Need for 3rd tier of raiding

https://www.change.org/p/square-enix...iding-in-ffxiv

As evidenced by the fast clears of A12S (less than 2 days from launch), it's time for FFXIV to add a 3rd tier of difficulty, the same as many other successful MMOs, in order to appease the varied interests of its wide player base.

While many players may be happy with the easier content, there remains a large number of people who want and need harder challenges to stay interested; and the more people playing FFXIV, the better it is for everyone!

But the question is: Is there really a large enough amount of people that can actually clear said content to merit spending development time on it? Gordias seemed to indicate there isn't, and that's with a cheese strat existing.

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Originally Posted by Olympus

While many players may be happy with the easier content, there remains a large number of people who want and need harder challenges to stay interested; and the more people playing FFXIV, the better it is for everyone!

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How large do you think this number is? Is this an attempt to cater to the 1-5% of raiders in this game?

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Originally Posted by Centershock

How large do you think this number is? Is this an attempt to cater to the 1-5% of raiders in this game?

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I guess we'll see how large the number is! SE brags about 6 million players, but we know that number is much lower.

There are over 8,000 players who cleared A8S and uploaded to FFlogs. I don't think they'll be satisfied with the difficulty of A12S, which took hardcore raiders 2 days to learn.

That's 1.3 million dollars worth of annual subscriptions from players who cleared A8S...seems like the development of a 3rd tier wouldn't cost that much!

I killed a4s and a8s and I'd rather not revisit Brute Justice/Manipulator difficulty in this game.

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Originally Posted by Olympus

I don't think they'll be satisfied with the difficulty of A12S, which took World First raiders 2 days to learn.

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FIFY

/10char

With cost and development time I don't think SE needs to cater to such a small minority where it could be better spent elsewhere we aren't even talking about raiders in general but the top .01% who cares if they finish something in 2 days or 2 months. It'll take majority of raiders much longer then that

While this game is certainly in need of more mid-core difficult content, it's not JUST that that's the problem with it. Hardly anyone that argues "we need difficult content because we have fun with that" ever goes into detail beyond just that. Devs are led to believe people find challenge to be a rewarding experience, so provides you said difficulty with Savage Coil. Players only complain that there's no reason to take on said difficulty because there's no good gear rewards from it.

In comes the first tier of AS, with its better gear rewards, only to be met with countless cries of it being too hard, and that the hardest of challenges should not be THAT demanding of a task for a group to clear. Then comes easier, but still challenging tiers of AS, only to be met with cries decreeing the content is too easy because they decided to dumb it down for "casuals". The devs are likely fed up with feeling obligated to listen to players on the matter of raids (since complainers clearly don't even know what they want, or fail to properly express what they want until hindsight kicks in after the fact).

If they don't want or can't manage to make a mid-core tier raid, alongside the ever popular faceroll normal modes and difficult Savage modes, then that's that. What they need to do by a far more realistic or practical sense is introduce mid-core challenges elsewhere. Gauge proper interest through content to be done by the majority, NOT the exceptionally small minority (i.e. Savage mode raiders that are both successful and unsuccessful). Dungeons are a good start to have mid-core difficulty, since it's smaller groups (meaning more accessible for people to form pre-made parties) and is likely easier to market and balance.

BTW, I hope the change.org thing was a joke, because that site is seriously overused to the point of it being a joke lol. That is, at least within gaming or internet related communities.

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Originally Posted by Olympus

I guess we'll see how large the number is! SE brags about 6 million players, but we know that number is much lower.

There are over 8,000 players who cleared A8S and uploaded to FFlogs. I don't think they'll be satisfied with the difficulty of A12S, which took hardcore raiders 2 days to learn.

That's 1.3 million dollars worth of annual subscriptions from players who cleared A8S...seems like the development of a 3rd tier wouldn't cost that much!

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Apparently, 1.0 cost about $400 million to make, and an unknown amount to rebuild it for 2.0. (Betting closer to at least 2/3 of that.) I can't find figures on how much it cost SE to make Heavensward.

