Quote Originally Posted by DarkEiraStar View Post
To be clear this isn't even a matter of difficultly, its a matter of perception. OP perceives FFXIV as becoming too "easy" and therefore not fun. Yet how many people would really continue to pay $13-$15 a month if they could only access half or less of the content that they wanted to played because the game was designed only for the most skilled players.

The community in WoW ruined the game long before the current expansion. All endgame content became gated behind max item levels that you could only get by already having done the content. Hardcore and Midcore got to have an exclusive club and feel superior to the casuals that only were allowed a watered down version of the raids.

The first sign of an MOO dying is not the hardcore or the midcore leaving.
Well WoW is a complex bag to unpack, because a lot went on there that has lead it to it's current state and its not a point-to-this specific-issue kind of problem.

However, if you created to much division between the best players and the average player, yeah thats gonna create problems. But, if you drop the skill floor out completely, youll end up killing your MMO as well. You cant have it so casual that most game content can be completed by literally pushing 2 skill buttons. Here's the rub: You have to find a balance with the average player that they CAN make the leap to Savage and Ultimate stuff with invested effort, while at the same time making sure those tiers are tough for the people who want it tough. This usually means raising the skill floor, not dropping it, on average players over time. The higher level they get, their skill should increase. Not just get stronger simply because they have better stats/gear.

The issue with balancing 'down' is that it is leads to a self feedback loop. Make content easy, average players think that is the average, creates a larger and larger gulf between the hardcore players and the average players, which obviously fuels resentment. This gets worse because average players stop feeling like they can realistically bridge that gap, and when devs try to implement more difficult content, players whove been trained on the easy mode cant cut it effectively and complain its to hard. This usually results in it being made easier which lowers the quality of play on average players, thus creating a larger gap and preventing harder mechanics.


As the Savage and Ultimate raids scale up in difficulty, so too must the average dungeon content. This means the average player should get better as well. With how FFXIV handles some of the midcore content and how people have difficulty even doing mechanics that have been around since the beginning of HW, or how they complain the Burn is to hard to do, its clear that there is some merit to the idea that midcore and casual content mightve been to easy. That or players have have been poorly trained to expect dungeons where they can complete the content by pressing two buttons or just pressing random skills without even trying to do proper rotations. While it's not indicative of all players, if I see a BLM at level 70 just spamming fire and bliz and doing nothing else but using transpose when they run out of mana, that is a problem. Those players are ignoring most of their kit and class mechanics and should fail dungeons and trials. That isnt a matter of "Playing the game my way" at that point, but deciding that you cant be bothered to even play the game at all but expect the rewards.

Like I said before, if youre in 390s and pulling 2-3k dps as a DPS, youre not doing something right. If a tnak can sit in tank stance spamming ONLY their aggro combo and get the near same DPS as you, this is a big problem in the quality of skill. And oddly, what Ive seen is the people most hostile to the idea of making things harder are the very same people who just push one or two buttons to play their class and never seem to want to improve. As long as their is a visible path to improvement, I would hazard MOST players would be ok with upping the difficulty.