Take it easy on the Nerfing :/

[Niwashi]

To be honest, I believe that skilled players SHOULD have access to juicy rewards locked behind difficult content. Rewards that the more casual players either have to a) get better to attain or b) forget about attaining. I agree with you on that point.
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To put a juicy reward behind a challenge barrier is not disallowing a paying player to have access to "all" the content in the game. It is right there for them. It merely requires them to socialize and get better to attain it.

I would agree with this if the hardest content in the game were solo content. But like most (likely all) MMOs, the hardest content requires not just a skilled player, but a whole team of skilled players who are familiar with each other's gameplay.

Many players have real lives that don't allow for their gaming to follow the sort of regular predictable schedule that would make it possible to join a static group. No matter how skilled they are at the game, their job, and the specific content they're trying to complete, they can still only complete content that can be done by one skilled player and 7 other random unknown people that joined their PUG. The only content that's available to all paying players is content that's PUGable.

That leaves the only options as:

1) Make the hardest content in the game easy enough to do in a pick up group. Of course, this is going to anger any statics who want challenging group content.

2) Exclude most of their paying customers from any access to the content they're paying for.

3) Make sure all the rewards are available through easier content, and that the most challenging content simply provides somewhat faster access to them, along with the pride and enjoyment that comes from the challenge itself.

Since #1 and #2 both have some pretty major drawbacks, #3 is really the most viable pattern.

[Ibi]

What is key, in my opinion, is that the power-as-reward method is problematic and should be abolished entirely from progression content.

Removing the power-as-reward method would remove the motivation for at least some subset of what's already a small portion of the population.

Raid instances generally get an unbalanced proportion of development time (compared to the number of people participating in it), which is why we're getting two difficulties for Alexander. SE want more people participating in that kind of content, not fewer.

Of course, you can justify having extremely niche content (challenge, with no power rewards) with things like Savage SCoB, since that means you don't have to develop a lot of new assets, but then people just complain about it being "recycled content" instead.

That leaves the only options as:

1) Make the hardest content in the game easy enough to do in a pick up group. Of course, this is going to anger any statics who want challenging group content.

2) Exclude most of their paying customers from any access to the content they're paying for.

3) Make sure all the rewards are available through easier content, and that the most challenging content simply provides somewhat faster access to them, along with the pride and enjoyment that comes from the challenge itself.

I wouldn't say they're the only options. Just to come up with some completely random things totally off the top of my head:

4) Introduce the content at a high level of difficulty, directed at organized groups, and start incrementally decreasing the difficulty after it's been available for some amount of time, or when new content is added.

5) Provide comparable (rather than identical) rewards that can be obtained through easier content.

I feel the population of this game that enjoys challenging content and doesn't complain does need to start being more vocal. There needs to be people letting we know that there is people who enjoy the tougher content and oppose all this I want it now with no effort attitude that is being expressed on the forums every day.

I suspect that the population of the game that enjoys tougher, challenging content is already proportionally more vocal than those that either don't enjoy it or don't care.

It's just that the second group is several times the size of the first, so even with a smaller portion being vocal, they still have more total voices.