All of that compared to $1.3 million doesn't really seem all that much.

oh hey this thread and within a week nice a friend of mine owes me lunch haha!

but in all siriousness, when it is to easy people DEMAND it to be harder, so they made savage for TSCoB which people said was to hard so they made the final a nice ballance, but people called it to easy

then alex came along, A1 to A4, when A1 is called a static crippiler and A2 and A3 a static killer people saw it as far to hard and begged it to change
to which it was insted of DPS it was changed to mechanics but now A6 Was a static killer A7 was a wall and A8 was very very difficult to where not alot of people cleared it.

now with the numbers for A4 clears and A8 clears being low but they want the raids to be done by everyone (who puts in the effort and not the 'elite few') they made this one slightly more forgiving, the people who raid 16+ hours a day will off corse clear this so quickly, and they should be commended, but for the people who have yet to get there let alone see savage may be stuck for MONTHS trying to complete it.

with that they will make it as it is now. so that way more people can play and pay to play.

that is until people cry to easy and the whole shibang repeats with 4.0 :/

WoW has 3 difficulties, but they also have a much bigger team (and like 90% of the point of that game is to raid, unlike here). I'm not sure they have the people to make this and still have a 3 month patch schedule..

I love the current difficulty of AS9, As10, and AS11.
I do not how ever like the current difficulty of AS12.
The final battle always needs to be really hard.

Let the rest of us gear up in the 1st 3 floors, and have a taste of slightly harder content, and then with that little hope, we'd at least TRY the final fight. (Of course lose)

And the best players have something to strive for/accomplish.

"Gear up" on 3 fights lol

You need more bosses if you want gear progression like that.

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Originally Posted by FoxyAreku

WoW has 3 difficulties, but they also have a much bigger team (and like 90% of the point of that game is to raid, unlike here). I'm not sure they have the people to make this and still have a 3 month patch schedule..

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Correct. The XIV dev team has said numerous times that they don't have the staff to make differentiating difficulty tiers, not without SERIOUS detriment to other forms of content.

I think WoW's mythic keystone dungeons might be a good solution for some of this. Keystones are really simple in practice, and probably simple to program - every keystone you put into this fountain at the start of the dungeon in WoW boosts the mob HP and damage by something like 2%? Stackable up to a certain point. As a result, the ilevel of the gear rewarded scales with it, so if your 5-man team is skilled enough to clear the dungeon within the time limit (there's a time limit), you can get some pretty nice rewards WITHOUT raiding.

This could work similarly with the Alexander Savage tokens or tomestones. Let players put in an item that adjusts the difficulty of their expert roulette or something, and have it reward more tomestones, maybe with a SUPER rare chance at getting a raid gear token (I think just more tomestones would also work, though).

For whatever reason, there are a ton of people who don't give a crap about raiding, and while I don't think they should be left with faceroll fluff as their only means of content, I don't think adding MORE raid tiers is the solution. I think more variable sizes for challenging content is a better way, considering most peoples' issue is along the lines of, "my schedule doesn't allow me to raid" or whatever. Keystone dungeons are fairly difficult, but they're not especially time-consuming. I think they're a great midcore alternative for people who don't want to raid.

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Originally Posted by FoxyAreku

WoW has 3 difficulties, but they also have a much bigger team (and like 90% of the point of that game is to raid, unlike here). I'm not sure they have the people to make this and still have a 3 month patch schedule..

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WoW released a new raid this week. The hardest difficulty was cleared in a day.

Some people will just clear things super quick.

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Originally Posted by Olympus

I guess we'll see how large the number is! SE brags about 6 million players, but we know that number is much lower.

There are over 8,000 players who cleared A8S and uploaded to FFlogs. I don't think they'll be satisfied with the difficulty of A12S, which took hardcore raiders 2 days to learn.

That's 1.3 million dollars worth of annual subscriptions from players who cleared A8S...seems like the development of a 3rd tier wouldn't cost that much!

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Total agree.

Imo normal mode caters for less people and is more of a waste of resources than savage raids. It doesnt deserve the title of raid if it can be beaten in under an hour with a DF group.
Normal needs to be harder, infact i think it should be the same difficulty as the creator savage. While savage needs to be harder like midas.

