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

[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.