Criterion

I want to talk about Criterion because of what happened with the Chaotic raids and I do feel both show dire failures into providing a satisfying experience for a majority of players, both for their own reasons.

Target audience

Criterion released in three forms: Variant, Criterion (normal), and Criterion (savage).

- The Variant as far as I can tell was well received, or at least didn't see a lot of backlash, and most players seem to have been happy solving every path casually. If anything, the only complaint I've seen is that it is formulaic for literally no reason: it's always been 3 main paths, each with 4 different possible solutions, every time. It's very telling how XIV game design is literally petrified into meaningless and harmful unchanging formulae. Meaningless, because this doesn't bring anything of value to the game, and harmful, because predictability harms reception and surprise from the players that eventually grow jaded of everything.

- Criterion and Criterion Savage have been essentially the same content, just with one adding serious difficulty restrictions on raising and enrage, essentially meaning that it has more or less to be completed without mistakes. On its own, the difficulty gap between both modes is pretty steep, and one is essentially a lesser, progging step for the latter. It's like if savage or ultimates had two modes, one being more lenient to allow people clearing, and one being the true hardcore mode. This is all well and good to alleviate for different types of raiders, but this fails to account for that the majority of players aren't raiders, much like chaotic failed to account for. Whether it's about raiders being 10% or 30% of the playerbase doesn't matter because at the core it only leaves Variant for everyone.

Gameplay and difficulty

Variant is great especially when done solo (due to its Duty Actions), but I'd argue that it is by far not a compelling pve experience. The bosses, could be considered one when played solo, and are essentially like a solo instance where it's all about practicing DDR mechanics since it's literally impossible to die unless the player has like 10+ vulnerabiltity stacks. Bosses are probably a bit more involved mechanically than the usual dungeon bosses, although since Dawntrail and its new dungeons, it is not a given anymore.

With this in mind, Variant is all about the exploration of different paths and finding what triggers them, or solving their little puzzles. This can be done solo or in multiplayer, which is good, but the pve is NOT at the center of this mode, precisely because of the Duty Actions. If I wanted an actually interesting pve experience, I'd not play this, because the duty actions are essentially acting like a god mode to account for its willingly role agnostic queue system: parties can use any roles like deep dungeons, but since the trash and bosses aren't like deep dungeons but more like normal dungeons, then the system requires those Duty Actions to account for a lack of tank (and possibly healer). This system is specifically acting as a crutch to allow players to progress through to explore and solve the different paths, and not as an actually engaging pve experience.

Criterion and Criterion savage share the exact same mechanics, besides bosses having more HP and the additional duty restrictions in the latter. The mechanical difficulty of those raids oscillates between extreme trials (usually the first boss), savage (the second boss) and ultimates (the third boss). They try to crank up the difficulty in order to account for a lower player amount (4 instead of 8), which by the nature of probabilities brings less risk of wiping mistakes, and every boss tends to have strong, hard body checks as well. Mechanically, they're very much what one would expect from savage raids: a trial boss in the middle of an area, usually squared or circular.

Criterion trash sections are actually the hidden gem, where everyone of them is unique, with unique mechanics, and in terms of difficulty are closer to older raids like CLL/Dalriada, where it's very possible to wipe by not being careful, but the whole sections are accessible for almost every profile of player. Those sections are by far easier than any of the bosses.

I'd like to argue that this is what the difficulty of Criterion (normal) should have been about, including its bosses. Challenging but "fun chill", content that can be partied up on the spot by any player, including non raiders, but that's not a resident sleepers snoozefest like dungeons or any storymode story in this game tends to be. Criterion normal and Criterion savage acting as a double duty aiming at the same population is a wild mistake and I do not understand how the devs can still only think in a binary world where it's all about casual content vs raiding content and nothing organic in between.

For the next Criterions to come, Criterion normal should be changed and made unique enough for everybody to take part, but keeping it challenging enough like we used to have content like that in the past (Ivalice, Mhach, CLL, Dalriada, etc). Whether it keeps the very boring layout that it currently share with its savage version (corridor with adds, boss, then corridor with adds, then boss, then boss), or tries new things by using the actually beautiful layouts designed for Variant is up to the devs, but it needs to seriously review who it is designed for, because savage already does the job for raiders. And perhaps Criterion normal could actually act as a much needed furniture for roulettes like expert, that are literally crying tears of blood because of the lack of content.

Rewards

Everybody seems to agree that the rewards part of Criterion has been a disaster. Savage doesn't offer much incentives to be done beyond people that really want to clear that specific challenge, and they tried to somewhat alleviate this with the latest one in Alo Alo, but I do not think people really cared. Most of the rewards are locked behind the normal version, which is still on the level of other savage content to prog and clear anyway.

Even if it requires quite some time to grind for the rewards as a counterpart, I'd say that Criterion normal, by being accessible to everyone with an actual pve experience (unlike Variant that's made to be done solo), could greatly invigorate dungeon queues for a while.

Criterion Savage on its own side, could have its own rewards aimed at raiders, much like savage does.

I'd like gearing to also be part of it, whether it's just in the savage version or in the normal one as well, because this game truly lacks gearing options, and gearing is also the base drive behind any MMO for people to tackle repeatable content. Now then, imagine if the casual criterion gear, while being lower ilvl than savage, also brought back old pink items? Additional incentives to keep going in, I say, and would dramatically improve content shelf life.

Hopes

This is my personal hopes for the content in the future, before they repeat the same mistakes again and again and eventually kill the content, or make it lukewarm in nature because coping on "it's impossible to please everyone anyway". What a jaded way of seeing things, Yoshida.

Thank you.

I agree with most of your points. I really like Variant Dungeons. I wish Criterion would be more like EX Trials in difficulty (all the way through). But most importantly, let us do the old content unsync'd. That is the biggest problem with it. The old stuff is just dead cause no one does it.

I did forget to mention the lack of unsync indeed, good catch. There is little reasons for it not to be unsyncable like all content unless they do consider somehow that it's ultimates with bragging rights. Perhaps savage criterion? But certainly not the mainline criterion.

If Chaotic gives catch-up rewards for armour, then let Criterion give accessories. Both Chaotic and Variant/Criterion dungeons should be released in the same patch.

Difficulty-wise, Criterion should be around Extreme's difficulty. There's already a Savage Criterion, there's no reason for there to be Savage and Even-More-Savage.