A12 savage World first 3 days after patch

[Velhart]

Really all this complaining is going to do is become detrimental to the game itself. People cried for harder raids, and they got them, which in turn nearly destroyed the raiding community. Population of servers dwindled while the bigger ones became over crowded. You call this the GIT GUD days, I call it the days this game nearly fell apart for the second time. Sure people can spend a month clearing this content. However, this gives them the opportunity to do more with the game. Instead of being obsessed with trying to clear a raid and clearing it 5 months into the raid cycle going at it for 3 to 5 days a week 2 hours a day. That's unhealthy. Nobody lives your life. Everyone has their own schedules, their own goals, and their own playstyles. And really they should. Every bit of this game is not intended for specific people, it's intended for everyone even based on their schedules. So don't bring the community down with you because you're unhappy that's unfair.

When you make an MMO, you definitely need to balance and make a compromise between casual, midcore, and hardcore play. Each bring something to the table that is required to make a healthy MMO community. It would be the same situation if everything was for midcore/hardcore and casual players were left in the dust. It isn't a "git gud" mentality necessarily, it is that when the scales are heavily out of balance, the development team needs to go back and find out why it is.

Alexander originally described by the development team before release was that Normal was suppose to be Coil level with an echo buff and Savage was going to be harder than that. What we got instead was a ridiculously easy story mode and a brutally hard Savage mode. It broke the balance and midcore players were not motivated to play.

If I want to be realistic on the developer's intent with Alexander: Creator, it is likely they are trying to desperately draw the midcore players back in. Then have them continue raiding 4.0 onward. Also on top of that, the team believes complex lv.60 rotations are what had people quit raiding. I'm...not entirely sure of that, but lets go off that assumption. So their intent is to right now lower the difficulty so midcore can clear it, then when 4.0 comes, they will ease the rotation of jobs at lv.70(?) and in turn, increase the level of difficulty again. So I look at Alexander: Creator as the bait and attempt to work midcore into harder content in 4.0.

Despite SE's claims that adding three modes is too difficult with their resources, I would still attempt to see if a Normal > Hard > Savage set up can be a thing for the expansion. It will not completely resolve their issues in the casual, midcore, hardcore balance, but it is a step in the right direction.

[Kaurie]

Eh even if they re-allocated staff to make 3 difficulty levels do we really want the same content in 3 different flavors?

I'd rather have two tiers and the content be totally separate things, but then the casual "but muh story" people would complain.

That depends on the other content that we are getting instead of 3 levels. If it is Diadem, LoV, PotD or Aquariums, I'll take the added difficulty level.

[SumoSamurai]

When you make an MMO, you definitely need to balance and make a compromise between casual, midcore, and hardcore play. Each bring something to the table that is required to make a healthy MMO community. It would be the same situation if everything was for midcore/hardcore and casual players were left in the dust. It isn't a "git gud" mentality necessarily, it is that when the scales are heavily out of balance, the development team needs to go back and find out why it is.

Alexander originally described by the development team before release was that Normal was suppose to be Coil level with an echo buff and Savage was going to be harder than that. What we got instead was a ridiculously easy story mode and a brutally hard Savage mode. It broke the balance and midcore players were not motivated to play.

If I want to be realistic on the developer's intent with Alexander: Creator, it is likely they are trying to desperately draw the midcore players back in. Then have them continue raiding 4.0 onward. Also on top of that, the team believes complex lv.60 rotations are what had people quit raiding. I'm...not entirely sure of that, but lets go off that assumption. So their intent is to right now lower the difficulty so midcore can clear it, then when 4.0 comes, they will ease the rotation of jobs at lv.70(?) and in turn, increase the level of difficulty again. So I look at Alexander: Creator as the bait and attempt to work midcore into harder content in 4.0.

Despite SE's claims that adding three modes is too difficult with their resources, I would still attempt to see if a Normal > Hard > Savage set up can be a thing for the expansion. It will not completely resolve their issues in the casual, midcore, hardcore balance, but it is a step in the right direction.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that SE wants to continue breaking away from the common MMO norm and make an MMO that's not generic. And based on my experiences with Job rotations, most are not even difficult. Level 60 rotations to begin with, they're mostly add ons to the 50 rotation. Now I said most, some were literally given full mechanics. I'm not going to point it out. However, I can't totally see this as a reason why Gordias destroyed most of the raiding community. Now you are correct with the Normal being too easy and Savage being too difficult. There wasn't really a step in between that got raiders ready for the raid.

That being said, there's still the issue that most people do not want to spend 80% of the patch cycle struggling to get these raids down. People get burned out and then they will quit. Mostly to wait for the next update for more content. And I do agree with making three tiers however making the savage tier another means to progress in gear and for pure vanity. Which also leads to a possible theory we may get an extreme savage strictly for vanity in 3.5. I understand players wanted to have prototype gear and savage gear different between each other not just dyable. However, looking at the Alexandrian gear, it is not dyable and if they were to add true savage fights they could make it possible to dye them. Again for pure vanity, plus other rewards, maybe even gear like how SCoB was set up. It maybe a very weak hypothesis to my theory, it's a theory nonetheless. If they were to make that possible though. Make Normal and Hard available at the start then add Savage in the catch up patch. It would keep raiders busy.

Like I said just a theory.

