[Personal Opinion] FFXIV is too casual friendly

I don't like using the phrase "too casual friendly", because casual players can enjoy difficulty... (like me!)

I do, however, agree that the game is way too easy in too many places. I'd like to be able to stay awake while doing dungeons. While I'd wish for WildStar levels of challenge, I'd settle for any kind of difficulty increase really... >_<

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Originally Posted by Enur

What would be the better option?

Being given a single gold trophy to strive and improve for? Or giving everyone a price for participating?

In the long run i believe a gold medal is better. I remember fondly my first few weeping city runs. The community worked together on something. I dont, however, have any memorable thoughts on any lvl 60 dungeon. Theyre all so bland and same-y. Boring. No challenge.

I mean theyre called expert dungeons for crying out loud, yet no expertice is required to conplete them. Easy, spam bootshine, no-brain content should be left in the lvl 50 roulette. Dont play an mmo if you dont want to improve for (and with) other people.

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In common sense, yes this is true.
In business however it's not.
It's for Square-Enix way better to keep everyone happy, making sure they keep paying and playing then just raising a few above the others.

Since we get one story dungeon and one hm dungeon, Perhaps they should keep the story one the current faceroll difficulty and make the hm normal difficulty (oh the irony). It is an optional dungeon after all.

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Originally Posted by Clethoria

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First off, let me say that I appreciate this (usually toxic) discussion being kept reasonable and healthy as a debate topic, it's nice to see.

However I just want to point out that your line of thinking is slightly flawed when it comes to this game because the levelling experience is some of the harder "casual" content in Heavensward. Dungeons like Sohm Al and the Vault set players up to learn their jobs and actually have a reasonable challenge without being walled, which was great to see, but then at 60 the difficulty went completely flat and mind numbing (compare healing the vault to healing antitower).

Can you justify that you want to keep things as they are when the actual MSQ was one of the more challenging and engaging parts of the HW dungeons?


Edit: Just a reminder to everyone, the devs said at fanfest that something is changing about dungeons in SB to make them more engaging.

The OPs remark is to bias, he list things that are of course easy because that's what the devs designed them for. Dungeon are easy because they are just a tool to help people catch up. MSQ is easy because it's meant to be enjoyed, but hey even then it's inaccurate to say MSQ is easy, recall the last DF based fight we had in MSQ last VU? That was somewhat hard before people understood the mechanics. As for Job quest, same deal, no point trying to micro-manage difficulty with a singular instance that players only go through once with their character, it's just a fun narrative for your job.

Overall your statement would work better if you provide the full run-down of all current content and the diversity of who it caters to, because honestly, I think it's rather balanced atm. When Diadem 2.0 comes around it might have a better balance because it would have content that caters to the midcore players and POTD is the first step in "Deep Dungeon" content to provide that tough content people are asking for in dungeons.

Truth is, in the current dungeon format that is set for catching up, you can never make them difficult because they fit a set linear design to make them easy to run however let me leave you with this question.

What if SE decided to only release 1 "Extreme" Dungeon per patch however they also introduced a Mini-Deep Dungeon for those that want a slice of randomness thrown into their runs. So rather than design 2 linear dungeons they design 1 linear dungeon that casual players can go through and then provide an RNG dungeon for those that want something random. It could just be a bite-size 10-floor design dungeon with it's own unique gimmicks that vary traps, unique mini-bosses and bosses. There could be 2 designs for these dungeon types, a Matched-setting that provides a linear RNG narrative that changes with each run and a fixed-party setting that gives the group of 4 a unique path to choose which route they want to take to complete the objective.

You could say that this matched RNG-dungeon would provide the same difficulty curve as the normal dungeon but the mob types, potential gimmicks and even bosses would vary. Meanwhile the fixed-party group would provide players with the opportunity to adjust the difficulty based on how they feel, taking certian paths that are only open as long as they have less than 0 KO party wide or reach a certain location in X amount of time, or find a secret that leads them to opening a hidden area to move forward.

