Going to the same route as WoW. The game is TOO easy

[ScorpioShirica]

Listening to forums on difficulty is how WoW turned their most successful expansion with WOTLK into their most disastrous with Cata (where they stopped publishing numbers). Unsurprisingly, a majority of people that don't have the time to spend ridiculous hours "getting good" love casual content and don't want a very difficult game.

[Reinha]

Listening to forums on difficulty is how WoW turned their most successful expansion with WOTLK into their most disastrous with Cata (where they stopped publishing numbers). Unsurprisingly, a majority of people that don't have the time to spend ridiculous hours "getting good" love casual content and don't want a very difficult game.

They didn't stop publishing numbers in Cata and when they did stop it was because 5 million people had quit in a short time span, their biggest reason being lack of content.

[Shurrikhan]

Listening to forums on difficulty is how WoW turned their most successful expansion with WOTLK into their most disastrous with Cata (where they stopped publishing numbers). Unsurprisingly, a majority of people that don't have the time to spend ridiculous hours "getting good" love casual content and don't want a very difficult game.

Yeah, no. Cata's direction was tangential to community desires at best. In some cases, it stood in direct contrast to them.

And Cata's downfall wasn't its changes, although they may have helped push certain players off certain specs (while others only became more engrossed with their favorites). Its downfall was its content and clear lack of polish.

We can find far more numerous examples of Monkey's Paw changes right here on XIV, within recent times, than we can in the move from WotLK to Cataclysm, despite how incredibly well documented and scrutinized that period of WoW has become.

[Ronduwil]

And Cata's downfall wasn't its changes, although they may have helped push certain players off certain specs (while others only became more engrossed with their favorites). Its downfall was its content and clear lack of polish.

Speaking from my own personal experience, 90% of my guild quit because Cata Heroic dungeons were harder than WotLK raids and the gear rewards for those super hard dungeons were disproportionate to the difficulty involved. On top of that, starter Cata raids were on par with WotLK hard modes. The leap in difficulty was simply insane. I stuck it out and eventually cleared all the Heroic raids in Cata, but I was completely burned out by the end of that expansion. It felt to me like the community never recovered. WoW went from being a relaxing game that I played at the end of my work day to being a second job. Successful raiding guilds became mini-corporations, complete with job interviews, performance quotas, and difficult hiring/firing decisions. That doesn't make for a compelling game. I want to have fun with my friends in a game, not raid successfully with my co-workers.

They tried to overcorrect by adding LFR "for the casuals," but 25-man content simply isn't conducive to building bonds between guild-mates. The current Mythic+ system suffers from the same problems that plagued Cata: the timer requires that you exclude under-performers. You can't play with who you want. Instead, you have to find the best co-workers available to you and work with them. Again, I want to play a game at the end of my work day, not maintain a second job.

[Shurrikhan]

Speaking from my own personal experience, 90% of my guild quit because Cata Heroic dungeons were harder than WotLK raids and the gear rewards for those super hard dungeons were disproportionate to the difficulty involved. On top of that, starter Cata raids were on par with WotLK hard modes. The leap in difficulty was simply insane. I stuck it out and eventually cleared all the Heroic raids in Cata, but I was completely burned out by the end of that expansion. It felt to me like the community never recovered. WoW went from being a relaxing game that I played at the end of my work day to being a second job. Successful raiding guilds became mini-corporations, complete with job interviews, performance quotas, and difficult hiring/firing decisions. That doesn't make for a compelling game. I want to have fun with my friends in a game, not raid successfully with my co-workers.

They tried to overcorrect by adding LFR "for the casuals," but 25-man content simply isn't conducive to building bonds between guild-mates. The current Mythic+ system suffers from the same problems that plagued Cata: the timer requires that you exclude under-performers. You can't play with who you want. Instead, you have to find the best co-workers available to you and work with them. Again, I want to play a game at the end of my work day, not maintain a second job.

Ahh, I guess my friends must have been a little more on the midcore side or above going from WotLK to Cata because they loved Cata heroics. I did as well.

