FFXIV and Risk vs. Reward

[DenebPunkin]

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.

Anyway, the TL;DR is that FFXIV needs to provide risk and reward in the open world, needs to gate max-level content behind ability checks, and needs to do this in order to remain a healthy community, regardless of what players currently think about casual vs. hardcore. It's not really about that, it's about creating a difficulty curve game-wide that increases both risk and reward so that reaching the 'endgame' community content puts players in the strongest position to forge powerful positive memories of overcoming challenges and draws them to come back to the game again and again. And this demands that the endgame content not be a faceroll.

Say what? Last time I checked.. the Hardcores gorge on new content within the week, spend the next week complaining about a lack of content... cap something for the next 2 weeks... and then dont resub for the next few months till the next patch.

Also, endgame content was never face roll easy. On release, the content was quite difficult even for the truely avid hardcores, Ultima HM, Titan HM/EX, Ramuh EX, Coil 1, Coil 2, Coil 3 and currently AS3 which has most of the hardcore raiders still stumped and the most recent with Thor EX.