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

[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.