Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
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.