Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[Velhart]

In my opinion removing the loot restrictions only in the savage content would be one of the biggest motivations for the players to do it - so removing the loot restrictions in the easy content would be counterproductive.

How to gear all your jobs to ilvl240 in one week. Even people beating the first or second are getting a massive boost. Because once a group beats it, they will spam it till it is all dried up. Making the content completely irrelevant to a lot of raiders till the next tier. Restrictions are not there for the hell of it.

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In all fairness, people come and go in MMO's, it always happens, even in WoW. Especially during the end of a patch. FFXIV does not have issue reeling people back in. There is always a significant amount of people per patch, especially an expansion. The issue is how to hold people's interest enough. Right now we have casual content that people clear very fast and get bored of very quick, on the other end we have raids that due to it's poor structure that turn people off. Story mode just gives you your content with little effort and destroys the story aspect of motivation. Story was a heavy driving force in the Coils series and did motivate people to go in rather if they waited for echo buff or not.

SE doesn't get their own philosophies. Content should be challenging, but accessible at the same time. Casual content should be more challenging, but easy to understand. Midcore content should have EX trial fights and a Normal Mode raid with a FCoB level of difficulty. Hardcore should get a legit Savage that takes a good while to beat even at their skill level. This helps out on all levels of play ultimately. It helps the economy, keeps players in the game, and creates longevity on content two patches over. SE only knows how to look at numbers and that is why each patch lately has bit them in the ass. They listen to awful ideas on these forums and incorporate them poorly.

I am not a game developer, nor do I consider myself very knowledgeable or have talent, but even I can see the actions they take to balance things out are amateurish at best.