Why is FFXIV considered to be so hard/hardcore?

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Originally Posted by Moheeheeko

Its not difficult, this is just a massive case of the "first MMO syndrome"

I laugh at every thread talking about how unforgiving crafting is when I still have nightmares about crafting in other MMO's

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Lineage II: My D-grade Tarbar required me to hunt down 128 pieces of Steel, 128 Cokes, 64 pieces of High Grade Suede, 430 Crystal: D Grade (obtained only by destroying other D grade items), and 139 Gemstone D (expensive vendor goods). Oh, and did I mention that I also had to have 7 Tarbar heads (wtf was the rest of the crap for???)?

The drop rates on these items, btw, were like 1/120, 1/240, 1/350 or worse. Only one race could craft. Higher level items had to have two copies of the recipe, as one was used up in the crafting process.

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Originally Posted by Eclipsed

You want to see hard with tons of one shots :

Akilyios (Rift): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=662OoYUvgwE

There is nothing in FFXIV that even comes close to the difficulty of that fight. But yet we pugged it hundreds of times.

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Haha, that video would have been fun to watch, but man... too much clutter on the screen and giant numbers popping up on top of the action. I really hate raiders who think they need all that crap in the way.

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Originally Posted by Raminax

This line reminds me of the Hot Heart of Magic/Shining Statue of Siel in Aion. *sniff* Oh, the pain.

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Exactly. Oh whats that? you failed a bunch of materia melds? cost you a few million? Hot Heart Of Magic cost the equivalent of a LARGE house in this game, and lots of people failed 10+ times.

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Originally Posted by TheRogueX

Lineage II: My D-grade Tarbar required me to hunt down 128 pieces of Steel, 128 Cokes, 64 pieces of High Grade Suede, 430 Crystal: D Grade (obtained only by destroying other D grade items), and 139 Gemstone D (expensive vendor goods). Oh, and did I mention that I also had to have 7 Tarbar heads (wtf was the rest of the crap for???)?

The drop rates on these items, btw, were like 1/120, 1/240, 1/350 or worse. Only one race could craft.

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That's just time consuming. I have played L2 and it was difficult the way Facebook games are difficult if you don't pay for coins. What I remember from the game was sitting in one spot and killing the same mobs all day over and over again. The process itself wasn't challenging, just time consuming. If you lost your weapon by enchanting it be ready to go back and kill those same mobs for one more month. It challenged my sanity that's for sure.

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Originally Posted by Edli

f you lost your weapon by enchanting it be ready to go back and kill those same mobs for one more month. It challenged my sanity that's for sure.

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Or by dropping it. I once saved up for my shiny Bastard Sword (which had a 1/20k drop rate from monsters 10 levels higher than its level), only to die and have it drop. It was picked up by a passing stranger who offered to sell it back to me for about 5x what I had initially paid for it.

This game isn't hardcore in the least, there are some unnecessary restrictions (BCoB2 Lockout etc) and unforgiving mechanics in some battles that don't leave room for casual or lazy players. However, in comparison to FFXI (before the cap was raised above 75) this game is a breeze.. seriously I may moan about how ridiculous some things like dying AF are but it really doesn't compare to lengths you'd have to go to get simple things done in XI, anything worth getting required you to dedicate your life to it! >.< The best example of this is the original Relic quest in XI compared to XIV...

People think it's hard because they don't have Deadly Boss Mods to remind them of what to do constantly.

Because the community is full of quitters, the game likes to make it so one mistake can screw you, no one accepts failure, no one is willing to teach and no one will accept responsibility.

I still haven't been past turn 2, still haven't gotten titan EX done. I always get ignored for no experience, or can't come because I can't play every x-day at x-time. This isn't / wasn't helped by the dodgy lockout systems.

The game is hardcore in only one respect: You have to treat it that way to get anywhere with its community, or have extreme luck.

I haven't even logged on in over a month. I'd love to, but I just end up sat there doing nothing. The last fun I had was Gilgamesh and that's because I was right at the front of the crowd so no one could try to exclude me for stupid stuff.

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Originally Posted by Mattlex

and unforgiving mechanics in some battles that don't leave room for casual or lazy players.

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You, and many others on these forums, seem to mistakenly believe that casual players somehow lack the same skills as the laughably-labelled "hardcore" crowd. They simply have less available time to play, whether by choice or necessity. Some of us have been playing games considerably longer than many of the snot-nosed diaper brigade on here who mistakenly believe 1-2 day's content classifies them as hot shit raiders but many of us have simply come to the point where we're no longer invested in busting our balls for 3 monthly gear resets and asinine boss mechanics that can be learned by watching YouTube.

