Quote Originally Posted by Velhart View Post
I wouldn't argue it, but again, does not mean you should not be upholding yourself to these standards. If the charts show that people are not getting any incentive to build themselves into harder content, then they need to go to the drawing board and find a way to. Of course you do not want to force people to do this content, but at the same time you want to give them reasons to. More like encouraging if anything.
How much of the population that isn't currently interested in organized raiding would participate if a reasonable incentive even existed? Presumably it's some subset of the people running the CT series in 2.x and Alex Normal in 3.0, but it's hard (if not impossible) to say how large that group is.

More importantly, how much time and effort should SE be trying to put into pulling that group into this one specific activity, rather than developing more content that could appeal to a larger segment of the population?

Quote Originally Posted by Velhart View Post
If we had Easy > Normal > Hard in FFXIV, while I don't agree with the structure, it would at least give that bridge. However FFXIV is simply Easy > Hard and this is the main problem that developers need to look at.
It's part difficulty, part scale. The easier the transition is from what people are currently doing to whatever the next step up is, the more likely they are to make that transition.

Other people have said it already, but the small number of fights at any difficulty level sort of backed SE into a corner. If they want to last fight to be very difficult, they have to either make the steps between the fights very big or set the starting point too high.