasons and one of them is the widening gap between players. You need to take some economics reading to understand the difference between value and price. It doesn't matter if it's skirmish, delve or just sitting around playing with mog gardens. Casual people are getting less value than hardcore players. They have no access to delve content and can not participate in events that take more time. Therefore they have no access to better reward equipments. Maybe some people still have fun but FFXI is having people NOT HAVING FUN.

It sounds to me like these people can't have fun if someone else is stronger than them in the game.

A casual player is not able to keep pace with all the changes in the game. They simply don't have enough time to collect everything their character needs for advancement. As a result, that casual player will constantly lag behind the progress of a hardcore player. Your argument is that the casual player gets less value from the game because of this, and you are correct. Ignoring the fact that I use 3 different accounts for right now, I pay the same amount, but I enjoy the game for longer periods of time. No amount of coding will change the fact that a casual player gets less from the game than I get.

So every time a casual player cries out that he is getting less value from the game than I am, should the devs bend to his will and grant him his request? No. Because the only way to make it so everyone gets the same value from the game (as you have laid it out) is to just hand everyone the exact same gear. No quest. No boss. Just everyone gets the same value. Whether you have 1 minute per year, or 24 hours a day to play FFXI, everyone would be getting the same value for their money then, and it would finally be fair.

The value of the game is in how much it entertains you. Apparently, you're only entertained when you have final tier equipment.



People are leaving the game one way or another, and there's no way you can even know how many of them are leaving for which reason. From a business standpoint, it makes the most sense to alienate NONE of your members. We have ONE hardcore event in SoA so far. The rest of the entire expansion is softcore. Yet somehow, this one hardcore event is enough to get all the casual players all hot and bothered about how they don't have enough time to play the game. Isn't that what a game is supposed to do? Make its players wish they could play more?

[FrankReynolds]

I am hoping your goal in this is to persuade others to see your point of view and maybe change their thinking a little. Extremism and forced narrative thinking does not usually assist those in trying to convince an audience who is not already in agreement with the speaker to change their minds. Instead it usually does the opposite.

Uhh... says who? Any facts to back that? Or were you just hoping I would believe you because you used no extreme comparisons?

I am assuming you are trying to get a point across and attempt to change the person’s (whom you are responding to) mind when you respond to a post you do not happen to agree with.

Not necessarily. I may not be able to change the mind of the fanatic, but I can at least keep him from swaying others by pointing out the flaws in his arguments.

Extreme examples are usually flawed to begin with. They are outliers. They do not properly reflect what happens in most outcomes.

Says you...

Also, these examples have different paths and nearly no connections to each other. As a reader of your post, I had to put together the strings that weren’t there in order to make sense of it. Anyone reading it without a proper explanation after the fact would have to “read into it.” That’s another reason why extreme examples really do not work to help get a point across.

Any example, even the simplest is left to interpretation. Just because it wasn't immediately clear to you does not mean it wasn't concise. Why do you think there are book clubs? Everyone interprets things differently. That which offends your sensibilities makes another person laugh just as what I said made me chuckle a little inside.

I did not know my goal of doing this content was to exclude other players.

I never said it was. You don't make the game.

I simply pointed out that making content for a niche in a finite base of customers is a poor business model if you can't get those niche customers to supplement the lost income from the larger majority. They can't. You guys are not multiplying and you are not offering to increase payments.

I thought the goal was me making the most out of the money I spend on the game and the cost of opportunity associated with playing the game.

What do you think I am trying to do? How does telling them to keep making things I can't do or don't enjoy equate to me making the best of the money I spent? Furthermore, if I don't enjoy it and I quit, how does the loss of development funding benefit you?

I also believe that most players who participate in such content are on purposely excluding almost everyone.

They do. Why teach a guy to fish when you can make a killing selling him the fish you caught?

Most of SE’s paying customers from which region: NA, JP, or EU? I explained before that there is a strong possibility that SE is tailoring the game for their native audience (JP). We as US and EU audience members were invited along for the ride. JP culture strives more on team work and less on individuality than we do here in the US.

That doesn't change the fact that they aren't doing it. It doesn't matter if one culture likes X while another likes Y. If the people who hate X far outnumber the people who like X then they are your key demographic.

There is a point to where the fault of SE for how they make the content stops and the point where fault of the player begins for not participating in events. Players do have a choice to participate in the events. Players also have the choice for how long they play, what they do, if they change off of that DD job that is like the other thousand DDs on their server, etc. How they choose to spend their time and what tools they use the game provides them is where the fault of the player starts. You cannot keep blaming SE for everything without removing all the faults that the playerbase creates through their decision-making.

