"Raid difficulty is difficult to balance" Its not at all.

[Texa]

Not to be rude, but, why are those that want to play solo play an MMO? It's like joining Facebook with no intention of interacting with someone else.

I know a few people who just want to play it because they like final fantasy and exploring the setting by themselves.

Everyone has their own definitions of fun.

[JunseiKei]

I know a few people who just want to play it because they like final fantasy and exploring the setting by themselves.

Everyone has their own definitions of fun.

That's fine and all. I, myself, am probably coined as a 'solo player.' The difference is, I don't complain about a basic function that makes up MMOs: interaction with other players.

[Asuras]

I can't wait until this scripted boss fight nonsense goes away and MMOs start making their way towards adaptive AI battles. These petty arguments will go away as developers raise their hands in innocence and say, "Wasn't me!"

[Duelle]

They accomplish this by utilizing all fights already created, and then adding or taking away enemy actions and adjusting HP/STR/INT etc of the enemy as well.

That's sort of the thing, though. Combat in FFXI doesn't require much in the way of dealing with mechanics. The closest we ever got was DRKs on stun duty for Diabolos and RDM's chainspell stunning Dynamis Lord. Everything else you took to the face or bilnked away. At that point things became a race to who can deal the most damage quickly so that the boss dies before you. You can bring up staggers depending on the content, but even those are arbitrary.

Adding more tiers of difficulty to FFXIV would be more difficult given that you'd have to modify things like telegraphs, specific debuffs, throw in brand new mechanics and so on. That's a lot more to take into account compared to what FFXI's design does.

If they did this, not only would the game explode with content, and a massive amount of variety, but players would no longer have to rely on "running two different dungeons in expert roulette" or "spamming PvP" or "spamming the same fight over and over" to get drops and tomes. We could do a large insane amount of varying content, suited from the solo player with his chocobo (or I would love to see trusts being added to the game) all the way up to the max level players having their faces smashed in with content leaps and bounds more difficult than Alexander Savage Floor 3 at release.

Every example you presented for FFXI already had loot pools. Also that was basically a shortcut for the devs since they don't have the money needed to add new fights. Also see my above comment about the factors involved in designing content.

Raid fights at item level 270+ difficulty, granting gear such as

Yoshida addressed this some time ago by presenting the example of a chestpiece that increase the duration of Sentinel. That chestpiece becomes mandatory and then you have issues because of it (so a PLD would be considered trash without it and acceptable with it, much like the bullshit in FFXI with Aegis and Ochain). While I have always been in favor of set bonuses, those are tricky because you'd need to have the set bonus shared between tomestone and raid gear (if only to not drain the creative pool as quickly).

[JunseiKei]

I can't wait until this scripted boss fight nonsense goes away and MMOs start making their way towards adaptive AI battles. These petty arguments will go away as developers raise their hands in innocence and say, "Wasn't me!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i539I46LMOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2_NaVt7Asg

High learning curve and requires good reaction speed to play. To watch a good player playing the game and can execute dodges correctly, probably not very entertaining. Different playing it than watching it.
https://youtu.be/u0HjfBlUQqM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25OPn3gzFz8
The fights are not scripted. Monsters are given a move set. You have to learn their tells and how to dodge them. Kill them and collect their materials to build your weapon and armor. That is the game.

Also, there is not such thing as healers. Mistakes can often get you 1 shot or quick-combo-killed and you're alloted 3 deaths and you're taken out of the fight, forced to start from scratch. Oh yeah, those deaths are shared if you bring [up to 3] others with you.

:> There'd definitely be a sharp decline in players as it's not very friendly unless you actually want to get good and are willing to put the time and effort in. If you're not good, you get killed. Quickly.

EDIT:
Here, Jinouga has always been a pretty badass monster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EqlM--T5pA

[alimdia]

Have you ever played WoW?
You don't know how dividing this is. Between trinkets and set bonuses, a raiding player can easily deal over double the damage of a non-raiding player. Getting into groups mid tier is almost impossible.