I think things like that could be fun, if people didn't mind SE splitting their current 2 dungeon resources into 1 dungeon and 1 RNG dungeon with POTD inspiration.

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Originally Posted by RizenSaga

This topic is all opinions. Don't tell me how I should play the game. Don't tell me this is an MMO so it should be a certain way. If you ever failed your first time at insert dungeon name here Extreme then you weren't ready and need to learn the basics of game play. If you weren't over geared before running a dungeon then you should of never ran it. Alright now that we got that settled lets all uninstall the game except for the Korean players out there because we all know they never wipe. Ever.

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You contradict yourself, you can't say don't run a dungeon if not over geared, and also say don't tell me how to play. And furthermore it's not an opinion that every fight in this game follows nearly the same exact formula, the only difference between the difficulty of each content level is the rate of how quickly the mechanics happen and the dps checks.

SE can make things as easy and hard as they want, recall A3s, that fight broke many raid groups, now recall Steps of Faith, that fight caused many players to scream and cry. Now look at the current raid and dungeons, players are burning through them with such ease it's remarkable. But weakening or strengthening content isn't the answer to issues SE has, they need to revamp their formula as a whole and find a constant, or develop fights that don't follow the current system that 98% of the entire game follows.

Look at WoW, they dumbed down the classes so much but at the same time they made that same content a bit harder and more challening for those who want it that way by buffing up the numbers/adding a mechanic or two more. In FF there is content for those who have the time and are willing to put in the effort, but there is also content for those who don't have the time or maybe even the will to actually get up from the scrub level. I consider myself a casual mostly cause I don't have enough time to dedicate myself to the game. And let me tell you that getting some things done (like the anima) takes a while when you aren't actively grinding your ass off. The bottom line of my ramble is - I think the game is well-balanced. Seen way worse out there on the market. More difficulty levels wouldn't hurt anyone though, just to keep it challenging. Normal - Savage/Extreme - WIPEFEST or sth... I personally would love to try extreme/savage versions of dungeons.

We should also remove the "Hard Mode" tags away from piss easy content that is usually less challenging than their Normal Mode variants. Why is this even a thing, I don't know.

People have been asking for more moderately challenging content for ages. Palace of the Dead kinda fills in that blank now, but I still think we should scrap Hard Mode titles from all super easy content and actually reserve those titles for the moderately challenging dungeons and the like... and of course have some time and focus invested into that sort of thing in general.

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Originally Posted by Airget

I think things like that could be fun, if people didn't mind SE splitting their current 2 dungeon resources into 1 dungeon and 1 RNG dungeon with POTD inspiration.

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Simply pointing this out as this is really my only issue with PotD and anything inspired from it;
While it's great to get all of your skills, weapon and armor as you go with PotD, it doesn't reward you for trying to do things correctly like you would encounter in a real dungeon. Due to the nature of the randomness of traps, they took out positionals from mobs, so you automatically never need to learn if a move is rear or flank in the case of melee. Also due to this nature, you don't really learn the need to dodge flank or rear to avoid AoEs while trying to get your increased potencies from hitting the correct sides.

In my opinion story dungeons and MSQ (including class/job quests) are totally fine the way they are, ever since this is content everyone needs to do to move on with the game. So everyone should have a chance to complete it. Those who this is not enough for do have optional stuff, such as Ex Primals and Savage raids.

But here comes the question: If Ex Primals and Savage is for people who WANT to challenge themselves, how does it come it is free to enter for everyone?! This is SO annoying... people keep entering Sophia EX farm groups even though they have no clue what to do at all. To prevent this and give above mid-core/hardcore players the chance to play the forcing way they want to, without people wiping them because of a lack of class skill, we need a new system for that. A test within the starting quest for this content for example, in which you need to beat an enemy by showing you are capable of playing your class to an certain point

And the argument "just go with your fc then" is ridiculously invalid, because my fc members have a real live as well and will not always be online when i am and even if they are, they might not be in the mood to do it when i am. >.>

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Originally Posted by Yeol

SE made FFXIV too casual friendly. I am talking about the difficulty here not the quantity.
Nothing can be said about the quantity. It is polished.

