I might of figured something out today. Game too easy for leveling duties?

[Ama_Hamada]

Again, its not new players that are the problem. Its lazy players. Sometimes they are new too, which can make things, interesting.

You got a point, maybe I should of worded it as "Make things harder so people do not have room to be lazy" Being new is no excuse to ignore directions for the same mechanic 3 times in a row (first time after the fact, second during the fact, and 3rd time right when it appeared)

[Khalithar]

Well Ama here's my thought on it, make of it what you will. I do think that the (early) leveling duties are a bit too easy and that the difficulty curve of the dungeons as you level is fairly inconsistent, even a fairly average player can progress through all of the main dungeons pretty easily right until you reach the Vigil/Darkhold/Vale set of dungeons where the difficulty noticeably ramps up. I actually thought the difficulty curve leveling from 51-60 was fairly consistent until you reach library which is significantly easier than the dungeon before it: Vault. Not to mention the addition of the EX dungeons and their inconsistent difficulty, back in early HW we had Neverreap and Fractal, Neverreap was noticeably easier than Fractal for example.

Going forward I believe there should be a consistent incremental increase in the dungeon difficulties to maintain a steady difficulty difficulty curve rather than an inconsistent one. But as far as the difficulty of the content goes you reminded me of a question I asked a long time in a few other games and I'll pose that question to you in relation to the difficulty of the content and I'm serious, I don't mean this in a sarcastic way:

Should there be an expectation of victory when you run any type of content?

I really started dwelling on this question when Wildstar first came out, a game that marketed itself on it's high difficulty and I believe, normal pug groups couldn't even get past the first boss in the very first dungeon because it required a lot of careful coordination with hard hitting difficult trash pulls, it was taking coordinated premades on voice chat to even get past the initial bosses in non-level capped dungeons.

Do we go in expecting to be able to clear everything and know that even if we have a bad group we can usually scrape by? Or do we go in understanding that if we have a bad group then it means you have to give up, re-queue and try again to hope for a better group? Which way should the devs design the game?

[kattzkitti]

The problem is that the level sync system is complete garbage. While it knocks your level down to whatever the given dungeon is sync'd to, the item level sync gives you the equivalent of the highest in every stat a piece of gear at that level can be at. This means that if your gear is high enough item level to be sync'd down, you're put into a position of vastly overgearing the dungeon. There's only a couple dungeons where this isn't the case, but those dungeons also suffer a bunch of other oddities as well so I'm pretty sure it's just the dungeons themselves being broken.

[Dualgunner]

Would more guildhests help this issue at all, or increased reason/reward to use the ones we have help?

[Ama_Hamada]

Would more guildhests help this issue at all, or increased reason/reward to use the ones we have help?

Yes that is a good idea, they need to relook at those, put some 50-60 ones in and have the rewards enough so people do them. Also they need to be hard enoughwhere you have to follow the instructions or wipe, there is a few you can completely ignore them.

Well Ama here's my thought on it, make of it what you will. I do think that the (early) leveling duties are a bit too easy and that the difficulty curve of the dungeons as you level is fairly inconsistent, even a fairly average player can progress through all of the main dungeons pretty easily right until you reach the Vigil/Darkhold/Vale set of dungeons where the difficulty noticeably ramps up. I actually thought the difficulty curve leveling from 51-60 was fairly consistent until you reach library which is significantly easier than the dungeon before it: Vault. Not to mention the addition of the EX dungeons and their inconsistent difficulty, back in early HW we had Neverreap and Fractal, Neverreap was noticeably easier than Fractal for example.

Going forward I believe there should be a consistent incremental increase in the dungeon difficulties to maintain a steady difficulty difficulty curve rather than an inconsistent one. But as far as the difficulty of the content goes you reminded me of a question I asked a long time in a few other games and I'll pose that question to you in relation to the difficulty of the content and I'm serious, I don't mean this in a sarcastic way:

Should there be an expectation of victory when you run any type of content?

I really started dwelling on this question when Wildstar first came out, a game that marketed itself on it's high difficulty and I believe, normal pug groups couldn't even get past the first boss in the very first dungeon because it required a lot of careful coordination with hard hitting difficult trash pulls, it was taking coordinated premades on voice chat to even get past the initial bosses in non-level capped dungeons.

Do we go in expecting to be able to clear everything and know that even if we have a bad group we can usually scrape by? Or do we go in understanding that if we have a bad group then it means you have to give up, re-queue and try again to hope for a better group? Which way should the devs design the game?

"farming" it should be "expected" like i need spend 5 hours + collecting lights, I should have easy outs for that.

Progression, no it should not be guaranteed, like at level DFs, MSQ, current DF raid (our dun atm) back when the gear was tied to being weekly, so if we are going by this, now it would just fall under farming, but when first out, no victory shouldn't be guaranteed.

[Istaru]

Do we go in expecting to be able to clear everything and know that even if we have a bad group we can usually scrape by? Or do we go in understanding that if we have a bad group then it means you have to give up, re-queue and try again to hope for a better group? Which way should the devs design the game?

My 2 cents.

Harder content please. Yes, there will be growing pains. But I think it is worth it.

We have so many threads here about our character's progression and growth. But what about *OUR* progression and growth? What about how we learn new things and find new applications of them? I don't see anywhere near as much interest displayed for that.