I accept we're probably on the same page in thinking this game is stupidly easy as well. I just take umbrage at the labelling of casuals as borderline windowlickers.

it's not hard in the sense of the difficulty of the game, it is hard because it deminds people to not lag (brain and connection), also everyone focus to evade the countless numbers of repeated attempts to 1 shot the players. Your gear doesn't matter that much, your progress into the fight doesn't matter, if you scratch your nose at the wrong moment when the boss is at 1%, your whole party wipe.

To put it clear :

You have a static the game becomes easy. As you have time to practice over and over again. Is like playing offline but with friends

You have no static the game becomes A challenge. You have no one to practice on a regular basics , you have to adjust to others people's tactics making it difficult to have a routine.

In other words those who clear coil 1 and 2 over and over again are no better or different than someone without a static only they have an advantage over the non static players.

I still find hilarious read the shouts and the lame PF looking for pros and mega clear experience... they forget when they started or how they learn.

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Originally Posted by Mature

To put it clear :

You have a static the game becomes easy. As you have time to practice over and over again. Is like playing offline but with friends

You have no static the game becomes A challenge. You have no one to practice on a regular basics , you have to adjust to others people's tactics making it difficult to have a routine.

In other words those who clear coil 1 and 2 over and over again are no better or different than someone without a static only they have an advantage over the non static players.

I still find hilarious read the shouts and the lame PF looking for pros and mega clear experience... they forget when they started or how they learn.

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Well said.

There is nothing hardcore about this.

You can reach level 50 by getting carried and not knowing how to play your job, get level 100 items (and now 110!) doing easy dungeons. Echo makes so you don't need to be a good dps/healer/tank to pass some mechanics and even coil is mostly just jump the rope.

The only "hardcore" thing is probably brutal coil, but no one cares about it.

Like many other said FFXIV raids are not hardcore at all. The issue is they have mechanics that every single one of your members need to do right. So when you have 7 other people doing turn 6-9 and one person fails and wipe the party over and over. You get to the point that you go wow this is really hard then when that one or more person in your raid party stop failing you made your first mistake after 5hours of doing it. Then you go back to wiping because the other start failing again it become a endless cycle that end up breaking your party then you go looking again. It may happen again and happen then people come on the forums saying the game too hard.

Overall FFXIV is a very simple game that make itself hard by adding stuff that if one person fail there a high % that it's game over.

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Originally Posted by Eclipsed

I have played virtually ever major MMO, and most minors of note. I have seen a lot of communities and a lot of different kinds of content/dungeons/raiding. But never until this game have I seen the difficulty of the raids being discussed so often in guild or on the forums. People I came here from Rift with, people who beat pre-nerf Akilyos and Hamerknell (which were on a magnitude of difficulty a thousand times harder than anything in FFXIV. Think 10 times the mechanics and fail conditions, you even had to do platforming jumps and dodging without telegraphs in the fight!) tremble in fear of FFXIV.

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You lost all credibility with your mention of rift.
Because...
1. Noone in the world beat pre-nerf Aky. It was most likely impossible. You probably mean the big wave nerf, more like the 6 or 7th nerf. (General fix nerf, Spout Nerf, HP tentacle Nerf, and multiple patches of buffs to DPS). Yes dps buffs are nerfs to content.

2. Rift raids were joke easy in comparison. Threat a joke, healing a joke (the year+ long reign of 1 button healing inquisicar?, or 1 button tanking?), complicated dps rotations were the hardest part of the game, and were often nerfed or changed often. The observed increase in difficulty is simply as a result of the logistical difference between an 8 person raid and a 20 person raid. Which is relevant and a real difficulty increase, however it does not make the encounter itself more difficult. To further explain this even if your using equally skilled players the chances of 1 of 20 people messing up is always higher then 1 of 8. Not to mention the logistical nightmare of scheduling/gear/breaks/class balance added at 20 people. Balance therefore is far less tight, you could easily be carried in such a situation. We had at least 2-4 people who were not ideal in our rift guild, and we still cleared content highly competitively.


So yeah... The community might be as you say, bad and afraid of raids.

But making things up and pretending to be good at other games gets you 0 credibility on the topic.

FFXIV is the most casual mmo on the market right now.

Anyone calling XIV hardcore has never played a hardcore mmo.