Over all we have:
- Easy Main Scenario Quests.
- Easy Job Quests.
- Easy Dungeons.

If players can pass the core of the game easily with minimum effort. How do you expect them to play at standard level later in game?

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Is it really that easy? For experienced players with great gear it may well be, but for average players encountering the content for the first time with gear that is only just good enough? For them it is not all that easy.

Besides, I suspect most players are not really interested in improving their skills or facing a challenge - they play to have fun and for the story. Making the MSQ/Job quests/story dungeons much harder would just make them come to a stop at some point.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Is it really that easy? For experienced players with great gear it may well be, but for average players encountering the content for the first time with gear that is only just good enough? For them it is not all that easy.

Besides, I suspect most players are not really interested in improving their skills or facing a challenge - they play to have fun and for the story. Making the MSQ/Job quests/story dungeons much harder would just make them come to a stop at some point.

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As long as you know the basic mechanics, they were all pretty easy to figure out, even on day one in terrible gear. Also, it comes down to how much you know the class you're playing on.

We did wipe three times in Aetherochemical Research Faculity before we figured out, oh, we need to go into the thing that gave us vulnerability stacks in The Vault. We ended up laughing about how trollish it was to make that mechanic look like something that was to be avoided before.

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Originally Posted by AmeliaVerves

And the argument "just go with your fc then" is ridiculously invalid, because my fc members have a real live as well and will not always be online when i am and even if they are, they might not be in the mood to do it when i am. >.>

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One of the issues I face - finding a place to play considering the time/capability in general.

Honestly Nidhogg normal has been the only non ex/raid fight in HW that felt right on difficulty it wasn't overly hard but required you to be able to play your class decently well to clear.

At end game that is the level of difficulty we should be aiming for casual content and hopefully in Stormblood they add some in game resource that can help people with rotations so they don't need to go look online which can be a bit confusing/ overly complicated for newer players

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Originally Posted by Rita1989

Honestly Nidhogg normal has been the only non ex/raid fight in HW that felt right on difficulty it wasn't overly hard but required you to be able to play your class decently well to clear.

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I agree.

During 2.0, Hard mode Primals were very nice even though beating Titan as a WHM was kind of difficult for me because of the lag in Europe. However, I like to think it helped me improve.
When 2.1 was released, Good King Moggle Mog was a great fight (PLD add could be a pain if it linked with both the party healers), in between Garuda and Titan. The fact that it had i75 weapons drops was also nice as not everyone had i80 weapons for every job and it kept people queueing for it (no trial roulette yet).

However, when 2.2 came, I think it was a mistake to make Leviathan so easy with no drops at all. I think it should have had i85 weapons for glamour purpose in order to keep the trend started with other hard mode primals trials and to motivate people. And so on and so forth with Ramuh, Shiva and even maybe Ravana and Bismarck for leveling weapons.

I also think that, in 2.55, Steps of the Faith would have had a better welcome, should we have had been able to restart easily the fight after a wipe. Losing 15 minutes after a wrong start or a miss harpoon was a real problem.

Agree. I understand here are people of different ability, and don't mind having some easier content, but until recently, savage raid was the only content that offered any sort of challenge at all. it literally was either brainAFK content or raid, with not much in between, except I guess maybe the latest ex primal. Weeping city and potd are steps in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. WC is not bleeding edge difficulty, but it does still require some sort of co-ordination

I could understand the easy first lvl dungeons but the 60+??? c'mon. They are easy to the point of faceroll on keyboard and win. That if you don't fell asleep during the run. No mechanics no effort. First day of the patch I could mass pull without fearing the mobs will be powerful. This didn't happen during the 2.X series. There is no need of too complicated and too hard dungeons but what we got the last few patches is easy to the point of silliness. It's boring. The game became too easy because they want more subs fast. The overall difficulty of the 2.X series patches was more appropriate.