Lack of content difficulty is part of the problem.

People are lazy because the game does not punish them for being lazy. There is no reason to exert yourself for most people as the benefit is quite small.

Why spend time at a training dummy perfecting your rotation? Why bother to look at the different pieces of gear available to you and figuring out which pieces when combined make the best set?

People get more utility out of their time by watching a movie on Netflix while putting in a minimal amount of effort in this game.

Another problem is the reward system.

If you clear a duty in 15 minutes or it takes 40 minutes, your rewards for that content are the same. Bring back the bonus chest system. Give people a reason to pay attention, care about their performance and they may.

Another part is the rest of us.

We accept poor performance in DF all the time and for the most part, we just suck it up and keep going since doing something about it is problematic.

You may need to wait to replace the person. You may have to disband and start over, and with a 20 minute queue, people don't want to do that. Lastly, if you try to get someone to perform better, even if you are nice in what you tell them, you run the risk of them attacking you.

[Belhi]

There are players who don't want to be particularly challenged when playing. They want to veg out and play. Its like when watching TV. Some TV shows you watch just to kick back. They don't have to all be educational Documentaries or highly through provoking dramas.

There player base is varied with a board range of interests and desires. I often here people complain about dumb questions at Q&As but people forget that to someone that question was important enough to their enjoyment of the game to ask. Satisfying that player is just as important to SE as satisfying any other. This is why just pushing up the difficulty on everything is a bad idea. Trying to force people who are casual and want an easy play through to play harder is just as likely to drive them from the game which in turn lowers SE's revenue from the game and effects the resources the devs have to make more content. This is why they try and present a variety of content for players.

[Uhm]

In your case if it was a premade I'm not surprised that they where that way honestly, the worst people (personality wise) I encounter are often the ones that have "friends" with them, and in most cases being friends means looking at nothing they do critically and going along with everything just because.
I was partied with two other people once who kicked the tank because of aggro and pulling before him issues, now in some cases it is on the tank but in that case I don't think it was, so I clicked no, didn't matter though since they obviously clicked yes. Turns out that tank was the same tank we had in the previous run too, wich went down without problems, who gave the dps his commendation. And I guess justice was served as we had to abandon the dungeon, since they kicked the tank and no new tank came.

I think the skip soar problem is more an issue with the design of the boss and the fact that ilvl is most of the time higher than the minimum required to kill the boss.
If you can skip something and make it more efficient, then people will want that in a farm party. Same as "why have two healers if you can do it with one".
I neither like nor dislike that mentality, I can understand it though and it makes sense.

I hope things won't get easier in the future, if there is such a gab between skill/lazy level in players (and I have been in Dun Scaith runs where we wiped at the pure "dps the portal or die" mechanic) I think there should be more levels of difficulty.
Give players the choise to stop at their comfort/skill level but don't dumb it down just because some don't care.
Make normal hard and extreme dungeons, make the extreme first and take away HP and some mechanics for the other two. If someone can't beat the harder ones then that's fine, there are still the easier ones.

I often see people describe something as toxic but honestly the definitions vary, so I'm not sure what could stop it. I just think, based on the kind of 'toxic' in this case, that every group of players should have something. Give lazy people appropriate content give casual appropriate content and same with hardcore.
Don't need to make a new dungeon, just make some adjustments to difficulty, I'm sure now that the cash shop flourishes there are some recources.
Although people will still try to do things that aren't quite on their level (yet?).
How do you tell a DRG that, just because Ring of Thorns sparcles after Heavy Thrust you shouldn't use it on single target and to watch a guide on the boss, without being the one in the wrong? Most of the time you can't if you dislike confrontation and hysteric people, but then again it might not even matter because you won't beat the Ex Primal anyway or see the last phase even though that's what the party was for.
And you just go on trying anyway because you think "At least I'm training...".

[NocturniaUzuki]

Well, although I think that most new players here have previous experience with MMOs, or at least previous gaming experience, the early difficulty progression definitely seems to be designed for very inexperienced players, even from a more basic gaming perspective. Which is good, in many ways, even if it is painfully boring for people who already know what to do.

I think sometimes we take for granted the abilities of new players because so many of them are not really new to MMOs or even games. Heck, I tried to get my Mom to play Portal once. It was a total disaster. She couldn't even control the player character because the concept of using WASD to move in conjunction with the camera was beyond her grasp. That was a bit of an eye-opener for me where I realized that, frankly, most gamers already exhibit a distinct skill in just being able to manage these control systems. It's not something that everyone in the world can actually do. Online gaming communities often have these hierarchies where people say you're "trash tier" or "total garbage healer/tank/DPS" when you can't heal the tank through a large pull, etc. But even the so-called "garbage" players are already very good if you take all of the non-gamers in the world into account.

Anyways, I have to go to an appointment, so I'm out of time, but the point is, even though it's an easy progression, in a lot of ways it's still not THAT easy. It's easy enough that you don't need to be an average-tier gamer to get through it. You can be a "bad" gamer and still enjoy quite a bit of FF14.

[skyfox]

I used to have a lot of issue in Behemoth. But I am no longer having this issue after moving to a JP server. not only they listen but most of the time they read the strat while waiting for the queues. Even in 24 man raid just came out, i rarely see people just rage quit. I think it's the environment not the game tbh.