Groups for the easier difficulties (ie flex/normal) often had requirements that would get you in heroic or mythic. Nobody wanted to "waste time" on properly geared groups.

Dungeon balancing was out of control because they had to balance it towards the average players. It wasn't a pretty sight to see a raider pulling and killing everything, making people feel worthless as they struggled to keep up.

Sounds like this game. Proper dps doing 2-3x reegular df dps

[BigRed5392]

snip

ya, my g/f stated that because ff11 shared servers with jp so they intermingled, ff11 player base was more organized. Content very much like diadem exists/existed in ff11 for a long time, but due to players being more organized never had too much trouble, all of this with out df, pf, and vote kick.

kinda funny ff11 is more organized then NA ff14 player base. still

different game, engine, community, dev team. Some ideas don't work from other games.

op please take a computing programming class. you guys act like they can just flip a switch and add stuff. yoshida even said this himself... they don't/can't

[loreleidiangelo]

I like set bonuses and the occasional gear piece with random auxiliary effects on them too. I've never understood the whole, "this would never work in FFXIV because groups won't take you if you don't have "Chestpiece of Invincibility+1 with the extra 2 seconds of Sentinel duration on it" - given how relatively faceroll it is to acquire everything but raiding gear, why WOULDN'T people be able to get those things? And I highly doubt anyone outside of world first groups would bench a PLD over those 2 extra seconds of Sentinel anyway, lol. That's not even a GCD's worth of damage reduction, it would just make timing CDs have a more forgiving window.

I think effects like that on gear or materia could work, so long as our methods of gear acquisition remain pretty consistent with what we have now. A system like Diadem's RNG drops would absolutely make it awful, though.

[Misutoraru]

I believe recently Yoshida had made a comment that he wants XIV to be XIV. That people are pretty much expecting XIV to be like XI, but he doesn't want that (was in one of the recent Q&A sessions. We're not EXACT words but close). It's supposed to be a different game. It's one thing for people to want ideas from it, but judging from the forums over the years, it's almost like people want XIV to be an XI clone/modernized XI. If you want to play something like XI, go play XI.

slightly Off topic
I never understand some of the community always use FFXI as a comparison to FFXIV
ok, they are both Final Fantasy Online Game, but that's it
they share some similarity, but FFXIV should be a stand alone FF online, not a clone of any previous game
like the new job thread, a lot of people expect the new job would be clone of FFXI, but this is FFXIV, we have our own system and unique mechanism

back to the topic
making different difficult with variation and basic stat is very very bad design
just like making a boss hit harder and tankier, difficult should be differentiate by mechanics, positioning, not by how much HP the boss increase or how harder it hit, or how stronger it take a hit
and for the gear progression, I have to disagree after suffering from WOW
highend raiding should give top gear but similar level gear could also be obtain with a longer grinding route
thus, doing high end raiding give you the fastest way to obtain the top gear, also could do some glamour thing like special mount to attack more people to do high end stuff
to put it simple, you do high end stuff, you enjoy the glory early, you grind, you take the longer path
and the cap, I dont like the cap, but completely remove it?nah?
the cap should have a higher capacity but not completely remove it

[Aniond]

What I said still stands. The idea of putting Groupers and Solo'rs together to complete the MSQ was a bad idea. And then they act surprised that people aren't getting along.

I made a suggestion the other day to actually make groupable versions of MSQ duties, you know.. the ones that force you to solo. Imagine the disgruntlement of raiders who have to solo/group 1-50 (in 2.0) and 51-60 (in 3.0) just to get to their content.

I enjoy all three levels of play. I like my daily beast tribe, doing my dungeons and raids. Honestly I think crossing intro all three makes a good game.

Once you box people into a stereotype you limit their gaming experience. The one thing that wow did wrong is ilevel difference in content. If you wanted to try higher level content you were held back.