- Low man content only
- Garenteed gear hand outs when you win
- Very very few time sinks. (Ones that exist are for vanity/sub par gear)
- Insta-Teleporting everywhere
- Gil has no value so no farming required to afford gear
- No long term goals, you can get everything shortterm
- If you miss a patch you can become near BIS again in 2-3weeks
- Shared mob mechanics in the open world (No claiming)
- No Openworld PvP
- Quick spawning mobs (Hunts included)
- All BIS gear from instances
- Instances with no limits to how many times you can attempt it after a fail
- Ability to level to cap level within a month for the average player (vs 8-12months)
- Ultra simplistic everything
- Linear only progression

If people are calling XIV hardcore they have absolutely no idea what hardcore is.

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Originally Posted by Mature

To put it clear :

You have a static the game becomes easy. As you have time to practice over and over again. Is like playing offline but with friends

You have no static the game becomes A challenge. You have no one to practice on a regular basics , you have to adjust to others people's tactics making it difficult to have a routine.

In other words those who clear coil 1 and 2 over and over again are no better or different than someone without a static only they have an advantage over the non static players.

I still find hilarious read the shouts and the lame PF looking for pros and mega clear experience... they forget when they started or how they learn.

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Agreed. The difficulty difference between being in a static and not is huge. The fights are different every time when you are always playing with different players vs. the same people each time. It is a much larger challenge. Sometimes i enjoy the unpredictability

Imo, it's partly the responsiveness of the game that makes it difficult for people. Never knowing if you were really out of that void zone or not until it's too late is super frustrating even for raiding veterans; many probably just give up. The rest is either new mmo syndrome or they only played XI. Players who have cleared WoW heroic raids (or a few heroic bosses) probably have no problem in this game, but that's not a very large crowd by any means. Not seeing anything past WoW normal mode (where one or two shot mechanics start to happen quite frequently) might make this game seem hardcore, even if the fights are overall less complex.

I find the mechanics for most bosses in XIV to be obnoxiously simple, then again it might just be that I have been playing MMOs for so long that the recycled boss abilities got tiring. As far as "The new dungeons are so easy!" Ya I bet if you did a dungeon tuned for ilvl 70/80 with ilvl 100+ gear it would seem easy ya?
As far as raiding goes, the concept of there being a degree of difficulty above the end game raid, in this case "Savage," is great. Anyone who wants better gear from Savage completely miss the point behind doing content designed outside the current ilvl and are probably the same people who complain about the game being easy once they out gear content. So I would rate the raiding difficulty rather in this MMO as of 2.3.
And finally, if you are having difficulty finding a static at this point in the game and are not new to the game then you probably lack the necessary social skills to function in an MMO or probably society at that.

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Originally Posted by Mature

To put it clear :

You have a static the game becomes easy. As you have time to practice over and over again. Is like playing offline but with friends

You have no static the game becomes A challenge. You have no one to practice on a regular basics , you have to adjust to others people's tactics making it difficult to have a routine.

In other words those who clear coil 1 and 2 over and over again are no better or different than someone without a static only they have an advantage over the non static players.

I still find hilarious read the shouts and the lame PF looking for pros and mega clear experience... they forget when they started or how they learn.

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So much this.

It's been mentioned before but I'll summarize: 1 shot mechanics in content tuned for 8 players to the point that losing any member who isn't a DPS basically means failure and losing 2 dps also means failure, makes this game frustrating. If all 8 players are top tier and have good connections so they can reliably deal with mechanics and no one dies then I can imagine this isn't that difficult but that's just not reality for most people.

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

If people are calling XIV hardcore they have absolutely no idea what hardcore is.

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Would you consider "EvE online" hardcore?

I am not a friend of comparing games and saying this one is hardcore and that one is not, because its just stupid... You can not compare games!

Every game have harder parts and easier parts. The same is when you say just by playing some days not even reaching endgame you can not tell if the game is good or bad.
You need to play a game longer to judge if it is for YOU harder or easier than other games YOU played, but thats nothing you can say generally, it was for YOU and can not be same for others...
There are way too many factors who influence the gaming experience and only if you keep all those factors the same you truly can compare!

The only two answers I can come up with OP is:

1. Maybe a lot of those in fear came from XI, where NONE of these mechanics are used...mechanics in this game make XI seem like a cakewalk since most if not all content in XI did not require you to dodge or move.

2. Maybe it's not the content they fear, but the people doing it. They don't want to be that player who is horrifically bashed needlessly about being new or not catching on to something as quick as others. I've seen that before. I put a Leviathan EX learning party together for a couple friends, and it was very apparent that it was one in the PF, but we had someone (From our LS no less) join with us and start bad mouthing after just 2-3 very good tries. We got them further than I got on my first attempt. But it wasn't good enough for this person (who was well aware it was a learning party) and was extremely rude. I think that keeps some people from going into the Coils.

