The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[Velhart]

The purpose of the easy mode is for people who were unable to complete Coil because of the difficulty and missed the story. It wasn't for people who could complete coil. Those people are intended to follow the progression and not even bother with the story mode (the whole reason they are releasing the next set at the same time).

Easy mode only accomplishes limiting hardcore raiders to midcore raiding with how they have the development team set up. Easy mode is only relevant for a few weeks till it gets forgotten. It would of been so much better if they made Normal Mode on Final Coil level and then echo buff/tune it down over time when it is outdated for people who wanted the story and fight at an easier level. This would make the content stretch out two patches easily and eventually give less experienced players access. Seriously, raiding is the only potential hardcore content in the game, the only content in this game. Why must we bring it down to people who only want the story? If we had Easy/Normal/Hard I wouldn't care as much because it doesn't affect the intended audience, but SE seems intent on catering to those who feel entitled to a no effort story mode. It doesn't make sense when you are balancing the three different types of audience. The hardcore just got pushed to the side, and that audience definitely sees it, and a lot have left due to it.

SE's mindset should be how to work someone into more challenging content, not how they can make it easier for them. Its backwards thinking.

[Moomba33]

I'm quite happy with Alexander Normal myself. I never got past t9 during ARR and I still need to find a group to do final coil with now.
I'm glad that this time I'll be able to see the story play out when it's new instead of waiting for nerfs.

I don't mind if SE decides to lock the best equipment behind challenging content in the future but I hope they continue to keep all story elements accessible.

[Alahra]

SE's mindset should be how to work someone into more challenging content, not how they can make it easier for them. Its backwards thinking.

How would you suggest for them to do that? They did various things in ARR as I talked about a bit earlier, but my impression is that there are still a lot of players for whom that approach didn't necessarily work, who didn't raid regardless of the various stepping stone paths, "catch up patches" and so on. What other methods do you think they should try to work players into challenging content who have not historically been interested in it?

[RiceisNice]

How would you suggest for them to do that? They did various things in ARR as I talked about a bit earlier, but my impression is that there are still a lot of players for whom that approach didn't necessarily work, who didn't raid regardless of the various stepping stone paths, "catch up patches" and so on. What other methods do you think they should try to work players into challenging content who have not historically been interested in it?

If the option is that we can only have 2 tiers of difficulty , "EX" difficulty and savage difficulty with be an ideal curve. In regards to EX difficulty, it can always be toned down to suit the players who are not interested in raiding (which is our current normal mode). Savage is meant to be hard, so there's really no point in nerfing that. If they do nerf it (or undertuned it to be EX), you're going to omit the hardcore players from a content they'd enjoy (which would be the ball busting one, although that's up for debate of those sort of people enjoy the current savage)

[Alahra]

If the option is that we can only have 2 tiers of difficulty , "EX" difficulty and savage difficulty with be an ideal curve.

That goes back to the ARR model, essentially, no? Or by EX do you mean a bit easier than old Coil?

I guess my confusion is this: we got Normal mode because enough people who weren't interested in doing Coil still wanted to see the story from Coil. Velhart's "broken record" is that they should have tried to get these people to do Coil (somehow), rather than making an easy mode of the raid content. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that (I think Normal is a cesspool), but what could have been done to get those players interested in raiding that hasn't already been tried in ARR (because those methods obviously didn't work well enough because the demand for Normal was high enough to warrant the creation of that content)?

I suspect there is significant overlap between the groups of players that the Zodiac/Anima questlines were made for (those not wanting to do challenging content) and those players who wanted to see the Coil story but didn't want to do the content at the difficulty necessary to see it. So, I'm not necessary sure that even lowering the difficulty to a certain degree (to say, be more in line with EX primals) would really encourage those players to get into harder content, as challenging content doesn't really appeal to them to begin with.

Something else has to happen in between, I think, to motivate those players. Velhart seems to think it's possible to do that and thinks it would be a better approach than creating the Normal mode that we got. So my question is, what is that? I don't really have any ideas in this regard, personally.

[RiceisNice]

That goes back to the ARR model, essentially, no? Or by EX do you mean a bit easier than old Coil?

I guess my confusion is this: we got Normal mode because enough people who weren't interested in doing Coil still wanted to see the story from Coil. Velhart's "broken record" is that they should have tried to get these people to do Coil (somehow), rather than making an easy mode of the raid content. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that (I think Normal is a cesspool), but what could have been done to get those players interested in raiding that hasn't already been tried in ARR (because those methods obviously didn't work well enough because the demand for Normal was high enough to warrant the creation of that content)?

