8 man "raids" = final content?

[Caraway]

I am talking of numbers, not content. You CANNOT call your game an MMO when the first M stands for massive and your endgame consists of 8 people. Really just an embarrassment to the MMO genre at that point.

You still have to co-ordinate with many people to even get 8 good players for this content. You also have FATEs which involve massive amounts of people, and above that you also have Hunts which involve just as many people (often a good hundred will take part) and they're a potential challenge enough to leave half of the group engaging them dead if they're not paying attention to the mechanics.

Play the game some more.

[Firepower]

The issue is tuning, how hard do you tune a fight, they chose 8 man fights because it allows a fair amount of balance between difficulty and numbers, if you was to have a 24 man raid on the difficulty scale of coil you have something that would be almost impossible to do for an even bigger majority than there already is the only similarity I could come across would be Dynamis back in the early days of FFXI where you need a highly co-ordinated large group of people otherwise you are going to wipe on almost every pull.

With 4 people you have to tune the fights even harder than 8 man (in relativity to skill/gear per player) to make a challenge, getting 4 completely co-ordinated people is much simpler than 8 and you would have to tune 24 down to a lower scale of 8 to make it fairer.

Take Titan EX for example, almost everything is 1 hit ko and there are reasonably sized areas to stand in to dodge. To scale it down for 4 people but keep difficulty intact the arena would be made even smaller and the areas to dodge would need to be even less which would require even more co-ordination to make sure nobody gets stuck in an area where it is impossible to dodge, anyone even one foot out of place is off the edge and its a wipe, originally in 8 man when it was first released that essentially meant you wasn't likely to complete the DPS checks but it was still possible and nowadays you can steamroll it even without echo and a few people falling off.

Now go the other way make Titan EX 24 man raid, firstly you would likely to be laggier due to the extra people on screen causing many people to get knocked off immediately secondly you would have to have 3x the amount of gaol's, adds and you would also have 3x as many plumes scattered around unless the entire 24 man raid stacks behind him. If you insisted on the difficulty remaining linear losing 3 people out of the 24 would start making it difficult to clear which at this point is highly likely to happen. I don't think I've seen a clear on WoD without losing a handful of people on every boss.

They originally had the Labyrinth of the Ancients tuned to a difficulty not far behind coil but when they tested it they found it too hard to deem worthy of release and then delayed it so they could nerf it to a stage they felt was fair. I think I remember Yoshi mentioning that the majority of the raid was similar to the Atomos battle and if anyone here remembers that around the time it was introduced it was a nightmare.

Would I like to see much more difficult 4 and 24 man raids, yes most definitely. But it poses a very difficult challenge for the dev's to maintain balance on those raids for the less hardcore since once you start making everything as hard as coil then you are likely to lose the majority of the playerbase.

edit: To Tiva below Yoshi always said the 24 man raid would be a step below coil and it was originally intended to be released in the patches before/simultaneously to allow people to gear higher before entering coil in later patches. It was never intended to be anywhere near similar in difficulty hence the delay to its release and nerfing to a stage that was reasonable

From live letter 8, dated 8/8/2013 (Pre open beta)

Q19: Please tell us what kind of bosses and mechanics are waiting for us in the Great Labyrinth of Bahamut and the Crystal Tower. Will primal equipment be necessary?

A19: As there are most likely newcomers watching, let me explain simply to start off. The Great Labyrinth of Bahamut will be the hardest content at the start of ARR for a while. It will contain a lot of things such as what happened after the Seventh Umbral event. While I can’t really say too much about the mechanics, there will bosses that can only be defeated by performing certain actions and that have different phases. Without having a party that can deal the proper amount of damage, you won’t be able to move past certain phases. Additionally, there will be shared damage type of attacks that you will need to have 4 people get hit by, as well as have a certain character act as a channeler for the damage. There will be a lot of different elements present.

The Crystal Tower is content that can be undertaken by a 24 person party. I don’t think that difficulty is really that hard, and we’ve adjusted it so it’s something that can be enjoyed by everyone.

[Tiva]

My personal take on this~
At ARR launch many people thought the main raid content of this game was going to be 24 man. I remember this because I was in a fc at the time that was hardcore (it's become one of the best on the server now) and they were recruiting for like 40 people. I remember being on their forums and they had all the roles of each group set up for what they would combine as for 24 mans. So like tank in Group A would stay tank, the other tank would go DRG. Group B, one tank would go brd, the other would blah blah blah. They had the plan all set up to raid 24 man. They were even pushing loot that way in first coil. Like "oh give that to person A because they will need it when they go dps for 24 man". But at this time it wasn't clear what 24 man difficulty was going to be. When it turned out that 24 man was going to be so easy, many of those players went back to WoW (I know because I'm still friends with them) and now whats left is just a few groups doing 8 mans. I think it was really unfortunately because SE couldn't figure out how to make alliances work, so they had to make CT really easy so it could be pugged. I suspect this is what happened. And then they figured out how to make alliances work later (Though its still not very good, they need a raid group setup like other MMOs where you can just invite up to 40 people. This would also help for hunts and fate grinding.). But by that time it was too late, there had been an eternity (seemingly) of nothing to do when ppl beat t5, and then they find out that 24 mans are going to be a joke, so many players just left. The current state of the game, I don't think they could make 24 mans work. There arent enough raiders now so with 24 mans there'd just be like 2 raid groups on lower pop servers. If they did, they'd have to do server merges or something, but I don't think this will work because they are still limiting character creation, which tells me their servers really can't take that many more people. However, I do think that bumping up to 10 man is feasible, and would be a great idea. 10 man would allow more dps into raids, comp would likely go to 1-2 tanks, 2 healers, 6-7 dps. I think it would be really fun.