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Originally Posted by Yukiko

Would you consider "EvE online" hardcore?

I am not a friend of comparing games and saying this one is hardcore and that one is not, because its just stupid... You can not compare games!

Every game have harder parts and easier parts. The same is when you say just by playing some days not even reaching endgame you can not tell if the game is good or bad.
You need to play a game longer to judge if it is for YOU harder or easier than other games YOU played, but thats nothing you can say generally, it was for YOU and can not be same for others...
There are way too many factors who influence the gaming experience and only if you keep all those factors the same you truly can compare!

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In its own genre FF14 is not hardcore.

The game isnt hard. The leveling system creates a sense of entitlement because the 99% of the game you can literally sleep through it's so insanely easy and effortless and takes up practically no time to accomplish. So when these players finally get to the 1 or 2 things in the game that are difficult, and they start actually dying, and are faced with the task of actually dedicating time to anything they lose their minds. It's just the way MMO's have become and there is no end in sight.

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Originally Posted by Eclipsed

Why is FFXIV considered to be so hard/hardcore?

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This is mainly because we have different generations of gamers experiencing the same content.
Comparing FFXI/EQ hardcore to FFXIV hardcore, or say, 3rd/4th generation hardcore to 7th/8th generation hardcore, is like comparing apples and oranges. The state of gaming has changed immensely over the years.

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Originally Posted by Rex

The only two answers I can come up with OP is:

1. Maybe a lot of those in fear came from XI, where NONE of these mechanics are used...mechanics in this game make XI seem like a cakewalk since most if not all content in XI did not require you to dodge or move.

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XI was much more challenging. If you wanted to down a big boss 6 or more people had to work together. In XIV 4 or more people just spam their solo abilities and follow the "script" and boom...done. The only skill it takes to dodge scripted and telegraphed attacks in XIV is the ability to point your eyes at your screen. If you can't do that, there's something wrong with you.

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Originally Posted by Sonofbaldo

The game isnt hard. The leveling system creates a sense of entitlement because the 99% of the game you can literally sleep through it's so insanely easy and effortless and takes up practically no time to accomplish. So when these players finally get to the 1 or 2 things in the game that are difficult, and they start actually dying, and are faced with the task of actually dedicating time to anything they lose their minds. It's just the way MMO's have become and there is no end in sight.

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Indeed. Having not actually raided for several years, I came into this game expecting Raid nights to be actual whole nights. As in, you continue to wipe until you get it right or the Raid Leader calls it. I'm used to a non-clear night lasting 5+ hours.

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Originally Posted by Sonofbaldo

XI was much more challenging. If you wanted to down a big boss 6 or more people had to work together. In XIV 4 or more people just spam their solo abilities and follow the "script" and boom...done. The only skill it takes to dodge scripted and telegraphed attacks in XIV is the ability to point your eyes at your screen. If you can't do that, there's something wrong with you.

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There's apparently something wrong with a very large portion of the playerbase (by your criteria).

Really though, I'd prefer if difficulty came more from knowing how to play your class well instead of the quality of your internet connection and reflexes while doing your rotation.

T4 was a lot like that, actually. Though if anyone goes down you were still pretty screwed, but it was far more a skill & strategy test than a reflex & latency test.

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Originally Posted by Sonofbaldo

XI was much more challenging. If you wanted to down a big boss 6 or more people had to work together. In XIV 4 or more people just spam their solo abilities and follow the "script" and boom...done. The only skill it takes to dodge scripted and telegraphed attacks in XIV is the ability to point your eyes at your screen. If you can't do that, there's something wrong with you.

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What he said still stands in a way. FFXIV is different, hard in a different way from FFXI and a lot of older MMOs. A fight like titan ex required for all 8 players to do the perfect dance for 10 min. A whole lot of synchronized movement all the time with one shot mechanisms and the inherent lag provided for a challenge a lot of players weren't used to before. I'm not saying FFXI is easy, just that being good at FFXI doesn't automatically makes you good at FFXIV. They're different.

Can't lodestone your achievements, assume you're stuck on t5 and titan ex.

IMHO hardcore was original EQ, where if you died, you had to run back to wherever you died completely naked without your gear to pick it back up.

