Quote Originally Posted by Kamatsu View Post
Here's the thing a lot of people who push for harder content for everyone, or push's for EX/Savage mechanics be put into normal/casual content, seem to miss
I don't know who's pushing for that, but it's not me.

most people who play this game (and most other MMO's for that matter) are casual players who don't have the time or inclination to 'git gud' or 'learn to be better'. These people have 30-90 minutes a day/2-days/week to play and just want to log in and play without having to stress, worry about hard-to-play mechanics or such.
This is going to sound rude. Very, very rude. But it must be said:

IF YOU CAN ONLY PLAY FOR 3 HOURS A WEEK WHY IN THE NAME OF HOLY HELL ARE YOU PAYING A SUBSCRIPTION FOR A GODDAMN MMO?! You barely have time to watch a movie!

It's not the community's fault these people are trying to shove their fish into our peanut butter. Square should absolutely not be trying to cater to people like that, and if they do then the game will die. What Square should be doing - some of the things I've posted already - would also help poor, misguided people though. Gradual increases in difficulty to test that you're reasonably competent and can handle further trials is sort of the basic principal good of game design. Otherwise, you get to Final Steps of Faith and everyone just falls over dead during the loading screen.

These are people that will leave a game if their casual content becomes too hard for them to casually beat, they won't go to forums, reddit, guides, etc to try and learn how to play better, they won't seek FC's / LS's / etc to try and improve... they will just up and quit the game.
So your stance is that they can only play 3 hours a week if they're lucky, they don't have any desire to learn about the game whatsoever (even if Square put in some tutorials, gameplay or text-based), they don't have any desire to make friends, annnnd they just want to push the "win" button to either see the story or something. Is that correct?

I'm not sure those people exist. But if they do, **** those people and good riddance. Go watch a movie and be happy instead.

something about Guild Wars 2
This is incompetent game design. The market reacted accordingly. This isn't even remotely close to what I've suggested SE needs to do. And are already sort of doing badly, e.g. Final Steps of Faith and Royal Menagerie.

Am I saying all content in FFXIV should be made casual? NO! There does still need to be harder-than-normal content for players who like and want to play content.
And what about the middle? Are Square to just keep MSQ stuff so braindead that 2~3 players can carry the other 5~6, so that Royal Menagerie is exactly as hard as Cape Westwind, while also keeping the level of EX Primals and Savage content on a (mostly) upward trend?

Sounds like a bad idea to me. Especially if someone in the "casual" pool finds that they want to try getting into non-story stuff or, alternatively, someone in the "not casual" pool finds that their schedule doesn't currently work for getting to do EX Primals or Savage for a while and... literally everything else they can play while heavily sedated.

And they might not be playing to a min/max'ers standards, but they are still playing the game... they are playing to have fun, relaxe from their work/family/etc obligations and don't care about trying to maximize their classes potential.. as long as they can press buttons, do decently well, kill/heal/tank things and not die too much...then they are happy, havbing fun and will continue to play. Moment that stops, they'll move onto any number of other games that offer them easy casual fun.
I'm going to again assert that MMOs, themepark or otherwise, by their very nature are not friendly to the type of person you're trying to describe. And the people that I'm describing - that the endgame community constantly rails against - are definitely not pushing their buttons. When standard minimum competence is sitting around or a little above 3,000 and someone is barely managing 1,500 - ostensibly lower than auto-attacking and mass spamming a single offensive GCD button - there is something very, very wrong on a fundamental level.

Very few people actually expect/demand everyone to be perfect min-maxed tryhards. I don't think most would even be upset if people were doing rotations that weren't anywhere near optimal (provided they made some sort of logical sense and not Thunder III -> Thunder III -> Blizzard III -> Thunder III -> Fire III -> repeat) and were just actively engaged in the game. But a lot aren't, because the game doesn't expect them to and doesn't give them feedback that it's not okay because, well crud, these other people can just carry me.

I don't even understand how some of these people managed to clear their class quests and single-player instance MSQ battles.

One thing that maybe could be done with the older content - such as ARR & HW dungeons & trials - is look at the level and gear synch settings. Because right now even with the synch'ing, these are all pretty much cakewalks due to overgearing... and it's usually only mechanics which kill people or threaten wipes. Maybe SE could look at tinkering with that so players stats and such are synched at a slightly lower level than they currently are - this would encourage better playing, while still not making the fights so hard as to discourage casual players from doing the content. They would likely need to keep tinkering with the stats & such till an 'optimum' level is found... but it's something I'd like to see them do
This is essentially what I was advocating for.

Except even at minimally acceptable gear levels (per the dungeon/trial's ilvl restrictions) I still don't need a healer, or sometimes even DPS, to kill bosses like Chimera, Coincounter, Griffin and maybe a dozen or so others.