How Do You Feel When Old Content Is Made Easier?

[Nyxn607]

As a person that works a minimum of 12 hours each day I work and busy being a family man on my days off, I like when they nerf content for the sole reason I don't have to spend the 1 or if I am lucky 2 days I get a week to play learning/farming 1 fight.

On the other hand, as an long time MMO gamer I wish they would keep the content at the same level for longer than they currently do. I would love to be able to accomplish some fights when they are relevant for the sense of accomplishment. Sadly I just don't have the time I used to.

So I am torn with what they should actually do.

[Wyvernheart]

Should me a video of a solo job taken on a lv 6o extreme primal without any issue then you got somethinf. Until then, lower level primals are more or less for solo and duos fun. Took a week for me and another samurai to get our strategy down perfect to beast sophi. Anything done to these bottles are just not needed.

[RiyahArp]

Riyah - you're making a positive claim here, saying that less people enjoy more difficult content. Back that up with evidence or for the love of god open your mind to the idea you might be wrong.

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage. On primal Pug PFs for all savage tend to cap out at 4-5 instances per fight, with the majority of them being farm parties. This is per data center; seeing all of 20 pfs for savafge per data center is not a sign of a healthy game. The amount of people doing savage or ex learning parties drops tremendously after the first two weeks the content is live, often without a single learning party in pf at a random time. SE released minimum ilvl for people who wanted to do old content somewhat close to the original ilvl it was released at; it was barely used, even when they gave increased drop rates to the crafted coil gear they introduced. I had a linkshell mate who was obsessed with using min ilvl to do all the old content, it would take him weeks to find the people to finish one fight. The hard 4 man content in POTD is also barely used, the big way you can tell is that crafted coil gear of the two higher tiers drops there like candy, but never hits the auction board.

The playerbase can and will leave instances they find are too hard in significant amounts. Trials of Faith, Pharos, Shinryu, launch 24 mans, Tsuku, etc. They sometimes leave preemptively, or will leave after the first wipe. There's plenty of evidence to show that people aren't particularly keen on content actually being hard, in practice. Heck, even reddit now is mostly about fan art and fluff pieces, and less about git gud or complaining the game is too easy.

I don't see why content has to be considered less important solely because of its age. If I go out and buy a ten-year-old single-player game and clear it, is the experience somehow lesser than an equally challenging game that was released last week?

You don't need to convince seven other people to play that game with you. People generally do the roullettes because they aren't hard, and you get a bonus to help out. We have had discussions about mentor roullette and coming into synced ex primal trials which show the difficulties of hard older content staying relatively hard; many mentors dislike it because you can spend the lockout just wiping, removing the reward for them being there.

They end up nerfing through echo and sync so players aren't just facing that. Other MMOs generally don;t even have that; they just make old content trivial and you get your overleveled buddy to facetank an entire instance for you

[Deceptus]

Some people's "requires a pulse" is others "stomp your face in." remember, the endgame crowd thinks byakko ex is incredibly easy.

I am by no stretch of the words an end game person (I've never touched a single savage other than coil unsynced at 70) and I was able to go into BEX and clear it easily at min ilvl. Byakko is basically do the mechanics (which are one at a time, and easy to recognize), don't die, and you'll clear.

I come at this from a healer's perspective. My whole job is to fix people's screw ups and there is a large majority of the player base who screw up. A lot.

[KisaiTenshi]

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage. On primal Pug PFs for all savage tend to cap out at 4-5 instances per fight, with the majority of them being farm parties.

On Primal, there are no newbies that aren't alts or rmt bots it seems. It's so incredibly rare to actually get newbies. When I do roulettes, I almost never get anyone from my server, it's always Lamia and Exodus. (Note those are preferred worlds.) It feels like nobody on Excalibur does anything but the hardest content, and I don't blame em.

But that also means that "oh just start a PF" means you are in for a wait worse than death. s/

I was playing on an alt as scholar, and I left the fairy behind after first boss fight in an ARR dungeon, and I was still able to keep up with a tank that was pulling too much and dps sprouts. I specifically created a Scholar because I didn't want to waste an hour waiting in a DPS queue, and my main character is WHM anyway. Anyway, this was with all grey gear for the previous dungeon. With blue gear this would have been even easier. There really does need to be a ilevel sync on all old content to retain some level of challenge. It doesn't need to be 2.0 launch level of challenge, but the current level of difficulty literately in a lot of content is tuned to a level where the healer doesn't even need to be present.

Encountering actual new players, let alone a group of them, is just not something you will run into often enough to care about about the difficulty of the old content. But I feel that the other players that are overgeared for content setup the expectation to newer/returning players that the content is always supposed to be a push-over, and thus when they get to the end-game content, suddenly the difficulty spikes up, because relative to all the content they played up to that point, it was all a push over.

POTD on the other hand offers a more linear difficulty as you progress through it, but it's not designed to be hard, as the monsters are tuned in a way that once you get 99/99 gear, floors 1-99 are a push over, and only floor 100 offers anything difficult depending on your party configuration and pomanders collected. After 100, I assume the difficulty just curves up less steeply since no additional gear is available, and your success hinges on not stepping on traps.