Nonetheless, I don't think its difficulty came down to a sweeping HP and/or "deadliness factor" buff across all mobs so much as a failure to rein in very specific mob effects when scaling up and how those changes forced awareness and decisive counterpoint. This left a much more punctuated difficulty that then felt quite manageable to very skilled players while seeming both unintuitive and overwhelming to less skilled players. Where a skilled player might look at the damage intake and immediately takes up a kiting pattern, that degree of adaptibility just wasn't available to many an average player. And given some of the weirdness that went on there, with certain mobs scaling far more rampantly than others from Normal to Heroic by nature of their skills, I always that as a failure to polish quite enough, since difficulty as a result of damage intake or output required isn't... linearly perceived(?) (if there could even be such a thing), especially once the floor has already been raised significantly.

The last point about Mythic+, though, is one I hope XIV will learn from. I like Mythic+ as an efficiently designed reiterative system, but it is far from perfect (or all that interesting fleshed out in terms of rewards), and in this case I would the failing you describe, for instance, comes from only ever trying to suit its needs for general grinding and gear progression simultaneously.

Let me exemplify. I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to take an underperforming player to content in which they would otherwise drown without (1) risk of failure or (2) making the difficulty excessively low for myself as well if there isn't anything about the content that would specifically require, somehow, that my lowest DPS be nearish the highest in party (e.g. by split-party mechanics or whatever or tight DPS checks). Though, if it's really just about grinding, and it isn't that much less efficient to just step down a level in difficulty, it's almost a bit irrelevant; the only true solution at that point is to have dynamic mechanics also tied into the difficulty level and to target those mechanics at specific players based on their individual difficulty levels selected, so to speak.

That said, it makes no sense to then treat gear progression as if it were mere grinding. That certainly doesn't happen in raids, so why should someone who can't beat the fights in X time at Y difficulty (the equivalent of clearing any boss Y in a raid, we might say) be rewarded with that same loot? Removing the Mythic+ timer would be the equivalent of removing every enrage from raids and making the excess time purely a point of vanity. I can't take Dyslexic Joe to the Linguomancer raid fight. It may suck, but that's just the fact of it. Why would I expect any different, then, from something that provides the same quality of loot, even if based on a dungeon model?

I'd thought a lot about a reiterative system very specific to XIV that gives more control over the elements of difficulty added by dividing up the different types of difficulty that may be added to a dungeon by Element, collecting and deploying TT Cards for optional bonus fights a la Necromimicon, and using player-based difficulty levels (an idea partly borrowed from 1.x, and partly from multiplayer Rogue-likes) in the form of Blessings/Challenges, with slightly different workings between premade and matched parties -- the general idea being to give a more interesting and player-directed reward structure via Relic Armor (aka Regalia) and the gathering of Element as an analog reward structure punctuated by progressing tiers therein for interesting materia effects, preferably while allowing greater skill gaps within any given party without creating conflict for that party's workings.

[Ronduwil]

That said, it makes no sense to then treat gear progression as if it were mere grinding. That certainly doesn't happen in raids, so why should someone who can't beat the fights in X time at Y difficulty (the equivalent of clearing any boss Y in a raid, we might say) be rewarded with that same loot?

Because at the end of the day, they beat the boss! That is, after all why you're going in there. To kill a boss and take his stuff. Putting an arbitrary expiration date on it makes no sense.

Removing the Mythic+ timer would be the equivalent of removing every enrage from raids and making the excess time purely a point of vanity. I can't take Dyslexic Joe to the Linguomancer raid fight. It may suck, but that's just the fact of it. Why would I expect any different, then, from something that provides the same quality of loot, even if based on a dungeon model?

That's my point: enrage mechanics, like arbitrary completion timers, are stupid! I know that a portion of the population gets a kick out of them, but they are anti-fun from my perspective. Why does everything have to be a freaking speed run? If everyone is at full health, the healers are still at full mana, and the boss is almost dead, why should the raid be arbitrarily forced to wipe? It makes no sense with regards to immersion, and it completely excludes the majority of players who are playing games simply for fun. I can see enrage timers as occasional gimmicks, but their pervasiveness is a symptom of lazy game design. When designers can't think of a creative challenge for a given fight, they fall back on enrage timers and arbitrary completion timers. I don't want to play a game if i can't play with friends who typically multi-task during gaming sessions out of necessity. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.

