[Suggestions] Extra content for hardcore/casual gamers requiring minimal dev time
Pulling this out of another topic as it was sort of off-topic in there and I feel it warrants further debate with input from people cleverer than I am.
The problem:
The community is clearly split in two. Hardcore players are getting agitated because they feel as though there's nothing to do in between new content releases once the trials are on farm, and casual players get upset if they reach content they cannot easily complete and end up locked out. This leads to a situation where most new content is released and is immediately the subject of numerous rage threads on the forum about it being either too hard, too easy or both, and everyone is angry either way.
And the people suffering the most from this are the development team themselves, who have to try to satisfy these completely contradictory requirements without going completely crazy.
This topic is not about whether casuals deserve rewards or whether hardcore players deserve a disproportionate amount of development time given that hard content will only be cleared by a minority of players. There are a million topics debating those issues already. This topic is about potential solutions to ease the problem without forcing YoshiP to hire hundreds of additional developers to make brand new trials every week.
To start the ball rolling, I have a few ideas, mainly based on letting the community make its own fun by being less prescriptive over what we can and cannot do. I acknowledge that a certain segment of the community will still be unhappy as my ideas involve no new bosses, glamours, butt sliders, emotes, questlines or mounts. These things all take ages to develop and implement proportionally to the amount of extra gameplay content they provide, and are expected additions over time anyway. I'm entirely focused on reusing existing game assets to generate new challenges.
For example:
- Allow undersizing current content and other types of duty. If we want to bang our heads against a brick wall trying to run Crystal Tower with three groups of three people or trying to solo The Vault, why not let us try? By all means leave the sync as it is for current fights, I'm only asking for the ability to go in undersized. If they're worried people will get stuck and rage about it, just put a warning message up that there's no guarantee the battle can physically be won without more people. If people seriously fret this will somehow devalue their clears, they need to look at tuning current content difficulty as a separate issue. It's already possible to 'undersize' current content by asking someone to come in and AFK, but that's no fun at all and relies on knowing lots of extra people with nothing better to do with their time.
- Allow rerunning content with enhanced difficulty levels. Rather than pushing everyone to rerun the same things over and over, getting gradually easier every time (by which I refer to running roulettes as you gear up, continually shaving any vestiges of difficulty from the content until you're able to run them in your sleep), offer similar levels of reward for making groups to take on harder challenges. For fun, and perhaps some silly throwaway titles/achievements as a bonus.
- The idea above could range from multi-level 'savage' dungeons with brutal difficulty hikes to something like the very popular trial roulettes at Fan Fest where you have to play familiar content except with some kind of crazy handicap. Throw the handicap roulette in Gold Saucer if necessary to avoid people being triggered by the idea that it's meant to be a fun game rather than hardcore progression, and put in some kind of limit to stop people rerolling it constantly for the optimum handicaps (or offer different achievements for every combination, or a WT-style reward which encourages people to try diverse challenges for better rewards rather than facerolling the one everyone thinks is easiest - maybe you have to complete x challenges per week for a special reward and the roulette conditions only change once, randomly, per day, so skipping a day to fish for a better trial can mean missing out on the super reward?). As soon as content is old enough to be irrelevant to most people (e.g. no longer in expert roulette or with weekly lockouts) it should be added to this mode, and of course undersizing should be unlocked right away just like in my first idea. It doesn't matter if the very hardest modes or challenges are almost impossible to win even as a full party. Let us try. Let us push ourselves as far as we can, and make full use of our nice gear.
- Fix the level 50 PVP modes so that they're worthwhile again and then fix Frontline roulette accordingly so that people can actually play something other than Shatter once in a blue moon. Please. PVP has huge potential to satisfy people who crave more challenge but it needs to have a constant stream of new rewards and varied content to keep people coming back.
- Multiplayer duels would also be nice in Wolf's Den, or a proper training mode for the Feast (not that 8v8 nonsense) where I can make members of my FC fight one another and learn the arenas in the Feast for no reward while the others spectate. Not 4v4; a completely freestyle training mode for 1v1 through to 1v4 through to 4v4. No rewards, no progress towards the kill/assist achievements, just pure learning and fun. Incidentally this would also completely obliterate the most common excuse for wintrading and increase engagement in the Feast from shy people afraid to learn in the no-communication-allowed post-apocalyptic wasteland it's become.
This kind of content boost requires zero new art assets and negligible actual effort. But potentially offers hours and hours of content for groups looking for thrilling challenges. I know there will be a bunch of people who disagree and want loads of high-effort new content to keep flowing, and of course I like new encounters being added too, but I run a small Free Company and we run out of things to do as a group all the time without constant repetition and memorisation.
I feel like the dev team is shooting themselves in the foot at times trying to provide an endless stream of content for us tuned for both hardcore and casual players. It's impossible to do that without releasing the reins a little and letting people who enjoy hard content for its own sake set their own challenges on their own terms.
