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

[Alipoprocks]

All I know is its always about more new content, I took a break from playing from September till now. Its almost seems as if I'm not item level 200, Duty Finder became like Final Fantasy XI where "Chirp" "Chirp" (crickets) is what I picture while waiting hours to begin anything that's before Heavensward. Any explanation to this, how the newest content is hyped only?

If you try to do content before 3.0, it will be difficult without friends because the huge jump in ilvl kills content and desire to play it.

[Mastanight]

If you try to do content before 3.0, it will be difficult without friends because the huge jump in ilvl kills content and desire to play it.

Ilvl should not matter because of the sync feature, final coil is a ghost town and I'm sure most haven't finished all of it. After the first months rush this is usually what occurs.

[Nadirah]

It simply means they failed to properly balance the thing to match their expectations (or vice versa).

Balancing this kind of content thinking "we need X% of the player base to be able to do this" is very difficult to do, especially while testing internally. They probably only have one or two teams of test-players able to beat the bloody thing, so translating their feedback into the actual FFXIV playerbase is tricky.

And that is why most games have a PTR.

[Nadirah]

It's incredibly silly. Currently you have Raid Finder (story mode essentially), Normal, heroic, and Mythic. They even nerfed normal. In legion (the next expansion) they should remove normal mode.

15 man Mythic. Imo.

On topic, Savage is too brutal and normal is entirely too easy.

We don't *need* three difficulties.

[Nadirah]

This is pretty much the main problem. Add to that the fact that WoW has functional cross servers systems and it's easy to see why mythic raiding is infinitely more popular than savage. The bottom half of each datacenter have no raid scene to speak of. 2-3 groups isnt a scene. The top half has a couple servers where you have some chance of finding a competent group that can actually clear savage, but its gonna take months to actually get in.

When the raids are relevant, you cannot cross realm Mythic.

[hagare]

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.

3 difficulty is best.
Story mode for those who don't raid. drops are the same as they are now.
Hard mode(coil difficulty) for the bulk of raiders. drops will be what Alex savage have now except the mount.
Savage mode for the truly hardcore. Gives out titles and the mount, drops the same gear as hard mode like what Coil savage did. Basically for the bragging rights and challenge.

[Dhex]

3 difficulty is best.
Story mode for those who don't raid. drops are the same as they are now.
Hard mode(coil difficulty) for the bulk of raiders. drops will be what Alex savage have now except the mount.
Savage mode for the truly hardcore. Gives out titles and the mount, drops the same gear as hard mode like what Coil savage did. Basically for the bragging rights and challenge.

Yeah the original call on the forums was for a "Story Mode" Coil. SCoB/FCoB were good for mid-core raiding and it gave hard-core something to sell - casual players wanted a Story mode. Savage SCoB filled the "I want a challenge!" for anyone hard-core enough to go after it.


Flash forward to Alexander - they took the "SCoB/FCoB" level of content and ditched it - added a Story-"Normal" Mode and stuck highest rewards behind the Savage modes. So I think they missed their mark, don't have enough staff, and aren't sure what kind of content to implement.

[Colorful]

3 difficulty is best.
Story mode for those who don't raid. drops are the same as they are now.
Hard mode(coil difficulty) for the bulk of raiders. drops will be what Alex savage have now except the mount.
Savage mode for the truly hardcore. Gives out titles and the mount, drops the same gear as hard mode like what Coil savage did. Basically for the bragging rights and challenge.

I'm well aware 3 modes is best, but as they said, they don't have the manpower for such content. Now, the most likely option (and best) would be to take out Savage. The last reported numbers was something like 2000 players that have cleared A4S, around 50% of those being JP players, the last reported numbers for Alexander Normal was something like 300,000? Take that number and double it and that's the active amount of players, meaning less than 0.5% of the playerbase has cleared Savage after almost 5 months. No one can argue that keeping Savage at the loss of a Hard Mode or Normal would be best for the game without speaking about their sole interest, and not the game's overall health. But regardless, I think I was right on the mark with my suggestion, as confirmed by a recently translated interview.

Yoshida: Since normal Alexander helps you get into Savage, let's talk about both. First, for normal, the number of players clearing is far more than we expected, which is really good.

It could just be me, but it sounds like Normal is here to stay.

Yoshida: The next update for Alexander will be in patch 3.2. Right now, we're working on the savage version and trying to decide whether to make it satisfying for the top players or whether to adjust it for a wider range of people. Given the cost of development, I'd lean towards a lower difficulty savage, but then some players may come back and say it isn't difficult enough...

As for Savage, they're not so sure, but it's definitely likely they'll tune down the difficulty as that would please the majority.

Source if interested.

[hagare]

I'm well aware 3 modes is best, but as they said, they don't have the manpower for such content. Now, the most likely option (and best) would be to take out Savage. The last reported numbers was something like 2000 players that have cleared A4S, around 50% of those being JP players, the last reported numbers for Alexander Normal was something like 300,000? Take that number and double it and that's the active amount of players, meaning less than 0.5% of the playerbase has cleared Savage after almost 5 months. No one can argue that keeping Savage at the loss of a Hard Mode or Normal would be best for the game without speaking about their sole interest, and not the game's overall health. But regardless, I think I was right on the mark with my suggestion, as confirmed by a recently translated interview.



It could just be me, but it sounds like Normal is here to stay.



As for Savage, they're not so sure, but it's definitely likely they'll tune down the difficulty as that would please the majority.

Source if interested.

true. If they can't give 3 modes, the best option they have is removing savage and give a Coil difficulty raid instead as hard mode.
They can always add a savage mode later in the minstrel if they ever wanted too.
Though that still won't get rid of the complaints that there is nothing "new" in Hard mode because everything is already in NM
except if they make NM and HM have the same minimum iLvL requirement to clear.

[Malevicton]

I'm well aware 3 modes is best, but as they said, they don't have the manpower for such content. Now, the most likely option (and best) would be to take out Savage. The last reported numbers was something like 2000 players that have cleared A4S, around 50% of those being JP players, the last reported numbers for Alexander Normal was something like 300,000? Take that number and double it and that's the active amount of players, meaning less than 0.5% of the playerbase has cleared Savage after almost 5 months. No one can argue that keeping Savage at the loss of a Hard Mode or Normal would be best for the game without speaking about their sole interest, and not the game's overall health. But regardless, I think I was right on the mark with my suggestion, as confirmed by a recently translated interview.

That's not really fair. Normal was designed to be facerolled by every skill level on week 1. Savage was designed to be a long term goal. That'd be like saying more people played Hello Kitty Island Adventure than Dark Souls because there were more completions of HKIA. Maybe it would be true, maybe not, but that statistic wouldn't mean jack. Plus they aren't separate groups, everyone doing savage also did normal.

Clear rates just generally aren't a good way to judge the hard content, particularly if you're only looking at a4. Plenty of people are still stuck on a3, looking at only a4 clears exclusively to compare to normal is extremely one sided. Attempt rates would be better if they existed, but since they don't a1 clear numbers would be a lot better. A4 clears aren't indicative of how many people are interested in savage.

I assume you were referencing the census slide? http://imgur.com/a/XplYZ Unless you were going on some count from fflogs. The slides date all the way back to August and over 30k players had already cleared a1s. normal mode had about 200k clears.