[Adrestia]

Because at the end of the day, they beat the boss! That is, after all why you're going in there. To kill a boss and take his stuff. Putting an arbitrary expiration date on it makes no sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rij_...&feature=share

[ForteNightshade]

That's my point: enrage mechanics, like arbitrary completion timers, are stupid! I know that a portion of the population gets a kick out of them, but they are anti-fun from my perspective. Why does everything have to be a freaking speed run? If everyone is at full health, the healers are still at full mana, and the boss is almost dead, why should the raid be arbitrarily forced to wipe? It makes no sense with regards to immersion, and it completely excludes the majority of players who are playing games simply for fun. I can see enrage timers as occasional gimmicks, but their pervasiveness is a symptom of lazy game design. When designers can't think of a creative challenge for a given fight, they fall back on enrage timers and arbitrary completion timers. I don't want to play a game if i can't play with friends who typically multi-task during gaming sessions out of necessity. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.

Because without enrages, every single encounter becomes a war of attrition. Just keep throwing bodies at the boss until it dies. You only ever need a healer and/or Caster (sans BLM) alive to keep going. This absolves any responsibility from damage dealers. In fact, you could literally just bring all four tanks, all three healers and a RDM to practically guarantee you'll see every mechanic within the first 30 minutes. Why bring a DRG when a WAR can survive half the mechanics bosses do? I'm sorry but if you can't focus on a fight for 5-10 minutes because of other obligations, then don't queue into the content to begin with. Normal modes and 24 mans are a mess because there is zero incentive for players to improve outside self motivation. As stated above, so long as someone's alive to raise people, it doesn't matter how many times you die.

If anything, I want enrages for the easier content so people are held somewhat accountable. They aren't about speed killing, but telling you to stop making mistakes and "git gud."

[Ronduwil]

Because without enrages, every single encounter becomes a war of attrition. Just keep throwing bodies at the boss until it dies. You only ever need a healer and/or Caster (sans BLM) alive to keep going. This absolves any responsibility from damage dealers. In fact, you could literally just bring all four tanks, all three healers and a RDM to practically guarantee you'll see every mechanic within the first 30 minutes. Why bring a DRG when a WAR can survive half the mechanics bosses do? I'm sorry but if you can't focus on a fight for 5-10 minutes because of other obligations, then don't queue into the content to begin with. Normal modes and 24 mans are a mess because there is zero incentive for players to improve outside self motivation. As stated above, so long as someone's alive to raise people, it doesn't matter how many times you die.

You can have mechanics to prevent this that aren't simply arbitrary enrage timers. For example, every time a player dies, the boss gains a damage buff. Or the boss periodically launches an attack that has to be soaked raid-wide. As players die, the others will naturally have to step it up.

If anything, I want enrages for the easier content so people are held somewhat accountable. They aren't about speed killing, but telling you to stop making mistakes and "git gud."

Why? Why do you want to hold someone "accountable" for not devoting as much time to the game as you do? Worse, why do you want to punish yourself because your friends aren't as dedicated to a video game as you are? I don't understand this mentality. I like getting good at the game for its own sake. I like the opportunity to exhibit my competence by carrying my friends through content. I think that's much more fun than trying my best and still failing because my buddy just wasn't good enough.

[Baalfrog]

I'm doing it!

Imagine, complaining in the the thread that the game is too easy (another can of worms) that its not easy enough.

Also, just cause another game has a great feature doesn't mean that you absolutely must pick it, see M+ point for more info. Thats SO stupid.

I guess nothing is worse than toxic casual. Great community BTW!

Edit: Oh yea, actually answering to the topic. BACK in the good old days of ARR when the game was good and hard, and men were Übermensch and everything was HARD and just to get to Sastasha you had to go to school 7 days a week 12 months a year and it was always snowing and it was always an uphill battle and the game was always SO INSANELY HARD that most people came from other games and they though, "Wow, this clearly is the dark souls of MMORPGs and everything is so hard! This will keep those casuals out of MY HARD MMO!"