Other MMO's, don't even try to make their content challenging. You can overlevel everything on day 1, and then the entire content can be cleared with a sneeze.

What I hope happens, at some point is that Square-Enix puts ilevel locks on all older content so that it retains some level of challenge, especially the 24-player content. Because as it stands right now, when you do the alliance raids, you keep getting LotA, and the reason for that is people don't want to play the SB 24-player content because it takes too long just to get the roulette reward. Elsewhere on the forum, people say they specifically remove gear so they won't get it when queuing for it. Please don't reward this kind of behavior. If the system knows they won't be eligible for the lighthouse, remove the tomes of creation from the reward.

[RiyahArp]

I come at this from a healer's perspective. My whole job is to fix people's screw ups and there is a large majority of the player base who screw up. A lot.

The healer in general is least affected by his mechanics, though. But the thing is, the ex trials are self selected, and a lot of people who would struggle with them just never bother doing them. That kind of leads to skewed difficulty perceptions overall, and if the same content were forced and everyone has to do it, you'd probably see a lot more issues with it. You're cutting off a lot of the bottom skill levels of players just with the self-selection aspect.

What I hope happens, at some point is that Square-Enix puts ilevel locks on all older content so that it retains some level of challenge, especially the 24-player content.

...so you don't want people to do it?

I mean, i did all I wanted of rab when it launched. I don't even do it now, despite needing to do it to upgrade 360 to 370. Neither pagos nor HoH will require above 360 I think, and most casual content doesn't require 360+. Even if I wanted to do it though, I don't want to go back to launch day and watch everyone wipe multiple times for a bunch of tomes that I can get easier elsewhere. The content is stale for me, and the easiness is to get vets to bother with running it at all. Before rab, the rewards are virtually useless now.

You're kind of relying on people liking the content enough to put up with this. Idk how many people do, to be honest.

[MoroMurasaki]

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage. On primal Pug PFs for all savage tend to cap out at 4-5 instances per fight, with the majority of them being farm parties. This is per data center; seeing all of 20 pfs for savafge per data center is not a sign of a healthy game. The amount of people doing savage or ex learning parties drops tremendously after the first two weeks the content is live, often without a single learning party in pf at a random time.

This isn't comprehensive and don't try to play dumb like you think it is. This is like looking out at the ocean and seeing one fin break the surface only to think "Well I guess that means there is only one shark!"

It's an easy way to lose a foot.

The problem is you have no actual evidence to back up your claim since it would require access to information we just don't have. The truth is that the only evidence that leans one way or another here is the circumstantial - SE keeps making Savage so they have to be seeing enough people do it to justify the investment.

[Ameela]

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage.

This makes absolutely no sense.

1 - One PF is comprised of multiple people so the number of PFs up isn't a good way of showing how many people want to do the content.
2 - You're completely disregarding parties that have already filled and are doing the content when you look.
3 - You're also not taking into account the fact that most people who do Savage have a static so they're not using PF in the first place.

And most people in Eureka are just tabbed out anyway until a NM spawns, I bet they're really enjoying themselves.

[KisaiTenshi]

...so you don't want people to do it?

Better than people going into it and ignoring the mechanics and wiping to enrage/pads mechanics that are brainddead obvious. 1 in 4 runs of LotA, wipe to Ancient Flare. Why? Because people try to skip the mechanic. There's also the random Behemoth + comets mechanic where people all stand near the boss, the comets drop and everyone dies because it's within the mechanic kill zone.

If there was still some challenge to these raids, players would need at the minimum to do the mechanics, and not ignore them.

Syrcus Tower, both Scylla and Glasya Labolas, never even get to their primary mechanic. Xande hits like a wet noodle.

World of Darkness, the only boss that retains any difficulty at all is Angra Mainyu, which is the first boss, and only because you can't ignore Double Vision and Mortal Gaze.

The Void Ark raids are also a push over, but as they're level 60 content, they're not as easy as the level 50's, but they still experience the gear creep.

The only mechanic that ever seems to put "dps burn" zerg players in check are Doom/Instant-KO mechanics like Deathgaze Hollow in Dun Scaith.

I would rather play The Royal City of Rabanastre and The Ridorana Lighthouse back to back each day, than play Labyrinth of the Ancients twice in a row which is what happens with the roulette on any day that isn't tuesday.

If the rewards are going to be the same from the roulette, then the difficulty should be the same as well.

[MoroMurasaki]

I would rather play The Royal City of Rabanastre and The Ridorana Lighthouse back to back each day, than play Labyrinth of the Ancients twice in a row which is what happens with the roulette on any day that isn't tuesday.

If the rewards are going to be the same from the roulette, then the difficulty should be the same as well.

I know we don't always see eye to eye but I just wanted to say I think this is well said and I very much agree with the idea behind the post.

I can't lie, this is an odd post to make, but I'm happy to have common ground with you for once!