Thank you for inviting Asmongold to the media tour!!

[Morphiana]

This is amazing I really hope Asmon asks Yoshi about the difficulty to purchase this game. I love this game and want it to last a long time but making it hard to purchase is a silly barrier to entry!

[Rinhi]

Do you think players actually enjoy decorating the floor while the rest of the group gets to actively participate in a given fight? The fact that so many players are decorating the floor is a sign that the content is already too hard, not that it needs to get harder.

yes they do and more importantly, it's a sign that the game did a bang up job NOT to teach players how to play their class at not even an average level if they constantly floor tank to mechanics over and over
maybe those players should watch a LP instead of forcing developers of making easy content even easier?

[Payadopa]

You have this already in 8-man-raids.

And no, i do not like multiple difficulties, either in dungeons nor in raids.

Cheers

You must hate pretty much all single player games then, too. lol

[DBriggs304]

yes they do and more importantly, it's a sign that the game did a bang up job NOT to teach players how to play their class at not even an average level if they constantly floor tank to mechanics over and over
maybe those players should watch a LP instead of forcing developers of making easy content even easier?

Or maybe the players should continue to enjoy the game and have fun and not approach game content like preparing for the nclex.

That type of gameplay is available many other places and can be experienced there.

[Allegor]

Because we've already seen how it plays out in WoW. The playbook goes like this:

1. Difficult dungeon levels are added
2. Players don't find them fun, and no one runs them
3. Gear rewards are removed from the easier dungeons and shifted into the harder dungeons to force players into the harder dungeons through gear incentives
4. Players unsub

FFXIV's surge is due in no small part to WoW's elitist stance on dungeon content.

The difference though is that M+ gear is designed to be comparable to, if not better than high end raiding gear, and has layers of rng because just about anything in that game is now a 'carrot on a stick' system to keep people artificially engaged, whereas XIV dungeons are mostly just for story and glamour - you don't even "have" to do them more than once because just about anything at end level gives tomestones.

No one is really asking for a copy paste of M+, that thing only breeds toxicity and anxiety and I do agree it should stay away, but a simple higher - optional - difficulty mode isn't anything from another world. Really though, leveling dungeons shouldn't feel more challenging than the so called "expert" roulette (yes, I know it's due to gear quality and ilvl scaling, but the point still stands)

[Ronduwil]

yes they do and more importantly, it's a sign that the game did a bang up job NOT to teach players how to play their class at not even an average level if they constantly floor tank to mechanics over and over

Your outlook on player mentality is unhealthy. No one enjoys floor tanking. I don't know how a sane person could say that they do with a straight face. As a new player, I'll give you a couple of cases in point of content that is stupidly difficult.

The first is the first boss of the second raid in the Void Ark series. You go in your first time, and you're immediately pulled into a black hole that you immediately have to start running out of. I don't care how good of a player you are; if this is your first time in the instance, the chance that you die to that mechanic is about 95%. So you're resurrected, and immediately after the resurrection, you're blown off the ship because you have no idea that you're supposed to put your back to an ice wall. Nothing in the game is going to prepare you for that.

The next one is the Bozja raid, Delubrum Reginae. Every boss in there has several gimmicky mechanics that everyone is just about guaranteed to die to on their first run. It took me about three runs of that raid just to get to the point where I could survive through the first four bosses without dying at least once. Between the ladder puzzles, the bombs with the reverse weight mechanics, and the Queen's Will stuff, you have plenty of guarantees that a first-time player will be dying regardless of how well the game has prepared them.

Also, "average" is a relative measure. In general, half the players will always be below average. The best players will always be far above average. Even if the game "trains" players to play at what you now consider to be an average level, the definition of average will simply shift accordingly, and what you now consider to be a good player will then become average while the player you now consider to be average will be considered bad. That's yet another reason that chasing this dream of designing a game to train everyone to be phenomenal player is futile. In the end, you're just left with a game consisting of the very best players while everyone else moves on to greener pastures where players are treated like customers who want to be entertained rather than like employees who are expected to perform and produce.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the ability to 15-man these bosses is what makes those mechanics viable right now. As it is, you get to experience the frustration of floor tanking for your first few runs, but once you get a few under your belt, you experience the amusement of watching others fall prey to the same crap that was killing you just hours prior. So you throw down some reses and/or eke out a win with half the players, and you feel like a hero who came through for your fallen comrades. In contrast, the way M+ works in WoW, losing a player in any given fight is at the very least a wipe, and in the worst case it causes the key to fail and the group to disband. No one is amused. Everyone's pissed, the failing player is blacklisted, and time feels wasted.

[Caurcas]

Wiping is part of learning my guy. It's builds knowledge of mechanics in the current content and allows you a base to pull from when encountering similar mechanics in the future.

[Poporito_Popoto]

Now it will be fun hearing the cries of casuals when more harder content get introduced into the game for these new comers.

It will be even more fun to hear the cries of hardcore raiders when it's not.

[Payadopa]

I still need to hear a convincing argument why having options is a bad thing. Just stick to easy and never think about hard content ever again. That is not difficult, people.

[Shurrikhan]

I think the “cost saving” approach in Mythic and M+ dungeons is where WoW went down the slippery slope. It was good for money, but destroyed their progression and reward structure, and hurt the game in the long run.

You're conflating two very, very different things, though.

"Savage" difficulty is not, itself, a reward structure. (Look at the original Savage rewards, for instance: a mere title.)

"Extreme" difficulty is not, itself, a reward structure.

"Mythic+" difficulities are not, themselves, a reward structure. They amount to, solely, the ability to (A) finely control mob stats to something that hits the "sweet spot" of challenge for you and your party and (B) a way to add bonus dungeon mechanics, if you want them.

Nothing about allowing players to set their dungeon runs to a finely-set challenge they can enjoy enforces any particular reward structure.

(You know what does prevent dungeons from, say, being unique, though? A flat daily reward that skews efficiency towards the quickest possible means of attaining it, since the actual content (beyond its mere type) done to get that reward is irrelevant. That's a reward structure that badly constrains content creativity and engagement, and you've been lapping it right up.)

ARR Hard versions

Sorry to have to break this to you, but ARR "Hard" dungeons (which, btw, were also in HW) were not any harder than regular dungeons. They were merely "v2" dungeons -- a way of recopying a few assets into an otherwise new dungeon. They constrained available settings to save on some mob assets, ground and wall textures, and the occasional doodad. I liked them well enough, in that it was interesting to revisit old settings after time had passed, but they are absolutely irrelevant to having multiple difficulties.

and be optional in MSQ

Almost no one here has asked otherwise for any mainstay content with a minimum difficulty level exceeding what we already see across those content types. That said, having additional difficult choices does not increase the minimum difficulty of a place (i.e., what would actually go into a standard roulette). The default remains the same; you'd just have more options now.

And, the greatest question to answer from your boss, “Is it worth the money spent?”

Minisculely increased cost for at least some dozen times the longevity and available engagement? Yes, it would be worth the money spent.