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

[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.

[Barraind]

I'm sorry but the idea that WoW Classic is hard is laughable. Tedious and time consuming does not mean hard. The raids and dungeons were devoid of any real mechanics compared to today and every class had about a 2 to 3 button "rotation". The only difficult thing is how time consuming that game is for no real reward. You can't login for an hour or two and make big progress. Travel time is insane and mounts are too expensive for your average player at level 40. You will spend a majority of your time auto running between places, eating food between single monsters, and afk on flight paths.

That game is pure nostalgia. My dumb kid self played it and got to raiding just fine. I respect it for what it was back then but I would never want to go back.

Theres a LOT of people who thought classic was hard because it was their first MMO. You could tell, really quickly, who in your guild had played EQ at any decently high level and who hadnt. "OH GOD I GOT THIS DEBUFF WHAT DO I DO?!?!?!?!". "OH GOD THERES 3 MOBS WE CANT CROWD CONTROL OMG WHAT DO WHAAAAAT DOOOOOO".

Meanwhile, everyone who had raided VT and beyond was like "hey, this isnt 7 trash mobs that can 2 shot tanks and require you know exactly where you're standing in relation to EVERYTHING because they can knockback AND blind you for 60+ seconds (at a time where blind turned your screen black and hid every. single. ui feature). This is a nice change of pace and free loot. "

And then you waited while mages summoned food and water because god forbid people buy stacks of them for raids... (or that one time where mage water was like 2x better than any water you COULD buy, because they really just hated people who wanted to efficiently do things, IM LOOKING AT YOU, SPIRIT CHANGES)

[Omymy]

So you wanna play a hard game and you gonna play WoW Classic.


Kay.

[Eli85]

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.

There was so much that I liked about your post, but then you wrote this. If we follow your logic, then any remotely challenging activity in an MMO would feel like a "second job." MMOs should be accessible—particularly in the leveling process—but if end game was catered to "take anyone, regardless of skill," then that is a very shallow game that would not maintain its player base.

On a personal level, I will not go back to WoW, but M+ is quite frankly the best MMO system that we've seen in a very, very long time. It's casual friendly and accessible. The only people who truly have problems with M+ are the horrendously awful players—and I mean the kind of players who don't read skill descriptions, do whatever they want, and play for the lols. The way M+ is designed—both in Legion and BFA—is the capped gear rewards (so completing a +10 or +15) is easily achievable by anyone who has a functioning brain. You may wipe some and have some groups disband because some really awful players snuck into your group, but it's so easy to join groups and the skill requirement is quite modest, making it the furthest thing from a "second job." Any of WoW's recent expansions is a really bad example to use for "second job." As outside the initial leveling process, players who clear the hardest content in the game can easily do so with an under <10 per week schedule. It really doesn't hold up.

[Drayce1]

If ya want some hardcore challenge mate. Keep an eye on pantheon.

This game is built primarily for the super casual player. If they decided to turn the overall difficulty of everything outside savage from its current 2 of 10 to say, 4 of 10, the majority player will quit amass, thus far less monies thus far less nice things going into the game.

This is what XIV is. Gotta deal with it.

[Barraind]

The current Mythic+ system suffers from the same problems that plagued Cata: the timer requires that you exclude under-performers.

Thats how the more difficult stuff should be though.

If your most challenging content is "you can take anyone, even if they arent very good", it cant actually BE difficult.

If ya want some hardcore challenge mate. Keep an eye on pantheon.

Cant wait for people to start realizing itll take half your available playtime to get your group TO the place you're going to go for the night.

The more anyone on their dev team talks, the more I am ready to run as far as possible away from that game, and I'm its target audience; people who remember the good old days of EQ and WANT something that has the "get a group of friends and grind stuff in a camp for hours, with mana regen and crowd control mattering a whole lot'. I actively DONT want the game they keep trying to push.

[Drayce1]

Thats how the more difficult stuff should be though.

If your most challenging content is "you can take anyone, even if they arent very good", it cant actually BE difficult.



Cant wait for people to start realizing itll take half your available playtime to get your group TO the place you're going to go for the night.

The more anyone on their dev team talks, the more I am ready to run as far as possible away from that game, and I'm its target audience; people who remember the good old days of EQ and WANT something that has the "get a group of friends and grind stuff in a camp for hours, with mana regen and crowd control mattering a whole lot'. I actively DONT want the game they keep trying to push.

They making it for the niche, not the majority. They stated this from the start.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

They making it for the niche, not the majority. They stated this from the start.

So did wildstar, and look what happened to it.

A lot of these games coming out with founders pack style purchases have bombed. I am super reluctant to believe in any of them anymore. They all fail or are terrible.

[Drayce1]

So did wildstar, and look what happened to it.

A lot of these games coming out with founders pack style purchases have bombed. I am super reluctant to believe in any of them anymore. They all fail or are terrible.

Wildstar was handled by incompetance and was rushed due to investors.

Pantheon is different. It will release when its ready, and has new pledges all the time backing it, as well as angel investments given by rich fans of Everquest to help it along.

[Barraind]

They making it for the niche, not the majority. They stated this from the start.

Yeah, the niche theyre aiming for is people who play the games I do and the content I do.

what they really want to aim for is people who fill that description but are 15 years younger, but the game isnt going to do that.