Yes, I can. They are selling something. They either make what the customer likes, or they don't. It's not the customers job to like something just because they made it. FFXI is not my child. I don't owe it unconditional love.

You can’t blame SE for the social barriers created by the playerbase. Most of these social barriers are created because of the amount of which jobs the players have most of versus what is needed.

Who makes the jobs again? Who makes the content that requires said jobs? Not I.

In the average plasm party, there are only 8 DD spots (6 DDs, 2 THFs). The 10 other spots are for support jobs (including tanks and sacrifices). The shouter will want to get the most plasm per hour, so he or she will try to get the best DD for the least amount of effort. The shouter then puts up that barrier of “Delve DD only, RankX.” The shouter can do that because the +85% of the playerbase are DD. There is a high demand for what little spots there are for the run for DD. The shouter is practicing what is called “progressive credentialism.”

As a company, they are responsible for making that effect as minimal as possible. It's not my job to run around giving sermons convincing people that they like something they don't or that they should invite someone they don't want. This sort of behavior will never go away.

The only people who can have any real affect on it are the games developers. No one, not you, not me or anyone else is going to affect the attitude change required to fix this without their intervention.

Is it morally wrong? It can be, yes. Progressive credentialism can exclude DDs with real skill and know-how but lack the credential that the shouter is looking for.

It is not wrong in the sense of cost: the cost of the shouter and the 17 other people he or she will eventually group with (whether the cost be time, opportunity, gil, etc.). It is easier to use progressive credentalism then it is to interview and question every DD that sends to a /tell.

That is why you don't make all of the fun / rewarding content rely on this.

Which would you rather do with your three hours of game play: be morally straight and not progress, or progress at the cost of possibly excluding others? Keep in mind, you joining a run that the shouter is using “progressive credentialism” does count as not being morally straight.

It's a catch 22. Human behavior will not change. The content can.

[Sarcasm] Yup, I just want that special gear to show around town to everyone to gloat. I have no intention of using it for the benefit of others. That Tamaxchi that I use to cure and help land enfeebles will never see the digital light of Vanadiel, and I will not use it to benefit the other players who I may one day want to team up with to reach a goal. You are correct. You found me out! [/Sarcasm]

And you don't think everyone else wants it for the same reason? They want to cure and land enfeebles just like you. You don't think they deserve to.

Wait, I think this may be a better response to that quote:

[Sarcasm] You are correct. I shouldn’t be selfishly focusing on getting better gear. I feel guilty for my actions. I have “progressive guilt.” I will add that guilt to my “male guilt”, “white guilt”, and “American guilt” I have to carry around with me every day to remind me of my privilege. Thank you for showing me the errors of my way. I will toss all of my gear I earned by playing support jobs, jump onto DRK, and sit and in town like the rest of the oppressed. I am so sorry for oppressing you and others! [/Sarcasm]

Ahh, but you play support because you have work ethic right? in a video game.. work ethic...

Am I explaining to you how to prevent Joey from losing hope with the use of social skills?

Am I explaining to you how my lack of social interaction with an unknown ninja is good for the game?

The question doesn’t make sense. Am I trying to not talk to him? Is he full of hope and wants to reach a specific goal but can’t because I won’t talk to him?

Explain.

Just a few paragraphs ago you explained why he can't get in a group. I am here arguing that they need to affect changes to lessen his need for that group and / or the difficulty of getting what the group wants him to have in order to be accepted. You are arguing against said changes and saying that joey just needs to suck less and kiss more ass (I'm paraphrasing your whole social argument).

Explain how this is good for the game and how it could possibly make the game more popular.

I have looked at LS applications before. I didn’t join many because of their barriers of entry. I got into two endgame LSs prior to Abyssea because I had RDM. I didn’t sign up at all, I got invited for the jobs I had and the game-play skills I had.

See that's what you think, but actually you got in because they could afford to bring in people and try them out without significant risk. The content was more forgiving of crappy players and / or gear. They made it take forever to get good gear, but just about anyone could partake.

You might be correct about the amount of players that may not be able to join a shell. Though, if the owners of the shell have taken the time to create the shell, they can set the standards. If the players looking do not have what is needed for that shell, if they really wanted to join, they would aim to get what the shell is asking for.

See, this is the catch. Most of what these shells want takes ten times longer to get solo. Many people look at the requirements and go "well... I don't have time for that crap". Things need to be done to make it so that it doesn't take 6 months to gear up for an event that will give you gear ten times better in two days. It's ass backwards. There is nothing worse than working your ass off knowing that some other guy is getting paid loot for almost nothing just because he knows the boss (So to speak).

