Petition to Increase Old Alliance Raids' Difficulty

[negiman4]

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Hey, guys, we can argue all we want about how many people would like the change or not. The issue here is none of you have evidence or data to back yourselves up. This is the point of the strawpoll I put in the original post, to provide at least some data. I fully recognize that this data isn't even close to 100% reliable because of where it's posted, the small data set, and the nature of online polls, but at this point, it's the best we have right now.

Here's a link to it: http://www.strawpoll.me/19547195/r

According to what I've collected so far, it seems to indicate that the majority of people support the change. 79% of people who voted expressed an interest in more difficult old alliance raids. Of those, 34% want extra rewards to compensate. The remaining 64% would be fine without extra rewards. I agree that there's a lot of ways to go about this, but I picked "lowered maximum item level" because it would be the simplest thing SE could do. The point of this whole thread is to draw attention to the fact that there are little to no mechanics that need to be done in the Crystal Tower raids, and further alliance raids in the expansions also suffer to some degree, though to a lesser extent. This is a big deal because, I and apparently many others see this as a detriment to newer players who will never see those mechanics and be able to learn from them. A lot of the mechanics introduced in Crystal Tower pop up again in later content, and there's a lot of value in making people, especially new players, do mechanics.

Furthermore, many new players mistake the alliance raids as the "difficult content" for the game, specifically players coming from other games or MMORPGs such as WoW. Imagine being a WoW player playing FFXIV for the first time, and you unlock your first "raid", only to find out that it takes less than 15 minutes to complete. If that were me, I would assume that this is what FFXIV considers to be "hard content", and I would probably quit playing, thinking FFXIV is basically baby's first MMORPG. Of course, most of the time, the community will pipe up and say that that's not the "hard content" of the game, but it still makes for a bad experience for new players, and sets them up for failure later down the line.

I'm personally of the opinion that FFXIV should start expecting more from players sooner, as regular content in general doesn't start showing any semblance of difficulty until mid-Heavensward when you reach The Vault. By this point, a player will have been playing for around 30 hours or so. That's waaaaaaay too long for a game of any kind to start expecting more from you. Plus, optional content should ALWAYS be at least slightly more difficult than mandatory MSQ content, which is not the case with Crystal Tower specifically. Take that as you will.