FFXIV: The State Of Raiding

[Bourne_Endeavor]

The two examples that you used are a bit curious. Only one of them was really a well tried attempt.

Lord of Verminion is really not an answer for horizontal progression. At best, it's a side game in a main game. At worse, it's nearly pointless and a waste of time. That was not what the regular playerbase was asking for at all and I think this was stemmed from an April Fools joke that a certain minor vocal group said "That would be so cool!" and took it for gospel.

Diadem's major problem was that it became a complete grindfest against mobs the whole time after you were done the quests. They completely butchered the entire zone by doing it as a glorified FATE, which people were more than vocal about FATEs being pure shyte. That's again a case of them not listening to the playerbase asking for meaningful content. Grinding my face against dinosaurs for 70 minutes is absolutely stupid.

They had something with the Diadem. They completely mucked it up. It was supposed to be about exploration; heck, it has all the makings to be interesting like that!

It turned out to be ridiculous. Pointless. And incredibly gimmicky because the gear dropped could have been BiS depending on how the rolls were made on the item. It was such a mess that I still shake my head thinking about that place.

And I would be very curious to see the stats pointing out the percentile of raiding in both JPN and NA. I will still wager, that if you put both playerbases together, that it's STILL around 5%.

And yet one could argue 5% of people liked Lord of Verminion. I know plenty who did. Your stance is to remove content that only a small portion of the population likes, but you could cherry pick most aspects of FFXIV in separated doses and those percentages wouldn't be high. How many people enjoy crafting, especially hardcore crafting? Probably within the 5-15% range-- equivalent to raiders. Should we remove it too because that clearly isn't catering to the majority interest?

Most MMOs are devised of small subgroups of players whose interests fall under certain areas. They won't like everything-- possibly not even half the overall content. But what they do like keeps them playing. If you start trying to only focus on one or two groups, you'll inevitably chase away far more players in the long run. Consider the implications no more raids would have. That impacts crafter since why bother buying expensive gear you'll never need? Dungeons may feel more repetitive because it's all we have from a gameplay perspective now. You can't simply look at raiding and say, "well, only x% actually do this. So we can cut it out with no harm done." I suspect you'd be very surprised how even fights like the extreme primals impact the game.

I didn't realize HW primals are more well received than ARR. Personally, I found almost the complete opposite - where my least favourite fights are Ravana and Sephirot EX and my favourites are MogEX and LeviEX.

I can't speak for everyone of course, but of the people I know both personally and among the Twitch channels I hang out in, Ravana, Thordan and Sephirot EX are all very popular.