[Velhart]

snip

Some jobs may feel like extensions, but other jobs went through a pretty big change. Comparing between lv.50 and 60 rotations, 60 is definitely more tunnel vision than 50. I'm with you that I don't completely believe that rotations are the core issue of Gordias/Midas difficulty. DPS checks were ridiculous in Gordias even with knowledge of your rotation and Midas had a ridiculous amount of mechanics to deal with. A8S in particular.

I don't think a harder mode of Alex is coming, but color me surprised if it did. It would help create a little more longevity before the inevitable drought between 3.5 and the expansion. For the Alexander gear, I really think they should keep the aesthetics in Savage. Give generic looking Alex themed gear in Normal mode. As silly as it sounds, cool looking gear is a possible motivation tool for some people. Some like looking higher gear level. Then again, most Alex gear look pretty generic itself and hard to pick from a crowd. Now FCoB gear, despite it being over the top, definitely stood out and looked like raid gear. The development team shouldn't be afraid to have gear sets look silly and over the top.

[Dement]

Granted I am not a game developer so it may be more work than I imagine but if Yoshi said that they created fights at Savage difficulty and tune them down for Coil why not just do the same for Alex, tuning it down to old coil difficulty and call it "Hard" which drops the Prototype gear. This now creates two of the tiers. To create the third tier: leave the Hard fight the same but adjust the damage output numbers for every mechanic way down to face roll levels so that nothing will easily kill a group even if a mechanic is failed and call it Normal or Story mode.

There, now you have three tiers: the casual group can clear the Story mode cause damage and failed mechanics are easily healed through failure and they see the fight. Midcore groups get a training mode (something also frequently asked for through Coil) by being able to train on the whole fight in Normal mode to make sure that they fully understand the mechanics before attempting Hard mode clears. Savage exists to appease the hardcore crowd as well as give midcore groups something to strive for once they've cleared Hard mode. Everyone gets something, everyone is happy.

How much extra development time would this really take? It's the same way they said they did Coil with the added step of only adjusting damage modifiers between Story and Hard. I can't imagine changing some numbers around would be incredibly time intensive.

[KaitlanKela]

When you make an MMO, you definitely need to balance and make a compromise between casual, midcore, and hardcore play.

I agree with this, however, I think the game is balanced, or very close to being balanced. Casual/Midcore/Hardcore need not get EQUAL content representation, that's an inefficient use of development time. They need representation relative to the number of people in each group.

Look at the clear rates for Gordias Savage pre-nerf. Something like 2.5% iirc? That's the hardcore group. They need less attention compared to the 97.5% or else SE is wasting time and money, and they're not going to do that as it's not a sustainable business model.

This is what I would like to see: SCoB. Casual content is MSQ and 24-man stuff, dungeons roulettes, relic; Mid-core content is Extreme primals -> SCoB (maybe tune normal mode down a little from when SCoB ACTUALLY was); H/C -> Savage. They tuned NM Alex faceroll because they wanted people to enjoy the story, but IMO it should be accessible to casuals if they commit and work at it, there's no need to make it stupid easy. Raids should straight-up be midcore level content, like coils. And let Savage be tuned like Gordias in that case. The midcore people have their level of difficulty, and the HC people have theirs.

[Kaurie]

I agree with this, however, I think the game is balanced, or very close to being balanced. Casual/Midcore/Hardcore need not get EQUAL content representation, that's an inefficient use of development time. They need representation relative to the number of people in each group.

That is interesting, because i feel midcore is severely undervalued and overpopulated in this game.

[KaitlanKela]

That is interesting, because i feel midcore is severely undervalued and overpopulated in this game.

Well, I mean this patch. IMO Creator (savage) is tuned for the Midcore crowd. That's precisely why I think this arrangement is so healthy, it's giving that undervalued, heavily-populated mid-core crowd the attention they desperately needed.

[Kaurie]

Well, I mean this patch. IMO Creator (savage) is tuned for the Midcore crowd. That's precisely why I think this arrangement is so healthy, it's giving that undervalued, heavily-populated mid-core crowd the attention they desperately needed.

Yes, but with that in mind - that is 6 fights per 6 months for the midcore crowd. That's pretty barebone considering how much content is designed for casual players.

[KaitlanKela]

Yes, but with that in mind - that is 6 fights per 6 months for the midcore crowd. That's pretty barebone considering how much content is designed for casual players.

Yes and no. I'd like to see some statistics on this but I'm not sure there are any. HOWEVER, in my anecdotal experience there are FAR MORE casual players than even mid-core players.

Now, everyone wants straight-up MORE content all around, me too, but considering the very limited development team FFXIV has, IMO they'd be doing the right thing from a business perspective giving their time to a ratio of about 2/3 casual content and aesthetics and QoL, about 1/4 to Midcore and 1/12 to the hardest of the hardcore.

Again, I think the IDEAL arrangement would be to have the NM raid (along with ExPrimals) be tuned Midcore and the Savage raid be tuned HC. I think Savage should still be approachable to the Midcore crowd as well, perhaps after they gear up significantly more than the H/C crowd does for the fights. Therefore, the M/C group can also enjoy the Savage content as well (and presumably for longer), if they so choose. That leaves "casuals" with MSQ, dungeons, HM trials, crafting, gathering, beastribes, relic, PotD, Gold Saucer, etc. And Casuals can also approach the NM raid and Ex primals, if they take more time and outgear the fight a little bit. Savage should, however, be completely inaccessible to a "casual"