Daily Challenge: Extreme Trial

This is by no means my original idea. These are suggestions I’ve seen in replies to other threads about synced old content. I’m surprised that no one made an actual thread about these suggestions as far as I’ve seen.

So this is a way to breathe life into old extreme trials. Personally I’ve noticed that it can be difficult for new players to form a group motivated enough to run older extreme trials level-synced. Most players rather run this content unsynced and blast right through. I don’t blame them, there’s no incentive for them to run the content at the intended level. However new players will not be able to experience the full fight.

Daily challenge: Extreme Trial

I know that a random roulette in the duty finder will not work. There’s too much of a gap in difficulty between certain trials. This would work similarly to Frontlines where you see the type of match you will get for queuing that day. Each day a certain extreme trial will be available. You will see what you will get so you can be ready. Queuing for the daily challenge will level sync you of course.

Rewards (All of these are examples)

Now for the part that will motivate players to do these challenges. Completing the daily challenge will award a new currency called “Memory Shard” once a day. Memory Shards can be exchanged for glamours/mounts/minions/etc. Some miniature earrings like the Namazu earrings perhaps? How about mounts or bardings like the flying cloud and starlight barding?

There would be some perks for running challenges:
- Increased chance of learning Blue Mage spells.
- Increased drop chance for mounts.
- 10 totems upon completion.
- Tomestones/Exp upon completion.

The amount of Memory Shards awarded will depend on the difficulty of the content. For example:
- Garuda Extreme will award 2 MS.
- Ministrel’s Ballad:Tsukyomi’s Pain will award 8 MS.
The actual amounts will of course be determined by Yoshi’s team. They have the completion ratio data after all.

You can solo or premade queue for the daily challenge. The challenges will only include trials that are not part of the current expansion. The stacking echo buff will work normally. I know that there’s no way to get an authentic 1:1 experience since jobs have changed since then but this I feel is as close as you can practically get. I think this would be great thing to run with your FC, LS, Fellowships, friends, etc.

Let’s discuss. What do you think?
What rewards would be good?
Should mount drops and blue magic be guaranteed?
Should your gear be synced to max or min ilvl? Or somewhere in between?
Should it be a weekly challenge?

tl;dr: New daily for extreme trials that is NOT A RANDOM ROULETTE while level synced for rewards.

imo WT does enough to somewhat breathe life into old EX trials. this is a very niche thing that almost brings no benefit.

Personally I think it’s silly that it still counts when you run an extreme trial unsynced for WT.

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Originally Posted by Firago

Personally I think it’s silly that it still counts when you run an extreme trial unsynced for WT.

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Some of them would never get run otherwise however. Thordan unsync'd is a big fat 'no' from me.

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Originally Posted by Firago

Personally I think it’s silly that it still counts when you run an extreme trial unsynced for WT.

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And yet, if they made it only count while level sync was in effect, you'd have dozens of topics from Level 80s complaining that they don't want to play around with a Level 50 rotation just to get a sticker for a weekly reward.

With all those threads like this popping up, I wonder if all your guys requesting this arent better off just creating a Discord dedicated to finding/collecting people who are intrested in doing those fights the "proper" way again, just for the sake of it.

I have to reasons for making this alternative suggestion - one personal and on practical.

Lets get the personal stuff out of the way first: Personally, I'm not really intrested in a feature like this - I've done all those fighst when they were relevant, I've farmed them to death for their mounts and I'm hoarding tokens from each and every one of them, so I wont have to do them again if I ever want to glamour a weapon. Basically, what I am is: Done with those fights. I dont really want to go back, especially not on a weekly/daily basis... I like the feeling of being down with those fights and just being able to focus on the new ones. I obviously know that "I dont have to do the roulette if I dont want to" - its an argument I used myself often enough, admittly, but I still wanted to give my personal opinion on this.