[Wintersandman]

When it turned out that 24 man was going to be so easy, many of those players went back to WoW (I know because I'm still friends with them) and now whats left is just a few groups doing 8 mans.

They did bring Molten Core back.

[Tiva]

They did bring Molten Core back.

Not sure what is relevant about that to the discussion? Can you explain?
I'm not playing that game any more, but to my knowledge they brought it back as a temporary event for a while but it wasn't raid content. Just like those holiday events.

[Kiara]

Some great points on this thread.

I think these days, it would indeed be much harder to organize and wrangle, say, 24+ Players to all show up at once.

But if the system was designed to be flexible enough, it wouldn't need to be a fixed amount of Players "only," and could be executed in a variety of ways. It could also engender multiple FC / LS / Different Groups of Friends to help out and do this raid; more "Community."

I'm not saying it was perfect by any means, but even the early years version of Dynamis, there were some days where we didn't have the full 64 Players going, and we still cleared it. On days when some people couldn't make it, we asked in our various Linkshells / Friends List to see if anyone wanted to join in.

Also even when there were the slower days (Sub-40 Players for the 64 Player Raid), there were still Multiple Objectives / Multiple NMs / Multiple Drops / Side Paths and things to accomplish, so we would still enter the Raid and do it.

In the later years, I heard they nerfed it a lot so you could Low Man that raid(?) as well.

And as someone mentioned, of course a larger Raid *couldn't* be as stringent / filled with as many Instant Death mechanics as current 8 Player Raids. But there are other ways to balance and make things challenging.

But yah, these days, it seems like Smaller Raids is the preferred way to go.

[Callinon]

I am talking of numbers, not content. You CANNOT call your game an MMO when the first M stands for massive and your endgame consists of 8 people. Really just an embarrassment to the MMO genre at that point.

Apparently they can.

[Wintersandman]

Not sure what is relevant about that to the discussion? Can you explain?
I'm not playing that game any more, but to my knowledge they brought it back as a temporary event for a while but it wasn't raid content. Just like those holiday events.

It was sarcasm. Stating that your friends abandoned FFXIV to go back to a game that is recycling content.

But even to your suggestion of 10 man raids it would break the current party structure. Since parties are increments of 4. I know what you're gonna say is parties are full at 8 but that is a full party and you don't gain any benefits of having a 7th member over a 4th when it comes to Limit Breaks, etc. You can also form alliances for open world content but no one has bothered. As I stated earlier the overall MMO community is moving away from large raid content. Blizzard is even doing it in WoW. They made all of the raid content equal for people in any size raid. Because like you some people want 24 while a majority of the player base wants to be able to do 10 man and it is the primary reason they abolished the 40 man content when Burning Crusade came out.

I am talking of numbers, not content. You CANNOT call your game an MMO when the first M stands for massive and your endgame consists of 8 people. Really just an embarrassment to the MMO genre at that point.

And you sir. We all know the real end game for FF games is crafting.

That would be on the guild leader. Extras are ALWAYS needed.

Being an extra is never fun. They will find something else to do or go to a group that needs them. People don't want to wait to raid and they will do it outside the core.

[Nekrage]

Being an extra is never fun. They will find something else to do or go to a group that needs them. People don't want to wait to raid and they will do it outside the core.

The rules I put into place to be a part of the core will ensure not everyone has a desire to be in the core. Being outside the core group gives you leeway but also wont give you a dedicated spot until the core has everything they need.

I have led worlds best guilds before, this comes down to a guild leading rule set. How good is your administration?

Games are far too babied nowadays for players like you.

[Lyzern]

I don't have many opinions on this, I honestly don't really care, I don't mind how the current setup is done.

I will say one thing though: Quality > Quantity and it kinda seems like it has been their focus so far. They're focusing on few people knowing the mechanics and their job and being able to, with a lot of cooperation, beat the boss. It looks to me that 1 mistake can wipe most fights (Especially on content up to T9, which is my experience), so, increasing the number of people in such types of fights would either decrease the difficulty, because there can be more mistakes made, or contraditory to it, increase the difficulty 2 times more, because now you need 24 people to follow the mechanics perfectly, instead of just 8.