Heaven on High: That's it?

[RiyahArp]

Nothing in his statement claims he was querying any specific part of the playerbase, but the playerbase as a whole—so anyone looking to say that it was “only the raiders” that enjoyed have no argument there.

This simply isn't possible. There's no way no one but the 180-200 people liked the challenge. If you asked people who did potd, pretty much mostly anyone who did it was satisfied, and no one was complaining for nerfs. Well, except for soloists.

My bet is that yoshi looked at the data mid expansion. What he saw was that casuals mostly did 1-20 and then 51-60, while people who did 101+ went all the way to 200 barring death. He probably interpreted this as "casuals don't like the challenge of the higher floors" when it really was that the goals of the casuals weren't served by the harder floors; leveling, mostly. It just was very inefficient to do the whole series if your main goal was leveling up, while you had to do the whole series in challenge floors, even if you wanted just to farm stuff. Because I don't think people wanted any of it to be easier; they usually were "people are speedrunning it too much."

Either this, or its another JP/NA divide. But no, there's no way people were complaining about the challenge to the point it needed multiple instakill pomanders added.