[Poll] Hard vs Easy (Yea, I went there)

[Kiote]

lol I didnt mean everything.. The you must party all the time to do anything ever in FFXI was stupid.. People should be able to effectively solo creatures of reasonable level at a quick pace. But you should not be able to walk through every storyline quest and you should not be able to solo every boss. Most importantly there has to be something to strive toward. Every MMO needs its AV or its Megladon. Superior super Mobs that drive us toward become the most powerful and highly skilled players we can be.

The biggest problems I have with games like WoW and Rift and pretty much every game like them is that the "Strategy" is Throw as Many People as Possible As Fast As Possible and Have them Click every skill on their bar.

This is where FFXIV currently stands.. It is as easy as WoW.. I didn't even think that was possible. Even Blatant WoW clones aren't as easy as WoW.

I'm not saying this game should move away from solo play. I love solo Play. We just need something to drive us into group dynamics that take significant strategy. I don't want to win on the first try.

[weeble]

i personally want caped everything dungeons,missions and even side quests. i pretty much want everything to be party play. and the harder the content the better, i don't care how many times it takes to take down. things like this i likes. when i play offliners and the such i start it at the hardest gameplay i can, i beat it i toss it. if takes me a few times to do parts it beats repeating the same things over and over to me either way. specially non repeatable stuff, though i want repeatable stuff to be hard to. besides what else there to do, everyone ends up usually waiting for new content no matter how much they do or don't play. might as well enjoy some real challenges while we do and with groups cause like i said earlier mmo's are online play with peoples, go play offliners to solo.

[Reika]

That is what I am hoping for from the Dungeons to be added. I hope we never see a 'must party to go to the bathroom' system FFXI had going on. But there definitely needs to be some things you NEED a group to do. mainly eng-game content, with some mid-high game content here and there.

[Molly_Millions]

You like to set leves to 5 stars and get everyone killed? ^^

I know someone on my server that likes to do that, even tho it will make the monsters like 40 ranks above us.

To be fair, I only set it to 5 star when the SP is capped at 4 and everyone agrees. But that wasn't always the case. Before we figured out the SP cap for each leve, I always set the difficulty one setting above what I thought we could easily handle sometimes we could not, hence the nickname.

[Reika]

To be fair, I only set it to 5 star when the SP is capped at 4 and everyone agrees. But that wasn't always the case. Before we figured out the SP cap for each leve, I always set the difficulty one setting above what I thought we could easily handle sometimes we could not, hence the nickname.

Yea, but as long as it puts to in or close to the 10 rank cap its all good... but 30+?! needless to say I dont play with the guy no more. for more reasons than that....

[Evenstar]

I want/need/like challenging content. However, this does not mean I like to look at my monitor for 3 hours only to see someone else with a bot or a better connection to the servers get the fight the NM.

Long fights are fine, challenging fights are great. I am also fine with them being really time consuming, as long as it is not stupid time consuming like camping a HNM on a 21 respawn timer and a 3 hour window :P

[Molly_Millions]

I am also fine with them being really time consuming, as long as it is not stupid time consuming like camping a HNM on a 21 respawn timer and a 3 hour window :P

I don't think we have those in this game, all the BCNMs(?) spawn roughly once a game day save one.

[OJtheLIONKing]

I'm all for challenge. However, I think it must be well designed challenge, and I definitely do not think that time spent=challenge/difficulty. I'm a lifelong gamer, but I'm also an adult with responsibilities, and I am neither able nor willing to spend all night camping an NM that a botter/lucky person will beat me or my group to. I don't think boss fights should stretch for more than 10-20 minutes because, among other reasons, murphy's law declares someone (most likely the tank of course) will disconnect, need to go afk for some irl reason, have a crash, etc. Then we'll have wasted all that time not on a challenge, but on a timesink.

So what do I expect? A dungeon-going experience that requires skill and some coordination to beat, but will not require everyone to clear 4+ hours of their schedule for a single sitting, and won't completely boot you to the start or fail you if something unexpected happens. Quick fights are by no means automatically easy, see the Snoll Czar fight in CoP for at least 2 years after its implementation, for example.

That's for dungeons though. Frankly, considering the dearth of content at any level in the game at present, I think SE would do well to make the journey to level cap as quick as possible and focus on providing a rich endgame so they can create quality content for as many players as possible. As we've seen with the quests they've added and the raids that are coming, having to stretch content across the entire level spectrum tends to leave everyone unsatisfied, and it will continue to do so as long as it takes so long to hit the level cap, especially in a game like this that has a single character with many classes. We see that players, despite what people may say on forums, don't much care for this by the amount of exploitation of the leve system that goes on to get an acceptable xp rate.

As usual, my post has become quite a bit longer than I originally intended, so to summarize my thoughts, the leveling curve should be shorter and designed to help players learn their abilities, but should also be soloable at an acceptable rate. The endgame should be challenging, but fair (i.e. it's possible to learn the fight on your own without needing reams of information from hundreds of people banging their heads against it on a wiki) and shouldn't require all night to complete. This is not contradictory, despite what many people on the forums might argue, as tedium does not equal challenge.

[Raze]

Within my LS, I'm known as '5 Star Molly', I'll let you guess what I'd rather have based on that.

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF LOL What? My vote is once again for hard, good thread Meowy, reflects what the players want pretty accurately. New battle system + challenging content = w i n

[ViceVersa]

Frustration and a stupid amount of hours spent does not equal fun. I don't understand why some people seem to think an endurance run is fun and challenging. Running Kirin around in circles for 2 hrs was not challenging. That's why people started using the melee burn technique, it cut the fight down to minutes and gave the same reward.

Honestly, I don't know why people bash WoW as being easy. My guild has been running the current raids and although it took us months to clear the normal bosses we are no way near clearing all of the hard mode bosses (yes they are hard, this is coming from someone who has played EQ and FFXI endgame and yes we are a very competent guild) and a new raid is already on the way with fresh bosses. These fights are short (5-10mins) and are challenging in their design. I'm not saying that FFXIV should be exactly like WoW. In fact, I get mad when I play a new MMO and find that its nothing but a WoW clone. I'm just saying that it is possible to make worthwhile and fulfilling content doesn't have to resort to 4+ hr fights that require little strategy and waiting for a NM to spawn every 24 hrs, staring at a placeholder for 10 hrs only for some guy who just showed up to claim it. That is archaic game design that places tedium in the place of fun.