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Originally Posted by jack891

Imo normal mode caters for less people and is more of a waste of resources than savage raids. It doesnt deserve the title of raid if it can be beaten in under an hour with a DF group.
Normal needs to be harder, infact i think it should be the same difficulty as the creator savage. While savage needs to be harder like midas.

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U fool now the casual guys will come here saying shut up u are part of the 1% population , content must not be suited to you! Every1 has his right to get the max lv equip easy fast so they can show their friend how cool they are!

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Correct. The XIV dev team has said numerous times that they don't have the staff to make differentiating difficulty tiers, not without SERIOUS detriment to other forms of content.

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what other content is the developtment so buesy working on ? the 2 dungens and wondurus tails which is a check list for content that has been made months or years ago?
or is it the relic quest, that invloves doing the same dungen for tomes, 100,000 times?
or is it diedram, consisting of a woping total of 2 maps?
or is it maybe guildhiests? lol

most of the stuff develers are doing is, adding more check lists, of weekly objectives for content that is 2 years old .

World of Warcraft has four difficulties, and the toughest difficulty of its seven boss raid went down in the same time frame as FFXIV's two difficulty, four boss raid, so there's a chance that it's not as simple as "add more difficulties."

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Originally Posted by jack891

Imo normal mode caters for less people and is more of a waste of resources than savage raids. It doesnt deserve the title of raid if it can be beaten in under an hour with a DF group.
Normal needs to be harder, infact i think it should be the same difficulty as the creator savage. While savage needs to be harder like midas.

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The title of "raid" isn't quite so subjective. "Raid" by MMO standards is just representative of a large collection of people taking on something, beyond what is considered an entry level norm. I mean, if we had something like WoW with forming a raid to kill a faction leader (which generally won't take more than 30min before having success or failure), I don't think you could argue that forming a 24man alliance for such a short event is not a raid. S-rank Hunts here can technically be considered raids lol. Difficulty does not constitute the correct use of the term.

It's probably not as easy as you think it is to get an exact level of difficulty every single time and for every single type of fight. Some things will be an exception to the tier, others will not. Competitive world first players are dedicated, something that hardly anyone outside of that sort of practice would understand to the same degree (for the game). You can't present players difficulty on-par with any Savage mode fight when there's not much else for them to be forced into doing beforehand as a build up.

Basically, they will need to up the difficulty of nearly everything else in order to make that acceptable. I'd say that would alienate a lot of the majority that are here now. There's a reason why the simple content is often the most done, compared to things that take time and preparation.

The majority of players do want their faceroll battles. They may not exclusively want that, but they enjoy the fact it's there for them to take part in. Suggesting that be removed is a recipe for disaster at this point. Come 4.0, maybe that'll be a thing for it to not be as faceroll.

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Originally Posted by Ibi

World of Warcraft has four difficulties, and the toughest difficulty of its seven boss raid went down in the same time frame as FFXIV's two difficulty, four boss raid, so there's a chance that it's not as simple as "add more difficulties."

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To be fair, I think the raids were available on the PTR too, so information was probably already out on the fights. Still, it's not like it'd take much longer for people to figure it out these days... that is, unless people want to take on something like Absolute Virtue from XI again. That was about as unique as it gets for this genre. Not that such a feat would be possible here of the same caliber, plus the fact that we'd already have the concept of such a fight recorded as reference, unlike back then.

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Originally Posted by starLivitation

what other content is the developtment so buesy working on ? the 2 dungens and wondurus tails which is a check list for content that has been made months or years ago?
or is it the relic quest, that invloves doing the same dungen for tomes, 100,000 times?
or is it diedram, consisting of a woping total of 2 maps?
or is it maybe guildhiests? lol

most of the stuff develers are doing is, adding more check lists, of weekly objectives for content that is 2 years old .

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I didn't say that I agreed. I said that the developers have gone on record saying as much.

Why couldn't they just stick to the Coil savage style (i.e. not dropping any higher gear to avoid people feeling the need to complete it to stay relevant in the game at all) and release it one or two months after the patch release? Or maybe even in the odd numbered patch? That way everyone can gear up and SE can tune the content after max itemlevel without it adding fake difficulty/timewall due to the lack of gear as people would have time to gear up for it even if they just farm their tomes.