The idea isn’t “The best players should have the best gear,” the idea is “What players’ sets of skills, jobs, and gear that would work best for the shell as a whole in order to reach the shell’s goal and benefit the members at the same time?” The idea of the shell is to reach the goal in the most efficient manner effectively. It is what real life businesses do (you know, that business point you keep bringing up). There are shells with a “good-ol-boy” system, but those are very rare.

And that's great for the shell, but bad for the game and by extension the games developers. Linkshells make lots of money when they can aquire / sell things no one else can get. But that doesn't help sell subs. It just helps RMT really.

EDIT: hurt my back earlier, on lots of pain pills, take with a grain of salt etc.

[Stompa]

Delve megabosses don't require you to sit at your computer for 10 hours to beat them. Delve is 45 minutes long. Everything beyond that is just the prep work which can be done ahead of time. Or is 15 minutes of gathering and 45 minutes of delving too much time for a casual player to set aside?

When I use the term "hardcore", I mean a person who cares deeply about being a better player and shapes parts of their RL around FFXI. For example: making sure they work specific hours so they have time free for linkshell events, spending lots of money on hardware to play FFXI on, spending free time studying aspects of the game or pondering things which give you difficulty.

Well re; your delve point, shout runs take ages to fill up (sometimes) because they are waiting for certain specific job/gear. But you are more importantly missing the point that this Delve run would have to occur precisely during the 2 hrs the player is logged in and it would have to fill-up and start fairly quickly. The odds of that happening are very very small. Most ppl doing Delve are online longer than those two hours, hear a shout and join. That is difficult if you have only a two hour window. And of course then there's delve fails, where they fight it again after losing. Again this wouldn't be possible on such a small gaming window. And also wkrieves, stupendous 7-20+ hour sessions. This is SE at their most Player-Hating, ever. It is anti-gaming. I've been 32 years as a gamer & I know that accessibility and playability are the two gold-standards of videogames, my issue with SOA and some earlier content is that SE don't understand that.
I actually did LOL at your "making sure they work specific hours so they have time free for linkshell events" comment. Given the employment situation and economic problems globally, people are happy to get *a* job, and work whatever hours they are told to, and often work TWO jobs, or triple-shifts. In addition, many gamers are students, they study and then they work in the evenings. These people have a limited gaming window. Neither of your two points ^above would apply to these people.
I am self-employed on the computer, I have a work PC next to my game PC, and can stay log in all day, multitask work and ffxi. But on my LS for example, an average group of people, most people play evenings after work and/or studying. None of them can afford to play for more than 3 hours usually.

[Yinnyth]

I've been 32 years as a gamer & I know that accessibility and playability are the two gold-standards of videogames, my issue with SOA and some earlier content is that SE don't understand that.
I actually did LOL at your "making sure they work specific hours so they have time free for linkshell events" comment. Given the employment situation and economic problems globally, people are happy to get *a* job, and work whatever hours they are told to, and often work TWO jobs, or triple-shifts. In addition, many gamers are students, they study and then they work in the evenings. These people have a limited gaming window. Neither of your two points ^above would apply to these people.

There are more people in this world who can't afford to purchase a computer and copy of the game than there are hardcore FFXI players. This is not a reason against FFXI releasing one hardcore event with rewards in scale to the effort required for them. It is merely an observation to the sad state of the world we live in. If you are working 2 full-time jobs merely to make ends meet, you are in a rough place, and I wish you the best. But MMOs have a system in place where time invested = character progression. If you have less time to invest, you have less character progression. Being upset that you don't have the same things ingame that I have is less a statement of how messed up the game is, and more a statement of how messed up our world is.

SE gives things that you can do with only 2 hours per day, 3 days a week. Your chances improve even greater if you find a group of people who happen to run events during your 2 hour window that are willing to accept you (like 3 of the people in my delve LS who already have their tojil win despite being RL-focused, but capable of playing well during the limited time they're available.)

Someone who plays the game casually could accept the fact that they are a casual player, and instead of trying to undermine all hardcore content, they could enjoy the majority of new content instead of obsessing over the one event which is beyond their grasp currently.

[Stompa]

......But MMOs have a system in place where time invested = character progression. If you have less time to invest, you have less character progression. Being upset that you don't have the same things ingame that I have is less a statement of how messed up the game is, and more a statement of how messed up our world is.....