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Originally Posted by AmeliaVerves

But here comes the question: If Ex Primals and Savage is for people who WANT to challenge themselves, how does it come it is free to enter for everyone?! This is SO annoying... people keep entering Sophia EX farm groups even though they have no clue what to do at all. To prevent this and give above mid-core/hardcore players the chance to play the forcing way they want to, without people wiping them because of a lack of class skill, we need a new system for that. A test within the starting quest for this content for example, in which you need to beat an enemy by showing you are capable of playing your class to an certain point

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At least Raid Finder is a step in the right direction, where you can only queue under duty completed if you have cleared it. The issue still comes from players that were carried, either by friends or shoving out gil to content sellers, there's no way of telling if someone has the fight done, understands it and can play competently enough with others. Unfortunately, I can't think of something to improve on what SE has.

Personal Opinion: I like FF XIV as a "Theme Park" as it is, with activities of different difficulties. If some weak players choose to enter some rides to hard to handle for them and vomit all other you, then blame them, not the ride.
Only thing I can think of that would help with your issue, is having some sort of Advanced Training Hall requirement that locks you out of some of the hard end content until you pass all its checks. But I certainly do to want the base game MSQ, simple SQ to becomes hard content.

It feels to me too that we have easy content and extreme/savage content. Something in between would be nice. Not everything should be ramped up in difficulty, I sometimes like to switch my brain off and go do super duper easy stuff. It can very very relaxing. In my humble opinion it would be cool if the expert roulette would be normal difficulty instead of very easy. Nothing brutal but something along the lines of "you might actually die if you don't pay attention".

I think it was very sad that the community had to practically beg for the devs not to nerf the difficulty of Wiping City :(

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Originally Posted by Squigley

This! Can we have it?

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I do enjoy the Alex savage raids and i enjoy the challenge it brings, but i will totally NOT be up to doing it everyday, that would be too stressful for me. So it would be awesome if we could have content giving us a small, everyday challenge to enjoy and get a little feeling of "I did it, nice!" instead of "expert run...... such boredom...... much wow...". :/

"FFXIV is too casual friendly", and yet every day there are numerous requests to make it easier, and easier, and easier...

are people seriously saying weeping city is hard? there is nothing hard in this game since years...
this games revolves and recycles always the same mechanic, dodge, avoid that, prey and crap like these. Palace of the dead is the sum of all mechanics in game, which again is extremely boring and easy.
what is hard on weeping city? the sphere boss? please lol..

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Originally Posted by ZhaneX

"FFXIV is too casual friendly", and yet every day there are numerous requests to make it easier, and easier, and easier...

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Where are those requests? Can you link them please. There are tons of requests by the hardcore community especially on this forum to make the game harder. SE doesn't appear to be listening. Personally when farming tomes for whatever I'm not interested in savage level difficulty.

The only way yo increase difficulty in dgns is to wrestle some control away from players in the form of mini checks. There are dgns out there that manage to provide these and a reasonable clear time as long as those checks are cleared. The earliest one for example is Dzaemael darkhold. Its a tank check. The tank's freeform is taken away in the first part because the tank has no choice to lead mobs in a specific zone to reduce dmg from the ahriman. Then this repeats itself in the form of exploding crystals, knockback frogs and those floating mobs that kill tp.

Devs just need to create future dgns with mini-checks like that in order to provide a decent challenge that players just can't burst through carelessly.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

Where are those requests? Can you link them please. There are tons of requests by the hardcore community especially on this forum to make the game harder. SE doesn't appear to be listening. Personally when farming tomes for whatever I'm not interested in savage level difficulty.

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It was something of a back-handed comment towards the "Jump Potions" being rumored for implementation.