Now for the more practical side: This will only work for so long - people, myself included, will do them as long as it takes to get the desired rewards (or, depending on the primal just skip doing it alltogether) and then it will be dead again. Ex-primals arent really made for DF, they're just not - maybe half of them are doable, a quarter will be painful and the last quarter will just see people leave left and right (or outright not queue up for them).
Either way I dont think constantly adding rewards to old content is a real longterm solution, because it will always only work right after the reward is added, when people hardcore farming it and then you'll be back to square one.

If you really want to do those fights again the longterm solution that I think would work best is to gather people who also enjoy doing this fights synched. To find people who dont need a carrot, but would just like to do Ramuh EX again...
If you think it would be great to do those fights with friends again: Why not do those fights with friends again right now? If you enjoy doing those fights why do you need rewards sprinkled on top of them? Why not grab your friends and set yourself a fun challenge - switch up jobs, all-tank-runs, all-heal-runs etc.?
I feel that at a certain point the best way to keep those fights going is to take initative yourself, find people who enjoy the same thing as you, spice the fights up and just enjoy them for the sake of it. Thats more likely to keep them alive, at least in an isolated community, than "making" everyone run them again just to grab the rewards and then return to the happy state of "Thank god, I never have to see Nidhogg again!"

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Originally Posted by Enla

Some of them would never get run otherwise however. Thordan unsync'd is a big fat 'no' from me.

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This. I've simply forgotten certain mechanics from content that is 5 years+ old.

Hell, I got put into Swallows Compass in my 567 roullette and had to remember certain parts of it.

Considering that people sometimes already have a hard time clearing normal trials. I'd say no.

We have Crossworld PF's for a reason, use them. If you can't find anything there try discord/forums.

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Originally Posted by Vidu

With all those threads like this popping up, I wonder if all your guys requesting this arent better off just creating a Discord dedicated to finding/collecting people who are intrested in doing those fights the "proper" way again, just for the sake of it.

I have to reasons for making this alternative suggestion - one personal and on practical.

Lets get the personal stuff out of the way first: Personally, I'm not really intrested in a feature like this - I've done all those fighst when they were relevant, I've farmed them to death for their mounts and I'm hoarding tokens from each and every one of them, so I wont have to do them again if I ever want to glamour a weapon. Basically, what I am is: Done with those fights. I dont really want to go back, especially not on a weekly/daily basis... I like the feeling of being down with those fights and just being able to focus on the new ones. I obviously know that "I dont have to do the roulette if I dont want to" - its an argument I used myself often enough, admittly, but I still wanted to give my personal opinion on this.

Now for the more practical side: This will only work for so long - people, myself included, will do them as long as it takes to get the desired rewards (or, depending on the primal just skip doing it alltogether) and then it will be dead again. Ex-primals arent really made for DF, they're just not - maybe half of them are doable, a quarter will be painful and the last quarter will just see people leave left and right (or outright not queue up for them).
Either way I dont think constantly adding rewards to old content is a real longterm solution, because it will always only work right after the reward is added, when people hardcore farming it and then you'll be back to square one.

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Thank you for taking the time to read my suggestion and putting together a constructive reply Vidu. I respect your personal opinion so with all due respect I will say that this optional challenge isn't for someone like you. This isn't for someone who who has “farmed it to death” and is now done with it and would never want to run it again. It's more for newer players say for example: players who started during HW. They didn't get to experience the ARR extreme trials when they were current. Think about players who are just starting right now during ShB, they didn't get to experience ARR, HW, or StB extreme trials when they were current. This challenge is for them. When you see a trial that you'd like to play at the intended level go ahead and queue for it solo or join one of the new PF's that will actually say “Daily Challenge.” The rewards could be something similar to what the Moogle Tomestones award: Things that veterans already have or maybe have a tiny tiny earring with a miniature beastman.

The idea is to make it easier for players who haven't experienced the content at the intended level an opportunity to do so. Maybe a trial that you happened to enjoy pops up, maybe someone doesn't mind attempting to teach players how to clear a trial, maybe it can be a focus for certain FC's, LS's, Fellowships, Discords. Right now in my personal experience along with what I've seen on the forums and chats in general I see that it can take hours or multiple attempts for a PF for synced content to fill up. Why do you think threads like these keep popping up?