Yes, ARR's model + Savage mode for each tier. People would eventually do FCoB without a static anyway because it was open to DF, much like our current normal mode alexander. With this setup, you'd be able to satisfy the three groups eventually, while our current model doesn't set up for that.

[Alahra]

Yes, ARR's model + Savage mode for each tier. People would eventually do FCoB without a static anyway because it was open to DF, much like our current normal mode alexander.

But there are a lot of people who didn't do Coil, even when it was in DF. That's where the desire for a Story mode came from in the first place (which resulted in Normal). That's what I'm trying to figure out: are those players individuals who can be persuaded to take on the harder content in some way? Even after Echo buffs, huge mechanical changes to things like T7, and months for strategies to become known, there were still players requesting a Story mode for Coil.

Should that mode thereby be scrapped now that it's already been implemented once, to go back to that model without some way to make it possible for the players for which Normal was designed to see the story? If, how do you set things up so that they will want to tackle that content in the more difficult raid so that they can see the story?

[RiceisNice]

But there are a lot of people who didn't do Coil, even when it was in DF. That's where the desire for a Story mode came from in the first place (which resulted in Normal). That's what I'm trying to figure out: are those players individuals who can be persuaded to take on the harder content in some way? Even after Echo buffs, huge mechanical changes to things like T7, and months for strategies to become known, there were still players requesting a Story mode for Coil.

Coil after the nerfs and echo is essentially the story mode difficulty comparable to what we have now with Alexander Normal. Honestly at that point if you hadn't cleared coil, you weren't interested in it to begin with. I mean it's a comparable perspective of the players who complain about FCoB being too easy without having stepped in there.

[Ibi]

Something else has to happen in between, I think, to motivate those players. Velhart seems to think it's possible to do that and thinks it would be a better approach than creating the Normal mode that we got. So my question is, what is that? I don't really have any ideas in this regard, personally.

I don't know that the motivation was necessarily lacking for Coil. The pool of people who wanted to see the story and never even tried Coil on the basis that they thought it would be too challenging is probably very small when compared to the pool of people who tried, couldn't get through it for whatever reason, and gave up.

If I were to guess at what's needed for those people, it's probably smaller steps up in difficulty from where they are in terms of their capabilities to where it's desirable (from SE's standpoint) for them to be. People aren't going to stop when they come across a step that's too big for them to currently overcome, they're going to stop when they come across a step that feels like it's too big for them to ever overcome.

The problem with that is that you need either a) vastly more content than we're ever going to get from this development team, in order to cover the full range of player capabilities while keeping the steps close together, or b) to either set the bottom end of the scale relatively high or the top end of the scale relative low, so that the steps can be close together even though there aren't that many of them.

As long as we're still getting 4 boss raids (even with two levels of difficulty), SE are always going to be stuck with option (b) as their best case scenario.

[Alahra]

I don't know that the motivation was necessarily lacking for Coil. The pool of people who wanted to see the story and never even tried Coil on the basis that they thought it would be too challenging is probably very small when compared to the pool of people who tried, couldn't get through it for whatever reason, and gave up.

Whatever the reasons were, SE warranted there was enough demand for Normal mode that it's what we got.

The problem with that is that you need either a) vastly more content than we're ever going to get from this development team, in order to cover the full range of player capabilities while keeping the steps close together, or b) to either set the bottom end of the scale relatively high or the top end of the scale relative low, so that the steps can be close together even though there aren't that many of them.

And that's ultimately my concern—I can't see a way for the developers to really create the necessary content to really bridge the gap, so I was curious if others had some other ideas that I hadn't been able to think of that perhaps aren't necessarily tied to content.

There were already plenty of "stepping stones" in ARR, especially in 2.0/2.1, and those steps weren't gradual enough for the segment of the playerbase in question here. So we'd need a lot more content (I think the closest we came was in 2.0/2.1, which had 6 end-game Primal battles and a 24-man raid—a wealth of content we've not seen in the game since then and aren't likely to see again, sadly).

I think the Normal/Savage split has ultimately been pretty harmful to the game as a whole, but it's probably here to stay (at least until 4.0 maybe), so it seems to me to be best to address feedback in such a way as to work within the framework we're likely stuck with.