FFXIV and Risk vs. Reward

[Krylo]

Any job can take out any single open world enemy in 5 or less hits. Some can just oneshot burst before their GCD resets. The caveat of course is hunts, but I'm not talking about hunts. I'm talking about the flora and fauna of Eorzea - the stuff that's out there and aggressive to players.

Why is this a problem?

"But Cina, how annoying would it be if I had to actually fight stuff that aggro'd me while I was running through Sea of Clouds!?" Okay, sure. You're telling me that while you're doing beast tribe quests or crafting or whatever, you'd rather just run away or burst it dead and move on. Does this make the world feel real to you? Does it make you feel like you're challenged at all, or that the world is a place that might harbor some danger? What if some enemies aggro'd to smell, sound, use of magic, or low HP? What if some enemies only came out at night or got stronger when the weather was rain or heat wave?

What if this stuff actually mattered? What if you could still burst that poor Paissa in 3 moves but a rather testy Bull Dahlmel could oneshot YOU if it was around? I do not argue that every enemy have 10x the HP they have and 10x the ATK power. No, I argue that the range of strength be bracketed and that enemies spawn that are easy for players to defeat, and some that are difficult, and some very difficult. This adds more flavor, more variety, and most importantly, more risk.

I was wondering how long it would take this to come back after mobs were 'hard' at the start of HW. I'd predicted it ages ago, and you could probably find threads here where I pointed out that ARR mobs at 50 in 45+50 ilevel gear were 'difficult' too.

Here's the thing, though, the only way to have open world mobs that are difficult for people in 200/210 gear is to have open world mobs that make large areas of the game inaccessible to people fresh at 60 in 150 gear. Which, in turn, would make getting up to 180 and then 210 almost impossible as that you need to travel all over the place to open up dungeons and do hunts and blah blah blah.

The open world is never going to be dangerous in a vertical progression game for more than 1 or 2 patch cycles because of gear. There's no way to really change this that's not going to be an incredible burden on new players/at the beginning of the expansion.

People whined about this through most of ARR's patch cycle, but I'd have enjoyed seeing any of them throw on some pre-darklight gear and solo their way through the sylphlands doing beast tribe quests. Would it have been possible? Sure would have. Would it have required a lot more thought, careful pulling, etc. than people generally do, and fulfilled most of their tick boxes for 'challenging over world content'? Yes.

If you've read this far, you're going to tell me "Cina, casual players are the bread and butter of the sub base, you can't piss them off to please the hardcore players." If you're talking about short term goals, you're absolutely correct in that casual players are going to be your revenue stream. But if you're talking long term, over the length of the game, it's the hardcore players that keep coming back and that don't get bored and leave after they've done their first relic, or whatever it happens to be. Casual players, by their nature of being casually interested, will come and go. But the hardcore player subs and subs and subs. Unless they're no longer happy with the way the game is developing, and I worry that that is beginning to be the case here.

And this is, categorically, bullshit. It might have been true in the 90s but this isn't the 90s anymore, and a large portion of players who are called 'casual' aren't. They're playing for hours on end, grinding for ages to get the relic weapon, to upgrade their gear with tomes, etc. They aren't doing raids not because 'they only have a casual interest in the game' but because they are thirty years old. They have jobs. They have children. They have friends and social obligations. And they can not set aside four hours or more a night every week to learn the hardcore raids with a static. Or they can, but doing so would use up such a large percentage of their free time that they don't want to and would rather do anything else in that 4 hours.

We're no longer in the age when the average player is 15-25 and is in highschool or college and has no job. We're in the age when the average gamer is in their thirties. This is why games these days are shooting for easy exit points and the ability to feel like you've accomplished something in every 30-45 minutes of playing--because if it takes an hour or two to accomplish something in a game, and you've only got 45 minutes of free time after you've gotten off work, brought the kids home, had dinner, spent an evening with the family, and finally put the children to bed before you need to get up for work again the next day. . . guess what? You aren't going to be playing that game.

The people that hardcore 'raiders' like to deride as casual are actually the lifeblood. They're the ones who stick around. It's the Raiders who take a break between raid tiers. Look around these very forums, or reddit. Go back a couple months to when A4S was either being cleared or being given up on, and count the number of people complaining that their raid groups were falling apart because everyone was taking a break waiting for the new raids. Go back even further to after every turn of bahamut and do the same.

'Hardcore' raiders play seasonally when the game has new hardcore raiding content, and tend to cycle between games or play offline games in between those times. The 'casual' players, as a majority, don't--because their enjoyment is tied to crafting or fishing or gathering (all three of which would become incredibly frustrating for a portion of the player base that doesn't even LIKE combat if combat became much harder while they were trying to travel between nodes and get their gather on). Or because they're working on the current casual grind to upgrade gear. Or because they actually enjoy the easy 24 mans and dungeons and are willing to run it repeatedly. Or because they like running the marketboard. Or because they're part of a casual FC that spends its time helping newbies and organizing events around dungeons that are no longer going. Or because they're playing LoV/TT/whatever other minigames.

Or, in short, because they consume more than one piece of content that the game has to offer.