Extreme/Savage/Synced roulettes
ARR Extreme Trials, Mentors, and Duty Finder
It's time we get an Extreme Trial Roulette.
PLEASE I NEED HELP with EX trials
[Feedback] Raid roulette
They should add a Weekly Savage Content Roullete
Duty Roulette : Extreme? Mentor?

There are still more but I think I made my point. I'm pretty confident when I say that they will continue to pop up from time to time until such a system is put in place. IMO I don't think this feature will “die out quickly” as there will always be new players coming in who haven't done this content unless you want to say the game is dying. :p

Just use pf, this sounds like a waste of devs resources.

My only thing on this would be having yet another currency to try and keep up with. And, depending on the rewards, I imagine it'd have a 'weekly cap' as well to keep it from being 'wait til easiest EX and then spam farm for rewards' (altho that may also still happen).

Other than that, I think it'd be interesting. I didn't do a lot of EX primals after Ravana and Bismark, so having an incentive to go back and do others would be interesting and one way to do these old contents without wasting hours in the PF. WT has helped some but, as you said, you can do it unsynched so there's no helping those at level and first timers unless they happen to find a WT PF (which I don't see anymore on Crystal nowadays). I don't think it'd hurt anything, although the queue might be pretty long depending on the primal.

Now, one thing you can do to sweeten the deal is, like say Sephirot EX is up on the DF. If you complete it you are guaranteed 1 of his saps, or something of that nature. You can make it 2 for "Adventurer in need" if you want. Will that mess with the market of said items? Sure, as much as the old reuse 'abuse' did. At the same time, it might also revitalize the market of that particular item. Honestly I think it'd be a cool implementation.

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Originally Posted by Kidria

My only thing on this would be having yet another currency to try and keep up with. And, depending on the rewards, I imagine it'd have a 'weekly cap' as well to keep it from being 'wait til easiest EX and then spam farm for rewards' (altho that may also still happen).

Other than that, I think it'd be interesting. I didn't do a lot of EX primals after Ravana and Bismark, so having an incentive to go back and do others would be interesting and one way to do these old contents without wasting hours in the PF. WT has helped some but, as you said, you can do it unsynched so there's no helping those at level and first timers unless they happen to find a WT PF (which I don't see anymore on Crystal nowadays). I don't think it'd hurt anything, although the queue might be pretty long depending on the primal.

Now, one thing you can do to sweeten the deal is, like say Sephirot EX is up on the DF. If you complete it you are guaranteed 1 of his saps, or something of that nature. You can make it 2 for "Adventurer in need" if you want. Will that mess with the market of said items? Sure, as much as the old reuse 'abuse' did. At the same time, it might also revitalize the market of that particular item. Honestly I think it'd be a cool implementation.

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Ah yes for the currency (Memory Shards) you can only get it once per day so in a way that's the cap. Also the trials will award varying amounts of MS depending on the difficulty say for example the easier ones give 2 pieces and the harder ones give 8 pieces. If you only do the challenge when it's an easy trial then you would be collecting MS at a slow but steady rate. If you want to start collecting them faster you might want to work towards at least attempting the harder ones.

I like to think that this would do wonders to improve player skill in the community overall but that's the optimist in me talking.

your whole "newer player who has FOMO because they didn't get to experience it as it was" argument doesn't hold any water with me. IMO of course.
if you're late to the game you're just gonna have to deal with it is my response. do as Vidu suggested just find a discord of like minded ppl. don't waste dev time with such a thing.

Maybe daily is a bit tight? I think it would be a bit harsh on time for anyone needing time to learn the fight, and pressure impatience to clear before reset. Maybe a period of a few days, or weekly something kind of similar to Wondrous Tails? Wanderer's Tales, but I think with quite a difference in the amount of duties, journal/quest-item interaction, and reward. Or maybe more like the challenge log, or be in the challenge log itself, except unlike the rest of the challenge log the options of that category change each week. I don't know how much of an issue there could be with only recognizing completion of a level synced duty. However the poetics reward they already have already require level sync.

