Savage Clear rate being lower the Devs expected, good or a bad thing?

[Velhart]

The best for the game would be to have 3 difficulties, but as they said SE isn't willing to increase their team size. Statistically the best option is to keep Normal and create a Hard mode while removing Savage as that caters to less than 5% of the player base. The vocal minority will cause a shitstorm on here, but after a bit everything would return to normal.

A 3rd option is having both Normal and Hard come out in 3.2, and then Savage in 3.25 or 3.3.

95% of the game is catered to casuals. Why can't raids just be hard and then an even harder mode than that? You are basically saying there should be no hardcore content.

[zosia]

95% of the game is catered to casuals. Why can't raids just be hard and then an even harder mode than that? You are basically saying there should be no hardcore content.

Just a rough breakdown:

Savage Mode: savage, in it's current iteration, caters to less than 1% of the player base.
Hard Mode: Coil appealed to about 10% of the player base.
Easy Mode: alex normal, half of the active players have cleared it.

Obviously, it's an ideal situation to have all three, but if I am forced to pick two, I will go for Hard and Easy modes since it covers the largest % of the player base.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

95% of the game is catered to casuals. Why can't raids just be hard and then an even harder mode than that? You are basically saying there should be no hardcore content.

The game is 95% faceroll. If they made it start off faceroll then get slowly harder as you play progressively it wouldn't be such an issue. However when you have almost an entire game that is casual then throw ONE part that is SUPER HARDCORE! =O You understand what kind of issues that may bring?

NA Players are all about consistancy.

Those people weren't the target audience for Savage.

Everquest II got through this by making content and raids where the first bosses started off easier then got progressively harder as you get through the zone. This allowed people to gear up a bit on the easier parts of the zone and still see it all and get the story. It also meant that they only needed to design one zone instead of 10.

If they were truley aiming for the 5%, then .. well the development was kind of a waste of time. The 5% already cleared it and are bored now because there is so little to do.

Shard of Hate is a good example of this. It was still a hard zone and groups still wiped on the first few bosses because of how unique their mechanics were. Enemies inside the zone also respawned so if you didn't kill a boss fast enough you had to deal with adds.

The last boss in Shard of Hate, only a few guilds could kill him. However, the items he dropped were astounding.

[Saccharin]

Everquest II got through this by making content and raids where the first bosses started off easier then got progressively harder as you get through the zone. This allowed people to gear up a bit on the easier parts of the zone and still see it all and get the story. It also meant that they only needed to design one zone instead of 10.

That was a long time ago and most the MMO audience just don't want to do that now. back then you'd probably find that most of those players were what people would call hardcore back then, able to spend a significant amount of time in the game.

MMO player base in general is going to be alot older sure to past games like Everquest. Younger gamers are more likely to be attracted to thing like MOBAs and shooters.

The older players are likely to have less time to spend in an MMO with full time jobs, family etc. 8 man raids and casual content is likely going to be more suited to the majority of them.