We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Edax]

Because they are fundamentally different games in different genres. Chances are there will be very little cross over between their respective ideas. Companies have long tried to shoehorn in mechanics or ideas from other games only for it to fail miserably. In fact, we needs not only any further than FFXIV itself. Eureka is essentially the developers trying to recreate an old school grind MMO that has long since died out. The result? Widely polarizing opinions at best; outright negativity otherwise. You can't take something from another game and make it fit.

For argument's sake though, let's say they did implement a radical change like this. You can now obtain the best gear from raids, trials, dungeons and even on the cash shop. So why does anyone bother clearing Savage more than once or twice? Better even, why touch anything except the easier content? There's no longer any incentive for bother. Worse even is how do the devs incentive any content now? Savage takes weeks of clearing to obtain gear, but this change makes it so you could be bis within a month; less if we hearken back to your earlier demand you shouldn't have to farm; that the rewards are given out in full upon clearing. Now you have seven months with nothing since the developers can't develop things fast enough to keep up.

Well, if nobody in the MMO world ever really deviated from that norm (as per your experiences), can we really tell if changing it would not work?

There's little theoretical reason why it shouldn't. The reason why difficulty options arose in gaming is because the skill level of the playerbase varies. If you tune the difficulty to easy, more skilled players get bored. By adding a harder difficulty, you do nothing for less skilled players, but your higher skilled players no longer get (as) bored and thus derive more enjoyment from your game.

If that is the case, it begs the question why higher rewards are needed to compensate for higher enjoyment. And if that is not the case, it begs the question why you add a higher difficulty in the first place.

Conclusion: People are weird.

People enjoy difficulty things in video games for their own sake. People play Legendary difficulty on Halo without any promise of better gear. In Halo Reach, all the armor that's unlocked is 100% cosmetic (yes I know Halo Reach is not an MMO). This happens in almost all other genres of video games, where players seek out the harder difficulties. The devs didn't need to bribe the players to keep playing the hard content. MMOs are an aberration in this way, the result of trying to copy WoW. That hard content raid gear would be worth a lot of gil on the marketboard, especially if only a few players are willing to do it, and there will always be a demand for it, even if it has the same gear rating as other sets.