Of course, when actually thought on, the support for such a Pay-to-Skip option is indicative of just the opposite to what I said. People want to skip over the content they've done before not because it's too hard, but because it's too easy. Sure they could just plow through everything on an alt or whatever, it would be easy. And that's boring. If content throughout the game was harder, or at least more interestingly designed (SE seems to have the backwards idea that interesting to play automatically equals hard, and vice-versa...) then people might not mind it so.

And this is true whether a new player, or a veteran doing roulettes or an alt or whatever. Content that keeps players engaged helps invest newbies in the game, and keeps bringing veterans back to it. As opposed to say, "Dungeons" designed to be ground out in ~20 minutes a shot on endless repeat, which is pretty much what Yoshi-P admitted was the design mentality for a while now...God I hope they're breaking that for Stormblood.

To answer the original question, I don't know if there are actually people requesting easier content still, but if there are, they're freakin' crazy; as I just outlined making the game any "Easier" benefits absolutely no one.

Casual has little to do with difficulty, casual refers to time constraints and dedication. If you can get in, get stuff done and get out in 30 minutes, that's casual friendly. If you have to build a party for 20 minutes just to get in, spend 2 hours inside the content and then get out, that's not casual friendly. Doesn't matter how the content inside looks: The first could be a tough boss fight ala Savage, the second mindless grinding.

As for difficulty:
Difficulty is subjective. If you have a reaction time of 180ms, you'll find reaction tests much easier than someone with a reaction time of 440ms. If you have a short attention span, you'll find watching out for mechanics far harder than someone who can keep focused. Keep that in mind when discussing difficulty - "Normal" difficulty can subjectively be anything from "faceroll" to "unsurmountable".

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

Where are those requests? Can you link them please. There are tons of requests by the hardcore community especially on this forum to make the game harder. SE doesn't appear to be listening. Personally when farming tomes for whatever I'm not interested in savage level difficulty.

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Yeah I would rather not have difficult content for farming tomes either. I use to be in the make everything harder camp and "omg casuals are ruining the game" but changed when I got a real job and do a full load of grad school at night. Yes there are people who do this and raid but a very small portion do this. When I was an undergrad I played 6 hours daily minimum and sometimes 12 hours daily so I wanted everything a lot harder even daily dungeon running because I put so much time into this game. The fact is the majority of the player base is older, has kids and works a full time job. Majority are just doing good to cap tomes. It's just the reality of it for this game.

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Originally Posted by Mugiawara

I actually wanna go over Steps of Faith. You have to actually TALK TO YOUR TEAM and READ NPC TEXT
to beat Vishap. They had to nerf it because randoms couldn't do it. It's sad honestly...Yes it gated the expansion

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The way I see it, the problem wasn't that "randoms couldn't do it" but more that "they couldn't do it fast and without any mistakes" so the fight took so long that most people bailed out of it on the Trial Roulette.

I think if they had put it in the MSQ roulette, they wouldn't have to nerf it.

For the other difficulties, I think we just lack several steps in the learning curve. It's cool to start easy, but keeping it easy up to the lvl 60 Expert dungeons and even Alex normal...seriously ?

At the Fanfest, they talk about "Challenging new dungeons" so...fingers crossed.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

Where are those requests?

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The creation of Alexander normal mode...because Coil was too hard. Biggest change, split the raiding community.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

Over the top.

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Noone asked for savage dungeons to farm tomes in. Please read more carefully next time. :)

It's about to find a little challenge in everydays tome grinding which is more than boring! For that it would be nice if the "expert" roulette could actually be a little bit challenging. Otherwise what is it called expert for? :o For everyone else who doesn't want to face this challenge, they can do 60 roulette and still get stones from that. Isn't that a deal everyone could live with? :o

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Originally Posted by AureliusDraconium

Yeah I would rather not have difficult content for farming tomes either.

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I have 4 toons. I keep them all at current content and reasonably geared. It's a lot of work. I know I'm crazy to do it but I do. I just don't want to have to deal with wipe fests when dealing with the tome grind. Now if they want harder content I'd support raid or extreme level difficulty dungeons like our extreme primals but please don't make those part of the normal tome grind we need to run daily.

