8 man endgame content should go back to the 2.x method (no baby mode) Hear me out...

[Goji1639]

Casual Players will always find something to complain about, especially if they have to put actual effort into things and stuff. Constantly pandering to them never is a good long-term solution to any game that is worth its salt.

There are WAY more casual players than hardcore, and they pay the same money but they're not on the servers 10 hours a day eating up bandwidth. I think Hardcore players get the wrong idea about how much SE wants them around; SE prefers casual players and will always cater to them, as will every other successful MMO.

[Packetdancer]

There are WAY more casual players than hardcore, and they pay the same money but they're not on the servers 10 hours a day eating up bandwidth. I think Hardcore players get the wrong idea about how much SE wants them around; SE prefers casual players and will always cater to them, as will every other successful MMO.

"Successful" being a very important bit here.

WildStar was built by a dev team with a philosophy that "people want an MMO that's hardcore again, with raid content that requires a ton of cooperation and coordination to get through, and main story locked behind skill checks." And as much as I love the WildStar devs as people, I also think they were proven very wrong. Because while it was really neat content... a huge amount of the playerbase got to like level 25 or whatever, hit a skill wall, got frustrated with the inability to progress, and left; sure, some were motivated to 'git gud', but many others were motivated to 'git back to whatever other MMO they used to be playing'.

The game lost so many players—and so much money—that they first went free-to-play with RMT, and then just entirely were shut down. Because no matter how vocal the "hardcore" players are, they're far less numerous than the casual ones... and far less able to financially support an ongoing game wholly on their own.

Now, that "cater specifically to the hardcore playerbase" philosophy wasn't the only factor in WildStar's decline and demise, but from what I observed it was certainly a big one.

And as much as I've come to love savage and such since getting into it in this game, and look at that sort of content as a yardstick to measure my own improvement against... I also have many friends who are not into it, and who would be heartbroken to see lore locked behind it. And if it was required as part of the main scenario—like the skill check in WildStar turned out to be—they'd probably go play something else instead.

This game could definitely stand to tweak the balance in a lot of places, but if you tweak things too far you will chase away the playerbase.

[Goji1639]

"Successful" being a very important bit here.

WildStar was built by a dev team with a philosophy that "people want an MMO that's hardcore again, with raid content that requires a ton of cooperation and coordination to get through, and main story locked behind skill checks." And as much as I love the WildStar devs as people, I also think they were proven very wrong. Because while it was really neat content... a huge amount of the playerbase got to like level 25 or whatever, hit a skill wall, got frustrated with the inability to progress, and left; sure, some were motivated to 'git gud', but many others were motivated to 'git back to whatever other MMO they used to be playing'.

The game lost so many players—and so much money—that they first went free-to-play with RMT, and then just entirely were shut down. Because no matter how vocal the "hardcore" players are, they're far less numerous than the casual ones... and far less able to financially support an ongoing game wholly on their own.

Now, that "cater specifically to the hardcore playerbase" philosophy wasn't the only factor in WildStar's decline and demise, but from what I observed it was certainly a big one.

And as much as I've come to love savage and such since getting into it in this game, and look at that sort of content as a yardstick to measure my own improvement against... I also have many friends who are not into it, and who would be heartbroken to see lore locked behind it. And if it was required as part of the main scenario—like the skill check in WildStar turned out to be—they'd probably go play something else instead.

This game could definitely stand to tweak the balance in a lot of places, but if you tweak things too far you will chase away the playerbase.

I don't even necessarily think it's skill checks that turn players away. Souls games, for example, have carved out a sizable fanbase almost purely on the idea that challenging gameplay is fun and rewarding.

Where MMO's lose people is when they require too much coordination amongst strangers. I enjoy challenging content; I DON'T enjoy having to coordinate my real life and my game time around the schedules of 7 other people in order to even attempt said challenging content. It's a moronic expectation that will always leave content like Savage as an extreme niche and undesirable to the vast majority of players. Requiring that kind of thing even for story content would be a death sentence for this game.

[StriderShinryu]

I enjoy challenging content; I DON'T enjoy having to coordinate my real life and my game time around the schedules of 7 other people in order to even attempt said challenging content. It's a moronic expectation that will always leave content like Savage as an extreme niche and undesirable to the vast majority of players. Requiring that kind of thing even for story content would be a death sentence for this game.

This is an interesting point, and one that echoes my own experience. I really enjoy challenging content in games and will happily (well, mostly happily) spend hours on a particularly tough fight in a Soulslike game. The duo fights in Nioh were some of the best moments in that game and I think I spent upwards of 3 dedicated hours on at least one of them. But that's just me, and that's just for me. When thrown into a group, even an organized group, it's no longer about me and my experience. I have to hope that the others in the group don't mess things up for me when I'm playing perfectly. And, of course, I hate feeling like I'm the one messing things up for everyone else when I'm having a crap day and keep causing wipes. I'd love to see more actual challenging solo focused content in FF14 like a sort of Masked Carnivale for individual roles or classes.

In short, not wanting more hardcore challenging group content is not the same as not wanting more challenging content.