That sort of mechanic would never fly with kids today, they couldnt stand it. When I played EQ at launch though, it was the norm, and it made you approach things very, very differently when you knew a bad pull could leave you naked and a hell of a long way from your gear.

Nowadays there's no sense of loss really. You keep your gear when you die. You dont lose XP (yes in some older MMO's you could lose levels if you died too much!), and you just pop back into the fight fresh as a daisy.

So when someone calls modern day MMO players "spoiled", its because most of them have never played any MMO with those types of rules, so they have no idea what hardcore really is.

Ask an EQ veteran about "breaking into Hate" for a raid some time. That was a raid... and a hell of a lot of work, and gave far more satisfaction than anything FFXIV could ever offer. You earned the drops there, it wasnt a Salvation Army handout like FFXIV has.

So no, FFXIV isnt hardcore, its not even in the same ballpark, city or galaxy. Its kiddie land compared to MMO's that came before it, but only because thats what the tastes of the modern gamer seem to want and they're the ones paying for the subs that keep the game afloat.

The loudest voice we hear is that of puggers.

It's extremely hard to pug endgame. If someone messes up, it's so hard to make a comeback. I also think that so many people don't know how to play their job. That's not really a problem when doing Alex maps or Stone Vigil, but when doing endgame, it shows.

The FC's/statics don't have serious problems. Some progress faster than others, but you get the feel of the fight with the group. In pugs it's so time consuming, not worth it.

Should SE make content even more easy, I sure hope the savage modes stay with rewards other than titles.

I find it interesting that it's always Titan and T5 as an example for difficulty, or plumes/landslides and divebombs. I don't understand how these keep hitting the same people.

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Originally Posted by abzoluut

The loudest voice we hear is that of puggers.

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if somehow yoshi decides to remove Duty finder or any form of match making mechanism maybe we'll see the glory days of "looking for party" in XI and people will actually be encouraged to get out of their comfort zone and start socializing/making statics doing things together..etc.

It's not hardcore. It's just an abundance of incredibly casual, with a tiny amount of massive grind or insta-kill mechanics and latency issues.

There's hardly any content for those that are in between.

You either follow the pug model and have no hope of insta kill encounters, so get to grinding... or you are in a static, committed... for a tiny amount of content. There aren't large server pickup raids or other fun mid range encounters (cept for CT, I guess). It's an incredibly narrow game, content wise.

The design completely segregates those that do the tiny amount of high end through lockouts.... so there is hardly any overlap between player communities... with most if not all cross sectional interactions going through DF, which removes consequences for actions and makes community building impossible.

Games like EQ were certainly much more "hardcore". They also felt much more rewarding for the grinds they did have - and those grinds served as socialization mechanisms for building server communities.

With tiny group locking encounters, cross server small party casual completion, and leveling being very solo able, this game has undermined server community cohesion in almost every design choice.

As far as rewards go - this is the only game I have never even been tempted to bother with "end game" instances, because they will be obsolete so quickly....and they offer no real "experience" in the same sense that the older games offered you a new zone or epic level "experience (Plane of Time...loved it)... these are just a couple of instanced rooms with a boss stuck in them (loot pinata)... it's not very epic. Certainly nothing on the level of fighting a dragon in EQ.

All of that might even be overlooked if this FF game lived up to the story line expectation I have of SE... but once you "beat the game", it goes down the toilet. ..and the only thing worse than the rehashed content is the rehashed story elements of the primals. It's bad enough that you have to reuse encounters, but to drag the story into justifying such a short cut design is just plain sad.... and then there are the fillers... like making perfume... /gag

I'm not down on SE... love the company- love Bravely Default... but playing each of these, even though they are different products, the quality and strategy differences are readily apparent. This is a homogenized product for a broad market. It's perfectly fine if that is what you want- Personally, I think that it is unworthy of the FF title, despite the pretty graphics.

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Originally Posted by Dano

if somehow yoshi decides to remove Duty finder or any form of match making mechanism maybe we'll see the glory days of "looking for party" in XI and people will actually be encouraged to get out of their comfort zone and start socializing/making statics doing things together..etc.

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I just wanna say I remember those glory days back in runescape and I can say this... I remember wanting vomiting all over the place and the desperation and the abject failure and the eventual hacking that it lead to. Thanks but you'll forgive me if I want to light a match on those glory days and watch them burn. Duty finder even with all its faults is still a great feature and has made the game incredibly friendly to play. And I say that from the stand point as a veteran.

