Records of Eminence!

[Afania]

You seem to think people might actually WANT hard fights. Whenever I see complaints, it reads to me as "I want a fight that is hard for everybody except for me and my friends so we can be better than the rest".

Yes ppl actually want challenge in a video game, what a surprise.

Just to point out FFXI isn't really the hardest MMORPG on the market.

People who spend the time and effort to put together a party, gear a job should be rewarded, or else there isn't much point to play anymore.

If you're a teacher of a class, and you want your students to study hard, you'd tell them "Whoever gets top 3 in next exam can get a gift as a reward", not "after next exam everyone can get a gift as a reward". If you hand out reward to everyone, nobody would study hard. If only top 3 gets reward, everyone would want to study more.

If you can win every BC no matter what gear/skill/knowledge you have, there aren't any reason to actually gear your jobs, make more friends, test and experiment what job and strategy works the best...you know, don't need to do the fun stuff of this game and still able to beat it. I don't really need to play the game for real, can just log on, sleep through the content, got bored and log off.

The game(or work/anything you do in life basically) is fun when you set a goal, and work hard for it, and got rewarded by accomplishing the goal, and vice versa.

So what's wrong with wanting content that not everyone can beat?

If you are looking for a real piece of challenging content, I believe Divine Might II is where you will find it more so than anything, each Angel makes Delve NMs look weak by compare, admittedly, they have weaknesses like Shadows that old NMs from their day and age always suffered, but, they are easily the hardest this in this game right now on Very Hard.

AFAIK DM and AA doesn't reward ppl for doing very hard since craft mat drop on easy mode, and VH weapon isn't 100% drop(from what I've heard).

Having a difficulty setting is a good thing, but if doing harder mode doesn't get much better reward, everyone would rather solo.

Plenty of my friends been soloing easy mode AA for pages/expensive craft mat and refuse to party with others, because if you solo you get all the pages in pool and all the gil items in pool. You can probably build a relic by soloing AA all day and sell every mat. But doing normal~VD needs a pt which takes time and less chance to get items.

This probably applies to DM, I honestly don't know which LS has the resource to do a very hard DM fight, which may need 18 ppl and normal can be cleared with 12 or something. Unless very hard gives something you can never get in normal, most ppl probably won't bother.

Also, title isn't a reward IMO. Personally I won't go through the pain in the ass just for title. Even aftermath from RME is a much better reward for hardcore than loltitle. At least aftermath helps the pt and title does nothing.