Both of which are not MMOs and are completely different types of games. I fail to see what you are trying to do with this example, it makes no sense.
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Rereading, I worded it wrongly: "Lucky for WoW (made by Blizzard) they had made the right steps in the beginning and could take the hit (in subscription numbers), not so much other smaller MMOs."
Halving of 12mil players is less threatening to an MMO than halving of the 500k FFXIV has (or had since January). However that isn't "doing well" by any stretch, and they should have designed the game around what gained their subscriptions, not lose them for the past years.
I don't mind well thought out nerfs. Even echo is fine. But basically steps is a joke now. 50% health BEFORE the first gate(10% after the second). It's like congratulations you just beat the fight and you can ignore ALL the mechanics in this fight. Just burn.
We ran steps with quite a few FC members that are mostly casual - after the nerfs we ran it for a few more. The people that were casual went: This is no fun anymore... I liked a bit of a challenge before.
FCoB wasn't nerfed technically, the players received a buff that you can turn off and do the FCoB the normal way.
Steps of Faith is a mess, there is no challenge to it not like FCoB.
It's only a coordination trial, if you're coordinated you win, if you aren't you loose.
And let's face it, when you get PUGed with dudes you don't know it's like being snared foot to foot with 7 guys and trying to run in sync, in other words it's hard.
SoF got a nerf because a lot of people had almost no coordination skills.
And why do so many people care? Was SoF the fight where the devs put the most effort to make? Was it the most awesome fight you saw in FF14 ?
No. So if they nerf the heck out of this fight it matters not because it's a main story fight and it should not hinder players from getting to advance in their scenario quest line.
Steps had to be nerfed, they done want to start selling an xpac people can't access because they can't progress. SE would lose money that way.
Yeah but my request is not to do it for EVERY piece of endgame content. With the level cap increase, topped off with increased ilvl gear, which I feel will be pretty easy to obtain, that alone would relieve some of the difficulty of older content (depending on if they lvl sync it.)
There's enough Zergie and Tank/spank content as it is. I really dislike the way they've taken well thought out, reasonably challenging content, and reduce them to what feels like a joke. (Turn 7 being the best example of this, as it gave players room to not pay attention to their voices and shrieks, which I feel just made a lot of players lazy)
At least Give players the option of taking on the original content (perhaps an option that only preformed parties can have). and if they wipe 2-3 times then present the "option" of doing it with reduced difficulty (at the expense of obtaining full rewards prior to completion of instance) I would love if SE did that versus permanently inflicting echo or minimizing fight mechanics once a nerf has been set in place..
We're seeing this from different points of view. From your point of view, they lost nearly 50% of their sub base which is indeed troubling. From my point of view, even though they lost so many subs, at 7 million subs they're still the world's leading MMO which is why I view and still maintain that they are doing quite well.
But I will admit this. If that trend of losing 1 million subscribers per month keeps up, then yes, they will be in trouble.
Not to be "That Guy" but I said that It was an "interesting challenge" considering that it was story content, but that's not the endgame content I was referring too. I'm referring to content like Coil, Extremes, Alexander and the like.
The other posters used SoF for their reference...
btw you can understand something and still not agree with it :)
This is a very worrying step for SE to take.
Steps wasn't even hard. It needed a small amount of communication, somewhere along the lines of: "Who is MT? Who is on Cannons? Who is on Dragon Killer?" and other than that it's a tank and spank, almost quite literally.
The fact that half!!! the player-base were apparently incapable of doing such a trial is absurd, and goes to show what SEs policies of banning people who criticizing other players skill level for "harrasment" has done.
I guess in the future we should just expect all story to be even more derp mode than the story content already is.
World of WarCraft is in absolutely no sort of danger. They lose 3m subs as you would expect the after the first month of an expansion and guess what? They still have 7m subscribers. That, just for the record is over 10x what FF XIV has.
Subscription costs naturally go up over time, as inflation takes effect.