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Originally Posted by Cessna

I just wanna say I remember those glory days back in runescape and I can say this... I remember wanting vomiting all over the place and the desperation and the abject failure and the eventual hacking that it lead to. Thanks but you'll forgive me if I want to light a match on those glory days and watch them burn. Duty finder even with all its faults is still a great feature and has made the game incredibly friendly to play. And I say that from the stand point as a veteran.

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The Duty Finder is fine. It doesn't stop people from socializing unless those people just plain don't want to socialize.

I have no idea why you'd want to "vomit all over the place", but then again you are referring to that Runescape game. I guess if I played that, I probably would want to throw up too. In XI though the only "hacking" one could do was usually Fishing botting and while it was annoying seeing players just afk fishing up fish, for a long time there was something a normal player could do about it. Ah man, I miss the days of MPKing fish bots. Ah.. good times, good times.

Anyway, socializing is something that you pretty much had to do in order to get yourself recognized and known on your server. The more well known you were, the more apt people were to want to party with you and do stuff. The system worked great. If you built up a bad reputation for yourself, players were less likely to want to do things with you. Which generally makes a person not want to do that.

This kind of thing isn't as prevalent in today's world of 'instant match-ups with random players for the sake of expedience' but it still exists. People still talk to one another, make friends online with strangers and play with those people they befriend.

This brings me to what I consider the problem with FFXIV:ARR. So you are a social person and have quite a variety of in-game friends (as well as possible IRL friends that might play with you), and you want to do content with a variety of your friends. Too bad. You can only do a normal dungeon with 3 other players, and endgame-type content with up to 7 others only. No more than that, because that's what the XIV devs determined.

A group of 4 is a very small group. A group of 8 players is still a small group of individuals. Yet this is the max capacity we have for forming groups to do any content, a very limited room for the many friends you might have. Even when they opened CT up so that 1 full party could be "pre-made", the content itself is designed for 3 full parties. Only 1/3 of the amount of people able to do CT can even be from the same server intentionally.

The devs really need to figure out a way to allow alliances to form before queing up for multiple party content/raids. Right now there truly isn't a reason for having large FC's to be honest. There is no content in the game, except for hunts, that allows for a large group of people to play together. Hunt's don't really even count considering it's just a mindless zerg whether organized and courteous or chaotic and greedy.

Everything in this game is only designed for one full 8-man party, or one 4-man (half party) to que up and do. They really need to hurry up and change that.

I don't dislike doing content with strangers, I actually like the DF and what it does, but I feel it certainly would be better if you could do large scale content with all players you knew. Or at the very least they all be from your own server. How often am I going to see another player from another server, really? Outside of a randomly joined DF instance, never.

Nothing is hard if you do it enough times, however... when you have 380ping and there are one shot mechanics that kill you even though you have been out of the plume/whatever for 3 steps and started casting a spell... it makes people frustrated; and frustrated people talk a lot.

My tunnel brings me down to 220 ping, it's ok. *shrugs*

Though it does mean that things like stacking must be done absolutely... because if say in the case of the divebomb - the target is standing a yalm in front of me... chances are that persons placement is going to get me struck unless I go stand on them before the target comes up.

So in combat situations I need to have a mentality of 'do this to save myself' rather then 'is everyone ok where they are'
I need to play more selfishly to make up for my connection shortcomings to make sure I do not let the team down in the big picture.
But I have a static so its not a problem for me personally... but for PUGs in the same conditions - I can understand.

Difficulty is subjective. That is why some people would consider it hard, while others consider it easy.
There are also many elements that require quite a lot of grind, which is why some would consider it reasonably "hardcore".

I think you are over-inflating people's opinions of this game however. I haven't seen any comments saying that it is the hardest MMO on the market..

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Originally Posted by Dano

if somehow yoshi decides to remove Duty finder or any form of match making mechanism maybe we'll see the glory days of "looking for party" in XI and people will actually be encouraged to get out of their comfort zone and start socializing/making statics doing things together..etc.

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To make those contents not too easy, it should remove pre-made party, playing with random players is the real true socialization.

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Originally Posted by Raminax

This line reminds me of the Hot Heart of Magic/Shining Statue of Siel in Aion. *sniff* Oh, the pain.

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Oh god, and even that was a cakewalk in comparison to Balic crafts. I finally made myself a 55 Eternal Balic Staff and by then my Legendary was already +10 so I sold it for 900m Kinah. FFXIV you can level any craft to 50 in a day and then craft anything in the game the same day, granted to reliably HQ it you need all of the jobs but 2 per week is pretty damn quick. Again, everything in XIV is designed for casual players and newcomers to the genre.