Endgame too challenging and teamwork based (Hear me out)!

[Wingless_Seraph]

Perhaps if people put their egos away and toned their down judgmental response, this thread wouldn't turn into the typical push button responses that plagues these forums.

You're not going to convince the OP of anything and he's probably cleared more content consistently than most people in here responding to him. So try to look at it from his perspective and think about his angle.

First and foremost games should be about entertainment, and people talking about challenge are fooling themselves in the current state of MMOs. Your idea of overcoming the challenge is to go on youtube, watch some other guild complete the fight, and spoon feed you step-by-step instructions on how to beat the encounter. The sad part is that beyond group makeup, these boss fights in FF14 are generally so scripted there is next to no variance to how you beat them. So where does that put your difficulty? In your PT makeup and the human behind the keyboard/gamepad. Take 8 mediocre players and some of the fights (Like Titan) is nigh impossible to overcome. Take 8 players with low latency and ability to dodge and most every encounter in this game is a faceroll snooze. So I ask you? Where's the challenge?

The challenge comes in what the OP is talking about, getting 7 other people with him to complete this content, which he says has been frustrating. Anyone who has ever been a raid leader or guild leader knows that there will be times where the babysitting and human management shadows the entertainment.

MMOs don't have to be this way, they've changed a great deal and if anyone is using WoW in a bad light, well you're either biased against it with some hidden motive or not being realistic. WoW is an MMO that drastically changed its raid level content and gearing progression over the long years of success it has held onto. The reality is, challenge is a murky bog of water that scales greatly from player to player. One man's challenge is another man's faceroll, and one man's frustration is another man's goal to overcome.

Middle ground needs to be achieved. Risk versus Reward is probably what people are thinking about when they talk about challenge. In reality, I believe many more people would rather be able to log in, set a goal, and achieve it without the hassle of befriending skilled players, removing dead weight from their groups, and basically turning into someone who's more concerned with min/max than just having a decent time with random people. And that's really the jist of what I get from the OP.

Debates on the rate of content completion, subscription retention, and risk versus reward are different topics all together.

Do we make MMOs more accessible to the average player or do we make them more frustrating so that only a smaller % of the playerbase can complete it? WoW went the route of accessibility and it has earned Blizzard more money than any single game in gaming history.

Personally as someone who has a history of just generally being good at these games, I find that nothing is ever really difficult to me gameplay wise in these MMOs. It comes down to finding similar skilled players who sometimes aren't the nicest people or most engaging people to play with. I'd rather it be more casual so I can pick up and play with anyone, carry on a conversation, set an evening goal and set about completing it without giving out verbal hand jobs and cherry picking people I identify with as good players.

The bad news is that you can't please everyone without some serious finances and even then you'll have praisers and haters. And a very good developer can make challenging high risk vs reward encounters for the solo player. There is room to appease everyone, but most companies don't have those resources until after the game becomes successful and being successful generally means appeasing the majority, who, unfortunately for many of the people replying in this thread, are typically not going to be your first pick to Titan or Coil.

[sasakusaku]

Perhaps if people put their egos away and toned their down judgmental response, this thread wouldn't turn into the typical push button responses that plagues these forums.

Excellent post, /tip sugar loaf hat

[Rutaq]

...
Do we make MMOs more accessible to the average player or do we make them more frustrating so that only a smaller % of the playerbase can complete it? ...

Given the large number of casual, solo play, easy mode MMOs on the market... I would vote for " make one more frustrating so only a small % of the playerbase can complete it."

Why do games have be designed to cater to the lowest common denominator ? A social game of tic tac toe can be fun but does that mean that we can never play anything more complex or challenging because it would be too tough for my 3 year old niece ?