Am I just old fashioned?

[Gunspec]

Sometimes I hear players say "This is the content I want", and I think of a half dozen games I've tried that HAD that content, and it was abandoned and empty. Group quests that no one ever runs. World bosses that sit around bellowing to all the players who don't need the meager rewards. Enemies that give one-time achievements, and are then forgotten. I've been finishing the last few veteran zones in ESO, and no one ever bites when I want to tackle a group event.

Even FFXIV has it's examples already. I've seen Gorgiemra die in North Thanalan less than 5 times, and it's fate clock is normally ticking down completely ignored. Lazy Laurence in East Shroud gets pretty much the same treatment. We all have killed Svara more times than we can count, but how many times have you seen Steropes getting the cold shoulder?

You really want tough content? Odds are you will be filling your nights running raids, killing primals, sacking dungeons. That precious dangerous world you want is going to need to learn Triple Triad to kill the time. Maybe Godbert can help them.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

When I hit an enemy i would like it if they actually "hit back." But Unfortunately most of the community don't actually want monsters to hit them back. So instead we get to fly completely over them because that is somehow fun..... lol!!!!

EDIT: Ultimately I'm just glad that Yoshi is actually getting told that there are people playing the game that would like a bit more difficulty.

[Kaethra]

So do you guys think I've got some valid concerns or am I just old-fashioned and not with times of the modern MMO standard?

You are old fashioned. But with that status comes experience and knowledge. Look at the responses, "forcing people to be social will make them quit." Yeah right.. take a look over at Everquest, as they just opened up a sub only progression server 3 days ago bringing back the 1999 heyday... now try to get on that server.. oh its full, even now.. at 3am EDT so you will have to wait to get in.

These 'newer' MMO players got their start in the tail end of WoW. They don't know any better. Heck even WoW had harsh over world content at the beginning. People didn't quit, the game thrived. The only reason such content was removed was because the game became top heavy. But I don't see why FFXIV couldn't do something similar. Match the difficulty to the population. Make dungeon like mobs in the overworld until the next expansion.

Players won't quit. They'll adapt.

Everyone complains about players who go into the DF and don't know their class, their role, or do derpy stuff. They do this because they don't have any sense of playing with others. To them the rest of the party is just.. NPCs. No talking, no communicating. Just run in, grab the loot and go.

Force them to communicate to get the basic leveling process done and they'll do it. They won't quit. Why won't they quit? Because people like me will call them out on it, and they HATE that. Millenials are motivated more by peer pressure than anything else. They can't stand being inferior to a 'peer'. They have to succeed.

[Lemuria]

the real problem is forcing 90% of the game to require a group. people want to play a game if most of the game is looking for other people to play with it's not much of a game.

From your posts several things are clear. Firstly, that you've never played 1.0. Secondly that ARR is likely your first MMO or at least the first one you spent some actual time in.

Virtually every MMO has difficult overworld content. It's the norm to have enemies which challenge players and areas which are considered difficult to traverse solo. Note that I say 'difficult' not 'impossible'. Final Fantasy XI had very strong overworld content, with even 'Decent Challenge' monsters proving more than a match for the average adventurer. It had numerous notorious monsters which would spawn randomly, adding flavour to the challenges and even mega bosses which would see through Invisibility spells and crush the unwary.

It lasted TEN years.

You want to talk about catering to the higher amount of players? This is how you do it. People get bored when games are reduced to merely grinding the same content over again. A challenging overworld stems this considerably by slowing player progress in a more natural way and encouraging teams where you may otherwise go solo. Teams. That word is not an expletive in an MMO, it's the core function of an online game. The idea is to foster healthy team relationships and even friendships, something which the current Duty and party finders are not doing very well.

You can pretend to speak for the masses, but the popular MMO's already disagree with your statistics. People will play a game that is engaging, difficult or not. If you can engage players and keep them coming back regardless of the difficulty, you've done well. If your players run at the first sign of trouble, then you probably goofed up from the start.

[Kaethra]

-snip-

I think if he tried EQ.. his mind would asplode the moment he got ganked by a random griffon or hill giant

In all seriousness though.. you make a good point. Its not the difficulty of the content, its the social experience. We all have terrible memories from EQ, Early WoW, FFXI, or even FFXIV v1.0... but we don't recall them as being terrible. We carry an aura of nostalgia because we banded together with other good people and overcame the challenge (... or didn't.. but it was a good shot!).

That in itself is worth more than any piece of loot, gear, or relic.

[StrejdaTom]

No you aren't old fashioned, you just ended up in game full of carebears.
There are even MMOs where people can attack you anywhere at any time and people play them, only FFXIV audience is confident enough to say "if you do this, we leave and the game dies" all the time when devs do something they don't like.

Stop being spoiled little brats, world doesn't turn around you and if you leave, it won't ruin the game, fortunately. (not pointing fingers on anyone)

[Amatsuhira]

Personally i would like to take my end-game job and go back to these trouble zones and protect my fellow players from baddies.

[Havenae]

Actually I think more people quit this game because it is hands down the most anti-social MMO I've ever seen. And trust that I've seen quite a few MMOs in 20 years.

For all the people saying adding force group content will cause players to leave, you obviously don't understand the concept of community and how a positive community actually helps a game thrive. It is quite possibly the only thing that kept ffxi alive as long as it has.

This is something this game sorry needs. If this game doesn't somehow become more sociable it's going to become progressively harder for se to pull in and retain players.

[Gilthas]

Players won't quit. They'll adapt.

Yes, but by that reasoning there was no need to make these changes.

It lasted TEN years.

Yes it did, but you have no evidence that what made the game last was all those things you mentioned, when the only thing we really do know is that the game topped off at around 1 million subscribers, had the playerbase numbers take a significant hit after WoW was released and then kept slowly losing subscribers over the years.

You also fail to take into account that many people that played FFXI actually don't want FFXI-2 and are pleased with the differences that FFXIV has.

But to top it all off: your "team" argument is one big lie. Forcing everyone to group for everything doesn't lead to more socialization, it leads to what we had in FFXI: you did all the hard stuff with your linkshell and you did merit parties with random people where the "socialization" didn't go beyond "Hi, where are we camping?" and "Thanks for the party".

I do a hell of a lot more things in the open world of FFXIV than I ever did in FFXI, because FFXI's open-world wasn't challenging, it was one major annoyance that most of the playerbase only subjected themselves to because they needed to go through it to reach a HNM or other endgame content. No one was going "I got agro, this is so exciting!", "Woot, lets go kill it guys", they were going "****, I just caught agro", "Geez, don't you know how to sneak past them?".

Most of the people that quit FFXI, quit it because of the "waiting game" where you spent most of your time waiting for people than actually playing the game.

[Kiara1]

My first mmo was wow vanilla. I died at level 2 against mobs I had to kill to complete a quest. I probably died more than 100 times on my road to level 60 in dungeons when someone aggroed unexpected patrols, or if you accidentally aggroed too many mobs in the wild. And sometimes you'd get ganked and then suddenly the entire server would come to protect you.
I loved it that way, and I agree with OP that this game is waaaaay to easy. I've never died in the wilds against mobs in this game. So quests where you have to kill them feels so pointless cause there's no danger. You just go there and press 1-2-3-4-5 and they are dead and you turn it in.
There's no planning "hm okay I can pull that mob over here so I won't aggro any others", instead you just grab all of them and use your aoe skill until they die.

Yes give me dangerous zones, I want to ask people to travel to a city with me cause I know I won't survive if I go alone.

But like I've said before, the average player in this game is really bad and just pressing 1-2-3 is a challenge to them so most players are probably gonna quit if they make it too hard.