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Originally Posted by AmeliaVerves

Noone asked for savage dungeons to farm tomes in. Please read more carefully next time. :)

It's about to find a little challenge in everydays tome grinding which is more than boring! For that it would be nice if the "expert" roulette could actually be a little bit challenging. Otherwise what is it called expert for? :o For everyone else who doesn't want to face this challenge, they can do 60 roulette and still get stones from that. Isn't that a deal everyone could live with? :o

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No they need to change the name from expert to current dungeons because that name some how seems to imply they need to be harder. The 60 dungeons were all expert dungeons at one point weren't they if I'm not mistaken. How would they add them to the 60 roulette then when the next update arrives?

The fundamental issue that EX dungeons have and will have is the fact that very quickly you will outgear the dungeon making its mechanics trivial since many of them won't come close to killing you. The only way around this would be a ilvl sync, which in turn would end up making the EX dungeon take longer to do.

Also, with the dance steps of any fight, do it enough times and it will become easy.

As I said earlier, I think the best solution would be some kind of bonus for completing the existing EX dungeons with minimum ilvl sync. This would make mechanics far more punishing and while the dungeon itself isn't likely to be something you struggle with, doing it quickly and efficiently would mean you couldn't do it in your sleep. More over it would utilise a pre existing feature of the Duty Finder and have no real negative impact on people not interested in 'more challanging'.

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Originally Posted by Clethoria

So why should casual players roll over for what you want again? To help us improve? Because I'd rather not pay for a game forcing me to be super srs when I just want to run around like a spaz and have fun.

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Not sure if you're just joking, but if you're not I believe you'd be more happy playing Diablo rather than an MMO.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

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That is, indeed, true, but why is it impossible to make optional dungeons harder than the ones of the MSQ? Ever since you don't need to run them (but have an easier one at hand) it would be for those who are willing to face the challenge.

It's just really frustrating that everything gets nerfed as soon as a hand of people scream for it, but the huge amount of so called "mid-core" players are ignored. It would be nice for a lot of them as well, ever since they (probably) don't have enough time (or patience or whatever) to go raiding, they could still face content they can improve their skills with.

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Originally Posted by AmeliaVerves

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The expert Roulette exists so just barely equipped first timers of the included dungeons can find people to team with to do them. If you make these dungeon harder for overgeared and overtrained players, you're messing with the difficulty intended for those just matching the gear requirement or new to it.

I suppose the RAIDs is what you're supposed to do for challenge, not the roulettes. Of course once you've done it all, the only thing you can do is wait for new harder content.

As for if you REALLY care about getting more challenge while playing lower difficulty dungeon, you can always temporarily unequip all or part of your equipment but the weapon to make it harder :p

Casuals play less but pay the same, less stress per-player means more profits......


Casuals love the cash shop....


Casuals outnumber everyone....


Casuals pay the bills, why shouldnt they be catered to?

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Originally Posted by Chocolys

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Unequipping will not make dungeons/mechanics more interesting. :(

You keep complaining you are not willing to play harder content just because some of the players request that, but at the same time you force them to play easy and, to them, dull content because you want it that way. Not really fair if you ask me. :x

while i am an end game content raider I have to side on the casuals on this argument.

There are more casual players than hardcore raider players. I think the progression is fine as it is but we do need better ways of getting equipment other than tome grindings.

A lot of people lately have been complaining about bad players. Have you considered that good players are helping make them bad? When you're ridiculously overgeared and insist on ignoring mechanics and powering through, even when one of the party members is brand new and at minimum ilvl, how do you expect them to improve? The worst thing I've seen bad players do is try to act like good players and fail (e.g., with large pulls or ignoring mechanics).

In fairness, the dungeon design allows for this, but still. The impatience of hardcore players who run off before you can cast stoneskin, immediately pull every boss, never explain anything to anyone, and don't even roll on loot is definitely not helping new players get better.