Quote Originally Posted by Zaft View Post
The problem is there's no reward. It's like if WoW attempted to have Mythic raiding with nothing but a title from it. The large majority of people wouldn't bother.

If you're going to have harder content, the reward needs to be superior. Otherwise people will do it once and never touch it again.
There is a risk with multi difficulty tiers with superior rewards with higher difficulties that it leads to Power creep and stat bloat. One of the reasons WOW just did its 'crunch' with numbers was because their raid structure caused that. They also said they will have to do it again in a expansion or two.

There are two factors I see governing this. How many people will actually be doing the harder content vs the time it will take to manage the rewards system and structure the encounters to work well as a challenge in 24 man fights and what other ingame systems they wish to create that would have to be pushed back or laid aside to facilitate it.

For the first one, its important to remember that large group hardcore content has a relatively small playerbase. Wow is the best example and I think the last time I saw details on it, it was something like under 10% of the playerbase even touched the content and only a small portion of that completed it while the content was still relevant. I cant say how much work it would require to create and test the harder version and manage the reward systems but I'd assume including QA testing it would be a decent amount.

For the second issue, you have to consider that SE has many content forms they are looking to develop. They have the new Airship system, are talking about 3 new features in the Gold Saucer and of course, all the usual patch dungeons and such they are working on. Resources in this game are finite. They can't just simply do more. These devs work their asses off as it is. So to include the above system its likely something else will get left out. Whatever it is, the devs would have to be convinced that it is more healthy for their game to include content a small portion of the playerbase are likely to play than add whatever other systems they are looking at.

Their compromise looks to be Alexander Savage. I think they will wait and see how much people play that before they consider adding anything else.