Quote Originally Posted by Ibi View Post
Challenge means something completely different between the two games though.

FFXI's challenge was primarily in how inconvenient things were, rather than the actual battle content being difficult. That's not to say that all the fights were completely devoid of difficulty, but you could reasonably expect to get through even the toughest mission battles in less than a dozen attempts. The vast, vast majority of them wouldn't take more than two or three attempts.

In FFXIV, it's not unusual to put in over a dozen attempts on a given fight in a single sitting, and not be at all surprised if you don't advance your group's overall progress by even a single phase.
When you compare the hardest content of both games, XIV wins in my opinion. The raid content is tuned to the max, but is contained within a small bubble concealed away from the sunshine and rainbows of the rest of the game, that is the difference. I don't want them to make the sunshine and rainbows disappear, I want the hardcore bubble to be bigger, with some midcore content scattered about.

I also think that XI's difficult is bad design though, so that might skew my view.