Why is Yoshi P turning his back on the playerbase that loves this game the most?

[Connor]

Dungeons in any game dating way back to the SNES have never been difficult or challenging, little more than glorified loot piñatas to beat on. Expecting a dungeon to be difficult in this day and age is giggleworthy. On that note, 'fun' is a very subjective term. What you consider 'fun' someone else won't, and what someone else finds 'fun' you won't, so there's not much point in discussing it.

I'm not sure if this in reference to my posts, but as I mentioned I don't think content such as expert dungeons should be 'difficult'. What I personally feel is that the most recent dungeons are easy but not fun. The enemies pose little threat to most parties, there isn't much interaction with enemies or mechanics within them and many of the mechanics during boss fights can be ignored with little repercussions.

By no means do I want the dungeons to have things like instant-death if you stand if an AoE, but I feel like they've been toned down a little too much this cycle. And naturally this is a subjective opinion, but the entire point of a debate is to consider a variety of opinions and open up a dialogue about these differing opinions. If we follow the logic that there's no point in discussing things we're going to disagree with others on, the entirety of the forums would be empty because as far as I'm aware the forums are supposed to be used by developers to consider what people want from the game, and describing what we feel is 'fun' and what is isn't is one of the ways they can do this. Ultimately what's most important is that we all consider and respect each other's opinions and beliefs, even if they conflict with our own

[loreleidiangelo]

Dungeons in any game dating way back to the SNES have never been difficult or challenging, little more than glorified loot piñatas to beat on. Expecting a dungeon to be difficult in this day and age is giggleworthy. On that note, 'fun' is a very subjective term. What you consider 'fun' someone else won't, and what someone else finds 'fun' you won't, so there's not much point in discussing it.

I won't disagree with your second part, but I think there are tons of games with fairly difficult, challenging dungeons that still don't edge virtually everyone but those on the bleeding edge of progression out of content. Wildstar, mythics/mythic+ in WoW, TERA, Blade and Soul...actually, now that I think on it, pretty much every other game I've played moderately seriously EXCEPT this one.

I don't mind if your argument is that dungeons in XIV are a crucial vehicle towards making sure that people who aren't very skilled can remain relevant...fair enough. But to imply that other games just let you cruise control through content quite like XIV does is an erroneous assumption, IMO.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

snip

I'll take your word for it. I've played few mmos due to hating how rng and grind filled they are, as well as how lackluster the story has to be due to the medium. However, I've never I've heard of any game that had dungeons as the epitome of the end game. Usually those are raids, not dungeons, but again, I'll take your word for it, seeing as I'm speaking from the perspective of a predominantly offline gamer.

[Auteur]

I won't disagree with your second part, but I think there are tons of games with fairly difficult, challenging dungeons that still don't edge virtually everyone but those on the bleeding edge of progression out of content. Wildstar, mythics/mythic+ in WoW, TERA, Blade and Soul...actually, now that I think on it, pretty much every other game I've played moderately seriously EXCEPT this one.

I don't mind if your argument is that dungeons in XIV are a crucial vehicle towards making sure that people who aren't very skilled can remain relevant...fair enough. But to imply that other games just let you cruise control through content quite like XIV does is an erroneous assumption, IMO.

The key distinguishing characteristics of FF14 from those games are (1) SE doesn't want to compete with the F2P games for the hardcore gamers because SE can't monetize them, and (2) there's no real PvP in FF14 to speak of. Why is this important? Because the hardcore gamers/PvPers have a much much higher difficulty tolerance (in large part because they have much more time they can devote to a game) than the audience SE is trying to capture, i.e. "casual" players. On point (1), you monetize hardcore players by a cash shop with material benefits and those hardcore players will spend a lot of real money for in-game advantages in those F2P games. Here, SE on a sub model simply can't extract the same revenue from that otherwise very small percentage of gamers.

On point (2), WoW can afford to institute that higher difficulty in part because they have developed a well-defined PvP structure that's essentially separate from the PvE element. Why is this important? Because people who don't want to raid/not good at PvE but still want to be competitive can turn out their angst in PvP. Hence, because WoW can cater to so many people, they can afford to institute hardcore elements without significant risk of alienating a large portion of their game pop. Here, looking at the composition of FF14's player base, SE simply doesn't have that same mix or enough people with "high pain tolerance," hence the huge risk of terminally damaging the bottom line if they keep trying to appeal to hardcore players.

Bluntly, SE appears to have made the business decision to keep appealing to "casual" people over any other segment. Why? Do the math: getting 5 new people to subscribe for 1 month because they are attracted by this game's low barrier to entry, relatively lower difficulty, etc. is worth a lot more than having 1 hardcore player subscribe for 4 months (5 X 15 > 4 X 15). And SE and Yosh-P, rightly IMO, believe that in a game without any meaningful PvP it is practically impossible to capture a hardcore player's attention for a sufficient amount of time even if you did try to appeal to them because they just burn through any content faster than a regular person (I think someone complaining about new raid difficulty mentioned they played at least 5 hours a day).

For example, certain players in Archeage regularly spent at least $10,000.00 in the cash shop. Assuming a subscription rate in FF14 of $15 a month (higher than the actual), that's 667 sub months to match one hardcore whale in Archeage. You can start seeing why SE is forced to cast a wide a net as possible to match that revenue.

[Elkanah]

The difficulty of the "Expert Roulette" dungeons should increase with each patch. It only makes sense. By the time a player can unlock them, they've already run a lot of lvl 60 content and dungeons, and know their rotations on at least their main job. Giving us two face roll dungeons that almost anyone can clear on their first run on day one feels not just insulting, but like a rip off.

I just want more adds to increase or make things harder like AK did lol.

Remember old AK? That demon wall kept moving til the end and you needed to dps the living out of the bees and the boss to pass or be spotted in poison and die. That was fun lol. And challenging. But it wasn't difficult if you knew what you were doing, but it was still fun! lol

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Demon Wall was only difficult because at the time, everyone was barely at the minimum ilvl.

[ADVSS]

I just want more adds to increase or make things harder like AK did lol.

Remember old AK? That demon wall kept moving til the end and you needed to dps the living out of the bees and the boss to pass or be spotted in poison and die. That was fun lol. And challenging. But it wasn't difficult if you knew what you were doing, but it was still fun! lol

lb left bee! that was a nightmare to tank because of all the movement/repel/aoe stuns from the bees, yeah about a 50 50 clear rate with df pugs i remember lol

[Chiramu]

lb left bee! that was a nightmare to tank because of all the movement/repel/aoe stuns from the bees, yeah about a 50 50 clear rate with df pugs i remember lol

That was the first time I found healing learning difficult, with shitty gear cause you're working on the level 50 set. I remember being so proud of having Darklight.

[ADVSS]

That was the first time I found healing learning difficult, with shitty gear cause you're working on the level 50 set. I remember being so proud of having Darklight.

aw yeah cause we were missing i80 till ct came in the odd patch, gear was very akward back then lol. and poor healers using medica 2 right before the bees spawned lmao

[Elkanah]

Demon Wall was only difficult because at the time, everyone was barely at the minimum ilvl.

There was also a lot of not so bright individuals even after that time period of getting geared up.