Isnt this like the third tread this week about this? People wanting roulettes for content that despite being old, is still hard? Do people really have this much faith in DF......Oh....

Something that occurred to me regarding this: while it makes sense as an "optional roulette", from the repeated conversations over the also-optional MSQ roulette it seems that some amount of players see the daily roulettes not as something to pick and choose, but that every roulette is something they should do / must do / are entitled to the rewards from every day. Whether the attitude has any correlation to their skill level or not, it's likely you'd get those players and not just those who want the challenge.

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Originally Posted by Firago

Thank you for taking the time to read my suggestion and putting together a constructive reply Vidu. I respect your personal opinion so with all due respect I will say that this optional challenge isn't for someone like you. This isn't for someone who who has “farmed it to death” and is now done with it and would never want to run it again. It's more for newer players say for example: players who started during HW. They didn't get to experience the ARR extreme trials when they were current. Think about players who are just starting right now during ShB, they didn't get to experience ARR, HW, or StB extreme trials when they were current. This challenge is for them. When you see a trial that you'd like to play at the intended level go ahead and queue for it solo or join one of the new PF's that will actually say “Daily Challenge.” The rewards could be something similar to what the Moogle Tomestones award: Things that veterans already have or maybe have a tiny tiny earring with a miniature beastman.

The idea is to make it easier for players who haven't experienced the content at the intended level an opportunity to do so. Maybe a trial that you happened to enjoy pops up, maybe someone doesn't mind attempting to teach players how to clear a trial, maybe it can be a focus for certain FC's, LS's, Fellowships, Discords. Right now in my personal experience along with what I've seen on the forums and chats in general I see that it can take hours or multiple attempts for a PF for synced content to fill up. Why do you think threads like these keep popping up?

Extreme/Savage/Synced roulettes
ARR Extreme Trials, Mentors, and Duty Finder
It's time we get an Extreme Trial Roulette.
PLEASE I NEED HELP with EX trials
[Feedback] Raid roulette
They should add a Weekly Savage Content Roullete
Duty Roulette : Extreme? Mentor?

There are still more but I think I made my point. I'm pretty confident when I say that they will continue to pop up from time to time until such a system is put in place. IMO I don't think this feature will “die out quickly” as there will always be new players coming in who haven't done this content unless you want to say the game is dying. :p

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I really dont want to destroy your illusion here, but should your suggestion go through realtiy will anyways, so... I might just go ahead and do it:

The first thing to adress here is the "its for new players who didnt get to experience this when it was current" - the sad truth is that even with a roulette added they wont get to experience this content in the same way - or difficulty! - it was back then. Those fights have either been outright nerfed and our jobs have been buffed (because they're not balanced for level 50 anymore) on top of pretty much everyone (maaaybe save for a new person - and 1/8 doesnt matter anymore then) is overgeared since ilvl sync isnt really working great. The "doing it when it was current, challenging content"- window has closed long, long ago and cant be opend again (unless the fights get de-nerfed and our jobs balanced for level 50 again, I guess).

The second thing is that while it might currently take hours to fill a PF, depending on the primal and the level of experience it can also end up taking hours to beat the damn thing - with timers running out, people leaving... and if you're a random DF-group who actually sticks together, works out how to deal with everything Thordan throws at you, gets closer and closer to the kill and then... your timer runs out, you all get kicked right when you had him at 5% and would now have to reform this party by invinting everyon manually again it doesnt really sound like a great way to deal with this.