Well ok, but re; "character progression", the people I'm talking about have played ffxi religiously for 9~ years, and have all their 99 jobs and af3+2 sets etc.and every preSOA storyline finished, high crafting, etc. Their characters are not unprogressed at all, they are simply unable to engage in single runs that last for 10 hours or w/e.
Also the example of ppl around the world can't afford computers/software is irrelevant, we are talking about Final Fantasy fans, who played all the pre Xi games by Squaresoft and the later SE games. They have computers, they are good at games, their ffxi chars are top-notch, they just have a problem fitting long events into their lives. That isnt the planet earths problem, that is SE making some gear that only ppl with oodles of freetime can obtain.
Perhaps more importantly, and as I originally said, this was not a problem when your options were RME's or the lesser Magians. Anyone could solo a powerful magian on their own timescale, it was better than AH/nm drop weapons by a huge degree, so a player could feel that even though he didn't have time for RME, he could farm a magian with a very respectable dmg/delay/augment bonus on it which at least kept him in the same ballpark as players with RME. That is NO LONGER TRUE. SoA weapons are over double dmg of magian99s. So there really is a new SoA era gap between the haves and the havenots, which did not exist even remotely as much in the RME-magian gap.

[Yinnyth]

No, not anyone could solo a magian on their own time scale. Soloing a magian required a base amount of time investment. To the extreme, let's say you have only 5 minutes per day that you can play, and you are a bard who wants his fire dagger. Well, you're going to need fire weather which is rare as heck and very unlikely to happen during that 5 minute window during which you play, or firesday which is also unlikely to occur during your 5 minute window, so most of your playtime is spent hoping you get lucky and actually make progress. But even if you do get lucky, you're a bard, so you're fortunate if you can even kill one enemy in your limited time.

This is similar to what a person with only 2 hours to play faces today. The chances of them getting a delve run together during that slim window of time they play is relatively small (ignoring for a moment that they could create or join a linkshell which does scheduled delve runs during their available time). SE cannot make the game cater to every RL handicap a person has though. If it's fair to make it so casual players can obtain everything ingame regardless of how much play time they have, we need to find the lowest common denominator and scale it down to him, so everything needs to be doable in 5 minutes per day.

Would an MMO that only takes 5 minutes of your time per day in order to "win" be entertaining to you? I don't think 5 minutes of entertainment per day would be worth my subscription fee.

[Rustic]

Since there is such a gap therefore we should introduce super hard content for players and hope that they will become better and competent? That's the solution you wanted to talk about right? And that's what SE had done. Do you think FFXI is now growing in numbers or do you think people are quitting?

The largest mistake SE made was making content around alliance and hardcore players with lots of play time. They throw out the hard content and hope people will change. Then they rapidly lowering the difficulty so everyone can do it. Well they failed, ever since Abbyssea. They failed even bigger when they put in better rewards for large competent alliance than small party and solo content. Look at what's happening.

Same thing that's happening to WoW. As the challenge level declined, the population of the game declines. The casual wants the best shinies for the least effort, no matter what the MMO is. If you make the game that way, you then lose the hardcore population.

Oddly enough, if you -don't- cater to the casual, you last far longer. EvE Online is a feral mass of PvP and steep learning curves requiring in many cases dozens if not 100s of players to prosper in many parts of the game.

(Anyone who disbelieves this, I encourage you to go running around Goon-controlled space sometime and tell them you can take them on. Bring plenty of lube.)

It encourages player quality and teamwork. It succeeds fantastically. If you want casual, Runescape has been catering to you for years. You want to encourage people to play? You get them to go in, stick together, depend on each other. Make your game a casual solo-fest and the biggest reason for player retention goes straight out the door- friends. Comrades.

Abyssea was a failure in that, as people rapidly devolved into two-boxing or soloing much of the content. People stopped depending on each other, even in 6-man exp parties (which no longer exist, thank goodness), and spend much of the game running around in their newbie gear exping their way up through an endless supply of skeletons, crawlers, and bees...and then get to 50+ without even understanding simple things like "what stats are good for my job" or "I need spells, really?"...and are then encouraged to do much the same thing where they can be spoon-fed in Abyssea PT's where again, they often do even LESS.

And the server populations have plummeted. Turning the game into pablum kills it by inches, because in the end, that is the very definition of boring, led along only by the hope of new shinies so you can all be the specialist of snowflakes...because none of you will be special. When the rodeo ends, you could have plunked down $30 for a copy of a console game and felt like you accomplished more.

Now we have a game full of players who have been vastly "underexercised" and once again, are being asked to do the equivalent of a marathon to get to the top. And they whiiiiiiine about it. And want it eaaaaasy.

Screw that. We won't have an FFXI at that rate anymore. There's content for casuals, in Adoulin, but there -has- to be content for players who want a hard mode. And yes, they can't share. If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be hard enough to keep the players who craved a challenge in the game to begin with, and if the gear was identical, nobody would do the hardmode content because it'd be zero reward.

Instead, we have people who think they're competent trying the hardmode content because they want shinies raining down from heaven like Abyssea did and getting burnt. I'm sorry, but either skill up or shut up on that. Another Abyssea and there won't be an FFXI left anymore, because that kind of game is F2P on a dozen dozen companies.