New Variant Dungeon: Reward structure is a downgrade from previous ones.

Wow. What a massive 'L' by the devs for what continues to be blatantly the weakest expansion for casual player retention.

I had gone to bed after reading the patch notes wondering if the genie mount would end up being the savage mount or 'all variant routes cleared' mount, only to discover this morning that there is no mount reward this time for the latter achievement, only some incredibly disappointing sleep mask (seriously, were people even asking for more of those?) instead of a mount like the precedent set by all other variant dungeons.

So... Like many have already voiced, I guess the conclusion the devs decided to come to in fixing the lack of enthusiasm and participation in criterion and savage-level variant dungeons is to penalize the casual playerbase's reward in lieu of simply adding better reward structures on their own to the higher difficulties. Like, I don't even know- that's either flagrant tone-deafness at best, or spiteful vindictiveness at worst. Imagine suddenly taking away the tomestone weapon currency from the last normal mode raid boss, and then telling players it only drops from the 1st savage mode raid boss now? Or to make savage mode more enticing, they'll be leaving the tomestone upgrade materials exclusively in savage, and will not be releasing them later from Hunt currency or Alliance raids.

Suffice to say, now I have no real interest in running all paths of the newest variant dungeon, and the whole patch feels more like a wash, especially if I don't have any real interest in Thavnarian glamour set #4/ Vanaspati gear 2.0 touted in the patch notes.

here to add my voice to the chorus of disappointment. i was looking forward to this dungeon, i wanted to learn more about corvos. i enjoy doing the dungeons themselves, i've done them all multiple times solo and with friends. i also use 2/3 of the mount rewards from the last dungeons frequently. but i am a causal player and it is a time commitment to do all of the paths. getting a shitty sleep mask we already had in the game feels like a slap in the face honestly. i never did criterion dungeons because i was happy with the rewards from normal runs. i don't have the time/energy to put into doing harder content and i was ok with that because casual players would still get rewards that were worthwhile.

You know, somehow I don't think this is what people meant when they said variant dungeon rewards needed to be reworked. Seriously, a pajama mask for getting all the routes? That's real motivating to actually do them all Square.

This has me extremely worried about 8.0

Unfortunately I do not think this dev team cares a lot about balancing the experience as such and I am unsure how many ways, shapes and forms their "I don't care" needs to be communicated before we all just accept that. XIV is what it is.

Like zoom out and consider, weren't we having all these same discussions in Endwalker? So it's not like, oh surprise we had no warning and had to cobble together OC! They just don't care. They heard the feedback, greelit Cosmic, had artists waste their time designing new maps to fill it with typical AI gameplay and storytelling. Hell at this point I am insulting AI I think. But I can see/hear the devs saying "Oh you want causal content, I'll give you casual content' as they're laughing playtesting a Mech Op.

Same with these rewards, "Oh they're complaining about rewards again...let's give them ..a face mask!! Bwshaha" "clocks out and goes on 12th vacation of 2026*

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

most players don’t evaluate glamour, mounts, or weapons based on difficulty they just use what they like.

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Come on, you can't be pretending that MMO players don't like having and showing off rare mounts, items and titles.

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

Seeing someone with an Ultimate weapon doesn’t tell me anything except that they like the weapon.

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It also tells you they completed the activity required to obtain it, that's a fact. (cheating notwithstanding)

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

again, casuals also contribute to the funds that pays for dev time. So only catering to one side of the playerbase is simply not good.

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Casuals who refuse to engage with any challenging content are getting this fun new dungeon to explore. An achievement reward for doing all the routes would be nice, but this type of content generally doesn't need as much reward compared to the subsequent harder difficulties which require greater incentives to invest the effort. They're just fun, unlike spending hours herding the 7 donkeys in my PF group who can't do mechanics to the finish line of a savage fight. Ideally there'd be rewards for both, but SE makes inefficient use of its resources so we have limited pickings.

If there's a way they aren't catering to casuals enough, I think it's more in terms of content longevity - beyond just the items offered. Most casual content is one-and-done spectacle, and doesn't last long enough especially in the grand scheme of the expansion's lifetime. This is a separate problem that I hoped OC would address, but we all know how that went. IMO what we need is more stuff like Eureka and Bozja which makes efficient use of assets to provide long-term enjoyment for all types of players. If they used the existing open-world zones for this gameplay, that'd free up even more dev resources and file size for making reward items. A ton of dev time goes into making casual content, but the stuff they choose to make takes like half an hour for players to finish leaving you with nothing to do afterward. You can add mounts or glam to incentivize repeating the same easy duty multiple times... but I feel we can do better than that.

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

You say that giving rewards to normal‑mode content takes away from raiders but that doesn’t hold up at all in DT. Raiders have had an enormous amount of content this expansion

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Quantum notoriously lacks any rewards beyond a title, and as a result many people saw little reason to clear it. Forked Tower was similar, and everything else has been the standard fare (Savage is still lacking reward-wise, I should add). I agree that the content offerings in DT have been too focused on the high-end boss format, and should be more varied and wide in their appeal as I touched on above. We also need new types of rewards which take less dev work to create.

So. I ran the dungeon once this evening, and I found it charming. I might do all the paths for fun and lore during this final month of my subscription, and I might grind potsherds for the storyteller’s glam set. (There are many things I’m not impressed by in Dawntrail, but the glams are FIRE.)

I definitely agree though that the reward structure is an inexplicable downgrade from the previous variant dungeons, and the potsherd rewards put the lie to the idea that it’s because of limited resources. We got two glam sets, twice the usual quantity of glamour rewards from a variant dungeon. Surely they could have given one glamour set and one mount that’s a reskin of an existing one on an old animation skeleton for a similar art budget. (Though my preference would have been to give us both glamour sets and a new mount.)

One of my personal favorite experiences in terms of dungeon content. Fight designs were great, mechanics were fun. Boss designs really nice.
Locations, graphics, even music, really well done. Very wholesome as well.

And then you drop the ball with the rewards that was the MAJOR problem with V&C.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer the current Advanced and Criterion systems over the old one. But the devs must have known there was a massive problem with the rewards in of themselves.
I'm honestly baffled by this.

Wow, yeah this isn't cool at all. It's insane to a huge degree that the face mask is the reward and everything is just nerfed in terms of rewards in general.

I don't bother doing content since I'm someone with many alts with no time or desire to repeat content on said alts, and who really doesn't have any desire to get new stuff on my "main". Most things don't fit.

And yet somehow this motivates me even less and makes me all the more worried for the future of the game.

What in the world are they even thinking?

Yeah, this just makes no sense at all. I'm usually someone willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt on things like this, or to at least be willing to give them a chance to make up for bad decisions, but this is just all around stupid.

Why remove the one major reward for doing the 12 paths? I'll still do it because I enjoy the process but it's a pretty big investment if you try to figure it all out yourself and to just get such a terrible reward for doing so? It's just insulting. A stupid sleeping mask? Come the F on.

And why are they still completely unable to just properly reward the players who complete the "savage" version? Why is it so hard for them to just do something like give alternate statted right side gear pieces? Same iLevel as the Savage pieces but with a different stat arrangement would be perfect, wouldn't really detract from the Savage rewards, and would drive the most dedicated hardcore players to the new content (as well as open up an alternate gearing method for those who don't do Savage 8mans).

On a purely mechanical and visual level, the new Variant is great.. but they really need to get their heads out of their collective rear ends on this content or just stop doing it altogether. It seriously can't be that hard.. and this is their 4th go at it.