Mistaking difficulty for other things

[Godryc]

I see a lot of people saying more difficulty is something they'd really want to see added to the game. A number of people are saying they want that more than anything. I even saw one person say that difficulty essentially equaled things that require more time and effort.

I really hope this is not what we are asking for. Something is not difficult because you have to spend more time on it. As for the effort part I get the feeling that its only considered effort because of the amount of time being put in.

But even if its because you have to fight nothing but mobs that are way higher level than you. Time and Effort is not Difficulty. Difficult things often require more time and effort but it doesn't work backwards.

I would much rather think of difficulty as something that is mentally engaging and challenging and of course still fun.

What is difficulty to you? Are we really just asking for more grind (time and effort) or is it really a challenging engaging experience that we're after? Clarity is important when the devs are listening so closely.

One last note, there was a dev response recently about them making crafting easier. I don't think it needs to be any easier but we can talk about that in another post.

[Xatsh]

The underlying main issue with the game is there is no feeling of accomplishment no reward.

Part of that is because everything just falls over dead. (difficulty part)
- The missions a joke, a rank 20 person could probably beat rank 36 battles.
- Leves are a joke, the mobs have 1/2 the hp as normal mobs
- Lower level NMs are decent for their Levels
- Higher level NMs are a joke, I am watching people duo/trio them people want things that take 8 coordinated people to kill.

The other issue is people are being handed everything and are being handed it fast
-You can get millions apon million of gil just playing the game. You do not even have to try to make money to make it. Therefor getting gear feels meaning less.
-NMS while they might have a horrible drop rate, if you fight it for an hour you are most likely guaranteed to get it. It is like this for every lesser nm.
-Leveling is much to fast with fighting classes, you can get to 20 in like 3hrs then all the way to 50 in another 3 weeks. While I agree 50 is obviously not the permanent endgame... the game is just too easy to progress.


So you have 2 issues of why people are complaining they are not the same.
-Difficulty does not = time , but the people who are bringing in the time complaint are doing so because atm square is taking 2-3 months to develop content which is good for 2hrs.... think about that for a sec.

People do not necessarily want long time sinks, but they want content that will last them for thousands of hours. They want to feel that working on something will payoff. They do not want handouts, they want to work hard and along time to get the best of the best gear. Atm the game simply lacks that.

Between the ease of killing everything, and the fact that everything in the game besides faction NMs just crap out gear there is simply no feeling of reward, accomplishment, or fun in the whole game.

Square has a major issue, they need to find a way to make casuals happy as well as make it to where the people who can play 60hrs a week never run out of content to do.

[_C-a-e-r-i-t-h_]

There's good difficulty and bad difficulty. Something that takes a lot of time and brute force is bad difficulty. Something that takes a lot of intelligence is good difficulty.

Examples of Good Difficulty:

Radiant Historia's battle system. If you auto-attack, it takes a really long time and is very very hard. If you use your abilities intelligently, you can end most fights in 1-2 rounds. This is good difficulty, it rewards intelligence and ingenuity.

FFXI's Salvage. With all the limitations imposed on the team (time, cells, routes to take, monster selection), a team had to play smart or get their ass kicked. The bosses like LBC were a perfect example of this same difficulty you see in Radiant Historia: brutally hard but if you approach them intelligently you can take them down like clockwork.

Devil May Cry. Skill is more important than effort here. It's a meatgrinder otherwise.

Examples of Bad Difficulty:

FFXI's Salvage. Once you got the pattern down and knew what you were doing, the drop rates were so bad that you had to grind over and over and over for a 2% drop (times 6 because everyone on your team wants it too).

Yiazmat from FFXII. Has like 50 million HP. You can actually leave the area and save and come back during this fight, that's how long it takes. Not necessarily hard, but just plain fatiguing.

Final Fantasy XIV login screen. Ugh, so much effort to get past this.

But yeah crafting isn't hard it's just monotonous.

[weeble]

i think what all mmo's need to do at this point is create seperate servers for casual and hardcore, let people chose. there is pvp servers an non pvp in most mmo's now. so how bout just make 2seperate games for the both as well. seriously don't think they can ever satisfy both. and eventually casuals will realize that they need us to even wipe there asses lol jk, but seriously lol. i like this idea.

[Godryc]

So you have 2 issues of why people are complaining they are not the same.
-Difficulty does not = time , but the people who are bringing in the time complaint are doing so because atm square is taking 2-3 months to develop content which is good for 2hrs.... think about that for a sec.

People do not necessarily want long time sinks, but they want content that will last them for thousands of hours. They want to feel that working on something will payoff. They do not want handouts, they want to work hard and along time to get the best of the best gear. Atm the game simply lacks that.

Ok I can agree with this. We want a lot of content. And sure it is frustrating when you wait months for new stuff and it really doesn't provide more than an hour or two of extra game play.

The problem I see is there's no way around the long wait time. Developing, testing, and balancing content takes time I don't think many of us imagine differently. The more we rush them the poorer the quality we get. The player base has a long wait on its hands and unless SE is going to double their production team size I can't see this changing. Even doubled it would probably be quite a while until we saw "enough" content coming into the game.