In regards to your last point there: I do believe that there are always new people coming into the game - but I dont believe that all of them are intrested in doing Ex-primals at all or even the proper way. Think about how this looks for a new person right now and compare it to how it was for a veteran: A new person can unlock all ARR-primals during the course of a weekend - on top of the Coil-raid, the 24-man-raid, a ton of dungeons and Ishgard, aka HW. They've also learned until this point that anything they unlock can and should be cleared with DF in less than 30 minutes - so... they queue up for those Ex-primals not only blind to the fight but blind to it being a challenge. At least thats what I'm often getting and seeing when doing my mentor roulette - I'm actually happy when its not a guildhest but a primal, but I can tell you that it often leads to frustrated and annoyed newbies who are suddenly faced with something that isnt faceroll, which was not what they were intrested in right now. I've also met quite a few people who werent intrested in doing the old things the proper way again and were much more eager to make actual, relevant progress - instead of spending an afternoon doing something that could have just taken an hour. I know this is anecdotal, but I just wanted to illustrate that I dont think its the right approach to claim that we need to keep this alive because everyone new person coming into this game will want to do those fights the proper way.
For vets back then these fights meant progress since they dropped better gear (and they were all we had to do for months) - for a new player they're actually slowing down their progress, seeing how they have better gear already and a mountain of content ahead of them.

And for my last point, just a little though in regards to "What even is the proper way of doing these fights?"
Because to me and in my experience its never been doing them via DF (I think the only time I was ever really able to use the raidfinder for something was Sophia - I did try Ultima, Garuda and Ramuh via DF and it was mostly painful. I remember getting Shiva, Ifrit and GKMM for mentor roulettes - Shiva went through after 50 minutes, Ifrit had people leave straight away and we gave GKMM a shot for 20 minutes until the new people wanted to give up, at least for now).
To me the proper way has always been to do this with friends (we created a LS just for the purpose of finding like minded and skilled people to do EX-primals), your FC - or by setting up a PF. Doing it the "proper way" never really involved queuing up for it via DF. Part of the proper experience for me has always been to find other people and work together to finally get this clear after putting in the fifth hour. Not something you quickly queue for like any other content, get in, fullfill the objective, get out.
Its not DF-content - specially not done the proper way.

Which brings me back to my suggestion: The proper way to me would be to do what we did back then... build yourself a community intrested in the same things you are. I'm sure you'll find people who'd like to experience those fights properly again aswell as new players who dont want to unsych them.
Or try something like people did with PvP and 24-man evenings: Build a community that will queue for specific content at a specific time of a week - or set up PFs at that time.

All of these suggestions that want to make queueing for Ex-primals easier seem to forget that thats not how this content was done - and that the reason for that is that behind the DF-queue that seems like the problem to you waits the real problem: A fight with mechanics you cant ignore.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Something that occurred to me regarding this: while it makes sense as an "optional roulette", from the repeated conversations over the also-optional MSQ roulette it seems that some amount of players see the daily roulettes not as something to pick and choose, but that every roulette is something they should do / must do / are entitled to the rewards from every day. Whether the attitude has any correlation to their skill level or not, it's likely you'd get those players and not just those who want the challenge.

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This. ^^^^^ In those threads one of the prevailing arguments is that people shouldn't be gated by the time investment those roulette's require but at the same time that anyone who queues for it is still entitled to the huge rewards given as payment for said investment. Very much a 'have your cake and eat it too' sort of situation. Not to turn this into another thread about that sort of subject but I can very easily see that same mentality being copied for any harder difficulty roulette that's put in place. I can almost guarantee that if a roulette is implemented that one of the very first threads posted on the patch day will be something akin to how the reward isn't worth the difficulty and could they please under-tune the Extremes offered to make it so a clear is all but guaranteed. Or, at worst, that unsyncing the content but still getting the reward would be an option. To say nothing of the people who would flood the roulette because it's there and then demand to be carried.

That isn't to say this is a hard argument against the idea, but a reality to consider if it's ever implemented. Unless the team finds a way to actually dissuade that kind of thinking, and sadly speaking it would mean the roulette would likely need to offer next to no rewards to keep the people who have no business doing harder content out of it, then it's likely not going to end well.

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Originally Posted by Firago

There would be some perks for running challenges:
- Increased chance of learning Blue Mage spells.

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Running old Ex-Trials sync is one thing, as we have this in mentor-roulette already - but also running it sync with blue mages in your party? No way.