Quote Originally Posted by Callinon View Post
Honestly this. SB and ShB both saw significant ability pruning on combat classes, but there's never been any on crafting classes (unless you want to count the elemental abilities in ShB.. ok) and it's way WAY past time. If the different abilities actually mattered maybe it'd be ok to have 40 of them like we do right now, but most of the time one ability just obseletes another. But that's a thing we've been solving with combat classes for quite some time now.



You must not have played any other MMORPG... like ever. Because this is quite common in all of them.

Fun fact though: successful games are built on their casual audience, not the hardcores. Hardcore players are good to have around, don't get me wrong... it's good for the game that those players exist. But there aren't anywhere NEAR enough of them to sustain a product long term. Given that reality, skewing a game toward appealing to the casual player makes perfect sense.
Yeah, that’s true. I’ve heard WildStar went that route, and it did pretty poorly. Thing is, that applies for games that only cater to hardcore players, without caring much for their casual players. Either that or at least 40% of the game is too hardcore. That’s a bit too harsh, even for me lol.

But, driving out your hardcore players isn’t optimal for maximizing sales. Also, there hasn’t been any statistical chart of FFXIV declining in 2.0 - 3.0 when crafting was super difficult, like, at all. And that’s likely because most of the game wasn’t hardcore, just the crafting.

For optimizing profits, no, driving out 100% of your hardcore players isn’t ideal, like, at all. Ideally, you’d want both players to be playing your game on a monthly basis.