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Originally Posted by Olympus

https://www.change.org/p/square-enix...iding-in-ffxiv

As evidenced by the fast clears of A12S (less than 2 days from launch), it's time for FFXIV to add a 3rd tier of difficulty, the same as many other successful MMOs, in order to appease the varied interests of its wide player base.

While many players may be happy with the easier content, there remains a large number of people who want and need harder challenges to stay interested; and the more people playing FFXIV, the better it is for everyone!

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For what? Do you remember the first savage? Hardly got cleared because guess what was not in it? GEAR. Just titles... A third tier of raiding will not make people happy. Waste of resources....no thx

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Originally Posted by SinisterJointss

For what? Do you remember the first savage? Hardly got cleared because guess what was not in it? GEAR. Just titles... A third tier of raiding will not make people happy. Waste of resources....no thx

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No, it was mainly because it shared lockouts with regular coil which was an absurd move on the developers part. Many groups had members that wanted to try savage with others (friends) that might not have been interested so they farmed normal. I would have loved to have been able to go back in and try savage after clearing normal during that raid tier.

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Originally Posted by Olympus

https://www.change.org/p/square-enix...iding-in-ffxiv

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One (1) supporter. Lol nice

I'd rather content that is harder than normal but NOT Savage level. My idea of fun isn't a mandatory 6hrs a week with a static... that's a job at that point. But I feel those in a similar boat may want more of a challenge.

Yoshi P has said he wants 3 tiers but only has the staff to do two. They are trying to hire more staff but skilled developers who speak Japanese and are willing to work in Japan aren't a dime a dozen.

I don't think this is a question of if they should or if they want to but if they currently can.

As for content release, FF14 is pretty damn competitive. Very few MMOs work on a mostly consistent 3.5 month patch cadence and guarantee new dungeons, multiple gearsets and some form of large scale group content (Alex/Mhachi stuff) in addition to other additions such as the side story stuff, the Primal fights, Deep Dungeons, and yes the Diadem stuff.

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Originally Posted by Ibi

World of Warcraft has four difficulties, and the toughest difficulty of its seven boss raid went down in the same time frame as FFXIV's two difficulty, four boss raid, so there's a chance that it's not as simple as "add more difficulties."

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But WoW used PTR and invited top tier raiders to test, they have already cleared it before it's released.

There isn't even enough people raiding to justify the second tier, let alone a third.

Before raiders were able to beat all the hard raids, and then when they got the gear, they were able to use that gear on the other hardest content. Coil Savage. But no, titles weren't enough. Maybe some glamour could've helped but obviously there wasn't incentive or something so no one did it and Savage failed.

I hear how raiding is bad because the gear you get from raids is useless due to the fact that there is no content to use it on. Coil Savage was exactly that. And it failed.

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Originally Posted by Belhi

Yoshi P has said he wants 3 tiers but only has the staff to do two. They are trying to hire more staff but skilled developers who speak Japanese and are willing to work in Japan aren't a dime a dozen.

I don't think this is a question of if they should or if they want to but if they currently can.

As for content release, FF14 is pretty damn competitive. Very few MMOs work on a mostly consistent 3.5 month patch cadence and guarantee new dungeons, multiple gearsets and some form of large scale group content (Alex/Mhachi stuff) in addition to other additions such as the side story stuff, the Primal fights, Deep Dungeons, and yes the Diadem stuff.

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As long as they spend time making content like diadem where people step in 1 week than leave , as long as they focus on making xx hairstyle glamours and bla bla. Sure they don't have time for it lol

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

But the question is: Is there really a large enough amount of people that can actually clear said content to merit spending development time on it? Gordias seemed to indicate there isn't, and that's with a cheese strat existing.

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Clear rates and try rates are very different. Yoshida stated in some recent interview, he was very happy with the clear rates of A5S and A6S. So the clear rates of A8S did not reflect the amount of people trying it.

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Originally Posted by Pasquale

As long as they spend time making content like diadem where people step in 1 week than leave , as long as they focus on making xx hairstyle glamours and bla bla. Sure they don't have time for it lol

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Because the people designing hairstyles also design fights...