Maybe one bright side to this is that the game is currently undergoing core-system overhauls (battle, core coding, environments etc) When the system overhauls are done we will likely see an increase in the amount of content being released per patch.

[Perrin_Aybarra]

I'll post this again, even if you all must be tired of me insisting on this. But to me challenge comes with capped fights that are designed around that cap level. The way they had level capped areas/missions in FFXI. To me that is the definition of ongoing challenge, promotes skillfull play and even includes casual players. Being casual =/= wanting everytime steamrollable and easy. Capped missions also makes things challenging without being a grinding time sink.

Capped missions allows for high level to go help their low level friends and still get excitement with the mission and also keeps you more on your toes since bad playing could lead you to a wipe.

I think anyone who oppose to that just wants the possibility to have easy content by allowing their high level LS mates to come clear stuff for them while they watch TV and eat cookies. But that's just my opinion.

[_C-a-e-r-i-t-h_]

I'll post this again, even if you all must be tired of me insisting on this. But to me challenge comes with capped fights that are designed around that cap level. The way they had level capped areas/missions in FFXI. To me that is the definition of ongoing challenge, promotes skillfull play and even includes casual players. Being casual =/= wanting everytime steamrollable and easy. Capped missions also makes things challenging without being a grinding time sink.

Capped missions allows for high level to go help their low level friends and still get excitement with the mission and also keeps you more on your toes since bad playing could lead you to a wipe.

I think anyone who oppose to that just wants the possibility to have easy content by allowing their high level LS mates to come clear stuff for them while they watch TV and eat cookies. But that's just my opinion.

Wait, your LS gets cookies? Where do I sign up?

[Xeak]

I think adding difficulty to the game will definitely make it a lot better, even if it's just adjusting the strengths of the monsters. I liked how in FFXI it took time to defeat even normal monsters that con EP. In FFXIV you can kill about 10 monsters in the same time. During leves when groups of monsters attack, I don't mind that mobs being easier than normal, but balance it a bit to give it a challenge. I hate just going in and pressing 1 for a normal attack maybe 3 times and then I'm ready to fight the next monster in line.

Also, I do like the idea of implementing some kind of caps. CoP was the best expansion for FFXI, and it was because of the caps. It took me months to beat the Promyvions (mostly because it was a weekend thing I did with friends), but even when I had finished I would always be the first (and only) to offer help to people who haven't done it because I enjoyed the challenge. I enjoyed capped Promyvions and mammets more than any other content in the entire game (mammets was as far as I had gotten before the removal of caps, then I just quit doing CoP because of lack of challenge).

And if there are no caps, at least scale the monster levels up to match the highest player, like someone had suggested in another thread. It greatly pisses me off, especially in FFXI, that players get handed things to them because they have such great buddies (like a friend of mine I had received a Haubergeon from someone for free when it was still worth a million or 2) while I'm working my ass off to achieve the same thing because I don't have friends who are that kind to help me.

[Perrin_Aybarra]

I think SE's definition of challenge has died. To me CoP was the golden age of MMORPG, the very definition of what it should be. FFXIV is becoming more and more a joke of a game, trying to make everything so easy that even facebook games are starting to be more challenging.

Like you said Xeak, I also loved to go back to help friends do their CoP missions, loved the fact that I was capped and that there was always a challenge waiting. Removing the cap was really a bad decision if you ask me, there are plenty of games that pretends to be MMORPGs out there that already allows you to go steamroll through their content... FFXIV should be aimed for a different crew.

[Xeak]

Agreed. Throughout Final Fantasy's long and glorious career, the games have continued to be aimed at pro-gamers, people who love the challenge. Since FF became an MMO (at least in recent years on FFXI) it's targeting players who I'll refer to as pansies. They think something's too difficult because they went through it once, failed, and never bothered to try again. I suppose most MMOs would rather their players just be bulked up with tons of content that they'll never bore of regardless of being so easy (like WoW). I think the easy content is a bore just going through it the first time, and getting whatever treasures from it isn't as rewarding, and those "elitists" who rule WoW shouldn't be considered elitists. I'm sure many on here will agree with me on that, I know plenty of people on the Bismarck server on FFXI did. It's the challenges of the game that makes elite players. I would like to see FFXIV as challenging as FFXI had been and then some. That would make for the perfect MMO imo.

It seems like SE just wants players for now though, which is understandable. FFXI didn't have the cred that WoW did. It took FFXI 6 years I believe to reach 2 million subscribers while WoW had 10 million in maybe about 3 years. So giving us content that's enjoyable and easy for now I'm not completely against, but I hope they give us plenty of challenging content when the PS3 release comes and we have to start paying a subscription fee. I've stuck with FFXIV since alpha, even on my laptop where the graphics lagged unbelievably. (I have a desktop now that's a lot better!) My hopes for this game have no dwindled a bit. But if FFXIV continues to target pansies like the WoW audience, I'm not sure I'll stick around very long. Each time I started up on WoW I could only play for maybe 2 months before boring of it and quitting for a year. I would hate it if FFXIV became just like that for me.